Pratchett Attending Australian Con

Fantasy and sci-fi author Terry Pratchett has announced he’ll be attending the upcoming Australian Discworld Convention in April, 2011. (Or should that be XXXX?)

Pratchett at the Colour of Magic Premiere

It was revealed in an email by the organiser of the event that Pratchett would be attending, “barring any serious mishap”, on the condition that the fans come too. Pratchett will be accompanied by his personal assistant and a swarm of fans, who will probably descend upon Australia like a swarm of locusts. It was previously uncertain as to whether Pratchett would make the 10,000 mile journey, as his condition sometimes makes travel problematic. This announcement has cleared up such doubts and will no doubt herald the booking of a few dozen Outback holidays.

Discworld conventions have blossomed across the globe, as Pratchett is popular across Roundworld; Australia, America, England, Germany and Ireland have all played host to the conventions, and Holland has declared that it will be playing host to one soon as well.

The Harkin is a writer, blogger and Brit. You can read more of his self-indulgence here or try to endure his banal tweets.

£18,090 Raised At Discworld Convention

Terry Pratchett has been long associated with charitable giving. After revealing his tragic diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, he gave massively to research into the disease. But his love for the Orangutan of Borneo predates that and even to this day he leads fundraising efforts for the Orangutan Foundation. Pratchett, besides being a member of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, is actually a pretty famous author or something? Write books about magic librarian monkeys or whatever. He has a lot of fans to draw on. 

This Just In: Baby Oran's Adorable

 

 Another charity present at the 2010 Discworld convention is the Tall Ships Youth Trust, a group that aim to help young people learn discipline and self-confidence by learning to sail. Both charities had stalls in the convention Dealer’s Room, which is clearly fraud because they weren’t selling anything. But anyway.

 

On Sunday, the Discworld Convention raised nearly twenty thousand pounds for the two charities at auction. Up for sale were movie props donated by the Mob film company – including the Luggage and the Oscilloscope -, rare books, watercolor pictures and even shell casings from a gun Pratchett fired at an American shooting range. When the smoke cleared, the finally tally of money raised was eighteen thousand and ninety pounds. 

That’s a lot of bananas and rigging. 

The Harkin is a writer, blogger and Brit. You can read more of his self-indulgence here or try to endure his banal tweets.

You Didn’t Hear It From Me

I’m writing to you from the 2010 Discworld Convention and you can’t stop me ahahahahahaha. 

Ahem. 

Rob Wilkins is Terry Pratchett’s PA and no-one’s entirely what that actually means, but he seems to muddle along okay. Rod Brown is a former producer of UK film company The Mob, which means no-one’s entirely sure what he does either, besides making a lot of money. He has since left The Mob to set up as a freelance producer in Los Angeles. The two of them sat down yesterday with some fans in a little side-room of the Birmingham Hilton Metropole to talk about the movies and the general process of writing; a klatch. 

  When Rod arrived, he was burdened with a lot of bags, boxes and children. Over the course of the klatch, Rod produced props from Going Postal (out now on DVD and Blu-Ray, starring yours truly) and The Colour Of Magic (also yours truly, also out). We all had some fun passing them round to look at; trying on the Postmaster’s Hat, flicking through Lord Vetinari’s biography, reading Twoflower’s phrasebook. But the main thing that came out of the Klatch was definitely not any leaked information about the next Discworld movies. 

If anything was mentioned, it would be very wrong of me to mention it on the internet. That would be unethical, a breach of trust and just plain naughty. With that in mind, I should definitely relay what wasn’t said. Rod definitely didn’t say that he was working on Good Omens next year and certainly didn’t have a first draft screenplay. The Mob certainly aren’t working on adapting Unseen Academicals for the screen next and even if they were Rob Wilkins wasn’t hoping to get a few shots of himself playing football if he did. 

This Is Not Happening, understand?

 

 At no point was any of that said, by anyone, to anyone. And even if it was, I didn’t just tell you and you didn’t hear it here first. Right? Right. I’m glad we had this talk. 

The Harkin is a writer, blogger and Brit. You can read more of his self-indulgence here or try to endure his banal tweets.

Pratchett Announces Collaboration

Terry Pratchett recently declared his intent to write a series of sci-fi novels with fellow author Stephen Baxter. In a talk given today at the 2010 Discworld convention in Birmingham, the two bestsellers and award-winners got up on stage to discuss general ideas and outlines about the project. The current title for the series as a whole is Long Earth.

Stephen Baxter, pictured here, is definitely not a football manager.

Pratchett is best known for his fantasy work, especially the Discworld series, but does have roots in science fiction. In 1976 he wrote The Dark Side of the Sun, and his 1981 novel Strata features a flat world similar to the later Discworld. Both are generally considered parodic of Niven’s Ringworld. Stephen Baxter comes from a hard science background, in mathematics and engineering. As well as writing non-fiction, Baxter is notable for his award-winning novel The Time Ships.

Pratchett’s next novel, “I Shall Wear Midnight”, is released September 2nd

In their talk, Baxter and Pratchett revealed that the general principle of the series would be a world in which scarcity and territory were no longer a sparking-point for conflict following the discovery of seemingly-infinite parallel worlds. Nearly identical to Earth in every way, these worlds are so numerous that “everyone can have a galaxy of Earths, all to themselves”. Of course, Pratchett said, things aren’t necessarily so simple. Just because everyone has all this space doesn’t mean they’ll all suddenly become nice. Pratchett hinted at political conflict arising over the new worlds, but was generally coy about giving out specifics.

 

While it is definitely early days for this project, Pratchett and Baxter are both prolific writers; Pratchett in particular is notoriously fast at churning out his books, at one point producing a complete novel once every six months. Pratchett is currently also working on his next Discworld novel after I Shall Wear Midnight, a City Watch story entitled Snuff, which might delay the collaboration. A conservative estimate might expect us to see the first Long Earth book hitting shelves in early 2012.  

The Harkin is a writer, blogger and Brit. You can read more of his self-indulgence here or try to endure his banal tweets.