Terry Pratchett: You look at the brain and think this looks if you saw it on the butcher's slab you wouldn't want it very much. But there isn't very much there and it isn't all that big. One reason I'm doing well apparently is that because—my teachers will turn in their grave on this—I have a large brain. It doesn't mean it's used any better and it doesn't look as if it's all that bigger but apparently I can rewire a little bit or so it would appear and I still keep on going.

Natasha Mitchell: One of the world's most celebrated novelists talking about what he describes as 'the moron in his head', Alzheimer's disease. Over the next two shows, two novelists charting the terrain of the brain in very different ways. This week the making of a magnificent imagination. It's the great attribute isn't it we have as humans to imagine, to fantasise, to occupy a mental playground and yet Terry Pratchett's imagination is populated with so much more than humans. There's an entire geography of countries and cultures in there with wizards, witches, trolls, werewolves and vampires all jostling alongside humans. Hello, Natasha Mitchell with you today for All in the Mind—welcome.

Sir Terry Pratchett is our guest today because he's a man whose mental universe is iconic amongst his global fans.

Alexandra : I was in the Rowden White library at Melbourne University in 1987 and I picked up The Colour of Magic and went Oh my God.

Handel: A lot of the characters, the interaction with themselves is one thing but it's their internal monologue, them talking to themselves.

Kim: I'd actually like to be Nanny Ogg...

Dannie: Right down to the one tooth and the filthy sense of humour.

Kim: But I think I'm closer to the Librarian I'm afraid.

Natasha Mitchell: Most of Terry Pratchett's novels are set on a world called Discworld, this is a place carried by four elephants standing on a giant turtle travelling through space. His sprawling city of Ankh Morpork is something like Tolkien's Middle Earth propelled into the 19th century where dwarfs and trolls have moved to the big smoke and send money back home.

New arrivals in the city mostly get jobs as police officers with what's called The Watch under the command of one of Pratchett's most popular characters Sam Vimes who climbs the ranks over several novels from working class alcoholic to foreign diplomat. But now Terry's imagination has another occupant too—early onset Alzheimer's and I have to tell you that producer Corinne Podger brought her entire collection of Terry's novels into the office to do this interview—yes, she's a woman who spends half her life at work and the other half in Discworld as an elvin woman.

Corinne Podger: I've watched quite a few of the interviews you've given specifically on Alzheimer's disease and I really was touched by the comment that you quite often make that you don't want to be seen as someone famous with Alzheimer's disease.

Terry Pratchett: The cat is out of the bag so it doesn't really matter.

Corinne Podger: I wanted to focus on the psychology of your novels really. Yes I know, I know.

Terry Pratchett: I'm doomed.

Corinne Podger: Let's hope not doomed—Terry Pratchett welcome to All in the Mind.

Terry Pratchett: Thank you.

Corinne Podger: Writing Discworld novels, you've suggested is like 'hallucinating gently for a living' but it is a very comprehensive hallucination.

Terry Pratchett: Yes indeed.

Corinne Podger: Where did the inspiration for this vastly detailed universe come from?

Terry Pratchett: What it is, is a kind of antidote to fantasy. It's a fantasy universe, a quite ridiculous one but the people on it are real, even if those people are trolls and gnomes and whatever, they are not cardboard characters. Soon after Lord of the Rings came out, Lord of the Rings showed for the first time that fantasy was big money and there were a lot of, I wouldn't say copies, but you got a lot of books which were Tolkeinesque and lots of quasi-medieval things where people said 'Ho, landlord, a pint of your finest ale'. Try that in any shop in the world and you'll be thrown out.

The only ideal I had was supposing it was real. Supposing it was really real, how different would it be? For example Ankh-Morpork, the biggest city on Discworld, actually does have a condom factory. You won't find that in Lord of the Rings and I hope you won't find it in Harry Potter, but you never know these days.

Corinne Podger: I've always seen Ankh-Morpork as broadly analogous with a kind of hip, upbeat Dickensian London.

Terry Pratchett: Yes, with additional things and it's a melting pot that doesn't melt. When anyone from a particularly new or unheard of species comes in they're always put in the Watch.

Corinne Podger: There's always pressure on the Watch to take in ethnic minorities.

Terry Pratchett: Well yes, so they might become one day ethnic majorities. But it's actually treating the creatures of fairytale and myth as if they are real; they all have their certain talents. Once upon a time the trolls were considered as beasts and now Sergeant Detritus of the City Watch is a highly respected policeman. How do vampires cope in a target-rich society without getting burned alive? But all these things are ultimately about humans and how they interact in some way.

So what is it really like, seriously, to be a werewolf? Well first of all always have a little thing on your collar which in the case of this young lady carries a small pair of pants, because after you become a werewolf when you go back to being human the pants don't come back again.

[Reading]: 'I don't think I can go through with this Sergeant Angua,' the werewolf had hissed, as she headed along Treacle Street again. 'For one of us being around a vampire is like the worst bad hair day you can imagine and believe me a werewolf knows what a real bad hair day is.'

'Is it the smell?' said Carrot. 'Well that's not good but it's more than that, they are so poised, so perfect. I get near and I feel hairy, I can't help it, it goes back thousands of years, it's the image. Vampires are always so cool. At least she probably doesn't have to stash changes of clothes around the city. And when do I ever rip out a throat? I hunt chickens and I pay for them in advance. Oh God, and it's already well past Waxing Gibbous tonight, I can feel my hair growing. Bloody vampires!'

Corinne Podger: What built you as an author, what were some of the influences?

Terry Pratchett: My mother used to tell me stories on the way to school. In those days we lived about a mile and a half from school and we'd talk about stuff, about stuff we saw, it was exactly what mothers should do and in fact in Finland if you don't know children are not allowed to go to school until they're 7, by which time mum has taught them the folklore and their manners and all the other things that the kids in fact don't have now. And it didn't come as a shock for me to find out later in life that my mother's grandfather had been from Ireland and had told her all the Irish ballads and things and I think some of that carried down.

Corinne Podger: You've called her the motor of your success.

Terry Pratchett: Yes, she was upwardly mobile before people had coined the word. She taught me to read at a penny a page, completed successfully to my mother's approval.

Corinne Podger: So you'd get a penny for every page?

Terry Pratchett: I'd get a penny. And a penny was a penny in those days, you could take someone's eye out with a penny. But after a little while I thought I like this stuff and was given The Wind in the Willows. After that, that was it. Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about Wind in the Willows and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought—you know about The Wind in the Willows...

Corinne Podger: It's very much a class comment.

Terry Pratchett: Yes, they are all very upper class, when they go out to have adventures they go in the canary-coloured caravan, as you know, and the canary-coloured caravan is pulled by a horse, and the horse can't speak, and in some way when I was about 9 I thought, tough luck for the horse. My first ever Bolshie thought, of why isn't he let off occasionally, why can't he speak, you know, yay for the down- trodden workers.

Corinne Podger: Ponies of the world unite. You became a passionate reader though, you spent your entire childhood by the sound of it not just reading fantasy books, reading everything.

Terry Pratchett: That's the thing, that's the whole thing. If you were a child you weren't allowed into the adult library until they judged that you were fit. Well I'd watched the librarians for a while and said please sir, when I grow up I'd like to be a librarian, can I do a Saturday job? And after a while he said, yeah OK, but we couldn't pay you anything—and there was me prepared to hand over my pocket money. And so I did all the stamping of the books and stuff like that and because I was an honorary librarian I was de facto an honorary adult and I could go anywhere in the library and take out any book that was of interest to me, never mind if it wasn't the right kind of book for a child. And in fact, especially if it wasn't the right kind of book for a child. So I was reading translations of Homer at the same time as reading Tove Jansson—are you familiar with the Moomintroll books, thank goodness that people still are. They were some of the best books ever written for kids, and adults can dive into them and you can find extra levels of meaning.

Corinne Podger: And at a very young age an acquaintance with some of the great satirists through Punch magazine.

Terry Pratchett: Yes, and that's another thing, this is the thing I always say to wanabe writers, Punch magazine—the bound copies I read from the mid Victorian era all the way up to swinging London—and that meant I read the very best satirists and parodists and humorists and indeed just users of the language for effect.

Corinne Podger: And a healthy smattering of sciences too.

Terry Pratchett: Yeah, well I picked them up with the science fiction because I found the science fiction, which kind of leads you on to science. So it wasn't before long that I had a rather cheap telescope because my mum and dad took the view that anything that really keeps him going, obviously he's going to be Prime Minister or something like that, but I thought nothing was as bad as that. I could see the moon, I could see all the craters and all the rest of it and I used to stand outside in the night and listen to Patrick Moore who is still going strong and is now a great friend of mine and I feel very blessed about that.

Corinne Podger: You say that you read all of those different genres in much the same 'mental tone of voice'.

Terry Pratchett: Yes, and it was all kind of science fiction because what is palaeontology but a kind of science fiction only that it's real. And it wasn't as though I couldn't confuse the real from the fake as it were, it was because I came to understand the pairing of them. So I read, say, palaeontology for the sake of learning about dinosaurs and how they died and all the more obscure corners like the Burgess shale and things like that. And in a sense I read it in a science fiction voice although I knew it wasn't science fiction. It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational—and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not Star Trek. Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Corinne Podger: Were you writing stories yourself as a child—when did you start?

Terry Pratchett: Yes, I used to write little illustrated stuff for the kids when I was about 12 at school as Art Buchwold once said every gang has one writer in it, he can make up nicknames, he can come up with ideas so he doesn't get beaten up, that's his place in the gang. And I did whole stories about trolls and my best one, the Lord of the Rings–Jane Austen fusion. I really liked the bit...

Corinne Podger: Pride and Pumice.

Terry Pratchett: I really remember the bit where the orcs attack the rectory and the kids used to laugh at them and that's it, it gave me an audience and as you may gather I'll do anything for a laugh. I actually sold a short story to one of the three in those days science fiction magazines that there were in England and got 14 pounds and that bought me my first typewriter and after that I was the worst thing you can imagine: an adolescent with a typewriter.

Corinne Podger: A life of memories, the compost that grows an author, is how acclaimed fantasy writer Terry Pratchett describes it. He's our guest today on All in the Mind on ABC Radio National and on Radio Australia, I'm Corinne Podger.

Terry Pratchett: I ran away from school, went to see the head of a local paper and he was probably the last person in the world ever to say 'I like the cut of your jib young man,' and that was it—straight out of school in to the newspaper, now that's journalism.

Corinne Podger: What did that teach you about human nature?

Terry Pratchett: It's about the commonality of mankind, you learn about people, you realise that all the problems you've had, someone else has had. You realise as a kid the old man with the stick that used to chase you down the lane for stealing his walnuts was probably a decent old bloke who had fought in the First World War and that's why he has the stick. So you kind of learn not to see through people but to see into people to some extent just by using yourself as a starting point.

Corinne Podger: But Terry found he wanted to go even deeper, as he told a crowd of fans at Melbourne's Wheeler Centre on his tour across Australia this month. Oddly enough he found fantasy the best way to get to the truth.

Terry Pratchett: One of the things that the local journalists had to do was cover the coroner's courts and it seemed to me that we never ever got to the truth. So there was this kid and he'd beaten up some bloke and stolen his money and there was the kid standing there wearing the first new suit he's ever had and there's his mum and you think where did this story start? It made me restless about journalism because whatever you got was only a shadow of the truth. Perhaps the greatest crime may have taken place long before the boy had been born but you could never track [it] down the universe.

Corinne Podger: A lot of your novels do deal directly with social challenges like discrimination, like poverty, like racism. Why pick fantasy as a genre for that?

Terry Pratchett: Ah, you will have heard of GK Chesterton. He once said that humour could get under the door while seriousness is still rattling at the handle, and with a joke you can get an idea across, whether positive or negative. But it's not being delivered as a sermon, it's all part of the book and that's why, it's a surreptitious way of getting things across.

Hannah: He writes these comedy books that a lot of people probably wouldn't take that seriously but he's clearly a man who thinks a lot about social justice and things like racism and things that actually affect us in the modern world, the real world but he applies them in a comedic way. I think half of his books should be made essential high school reading because of the lessons they teach.

Handel: He kind of represents both fantastic storytelling and a sort of narrative moral compass so I really like him. And I suppose I'm also just fond of the fact that he's not shying away from the idea that story can spread understanding and story can lead you in a positive direction ethically. Like he explores ethical questions in his books.

Corinne Podger: Terry Pratchett fans Hannah and James at Melbourne's Wheeler Centre. If we talk about, then, characterisation in your novels—it's never a straight fantasy battle between good and evil.

Terry Pratchett: Oh good heavens no.

Corinne Podger: There is always those shades of grey.

Terry Pratchett: Often there is no good exactly and no evil exactly. The witches on the whole tend to be rather strict but mostly a kind of midwife, but a seer, and possibly the only person in the village who can read and indeed think further ahead than a ploughman did. And the City Watch are kind of OK and even the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork who is a tyrant...

Corinne Podger: With a scorpion pit.

Terry Pratchett: Well it's always there as the threat. The city has to work, he understands that if the city dysfunctions then it's bad for everybody.

Corinne Podger: There are some figures that you take aim at in a general sense. For example monarchs—that Ankh-Morpork has a rightful king who never takes office or at least hasn't so far. Does the way that people's lives are run and who runs them concern you?

Terry Pratchett: I am slightly schizophrenic on this one, bearing in mind I bowed my head twice to her majesty, God Save the Queen, because always hold on tight to nurse for fear of finding something worse. If we did not have a queen at the head of state there'd be some bloody politician and I like the idea that periodically an English prime minister has to stand in front of a very small woman who has known every prime minister that we have had since Churchill—who taught her quite a lot—and she will say to him in that little thin voice of hers, 'Can you tell me why it is you have totally messed up the country again?' I like the fact that they should have something to fear and it's something that goes back a long way.

Corinne Podger: That is perhaps an alternative universe that one might dream of.

Terry Pratchett: It is, I dream of it every night.

Corinne Podger: And his dream world spills on to the pages too, with characters like Sam Vimes, the deeply conflicted, bad-tempered but fair chief of the City Watch, Discworld's motley police force. He's most fans' favourite.

Hannah: Well the whole joke about him is that he's meant to be one of those disposable characters that when you storm the castle doors he's the first one knocked over and that's the end of his story. So I like that he tends to give voice to characters that we don't conventionally hear from and that he makes them the centre of his stories.

Handel: I'd like to say Vimes, but I suspect I'm more of a Nac Mac Feegle.

Corinne Podger: So you aspire to be the commander of the City Watch but you in fact identify with a six-inch tall pixie?

Handel: Yeah.

Corinne Podger: Why is it do you think that Captain Vimes is a character that men particularly aspire to? What makes him so appealing?

Handel: I think Vimes represents what's best in, well, people in general but I think he represents a sort of idealised man. While he's sort of masculine and strong and represents the good things about masculinity, at the same time he doesn't treat women badly in any way. He is very supportive of having all types of species in The Watch, he doesn't discriminate against anybody. He uses the powers that he has to protect people and to make things better for people and to look out for people who are less fortunate. And yeah, I just love him to bits and my personal theory is that Vimes pretty much is Terry Pratchett.

[Reading]: 'I know it's hard for dwarf and troll officers right now,' [Vimes] said to the room at large, 'I know that giving one of your own kind a tap with your truncheon because he's trying to kick you in the fork might feel like you're siding with the enemy. It's no fun for humans either but it's worse for you. The badge seems a bit heavy now, right? Your people looking at you and wondering whose side you're on—yes? Well you're on the side of the people, which is where the law ought to be. All the people I mean, who are out there beyond the mob, who are fearful, and puzzled and scared to go out at night. You know it's going to be a bad night tonight. If indeed there has been a murder then I will see that the murderer is brought to justice no matter what size they are, what shape they are, who they are, or where they may be. You have my guarantee on that; my personal guarantee. Is that acceptable?'



The general change in the atmosphere indicated that it was so. 'Good,' he said, 'now go out there and be coppers.'

Corinne Podger: If we could turn to what you called the elephant in the bedroom: it's four years now since you were diagnosed with a variant of Alzheimer's disease, posterior cortical atrophy—what is it?

Terry Pratchett: Call it visual Alzheimer's. The eyes aren't wrong. I put things down and don't know where they are and people say well, that happens to everybody especially when you get older, you lose your car keys, everyone loses their car keys. You shouldn't lose the car, you shouldn't be able, just on the one occasion recently, not be able to find the way to the toilet and after all there was only one way (I was rather drunk at the time). But you get strange effects, you don't see what is there because your mind isn't, the brain isn't talking to the eye properly.

Corinne Podger: It's a fascinating position for a fantasy writer to be in.

Terry Pratchett: It is, it is, my world is a slightly fantasy one and curious things happen. Not long after I was diagnosed I was sitting in the garden and I looked down and down there in the grass was a little gnome with a pointy red hat. Now I don't have any truck with that kind of fantasy rubbish, so I thought I know how this goes, if I now look at it carefully what I have seen is a montage: there will be a fallen leaf and there will be a stone and I'll look back and there will just be those pieces. And I looked back and I couldn't find those pieces. However, I don't think there was a gnome. But Lynne said I lose a lot of things, but I notice small things that she doesn't notice, as if I'm working on a different wavelength.

Corinne Podger: It wasn't long after you were diagnosed, in fact very shortly after that you went public and since then, four years on, you've often remarked or complained that you don't want to be Terry Pratchett the famous Alzheimer's sufferer. Do you regret going as public as you did?

Terry Pratchett: No, I had hoped that the outcome would be better than it is, except for perhaps now when people are diagnosed someone says, oh, it's like that bloke on the telly. At least now it can be talked about, I think if nothing else I think I have as it were dragged the dragon out of the dungeon. But at the moment we are nowhere near killing it. But indeed I've always said once you can talk about it then its death is on the way.

Corinne Podger: For you as an author how has it changed the way you work, how have you accommodated it as a writer?

Terry Pratchett: It works because I'm a rich author, so I have a PA. I dictate to him a lot, sometimes he proofreads bits, also I can afford quite a speedy computer, I also have a text...a very good text-to-speech, it's not just the software it's hardware as well, and that is incredibly good. In fact on one occasion overnight we stuffed all my Discworld books into the memory and it worked out how to spell Granny Weatherwax and things like that which is pretty clever but it doesn't know dirty words because it was put together by Americans and they don't like to put dirt...so it doesn't even like the name that is the other name for a donkey.

Corinne Podger: Which we can say here on Radio National.

Terry Pratchett: Like ass, it doesn't like arse either.

Corinne Podger: One of the effects of PCA is the need to think about things that you would normally do automatically. That description that you gave reminded me of the character of Windle Poons, one of the wizards in your books who comes back to life and his brain has to organise everything.

Terry Pratchett: Yes, yes.

Corinne Podger: From digestion to walking around.

Terry Pratchett: That was a long time ago so the fantasy was in the past.

Corinne Podger: And this is now the reality.

Terry Pratchett: It is like that, yes, and I get more tired because I know that I'm having to put in more energy to be normal or as ever.

Corinne Podger: Being who you are has meant you've been able to jump the queue and be a hamster for potential new treatments.

Terry Pratchett: Not really. In a very small way perhaps but no one has come up with the killer. I've tried a few things. In fact I believe as we know that... um... although... this is what PCA does for you, you get halfway through a sentence. There have been some cases in America where somebody's really very stricken to allow them to be a guinea pig, and I think this all came about because of AIDS, people who were HIV positive did volunteer to test various drugs. And this was seen to be a one off thing.

Corinne Podger: Have you found anything helpful that you've tried so far?

Terry Pratchett: Well there was one small thing that is on prescription and so I have that and I've tried a few other things and of course because I'm known to have money of course you must be amazed at how many ways there are to cure your Alzheimer's, all of which involve an awful lot of cash down right now. Rather strange, isn't it?

Corinne Podger: There are two diseases at work here you've said, one is having Alzheimer's or a variant of it and the other is knowing that you have it. Has it been worthwhile, that knowledge?

Terry Pratchett: Yes, knowledge is always worthwhile. I have seen some terrible things, I saw the remains of a woman chopped up by an express train once, the police were around, I was a journalist obviously and I walked along a little way to the linesman's hut and the woman had been smoking cigarettes in the lee of the wind while waiting for the express train and I counted the cigarette ends and there were six and I shall always remember that. She was undecided and you think what a shame that someone hadn't been there. It was a small truth, dreadful though it was, that she didn't just take her life she agonised about it for some time and carefully stubbed out her cigarettes.

Corinne Podger: I don't want to ask you about the end game because you've gone on the record about that many times but you do write extensively about alternative universes and perhaps going down a 'different trouser-leg of time' you might meet an alternative Terry Pratchett who doesn't have Alzheimer's. What would you say to him if you could meet him?

Terry Pratchett: Lucky bastard. I was fortunate in being brought up with no religion at all, my parents were very, very good people, it's what I call Jesus-lite, believing in everything that Jesus said but not bothering about going to church and certainly not bothering about the Old Testament. I nevertheless don't believe that death is the end. I'm sure Richard Dawkins is going to take me off his Christmas card list for that. Of course, he possibly doesn't have Christmas cards. Because I think the universe is clearly wonderful and so I think something must happen, even if you only go around Alpha Centuri a few times as a wasp it's got to be better than this.

Corinne Podger: Sir Terry Pratchett it's been an absolute pleasure and a privilege.

Terry Pratchett: And may I say so it has been for me as well.

Natasha Mitchell: The mystical imaginings there of Sir Terry Pratchett. A beautiful man, knighted for his mind no lessᰬwell, officially services to literature but anyway speaking there with Corinne Podger. And his next book Snuff is due out later this year. Head to the website for more details, the audio and the transcript as well: abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind

And on Alzheimer's disease, well this week it's been the experience writ large and real by a fiction writer. Next week the experience is fictionalised by an acclaimed neuroscientist-turned-novelist. Join me then, I'm Natasha Mitchell thanks to studio engineer Angie Grant. Ciao for now.