Pratchett has stated openly that he desires to take his own life when the Alzheimer’s becomes too unbearable. He said he would like to end it ‘sitting in a chair with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod’, and many people sympathise with that. Unfortunately the law is not a living, breathing human being and doesn’t necessarily see it that way.
What I personally find fascinating about Terry Pratchett is his spirit, and it’s that inner strength and ability to tackle the world full on which is the main theme of this book.
Terry Pratchett – The Spirit of Fantasy is not an unofficial biography and not a Discworld companion. It is a tribute to a man who has sold 70 million copies of his books worldwide in 38 languages, and who has shown that he wears his heart on his sleeve, even long before his illness. It is also a book that applauds a writer of fantasy whose very soul lives in the real world; and that’s what makes him popular – his ability to make his audience empathise with his works and the real world around them.
Alzheimer’s Research UK is the United Kingdom’s leading dementia research charity. It was founded in 1992 and is totally dependent on donations from individuals, not the government.
It is not my wish to over-analyse and discuss the characters and plotlines of every Terry Pratchett novel in this book. A thousand words on each novel alone would be higher than the entire word count available for this book, and would offer nothing new or insightful about the man or his works. So a different approach was needed, one that exposed relevant moments, situations and characterisations in his work against the backdrop of his life, philosophy and career, in comparison to the fantasy he writes. This may be frustrating for some Pratchett fans, who would like an in-depth analysis of, say, the Night Watch and the streets of Ankh-Morpork, but it is Terry Pratchett himself and how his work reflects the man that are important here.
Pratchett was knighted in the 2009 New Year’s Honours. He had received an OBE in 1998 for services to literature, and many agreed that the accolade was well deserved by the much-loved author.
Pratchett’s career as a novelist started long before The Colour of Magic, his first Discworld novel in 1983. His first novel, The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 and is hugely collectable in its first edition nowadays. But what do the early works tell us about the man, and how did they set the scene for the Discworld novels that followed?
One must pay tribute here to Terry Pratchett’s official website and to his agent Colin Smythe’s website, which list a very comprehensive bibliography. I freely admit that I checked my own collection and other titles against these sites, along with claims of additional collectables; if items appeared to exist outside these official sources, I demanded to see evidence of their existence first.
There is more to Sir Terry Pratchett’s life than Discworld, and this book makes that clear. Conversely, Discworld is so far-reaching, and the books and associated collectables so vast, that an extensive bibliography has been included at the end of the book (Annex C) for the incurable fan.* Not only does this provide a user-friendly checklist of items to acquire but also showcases the sheer volume of work Pratchett has produced and the amount of energy his publishers, agent and various artists have put into creating collectable editions of his works. This is also showcased in Annex A, in which I look at the films (mainly TV mini-series) made from Pratchett’s work, which are all worthy of mention and are much-loved companions to the novels for many fans.
Terry Pratchett is one of the most respected fantasy writers Britain has ever produced. He’s up there with Tolkien and CS Lewis, and one could not bestow a higher – or more relevant – accolade.
‘No choice was left them but to play their part to its end.’
JRR Tolkien (‘The Return of the King’, The Lord of the Rings)
(and a bit of a rant)
Once upon a time Terry Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe walked into a well-known bookshop and asked where he could find the latest title by his author. Despite the book spending four weeks at number one in the bestseller lists, it couldn’t be found in that part of the bookshop. Smythe was informed that it could be found in the science fiction/fantasy section, giving the distinct impression that books in that department were not worthy of the bestseller bookshelves, even though the title in question had outsold all other bestsellers for several weeks.
For me, it’s not only the injustice that this narrow-mindedness conjures up, it is the superficial labelling of two genres under one heading. Although science fiction and fantasy do come under the umbrella of speculative fiction, they follow two different historical patterns. Fundamentally, science fiction has to be based upon a natural projection of current science, while fantasy doesn’t need any of that but has a strong tradition of dwarves, warriors, wizards and dragons. The greatest visionaries in both genres are a million miles away from each other, people such as HG Wells and JRR Tolkien, or Isaac Asimov and CS Lewis. People did believe once upon a time that there was life on Mars and so was born The War of the Worlds, but Wells’ masterpiece says much more about the vulnerability and scientific naivety of mankind than just speculating about creatures from another planet, and that’s what makes the book so valid today. Conversely, there is no Narnia at the back of the wardrobe, with fauns, talking lions and ice queens (well, not when I last checked), so The Chronicles of Narnia sit squarely in the fantasy genre.
One could argue that The Lord of the Rings created a history that has many parallels with our own great wars and great warriors, and involves the birth of a true language and the spirit of legend – stories passed down by word of mouth. But Hobbits are not based upon a scientific certainty, nor elves or walking/talking trees. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy. I applaud its ‘fellowship’ and concede that the loyalty and honour Tolkien’s great novel demonstrates is at the heart of every strong friendship in the real world, but dragons don’t exist. On the other hand, Asimov’s Foundation series was based upon political tensions in a science fiction setting. It is as cerebral as Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, but, unlike Wells’ novel, impossible to film. Asimov, like Robert Heinlein, took politics into outer space and found an even more tangled web of intrigue and malice. One can argue that Pratchett weaves politics into his fantasy novels in much the same way, but the fundamental difference is that in science fiction it could conceivably happen because it is a forward projection, whereas in fantasy it can’t, so it can only be satirical at best.
There is a discernible difference between science fiction and fantasy and that mindset is echoed throughout this book. Yes, parallels can be drawn between the two genres, but they don’t necessarily have the same audience. TV’s Doctor Who is not a fantasy series; it is a science fiction adventure series and has always been so. Conversely, a novel such as The Neverending Story cannot be classed as science fiction because it is an impossibility, something that can’t come true in the real world, so it is fantasy.
Sometimes the speculation of the writer can be thought ‘fantastic’ even in the science fiction genre, but this is normally associated with the long-term vision of the writer. Again, HG Wells offers us a classic example with The Island of Doctor Moreau, where he predicts genetic engineering decades before it was ever dreamed of. Then there is Jules Verne and his breathtaking 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; the underwater ship – the nuclear submarine – dreamed up with accuracy.
It is important to understand that there are two genres within the forum known as ‘anorak’. There are also two different audiences that cross over as much as those for detective fiction and historical fiction. ‘And what of the horror genre?’ I hear you cry. Yes, that sits next door to the double-header label of science fiction/fantasy in the high street, as it is also