MR. PRATCHETT? YOU PROBABLY KNOW WHY I'M HERE.
That's our old friend Death, a beloved character in several of Terry Pratchett's novels. When death came for Terry Pratchett I hope it was his Death, who always kept the whole business tidy and genteel and oddly reassuring.
Terry Pratchett is gone now, and he is going to leave one hell of a hole in the world of storytelling.(1) I'm not sure I've read all his novels, but I've read over 30 of them. In those novels he pulled off two of the hardest tricks in writing. First he wrote a series where each book was at least as good, if not better than the last--and this wasn't some puny trilogy,(2) it was a series of 40 Discworld novels. Second, he made it look easy. Like a master juggler of words and ideas and characters. Oh, the characters.
Death. Carrot. Leonard of Quirm. Lord Vetinari. Detritus. Cut Me Own Throat Dibber. Reg Shoe. Commander Vimes. Moist Lipwig. Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobby Nobbs. Granny Weatherwax.
If you know who any of those few out of hundreds of characters are then you've spent some time in the products of Pratchett's labyrinthine, lunatic mind; you've seen how he would take some decidedly off-center social commentary, whip it up into a mind-bending foam, and then blast it into a book with twisted, lovable characters, logic-twisting plots, settings like no one else has ever conceived, and humor, humor, humor: highbrow, lowbrow, and everywhere in between. With footnotes. (3)
Quite a few years ago I was guest at a Worldcon where he was also a guest. I was a shy nobody with a couple soon-to-be-remaindered paperback novels to my credit. I wanted to meet him. I could have walked right up to him in the Green Room.
I couldn't do it. This was Terry Pratchett. No matter how nice he might have been--and his approachability was legendary--I was just too in awe of him then, and in the years since that awe has never diminished. I just finished what was his last novel, 'Raising Steam', written with the help of voice recognition software and an assistant. He kept his essential Pratchetness (4) to the very last word, delivering the sort of story no on else could write.
If you have never read any Discworld novels, then go get one or several, and enter a world of joy and wonder you will want to visit again and again. If you have read a few Pratchett novels, go get more, and re-read the ones you have. Have a laugh--and think about the sly moral messages that wore funny faces and happened to involve zombies, dwarves, werewolves, vampires, trolls, witches, cops, bureaucrats, dreamers, tyrants, losers, gods, and a great turtle sailing through space with a whole flat world on its back.
Rest in peace, Terry Pratchett.
Knight. Gentleman. Satirist. Hero to a civilized world.
(1) The Grand Canyon springs to mind.
(2) A puny trilogy is one with a rather squishy second book.
(3) A Pratchett footnote was a thing of strange beauty. Like a platypus with carefully applied eyeliner and lipstick.
(4) More footnotes.