Celebrating Terry Pratchett Day

Yesterday would have been Sir Terry Pratchett’s 78th birthday. It has been over ten years now since he was taken away from us, and I still have some unread Discworld novels in my collection, because I still can’t bear the thought of living in a world where there are no more new Discworld novels for me to read.

To celebrate Terry Pratchett’s life this year, I thought I might take a moment to briefly reflect on how I became a fan, and why his work means so much to me.¹

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I first started reading the Discworld series² over twenty-five years ago, back when I was going through an extremely difficult time in my life. I had just moved (against my will) with my immediate family to another country, and was far away from my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. I was in my first year of high school in a small town where everyone else my age had grown up together. I was very shy and painfully aware that I had nothing in common with my new peers – culturally or otherwise. I had no friends, and feared I wouldn’t be able to make any. I quickly abandoned all of the hobbies that made me happy and spent my free time moping at home alone.

… I’m not sure if you’ve ever met or been a depressed fourteen-year-old girl, but they are Very Difficult to Deal With.

My mom desperately wanted to help me in whatever way she could (starting, I guess, with getting me back into reading for pleasure again). She dragged me off to the library with her – a place I ordinarily would have eagerly and voluntarily visited, had I not been miserable at the time. While I sulked in the background, she informed the librarian that I loved fantasy novels, and that she wanted to find something new and fun for me to read. The librarian thought about it for a moment, then recommended the latest Discworld novel they had in their collection: Carpe Jugulum.

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If you’ve read the novel, then you’ll know that Carpe Jugulum is a bit of an odd entry point for anyone new to Terry Pratchett’s writing. It’s the sixth novel in the Witches arc, featuring several characters who were already well-established and beloved in the Discworld series at that point in time. I had absolutely no idea what was going on or who any of those characters were, but once I overcame my gloomy reluctance to do anything fun for myself, I couldn’t put the book down.

What followed was a voracious devouring of all things Pratchett. His writing made me laugh at a time when I urgently needed to laugh. It also did so much more than that; it basically laid the philosophical groundwork for how I started to think about people and the world more generally as a young adult.

There’s a passage in Carpe Jugulum I still return to all these years later, a conversation between my favourite character (Granny Weatherwax) and Mightily Oats³ about the sort of things Omnian priests believe in:

   [Mightily Oats] “There’s a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example.”
   [Granny Weatherwax] “And what do they think? Against it, are they?”
   “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of grey.”
  “Nope.”
  “Pardon?”
  “There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
  “It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
  “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
  “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”
  “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”
  Granny’s voice trailed off.

— Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (1998), pp. 313-14

Treating people as things… Even at fourteen, I was able to see there was an awful lot of that going on in the world. As I grew up, I aligned myself with individuals, groups, and institutions that made a genuine point of refusing to see people as things. This is the reason why I vote the way I do, why I do the job I do, and so on.

My parents and my education are largely responsible for shaping me into the person I am today, but Terry Pratchett played a part as well. When he died, I felt like I’d lost a mentor – and I guess I sort of did. But as all Pratchett fans know, “a man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”

Happy (now-belated) Terry Pratchett Day to those of you whose lives were similarly changed by the man’s wit, humanity, and general brilliance.

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