Terry Pratchett, the convention tweaking fantasy author, has died of early onset dementia:
Terry Pratchett, the immensely popular British fantasy novelist whose more than 70 books include the series known as Discworld, died on Thursday at his home near Salisbury, England. He was 66.
The cause was posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of dementia, Suzanne Bridson, an editor at Transworld Publishers, said in an email.
An accomplished satirist with a penchant for sending up cultural and political tomfoolery, Mr. Pratchett created wildly imaginative alternative realities to reflect on a world more familiar to readers as actual reality.
Often spiced with shrewd and sometimes wryly stinging references to literary genres, from fairy tales to Elizabethan drama, his books have sold 85 million copies worldwide, according to his publisher. And though Mr. Pratchett may have suffered from the general indifference of literary critics to the fantasy genre, on the occasions when serious minds took his work seriously, they tended to validate his legitimate literary standing.
In 2003, the novelist A. S. Byatt wrote that critics were paying attention to the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling but rarely to other fantasists.
“They do not now review the great Terry Pratchett,” Ms. Byatt wrote, “whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.”
Mr. Pratchett’s primary setting, Discworld, is a planet of sorts, Frisbee-like in shape and balanced on the backs of four elephants who themselves stand upon the shell of a giant turtle.
Mr. Pratchett introduced it in 1983 in the novel “The Colour of Magic.” Its protagonist, Rincewind, one of a number of recurring characters in the series, is a feckless wizard-wannabe who was an unsuccessful student at Unseen University, the principal school for wizards in the city-state of Ankh-Morpork.
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He is survived by his wife, the former Lyn Purves, and a daughter, Rhianna.
Three Twitter posts on Mr. Pratchett’s account on Thursday described his demise in imitation of his fiction.
“AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER,” the first said.
“Terry took death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night,” the second said.
The third said simply, “The End.”
I would note that The Colour of Magic is responsible for one of my bucket list items: I want to go to the top of a hill in a thunder storm in full (metal) armor, and shout curses at the gods.*
As a bonus, let me give you my favorite non Diskworld quote:
I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.
I will miss his writing.
*At one point in The Colour of Magic, the protagonist, Rincewind, is asked what exactly it meant to be a tourist like Twoflower, he explained, “Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards’.”