(I keep coming back to this post and fiddling with it. A threnody-in-progress, as I consider what this man meant to me.)
Well, we knew this day was coming, but we are no less sad. The world is without one of its finest satirists and humanists today, with the passing of British comic writer/fantasist Sir Terry Pratchett, from complications due to Alzheimer’s.
News here. A lovely segment from Buzzfeed here, on some of PTerry’s best quotes. The BBC obituary is here. A more in-depth tribute on Junkee here.
Terry Pratchett was the most deft writer I knew at weaving ultra-deep, ultra-serious content into rollicking humor. Along with Tanith Lee and Guy Kay, PTerry showed me the incredible catharsis of smile-through-your-tears endings. He was also an exemplary human being, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2009 and 2011 North American Discworld Conventions.
Since 1983 and the start of the Discworld phenomenon, I have marveled at how kind he was, even to the idiots in his books and their real-life inspirations. Unlike many modern comedic writers and satirists, Terry Pratchett’s humor was never needlessly cruel. It could be pitiless, real, and unflinching*, exasperated by human frailty and pigheadedness, but a core of basic decency and ‘I understand’ shone through everything he wrote.
He and his work remain one of my litmus tests for new acquaintances, especially of the writing kind. If they don’t understand or dislike Terry’s writing, if they can only see into the surface layer of farce and whimsy – then they and I don’t have much in common.
*Last year, Neil Gaiman wrote an appreciation of Sir PTerry in The Guardian; it’s worth reading again for the insight. Most notably, that Terry Pratchett was driven by a deep, powerful fury: a drive to testify for human intelligence and heart, and against the horrible or banal tribal conventions we so often use as excuses to be neither intelligent nor kind.
We’ll miss you, man.