And it was great and it was very international and they capped the numbers at 750 which is big for a con in the U.K. On Sunday night, I looked down at this hall and people were having fun and there were lots of people in costume and they were kind of continuously creating Discworld … and I looked upon it and saw that it was pretty good.
As a kind of experiment, a guild system had been set up, and guilds had to vie with one another to get points for their guild. And as I was telling the kids earlier, you’re sitting there and a sweet little munchkin who is now working for the Assassins’ Guild comes up and goes, “Stabbity, stabbity, stab. That will be two dollars.”
“No,” I say, “that’s not how assassination works. You do not charge the corpse.” So she thinks about it and says, “My friend Keith,” (another small munchkin salutes) “he’s from the Guild of Alchemists and will bring you alive again for three dollars.” So with rigor mortis setting in, I stuck my hand in my pocket and gave them some of the fake convention money and then she smiled sweetly and said, “And for five dollars, I won’t kill you again.”
It was amazing to see how this Ankh-Morpork system evolved during the con. Within a few hours of it starting, the head of the Merchants’ Guild embezzled his guild’s money to purchase the assassination of the head of the Assassins’ Guild so he could take it over, and on the second day, the forged money started to appear. It was magnificent! It was Ankh-Morpork come to life. And I looked down at the hall at the people having fun and enjoying themselves and occasionally charging one another to kill them and I thought, “My Work Here Is Done.…”
My next book out is Going Postal. It’s about a fraud, a criminal, a con man, who to some extent becomes redeemed through the book, and learns that in addition to fooling everybody else that he’s a nice guy, he can even fool himself. And a friend of mine who read a draft copy said, “There is a little bit of autobiography in all books, isn’t there?” Only friends will tell you that.
And, indeed, I think I am a fraud. I am a Guest of Honour at this convention. When I was a kid, Guests of Honour, as I said the other night, were giants made of gold and half a mile high. They had names like James Blish, Brian Aldiss, Arthur C. Clarke.… I’m five foot seven and I’m never going to get any taller.
I wish I could say I had any purpose in mind when I started the Discworld series. I just thought it was going to be fun. There was an awful lot of bad fantasy around in the early 1980s. There was plenty of good fantasy around, I have to add, but there were just too many dark lords, or differently pigmented lords as we call them now. I thought it was time to have fun with this. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic were the result. Then I found that they were selling. This came as a huge surprise to me. So I wrote Equal Rites. I wrote a third of Equal Rites in one weekend. In fact, after one of the nuclear power stations I was a press officer for exploded. Well, it didn’t really explode. Well, not much. I mean, it more sort of leaked a bit. But not much. You could hardly see it. And no one died. Trust me on this.
The nervousness here comes from eight years as a nuclear press officer. I never really had to deal with a genuine nuclear accident, but some of the things I did have to deal with were slightly worse, from my personal point of view.
There was, for example, the man who came to a nuclear power station on a public Open Day and turned out to be too radioactive to be allowed into the power station. He set off the machine that shouldn’t go bing, which is only supposed to go bing, or rather, not to go bing, when you are leaving the place. That presented a problem: when a man goes through the machine that shouldn’t go bing and it goes bing, you just know that the Health and Safety Executive is going to ask questions if he still goes bing when he leaves, and you’ll have to prove that he brought the bing in with him.
It turned out that he had been dismantling a Second World War aircraft altimeter on his kitchen table—that’s the kind of thing we Brits do for fun—the night before, and had got pure radium all over his hands. So we scrubbed him up and the power station sent some men in nice clean white suits to take his kitchen table away and put it in the low-level-waste depository. Not many kitchen tables end up like that, or go bing.
Oh, while I think about it, I’ll mention there’s something about spending a lot of time with engineers that makes you burst out laughing when you hear the term “three completely independent fail-safe systems.” I learned all about the “Fred Factor.”
It works like this. Someone decides we’ll have a nuclear power station and they call in leading technical architects, and they design it. Subsystems are designed by competent engineers and sub-subsystems are designed by equally competent engineers and so it goes down and down and then you get to Fred. Fred is not a bad person, or even a bad workman. He is just an innocent victim of other people’s assumptions.
Fred has been given a job sheet and some tools and told he’s got an hour to do the task. Fred has got to wire up three, as it might be, completely independent fail-safe systems and he wires them up and they are indeed completely independent except for one crucial wire from each system which must go through the wall and into the control room. And Fred sits there thinking, “Why should I drill three holes when one will clearly do?” So he takes out his drill and he drills one hole through the wall and he runs all the wires through it and he positions them just under the Acme Sharp-Edged Shelving System, in a bay where a very small truck is shunting goods around and backing up an awful lot and good heavens, one day all three systems fail at once. That’s a terrible surprise, even to Fred.
We had various Fred-type emergencies when I was working for the industry. For example, it should be impossible, completely impossible, to pour nuclear waste down a lavatory. But no one told Fred. So when, after a job of work, he was cleaning the top of the reactor, he tipped a bucket of, well to him, dirty water down the lavatory; and it just so happened that the health physicists, checking the sump outside shortly afterwards, heard the Geiger counter suddenly go “bing!” And there, lodged in the sump, was a bit of iron like a piece of grit.
Unfortunately, just before they had done this, a big tanker had already taken a lot of the sewage sludge away from the station sewage to a big holding tank at a local sewage works. That was good. It was going nowhere, at least. But how do you find a few tiny lumps of welding spatter, smaller than a pea and, frankly, not highly radioactive, in eighty thousand gallons of crap? Just feeling around is not an option.