Opinion on Truckers (1989) and related work
- Interquel: Diggers (1990)
- Interquel: Wings (1990)
- Spin-off: “Only You Can Save Mankind” (1992)
Truckers (1989
)
Terry Pratchett (writer).
Read in childhood.
References here: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001), The Secret World of Arrietty (2010).
‣ Diggers (1990)
Terry Pratchett (writer).
‣ Wings (1990)
Terry Pratchett (writer).
‣ “Only You Can Save Mankind” (1992)
Terry Pratchett (writer).
Read in 2026.
In the English town of Blackbury, which was the site of Truckers, an otherwise unrelated twelve-year-old boy has a lot of free time on his hands because his parents’ marriage is beyond salvation. He doesn’t get a lot to eat and school isn’t great, but there’s this shoot-’em-up game on his computer that’s really catching his attention. The enemies in it start talking to him, and they don’t want to die.
Only You Can Save Mankind is worth reading only if you grew up in this specific time frame and were into video games. If so, you will enjoy Wobbler, a cracker character deeply involved in the software culture of the early 1990s. However, even if you did play period shmups, the story won’t make sense, because Pratchett is too lazy to figure out the premises of his own fantasy scenario.
To start with, there’s a Todorovian angle, where the strange events of the story could possibly be in the protagonist’s mind. A lot of the plot development happens literally in his dreams, and he thinks he’s going insane. His friend Bigmac plays at being a big, dumb skinhead, but is really none of those things. Perhaps the strange events are meant as a toxic game of pretend. That angle doesn’t work out, because other people do get involved and clearly witness the same strange events.
Next to the Todorovian angle, there’s a Zizekian Id-Machine angle, where the strange events of the story are presented as more firmly real, but materialized only in response to the expectations or desires of the people. When Johnny’s alone with the aliens from the game, they behave one way, but when his over-achiever friend “Sigourney” is with them, the aliens are more sinister because Sigourney likes Aliens (1988). This angle doesn’t work out, because there is no reason why there would be an Id-Machine like Solaris (1961) in this scenario, and no such machine is ever described or found.
Finally, there is an illusionistic, more traditional science fiction angle, where the strange events are integrated with the rest of the narrative through worldbuilding. For example, the aliens resemble alligators, and it turns out they have co-evolved with birds who live as their toothbrushes. That is Pratchett jokingly inserting a myth that Herodotus may have started about crocodiles. Pratchett extrapolates to make the bird dentists useful in other ways. However, like the Todorovian and Zizekian angles, this fully materialist angle doesn’t work out, because all the aliens breathe air and speak English.
Two thirds of the way through the book, Pratchett simply gives up on all of his attempts to determine the premises of his own book. Instead, Johnny speaks for the author:
Games look real. Real things look likes games. And ... and ... it all kind of runs together in my head.
A page later, the boy precociously submits an ontological argument against the 1991 Gulf War on his television, saying about war that:
But we always turn it into something that’s not exactly real. We turn it into games and it’s not games.
This is the author’s thesis statement, written when Adam Curtis was just getting into the best part of his career, often writing on the same subject. To underline the statement, Bigmac narrowly escapes a car crash that very likely kills one or two of his skinhead buddies: A moment of “real” violence in contrast to the violent events of the game.
Like all of the attempts to establish narrative premises, the thesis statement doesn’t work out. Pratchett never takes violence against the alligator people as seriously. Only You Can Save Mankind is not a worthwhile novelette about how the operators of smart bombs grew up playing video games, or about the hypermediated perception of Operation Desert Storm in the UK. Pratchett may have aimed that high, but all he managed was fabulism about NPC enemies transcending their programming on a 16-bit system.
Pratchett does not even figure out the properties of his fictional game. Is it a scrolling 2D shooter on a parallaxed field of stars, or a 3D game like 1993’s Starfox, but seen from a cockpit like the Descent series? The game’s NPCs are aware of a metafictional “Border” at the edge of “game space”, but that ultimately means nothing.
Lords and Ladies (1992) is a very good novel, by the same author, from the same year. Only You Can Save Mankind, by contrast, is not good, and it being aimed at children is no excuse. Maybe Pratchett really wanted a metaphor for technological or economic superiority in the Gulf War, but I think he was just flailing, trying to come up with any kind of story that didn’t make him feel trapped on the Discworld.