Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett: The Satirist in the Pointy Hat

On 25 August 2017, at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, a hard drive was placed on the ground and run over by a steamroller. It belonged to Terry Pratchett, who had died two years earlier and had left explicit instructions that anything unfinished be destroyed. According to his assistant Rob Wilkins, the drive held "an awful lot" — at least ten complete titles and a mass of fragments. No estate has ever refused a posthumous windfall more theatrically, and none has ever been more in character.

Beaconsfield to the Bucks Free Press

He was born on 28 April 1948 in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, the only child of David Pratchett, a mechanic, and Eileen, a secretary. At Holtspur School he was bullied over a speech impediment. He passed the eleven-plus in 1958 and went to High Wycombe Technical High School, where he joined the debating society and wrote for the school magazine — which published his first story, "The Hades Business," when he was thirteen. Two years later it sold commercially.

He left school at seventeen in 1965 and went straight into journalism, apprenticed to Arthur Church at the *Bucks Free Press*, where he produced more than eighty children's stories under the byline "Uncle Jim." He picked up an English A-Level and the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency course on day release. Everything he later became — the speed, the deadline discipline, the ear for how ordinary people actually talk — was installed in a provincial newsroom before he was twenty.

His first novel, *The Carpet People* (1971), came about because he mentioned the manuscript in passing during a 1968 interview with the publisher Peter Bander van Duren. Two science fiction novels followed, *The Dark Side of the Sun* (1976) and *Strata* (1981).

Press Officer for Nuclear Power

From 1979 he was press officer for the South West Region of the Central Electricity Generating Board, handling communications for nuclear power stations. He took the job shortly after the Three Mile Island accident and enjoyed pointing out the impeccability of his timing. It is the least likely apprenticeship imaginable for a fantasy novelist and, given how much of Discworld concerns bureaucrats managing catastrophes they only partly understand, probably the most useful.

The Colour of Magic, and Forty More

*The Colour of Magic* appeared in 1983. By the time it ended with *The Shepherd's Crown*, published five months after his death, the Discworld series ran to forty-one novels written across thirty-two years. He went full-time in 1987. By 1996 *The Times* had him as the UK's bestselling author; by 2023 he had sold over 100 million books in forty-three languages.

The range inside that output is routinely underestimated. He wrote *Good Omens* (1990) with Neil Gaiman. He wrote for children without ever talking down to them — the Nome trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell books, five novels about the trainee witch Tiffany Aching, and *The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents*, which won the Carnegie Medal and which he called his most treasured award. With the mathematician Ian Stewart and the biologist Jack Cohen he produced four *Science of Discworld* books. He held that fantasy was "the oldest form of fiction" and deserved serious standing, arguing that "it is easier to bend the universe around the story" than the reverse. He refused to use chapters in his adult novels, considering them an interruption.

Sir Terry, and the Sword

He was appointed OBE for services to literature in 1998 and knighted in the 2009 New Year Honours for the same, receiving the accolade at Buckingham Palace on 18 February 2009. Then, in 2010, he made himself a sword out of iron ore dug from deposits near his house. His explanation is one of the great statements of authorial principle: "You can't ask a fantasy writer not to want a knighthood. You know, for two pins I'd get myself a horse and a sword."

Ten honorary doctorates followed — Warwick, Portsmouth, Bath, Bristol, Dublin, Winchester, Bradford, Buckinghamshire New among them — along with the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2010, the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2011, the NESFA Skylark Award in 2009 and the British Science Fiction Association's annual prize in 1989 for *Pyramids*. An asteroid and a fossil sea turtle both carry his name.

The Embuggerance

In December 2007 he announced that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease — specifically posterior cortical atrophy, a rare variant affecting the posterior regions of the brain. He called it an "embuggerance," adding that "we are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism."

He then did what he always did, which was work. In 2008 he gave £494,000 to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, appalled to learn that "funding for Alzheimer's research is just 3% of that to find cancer cures." He made a BAFTA-winning BBC documentary, *Living With Alzheimer's*, in 2009, and the far more contentious *Choosing to Die* in 2011. In his Richard Dimbleby Lecture, *Shaking Hands With Death*, he argued the case for assisted dying — a subject he had been writing about in fiction, through the Discworld character of Death, for a quarter of a century before it became personal.

He died on 12 March 2015, at his home in Wiltshire, aged sixty-six. His humanist funeral was held in Salisbury on 25 March.

Why Terry Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty is moral seriousness delivered at comic speed. Pratchett could make a reader laugh at a joke and then discover, a paragraph later, that the joke was load-bearing — that it had been carrying an argument about policing, or religion, or the press, or death. The critical record tracks this shift precisely. Edward James wrote in 1994 that Pratchett "has grown from parodist to a commentator on the world at large." Helen Falconer, in 2000, judged that he "has developed into a scathing political satirist." Gregory Feeley called him "a humorist of the most mordant, darkest shade," and Faren Miller placed him as "a satiric and ironic observer of twentieth-century social mores." Chris Barsanti reached for G. K. Chesterton as the comparison. Forty-one novels without a slump, plus a Carnegie Medal, plus 100 million copies, is not an accident of marketing.

The counter-case is real and Pratchett would have been the last to suppress it. The books are uneven. Tom Shone's 1992 review of *Small Gods* accused him of "relying on his popularity without providing an intellectual challenge to his readership." Feeley, an admirer, still lamented the longer novels, holding that the stronger works are the ones where Pratchett "practices brevity." Sara Ludovise dismissed *Monstrous Regiment* in 2003 as "a one-joke effort lacking the soul of previous Discworld novels," with one-dimensional characters and a plot resolvable by the fifth chapter. Publishing a novel or two a year for three decades guarantees some of them are machine-made. And the disconnect noted repeatedly by critics — enormous sales, thin establishment recognition — cuts both ways: the literary world's snobbery about genre was real, but so is the fact that no Pratchett novel has yet had to survive the century without the affection of the people who grew up on it.

Legacy

The Pratchett estate endowed a Masters scholarship at the University of South Australia's Hawke Research Institute. The steamroller did its work. What remains is a forty-one-book satire of our own world, dressed up as a medieval fantasy realm into which modern technology and modern social upheaval keep intruding, and the uncomfortable suspicion that the costume was never really a costume.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of the British Empire — 1998
• Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize — 2012
• Carnegie Medal — 2001
• Knight Bachelor — 2008
• Notable work: Good Omens
• Notable work: Nation
• Notable work: Discworld
• Genres: fantasy and fantasy comedy