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| This is easily one of the most recognisable portrait shots of my generation. |
For a while, my brother in law ran a pub in Headington. He had a standing rule, never - alas - enacted, that if the relatively local author Terry Pratchett ever came into the White Hart, he could drink for one signature per pint.
Terry Pratchett has been a fixture of my life since I was bought a copy of Guards! Guards! in... I don't want to think when. I was living with my parents. I mean, I was a long way from even thinking about not living with my parents. I think the book was new out in paperback, so depending on whether it was ever release in hardback this would have been my birthday in '90 or '91. I was a youngish teen, I'd missed Lovecraft, and heroic fantasy was starting to pall. It was the right book at the right time, and I was hooked.
I picked up the back numbers of the Discworld series within the year and until a very few years back, when I stopped being able to read as much as I had for various reasons, any new Pratchett was snatched up in hardback. Good Omens introduced me to Neil Gaiman and remains one of my all-time favourites. The Science of Discworld transcended the popular science genre and combined an intriguing short story with truly thought-provoking scientific philosophy. It was the series that introduced me concepts like lies-to-children and Pan narrans; humanity, the storytelling chimp.
"Imagination, not intelligence, made us human."
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| The dude was a wizard; there's no denying it. |
To say that Terry Pratchett has influenced me, my writing, my thinking, is practically to say that I sure do breathe a lot of oxygen. The news of his death, while to some degree expected, is bittersweet for me. On the one hand, he is gone; there will be no new books, no more ideas from that wonderful mind. On the other, he was writing pretty much to the end, and he has said since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's that his greatest fear was no longer being able to write. I can relate to that fear.
My parents got me Guards! Guards! because the books weren't numbered. If they had got me The Colour of Magic, I would have probably not got into Pratchett for years, but as it is, I have a set that has traveled with me to University and to every house I have lived in since. At one point, my flatmate and I realised that something had gone awry, because we had two copies of every Pratchett book except for Carpe Juggulum (both missing) and Jingo (which despite being our mutual least favourite, we had three of.) My favourite book that he wrote is probably still Good Omens; my favourite that he wrote alone is probably The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents.
"LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS?"
They say that no-one is gone who is remembered. If that is true then Pratchett will be here for a long time. I'm sure there are those who would sniff at the notion that a writer of comic fantasy be regarded the equal of Dickens or Shakespeare, and indeed I would note - mostly with affection to all parties - that Pratchett never wrote five books with the same plot about twins, nor took a character on a tedious digression through a bizarrely caricatured America. Genre is a blinker, and while he wrote in a fantastical setting, Pratchett wrote about the human condition, even if some of the humans in question were trolls, talking dogs or the anthropomorphic personification of Death. His protagonists were always complex, his antagonists embodiments not of cosmic evil, but of the petty evils of human excess, shortsightedness and selfishness. He himself once explained that the joy of the Discworld was that all life was there, and he could write any sort of book he wished within that setting, from showbiz satire to police procedural.
We have not lost a fantasy author today, nor a comic author. We have lost one of the philosophers of our age, and a man with an often profound understanding of what it was to be human. We are poorer as a species for his loss, yet infinitely richer that he was a part of our lives.
They say that no-one is gone who is remembered. If that is true then Pratchett will be here for a long time. I'm sure there are those who would sniff at the notion that a writer of comic fantasy be regarded the equal of Dickens or Shakespeare, and indeed I would note - mostly with affection to all parties - that Pratchett never wrote five books with the same plot about twins, nor took a character on a tedious digression through a bizarrely caricatured America. Genre is a blinker, and while he wrote in a fantastical setting, Pratchett wrote about the human condition, even if some of the humans in question were trolls, talking dogs or the anthropomorphic personification of Death. His protagonists were always complex, his antagonists embodiments not of cosmic evil, but of the petty evils of human excess, shortsightedness and selfishness. He himself once explained that the joy of the Discworld was that all life was there, and he could write any sort of book he wished within that setting, from showbiz satire to police procedural.
We have not lost a fantasy author today, nor a comic author. We have lost one of the philosophers of our age, and a man with an often profound understanding of what it was to be human. We are poorer as a species for his loss, yet infinitely richer that he was a part of our lives.
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