Once More *With Footnotes
Hollywood Chickens

A rough census indicated that the population stabilised at around fifty birds. For the first few years young chickens would frequently be found laminated to the blacktop, but some sort of natural selection appeared to be operating, or, if we may put it another way, flat hens don’t lay eggs.

Cogito ergo cluck.

Document C contains an analysis of the three eggs found in the debris. As you will see, one of them seems normal but infertile, the second has been powering a flashlight bulb for two days, and a report on the third is contingent on finding either it or Dr Paperbuck, who was last seen trying to cut into it with a saw.



Doctor Who?

I’m not quite sure why you’ve given me a Doctorate of Letters. Certainly the biggest service I have performed for literature is to deny on every suitable occasion that I write it but, nevertheless, I am honoured.

I have been writing Discworld books for the better part of two decades. They have, I hope, brought pleasure to millions, and it almost seems unfair to say that at least they’ve brought fun and money to one.



The Hades Business

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.

“The demons all got jobs elsewhere,” [said the Devil].
“Tax collectors,” murmured Crucible.
“Quite so.”



The Big Store

I like the stage. The special effects are better.



Paperback Writer

I came back from that event determined to be writer. After all, I’d shaken hands with Arthur C Clarke, so now it was just a matter of hard work…



Final Reward

“I have come,” said the barbarian hero, “to receive my Final Reward.” He peered down Dogger’s hall expectantly and rippled his torso.
“You’re a fan, right?” said Dogger. “Pretty good costume…”
“What,” said Erdan, “is fan?”
“I want to drink your blood,” said Skung, conversationally.
Over the giant’s shoulder – metaphorically speaking, although under his massive armpit in real life – Dogger saw the postman coming up the path. The man walked around Erdan, humming, pushed a couple of bills into Dogger’s unresisting hand, opined against all the evidence that it looked like being a nice day, and strolled back down the path.
“I want to drink his blood, too,” said Skung.

“It is said,” [Erdan] said, “that those who die in combat will feast and carouse in your hall forever.”
“Oh.” Dogger hovered uncertainly in the doorway. “My hall?”
Erdan nodded again. Dogger looked around him. What with the telephone and the coatrack it was already pretty crowded. Opportunities for carouse looked limited.

Dogger crept up to the trolley. “But it’s not yours!”
Erdan looked puzzled.
“It is now,” he said. “I took it. Much easy. No fighting. I have drink, I have meat, I have My-Name-Is-TRACEY-How-May-I-Help-You, I have small nuts in bag.”
Dogger pulled aside most of a cow in small polystyrene boxes and Tracey’s mad, terrified eyes looked up at him from the depths of the trolley. She extended a sticker gun in both hands, like Dirty Harry about to have his day made, and priced his nose at 98p a lb.



Theatre of Cruelty

He was, in fact, dead.
It would be hard to be deader without special training.

“He’s been drinking, too. We could get him for being dead and disorderly.”

Then he ambled back to the scene of the crime in the alley, where Corporal Nobbs had chalked the outline of the corpse on the ground (colouring it in, and adding a pipe and a walking stick and some trees and bushes in the background – people had already dropped 7p in his helmet).



Introduction: The Unseen University Challenge

Some of the questions foxed me, I can tell you. I was slightly glad of that – I’m not sure I’d feel at ease with myself if I knew every blessed thing about Discworld.

However towering the distant mountains, however dwarf-haunted the local woods, any character wanting to eat a piece of zorkle meat between two slices of bread probably has no other word for it than sandwich.

I’m told the BBC has forbidden people to take Discworld as a subject on Mastermind, which may show unusual common sense on the part of the BBC.



2001: The Vision and the Reality

I remember that spaceship. We had proper spaceships in those days, not like the sort you get now.

We hold in our hands a power that emperors dreamed of, and we say, “It was only £69.95 because Dixons had a sale on.”

Dr Haywood Floyd is important enough to have a moon shuttle all to himself and he uses a pen? Where’s the portable computer? Where’s the handset? You mean he’s not in constant communication? Why isn’t he shouting, “HELLO! I’M ON THE SHUTTLE!”?



Roots of Fantasy

It talked about gremlins, and how lots of trades created little superstitions and mythologies. But as a PR man for the place, I became aware that not everyone on site was one hundred per cent behind my cheery statements saying that, of course, we didn’t actually believe it. They were engineers. They knew about Murphy. They weren’t about to upset no pixy.



Introduction: The Wyrdest Link

Like volvas – they were Nordic seeresses (very safe ones, possibly with riding lights).



Thought Process

Interesting footnote in tortoise book reminds us that most famous tortoise in history must be the one that got dropped on the head of famous Greek philosopher… what’s the bugger’s name? Very famous man, wherever the tortoise-dropping set get together.



The Sea and Little Fishes

Trouble began, and not for the first time, with an apple.

“He sells his apple trees all over the place,” Nanny Ogg went on. “Funny, eh, to think that pretty soon thousands of people will be having a bite of Nanny Ogg.”
“Thousands more,” said Granny, tartly. Nanny’s wild youth was an open book, although only available in plain covers.

Nanny had nothing against witches being married. It wasn’t as if there were rules. She herself had had many husbands, and had even been married to three of them.

Granny Weatherwax could listen in a cutting way. She could make something sound stupid just by hearing it.

Scratch any witch and… well, you’d be facing a witch you’d just scratched.

You got on a lot better with people when you remembered to put frills round it, and took an interest, and said things like, “How are you?” Esme didn’t bother with that kind of stuff because she knew already. Nanny Ogg knew too, but also knew that letting on you knew gave people the serious willies.

No one would come into the clearing, of course. That would mean admitting they knew where it was. So they were blundering around in the surrounding bushes. She pushed her way through and was greeted with some looks of feigned surprise that would have done credit to any amateur dramatic company.

The man next to Poorchick took off his hat quickly and held it respectfully in front of him in the ai-senor-the-bandidos-have-raided-our-villages position.

Nanny nodded again, in a sort of horrified reverie. She realised that only she stood in the way of a wholesale rampage of niceness.

For several hundred years the Curses had been directed at Unlucky Charlie, who was, however you looked at it, nothing more than a scarecrow. And since curses are generally directed at the mind of the cursed, this presented a major problem, because even, “May your straw go mouldy and your carrot fall off,” didn’t make much impression on a pumpkin.

They had that look worn by actors about two minutes from the end of a horror movie, when they know the monster is about to make its final leap and now it’s only a matter of which door.

If she’d ever read books, she’d have been able to read faces just like one.



Let There Be Dragons

Teachers and librarians say, “You know, your books are really popular among children who don’t read.” I think this is a compliment; I just wish they would put it another way.

In the 50s most schools taught history like this: there were the Romans who had a lot of baths and built some roads and left. Then there was a lot of undignified pushing and shoving until the Normans arrived, and history officially began.



Thud – A Historical Perspective

“For,” he said, “all should know that while Hnaflbaflsniflwhifltafl teaches preparedness, strategy, boldness and quick thinking, it is also important to know when not to be too drhg’hgin clever by half.”

The traditional enmity between dwarfs and trolls had been explained away by one simple statement: one species is made of rock, the other is made of miners.

“For,” according to the trollish philosopher Plateau, “if you wants to understan’ an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he’s still your enemy, at least you’re a mile away and he’s got no shoes.”



Death and What Comes Next

AND ARE YOU AWARE OF THE THEORY THAT THE STATE OF SOME TINY PARTICLES IS INDETERMINATE UNTIL THE MOMENT THEY ARE OBSERVED? A CAT IN A BOX IS OFTEN MENTIONED.
“Oh, yes,” said the philosopher.
GOOD, said Death. He got to his feet as the last of the light died, and smiled.
I SEE YOU…



Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjurer

And to build up his contact book, which is now the size of the Bible and contains rather more interesting people.

He also had a very bad hat. It was a grey homburg. He was not a hat person. There was no natural until between hat and man.

And the moment, live on air, when we realised that an under-informed New York radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go thought Good Omens was not a work of fiction...



Elves Were Bastards

I recall an issue of Locus magazine that discussed or advertised three different titles that included a Dark Lord as the enemy […]. Oh, dear. Dark Lords should be rationed.



Medical Notes

Annoia, or Paranoia Inversa: The belief that you are out to get everyone.



The Orangutans Are Dying

Various organisations started paying me money to go and talk to them. This embarrassed me somewhat, until I heard about the Orangutan foundation.
I rang them up. I said, “I seem to bet getting all this money, would you like it?” A cautious voice said, “Yes?”



Alien Christmas

And then I saw a printout underneath it which said that at 2200 my role was After Dinner Speaker, which is something you’d expect to find only in the very worst dungeon, a monster lurching around in a white frilly shirt looking for an audience. Three hours later the explorers are found bored rigid, their coffee stone cold, the brick-thick after dinner mint melted in their hands.

You could tell it was a robot, it had two cogwheels going round in its chest and its eyes lit up when you turned its key, and why not, so would yours.

They go around saving the universe from another bunch of robots, saving the universe in this case consisting of great laser battles. The universe doesn’t look that good by the time they’ve saved it, but by golly, it’s saved.

Weirdest of the lot, though, is Kraak, Prince of Darkness. At £14.95 he must be a bargain for a prince of darkness.

Stuff two batteries up his robot bum and he starts to terrorise the world as advertised, and he does it like this, what he does is, he walks about nine inches ve-r-ry slowly and painfully, while dozens of little plastic pistons thrash about, and then he falls over.

No wonder he terrorises the universe, it must be pretty frightening, having a thousand tons of war robot collapse on top of you and lie there with its little feet pathetically going round and round. You want to commit suicide in sympathy. Oh, and he’s got this other fiendish weapon, his head comes off and rolls under the sofa.

None of the really traditional toys were there – no Rambos, no plastic models of the Karate Kid, none of those weird little spelling and writing machines designed to help your kid talk like a NASA launch controller with sinus trouble and a mental age of five.



Turntables of the Night

You could tell it was Hallowe’en because of the all the little bastards running around the streets shouting, “Trickle treat,” and threatening you with milk bottles.

Everyone wore a mask but hadn’t made an effort with the rest of the clothes so it looked as though Frankenstein and Co had all gone shopping in Marks and Sparks.

OH, I’VE GOT THEM ALL, he said, turning back to Wayne. ELVIS PRESLEY, BUDDY HOLLY, JIM MORRISON, JIMI HENDRIX, JOHN LENNON…
“Fairly wide spread, musically,” said Wayne. “Have you got the complete Beatles?”
NOT YET.



Cult Classic

I’d got this three-volume yacht anchor of a book from the library that day. Boys at school had told me about it. It had maps in it, they said. This struck me at the time as a pretty good indicator of quality.

What happened in 1066? The Battle of Hastings. Full marks. And what else happened in 1066? What do you mean, what else happened? The Battle of Hastings was what 1066 was for.



No Worries

Incidentally, an early Australian rival to Marmite was tentatively called Pawill, although the proposed slogan, “If Marmite, Pawill,” was never used as far as I know, possibly because of police intervention.

I was also pissed on by a koala, because that’s what they do.

I was allowed to kiss Granny Weatherwax. Few people can say the same. Not without having a very croaky voice, at any rate.

Today the person who knows how their setup works is away. […] Oh, and the default printer on the network is not, in fact, the one next to this machine. I find this out when someone rings down and says, “There’s some rather odd stuff coming out of the laserjet in the manager’s office. Who is Captain Vimes, mate?”



Troll Bridge

“What’s the good of killing a troll? What’ve you got when you’ve killed a troll?”
“A dead troll.”

“Billy goats?” said Cohen.
“I don’t know anything about billy goats,” said Mica. “She’s always going on about billy goats. I have no knowledge whatsoever about billy goats.” He winced.



Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories

I was asking random people in the queue to quote any magpie rhyme they knew […]. Typically the rhymes would run, “One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a funeral, four for a birth…” and presumably all the way up to, “1,347 for the phone number of the avian pest controller.”

I wasn’t about to spoil a good story by checking. I am a journalist, after all.



Once and Future

Basically, when you step out of a time machine you can’t rely on seeing a little sign that says, “Welcome to 500AD, Gateway to the Dark Ages, pop. 10 million and falling.”

You can start out by checking the constellations with a little gadget, because they tell me the stars are moving around all the time and you can get a very rough idea of when you are just by looking through the thing and reading off the calibrations. If you can’t even recognise the constellations, the best thing to do is run and hide, because something forty feet tall and covered with scales is probably hunting you already.

I told them at Base we might as well save a lot of effort by just, you know, bribing one of the future guys for the plans of the next model. They said if we violated the laws of Cause-and-Effect like that there’s a good chance the whole universe would suddenly catastrophically collapse into this tiny bubble .005 Angstroms across, but I say it’s got to be worth a try.

She and Nimue got on like sisters. Like sisters that get along well, I mean.

I’d heard about this high king. In his time, apparently, the land had flowed with so much milk and honey people must have needed waders to get around.



A Word About Hats

I bought a new hat for a tour last year. It turned out to be on the tight side, and I had foolishly not brought a spare hat. But a wonderful bookshop in the town of St Neots had once been a gentleman’s outfitters and there, on a high shelf, was a Victorian hat-stretching engine. No bookstore should be without one. They kindly racked the hat in front of the crowd while I signed the books. I believe that some people thought it was a way of forcing me to sign.

People ask me if I feel naked without my hat. The answer is no. I feel naked without, say, my trousers.
Once More *With Footnotes