Given the success the Discworld books have had with younger readers, in my experience, particularly boys around 12, 13 years old, I wonder why you chose to write specifically for children, given that they were already reading your work.

The Discworld series was never intended for children, and I have to say that you perceive them to be very popular with young boys. That is a trick of the light rather than the actual demographics of the readership. I know from the fanmail I get that an awful lot of my readers are the mothers of those young boys, and we find this at all the signings; the whole family comes and very often it’s because mum got interested because the kids were reading them. My wife actually analyses our fan mail. Now, obviously it’s limited to letters, so you can’t say exactly what readership survey it is, because it’s limited to those people who are actually going to write to you, but more than half of them are from females. Somewhere between 30 and 50% of them are from, to use that lovely phrase, "women of a certain age". I think that basically, firstly, mum keeps quiet in public, if she reads Discworld books, and 13 year old boys, if they like something, tend to be noisy about it, so they kind of show up. Same if you go to signings; a signing in the middle of the day is basically gonna have those people who can actually afford to stand in a line for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, and if there’s a university in the town, the creaking of the leather jackets will sound like a tea clipper going around Cape Horn. But I did a thing last night at the Mary Ryan bookshop in Paddington in Brisbane, and it was a family thing. There were lots of adults and there were lots of kids and there were lots of people there as families.

Yes, my boss reads the Discworld books with his 12 year old son.

So that’s point one. The children’s books, of which I suppose I’ve now written six, in a sense, I have to say, that they became children’s books purely because of the way books are currently marketed. In the case of the Truckers trilogy, it’s as if Gulliver’s Travels had never existed. If you’re going to write a series about humanoids six inches high, then "he’s-a going to be a children’s book" or at least it’s going to be slipped on to the market disguised as a children’s book, because the way books are currently marketed and sold, you don’t really stand a chance of doing it any other way.

So you didn’t write the Truckers trilogy specifically with children in mind.

I did, but it’s very hard to say... I knew that I could deal with quite big, important things, and that meant it was going to be a book for children. Because if was a book for adults, you deal with things like the problems of going through the male menopause while being a university lecture who’s been passed over for promotion. But for kids you can actually deal with big sky topics, and do the big brush. Curiously enough, it’s much easier to do that for kids, because they’ll cut right through the crap to the important stuff. So I knew it was going to be a book for children, but I, I though it would be... this is all post facto reasoning, I mean, I don’t actually think consciously like this when I’m doing it. But afterwards I can that what I’ve actually written was an onion skin book, so that you could go back to it a little later on, maybe, and see whole aspects to it. I mean, doubtless this would be purely of interest to you, and I doubt it would be of interest readers, it’s clear for example, in the Truckers trilogy, you have Gurder, who actually believes, but secretly suspects that what he believes isn’t actually truth. And you have Angalo, who’s the nearest thing they’ve actually got to a free-thinking atheist, and yet it’s very clear that all he’s done is found science, and his belief in science is quite as irrational as Gurder’s belief in "Prices Slashed". I did the quotes from his book, I forget what it’s called now, The Young Nomes Encyclopaedia of Science; it’s full of things like "we do not know why this happens, but because of science we will". "Planes stay up in the sky because of science". They have no real idea what it is, and while kids can enjoy the joke with this, when you’re a little older, you can see some of the mechanisms that are taking place. So those three books and the two Johnny Maxwell books, yes, I kind of had children in my sights, but I think what I really had in my sights was more a type of mind-set, which maybe is more common among kids, but is also to be found among fortunate adults.

Well, you’ve actually brought me really neatly and nicely to my next question.

I do, I give you quotes!

There is an assumption by a lot of people who aren’t terribly involved in children’s books that there must be enormous restrictions on writing for children in terms of content and form, but in fact a lot of children’s authors I’ve read about or discussed this with...

There are thoroughly "politically correct" restrictions. God knows how you get around this...

You’ve been working on it!

B ut I’ve had a long argument — discussion — with my editor who was aghast, not aghast, because she’s far too intelligent for that, but she was perturbed by the use of the word "nigger" even though it was in a context to make it clear why this was such an offensive word. It was almost like magic. The mere putting down of the word regardless of any of the context surrounding it was a bad thing, and Philippa Dickinson, who is my editor, is very very bright and very on the ball in this sort of thing. But this was OK, because I then could use it as a bargaining counter to get some other things that I wanted past!

Well, the same could be said about when Johnny (Only You Can Save Mankind) says the business about girls not being able to play computer games, and girls don’t have the part of the brain that allows you to play computer games, and we had this session at school when they told us to be nice to the girls at school about the things that they can’t do...

"If you pretend they can, they might". Yes... what was the point you were going to make about that?

Putting that in could have the same effect as putting the word "nigger" in, that it could be offensive if you read it just...

But the thing is, I can’t really be responsible for what people think if they read part of a book, and this is very clear in Truckers; the Stationeri, and it’s also clear that Grimma is really the motor who holds the whole thing together. She plods Masklin along, she can read faster, she’s brighter than most of the others. I don’t really have to point up the moral. And also in Only You can Save Mankind it’s very clear, I mean, it’s abundantly clear to Johnny that Kirsty is cleverer, luckier, in practically every respect except one, she’s superior. But frankly, that’s how 12 year old boys think. And I’m not going to make them think in a different way.

Exactly.

The third book in the series...

There’s going to be another Johnny book?

There will be eventually. One of the working titles was Johnny and the Devil, and as Philippa said, 10 000 sales get lost. Actually, in the UK, that probably isn’t the case, because I’m probably a big enough bulldozer to drive a title like that through the dirndl-mafia. But in the same way "witch" in the title can now cause hands to be thrown up. I think somebody’s going to actually have to confront that sort of thing, and just engage four-wheel drive and surge forward. It depends on the context, how you actually deal with it. And in the case of Only You..... you can see, and also in Johnny and the Dead, that the kids are trying to think, they know they should be thinking politically correct, but they can’t actually do it. Is a film racist, if Yo-less, who is black, actually enjoys it? White people worry about that sort of thing.

What you’re actually doing is allowing kids to think about those things without saying "this is the way to think about it". You’ve got Johnny’s perceptions and point of view, and then you’ve got Kirsty who’s contradicting that, so within the same book you’re giving them the room to think about it.

She also had a lot of wrong things with her character, like not listening to anyone else in any way, shape, or form.

And her bloody-minded determination to kill people!

Well, a bloody-minded determination to win, whereas Johnny is far too wet to ever have a very clear opinion.

Those "politically correct" issues aside, I’m thinking particularly of an article Diana Wynne Jones wrote about a book for adults she was writing, and how she thought, "yippee, I’ve got a book for adults, I can do what I like", and in fact found it far more restricting than she’d ever found writing for children. So are there things that you can do in children’s books that you can’t do in adult’s books?

Remember, I write in a field — the genre with which I am associated, I pick my words with care — is fantasy, and there’s always historically been a huge cross-over between children’s books and fantasy to the extent that they’ve often been confused. To some extent they both use the same tool kit, so that if in a Discworld book, in order that, apart from in order to amuse people and to hurry the plot along, if I want to look at human frailties from a different perspective, I can have an intelligent talking dog, provided within the context of the story I can make that stick. If the readers are approaching the books with the right mind set, they will accept this, provided you’ve got some explanation that fits.

Internal logic.

Internal logic. I have some difficulty with the Americans with these books. For example, they don’t touch the two Johnny Maxwell books. Partly, one of the reasons is the absolute horror at the political incorrectness of Johnny. They’re not allowed to think like that in America, even if the whole point of setting up that thing is to make them look foolish, which bodes badly for their culture. I had a long argument with an American editor, who said about Only You... "Look, what’s really happening. Are aliens really contacting him, is he really a disturbed child with it all happening in his head?" It is both of these things. This is merely the world as seen from his viewpoint, and the whole point which is surely being made is, it was the Gulf War, was it real or was it a video war? What’s real and what isn’t real.

It’s a lovely juxtaposition.

And kids are quite happy — they don’t even think about this. They’ll accept the whole thing as a given. They’re quite capable; kids can understand that life is a wave and a particle at the same time, they have no problem with that, but when you get older, you start labelling it. And the same with Johnny and the Dead. Can Johnny really see the dead? Is he really terminally disturbed? Well, you’re terminally disturbed when you’re twelve anyway, that’s what being twelve’s is all about. But it really doesn’t matter. He thinks he can see the dead, and acts as if this is the case, and that’s how it works.

So adults would ask too many questions about the whole premise of the book, where kids just accept it and read it in whatever terms you offer them.

With kids you can say "Once upon a time". With adults when you say "Once upon a time", and someone puts their hand up and says "When, exactly?" With the kids, you do have to get around to the "When, exactly?" at some point, but they will allow you to get that first mouthful out.

We’ve talked a bit about the tools of fantasy, and also questions of "political correctness" — I hate that term, but that’s the one that we’re all familiar with! Fantasy is generally, at least, sort of traditional fantasy, has been for a long time basically plot-driven, and writers like yourself and Diana Wynne Jones, who I’ve done a lot of work on, while plot is still very important, character is becoming far more important in fantasies than they were in perhaps traditional fantasies, where characters were basically archetypes; the hero, the princess, etc. I feel that part of this is because you’re deliberately manipulating stereotypes to raise the kinds of issues we’ve just talked about, is there anything else about character... Your characters are so interesting and involving; Granny Weatherwax...

I knew Granny Weatherwax was lurching towards the conversation... The thing is with fantasy, well, you have to be very careful. I am now allowed to go to literary festivals...

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