Displaying a noticeable lack of male figures in headwear, this year’s Guest of Honor interview failed miserably to live up to its name: “The Man with the Hat.” Chairman Brian Nisbet interviewed Terry on subjects ranging from how to come up with names to the possible future of Tiffany Aching, before bringing Stephen Baxter on stage to discuss Terry’s and his coming collaboration, The Long Earth.
Why Dollars?
The first question dealt with the currency of the Disc: why did Terry choose to name the Ankh Morpork currency Dollars instead of pounds?
To this, Terry countered that there are more countries in the world using dollars than pounds, going into the origins of the word dollar from the original word “Joachimsthaler.” Apart from that, he wanted to mix things up a little, not making things too British.
“Besides, they have pennies instead of cents.”
The poor literary historians…
Brian then quoted Terry saying how he saved a number of drafts on his computer, then, when the book was done, shouting “Get a real job, literary historians of the future,” deleting everything but the finished thing. One literary historian had handed in a question citing this quote, adding: “Why?”
Terry quibbed that he’d inherited a certain disregard for literary historians from his father. Though the quote was also made in a time where the technical realities were quite different.
“Back then, I saved my files on floppy discs that were actually floppy,” Terry remembers.
“Nowadays, each new computer has more capacity than all the computers I had before it put together.”
Back then, the limited storage space necessitated weeding out excess files ever so often. Nowadays, saving every draft of a book barely makes a dent in the available space on the hard drive. That means that nowadays, a lot more gets saved.
But that doesn’t mean that Terry would be happy to let people delve into his drafts.
“It’s about craftsmanship.”
And just as a master swordsmith throws away the shards and ashes that have gone into the crafting of a fine swords, the drafts that Terry make are just tools used in the process of writing the book.
“The book that is printed is the book I wanted to write. The rest is just steps on the way.”
Coming up with names
One congoer had wanted to know how Terry comes up with names. In many different ways, it turned out.
One good source is lists of old names
“It’s amazing how few names I actually have to come up with.”
Other names come to more as a matter of inspiration – like Bestiality Carter
“It occurred to me, that if people name their daughters after virtues, they might name their boys after sins. Some people might actually do that.”
Other names have no basis in anything in Roundworld.
“When coming up for the name for Angua, I was just playing around with sounds,” Terry recalls.
Sometimes, of course, a name proves to have unanticipated connotations.
“When I came up with Tiffany Aching, I wanted a name that didn’t sound anything like the name of a witch. Which is a bit ironic, since the name Tiffany comes from the word ‘epiphany.’”
Tifffany also proves the difficulties involved in translating books:
“I know that in some other languages, Tiffany is used to refer to either hairdressers, or women who you bring with you to your hotel room at night.”
I Shall Wear Midnight
On the topic of Tiffany, Brian and Terry continued on to talk about the book I shall wear midnight, which is set to release this coming Wednesday at midnight (when else?).
Terry explained that one American fan of The Boy That We Shan’t Mention had seen the Tiffany books as an attack on J.K. Rowling’s books.
“Which is ridiculous, since Granny were saying those things all the way back in Equal Rites,” Terry exclaimed
“The thing is, magic is hard. And it isn’t sparkly. The only thing you’re allowed – your only right – is your broomstick.”
Terry went on to say that a life as a witch was not glamorous, but rather very hard work.
“It’s a tough life with only a few satisfactions.”
Being a witch is “a dirty job, doing the things society needs someone to do.”
Stephen Baxter and the Long Earth
After talking to Terry alone for some 45 minutes, Brian called Stephen Baxter up to join them on the stage.
First they talked discussed how Terry had gotten into writing fantasy.
“I’ve done two not very good sci-fi novels,” Terry started.
After that, Terry wrote The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic as a spoof of bad copies of Tolkien.
"I thought: let’s treat all these creatures as if they were real people. Now real people are sometime being rational, sometimes being stupid.”
Then, around the time of Equal Rites, Terry found that the Discworld had started making him money. And so, one book took another, and he never returned to sci-fi.
The idea that lead to The Long Earth came to Terry around this time. Seeing a man seemingly pushing a horse into a pub, he started imagining a man who found an entire world, devoid of human life, the man taking livestock etc. with him to this world to live.
This evolved into the basic idea for The Long Earth: What if mankind found a way to go to all the earths that could have been – and found that only one of them contained Homo sapiens? Suddenly, scarcity of land would not be a problem – every man could get a galaxy of earths to himself!
Of course, the fact that the other worlds contain no human life doesn’t mean they provide no obstacles to human settlement. First of all, with no human civilization, most of the earth will be covered in woods. So provided the explorers manage to avoid materializing inside a tree, they will be in the middle of acres and acres of forest with a visibility of 15 feet. Secondly, “no humans” doesn’t mean “no threatening creatures,” or indeed, “no intelligent life” (Terry and Stephen were trying to keep quiet about much of the plot of the book, but some things were hinted at).
Another thing that was implied was that there will be at least two strands in the story: the story of someone who goes down the line of the many different Earths, going out to explore alone – and the story of those who stay behind, suddenly finding a world being left behind by everyone else. The phrase used was something of the lines of: “What would happen to the ruling classes if all the workers suddenly disappeared?”
Without promising anything, the two authors indicated that there might well be one or more sequels to The Long Earth, Terry saying that he had a perfect title for the final book set in the world.
Brian ended the interview by asking the authors what they’d say to, say, Discworld fans who were worried about Terry writing a sci-fi book. Stephen answered by saying that “this is Terry going back to his roots!”
Terry followed up on that saying that when writing in the real world, you must follow the rules of the real world, and those rules include science – so it helps to have someone who understands science. But when writing Discworlds, there are rules to follow just the same – only difference is, that those rules were set up by Terry.
And with that, Brian ended the interview, commenting that if one of his guests had run as much over time as he had, he would have been angry with them.
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