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?
Wait, that doesn't make sense. Are you saying you don't want or need any man-made thing? I assure you, many, many people were rewarded for designing, building, and selling the things you need and want to live your modern life.
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".
I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later. It hadn't occurred to me that it's just slop.
is this just slander or are you basing this on something?
I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
maybe but its not like people don't also do these things (erroneous sentences, weird fluff). I mean editors exist specifically to slap that shit out of writers.
That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps we end up demanding no doubt. Human only community meet ups to discuss and share ideas, music and art. No recording allowed.
The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course
The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.
Pratchett's Pocket editions were slightly battered? Pre-sale, even?
Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.
It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
This was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI.
More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?
This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.
Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.
The first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture:
> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
What does it matter? The AI slop universe is only going to grow worse no matter what we do. Accusing stuff you don’t like as being AI is just a thing you do, not an actual serious observation.
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 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.
The defining aspect of Pratchett for me is that he loved his characters, and let them be free. He wouldn’t force a character to do something “against his will” and you can see characters introduced as a joke and a parody become fleshed out and clearly loved without abandoning their core values, if you will.
Which translates (or comes from) a respect and love for the reader.
Sadly, I suspect that this may be, because it was an AI, prompted to "Write a short essay, in the style of Terry Pratchett, about how much I miss Terry Pratchett."
I suppose in the AI era, we need to assume AI. For me, I feel like 'attempted Pratchettisms' might well be the result of a human writing. It's hard to be as good as Pratchett but understandable to write a post like this trying to be.
That is, with ambiguity, I try to assume the best. I expect that is somewhat naïve.
I genuinely read (and still do) the blog as a human voice. I don't think writing about AI is enough to assume that a blog is authored by AI.
If the AI-generated content doesn't push out all the good stuff, the absolute flood of accusing everything written everywhere as being written by AI will.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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)
Funny, I would have said that was one of my favourites but it hadn't occurred to me at all that it's such a direct line to today's world! Thanks for the suggestion, I look forward to reading it again with that in mind!
(One of my favourite things about the Discworld books is that you can often read the same books completely differently. My partner and I often compare our thoughts on the various books and we often have disparate ideas of the concepts. They're so deep!)
I say Feet of Clay and the Hogfather should be mandatory reads for anyone involved in AI. Feet for the obvious alignment of golem to AI, but while Hogfather is a Christmas story I think the wish granting machine, how it was able to produce anything, and how Death disabled it are very much aligned with how Gen AI can feel sometimes.
Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."
Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.
Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:
"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"
Thanks, I'll add it to the list. I know I've read this one, but reading the plot summary on wikipedia, I remember very little of it. The death books are ones I mostly read 20+ years ago when I was a bit too young to grasp more than the basic layers. This thread has got me excited to reread the whole series :)
I recently finished the Aubrey-Maturin series after 13 months of through-reading thanks to a different HN thread. Quite a different series but certainly worth a read as well, especially books 3-10 or so.
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.
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.
While none of the novels are impossible to read without having read the previous ones, many of them build on the themes and the characters that came before, and some of the magic is lost without knowing what came before.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 insure how life would turn out and I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have believed possible.
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:
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:
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.
Didn't see any reason to assume so, and I enjoyed it, plus it introduced me to this apparently great author. So, AI generated or not, I'm glad it was posted.
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.
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?
Is the next Terry Pratchett not writing because AI exists, or because they'll just get accused of being AI?
This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.
It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.
We've not had an economy that rewarded doing things people want or need within my lifetime. Possibly we never did
Wait, that doesn't make sense. Are you saying you don't want or need any man-made thing? I assure you, many, many people were rewarded for designing, building, and selling the things you need and want to live your modern life.
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.
I spent ages trying to work out what "who knew more about furniture than most" meant, thinking it would be expanded upon or referenced later. It hadn't occurred to me that it's just slop.
is this just slander or are you basing this on something?
I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
I found this comment pretty convincing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247413
maybe but its not like people don't also do these things (erroneous sentences, weird fluff). I mean editors exist specifically to slap that shit out of writers.
That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps we end up demanding no doubt. Human only community meet ups to discuss and share ideas, music and art. No recording allowed.
The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course
Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.
It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
This was not AI, or at least was only proofread/edited by AI.
More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?
This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.
Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.
Read more books people!
I've never read any of Pratchett's books. Why does he know more about furniture than most people?
The first paragraph, and the one directly above the one about knowing more about furniture:
> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
What does it matter? The AI slop universe is only going to grow worse no matter what we do. Accusing stuff you don’t like as being AI is just a thing you do, not an actual serious observation.
Yep, pangram says it is 100% AI generated.
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.
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.
I sortof feel that the Witches might be the best, but then I think about the Watch, and I'm conflicted.
I read it, and I cried like a baby. Still do whenever I reach for it.
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.
The defining aspect of Pratchett for me is that he loved his characters, and let them be free. He wouldn’t force a character to do something “against his will” and you can see characters introduced as a joke and a parody become fleshed out and clearly loved without abandoning their core values, if you will.
Which translates (or comes from) a respect and love for the reader.
I don't know about male teenagers but teen girls read copious amounts of a genre called romantasy.
Pratchett himself would be very ill-defined if you limited yourself to naming a genre.
Pratchett appeared to enjoy writing cross-genre, and “tricking” people into reading things they’d not normally read.
It's riddled with ai slop markers. I personally hated it. Fine dining that turns out to be $0.50 ramen with a sprig of parsley on top.
> What a beautifully written article.
Sadly, I suspect that this may be, because it was an AI, prompted to "Write a short essay, in the style of Terry Pratchett, about how much I miss Terry Pratchett."
It's not remotely beautifully written. It reads as if someone prompted "Write an article called I Miss Terry Pratchett, and write it in his style."
It's full of attempted Pratchettisms that, if you're paying attention, make no sense.
It's on a blog where almost every post is about AI.
It's the opposite of Terry's warm, intelligent, humanist writing and an insult to his name.
I suppose in the AI era, we need to assume AI. For me, I feel like 'attempted Pratchettisms' might well be the result of a human writing. It's hard to be as good as Pratchett but understandable to write a post like this trying to be.
That is, with ambiguity, I try to assume the best. I expect that is somewhat naïve.
I genuinely read (and still do) the blog as a human voice. I don't think writing about AI is enough to assume that a blog is authored by AI.
If the AI-generated content doesn't push out all the good stuff, the absolute flood of accusing everything written everywhere as being written by AI will.
"a kind of paper that already looks guilty"
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.
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.
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
[1] - https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
[2] - http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/
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!
GNU Terry Pratchett - https://xclacksoverhead.org/home/about
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.
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.
Still reading but this looks an excellent article. Why not submit it here? I'd upvote!
(I would submit it myself but I feel that'd be stealing karma :D)
Man, people in the Bay will find a way to over intellectualize anything.
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.
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)
"Feet of Clay", his book about golems written in 1996, was about AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feet_of_Clay_(novel)
Funny, I would have said that was one of my favourites but it hadn't occurred to me at all that it's such a direct line to today's world! Thanks for the suggestion, I look forward to reading it again with that in mind!
(One of my favourite things about the Discworld books is that you can often read the same books completely differently. My partner and I often compare our thoughts on the various books and we often have disparate ideas of the concepts. They're so deep!)
I say Feet of Clay and the Hogfather should be mandatory reads for anyone involved in AI. Feet for the obvious alignment of golem to AI, but while Hogfather is a Christmas story I think the wish granting machine, how it was able to produce anything, and how Death disabled it are very much aligned with how Gen AI can feel sometimes.
Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."
Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.
Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:
"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"
That's why I like Claude the most.
In addition to Feet of Clay, Reaper Man is also about ideas related to AI.
Thanks, I'll add it to the list. I know I've read this one, but reading the plot summary on wikipedia, I remember very little of it. The death books are ones I mostly read 20+ years ago when I was a bit too young to grasp more than the basic layers. This thread has got me excited to reread the whole series :)
I recently finished the Aubrey-Maturin series after 13 months of through-reading thanks to a different HN thread. Quite a different series but certainly worth a read as well, especially books 3-10 or so.
it's barely readable on Firefox under Linux too
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’m wailing in sadness here knowing that I can’t ever be you, early forties and reading Pratchett for the first time in my life. Alas.
Otherwise no regrets reading him 25 years ago, none at all.
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.
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.
While you can read any of his books out of sequence, I strongly recommend following one of the paths here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Discworl...
While none of the novels are impossible to read without having read the previous ones, many of them build on the themes and the characters that came before, and some of the magic is lost without knowing what came before.
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?
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.
... It's better that way. I cried reading it, because it was very clear from the text how far the disease had progressed.
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.
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 think the three mini-series did a fairly decent job.
Pratchett was involved (and appeared) in all three.
The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic
Hogfather
Going Postal
The Watch was kind of unWatchable for me; which is sad, because I like the actors.
There were a couple of cartoon series by Cosgrove-Hall that were _really_ well done. (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music)
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.
I still haven’t read Raising Steam. One last time to experience a new Discworld novel, I’m saving it for a rainy day.
Weirdly, I picked up Night Watch just yesterday
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.
My 15 year old is devouring them right now. She pauses dozens of times every day to tell me the best jokes. I love it.
That font is too annoying to read. Probably fine for AIs thou.
I miss him too.
Even though I had the experiences he discribes with Douglas Adams first before discovering Terry Pratchett.
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 insure how life would turn out and I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have believed possible.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett.
Just recently read 'Making Money' and it was a blast!
Making Money is more instructive on the realities of finance than many entry-level college courses.
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.
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.
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
How do you know it was AI generated?
Didn't see any reason to assume so, and I enjoyed it, plus it introduced me to this apparently great author. So, AI generated or not, I'm glad it was posted.
These days I'm more thankful that so much of HN is conversation here by interesting people based solely on the article title alone.
Man I would love that tag. As an enjoyer of Pratchett's witty prose, seeing this is just sad.
I find this font surprisingly hard to read (on my phone). Is it just me?
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.