Terry Pratchett interview

There’s a terrific interview with my favorite author, Terry Pratchett, over at Science Fiction Weekly.

I’m fascinated with steam engines, and the telegraph, and intricate mechanisms. I think technology was at its very best just before the electronic age, because what you could use electricity for was just turning motors. By the time telephony replaced telegraphy, they had found ways of getting 12 messages simultaneously along one telegraph wire. Real, genuine, Jules Verne ingenuity had been applied to a world of cogwheels and vibrating reeds.

And, for me, anyway, this falls into the category of “Boy, I can relate to that”:

I’ve got a kind of tourist’s mentality. I take an interest in things. I learn a lot about them, but I’m never going to get that hooked. So I was into short-wave radio. I built myself a receiver and listened in, and that was fun, and then moved onto something else.