Terry Pratchett has just died

Bidley

randomhandclaps

Rubbish news.  RIP.

Fuzzdog

Never particularly liked his books (which is odd, as they really should be right up my street) but did meet him a couple of times, and he really was a truly awesome chap to chat with.

RIP Terry.

Paul_C

TheOtherDennis said:

Very sad news.

:-<

Still, let us not mourn what we lost, and celebrate what we had.

"The trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."

I always shied away from Discworld because it was fantasy, but someone insisted I try Soul Music. So I picked a copy up in Waterstones for a quick flick through and the first thing I found was this -

"The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to the shelves and which are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be  mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous tricks of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's mind."

And I've been hooked ever since.

Apparently his death was announced by Death -

"AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER."

I continue to re-read a lot of his stuff, but the gag towards the end of Soul Music is one of his finest IMHO

R.I.P. Terry, your writing helped me through some crappy (and good) times.

John_P

Very very sad news.       I have every book he has written and have enjoyed rereading most of them a few times.   

A new TP book was as exciting as a new album by my favourite bands and I'm gutted there won't be any more  

imalone

Really sad news. I read Truckers and Unadulterated cat when very small and though they had me in stitches didn't immediately realise till much later that the Discworld books were the same person. They're not just funny, they're full of a humanity that most writing doesn't have. And common sense, not in the "received wisdom" sense, but ideas you read and think, "actually, why can't the world work like that?"
I've been filling up most places I post with the quote from Reaper Man, probably my favourite of the books, which as you might guess is about death, also Death.
"In the Ramtops village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away - until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested.  The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence."
In that sense I think PTerry's existence has a while to run yet.

littlegreenman

All of the supermarket trolleys, in canals all over the world, heaved a collective sigh in mourning.