Terry Pratchett
Terence David John Pratchett OBE (known to some fans as Pterry) is an English fantasy author (born April 28, 1948, in Beaconsfield, Bucks), best known for his Discworld series.
Biography
Pratchett's first published work was the short story "The Hades Business", published in his school magazine when he was 13, and subsequently reprinted in Science Fantasy magazine in 1961, for which he was paid £14. His second published work was "Night Dweller", which appeared in New Worlds magazine, issue 156 in November 1965.
On leaving school in 1965, he gained employment as a local newspaper journalist on the Bucks Free Press ("I started work one morning and saw my first body three hours later, 'on-the-job training' meaning something in those days").
It was during his time as a journalist that he was sent to interview Peter Bander van Duren, a co-director of a small publishing company in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, Colin Smythe Limited, about a new book the company was publishing and Pratchett happened to mention that he'd written a novel of his own, The Carpet People. The rest is history...
In 1980, he became Press Officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board in an area which covered several nuclear power stations; he later joked that he had demonstrated impeccable timing by making this career change so soon after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the USA.
He gave up his work for the CEGB in 1987 when he realised he was earning several times as much money from his occasional writing; this allowed him to increase his output and he now typically writes two books in most years. It has been estimated that 1% of all fiction books sold in Britain are written by Pratchett, although this was calculated before the success of J. K. Rowling's books.
He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1998 for services to literature. Typically, his own tongue-in-cheek comment was "I suspect the 'services to literature' consisted of refraining from trying to write any."
His daughter Rhianna Pratchett is also a fantasy author.
Now containing over 30 books, the Discworld series is a humorous fantasy work that parodies everything under the sun where the disc-shaped world rotates on the backs of four giant elephants supported by the enormous turtle Great A'Tuin swimming its way through space. Major topics of parody have included many science fiction and fantasy characters, ideas and tropes, Ingmar Bergman films, Australia, film making, newspaper publishing, rock and roll music, religion, philosophy (mainly Greek), Egyptian history, trade unions, monarchy, and on and on.
Pratchett's novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents won the 2001 Carnegie Medal for best children's novel (awarded in 2002).
The Discworld novels
See the Discworld article for a list of Discworld novels.
Related works
Together with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Pratchett has also written The Science of Discworld (1999) and The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002). Both of these have chapters that alternate between fiction and non-fiction, with the fictional chapters being set on the Discworld. A third book in this series, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, is scheduled for release in May 2005.
Adaptations
- Comic books
- The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Mort and Guards! Guards! have all been adapted as graphic novels.
- Theatre
- Several of Pratchett's novels have been adapted as plays by Stephen Briggs and many of the scripts have been published in book form. These include:
- Animation
- Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music have also been adapted as animated series by Cosgrove Hall Films for Channel 4.
- Radio
- Guards! Guards!, Wyrd Sisters and Mort have been dramatized as serials and The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents has been heard as a 90-minute play, all for BBC Radio 4.
First editions of the early Discworld books in good condition are very valuable - the British first hardcover edition of The Colour of Magic is now worth over £2000 (4,500 copies were printed by St Martin's Press in the USA, of which 506 were sold in Britain under the Colin Smythe imprint, hence the scarcity!), while The Light Fantastic is worth £1000-1500.
It is even possible to get a character in one of the future Discworld books named after yourself. Usually people appear in the books by bidding for the privilege in charity auctions.
The covers of all of the Discworld novels sold in the United Kingdom until 2001 were created by Josh Kirby.
See also: Discworld, Discworld characters
Other non-discworld books by Pratchett
- Strata (though this does feature a disc shaped world, the novel is more a parody of Larry Niven's Ringworld) (Colin Smythe, 1981)
- The Dark Side of the Sun (Colin Smythe, 1976)
- The Carpet People (Pratchett's debut novel, re-released in a substantially rewritten edition after he became famous) (Colin Smythe, 1971)
- A trilogy of children's books (known as The Bromeliad):
- Truckers
- Diggers
- Wings
- Good Omens (co-written with Neil Gaiman)
- The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jolliffe. A homage to real cats)
- A trilogy of children's books about Johnny Maxwell, who sees dead people, aliens and a variety of other bizarre things:
- Once More* *With Footnotes - a collection of articles, introductions and short stories, published by NESFA.
Other books containing contributions by Pratchett
- Meditations on Middle-Earth (2002)
- The Leaky Establishment written by David Langford and recently re-issued for which Pratchett provided a foreword
Works about Pratchett
Pratchett's books have received a level of critical acclaim unusual for their genre. A collection of essays about his writings is compiled in the book, Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature?, eds. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, publish by Science Fiction Foundation in 2000.
Internet
Pratchett was one of the first authors to use the Internet to communicate with fans and has been a contributor to the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett for over a decade.
Influence
Pratchett has been named as a major influence on several other works. British writer Sam Smith has repeatedly said that an ultimate goal would be to create a series similar in style to the Discworld.
The term "Pratchettesque" has been coined to refer to those who try to emulate the Terry Pratchett style of humor writing.
Terry Pratchett makes no secret of outside influences on his works; in fact they are a major source of humor. He imports countless characters from popular culture, but always adds an unexpected aspect. These references are fairly consistent, and there are lists available on Terry Pratchett fansites which detail all the known references.
Trademarks
Aside from his distinctive writing style, Pratchett is known for the use of footnotes in his books.* Usually involving a comic departure from the narrative or commentary on the narrative, these footnotes are more numerous in his earlier work.
*"They found that, instead of making him sane, it was easier to make him hallucinate he was sane.^
^This is a common hallucination, shared by most people."
External links
- The L-Space Web
- Discworld Monthly (free monthly newsletter about Terry Pratchett OBE and his Discworld and other novels.)
- Bibliography on SciFan
- The Annotated Pratchett File (APF) on the L-Space Web - a detailed concordance of the jokes in all the Discworld books.
- Funny and useful quotes about Terry Pratchett