“You know those games where this ball runs up and bounces around and ends up in a slot at the bottom?”
“Pinball machines?”
“Is that what they’re called now?”
“I think so.”
“Oh. Right.” The Alderman nodded. “Well…when you’re bouncing around from pin to pin, it is probably very difficult to know that outside the game there’s a room and outside the room there’s a town and outside the town there’s a country and outside the country there’s a world and outside the world there’s a billion trillion stars and that’s only the start of it…but it’s there, you see? Once you know about it, you can stop worrying about the slot in the bottom. And you might bounce around a good deal longer.”
from Johnny And The Dead, my favourite Terry Pratchett book of all time
All witches are selfish, the Queen had said. But Tiffany’s Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare you try to take these things, because they are mine!
This quote right here, which I read years before I read one of his novels literally and I say this with no poetic liberty, saved my life. I repeat it to myself constantly to this day.
It’s the activist rallying cry. I will protect my people. No force of magic is stronger than my selfishness, stronger than my power to defend and defy.
Sir Terry Pratchett awakens. A skeleton stands at his bedside, wearing a long black robe. He sits up. “Well, hang on, let me get my hat,” he tells it.
The skeleton reaches into its robe. From abyssal depths it produces a heavy book bound in sheets of lead and night. It is the kind of book that gets stolen by a rugged adventurer from a temple with more spike-traps than the average house of worship contains. It is the kind of book to which the word “tome” might properly be applied. Frost forms on its pages from the lingering chill of the void.
The skeleton coughs once and holds the book out to the man sitting on the bed.
“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.
Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.
Stories,
great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and
uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have
evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they
have grown fat on the retelling … stories, twisting and blowing through
the darkness.
And their very existence overlays a faint but
insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves
deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows
certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the
path of the story, the groove runs deeper.
This is called the
theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started,
takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings
of that story that have ever been.
This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.
So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods.
A
thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been
kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the
pathways of story.
It is now impossible for the third and youngest
son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far
claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.
Stories don’t care who
takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that
the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories
are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the
story itself.*
It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.
“WHO WROTE WHAT BIT? Ah. Another tricky one. As the official Keeper of the One True Copy, Terry physically wrote more of Draft 1 than Neil. But if 2,000 words are written down after a lot of excited shouting, it’s a moot point whose words they are. And, in any case, as a matter of honor both of them rewrote and footnoted the other guy’s stuff, and both can write passably in the other guy’s style. The Agnes Nutter scenes and the kids mostly originated with Terry, the Four Horsemen and anything with maggots started with Neil. Neil had the most influence on the opening, Terry on the ending. Apart from that, they just shouted excitedly a lot.
The point they both realised the text had wandered into its own world was in the basement of the old Gollancz books, where they’d got together to proofread the final copy, and Neil congratulated Terry on a line that Terry knew he hadn’t written, and Neil was certain that he hadn’t written either. They both privately suspect that at some point the book had started to generate text on its own, but neither of them will actually admit this publicly for fear of being thought odd.”
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (2006 edition) – appendix by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (via hapfairy)
Don’t you think Bush/Blair looks tired?
(If you get this, pass it on)
*hops off bandwagon*
Anyway. The actual post-
Some of you may not know of my utter adoration for Terry Pratchett’s Johnny series, but…I utterly adore Terry Pratchett’s Johnny series. (See icon- that’s a quote from Johnny and the Dead.) And this Christmas I learned they’re making a miniseries of Johnny and the Bomb-it was just on Blue Peter half an hour or so ago. I’m completely torn. On the one hand, all the clips I’ve seen of it look excellent and pretty close to the version in my head, but on the other hand…it’s one of my books, even more so than Harry Potter. And although I’m always saying I want a fandom for it…in a way, I also don’t, because that means I have to share those books with other people.
And, of course, I might run across people talking about it later: “Shit plot, shit characters, book’s probably a load of crap too.” It isn’t, but that’s the sort of thing people say so often, and you can’t stop them but that sort of thing is a lot more frustrating than you might think. Even though it shouldn’t be.
And this entire post is pretty hypocritical of me, seeing as I plan to somehow make a film version of Only You Can Save Mankind. ;)
So…yeah. I’m going to watch it and tape it, of course, but…I’m kinda half excited and sort of wishing they weren’t doing it. I suppose I’m glad they’re doing JATB, which although I love it is my least favourite of the three- at least they’re not doing Only You Can Save Mankind.*
*this is because they’ve blown their aliens-and-spaceships budget on Doctor Who. ;)
1- Wobbler, Johnny and the Dead
2- Sergant Comely, Johnny and the Dead
3- One of my favourite quotes, Johnny and the Dead
4- Johnny to Kirsty, Only You Can Save Mankind
5- The back of the book, Only You Can Save Mankind
6- Bigmac, Johnny and the Bomb
7- Johnny’s musings, Johnny and the Bomb
8- Johnny, at the end of Only You Can Save Mankind
9- Johnny to Kirsty when they’re in game space, Only You Can Save Mankind
10- The Gunnery Officer to Johnny, Only You Can Save Mankind
11- Kirsty’s musings, Only You Can Save Mankind
12- More of Kirsty’s musings, Only You Can Save Mankind
13- Kirsty on Johnny, Only You Can Save Mankind
14- Kirsty on Johhny again, Only You Can Save Mankind
15- The end of Johnny and the Dead
16- The Alderman and Mr Vincenti, Johnny and the Dead
17- Kirsty and Johnny, Only You Can Save Mankind
18- Johnny’s musings on people, Johnny and the Dead
19- More of Johnny’s musings, Johnny and the Bomb
20- Johnny thinking out loud, Johhny and the Dead
Okay…comment and credit and don’t hotlink, please. :D Brushes by calixa and quebelly, and the pictures from gettyimages.
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