Announced all over the place, the death of Terry Pratchett. From the BBC site yesterday, with a wonderful photo:
Sir Terry Pratchett, fantasy author and creator of the Discworld series, has died aged 66, eight years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. [well, an early-onset dementia]
“The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds,” said Larry Finlay of his publishers Transworld.
The author died at home, surrounded by his family, “with his cat sleeping on his bed”, he added.
Sir Terry wrote more than 70 books during his career and completed his final book last summer.
He “enriched the planet like few before him” and through Discworld satirised the world “with great skill, enormous humour and constant invention,” said Mr Finlay.
Pratchett is variously described as the author of novels, fantasy novels, or fantasy (people don’t know quite what to do with fantasy).. But he was certainly a great comic writer, a sly social critic in the guise of antic fiction, in an elaborate invented world. His characters are lovingly and tolerantly drawn, in very humane fiction.
Earlier on this blog, a posting that drifted into the world of trade guilds, where I wrote:
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of fantasy novels, there are almost 300 Guilds in the city of Ankh-Morpork. The list of guilds includes ordinary occupational associations, with some surprises tucked in: alchemists, assassins, chefs, conjurers, fools, lawyers, rat-catchers, thieves, town criers, watchmen, …
Yes, assassins and thieves. And a central figure in the Discworld novels is Death, who is (how to say this?) charming..
(I came to Pratchett through friends — I think Roy Calfas or Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, or maybe both. Many thanks.)
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