Pratchett was far from a recluse, and I knew that he had regularly given speeches, written articles, and appeared as a guest on various shows and at conventions. But I hadn't realised how varied – and how lengthy – his non-fiction writing had been. Indeed, I hadn't known that he had started his writing career off in journalism, so in many ways his now more famous fiction owes a great deal to the traits and skills he honed with his non-fiction.
Whilst far from a complete collected works, A Slip of the Keyboard does a solid job of gathering together many disparate pieces from throughout his lengthy career and ordering them in a roughly sensible pattern. The book is ostensibly split into chapters, each revolving around a certain theme, and each roughly following the last chronologically (where possible). Unfortunately, what that means is that the opening chapters are much more scatter-gun and broad in their approach, effectively covering Pratchett's early life and career, whilst the final chapter is completely the opposite: laser focused and almost repetitive in its messaging around his diagnosis of Alzheimer's and subsequent crusade for more sensible laws around assisted dying. As a result, the emotional arc of the book is effectively a downward trend, from anecdote-laden comedic outings through to heavy discussions of the ethics of death and bodily autonomy. In some ways, that is a criticism of the format, but in others it feels somehow right. The book leaves you with its most important messages, firmly implanted, and well reasoned. If you were to take anything away from ASotK, I imagine Pratchett would want it to be his thoughts on end-of-life compassion and empathy for those caught in the worst sort of situation: a terminal one.
But that isn't to say that the writing gets dour and sullen; not at all! Even up to the end, Pratchett is able to harness a comedic turn of phrase or highlight the absurdity of life with a wry grin. Still, you can almost feel the disease taking effect, and the rage practically jumps off the page. For fans, then, there can be some moments that are hard to get through, but as with everything he has written, perseverance is more than rewarded.
Death aside, then, the book is filled with quirky and humorous anecdotes from his life, from the behind-the-scenes gossip from his time working at a nuclear power plant, through to the bizarre world of book tours and conventions, through to his continued incredulity at being a much-loved and celebrated author. I think it's fair to say that if you've ever found yourself engrossed in any of his series – from Discworld to Truckers – then you'll get a kick out of the tales from his broader life, too. I certainly loved it.
Notes
An excerpt from the foreword by Neil Gaiman:
Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.
Terry Pratchett is not a jolly old elf at all. Not even close. He's so much more than that.
On the benefits of starting a new book the moment the previous one has been sent to the printers (I particularly love the evocative image of books as bookmarks):
One minute you're a writer, next minute you have written. And that's the time, just at that point when the warm rosy glow of having finished a book is about to give way to the black pit of post-natal despair at having finished a book, that you start again. It also means you have an excuse for not tidying away your reference books, a consideration not to be lightly cast aside in this office, where books are used as bookmarks for other books.
On why you should write the blurb as early as possible:
Getting the heart and soul of a book into fewer than a hundred words helps you focus. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.
On a convention experiment where fans attempt to recreate the infamous Ankh-Morpork Guilds system – if I had access to a time machine, this is a moment I would visit and take part in, to experience 😉:
As a kind of experiment, a guild system had been set up, and guilds had to vie with one another to get points for their guild. And as I was telling the kids earlier, you're sitting there and a sweet little munchkin who is now working for the Assassins' Guild comes up and goes "Stabbity, stabbity, stab. That will be two dollars."
"No," I say, "that's not how assassination works. You do not charge the corpse." So she thinks about it and says, "My friend Keith" (another small munchkin salutes) "he's from the Guild of Alchemists and will bring you alive again for three dollars." So with rigor mortis setting in, I stuck my hand in my pocket and gave them some of the fake convention money and then she smiled sweetly and said, "And for five dollars, I won't kill you again."
It was amazing to see how this Ankh-Morpork system evolved during the con. Within a few hours of it starting, the head of the Merchants' Guild embezzled his guild's money to purchase the assassination of the head of the Assassins' Guild so he could take it over, and on the second day, the forged money started to appear. It was magnificent! It was Ankh-Morpork come to life. And I looked down at the hall at the people having fun and enjoying themselves and occasionally charging one another to kill them and I thought "My Work Here is Done..."
The entirety of page 98 is a really great overview of what makes fantasy work and makes it fantasy. But Terry also argues that fantasy is boring. Not in a bad way, but in a clichéd one. Better to make a world a little realistic. Let people be nuanced, throw out foundational morals, tell the stories about the real people around the edges of the heroes and dragons. And if you can poke a bit of fun at the genre (and at yourself) at the same time? All the better.
That feels like a much better guiding ethos than trying to make a fantasy world systematic. Make the people real, the rest will work itself out. Set it in the time after the legends and the great deeds, which are now half-remembered and probably all a bit wrong, anyway.
On how humanity's childlike impulses are some of our greatest strengths (page 112):
I also came across the word neoteny, which means "remaining young". It's something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings.
From page 183, titled Honey, these bees had a heart of gold: this whole article is just wonderful. It tells the story of how Pratchett read the book The Maze Maker by Michael Ayrton, which attempts to chronicle the life of Daedalus, the Green inventor and father of Icarus. One of his fabled inventions was a golden honeycomb, somehow cast from the real thing (impressive, as obviously a comb would normally melt in the heat of that process). Upon reading about this, Pratchett decided to find out if it was possible. So he tried to make his own. He sourced dead bees and some old honeycomb from the British Bee Association (because of course he did), and even managed to get some dead locusts from ZSL and some grasshoppers from the NHM that were considered "surplus to requirements", for practice insects. These were cast in a range of silver and gold. Which means that somewhere out there, someone owns a golden grasshopper, collected for the Natural History Museum, and gilded by Terry Pratchett. And that's just wonderful 😄
On the year 2001 compared to the film of the same name (page 207):
What we are, in fact, are electronic apemen. We woke up just now in the electronic dawn and there, looming against the brightening sky, is this huge black rectangle. [...] And like apemen trying sticks and stones and fire for the first time, there's a lot of spearing ourselves in the foot, accidentally dropping rocks on the kids, acute problems in trying to have sex with fire, and so on. We have to learn to deal with it. Where will it take us? We don't know, because we're back to being apemen again. And if apemen try to second-guess the future, they'll dream of little more than killing bigger pigs.