alt Hacker NewsI Miss Terry Pratchett
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Yeah, I miss Terry Pratchett too, but what I miss even most is reading an article and not wondering how much of it was written by AI. Imagine if Terry Pratchett was born in the 2000's and wrote in the 2020's. Well, he wouldn't. That's the thing. Imagine all the future Discworlds we'll never read because nobody ever writes anything anymore, because they've given up, and even if they did write there's so few chances to publish anyway, even before AI.
When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?
I discovered Terry Pratchett's books my summer in New York. I was a university student, and I'd gotten a job at eDonkey doing technical support. I lived in a crappy apartment in Brooklyn (this was circa 2004 or so), and worked near Union Square.
Quite a few days after work, or just on a weekend adventure I'd go to a bookstore a few blocks south of work and grab another Discworld book, and a slice of pizza from my favourite pizza shop labelled "Rays". I'd read some in a park, and explore.
I didn't know a lot of people in the city, filling days with Terry Pratchett was a great joy.
What a beautifully written article.
> What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more.
> What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t.
I feel the first keenly. I have put off a re-read of Pratchett for several years now: I want to forget as much as possible, to have the pleasure of discovery again. But I have read them all so many times I know it will all be familiar.
I don't know what teenagers read today. I hope Pratchett is still there. Even as an adult, I found his writing encouraged a kind of kindness in me. He had a way of understanding human nature and, with zero preaching, making you consider how people different from you felt. I still remember when I encountered Cheery the first time and how beautifully Pratchett navigated the intricacies of gender. I was an adult who already believed in kindness, with friends who have their own experiences of gender and from whom I learned and who I tried to support, yet he still taught me something.
Like many Pratchett fans I have not read the last published Discworld book, The Shepherd's Crown, because then I will have read them all.
The author of this piece hasn't read the Witches books! I'm jealous, they still have so much great Pratchett to get through.
As a teenager, I found Terry Pratchett’s email (in a newsgroup IIRC?) and sent him a thank you note. I told him how much his books made me love reading. He answered me with a short and sweet email. It was an important internet moment for me!
I have everything he wrote (which includes a number of non-Discworld books, like Johnny and the Bomb, and The Bromeliad Trilogy).
I didn't especially like the Science of Discworld books that much, but he didn't really write them.
One character that showed up in every one of his Discworld books -to a point- was Death.
After Sir Terry got his diagnosis, I noticed that Death stopped showing up in the books.
GNU Terry Pratchett - https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
Pratchett introduced the concept of active laziness to me. One of his characters is so lazy that he’s working out frequently because he is too lazy carrying around excess weight all the time.
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
I am a simple man. I see Terry Pratchett on HN and I share Venkat Rao’s lovely essay at https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules.
Man, I really miss Terry Pratchett too. He has been my favourite author for as long as I can remember (maybe Roald Dahl before that?). It helped having such a volume of work to go through at the time in my life where I was reading the most. I swear he has the most re-readable books too; so many small details and jokes that would be missed on a first pass.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Have all his fans added the X-Clacks-Overhead header to their personal web daemons? [1][2] 2 has the how-to's
Or perhaps quietly hid it as an Easter egg in a development environment?
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." - Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue
I really wish we had gotten Prachett on LLMs. I often wonder what he would have written about today's world.
A side note, if the author reads this: I really like your site and its design, but I find the font really difficult to read. (Edit: switching off `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;` makes it significantly more legible for me (Safari on a 110dpi panel)
The weirdest thing about this article, slop, part-slop, or not, is that even the memory of reading Pretchett when I was younger immediately brought me back into a different state of mind.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.
I'm sure terry pratchett, were he alive, would not appreciate the ai gif on this otherwise interesting article
Hah, so different from my experience - when I was young I was looking more for traditional fantasy and did not enjoy a Discworld book I picked up.
Now that I am in my middle 40s I just got a couple of his books and I am enjoying the Colour of Magic so much right now, having a real blast!
I have just started listening to Discworld during the drive with my Mum as we visit her Mum on the weekends. She enjoyed Mort more than I thought she would (though we also did the first Master and Commander book which she also quite enjoyed, so I guess you never can tell with some people) and now we've started Going Postal which so far I think is probably more directly "funny", closer in tone to Guards Guards which was the only one I'd read.
I am also halfway through Old Gods on my own time. What I find interesting is how different in tone his books can feel. It is a bit of a sprawling question on what to read though, besides "all of it" which is often not so helpful.
One day I will trick her into listening to a Le Guin.
The font on this website is unreadable.
I read the first 20 or so books in the Discworld series, but I cannot read this website.
So many good memories... reading the Light Fantastic for first time, getting Eric in that big format with many illustrations, the witches, Vimes and the guards during my uni years, Mort, Maurice, and so on and so on... and then... the profound melancholy in the Tiffany Aching books that brings tears to my eyes...
Terry Pratchett has had a lot of success with french people and at least some of the credits should go to Patrick Couton who made an extraordinary work in the translation of the discworld series, doing a great job at maintaining most of the nuances and adapt jokes from the english version.
What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
The really sad thing is that his later works reveal the decline in his mental faculties. They're not anywhere near as clever and incisive as his earlier books.
That font is too annoying to read. Probably fine for AIs thou.
I can't read the last book. Growing up, I was always 6 months to a year away from another Terry Pratchett book. I don't want to live in a world where there is no more of his books left for me to read.
In a very literal sense I wouldn’t have been the man I am if 9 year old me hadn’t stumbled onto a Discworld novel in the late 80’s.
Pratchett’s essential humanism shone (and sometimes shouted) through every page and satirically he was biting but never bitter.
He is without doubt and far away my favourite writer (apologies to Iain M Banks though I’m sure he’d have understood).
I’ve re-read Hogfather every Christmas since it came out.
I was an unsure 17 year old who was uncertain how life would turn out, Now I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have quite believed possible.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett.
I have read Discworld series 3 times and I'm thinking to read it all again. I wish there were movies based on Discworld but done right.
I still haven’t read Raising Steam. One last time to experience a new Discworld novel, I’m saving it for a rainy day.
Granny might not be for teenagers but she is the wise for adults
My eight year old found a Terry Pratchett book of mine on the shelf the other day. He is a little too young to read them today but I realized I get to enjoy Pratchett all over again through him.
I miss him too.
Even though I had the experiences he discribes with Douglas Adams first before discovering Terry Pratchett.
Huge fan as a kid and enjoyed even the disc world computer game. But when I pick it up now I find the writing too ponderous to enjoy.
Weirdly, I picked up Night Watch just yesterday
I find this font surprisingly hard to read (on my phone). Is it just me?
Lovely sentiment in the article, which was unfortunately AI generated.
Can we start tagging titles in HN with [AI-generated] or something?
I know some people have no problem with it, but it might help others (like me) to steer clear
After Terry Pratchett and later my grandmother died from it, I'm a bit scared of Alzheimer's. There is a lot of evidence that shingles vaccines (particularly Shingrix) reduce dementia risk:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=shingles
Furthermore, there was recently a study (published in Nature) suggesting that lithium deficiency could be a cause, since lithium orotate (a compound that reaches the brain) prevented it in a mouse model of Alzheimer's:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825326
This also fits with the old observation that regions with more lithium in the water supply tend to have fewer cases of Alzheimer's.
So I take now lithium orotate capsules (with 1mg of elemental lithium) as a daily supplement. I will also get the Shingrix vaccine soon, even though my health insurance doesn't pay for it (it only does so for older adults), but it isn't that expensive.
What a wonderful article! Despite being a huge fantasy fan, Pratchett has not yet come across my nightstand. I think that changes soon! I’m going to stop in my local bookstore and see if they have anything.
Regarding the authors point about current authors, I think Brandon Sanderson is really trying his best to live up to the mantle left behind by the great fantasy authors of the 20th century. Not all of his books that I’ve read have been bangers but considering he writes multiple novels a year across a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres, that’s somewhat to be expected.
I know reading isn’t as popular now that screens have become so engrained into our daily lives, but there are absolutely kids out there getting stuck into books and it’s never been a better time to be a writer given the access of the internet and the ability for an author to promote their work and showcase their storytelling creativity through the medium of social media.
How to get your AI company's blog to No. 1 on Hacker News:
1. Pick an author nerds like.
2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."
3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".
4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.