GNU Terry Pratchett

March 12th was the tenth anniversary of Terry Pratchett, who died of Alzheimer’s at the age of 66. To mark the occasion, I posted a thread on Mastodon about it. Here it is, for posterity. O.G. thread / alt link

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Right! Today marks ten years since the death of Terry Pratchett.

There’s a whole generation of adults who grew up reading the Harry Potter books, internalizing them to an extent that’s kind of frightening. That’s my relationship with the Discworld series: I read them from childhood through adulthood, and they’ve informed much of my worldview.

My Mastodon instance went down after that tweet. Uh, pretend I sent the following tweets yesterday … or that I’m tweeting from Alaska. 😆

He sums it up in Carpe Jugulum. I only read it once, which made tracking down the exact quote a little tricky, but this bit stuck with me. It’s from late in the novel, when priest Mightily Oats and witch Granny Weatherwax are on the run.

Oats: “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of grey.”

Granny: “Nope.”

Oats: “Pardon?”

Granny: “There’s no greys, only white that got grubby. I’m surprized you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that—”

Granny: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

Then there’s the Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of economic unfairness: if you’re poor, you’ll end up spending more money in the long run on affordable boots than a rich person will on a good pair of boots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

He usually wrote about normal folk in extraordinary circumstances. Rincewind was the world’s worst wizard. Sam Vimes was a random guardsman passed out in the gutter. Moist von Lipwig was a petty con artist sentenced to hang. Tiffany Aching was a girl who wanted to rescue her brother from the fairies.

Even his larger than life characters were sad. Granny Weatherwax was the world’s greatest witch, and Susan Sto Helit inherited her powers from her grandfather, Death. Both of them are cut off from the rest of humanity. I wouldn’t want to be either of them.

His novels suffered as his Alzheimer’s worsened. I’d argue that Snuff doesn’t work, and Raising Steam is bad. But his final book, The Shepherd’s Crown, works as a capstone to the series. And it’s explicitly about death, and one generation handing power over to the next.

His stories meant a lot to me. #GNUTerryPratchett