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Presented by Mark Lawson
Lawson: Hello, and welcome to another in the series of which well-known people offer their answers to the questions which have cost most of us some sleep: Is there a God? Is there a point? Is there anything else? My guest today is a man who the misfortune to become press officer for the nuclear power industry during the period of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl disasters, but later became rich and famous by putting forward the theory that the world is supported on the back of four giant elephants, the mselves standing on a massive turtle.
[Music: Hall of The Mountain King. Terry writing on a flash little laptop. Terry carrying various books of his own creation.]
Lawson: Terry Pratchett is one of the best selling writers in the world, with sales of more than 10 million. His literary empire began when Pratchett, while working as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, wrote The Colour of Magic, intended as a send-up of fantasy fiction. Pratchett invented Discworld, with its capital city of Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett's hero, a wizard called Rincewind, tries to make sense of his life before the arrival of Death, on his old horse, Binky.
Although begun as a joke, the Discworld series runs to more than twenty books, and taken very seriously indeed by millions of readers, and become the most popular fantasy books since Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Caption: Is Anyone Out There?
Lawson: Terry Pratchett, obviously you are no stranger to fantasy, but you are the first, I think, who has created a universe, in the Discworld books, which in a way have become, how can I put it, cult leaders. Are you ever astonished by what it is you have started by these things?
Terry: Probably, yes. It's very humbling for an author to get letters from people who really read a lot into them, in that they believe it or it changed their life because of it. I mean, I created the character of Death, well I didn't create death, but I created a particular character for Death, and some of the things he says in the books have meant a lot to people.
Lawson: Your books reveal a comic view of the world, which some people have found a bit unusual, or strange. Was there a time when you became aware that you looked at the world in a slightly unusual way?
Terry: I think I look at the world in a fairly logical way. I think the point is that we become accustomed to seeing the world illogically, because that's the only way to survive. If you look at it logically, you think, "Why are these people begging in the street?" "Why have these people not got homes?" they are logical questions to ask, and they're the kind of questions that children ask, and the adults say "I'll tell you when we get home."
Lawson: What was your attitude about religion when you were growing up?
Terry: Patrick Moore got to me before the Pope did. We live in a very, very big universe, sort of billions of light years across and an infinite number of worlds. I really do not think that there is someone playing some kind of cosmic game of snakes and ladders. But, religion on the whole, passed me by.
Lawson: Was it a happy childhood?
Terry: At home it was idyllic. I lived in a Richmal Crompton kind of a village, and there was a gang of us kids, just running around the place screaming and having fun at the top of our voices. I didn't really like school all that much.
Lawson: There's a lot of people who are taught, really, to dislike books. They feel as though books are about learning, exams and so on. And you certainly avoided that experience.
Terry: I was more or less, left alone to sort it out. My parents were of the opinion that books were a good thing. I was encouraged to read them, and I got a Saturday job at the library, because that got me access to lots more books. The books I was first interested in were fantasy books, then I discovered science-fiction. One of the nice things about good science fiction, is that it can lead you into other things. It's only one step away from palaeontology, it's only one step away from astronomy. And I read them all, in what I call, a 'science-fiction frame of mind'. "Gosh, this is the universe, isn't it amazing?"
Lawson: So you would position yourself as a humanist?
Terry: I think so, certainly an atheist of the Victorian sort. Which is to say not entirely certain that there's no one there, but you're happy to disbelieve that there's anyone there until such person actually, personally comes and discusses things with you for half an hour.
Lawson: In terms of a moral code, is there one by which you operate, and when and where would you draw the frame?
Terry: Probably, after 2000 years of Christianity, certain aspects of it get built in at a bone level, and that even though I am an atheist, I'm probably a Christian atheist, because after a while certain things get built into the way our society thinks and operates and presents its laws and deals with a whole host of matters. So, we purport these things as given, but you're not quite certain who gave them and why and where they came from. I think many world religions and civilisations have tended to subscribe to a remarkably similar moral code, because it works. People are, within fairly wide limits, basically good, because good survives.
Caption : Why are we here?
Lawson: This ability to tell stories which many sorts of people want to read, where do you think that comes from?
Terry: A lot of observation. I have been a human being for a large part of my life, and all authors, I think, develop the 'internal eye' and I observe people and it all goes down in some kind of mental notebook. I'm not certain a lot of talent is involved, but with a reasonable amount of craftsmanship there.
Lawson: Discworld. When did that...at what point did that come into your head?
Terry: Oh, I don't know. In my early thirties. I just wanted to write an antidote to all the bad fantasy that was out there, and Discworld was, in a nutshell, the classic fantasy universe. But with people trying to get on with their lives, and reacting rather more as we in the twentieth century would react.
Lawson: What was the first image that took shape in your mind?
Terry: I think the first image was the world on the back of a turtle. Big turtle, four enormous elephants and a flat world on top of it, which is an image of the universe which was fairly current a thousand years ago. You could easily have found people that would say that's what the world is supposed to look like. And I thought this is a remarkably ridiculous view of the world. Although, to be frank, sitting on a big ball of rock spinning through space doesn't seem that logical.
Lawson: What is it about humans that the deep need to have these stories, these creations?
Terry: I think you have to have a story. You have to have an explanation. Sooner or later, you have to make a decision as to whether you want to be a fallen angel or a rising ape, and I find it far more interesting to contemplate the fact that out of a huge, empty, cold universe, life began and gradually evolved, and came out of the sea, and became reptiles and arts graduates and mammals. That's far more awe-inspiring, than the fact that a finger touched some clay, and said "Let there be life." It may actually be exactly the same story told in two different ways. All creation myths are true, for a given value of true. I don't think you'll find many people today that will actually say that Genesis is a completely, totally accurate, literal description of how the Earth was created, and mankind came into being. Funnily enough, I do know people who would say that, and often their world view has a kind of logic to it.
Lawson: You said something very striking once which was that the way in which you wrote you avoided getting the fatwas, unlike poor mister Rushdie. But the implication was that the books are actually saying subversive things.
Terry: One of the givens of the Discworld universe is that a god is powerful, in direct proportion to amount of believers he or she has. I wrote a book called Small Gods. Small Gods is about a monolithic religion in one of the countries on the Disc. It's old and it's corrupt, and there is really no more room in it for its god. And the god is so lacking in god-like power now, that instead of manifesting himself as a great raging cloud of fire, or a white bull, or one of the other things that gods traditionally do, he can just about manage a tortoise. In theory, if the plot I delivered to you in about thirty seconds, I think over all, would offend practically every religion, and yet, all the mail I subsequently got for that is very positive, with loads of people of different religions, and no religions at all, said "Yes, that's exactly right! That's exactly how it is!"
Lawson: In one of the things you wrote about on the subject of Discworld, you referred to that there seemed to be this 'turtle-shaped hole' in people. Now that picks up, that's a phrase that theologians often use about the 'god-shaped hole' in people. Do you think there is a need to, this desire to believe in the explanation of it all.
Terry: I think people do like to know that there are answers to the big questions. The fact that they might not be the right answers doesn't matter quite so much. The advantage that Discworld has got, which is not shared by what we call 'the real universe', is that it quite genuinely has a caring god, which is to say, me. And I see to it that, on the whole that the good, or at least, the less bad, win, or at least don't lose, by too much at the end of the book.
Lawson: Do you want your books to change people? Have any effect on them?
Terry: Well, the cynical journalist in me says that the first thing we want to do is change them from people that have got $4.99 to people that haven't. I have no great moral crusade. I think it would be a very foolish author that would sit there and say "I write these books because I want to change people for the better." You'd think in England we would be very, very suspicious of an author like that.
Lawson: When people use the term 'fantasy' to talk about these kinds of books, it does seem to imply that they're not really to be taken seriously, that they're just a bit of fun.
Terry: People often talk about fantasy as if it's the icing on the cake, when, in fact, it's the whole of the cake. We are fantasy creatures. We sit here in this studio, on this city, in this country and built on fantasy, and fantasy's like a justice which has no real existence in the universe. There is no particle of justice floating around, but we have created it, and it now exists in some kind of a way. We're apes that have been strategically shaved, and yet we have created these marvellous pantheon ideas around us, and fantasy is the oldest literature.
Caption: Where Will It All End?
Lawson: Now in this universe that we're in, what do you think happens at death, or after death?
Terry: I'm in the unenviable position of someone that doesn't believe in a god of any sorts, and thinks that there may be such a thing as an immortal soul. But I think that's probably because of hopeless optimism on my part, I do not know. Not many people come back to tell us. I think that something survives. I think that one thing that certainly survives is the 'outer soul' of a person, by which I mean the memories people have of them. The things that they have done. They have this existence which will keep going, and it gradually fades away.
Lawson: Do you fear death?
Terry: I fear what comes immediately beforehand. I don't think I fear death. From a Discworld point of view, no one fears Death. What they fear is loss and separation and pain, and all the other things that generally come just before hand.
Lawson: If it turns out that there is a god, and it is possible to have what we recognise as a conversation with that entity, what would be the first thing you would say?
Terry: (laughing) Sorry!
Lawson: Terry Pratchett, thank you.
Transcribed by Thomas Pratchett
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