Terry Pratchett - Rest in Peace you wonderful man

Sixty-six years old - no age at all. And writing pretty much to the end.

I feel so sad that there will be no more of his wonderful stories.

Selfish of me, I know - but I was soooo hoping that there would be one more outing for Vimes and the City Watch.

I've been reading the Discworld novels since I was an adolescent. I think the most recent one I read was about 8 months ago. Thirty years of stories and wry observations of humanity and the oddities of existence. Pratchett's works have been with me my whole adult life and I already feel the loss keenly.

From the Guardian:

The announcement came in typically irreverent manner on the author’s Twitter feed, with a series beginning in the voice of his character, Death: “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.”


“Terry took Death’s arm,” the series continued, “and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.”

Rest in peace Sir Terry, you'll be missed but you won't be forgotten.

Very sad. I read the whole series over the last two years or so.

:( Thor reads the series continuously. when he gets to the end, he starts over. Occasionally pausing to slot in the Hitchhiker's Trilogy. :cry:

.

He was a truly brilliant mind.

My father brought me home The Light Fantastic because he knew I liked fantasy and he liked the cover art.
I took it to France with me, where I read it obsessively, along with the very different Pawn of Prophecy.
So years before their diagnosis of dementia, Dad and Terry Pratchett were linked in my mind.

Gone far too soon.

Awww.

Funny, though - my Dad got me into the Belgariad. We both read the whole series. So Pawn of Prophecy is also linked to my dad in my mind.

Personal recommendations? What to give my son as a first exposure to Pratchett?

The first of the Discworld books - The Colour of Magic.

In the beginning there was…a turtle.



Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. Particularly as it’s carried though space on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown). It plays by different rules.

But then, some things are the same everywhere. The Disc’s very existence is about to be threatened by a strange new blight: the world’s first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land. Unfortunately, the person charged with maintaining that survival in the face of robbers, mercenaries and, well, Death, is a spectacularly inept wizard…

The thing is, with the Discworld, there are several separates strands or storylines. So, the first few books concern the inept wizard Rincewind, and then the series branches out elsewhere. But every so often there'll be another Rincewind / wizards tale. Similarly, there are several stories with Granny Weatherwax and the witches. Sometimes the link up. There are stories about the Ankh-Morpork Citywatch, and there are stories of Moist von Lipwig - the books move around. They generally can be taken out of order - some people will do all the Rincewinds together, and maybe go through and do all the Citywatch books - some people just read them in order of publication.

So there are actually a number of possible start points and, particlarly as the series developed, there are quite different tones depending on which you read. Some are very light and frothy, some are really quite dark. Some deal with things like religious fundamentalism (Small Gods) others deal with the coming of modernity, with Discworld versions of Hollywood (Moving Pictures) or war (The Fifth Elephant). Some are crime capers, others are about the coming of age (A Hatful of Stars).

It's difficult to say which is the best intro - or which will draw someone in.


Another brilliant intro to Pratchett is Good Omens, which he co-wrote with Neil gaiman. It is a brilliant little book. Very funny.

“Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don’t let you go around again until you get it right.”





According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – the world’s only totally reliable guide to the future, written in 1655, before she exploded – the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just after tea…





People have been predicting the end of the world almost from its very beginning, so it’s only natural to be sceptical when a new date is set for Judgement Day. This time though, the armies of Good and Evil really do appear to be massing. The four Bikers of the Apocalypse are hitting the road. But both the angels and demons – well, one fast-living demon and a somewhat fussy angel – would quite like the Rapture not to happen.


And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist…

This is a good resource:

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/discworld_intro.shtml

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of A Colour of Magic

In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...

See...

Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.

In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.

Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and startanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.

Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.

The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartzwindowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.

The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A'Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe.[1]

For example, what was Atuin's actual sex? This vital question, said the Astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. In the meantime they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos.

There was, for example, the theory that A'Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favoured by those of a religious persuasion, was that A'Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

Thus it was that a young cosmochelonian of the Steady Gait faction, testing a new telescope with which he hoped to make measurements of the precise albedo of Great A'Tuin's right eye, was on this eventful evening the first outsider to see the smoke rise hubward from the burning of the oldest city in the world.

Later that night he became so engrossed in his studies he completely forgot about it. Nevertheless, he was the first. There were others...

. . .

[1] The shape and cosmology of the disc system are perhaps worthy of note at this point. There are, of course, two major directions on the disc: Hubward and Rimward. But since the disc itself revolves at the rate of once every eight hundred days (in order to distribute the weight fairly upon its supportive pachyderms, according to Reforgule of Krull) there are also two lesser directions, which are Turnwise and Widdershins. Since the disc's tiny orbiting sunlet maintains a fixed orbit while the majestic disc turns slowly beneath it, it will be readily deduced that a disc year consists of not four but eight seasons. The summers are those times when the sun rises or sets at the nearest point on the Rim, the winters those occasions when it rises or sets at a point around ninety degrees along the circumference. Thus, in the lands around the Circle Sea, the year begins on Hogs' Watch Night, progresses through a Spring Prime to its first midsummer (Small Gods' Eve) which is followed by Autumn Prime and, straddling the half-year point of Crueltide, Winter Secundus (also known as the Spindlewinter, since at this time the sun rises in the direction of spin). Then comes Secundus Spring with Summer Two on its heels, the three quarter mark of the year being the night of Alls Fallow - the one night of the year, according to legend, when witches and warlocks stay in bed. Then drifting leaves and frosty nights drag on towards Backspindlewinter and a new Hogs' Watch Night nestling like a frozen jewel at its heart.

Since the Hub is never closely warmed by the weak sun the lands there are locked in permafrost. The Rim, on the other hand, is a region of sunny islands and balmy days. There are, of course, eight days in a disc week and eight colours in its light spectrum. Eight is a number of some considerable occult significance on the disc and must never, ever, be spoken by a wizard.

Precisely why all the above should be so is not clear, but goes some way to explain why, on the disc, the Gods are not so much worshipped as blamed.

DanaC;923496 wrote:

The thing is, with the Discworld, there are several separates strands or storylines. So, the first few books concern the inept wizard Rincewind, and then the series branches out elsewhere.

The strands.

Outside of reading them in published order, or by storyline, Hogfather may be a good start.

Or Small Gods - given the current real world issues with religious fundamentalism it's rather good fun.

There's been a next discworld book for 22 or so years for, since I was in college, it's like staring into a void.

Bugger