Imaginary Worlds - Entering Discworld. Population: Terry Pratchett.

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Discworld might be the most popular fantasy series you’ve never heard of. The late Terry Pratchett wrote 41 novels in the Discworld universe. To honor the 75th anniversary of his birth, we look at what fueled his satire, how he put himself into his characters, and why so many Discworld fans find solace and inspiration in his worldview. I talk with Pratchett’s former assistant and biographer Rob Wilkins, dramatist Stephen Briggs who adapted many Discworld novels to the stage, cultural critic Emmet Asher-Perrin and Professor Jacob Held, author of Philosophy and Terry Pratchett. Also featuring readings by Pavel Douglas. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp and ExpressVPN. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here or email us at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I have been producing this podcast for over eight years, and in that time, there's been one topic that listeners have requested the most. Discworld. Terry Pratchett wrote 41 novels in the Discworld series. His books have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. They've been translated into over 35 languages. And the Discworld novels have been adapted into video games,

plays, made-for-TV movies, audio books, and graphic novels. But there's one country where Discworld never became a big breakout hit, the country where my accent comes from. I mean, I've been a sci-fi fantasy fan for my entire life, and when I read Terry Pratchett's obituary in 2015, I couldn't believe I'd never heard of him before. Pratchett always blamed his American publishers for not knowing how to market the books, although they did find a very loyal audience here.

So for a lot of listeners in the US, this might be all new to you. But for others around the world, this might feel like I'm explaining what Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings is. Discworld is called Discworld because the world is actually a flat disk that sits on the back of four giant elephants who are standing on the back of a giant star turtle that is traveling through space. So it's kind of sci-fi, but when you get into the world itself, it's pure fantasy. There are kings, queens, witches, wizards, kings, queens, witches, wizards, elves, dwarves, vampires, even golems. The books began with a lot of parodies of typical fantasy genres or tropes, but they evolved over time. The characters became richer and deeper,

and the parodies turned into brilliant social satire. In the way that Terry Pratchett wrote, he could make a 400-page book feel like 100 pages. I binged through a lot of the series, but the more I read, the more overwhelmed I felt. I mean, how could I cover this? There are hundreds of characters, multiple richly imagined locations. Doing an episode about Discworld felt like doing an episode about Earth. But this month would have been Terry Pratchett's 75th birthday, and I wanted to do something to honor him. So I asked my listeners on Facebook what I should focus on. And to my surprise, I got the same response over and over again.

Talk about his satire and his philosophy. And that does tie into something that I had been wondering about. How could somebody who saw the unfairness in life and the flaws of human beings so clearly always see the light in the end? Or as one of my listeners named Catherine Mika put it, quote, I have yet to find anyone who can so lovingly put humanity in a petri dish and then cruelly jab at it with a rusty nail, yet without seeming hopeless.

And that's so true. I mean, Pratchett really earns his happy endings. How did he do that? I touched with Stephen Briggs. He's a dramatist who worked closely with Pratchett in adapting Discworld novels to the stage. I asked him if Terry Pratchett would ever call him up and say something like, can you believe this thing in the news? It's outrageous. And then the next novel would be about that very thing. No, Terry never worked that way.

He used to ring a lot when he started doing a book and would say, oh, I'm doing this one. You'll like this. It'll be a good part of you in it. And the book itself would change direction quite dramatically during the course of its writing. So he rarely, I think, started off with an idea, which ended up being the main plot of a book. The idea often got buried completely or maybe turned up somewhere in a different book somewhere else.

The idea often got buried completely, or maybe turned up somewhere in a different book somewhere else. In fact, everybody I talked with said to understand Pratchett, you need to look at four characters that he kept coming back to throughout the series. Each one represents a different side of his personality, and the issues that he was often wrestling with. The first character is Samuel Vimes. He is the head of the City Watch. The Watch are the cops in the biggest city in Discworld, which is called Ankh-Morpork. And the cops on the Watch are made up of different fantasy characters, like a dwarf, a troll, a gargoyle, lots of humans. Sam Vimes comes from a working class background, and then he fell in love with a noblewoman.

Through marriage, he became nobility. He cringes every time somebody calls him your grace because he just wants to be a cop. Rob Wilkins was Terry Pratchett's assistant, collaborator, and eventual biographer. I told Rob that I have a theory. Pratchett grew up without money. Through the books, he became very wealthy. And I wondered if Vimes reflected his ambivalent feelings about class. Absolutely. And I never had that conversation. And it's one conversation I wish that I'd had with him. But I think that entirely. Terry, the house barely had running water where he grew up and they had to mix some electricity from next door by tapping into the system that was coming into the house next door.

That was not a wealthy upbringing, but they never did without. They never did without. They always found ways. And I think that that is a very much a Vimes way of dealing with things. Vimes knowing the value of a good pair of boots, you know, that again, that's very much Terry, you know, knowing the value of a good keyboard and things like that. And I imagine when Terry was down on one knee and the queen was tapping him on the shoulders

with her sword, knighting him. Surely, surely the parallels there with your grace, Sir Samuel Vimes, are absolute. By the way, that reference to Vimes in his boots was not random. One of the most famous quotes in Discworld comes from a novel called Men at Arms. Vimes is thinking to himself about the difference between the rich and the poor. Here's the actor Pavel Douglas reading from that novel. Take boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather

boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. That scene has been quoted by economists.

They call it Vimes's boot theory, and it can be applied to all kinds of situations, like renting versus buying a home. It always struck a chord with Stephen Briggs. It's so true. I can recall when I first started work, buying cheap shoes from cheap shops, then buying virtually every year, knowing that people like King Charles were probably wearing the shoes his grandfather wore. That is sheer genius, and I've used it in three of his Discworld plays. Vimes has a counterpoint in the power structure of the city,

and this is the second character that everybody mentioned as being a stand-in for Terry Pratchett. Lord Vetinari. Vetinari is a Machiavellian autocrat. the second character that everybody mentioned as being a stand-in for Terry Pratchett. Lord Vetinari. Vetinari is a Machiavellian autocrat. All he wants is for the city to function as smoothly as possible. Even crime is regulated. You can commit a theft if you have a license from the Thieves Guild, and you fall within their annual quota of permissible robberies. He allowed Vetinari to be a person without personal ambition. He might do bad things, but he does them for the greater good. And I think the things that Vetinari occasionally says

in the books are the way Terry recognizes sometimes the way the world works. So he often gives the slightly cynical approach, which I think is what Terry's real view of how things work. Not that they should work that way, but how they do. I still didn't quite see Vet Nari in Terry Pratchett. In every interview that I watched, Terry Pratchett seemed like such a sweet guy. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor. As the books progressed, I think I got a grip on what I was doing. And while I still hope they're funny, I discovered Roundabout Book for the joy of plot. But Rob Wilkins saw a different side of his boss.

I asked him one day about his own soul, and he said, it's like this, he said, if you chisel through my chest cavity, all you'll find is concrete. I said, oh, OK, Terry, it's not an odd thing to say. He said, yes, but if you chisel down through that concrete and you keep going, I thought, oh, I know where this one goes. I know where this one goes, but no.

He finished this one off in a way that I didn't expect. He said, all you'll do is find more concrete. And I, oh, Terry, come on. You've got to, Terry was so generous. He had a big heart. And he gave to so many charities and he loved animals and he loved his family. He had a big heart, but he would make

out as if he had this black soul that tormented him in the middle of the night or whatever, very much like Vetinari. I think he lent into that, and I think that's why a lot of people would feel that when they had met Terry, they had seen some Vetinari. In the books, Vimes and veterinary often have to work together, begrudgingly at first, but eventually they earn each other's respect. Emmett Asher Perrin is a cultural critic who has written a lot about Discworld. I remember seeing someone put it once, a fan putting it, like, what if checks and balances were sexy? That's kind of the dynamic of the two characters because you have in Vimes, and I think it's really a perfect way of describing

it is his wife, Sybil, describes sort of the core of his being as angered innocence. He also believes that there are good people and bad people. And there's this really important conversation that they have in the first book when they sort of interact where Vetinari calls him out on that and says Let me give you

some advice, Captain, he said. Yes, sir? I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people, said the man. You're wrong, of course. There are always and only the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides. He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window. Down there, he said, are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity, all out of a kind of humdrum everyday badness.

They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no. I'm sorry if this offends you, he added, patting the captain's shoulder, but you fellows really need us. Yes, sir, said Vimes quietly. Oh, yes, we're the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people, and you're good at that, I'll grant you. But the trouble is, that's the only thing that you're good at.

One day it's the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it's everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown, no one's been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It's part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack. Vimes is horrified by this idea.

He's like, how could you think that? Why would you say that? But also more importantly, how can this man get out of bed in the morning if that's what he actually believes? I think that so much of their push-pull is Vetinari helping Vimes become a little bit shrewder, a little bit more political, a little bit sharper in how he deals with people, especially people who have more power than him.

In turn, Vimes helps Vetinari become more human, which Vetinari doesn't realize is happening at all. In one of the books, Vetinari says to Vimes that all people want is for tomorrow to be just like today. But Vetinari ends up embracing change. His motivations are selfish, of course. He thinks if the city doesn't catch up with modernization, they'll lose their status. And when Pratchett first started writing the books, Ankh-Morpork was basically a medieval city. By the end, it's become essentially Victorian, and it's a better place to live. He basically has the world go through an industrial revolution, and that being written

at the same time that we were sort of watching huge technological leaps with computers, they're tomato, tomato, they're the same thing. He's that's really sort of what he's doing. I was going to ask you that, that he's writing these books at the same time there is a digital revolution happening in the real world, whether this is these are kind of allegories for that. Yeah, I think that they are. And I think that I think that the allegory it comes like at a certain point really early on, he kind of allegories for that. Yeah, I think that they are. And I think that I think that the allegory it comes like it at a certain point really early on, he kind of tried to make that a little too literal and then eventually eased off. That was like, you know, the whole yeah, wizards are going to make, you know, big computers out of stones. And that's going to be what's,

you know, he just sort of eased off and was like, never mind, we're not we're not doing that. We're going to we're going to use the Industrial Revolution as sort of a metaphor for it instead. This brings up a larger question that Pratchett wrestles with throughout the whole series. How much should you tinker with systems? On one hand, he clearly believes in social justice, but he also thinks the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Again, Rob Wilkins. There's so many things that Terry couldn't abide in this world. His politics, he kept very private, but he made the world know that he was anti-the government.

Whoever happened to be in government, it was his job to be anti, and I like that. Whoever happened to be in government, it was his job to be anti, and I like that. Jacob Held is a professor of philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas. He also co-edited a book called Philosophy and Terry Pratchett. He can recognize that people tend to fail, that they fall, that they're flawed, that they're messy, that systems are corrupt and so on. But he can say, even in that, there are ways in which you can exemplify humanity and be kind to each other and be decent to each other. When he talks about tyrants,

the tyrant is always the one who thinks they have the answer to all these problems, and they never do. That brings me to the third character Pratchett put a lot of himself into, Granny Weatherwax. In Discworld, the wizards are traditionally male. They live in a prestigious tower, and Pratchett often makes fun of them for being pompous or scheming. The witches are mostly women. Typically, they live out in the countryside and look after the common people, even if the

commoners are sometimes afraid of them. And no one is more feared and respected than Granny Weatherwax. She's cantankerous and very powerful, but she's sparing with her witchcraft, sometimes to the frustration of other witches. By the way, Granny is my favorite character in the entire series. I like to think of her as a very cranky superhero. Emmett is also a fan. So my favorite thing about Granny Weatherwax is the fact that she is a person who is good when she wishes she didn't have to be. We get a sense of why that is in the book Witches Abroad when you hear about her relationship with her sister, who is basically, for all intents and purposes in that book, she's like an evil fairy godmother. And what you learn from Granny is that she felt that she had to be good to counter her sister in a lot of ways, because her sister was being bad. Granny stepped forward, her eyes two sapphires of bitterness.

I'm going to give you the hiding our ma'am never gave you, Lily Weatherwax. Not with magic, not with hedology, not with a stick like our dad had. Hey, and he used a fair bit, as I recall, but with skin. And not because you was the bad one, not because you meddle with stories. Everyone has a path they gotta tread, but because, and I want you to understand this properly, after you went, I had to be the good one. You had all the fun, and there's no way I can make you pay for that, Lily, but I'm sure going to give it a try. But I am the good one, Lily murmured, her face pale with shock.

I am the good one. I can't lose. I'm the godmother. You're the wicked witch. Good? Good? Feeding people to stories, twisting people's lives, that's good, is it? said Granny. You mean you didn't even have fun? If I'd been as bad as you, I'd have been a whole lot worse. Better at it than you've ever dreamed of. The thing that he sort of nails with this explanation and this background for her is this idea of what it means when you are good. And it's not that you want to be bad. It's that you feel like you don't have a choice because everything else around you is so bad and unfair. So she has this sort of inner core of wishing that she could be selfish, wishing that she could do things just because she wants to, wishing that she could be selfish, wishing that she could do things just because she wants to,

wishing that she could use because she has incredible power and she could use it for bad reasons and she won't. As a philosophy professor, Jacob Held thinks that Granny's M.O. reminds him of the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Granny's approach to human beings is always motivated by a particular philosophical disposition. She's got a quote, I'll paraphrase, where she says effectively that all evil springs from treating people as things. And that's very Kantian. You respect human beings because they're humans. You respect people because they have this dignity. That quote is from the novel Carpe Jugulum. In the story, the kingdom that Granny protects is under siege by vampires. In one scene, she's talking to a priest.

There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example. And what do you 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. 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 mean they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things. That's where it starts. Oh, well, I'm sure there are worse crimes. But they start with thinking about people as things. Rani's voice trailed off. There's a quote by a philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, that I always use in ethics classes, which I think gets to this.

And he says, the world is sunk in evil and men are not what they should be. Don't let that lead you astray and see that you're better. And so Schopenhauer was a philosophical pessimist. He thought everything was garbage and would never be anything but irreparable garbage. But his response was always, that doesn't mean you should be bad. That means you should actually build an ethics of sympathy, empathy and compassion. And so he would talk about people's fellow sufferers. You have these instances where you have the recognition that, yeah, there's suffering, there's pain. That's the way the world is. But these characters respond in very humane, compassionate ways towards each other. One of the most humane and compassionate characters is Death, the fourth character on our list. I talked about Death in Discworld in an episode from last year called Befriend the Reaper, which was about the personification of Death in different fantasy worlds.

which was about the personification of death in different fantasy worlds. Death is concerned with the cosmic balance. In fact, he has this famous quote in a novel called Hogfather. Death's speech at the end of Hogfather. I actually have the quote on my wall back here, that humans need fantasy to be humans. To give you some context, the Hogfather is basically Santa Claus in Discworld, but he is half pig, half man. These villains are trying to get rid of the Hogfather and other mythological characters like the Tooth Fairy. In Discworld, these types of characters

exist because people believe in them. The only reason death looks like the Grim Reaper is because people believe that's what death should look like. If that concept sounds familiar, it's because Terry Pratchett was good friends with Neil Gaiman, and Gaiman used the same idea in his stories, like the Sandman and American Gods. Now, Death also has a granddaughter named Susan, who is mostly human. And in the novel, she asks him, why is this so important to save characters like the Tooth Fairy from disappearing? All right, said Susan. I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need fantasies to make life bearable. Really? As if it were some kind of pink pill? No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Tooth fairies? Hog fathers? Yes, as practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies. So we can believe the big ones? Yes. Justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing. learning to believe the little lies. So we can believe the big ones? Yes. Justice, mercy, duty, that sort of thing. They're not the same at all. You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder,

and sieve it through the finest sieve. Then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, death waved a hand. And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged. Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point? My point exactly. Again, here's Emmett. My favorite thing about how Pratchett sort of views humanity and consciousness is this deep understanding that our power is in our ability to make things up.

And obviously that works on sort of the meta level of being a storyteller, but it also works on the level of people have a tendency to wrap it up in, you know, mainly just faith. Faith is a thing that you believe in. But Pratchett's point is that everything is something you believe in. If you are a romantic, you believe in love. It's an abstract. It doesn't actually necessarily exist in the universe as a natural thing. You believe in it and that creates it. In a bigger sense, I think that a lot of fantasy writers use fantasy as a way of either explaining their own faiths or creating their own faiths. I think a lot of fantasy writers have a tendency to do that for whatever reason. And I think that death is one of those

figures that really comes as close to Pratchett creating God as he ever gets because death cares so much about us and sees us in a way that you would want a god to see us. Another word that people often associate with Pratchett is humanist. And a lot of tributes to him people often say he was a great humanist. Since Jacob Held is a philosophy professor, Since Jacob Held is a philosophy professor, I asked him, what does he think being a humanist means? I think a humanist is just somebody who has a moral compass but doesn't want to hinge it to metaphysics. Right. I mean, and Pratchett was was an avowed atheist or at least agnostic. Yeah, actually, I found a quote of his from an article in 2000 where he said, I'm very angry at God for not existing. You know, if you say human beings have dignity because they're all made in the image of God. Well, once that metaphysical pillar is removed. Right.

Then you're left with this existential kind of crisis of, well, now where does value come from? with this existential kind of crisis of, well, now where does value come from? And that's why I say I think if Pratchett is death and death is this transcendental idealist, I think that fixes a lot of those problems where he can say, I'm a humanist. I think humans are valuable and we should care for them and so on. And I'm going to build it around these concepts of things like freedom, dignity, respect, tolerance, care, what have you, all of these values that can append to human nature, that can append to some notion of a human essence that don't require us to have a metaphysical basis. So those are our four characters,

Vimes, Vetinari, Granny, and Death. But can I throw in, can I please throw in a bit of Moist Von Lipwig as well in there? That's Rob Wilkins. And the character he wants to add as a fifth avatar of his former boss is Moist Von Lipwig, a character whose name is so absurd, even the characters in

Discworld comment on it. Moist is a con man. Lord Vetinari uses him to oversee the modernization of the city. Vetinari thinks that the only way to facilitate change and make it stick is to employ this scheming, charming sociopath. This is one of the first scenes of Moise von Lipwick in the novel Going Postal. He's on trial for his crimes. There was a stir when they climbed up into the chilly morning air, followed by a few boos and even some applause.

People were strange like that. Steal $5 and you're a common thief. Steal thousands and you're either the government or a hero. Moist stared ahead while the roll call of his crimes was read out. He couldn't help feeling that it was so unfair. He'd never so much as tapped someone on the head. He'd never even broken down a door. He had picked locks on occasion, but he'd always lock them again behind him.

Apart from all the repossessions, bankruptcies, and sudden insolvencies, what had he actually done that was bad as such? He'd only been moving numbers around. Rob says when he first read these passages, I pointed out to Terry that there was so much of him in this character, just in the early days. Just that devious part of the brain surely has got to be the epicenter of any author's brain. The bit that's making up stories,

the bits that's making up excuses for things. And he channeled that through Moist von Litwig. And that's why Moist remains one of my all-time favorite characters and one of the characters I miss the most, because I know of at least two, if not more, novels where Moist would have been at the epicenter. And I dearly, dearly miss those. After the break, we'll hear about one particular emotion that Terry Pratchett said he relied on a lot to fuel his writing. From reading the books, I'd assume that emotion would be compassion or empathy. Not exactly. brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection

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how much they appreciate you. You know, it's not like if you're a lift maintenance guy and, you know, this lift got me from... Well, I always tell the lift maintenance guy that I'm really pleased that we actually got to the bottom in one piece. But it becomes just part of the job. And there is a dark side because you do a lot of things for the band

because, you know, I suppose you want to maintain that image and you don't want them to find out what a terrible old curmudgeon you are, really. Neil Gaiman told this

very revealing story about his friend Terry Pratchett. The story appeared in the introduction to a non-fiction book that Terry Pratchett. The story appeared in the introduction to a non-fiction book that Terry Pratchett wrote. In 1990, Gaiman and Pratchett co-wrote a novel called Good Omens, which is a fantasy novel, but it does not take place in Discworld. After the book came out, they're on a promotional tour. They did a radio interview and everything went wrong. Like the whole day was a disaster.

Afterward, Pratchett was fuming. Gay men tried to calm him down, saying it's not that big a deal. Let's just move on. And Pratchett said to him, quote, do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered good omens. That makes sense to Emmett. was the engine that powered good omens. That makes sense to Emmett. Anger as an emotion is, it's one of the clearest indicators that injustice is occurring, being angry. And I think that that's how he uses it most of the time.

He is constantly, I mean, that's part of the reason why Vimes gets angry all the time is that he's reacting to injustices and it makes him angry. The anger is there because it's the thing that's powering the humanism. You can't really get to humanism without the anger on behalf of other people, on behalf of what happens to them and what they have to live through. Rob agrees. have to live through.

Rob agrees. I think of the anger more as a laser pointer, that it focused absolutely on the issue that he needed to deal with. And Terry, there's so many things that Terry couldn't abide in this world. But anger is a difficult emotion to control. I am reminded of that every time I read the news or go on social media. And I think that's why a lot of people find his work inspiring. They want to know, what do I do with these combustible feelings? Rob saw Terry Pratchett wrestle with that all the time.

In that intro, Neil gave us the gift to talk about Terry's grumpiness. I was sacked every day. Let's not forget that. I quit every day, obviously, as well. But, you know, he was, you know, when that temper came out. Wait, you were fired or quit almost every day? Oh, every day. We would argue like crazy every day, but only about the words. It would never be about my cup of tea is too hot or too cold or whatever no

interest in that whatsoever i mean we do get as far as you know maybe walking to the car on occasions and then turning around and terry's standing oh this this was this was genius i've stomped off to my car terry comes out to the car holding the kettle and he's got the wire with the plug on the end and he's holding it and he said oh, oh, before you go, he said, how do you get the water into this? Holding the plug in the air. And that was it. Any bad feeling evaporated in that moment entirely. And I go back in and I make him a cup of tea and we start writing again. And that's how we did it. Well, what do you think? I mean, given that the two of you disagreed so much about so many things and yet he let you into the inner sanctum. What do you think you shared in common that he felt like he always still trusted you? Well, my love for the books was absolute.

My love for the writing, my love for the process. And my love for him as my friend. That relationship was unwavering forever. And he knew that. He knew that. And I gave him as much of me as I possibly ever could. And he knew that. He knew that. He knew that. And I gave him as much of me as I possibly ever could. And he knew that. He knew that. He always got 100% out of me. Always. And so that trust worked both ways. personal level. At the age of 59, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Pratchett wrote in an essay that when he got the diagnosis, quote, you could have used my anger to weld steel. Eventually, he found a way to joke about it. He even gave it a silly name, calling it his

embuggerance. Even when the Alzheimer's was taking hold, he could still scroll 130,000 words of a novel back and forth through his brain and pick up on the bits that needed polishing. That here is a man who is finding just everyday tasks difficult, and yet he can still focus on the words. Emmet thinks that even if anger was the fuel behind a lot of Pratchett's work, what got him through was his sense of wonder. One of the things that is difficult for satirists is avoiding getting bitter. And I think that the thing with Pratchett is you have that sort of deep layer of humanism that is powered by anger.

And in addition to that, it's sort of fascinating to me because I think to a certain extent, the fact that he writes fantasy is actually one of the things that saved him from it. Because as a genre, I don't really think that you can write fantasy without having a certain deep-seated awe at the fact that we exist. In looking at how these different characters were aspects of Terry Pratchett, I keep thinking about how complex we all are. And that goes back to a point that Terry Pratchett made over and over again in his books. If every person, or goblin, or vampire, or dwarf, or werewolf, is a world onto

themselves, then every one of them deserves respect and dignity. And when a person dies, it's like a world going dark. Although, in the novel Going Postal, one of the characters says, do you know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken? So if you believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Hogfather, justice or mercy, then reading his words can bring him to life again. Stephen Briggs says that may have been Terry Pratchett's plan all along. plan all along yes the thing about terry was it's a more realistic view of the not afterlife but after life as long as you're still talking and thinking about people they're still there and i still do find at conventions and things when talking about him i still tend to talk a lot in the in the present tense because he even now is rare that a day goes by i haven't he doesn't pass across my thoughts at

some point and his approach and his upbeatness despite the irritation and anger that drove him as a writer which we get from what neil said about him he would laugh at a lot of things. And I think being able to laugh at things helps a lot. And I think that's the final piece of his worldview. Humor can be the great equalizer. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Stephen Briggs, Rob Wilkins, Emmett Asher Perrin, Jacob Held, and Pavel Douglas, who did the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shout out on social media or write a review wherever you get your podcasts. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds.

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