A Blink of the Screen

Pratchett, despite the slapstick, the terrible jokes and the very clever complicated jokes, is somehow wise and grown up. As a reader I trust him.
    I was once asked by a television interviewer, ‘Isn’t all this simply really about us?’ and I indignantly replied, ‘No’, because I needed my secondary world to be other, separate and coherent. But he is of course writing about us. He is good at policemen, businessmen, fraudsters, murderers, banks and shares, and at music with rocks in it besides, as well as at goblins, witches, dragons, trolls and dwarfs. And of course, computers. But he writes neither satire nor allegory. What gets into his world is
in
his world, with its own energy and logic.
    The shorter stories collected in
A Blink of the Screen
often consist of incursions from the secondary world into our world. A fantasy writer kills off his barbarian hero only to find him on his doorstep, come to ‘meet his maker’. Death dances in a disco. The first story, ‘The Hades Business’, was written when Pratchett was thirteen. It concerns the irruption of the Devil into an advertiser’s flat. Pratchett is apologetic about it but it has a gleeful pace and a very satisfactory ending. All his stories have satisfactory endings. I particularly like the one based on a real incident in 1973 when a lorry overturned in Hollywood let out some crates of chickens, who settled in a shrubbed verge. I like the weird one in which desperate travellers are trapped inside the world of Victorian Christmas cards, with snow covered with ‘tiny tinselly shards’, monstrous robins, and a ‘dreadful oblong slot’. There are tales about computers, including one, written in 1990, which is told by ‘an amiable repairman, not very bright but good with machines’ who works on machines inside which people create their own reality. (Again with a good ending.)
    There is also a collection of stories from the Discworld – including a long and wicked one about Granny Weatherwax and a hilarious version of the national anthem of Ankh-Morpork.
    And there is a grim little poem about how
    They don’t teach you the facts of death,
    Your mum and dad. They give you pets.
    Pratchett comments, ‘I tried to write this as though I was thirteen years old, with that earnest brand of serious amateurishness. This is possibly not a long way from how I write at the best of times …’ I can see what he means. What his teacher understood when he was thirteen, and what we all, thirteen-year-olds, nerds and geeks, reading writers and university teachers, recognize with glee is that he is a born writer, a maker, inimitable.

Non-Discworld Shorter Writings

THE HADES BUSINESS

    S CIENCE F ANTASY
MAGAZINE, ED . J OHN C ARNELL, NO. 60, VOL. 20 , A UGUST 1963 . A N EARLIER VERSION WAS PUBLISHED IN THE
T ECHNICAL C YGNET
, THE H IGH W YCOMBE T ECHNICAL H IGH S CHOOL MAGAZINE
    Argh, argh, argh … if I put my fingers in my ears and go ‘lalalala’ loudly I won’t hear you read this story
.
    It’s juvenile. Mind you, so was I, being thirteen at the time. It’s the first thing I ever wrote that got published. In fact it’s the first thing I ever wrote with the feeling that I was writing a real story
.
    It began as a piece of homework. The English teacher gave me twenty marks out of twenty for it, and put it in the school magazine. The kids liked it. I was a writer
.
    And this was a big deal, because I hadn’t really been anything up until then. I was good at English. At everything else I was middling, one of those kids that don’t catch the teacher’s eye and are very glad of it. I was even bad at sports, except for the one wonderful term when they let us play hockey, when I was bad and very dangerous
.
    But the other kids had liked it. I’d sniffed blood
.
    There were three, yes, three professional sf and fantasy magazines published in the UK in those days. Unbelievable, but true. I persuaded my aunt, who had a typewriter, to type it out for me, and I sent it to John Carnell, who edited all three. The nerve of the kid
.
    He accepted it
.
    Oh boy
.
    The £14 he paid was enough to buy a second-hand Imperial 58 typewriter from my typing teacher (my mother had decided that I ought to be able to do my own typing, what with being a writer and everything) and, as I write, it seems to me that it was a very good machine for fourteen quid and I just wonder if Mum and Dad didn’t make up the difference on the quiet
.
    Fortunately, before I could do too much