Latest news with #Pratchett
Spectator
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Did Terry Pratchett really write classics?
The news that Terry Pratchett's 2002 novel Night Watch has joined the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics series may seem, to the Pratchett uninitiated, something of an eyebrow-raiser. Penguin has proudly announced that the book 'which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is… a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit' and that it was 'written at the height of Pratchett's imaginative powers'. All this may very well be true. But many people, even those millions well disposed towards Pratchett, might be asking another question: why this book, and why now? During his lifetime, Pratchett built on the legacy of another great British fantastical author, Douglas Adams, by creating his own universe, Discworld, in which many of his books are set. They have sold over 80 million copies, and even Pratchett's death in 2015 has done little to stem the enthusiasm. At one point, he was the most shoplifted author in Britain, so desperate were his teenaged admirers to get their hands on his stories. And his books have mostly remained books rather than being transformed into big-budget Hollywood spectacles. Pratchett once said that a film studio was interested but he was told to 'lose the Death angle', which would be tricky, given that Death is a major recurring character throughout the series. I've always enjoyed the Pratchett books and consider him one of the more amiable and less self-consciously literary knighted authors that Britain has produced. The writer Imogen West-Knights summed up Pratchett's admirers as she searched for a description of a certain kind of Briton: English, Terry Pratchett fan, sardonic humour, left wing-ish, leather jackets, maybe long hair, maybe folk music, Bill Bailey, real ale, usually middle age+. Warhammer adjacent. Likes swords but doesn't necessarily own one? If I have any disagreement with his elevation to the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics, then, it is less to do with Pratchett's own writing and more a sense of uncertainty as to what defines a modern classic. There is no stated definition on Penguin's website, and when I interviewed Henry Eliot, the former creative editor of Penguin Classics, a few years ago, he told me that: 'The Modern Classics series gathers the greatest books of more recent times, books that have challenged convention, changed the world or created something new. They are books that speak powerfully to the moment – and time will tell if they speak for more than that.' I would argue that Night Watch, although a book loved by Pratchett's many fans, is hardly something that 'challenges convention' or has 'changed the world'. Pratchett created something new in his Discworld series, and the love that his admirers hold for his works is testament to their enduring success. Personally I was surprised that Penguin didn't opt to publish 1987's Mort, the first Discworld novel to feature Death and the one usually regarded as Pratchett's single greatest achievement, or simply to come out with the entire series of Discworld books in one go. Pratchett was always a self-effacing figure and would probably have shrugged at the Classics label There are many deep-pocketed admirers of the author who would have ordered the entire canon in this new edition, although I can imagine that the effort involved in putting together 40-something painstakingly annotated novels may have been exhausting. This Penguin Classics edition also includes a foreword by Pratchett's PA and biographer Rob Wilkins, and an introduction and annotated notes by two Terry-o-philes, Trinity College Dublin's Dr Darryl Jones and the University of South Australia's Dr David Lloyd. Despite all that effort in making Night Watch appear to be a classic, even Pratchett would not have claimed that every one of the books was a masterpiece. Yet the nature of Penguin Modern Classics is that when they go all in on an author, they generally have to publish the entire works. Which means, for instance, that Evelyn Waugh's wildly unsuccessful Catholic fantasia Helena must be given the same serious literary treatment as the far more deserving A Handful of Dust. If Night Watch is successful – and only a fool would think that it won't be – then presumably there will be more Discworld editions over the coming years. Pratchett was always a self-effacing figure and would probably have shrugged at the Classics label (although he was evangelical about the fantasy genre, which he argued was done down by snobbish literary critics). Yet I can't help thinking that Penguin has done something similar to what the Folio Society has been doing over the past few years, and published a book that they know will cater to a fervent fanbase and sell in considerable quantities thanks to the added material. The question of literary excellence therefore becomes a secondary one. This is understandable – it's fine – but the brand is called Penguin Modern Classics, rather than Penguin Modern Notables. I am unconvinced that this particular instalment in the much-loved series lives up to its grandiose billing it.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Where to start with: Terry Pratchett
With more than 75m copies of his books sold around the world, Terry Pratchett is one of the most loved British writers, best known for his comic fantasy novels set on a fictional planet, Discworld. Ten years on from the author's death, and justbefore what would have been his 77th birthday, Pratchett's biographer Marc Burrows has put together a guide to his hero's work. Among Pratchett fans, this is the most controversial question you can ask, and often the one that puts people off. He wrote so many books: 59 novels, with 41 set on Discworld, plus art books, diaries, science collaborations and short stories. Some purists insist you must start with the 1983 novel The Colour of Magic, the first Discworld title. Pratchett himself disagreed, and I'm with him. It's a good book, not a great one – not all the jokes land, and it leans heavily on fantasy tropes. He got much better, very quickly. The real secret is that most of Pratchett's books work as entry points. He always wrote with new readers in mind, offering a gentle handhold into his world. But a good choice would be Feet of Clay – a proper police procedural with a great mystery and thoughtful reflections on prejudice, class and the very nature of personhood. And it's funny, but that's a given when it comes to Pratchett. Witches Abroad, a 1991 Discworld novel about three witches on an epic quest to make sure a poor servant girl doesn't marry a prince. On the way there are parodies of The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula and Hans Christian Andersen stories. Pratchett writes older women beautifully: Nanny Ogg might be one of the finest comic sidekicks in literature. This book skewers fairytales with glee, but also introduces one of Pratchett's key ideas: People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. It's a joy from start to finish. Pratchett's 2002 book Night Watch was recently republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, and rightly so. It's his angriest and most profound novel – a kind of mashup of Les Misérables and The Terminator via the Peterloo massacre and the battle of Cable Street. It's about justice, trauma, and how doing the right thing is exhausting, relentless work. It's also a page-turner, a moral treatise, a time-travel crime caper … and includes a scene where a police officer shoves ginger up an ox's bum. It's perfect. In the author's 1998 novel, Carpe Jugulum, a family of vampires invade the tiny mountain kingdom of Lancre, allowing Pratchett to have endless fun with the tropes of gothic fiction. There's a much darker core to this one, though. It's a story about who we are and about right and wrong. It's worth reading for this line alone: Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is. A slightly obscure pick, but I loved the 1999 spin-off Nanny Ogg's Cookbook. The recipes themselves are largely irrelevant. The real gold is Nanny's etiquette advice; this is some of the best comic character writing Pratchett ever did. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion The Johnny Maxwell trilogy: Only You Can Save Mankind; Johnny and the Dead; and Johnny and the Bomb. These follow the adventures of a chronically worried teenage boy, sheltering from his parents' divorce and the sheer awfulness of the adult world (the first book in the series is set during the Gulf war). He enters video games in his dreams, converses with the spirits of the dead and travels back in time to the second world war. Often overshadowed by Discworld, these young adult books are smart, warm, and full of big ideas handled lightly. The Shepherd's Crown, Terry's final novel, published just months after his death in 2015. It's his farewell to Discworld and its characters. There's a death scene I still struggle to read. It's graceful, brave and completely unshowy. Pratchett always wanted to write hard sci-fi, and The Long Earth series was an idea he'd had since the early 80s. The success of Discworld meant it was delayed and eventually written in collaboration with Stephen Baxter. The premise – what if we could step between endless empty Earths? – is solid. The first book has moments of magic, but the series runs out of steam quickly, and the characters never quite land. The 2008 novel Nation. This was the book of which Pratchett was proudest. A young adult novel full of rage and doubt, handled with an astonishing lightness of touch. Earlier novels such as Small Gods saw him blowing raspberries at organised religion. Here, he shakes his fist at the gods themselves. Marc Burrows is performing his show The Magic of Terry Pratchett at London's Duchess theatre on Pratchett's birthday, 28 April, followed by a UK tour.
The National
13-03-2025
- Health
- The National
Signs of Terry Pratchett's dementia hidden in his novels
Scientists reading between the lines of Terry Pratchett's novels believe they have spotted early signs of the author's dementia years before he was diagnosed. A study of 33 of Pratchett's Discworld books found he used simpler language in his later works, which can be a sign of dementia. The British fantasy writer, who died 10 years ago this week, revealed in 2007 that he had a rare form of Alzheimer's disease. The latest research suggests signs of linguistic decline were evident as early as 1998's The Last Continent. As time went on, Pratchett used less varied nouns, verbs and adjectives in his work, researchers told the New Scientist, despite an increase in the overall word count of his books. "This demonstrates a long preclinical period of dementia and the subtle impairments that aren't necessarily picked up by traditional cognitive tests," Loughborough University researcher Thom Wilcockson told the magazine. Pratchett had a form of the disease called posterior cortical atrophy, which damages the rear of the brain. People living with it tend to have problems with their vision and may struggle with words and numbers, the UK's Alzheimer's Society says. It says the first symptoms tend to occur when people are in their 50s or 60s, but early signs are "often subtle" and do not immediately prompt a diagnosis. Pratchett was 59 when he was diagnosed, saying he could no longer type and had given up his driving licence. He continued writing and his 41st and final Discworld book, The Shepherd's Crown, was published in 2015, six months after his death at the age of 66. He also donated money to Alzheimer's research in the hope a cure would be found before he died. Marking the anniversary of his death, Pratchett's former assistant Rob Wilkins said the author "indisputably lives on" in the minds of his readers. "While his words live on, so does Terry, and that will be the case, no question, not just for this one decade so quickly gone but for many further decades to come, "he said. Agatha Christie's detective novels have similarly been put under the microscope in the past, by researchers in Canada who suggested she too might have had Alzheimer's. They said the breadth of her vocabulary appeared to have dropped by 15 to 30 per cent towards the end of her life, with more repeated phrases in her work. Researchers found similar trends in the work of the 20th-century novelist Iris Murdoch, who was known to have Alzheimer's when she died in 1999. Her final novel, Jackson's Dilemma, was measured as using the simplest language of all her works.
The Independent
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
In an age of open hostility, Terry Pratchett's militant decency is more urgent than ever
Ten years ago today, Sir Terry Pratchett died. He was the best-selling author of his generation, knighted for services to literature. A man who responded to an Alzheimer's diagnosis by making it a political issue, working for increased funding and awareness while campaigning to legalise assisted dying, something he did while authoring or co-authoring another 10 novels. In his own words, he was, "from birth to death, a writer". Pratchett was often minimised and dismissed because he wrote fantasy novels — he was very proud of that. They were about wizards and witches, incarnations of Death, talking rats, giant turtles and tortoise gods and, on one occasion, a sentient cheese. Those books have sold over a hundred million copies. And because they were fantasy, and funny, and, above all, because they were popular and bought by the sort of people who read them on the Tube and swapped them down the pub, he was often ridiculed. "A complete amateur," snorted the poet Tom Paulin on BBC's Newsnight Review in 1994. "Doesn't even write in chapters." This epithet was added to the back cover of Pratchett's next book. Paulin's broadside sums it up. While the likes of William Burroughs and Irving Welsh can break the form of the novel and be hailed as geniuses. Pratchett, as he once said himself, put in "one lousy dragon" and he was deemed a hack. What the more supercilious literati overlooked was that Pratchett wrote about people. He used fantasy to reveal the weirdness, cruelty and everyday brilliance of humanity. Readers didn't respond because his books were set in a flat world carried through space by a turtle but because they were achingly, and often ridiculously, human. They were also angry. At Pratchett's core was a finely tuned sense of injustice that powered his best work. He couldn't abide bullies, pettiness, or bureaucracy that saw people as "things" – an attitude that he once described as being the very definition of sin. Those who studied his work describe his approach as "militant decency," though he never used the phrase himself. His books are deeply moral but never sanctimonious. They burn, yet are tempered with warmth and wit. They understand the world's cruelty but insist that people are neither fundamentally bad nor good but "fundamentally people". Pratchett's characters fought against injustice through small, persistent acts of goodness. The cop Sam Vimes refused to let the powerful grind down the weak. The witch Granny Weatherwax gave people what they needed, not what they wanted. Her young colleague Tiffany Aching learned that being a witch wasn't about magic, but about looking after those who had no one else. Pratchett's books hammered home the message that doing the right thing is often difficult, exhausting, and thankless, but that doesn't mean you don't do it. This was a man who, when knighted by the Queen in 2009, forged his own sword – his rationale being that if you're going to be a knight, you ought to act like one. That spirit underpinned everything he wrote. His books cut through hypocrisy with razor-sharp clarity, not just by pointing them out, but by showing how they could be fought with determination, wit, and decency. His characters weren't perfect, but they tried. In Pratchett's world, trying mattered. In an age of lies that spread around the world "before the truth has got its boots on" and open hostility towards marginalised groups, Pratchett's militant decency feels more urgent than ever. He understood that kindness isn't passive but an active, radical stance. His books remind us that it's not enough to be good in our hearts, we must also be good in our actions. We must stand up, speak out, and refuse to accept a world defined by pettiness and indifference. Ten years after his death, we don't just miss Terry Pratchett's writing. We miss his voice; his wisdom, wit, and ability to cut to the heart of things. But people live on in the stories they leave behind. Pratchett's stories, full of fire, compassion, and a stubborn refusal to let injustice go unchecked (and also some deeply, deeply silly jokes), still have so much to teach us. The world is still ridiculous. It is still cruel. And we still need people who refuse to treat others as things. Now more than ever, we need Terry Pratchett.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Texas woman applies to change last name on passport, receives unasked for sex marker change
AUSTIN (KXAN) — An Austin woman who tried to update her passport with a new last name said she unexpectedly received a new passport that listed a different sex marker than her previous one. Alexis Pratchett, who is transgender, filed the name update in December, but an issue required her to re-submit paperwork in early January. That caused a delay in the agency's processing of her passport. 'By the time [the State Department] got around to it, it was the new administration, and they'd already put out their executive order on sex,' she said. 'So I wasn't even sure if I was going to receive my documentation back, but when I did, about a week ago at this point, it came back with my former gender marker, which I would definitely consider wrong at this point.' Pratchett said she corrected her passport's gender marker four years ago. All of her other documents have been updated via legal process to reflect her gender. 'I provided a court order with proof of the name change,' Pratchett said. 'It was just the name change. It did not include a gender marker change anywhere on that paperwork.' She said she feels that the State Department making such a change to her documents 'feels incredibly stupid.' She's concerned that this could cause problems if she wanted to travel internationally or chose to move out of the country. KXAN reached out to the State Department for comment, asking if the agency would explain why the change happened. 'Even if my passport has an 'M' on it, it does not change the fact that I go day-to-day in society as a woman, that people see me and treat me as a woman,' she said. AP: The US stopped allowing passport gender marker changes. Here are some of the people affected She explained that paperwork discrepancy creates 'confusion' that always carries the possibility of someone escalating to violence, she said. 'You do all of this just for, like, basic safety, right? It really does feel good to…not have to keep pulling out this card with a name that isn't yours and a gender that isn't yours,' Pratchett said. 'Taking out an ID that shows [someone] that I am trans, it's not something I want them to know. It's not something I want a stranger with a gun to know. It's not something I want a cashier at the store to know.' Another transgender American who received an unconsented change was 'Euphoria' actress Hunter Schafer. She had applied after her passport was stolen in Spain; she received a passport with its sex marker changed, she said in a TikTok video. Situations like Pratchett's and Schafer's are ones that legal nonprofit Lambda Legal said it's looking for, during an online information session Wednesday. 'For many trans people, a passport has for a long time represented an avenue to an accurate identity document where state laws or policies prohibit updating driver's licenses or other state ID to affirm and match a person's accurate gender and identity,' said Carl Charles, a Lambda Legal senior attorney. 'A world without us has never existed': Transgender Texans react to Trump's gender mandate Currently, Lambda Legal recommends that transgender people should avoid applying for or changing their passports, if possible. That may change pending a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the Trump administration over transgender American's passports. 'If there's some discrepancy in documents, or the passport officials are exercising a really significant degree of scrutiny, they may request additional information that might allow them to essentially profile people as transgender and then refuse to issue them correct gender markers on their passport,' Charles said. According to the White House, existing passports will remain valid. But that doesn't cover Americans who need to make changes or order a replacement. These actions by the Trump administration's State Department may be spurred by the president's executive order. However, the agency's policies and rules haven't officially changed, with the new proposed rules listed in the Federal Register for public comment until March 20. Application for a U.S. Passport U.S. Passport Renewal Application for Eligible Individuals Correction, Name Change to Passport Issued 1 Year Ago or Less, and Limited Passport Replacement Nearly 12,700 comments have already been submitted across the three proposed rules, as of Wednesday afternoon. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
