Turtle Recall

Terry Pratchett and death have been locked in a slow, sad dance for many years now. The reaper is the Discworld author’s most beloved creation, a poignant, dryly funny character who adds a peculiar humanity to his PG Wodehouse-esque fantasy romps. But their relationship became far more personal when the writer was diagnosed with a terminal strain of Alzheimer’s called posterior cortical atrophy, and arrived at the conclusion that one day things might progress to the stage where he would prefer to take his own life. The terrible irony is not lost on him.

“In Discworld, Death isn’t unkind. He’s got a job. He’s rather like a civil servant really. He doesn’t go out of his way to be nasty. He dusts you down, points you in whatever direction you are going and wishes you luck. But as you get older and slightly more philosophical, you realise everyone dies. When you get to the stage of life I am at, where occasionally one of your contemporaries falls off the perch, you are well aware of the closeness of death. But there’s a reason for it – it’s so that there is space for new people and the planet doesn’t fill up.”
Without having ever quite intended to, Pratchett has become a sort of unofficial spokesperson for the assisted death movement (he hates the phrase assisted suicide, feeling it stigmatises). Last year, he made a quite upsetting BBC documentary entitled Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, which included footage of a terminally ill man in his 70s taking a barbiturate-based drink and slipping into a sleep from which he did not awake. Predictably Christian groups were outraged, which, oddly, Pratchett can understand.
“It would have been strange it if wasn’t upsetting, “ he reflects. “If people looked at it and laughed, well you would never want to have tea with these people ever again. Something like that needs to be upsetting. Otherwise you aren’t quite human. It was upsetting for those of us involved, including the whole movie crew. But it was totally without ego on the part of those making the movie. There was something happening. We watched and let it happen.”
Did making the documentary cause him to alter his long-standing views that the right for someone with a terminal illness to choose the time and method of their passing is a basic human right? He takes a deep breath.
“I know of various places in Europe and three states in the US where it is practiced. In every case it takes place at the behest of the person you might think of as the victim. Let’s call them the patient. They have to be of sound mind, fully aware of their circumstances and beset by a debilitating disease that is getting worse and which will ultimately be fatal. There are no scandals – nobody is suggesting that granny be thrown on the fire, which is one of the idiot objections that goes around. The only argument you can really make in these modern times is the religious one, which I think is fair enough. But it isn’t fair enough for someone who isn’t religious. I haven’t actually voted for god.”
Confronted with the grim fact that, unless he chooses to take his own life, he will slowly lose command of his senses, you might expect Pratchett to suddenly discover there was room for the divine in the world view. If anything, his illness has merely reinforced his belief that ours is a godless universe (indeed alongside Richard Dawkins he is one of the UK”s more prominent atheists). That isn’t to say he believes the natural state of life is that it should be nasty, brutish and short.
“My parents were perfect Christians in every way except that, to the best of my knowledge, they never went into a church with religious aforethought. They’d go along to weddings, funerals, christenings. But never to worship. Apart from that, they did everything Jesus wanted people to do. They thought that was enough for them. And I think it’s enough for me.” A bestselling author whose sold 65 million books in 37 languages, Pratchett – ‘Sir Terry’ as of 2009 – has weathered his fair share of withering views from elitists who think that, in order to be considered part of the canon, a novel ought be overwritten and lacking a plot. But the 63 year-old has lately joined that exclusive group of genre authors – Stephen King is another – who, by dint of their sheer popularity, have gained respectability from the chattering classes. Pratchett’s most recent Discworld, Snuff, received a kind review from AS Byatt in the London Observer, which is quite a distance from the disparagement heaped upon his first outing in the series, 1983’s The Colour of Magic.
“We talk about mainstream and genres,” he says. “Well, the reality is that genre is the mainstream. It’s all down to labeling in the end. On several occasions really good SF novels have been written by people such as Brian Aldiss. Remember he wrote a novel called Graybeard about a world in which no more children were being born. Some time afterward a book about a world in which no more children were born won the Booker prize. It was called Children Of Men.
“Now Brian Aldiss is a good writer. There is a sense that if you’ve dabbled in science fiction and fantasy you have suddenly disqualified yourself. You’ve been down-market, playing with the naughty people. I remember a well-known female writer shouting at me. I’d said to her, ‘There is more to literature than fine writing’. She said, ‘Literature is fine writing’. No it’s not – you’ve got to have a bloody plot. You have to have a point and characterisation. The fact the lighting is good isn’t enough. You need the other stuff.”
In addition to being warm and hilarious, Pratchett’s novels belong to a distinct school of fantasy fiction, one that rejects the stern moralising of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. You might see him belonging to the older ‘low fantasy’ tradition of Conan The Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Lieber (he is also influenced by their near contemporary HP Lovecraft and could, at a push, be lumped in with China Mievelle and the ‘new weird’ movement). Unlike writers such as Michael Moorcock he isn’t prepared to entirely write off Tolkien. But there are things about Middle Earth that don’t quite sit right with him.
“I disagreed with Tolkien about orcs. Have you read Unseen Academicals? It was a football novel but it was also about this. In Lord Of The Rings orcs are bad. We know that. It’s a given. You don’t exactly know why they are bad – apart from the fact they eat you up and things like that. In their souls, you don’t know why. Men can fall in Tolkien. Boromir in Lord Of The Rings could fall, and I thought, ‘Why couldn’t orcs rise?’ Why couldn’t there be an orc that wanted a nice job, involving kittens and flowers. You shouldn’t just stereotype people. I wasn’t cocking a snook at Tolkien. I was thinking, ‘Hang on a minute – we can have fun with these concepts’.”
Pratchett’s illness means he can no longer type (on most days this is the only indication that there’s anything amiss with his faculties). Instead, he dictates his novels – his latest will be a collaboration with hard SF writer Stephen Baxter – using voice recognition software. He’s perfectly comfortable with technology nowadays. But it’s been a bit of a learning curve. Laughing, he recalls the time he wiped a fully finished novel, having just dispatched the only hard copy in existence in the post.
“It was my first novel to get to number one,” he remembers. “It was called Mort. I wrote it on my first PC. It was extremely expensive. These days you couldn’t give it away if you put a Ferrari in the deal. I was so pleased that I’d finished it I got it printed out on the dot matrix and posted it off to my editor. Later that evening, I was sitting in front of my computer and something happened. It wiped everything. The only copy was in the post. The editor more or less waited by the doorway until it arrived. Nowadays, everything is different. I just tell my machine ‘save work’ and it does it automatically.”

The Irish Discworld Convention takes place from November 4 to 7 in the Falls Hotel, Ennistymon, Co. Clare. www.idwcon.org.