Terry Pratchett in Second Life

When Terry Pratchett arrived in Second Life yesterday it was to a thunderous applause. Those present had waited several hours to hear the award-winning author of the Discworld series speak at this Q&A session, knowing that if they did not arrive very early, they may not get on to the sim. “Who do we kick out so Terry can get in?” asked one of the crowd. “Don’t worry, we’ve got that sorted,” Nick Gloucester, Terry’s assistant for the evening, told us.

The event began with an ominous tone. Several members of the crowd found their viewers crashed with only ten minutes to go before the event began and a last-minute message went out to the Terry Pratchett Fans group apologising for “technical issues” preventing Terry from actually speaking. The session would go ahead as planned, we were told, but Terry would be relying on text chat to answer our questions.

Terry walked on stage to a round of applause, cheers and shouts; pulled off a series of gestures that would have looked more at home on a bodybuilder than an author; and took hold of a 1950s-style microphone to greet the crowd. “Hello everybody! Sorry, I’m new at all of this kind of stuff and so can anyone tell me how to get the rocket launcher?” he asked. “Okay, I know that you have to get the shotgun first, but sometimes you get lucky.”

Questions came slowly at first and with a lot of confusion over whether they were to be put to Terry directly or to Nick for moderation. After a slew of comments about whether anyone had a rocket launcher they could give Terry, and comments that “SL tends toward Make Clothes, Not War”, Nick asked for a volunteer question master, to receive all the crowd’s questions and fire them at Terry in an orderly manner. ImmortalitySou Ballinger was the quickly chosen victim for the inevitable Instant Message spam and the event got down to business.

“Will Second Life appear in one of your books?” asked Michaelx Beerbaum.

“As far as I’m concerned, my books are Second Life,” Terry replied.

On the subject of why Nation, his latest novel, was the first in 25 years to not be set on Discworld, Terry remarked: “[It] being on Discworld would change all kinds of things that I could do. After all, Nation is hardly full of laughs. Setting Nation on a thinly disguised “alternate” world does, I think, give it more power and urgency. … I wanted this world, but with a few interesting alterations.

“I came up with the idea in 2003 … I was so excited that I told Sarah Lefanu and I’m glad that I did because she is one person who can vouch that I came up with the idea before the big Asian Tsunami.”

This is not the first time one of Terry’s books has skimmed close to real world events, however. Making Money, the thirty-sixth Discworld novel, saw notorious con arist Moist von Lupwig given the task of rebuilding the failing Bank of Ankh-Morpork. “It seems that, primitive as it is, the Discworld economy is considerably more stable than the one here,” said Terry. “And, come to think about it, Moist’s solution to the problem was not a long way from what has been done over here.”

On the question of the most difficult book he has ever written, Terry told us: “Probably it was Nation. Probably because I wrote the first draft in six months and then spent the next six months wrestling it into the right shape. … For obvious reasons, mostly because I am the poster boy for the battle against Alzheimer’s, there have been quite a number of days when I have been unable to write a word. But for the last several years I have only done one book a year because of all the other distractions placed on an author’s life. Put it another way: Don’t ask a man to reply to every email AND do a full thousand words a day ”

“It seems from reading the early Discworld novels that you grew to respect characters like Granny Weatherwax and Sam Vimes the more time you spent with them,” said Salaamata Afarensis. “Do you find that your relationship with the characters in the books has changed over time?”

“It seems to me that if you get a character just right, they start doing the work for you,” Terry replied. “It is as if they become a subroutine in your own brain and you are right when you point out the similarity between Granny and Vimes; you might notice that both of them seem at every stage to be fighting some internal demon. ”

Several members of the crowd were eager to hear about any forthcoming film, television and computer game adaptations of Terry’s work. “I don’t have any particular hopes for Hollywood,” said Terry. “Besides, I like the British stuff, even though the budget is much lower than it might be in the States, I can get involved at just about every stage in the production. To an author, that is worth a great deal.

“Early in 2003 we had approaches from about 5 or 6 games developers. I told them all to go away and knock up something that would show me that they had a grip on what Discworld would be about, and none of them came back. I’m not unhappy about that. Certainly I would require a new Discworld game to be as immersive as Thief II and with the sound and graphics suitable for the times.”

The character of Eskarina Smith, who has appeared in only one Discworld novel, has been a favourite for a small but significant proportion of Terry’s fans. When asked if she would ever return, Terry replied: “I think that if the last Tiffany Aching book, which will be called I shall Wear Midnight, gets finished it will probably re-introduce Esk.”

The event ran over time and even then Terry had to depart before the final few questions could be answered. He had an appointment on “Nation”, the Second Life island created as part of the launch celebrations for the novel of the same name, to hang out with all the poor souls who had found they could not get into the Q&A. Asked if he would ever come back for another visit to Second Life, Terry told us: “ I think you’re going to have to improve the graphics considerably before I come back to Second Life. The graphics in Oblivion allow you to see the graphics in the bottom of a pond and I think that came out in 2002. ”

For a full account of the questions asked, and Terry’s replies, visit http://www.flickr.com/groups/terry-pratchett-in-sl/discuss/72157607890478353/ – where you can also find a large selection of photographs taken by some of the event’s participants.