RIP Terry Pratchett, 1948-2015

"Thank you for all the clever silliness, Terry Pratchett."

- a friend, posted on Facebook, which I think sums it up as well as anyone could 

My Facebook feed is already filling up with friends' tributes. Because those are the kind of friends I have.

Bugger. Not that we all didn't know it was coming of course.

I think I was just about the right age, and reading the right sort of fiction, to catch on to Terry Pratchett's work a few years before he became a phenomenon. Not that I begrudged it, in the manner that you're supposed to when a favourite band or writer becomes massively successful after a smaller, cult success when you were one of the ones who knew about them before everybody else.

And besides, there were plenty of others who knew how good he was long before I did. And plenty more who probably never read a word he wrote.

I am ridiculously poor at updating this blog with anything like the kind of regularity I would like, but I have managed to write about Terry Pratchett's work twice. On both occasions, I founds things in it which I had problems with. In the second piece I almost put in a note saying something to the extent of, "Look, honest, I do actually really like his work!" But hopefully that was obvious. I mean, you wouldn't read that much of a highly prolific author's work if you didn't fundamentally love it.

Discworld are some of the books that made me. He's a profoundly comforting writer. And I honestly don't mean that as a slight. We need writers which provide comfort. I've always loved just spending time in his imaginative world. And neither is this to say that there wasn't also profound comedy and good sense about the world present within his work. And silliness, too. Mustn't forget that. He was one of the greats, someone whose work is part of who I am.

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This may be a statement of something which to others is just the bleeding obvious, but it only occurred to me fairly recently: the realisation that the authors you grow up reading, that mean so much to you, helped to form who you are, even might be part of the reason why reading and literature is such a major part of your life: they're all from earlier generations. They may in fact already be long dead in fact, but living authors, when you're a child or an adolescent, they belong to your parents' generation. Or might in fact be older still. So, barring tragic accidents, you are going to outlive them.

Like I say, this might be obvious to most, but it struck me a while back. However much those writers which you discover in adulthood mean to you - and I don't think I've never stopped discovering new writers; at least, not yet - there's always something special to those you discovered in early adolescence, which will never be replicated.

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So farewell Terry Pratchett. Thank you for all the joy. And all the clever silliness.