THE DISCWORLD ...it comes into view overhead, bigger than the biggest, most unpleasantly-armed starcruiser in the imagination of a three-ring film-maker: a turtle, ten thousand miles long. It is Great A'Tuin, one of the rare astrochelonians from a universe where things are less as they are and more as people imagine them to be, and it carries on its meteor-pocked shell four giant elephants who bear on their enormous shoulders the great round wheel of the Discworld.    As the viewpoint swings around, the whole of the world can be seen by the light of its tiny orbiting sun. There are continents, archipelagos, seas, deserts, mountain ranges and even a tiny central ice cap. The inhabitants of this place, it is obvious, won't have any truck with global theories. Their world, bounded by an encircling ocean that falls forever into space in one long waterfall, is as round and flat as a geological pizza...    - Excerpt from Equal Rites (1987) The following is taken from The Discworld Companion (1994) Discworld, the. As all will know, the Discworld is a flat planet - like a geological pizza, but without the anchovies. It offers sights far more impressive than those found in universes built by Creators with less imagination but more mechanical aptitude. It exists right on the edge of Reality; the least little things can break through from the other side. It is allowed to exist either because of some impossible blip on the curve of probability, or because the gods enjoy a joke as much as anyone else. More than most people in fact.    Chaotic as it sometimes appears, the Discworld clearly runs on a special set of natural laws, or at least on guidelines. There is gravity. There is cause-and-effect. There is eventuality - things happen after other things. After that, it becomes a little more confusing. The following theory can be gingerly advanced:    The Discworld should not exist. Flat is not a natural state for a planet. Turtles should grow only so big. The fact that it does exist means that it occupies an area of space where reality is extremely thin, where 'should be' no longer has the veto it has in the rest of the universe. The Discworld creates an extremely deep well in Reality in much the same way as an incontinent Black Hole creates a huge gravity well in the notorious rubber sheet of the universe.    The resulting tension seems to have created a permanent flux which, for want of a better word, we can call magic. There are several secondary effects, because the pressure of reality is so weak. Things that might nearly exist in a 'real' world - back up there on the rubber sheet - have no difficulty at all in existing in quite a natural state in the Discworld universe; so here there will be dragons, unicorns, sea serpents and so on. The rules are relaxed. BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION This is stuff about Terry Pratchett himself. Information about Terry is usually hard to find if only because he prefers to talk about his works rather than himself. This information is condensed from the "About the Author" sections of his books. TERRY PRATCHETT. --- PERSONAL HISTORY --- "People never read these biographies anyway, do they? They want to get on with the book, not wade through masses of prose designed to suggest that the author is really a very interesting person so look, okay, he wrote these other books, all right. Most were also about the Discworld, and actually quite a lot of people liked them." - From the "About the Author" section of the earlier Discworld books. Terry Pratchett is, on average, a sort of youngish middle-aged. He was born on the 28th of April in 1948 in the village of Forty Green (now a part of Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire) and is still not dead. He lives in the west country with his wife Lyn and daughter Rhianna where he writes books in between answering the mail. He lives in constant dread that someone will find out how enjoyable he finds writing, and stop him doing it. He chose journalism as a career because it was indoor work with no heavy lifting. He's managed to avoid all the really interesting jobs authors take in order to look good in this sort of biography. He started work as a journalist one day in 1965 and saw his first corpse three hours later, work experience meaning something in those days. After doing just about every job it's possible to do in provincial journalism, except of course covering Saturday afternoon football, he joined the Central Electricity Generating Board and became press officer for four nuclear power stations just before Three Mile Island, which shows his unerring sense of timing. He'd write a book about his experiences if he thought anyone would believe it. All this came to an end in 1987 when it became obvious that the Discworld series was much more enjoyable than real work. Occasionally he gets accused of literature. He says writing is the most fun anyone can have by themselves. He grows carnivorous (which, he argues, are really insectivorious) plants as a hobby (which are doing quite well by the way) and tells us that they are a lot less interesting than people believe. He likes people to buy him banana daiquiris (he knows people don't read author biographies, but feels this might be worth a try). He tries to make computers do things they were never intended to do. He also feels that the world could use more orang-utans. He has a two speed Hedge Cutter and there is no truth to the rumor that he likes being presented with Dried Frog Pills. Someone's father once sold him a carrot. --- HOW DID HE COME TO WRITE? --- The first story he ever wrote was for a school assignment and was called "The Hades Business". He managed to get 10 out of 10 for it. It was the first time he had gotten 10 out of 10 for anything except for a painting which his teacher thought was two dinosaurs fighting. This story was then published in his school magazine. There it would have ended, except for his school headmaster who addressed an assembly shortly afterward and announced that he didn't approve of the "moral tone" of the story. The magazine, which would have struggled to break even, sold out within 15 minutes. He learned an important lesson, right then -- by writing it is possible to infuriate your enemies as well as please your friends. He then had the story typed up by his Aunt and sold it to the magazine Science Fantasy (#60, vol 20, 1963), and with the profits bought a typewriter. Thus his first act as an income earner was to fire his Aunt. His mother rewarded this Thatcherite attitude and paid for his typing lessons and he was on his way. --- I WANT TO CONTACT TERRY FOR AN INTERVIEW OR SOMETHING --- Contact his agent, Colin Smythe (CPSmythe@aol.com) - that is the best way to ensure that your request gets to Terry.  You can try to email him directly - but given the volume he gets, there is a good chance that it might not be responded to. Biographical information 'borrowed' with permission (thanks Orin!) from the AFP FAQ. Visit the L-Space Web for more information than you could ever need.