My brain can’t quite get it’s head around it, but Wednesday just gone marked ten years since Terry Pratchett died, and I couldn’t let that pass without writing something about the Discworld and my enduring love for it.
I’d like to start by pointing you at my Where to Start with Terry Pratchett post for my suggestions about not starting at the beginning of the series unless you’re a frequent fantasy reader, but actually starting with one of the mini-series within the Discworld. It’s six or so years since I wrote that, and since then I think I’ve re-read most of my favourite sub-series, but not the series as a whole. And I think I’ve re-read or re-listen the first two Moist von Lipwig books and The Truth every year – and helped by the fact that there have been fresh audiobooks released I’ve also added in the early watch books, which were a very hard listen on the digital transfer of the original Nigel Planer recordings – or at least they were so hard a listen on Guards! Guards! that I never bought any others and just stuck to the ones that were narrated by Stephen Baxter.
I love the way that Pratchett skewers the modern world and the things that he picks out to create an alternative version of. I do wish we had got the Moist takes on the Tax system that was hinted at in the final stages of Making Money, but Raising Steam was fun instead. Basically I wish we had more. I wish so the Embuggrance hadn’t happened and we had another ten PTerry books by now rather than only having the old ones to re-read.
I’m also really glad that I went to see him and Rob Wilkins at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2011 to talk about Snuff. Because I’m an electronic hoarder I went back and checked my emails – and the event was to mark the fact that snuff was his 50th book – but I know that I went because I wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to do events and I wanted to hear him speak. It was four or so years since he’d made the dementia diagnosis public at that point, Rob did the reading from the book and Terry had already stopped signing books – he was stamping instead. My only regret from that night is that I didn’t queue up to get the book stamped and meet him – but it was a work night, it was already after 10pm when it finished and I had come from one 12 hour shift and had another one the next morning. But I went, it was great and I was right – there weren’t many more chances, because I didn’t manage to do another one.
And I really respect the job that Rob and Terry’s daughter Rhianna have done looking after the Pratchett estate – they’ve been really thoughtful and careful about what they do with it and tried to follow his wishes – right down to steamrollering his hard-drives so that nothing else could come out that he hadn’t approved. And judging by Rhianna’s post this week, hopefully we may have a new adaptation of something coming at some point in the relatively near future.
Anyways, I’m off to think about whether I should but some more of the pretty hardbacks, which will lead to me looking at the Discworld Emporium website and then maybe do a Discworld jigsaw under my framed picture of Errol the Dragon. I’ll leave you with the links my original tribute post and my BotW post for Shepherd’s Crown – which I still haven’t been able to re-read.
GNU Sir Terry.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 