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.…”
My next book out is
Going Postal
. It’s about a fraud, a criminal, a con man, who to some extent becomes redeemed through the book, and learns that in addition to fooling everybody else that he’s a nice guy, he can even fool himself. And a friend of mine who read a draft copy said, “There is a little bit of autobiography in all books, isn’t there?” Only friends will tell you that.
And, indeed, I think I am a fraud. I am a Guest of Honour at this convention. When I was a kid, Guests of Honour, as I said the other night, were giants made of gold and half a mile high. They had names like James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke.… I’m five foot seven and I’m never going to get any taller.
I wish I could say I had any purpose in mind when I started the Discworld series. I just thought it was going to be fun. Therewas an awful lot of bad fantasy around in the early 1980s. There was plenty of good fantasy around, I have to add, but there were just too many dark lords, or differently pigmented lords as we call them now. I thought it was time to have fun with this.
The Colour of Magic
and
The Light Fantastic
were the result. Then I found that they were selling. This came as a huge surprise to me. So I wrote
Equal Rites
. I wrote a third of
Equal Rites
in one weekend. In fact, after one of the nuclear power stations I was a press officer for exploded. Well, it didn’t really explode. Well, not much. I mean, it more sort of leaked a bit. But not much. You could hardly see it. And no one died. Trust me on this.
The nervousness here comes from eight years as a nuclear press officer. I never really had to deal with a genuine nuclear accident, but some of the things I did have to deal with were slightly worse, from my personal point of view.
There was, for example, the man who came to a nuclear power station on a public Open Day and turned out to be too radioactive to be allowed into the power station. He set off the machine that shouldn’t go bing, which is only supposed to go bing, or rather, not to go bing, when you are leaving the place. That presented a problem: when a man goes through the machine that shouldn’t go bing and it goes bing, you just know that the Health and Safety Executive is going to ask questions if he still goes bing when he leaves, and you’ll have to prove that he brought the bing in with him.
It turned out that he had been dismantling a Second World War aircraft altimeter on his kitchen table—that’s the kind of thing we Brits do for fun—the night before, and had got pure radium all over his hands. So we scrubbed him up and the power station sent some men in nice clean white suits to take his kitchen table away and put it in the low-level-waste depository. Not many kitchen tables end up like that, or go bing.
Oh, while I think about it, I’ll mention there’s something about spending a lot of time with engineers that makes you burst outlaughing when you hear the term “three completely independent fail-safe systems.” I learned all about the “Fred Factor.”
It works like this. Someone decides we’ll have a nuclear power station and they call in leading technical architects, and they design it. Subsystems are designed by competent engineers and sub-subsystems are designed by equally competent engineers and so it goes down and down and then you get to Fred. Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman. He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.
Fred has been given a job sheet and some tools and told he’s got an hour to do the task. Fred has got to wire up three, as it might be, completely independent fail-safe systems and he wires them up and they are indeed completely independent except for one crucial wire from each system
My next book out is
Going Postal
. It’s about a fraud, a criminal, a con man, who to some extent becomes redeemed through the book, and learns that in addition to fooling everybody else that he’s a nice guy, he can even fool himself. And a friend of mine who read a draft copy said, “There is a little bit of autobiography in all books, isn’t there?” Only friends will tell you that.
And, indeed, I think I am a fraud. I am a Guest of Honour at this convention. When I was a kid, Guests of Honour, as I said the other night, were giants made of gold and half a mile high. They had names like James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke.… I’m five foot seven and I’m never going to get any taller.
I wish I could say I had any purpose in mind when I started the Discworld series. I just thought it was going to be fun. Therewas an awful lot of bad fantasy around in the early 1980s. There was plenty of good fantasy around, I have to add, but there were just too many dark lords, or differently pigmented lords as we call them now. I thought it was time to have fun with this.
The Colour of Magic
and
The Light Fantastic
were the result. Then I found that they were selling. This came as a huge surprise to me. So I wrote
Equal Rites
. I wrote a third of
Equal Rites
in one weekend. In fact, after one of the nuclear power stations I was a press officer for exploded. Well, it didn’t really explode. Well, not much. I mean, it more sort of leaked a bit. But not much. You could hardly see it. And no one died. Trust me on this.
The nervousness here comes from eight years as a nuclear press officer. I never really had to deal with a genuine nuclear accident, but some of the things I did have to deal with were slightly worse, from my personal point of view.
There was, for example, the man who came to a nuclear power station on a public Open Day and turned out to be too radioactive to be allowed into the power station. He set off the machine that shouldn’t go bing, which is only supposed to go bing, or rather, not to go bing, when you are leaving the place. That presented a problem: when a man goes through the machine that shouldn’t go bing and it goes bing, you just know that the Health and Safety Executive is going to ask questions if he still goes bing when he leaves, and you’ll have to prove that he brought the bing in with him.
It turned out that he had been dismantling a Second World War aircraft altimeter on his kitchen table—that’s the kind of thing we Brits do for fun—the night before, and had got pure radium all over his hands. So we scrubbed him up and the power station sent some men in nice clean white suits to take his kitchen table away and put it in the low-level-waste depository. Not many kitchen tables end up like that, or go bing.
Oh, while I think about it, I’ll mention there’s something about spending a lot of time with engineers that makes you burst outlaughing when you hear the term “three completely independent fail-safe systems.” I learned all about the “Fred Factor.”
It works like this. Someone decides we’ll have a nuclear power station and they call in leading technical architects, and they design it. Subsystems are designed by competent engineers and sub-subsystems are designed by equally competent engineers and so it goes down and down and then you get to Fred. Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman. He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.
Fred has been given a job sheet and some tools and told he’s got an hour to do the task. Fred has got to wire up three, as it might be, completely independent fail-safe systems and he wires them up and they are indeed completely independent except for one crucial wire from each system
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