The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers, Diggers, and Wings

"Yes, I’ve cheated slightly because this is really three books. But you can buy them as a companion edition, and I believe that in the US they were only ever published as a single volume. So I’m claiming it. Truckers was the first time Terry stepped away from the Discworld after becoming successful. He’d always been a children’s writer—his first book, The Carpet People, was a children’s book, and prior to that he’d been writing short stories for children for the local newspaper he worked for. At the age of 17, he got a job at a local newspaper. It had a children’s column that no one wanted to write; they considered it a pain in the ass, the worst job there. So Terry took it on. All the columns were collectively written under the pseudonym ‘Uncle Jim.’ But he took it on and wrote really wonderful short stories aimed at quite young children. They’re very Roald Dahl. He’d hate the word ‘wacky’, but it does kind of apply to those stories. But they are lovely children’s stories. And through that period he was writing the Carpet People book. So he’d always considered himself a children’s writer as well as a writer for adults. The Discworld is aimed at adults, but I think if you were 12 you could pick it up and read it. Once he got so famous he could basically do what he wanted, his first instinct was to write a children’s book. And the plot for Truckers actually comes out of those short stories he was writing in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s the story of a group of tiny gnomes who live in a roadside café. For various reasons, their food supplies are drying up, the hunting is bad. Almost all of them have died out; there are only around five of them left. So they decide to stowaway on the back of a truck and see where it takes them. It takes them to a department store, where they find an entire civilisation of gnomes living under the floorboards of the department store—and these gnomes don’t believe the universe exists outside of the story. “People always go to the Discworld first, but I’d say The Bromeliad is as intrinsically Terry Pratchett as you get” They think the story is everything, and have constructed a religion around it based around signs saying things like ‘Everything under one roof’ and ‘If you require help, please ask.’ They’ve made the founder of the store a kind of god-figure, and the store is their religion… then this group of outsiders drops in. It’s a very Pratchett idea, this. Then they find out that the store is going to be destroyed, and they have to convince all these other gnomes to leave the store, go out into a world they previously didn’t believe existed, and to put aside their religion. That’s the first book. What happens next, and where they end up is the second two books in the trilogy. The reason it’s called the ‘Bromeliad ’ is that there’s a bit in the second book, Diggers , where Pratchett talks about a character who, as she learns to read, reads every book she can get her hands on. She discovers bromeliad flowers, which bloom high up in rainforests. Within the petals are little pools and in those pools live tiny frogs. Those frogs live their whole lives in a flower not knowing that a world exists outside of that flower. And he has this beautiful analogy of the frog that looks up, over the petals, and sees the forest in front of him. Yeah, it’s not a subtle metaphor. But the entire series is about this idea that the world is always so much bigger than we think it is, there is so much to explore and to discover. And the more we wrap ourselves in ideas—particularly around religion, but all sorts of societal norms that constrain us—the more we are stopped from being able to see how much more we can get out of our existence. That, again, is a very Pratchett theme that comes up again and again. These are wonderful books. They’re aimed at children, so you can read them at ten, but you could read them as an adult and they still work really well. Terry never really saw a difference between children’s and adult fiction, except that you might not use the slightly longer words and you would make sure your themes were a bit more clearly laid out. But, essentially, a story is a story. People always go to the Discworld first, but I’d say The Bromeliad is as intrinsically Terry Pratchett as you get."