In person, Terry is genial, driven, funny. Practical. He likes writing, and he likes writing fiction. That he became a bestselling author is a good thing: it allows him to write as much as he wishes. He’s guest of honor at the World SF Convention—in many ways the ultimate accolade that the world of speculative fiction can bestow on those who have given it much—and he’ll still be writing, between panels, before breakfast, here and there. He’ll probably write as much in a day at Worldcon as most other authors will manage on a quiet day when there aren’t any DVDs that haven’t been watched and the weather precludes spending time in the garden and the phone’s out of order—and Terry will do this while doing his proper guest of honor share of panels and readings and socializing and drinking exotic drinks of an evening.

He wasn’t joking about the banana daiquiris, although the last time I saw him we drank ice wine together in his hotel room while we set the world to rights.

I’m delighted that he’s guest of honor at the Worldcon. He deserves it.

This was written to celebrate Terry Pratchett’s role as Guest of Honor of the 2004 World Science Fiction Convention.

On Dave McKean

I was twenty-six when I first met Dave McKean. I was a working journalist who wanted to write comics. He was twenty-three, in his last year at art college, and he wanted to draw comics. We met in the offices of a telephone sales company, several members of which, we had been told, were going to bankroll an exciting new anthology comic. It was the kind of comic that was so cool that it was only going to employ untried new talent, and we certainly were that.

I liked Dave, who was quiet and bearded and quite obviously the most artistically talented person I had ever encountered.

That mysterious entity which Eddie Campbell calls “the man at the crossroads,” but everyone else knows as Paul Gravett, had been conned into running advertising in his magazine Escape for the Exciting New Comic. He came to take a look at it himself. He liked what Dave was drawing, liked what I was writing, asked if we’d like to work together.

We did. We wanted to work together very much.

Somewhere in there we figured out that the reason the Exciting New Comic was only employing untried talent was that no one else would work with the editor. And that he didn’t have the money to publish it. And that it was part of history . . .

Still, we had our graphic novel to be getting on with for Paul Gravett. It was called Violent Cases.

We became friends, sharing enthusiasms, and taking pleasure in bringing each other new things. (I gave him Stephen Sondheim, he gave me Jan Švankmajer. He gave me Conlon Nancarrow, I gave him John Cale. It continues.) I met his girlfriend, Clare, who played violin and was starting to think that, as she came up to graduation from university, she probably didn’t want to be a chiropodist.