GNU Terry Pratchett

This post was supposed to be about Terry Pratchett and an Oblivion mod he contributed to. Instead, it turned into a much overdue eulogy that I could never being myself to write.

Author Sir Terry Pratchett laughing with birds perched on his has
Sir Terry Pratchett. I have absolutely no idea who took this photograph as I have never seen a credit on it, and for that I am sorry. But it is a favorite in that it captures his shining self so well.

One of the greatest writers of the modern age was Sir Terry Pratchett. Fight me. I’ve never paid much heed to celebrity deaths, but in 2015 I was devastated when I heard my favorite author had passed (and many others have said the same). It wasn’t just that he’d never write another book. Nor was it just my terror of the very real possibility of suffering dementia, myself, and watching someone so brilliant be torn apart by it. Terry was very open about his experiences and his fears and his frustrations, while at the same treating it with his usual drive and humor and referring to his Alzheimer’s as “the Embuggerance.”

I can’t say exactly why Terry Pratchett’s passing was so hard for so many of his fans. We’ve all faced the death of a favorite author before. None quite like Terry. He saw a darkness in people that disturbed him, and wrote about it. That mindless mob mentality that creates horrors like Nazis, Westboro, and MAGA hats. People who in their own might be decent sorts who love their families, but who give in tribalism and believe the sort of rhetoric that eventually lead to the Armenian Genocide or sterilizing Native Americans or separating refugee families for detention. Terry didn’t shy away from giving horror a face. In many of the Discworld novels the reader can watch him struggle with coming to terms with how Joe Plumber can become lead torturer for the Inquisition.

Terry is one writer in thousands who dealt with the dark side of humanity. So why has he affected so many of his readers in such a way that we are still so devastated years after his death? Perhaps because he always gave us that little glimmer of hope. Cheesy sounding, yes, but true. There is always that small group of people, heavily flawed and all altogether human (even when they weren’t technically human) who rekindled faith that we’re not all bad. These characters are the equivalent of the Facebook videos of people rescuing ducklings for a storm drain. “They did the job they didn’t have to,” the riff usually goes in the the books. And they usually did the job at great personal expense. Night Watch in particular hit me hard. It marked a turning point not just in Terry’s writing but in how I viewed him as an author. I had always considered him as a philosopher cleverly masquerading as satire. But with Night Watch I saw how raw his frustration was with the world. And through that frustration, depression, anger, and cynicism, he still manages to give us a glimmer of hope (even if I’m not convinced he felt it, himself).

Selected Books

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These are my three personal favorite books by Terry Pratchett. There are scores of the Discworld Novels, and many more independent novels, making them incredibly difficult to choose from. But these three stood out for me.


Night Watch

It’s a later entry in the Sam Vimes books, but it stands alone (as most in the series do).

Vimes is caught in a storm on top of the Unseen University’s library and a lightning strike sends him back 30 years to the bad old days of tyrannical autocrats, civil unrest, and the People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road (“Truth! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!”). As mentioned above, Terry’s horror at the capability of normal people to excuse horrible actions is most pronounced in this book (read: the Scouring of the House of Pain.)


Small Gods

This is the book that first made me realize what a philosopher Terry was (and not just because of his prominent placement of the philosopher Didactylos).

The Great God Om, due for his promptly scheduled Smiting and Propheteering, has failed to make his firey pillar/great white bull self known to his Chosen One.

This is because he has, against all his expectation, appeared as a tortoise.

Gods need belief to survive, and it is Belief that shapes them. In the face of the Quisition’s brutality, many have turned to the Ephebian theory that the world is not a perfect sphere as created by Om, but a disc on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a gigantic cosmic turtle.

“The Turtle Moves,” they whisper out of earshot of the Quisition’s torturers, the Exquisitors.

This book has one of my favorite parts, explaining the birth of the Omnian Religion. He first encountered a Shepherd, and it was that encounter which shaped his followers. This was quite lucky for him, as the next valley over was home to a swain. And while sheep must be led, goats must be driven.


Monstrous Regiment

Polly, an Abomination Unto Nuggan, needs to bring her brother home from yet another pointless war. She does this by cutting her hair and joining the army, where she discovers that a well-placed pair of socks opens up the world of gender politics.

So many things go into this novel: the role of women in deep patriarchy, religion gone bad, and the madness of warring governments where the consequences are paid by normal people. And Vimes makes an appearance, which always makes me happy.