Good Omens

It was the engine that drove Discworld—it’s not a “what if. . .” or an “if only … ” or even an “if this goes on … ”; it was the far more subtle and dangerous “If there was really a … , what would that mean? How would it work?”
    In the Nicholls-Clute Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , there was an ancient woodcut of a man pushing his head through the back of the world, past the sky, and seeing the cogs and the wheels and the engines that drove the universe machine. That’s what people do in Terry Pratchett books, even if the people doing it are sometimes rats and sometimes small girls. People learn things. They open their heads.
    So we discovered we shared a similar sense of humor, and a similar set of cultural referents; we’d read the same obscure books, took pleasure in pointing each other to weird Victorian reference books.
    A few years after we met, in 1988, Terry and I wrote a book together. It began as a parody of Richmal Crompton’s William books, which we called William the Antichrist , but rapidly outgrew that conceit and became about a number of other things instead, and we called it Good Omens . It was a funny novel about the end of the world and how we’re all going to die. Working with Terry, I felt like a journeyman alongside a master craftsman in some medieval guild. He constructs novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch. There is art, of course, but that’s the result of building it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in constructing something that does what it’s meant to do—to make people read the story, and laugh, and possibly even think.
    (This is how we wrote a novel together. I’d write late at night. Terry wrote early in the morning. In the afternoon we’d have very long phone conversations where we’d read each other the best bits we’d written, and talk about stuff that could happen next. The main objective was to make the other one laugh. We posted floppy disks back and forth, because this was before e-mail. There was one night when we tried using a modem to send some text across the country, at 300 / 75 speeds, directly from computer to computer because if
e-mail had been invented back then nobody had told us about it. We managed it too. But the post was faster.)
    Terry has been writing professionally for a very long time, honing his craft, getting quietly better and better. The biggest problem he faces is the problem of excellence: he makes it look easy. This can be a problem. The public doesn’t know where the craft lies. It’s wiser to make it look harder than it is, a lesson all jugglers learn.
    In the early days the reviewers compared him to the late Douglas Adams, but then Terry went on to write books as enthusiastically as Douglas avoided writing them, and now, if there is any comparison to be made of anything from the formal rules of a Pratchett novel to the sheer prolific fecundity of the man, it might be to P. G. Wodehouse. But mostly newspapers, magazines, and critics do not compare him to anyone. He exists in a blind spot, with two strikes against him: he writes funny books, in a world in which funny is synonymous with trivial, and they are fantasies—or more precisely, they are set on the Discworld, a flat world, which rests on the back of four elephants, who in turn stand on the back of a turtle, heading off through space. It’s a location in which Terry Pratchett can write anything, from hard-bitten crime dramas to vampiric political parodies, to children’s books. And those children’s books have changed things. Terry won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for his pied piper tale The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents , awarded by the librarians of the U.K., and the Carnegie is an award that even newspapers have to respect. (Even so, the newspapers had their revenge, cheerfully misunderstanding Terry’s acceptance speech and accusing him of bashing J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien and fantasy, in a speech about the real magic of fantastic fiction.)
    The most recent books have shown Terry in a new mode—books like Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment are darker, deeper, more outraged at what people can do to people, while prouder of what people can do for each other. And yes, the books are still funny, but they no longer follow the jokes: now the books follow the story and the people. Satire is a