Sir Terry Pratchett awakens. A skeleton stands at his bedside, wearing a long black robe. He sits up. “Well, hang on, let me get my hat,” he tells it.
The skeleton reaches into its robe. From abyssal depths it produces a heavy book bound in sheets of lead and night. It is the kind of book that gets stolen by a rugged adventurer from a temple with more spike-traps than the average house of worship contains. It is the kind of book to which the word “tome” might properly be applied. Frost forms on its pages from the lingering chill of the void.
The skeleton coughs once and holds the book out to the man sitting on the bed.
WOULD YOU SIGN THIS? it asks. BIG FAN.
These are very comforting.
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than twenty-six years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this — death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
But the Death of the Discworld is a little more unusual. He has become popular — after all, as he patiently explains, it is not he who kills. Guns and knives and starvation kill; Death turns up afterwards, to reassure the puzzled arrivals as they begin their journey.
He is kind; after all, he is an angel. And he is fascinated with us, with the way in which we make our little lives so complicated, and our strivings. So am I.
Within a year or two, I started to get letters about Death. They came from people in hospices, and from their relatives and from bereaved individuals, and from young children in leukaemia wards, and the parents of boys who had crashed their motorbikes.
I recall one letter where the writer said the books were of great help to his mother when she was in a hospice. Frequently, the bereaved asked to be allowed to quote some part of the Discworld books in a memorial service.
They all tried to say, in some way, “thank you,” and until I got used to it, the arrival of one of these letters would move me sufficiently to give up writing for the day.
The bravest person I’ve ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
I would like to think my refusal to go into care towards the end of my life might free up the resources for people such as him.
~ Terry Pratchett, “Point Me to Heaven When the Final Chapter Comes,” Mail on Sunday, 2 August 2009, from A Slip of the Keyboard
“
Terry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise.
He will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light. And, hand in hand with the anger, like an angel and a demon walking into the sunset, there is love: for human beings, in all our fallibility; for treasured objects; for stories; and ultimately and in all things, love for human dignity.
Or to put it another way, anger is the engine that drives him, but it is the greatness of spirit that deploys that anger on the side of the angels, or better yet for all of us, the orangutans.
Terry Pratchett is not a jolly old elf at all. Not even close. He’s so much more than that. As Terry walks into the darkness much too soon, I find myself raging too: at the injustice that deprives us of – what? Another 20 or 30 books? Another shelf-full of ideas and glorious phrases and old friends and new, of stories in which people do what they really do best, which is use their heads to get themselves out of the trouble they got into by not thinking? Another book or two of journalism and agitprop? But truly, the loss of these things does not anger me as it should. It saddens me, but I, who have seen some of them being built close-up, understand that any Terry Pratchett book is a small miracle, and we already have more than might be reasonable, and it does not behoove any of us to be greedy.
I rage at the imminent loss of my friend. And I think, “Wht would Terry do with this anger?” Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write.
”
— Neil Gaiman, - in his introduction to A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction by Terry Pratchett
(via panomphaeus)
(via panomphaeus)
RIP Sir Terry Pratchett
Announcement here:
It is with immeasurable sadness that we announce that author Sir Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66.
Larry Finlay, MD at Transworld Publishers:
“I was deeply saddened to learn that Sir Terry Pratchett has died. The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds.
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.
My sympathies go out to Terry’s wife Lyn, their daughter Rhianna, to his close friend Rob Wilkins, and to all closest to him.”
Terry passed away in his home, with his cat sleeping on his bed surrounded by his family on 12th March 2015. Diagnosed with PCA1 in 2007, he battled the progressive disease with his trademark determination and creativity, and continued to write. He completed his last book, a new Discworld novel, in the summer of 2014, before succumbing to the final stages of the disease.
We ask that the family are left undisturbed at this distressing time.
All enquiries: Lynsey Dalladay, Publicist ldalladay@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk
T: 0208 2316793 M: 07920 712543
A Just Giving page donating to the Research Institute to the Care of Older People (RICE) has been set up in his memory: https://www.justgiving.com/Terry-Pratchett
Sir Terry Pratchett, 28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015
“DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
Art by Paul Kidby
I don’t feel like laughing, not even smiling - but I’m doing both.
(Paul, thank you for helping me do it…)
AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
The End.
28/04/1948 - 12/03/2015
We’re devastated to report that the world lost one of its greats today — the peerless Terry Pratchett has passed away at age 66.
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent