Although I’ve never read anything by Terry Pratchett except some of his humorous but heartbreaking accounts of his decline via Alzheimer’s disease, many of my friends love his writing, and I’m sure that many readers here do, too. It’s thus with sadness that I report that Sir Terry has died way too soon: at the age of 66. It was Alzheimer’s, of course. The BBC News reports:
“The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds,” said Transworld Publishers’ Larry Finlay.
. . . The author died at home, surrounded by his family.
Mr Finlay said he was “deeply saddened” by the news of Sir Terry’s death.
“In over 70 books, Terry enriched the planet like few before him. As all who read him know, Discworld was his vehicle to satirize this world: He did so brilliantly, with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention.
“Terry faced his Alzheimer’s disease (an ’embuggerance’, as he called it) publicly and bravely. Over the last few years, it was his writing that sustained him. His legacy will endure for decades to come.
Reader pyers, who emailed me the news, added his own eulogy:
A lot of your readers will be well familiar with Sir Terry…. He was a humanist, passionate believer in voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill cases and, above all, a bloody funny man who took a wonderfully, jaundiced eye on humanity in his Discworld which isn’t quite like Earth but is a reflection of here ….
Much much missed.
This is what his daughter posted on Twitter in the last half hour:
I wonder if he took his own life at “The End”.
I am extremely saddened by this. His books were very important to me especially in my developing years. I knew it was coming yet it’s too soon.
I vividly remember starting to read the first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, sitting in a dentist’s waiting room when I was at university in 1985.
He’s been a favourite author of mine ever since and I had the luck to meet him in person at Conway Hall, London in 2013. This is very sad news.
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Oh, damn. I only started reading him literally about a month ago.
Jerry, you would absolutely love Discworld. It’s a place where the supernatural really is real…and it wreaks all the havoc you’d expect it to if it really were really real. There’s even a vignette of a creator god intelligently designing new species. It takes the claims of the Woo-ists seriously and then has all sorts of fun sending them up.
I’ve been reading them in the order suggested here:
http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/the-discworld-reading-order-guide-20.jpg
Amazon just delivered the Science novels and the last of the Rincewind novels yesterday….
b&
He was a great human being, & I enjoyed his books (though I tired of them after a while). I recall reading Guards Guards first as it was a gift, then realizing I had been put off reading the books earlier by the covers – which is silly.
And I salute him, for as a colleague reminds me, he said –
“There is no higher life form than a librarian”!
Oook!
b&
I do have long arms & red(dish – what is left) hair…!
Just be careful when you sneeze, then….
b&
Been reading The Last Continent lately, have you?
Yes, that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. Not sure if it’ll be The Last Hero or The Science of Discworld up next. I think I want to follow Rincewind a bit longer, so Hero seems to be leading….
b&
The first Science book, at least in its Pratchett segments, is a Rincewind adventure. The whole Science series is very good (though Science II is the weakest, IMO).
If you mean those incredibly busy, rich covers with big-breasted, scantily-clad women plastered all over them…I quite liked them, as a teenager. Artistically speaking they’re grotesque – as an illustration of the worlds in Pratchett’s books they work pretty well. I can definitely see why they put you off though.
That’s powerful timing from Amazon and you.
I’m starting to think authors die as soon as I discover them! I just recently finished reading Good Omens and loved it. I have other Prachett books on my too reads list!
I haven’t read Good Omens, just the first several Discworld novels in the order on the chart. I think I’ll make it through Discworld before branching out into his other works…should keep me quite busy for a rather long time….
b&
Nation is a very good non-Discworld novel of his. There’s even a cameo towards the end by Richard Dawkins 🙂
Most authors would do well to write as much as the Discworld series…and yet that’s just a part of his total output….
b&
I loved Good Omens (he collaborated with Neil Gaiman and Gaiman said they were mostly trying to make each other laugh). You’ll like it – very irreverent toward religion and humans and just very funny at times.
I think I should be safe and simply decide right now that I’ll have to read everything the man wrote….
b&
That;s what I’ve been doing, although I slowed down after he got Alzheimer’s to save something for when There Would Be No More. Thus, I haven’t read Making Money or any that come after it. I have read his novels mostly in the order in which they were published, except some that I couldn’t find when I came to them.
Good Omens is the only book by him that I read (yes, I got to reading it through Neil Gaiman, too!), and I absolutely loved it. I’ll look into the Discworld books as suggested above (interesting reading guide).
I discovered Gaiman via Good Omens!
I discovered Pratchett via Good Omens!
Good Omens is a great read. Mort has long been one of favourite Pratchett novels probably because it heavily features my favourite Discworld character of Death who SAYS EVERYTHING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, rides a horse called Binky and who “…isn’t cruel – merely terribly, terribly good at his job.”
That “doing your job” bit is mentioned in Good Omens where demons were described as being like auditors – just doing their job but not well liked for it.
Good Omens was co-written with Neil Gaiman. So not quite a typical Pratchett but still very good.
You have a lot of books to work through…
I discovered him a few years back and now I have every one of his adult books. (Adult in the sense of not children’s books, NOT ‘adult = pornographic”. Damn euphemisms).
That’s a little out of date.
Add _Snuff_ to the Watch novels.
Add _Raising Steam_ to the Industrial Revolution novels.
Add _I Shall Wear Midnight_ to the YA novels. (WhIch are very good for OAs too. _Wintersmith_ is flat-out one of the best DW novels, and inspired a Steeleye Span album of the same name, featuring TP himself.)
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Good to know!
…and where should they get added? After the others in the appropriate series, one might hope…?
b&
Yes, each continues the series.
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Whew — makes life easier. I can just make my way through the guide and then pick up stuff not on the guide.
b&
Well, that depends if you want to finish each complete series in turn…
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Good point. I suppose I could check for more books at the end of each series….
b&
I turned on the radio when I went into the kitchen to prepare dinner just now and they were playing “The Dark Morris” from the Wintersmith album.
Spooky, but not really a huge coincidence in the circumstances…
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I think it likely that he did take his own life. If so, I’m glad he died on his own terms.
I will mourn.
—Gideon
No details yet, but he was a prominent campaigner for ‘assisted dying’, so it would not be a shock.
I too have not read his books, but I have enjoyed some tv of his books (the one about the postal service was excellent)
He died, without assistance, at home.
If that was the case, then there damned well better have been somebody there dressed in a long black hooded robe carrying a sickle.
b&
“I’m a humanist, which means I’m an atheist, the trouble with being an atheist is that it lets God off the hook. You really want someone to blame.”
Sir Terry
“There is no justice, just us.” Cohen the Barbarian said that – & I suspect (without checking) that it was a Pratchett original that was picked up by others…
No, it was DEATH himself who said that – Cohen followed it up in The Last Hero with an assault on Dunmanifestin (the home of the gods for those who don’t know…) because mortals have been short-changed!
Just a follow-up to say that TP is easily my favourite author and I will miss his novels and sharp observations so much…
Dominic, just realised my above comment may be rather abrupt…apologies! That really wasn’t my intention.
I read everything he’d written when I was in my teens and even if I lost touch with his work since then he sustained me on long school bus journeys and during rainy school lunch breaks when football wasn’t allowed. He was unbelievably brave in facing up to the horror of what was happening to him and I wish his family and friends well. I hope his end was peaceful, whether on his own terms or not.
Damn. I already miss him. We have many of his books, and I count on them for reading while we are traveling on vacation. They are the perfect escape while escaping.
Here are some of his quotes. I very much enjoyed tracking these down.
“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”
“Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.”
“The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.”
“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.”
He’s very quotable, which I always think is a good sign in an author. If I can add a couple (which I don’t think have been included in other posts, but excuse me if I missed them):
“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”
“Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.”
That third one seems pretty profound to me. Says a lot about epistemology and what separates science from everything else. Of course, it’s not about cats so it probably gets an immediate markdown, but still.
I like: “Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life”
Sir Terry
Very sad, I’ll certainly be raising a glass to him tonight.
Reading those tweets, I seem to have something in my eye……
“If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. ”
“I meant,” said Ipslore bitterly, “what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?”
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
Or more ominously …
“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
Once again, a great British author leaves this world too soon.
† 2001 Douglas Adams
† 2015 Terry Pratchett
RIP!
And:
† 2013 Iain (M.) Banks
All 3 funny, insightful authors – whose atheism was an important part of their writing. Those 3 are my favourite authors from the past 40 years. All gone too soon.
Mr. Banks is another author who died just as I discovered him!
I read _The Wasp Factory_, Banks’s debut, before it was published. A friend of a friend at uni was a proofreader for the publisher, and she let me read the galleys. She liked the book a lot less than I did…
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Nice! I’ve got a few books queued up on my shelf that is overburdened with “to reads”.
Hm, never heard of Banks before (until now). I think, I have to do some research.
For those that may not know, Death is a character in his Discworld series, and always talks in CAPITAL LETTERS.
When I discovered him, it was fantastic to read book after book in the series, I loved the wonderful characters like Rincewind and Vimes and his astoundingly eloquent wordplay and laugh-out-loud story-lines. It was a wrench when I caught up and had to wait for the next one along with everyone else.
Another hero gone.
There’s also an appropriate skeletal Death for each species on Discworld. Death of Rats, for example.
I liked the extremely slow-moving Death of Tortoises. An empty shell. Black, of course
Only in Reaper Man. All of the Deaths except the Death of Rats got remerged.
My favorite passage of Pratchett’s writing from “Hogfather”:
“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
Our favorite author at home…
Hopefully, Death let him take a ride on Binky.
Absolutely stunned. This hit me like a ton of brisks.
So sad.
Very sad to read this – Alzheimer’s is indeed an embuggerance. Frustrating and depressing that so little progress has been made in treating the disease and it’s devastating effects.
All of the Unseen University novels are great send-ups of academia and its foibles. Any university professor who is new to DiscWorld might want to start with those.
Is it time for the cheese trolley yet?
I swear that my iPad changed my its to an it’s in the preceding. >:-(
iPads do that. I think they are little demons trying to mess with us.
iPads are of course worked by lots of little imps and demons.
You mean you haven’t opened yours up to see them?
No, I don’t want to expose the imps and demons to UV! They could maybe burn. Or perhaps that is just holy water.
I have meaning to read his stuff for years … maybe now I should. (On the other hand, when I reread _Salmon of Doubt_ I got depressed that there wasn’t going to be any more.)
Read it! There are at least 40 or so Discworld novels, that’s a hell of a lot of books to not read because you don’t want to get to the last one…
He was by far my favorite author. I own about 50 of his books and expect to complete the collection soon enough.
The news of his passing away, although expected at some point, literally floored me. I feel a lot of emptiness right now. On the other hand, as someone somewhere else said about him:
“So while I’m sad, I’d rather live in a world where he lived and died than a world where he never existed.”
Farewell, Sir Terry, you will be dearly missed.
“Small Gods” is one of the best send-ups of religion ever written. RIP and thanks, Sir Terry.
Could be (I haven’t read it yet), but Pyramids is also wonderful; see my comment below.
I like the bits about the camels and mathematics. Oh, and Ptraci.
Yes, there was so much fun in that book. But, as I said, my comment was already too long.
Oh — this is the TP book for you, PCC!
http://www.bookstation.hu/images/item_image/original/124749.jpg
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Oh God .. I had forgotten that! Dug out my copy and am laughing at the moment…
“Boot-faced cats aren’t born but made, often because they’ve tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where there was room.”
A huge talent, greatly missed
I’ve read over 30 of his novels, all of which I enjoyed very much. I am saddened that there will be no more. I feel I’ve lost a good friend who made me smile and shared his wisdom with me.
If you only read one book of Pratchett’s read small gods. Others are better but for an overview of religion it’s hard to beat.
Here is the last thing Neil Gaiman wrote about Terry Pratchett.
Damn those pesky dust particles…
Some years ago I had the pleasure to see Sir Terry during a promo tour in Germany. An unassuming, black clad man (with a black hat too) walked unto the stage and started talking. It sounded off the cuff, but I’m sure it was well prepared. He had the audience captured. I fondly remember that evening.
So long, Sir Terry, and thanks for all the books.
Alas.
So sad. I have loved the Diskworld novels since the first came out. I met terry once and have a signed copy of Good Omens in which he inscribed “To Richard, Reading this book will send you _straight_ to _Hell_… be seeing you *”
As others here have observed, this news raises the dust level a lot *snif*
When I found out, I felt like crying. I still do.
sub
I won’t respond to everyone’s excellent comments thus far, except to agree wholeheartedly, and to pick just one:
I think that Ben is right that PCC would love Discworld. Funniest books ever, and as trenchant a criticism of religion as you’ll ever find. All you have to do to make religion look ridiculous, Mr. Pratchett realized, is to take it at its word.
OK, a few weeks ago we had the annual thread about the best books you read in 2014. For fiction I picked, without hesitation, Declare by Tim Powers and Pyramids by Terry Pratchett (yes, I *do* read books by authors with initials other than TP). I just recently went back through Pyramids (I work a lot on the Pratchett Wikiquote page) and realized that funny as it is, as well-plotted as it is, it is also a master course in John Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith. What Pratchett does, of course, is to take a “non-standard” religion at face value, put it through its paces, and let Stephen F. Roberts take over from there. Any christian or muslim reading Pyramids would think “what a completely asinine religion!” while the thinking people among us would nod and murmur, “yes, but that is exactly how your religion looks to us.” Crackin’ good (did I use the British idiom correctly?).
My favorite religion-related quotes from Pyramids:
“Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil’s scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language.”
“The culture of the river kingdom had a lot to say about death and what happened afterward. In fact it had very little to say about life, regarding it as a sort of inconvenient prelude to the main event and something to be hurried through as politely as possible.” (Oh my. Philippians 1.23-24 anyone?)
“Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.”
“It’s a fact as immutable as the Third Law of Sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the job spec.
High priests tend to get put in the same category. They have to face the implied assumption that no sooner do they get the funny hat than they’re issuing strange orders, e.g., princesses tied to rocks for itinerant sea monsters and throwing little babies in the sea.
This is a gross slander. Throughout the history of the Disc most high priests have been serious, pious and conscientious men who have done their best to interpret the wishes of the gods, sometimes disembowelling or flaying alive hundreds of people in a day in order to make sure they’re getting it absolutely right.”
“Well, yes,” said the IIa, very embarrassed, because interfering with the divine flow of money was alien to his personal religion.
“Belief is a force. It’s a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time.”
“No one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it’s like having the auditors in unexpectedly.”
“The crowds were still outside. Religion had ruled in the Old Kingdom for the best part of seven thousand years. Behind the eyes of every priest present was a graphic image of what would happen if the people ever thought, for one moment, that it ruled no more.”
There are plenty of others (Deepak and those who use the word “quantum” as an invocation come in for a bit of needling), but this post is already too long.
We’ll miss you, Terry.
Thanks for all those great quotes!
Pratchett wrote ’em; I just collect and organize ’em.
Bugger! RIP Terry.
I was put off reading Pratchett for a long time because it’s fantasy, and I don’t go much on fantasy. But in TP’s case, it’s not just mediaeval mysicism, it’s a whole imagined world built quite logically (one might even say ‘scientifically’) on a fantastic premise.
In fact it strongly reminds me of Doug Adams’ Hitch-Hiker novels which arrive at very nearly the same situations by an unassailably sci-fi route.
But besides having a way with words, (as did DNA), Pratchett is a wry commenter on the human condition through his non-human beings.
My favourite Pratchett character is Death. That will sound bizarre unless you’ve read some of his books. But if you like dry humour and irony, Death has some wonderfully funny dialogue. In fact Pratchett excels at throwaway lines that acquire their point – and their wit – from the fact that his characters while often very ‘human’ in their nature, are not physically human. Like, e.g. when Sergeant Angua disappeared: “Her bed hadn’t been slept in. Neither had her basket.” Of course! – Angua’s a werewolf. Where else would a werewolf sleep at that time of month? But typically, that’s the only mention in the whole series of Angua’s basket – Pratchett doesn’t belabour the point. Another reason why he’s excellent reading, he flatters the reader by assuming the reader will ‘get’ these little references without him having to spell it out in words of one syllable.
… or with a footnote*.
* Not just one! **
** Footnotes within*** footnotes.
*** That always made me laugh.
It’s pleasing to see that Rhianna is a fan of her father’s work. Her tw**ts fit right into the Discworld universe.
Oh, and by the way, Randall Munroe is also a follower:
http://xkcd.com/1498/
Thanks for that link, it was great.
In 2012 T Pratchett suggested that R Pratchett – a good writer in her own right apparently – will be the custodian of the Disc World when the inevitable happened.
My particular favorite Terry Pratchett quote matches the theme of Darwin’s “tangled bank” with an added acceptance of the nature of evil:
“I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald, I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
Havelock Vetinari I believe?
I think he’s my second most favourite character, after Death.
“Havelock Vetinari I believe?”
Spot on!
It’s a quote that sort of stops you in your tracks and forces you to reread it a few more times to appreciate its implications.
Pratchett at his best, I’d say.
It was however uncharacteristically loquacious of the Patrician. He was more often given to succinct and slightly ambiguous comments which caused nervous interviewees to babble all their deepest secrets.
He would frequently terminate an interview with ‘Don’t let me detain you’ which was usually sufficient to accomplish the hurried departure of his visitors.
Quote of the year!
Before reading nearly all the Discworld books last year, the only TP work I’d actually read was a ‘YA’ novel called Only You Can Save Mankind, which I gained by swappage from the bunkhouse bookshelf while hunting unsuccessfully for fossils at Argadargada Station in one of the nearly-empty quarters of the Northern Territory of Fourecks. It was good (except for the black ants, and time limitation due to impending monsoon). And the book was good too.
Play again?
Fourecks = XXXX = Terror Incognita in ‘The Last Continent’. Bears strong similarities to Australia.
I just wanted to flag up how much I loved the Truckers, Diggers and Wings books – I was pretty young but they pulled me in like no other children’s book I’ve ever read. I never quite fell for his grown-up stuff but those three books were just magical.