#pragma prerequisite you have read lots of Pratchett books
A few years ago at a rare party, my friend Jim got drunk and espoused to me a theory, viz: that I am Captain Carrot; not in some existential do-gooder sense, but instead he suggested that I might have been the (literal?) inspiration for the character as physically described in the Discworld books.
Personally I suspect that Jim might have been mixing the story up with yet another, older meme from my social circle[1] – however his idea has got legs, and has a plausible backplot: in 1987 I was working for my university magazine and on the back of the release of Mort in hardback, through his publisher I wangled an interview with Pterry and so was sent early one morning to rendezvous with him at Waterloo station, to ride in a limo for the best part of a couple of hours to (IIRC) Bromley in Kent, to a book signing that I could observe – and then trot back to UCL to write-up.
The resulting article got spiked in favour of student union politics, and I haven’t the notes – something I regret to this day – but merely two weeks later I got on a train at Paddington and there Terry was again, in the same carriage. We politely exchanged nods, him sat at a table, me standing, while a pleasant lady asked him what he did for a living, thrilled at him being a writer, and “[had he] had anything published yet”?
Terry was very kind to her.
Anyway: Jim’s point was that I tend to leave an impression on people and that since I loom tall, am roughly triangular, have a voice that can saw through concrete and have/had a shock of orange hair[2], Jim wondered if my shape might have lodged in Terry’s brain and served as a template for the description of Carrot.
Since “Mort!” predates “Guards! Guards!” only slightly in time – if not in volumes – it’s not impossible, though in my heart of hearts I might wish it were true more than I believe it likely. The L-space wiki itself suggests otherwise.
But I do remember a few things from the interview:
- one was Terry’s insistence that he didn’t like tape recorders, he thought they were not good tools for proper journalists who ought to use notepads; this led to a discussion of journalism as training for being a disciplined writer.
- two was that apparently I was the first interviewer ever to be asking him about his work with BNFL as inspiration for “magic” in the early Rincewind books, with overspills of magic causing “walking trees” and “shoals of invisible fish” and so forth, compared to the contemporary woes at Sellafield. I was right, it was an influence, but he wasn’t seeking to make any political point – merely to juxtapose “magic” in one world and “physics” in another.
- thirdly (and this is where I’m racking my brains to draw detail) – he wanted to write a book under a pseudonym; I don’t think it was fantasy exactly, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the plot was, even though he outlined it. It was something “more serious” but not related to Discworld in any way. It was standalone.
That’s about as much as I remember; interviews I’ve seen from the past decade suggest that the idea behind “Nation” is quite recent, else I would think that that was a candidate. People reading this should bear in mind this was 1987, when book #5 of the Discworld series was just out, manuscripts for a few others might have been ready to go, and Terry was not the world famous crusading bazillionaire and national institution that he now is.
So now I’m wondering whether – 23 years later – perhaps somewhere in the Amazon catalogue there might be a Terry Pratchett book written under a pseudonym?
Does the internet have an answer? A suspicion?
I’d love to know.
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[1] …viz: that someone from the UK net.community whom most of us had met at one point or another – Tanaqui Weaver – both knew Neil Gaiman and was a partial inspiration for Delirium in the Sandman series, although Tori Amos has since been wrongly anointed and the credit given yet elsewhere, with Tanaqui expunged from the public record.
[2] apologies for the mullet, I didn’t know any better, or rather I just never got it cut – I hacked the front off so that I could see, but the back was heading towards Unix-Guru ponytail proportions, but never quite worked. The picture’s from circa 1993 but’s not too far off the mark for my university look. It certainly wasn’t intentional – that would require me to follow fashion and I didn’t even know what a “mullet” was… or rather I thought it was a kind of fish.
Update: better picture, 1989-ish. Shows the height differential.
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