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 Overlord Thraka wrote:
I'll be sure to check him out. Was puzzles me is that with how famous this guy was I've NEVER even heard the name. And I read a ton. Older stuff too! Just surprises me.

It could perhaps be because a lot of authors have become more widely known as a result of their work being made into films.

However, none of Pratchett's works were ever turned into films (the closest was some Sky adaptations).

I believe this was partially due to some... dubious offers being made to him. For example, one of his books, Mort, revolves around Death taking on a human apprentice. An American company were interested in buying the film rights for it, but wanted to drop the whole 'death aspect'.

 vipoid wrote:

 Overlord Thraka wrote:
I'll be sure to check him out. Was puzzles me is that with how famous this guy was I've NEVER even heard the name. And I read a ton. Older stuff too! Just surprises me.

It could perhaps be because a lot of authors have become more widely known as a result of their work being made into films.

However, none of Pratchett's works were ever turned into films (the closest was some Sky adaptations).

I believe this was partially due to some... dubious offers being made to him. For example, one of his books, Mort, revolves around Death taking on a human apprentice. An American company were interested in buying the film rights for it, but wanted to drop the whole 'death aspect'.

Hmm. As someone currently reading Mort, I can say that at no point since starting it have I though 'needs less of the death stuff'. Besides, Discworld without Death would be like Star Wars without Vader, or Middle Earth without Gandalf. Sadly, I really got into Pratchett just after the last TV one (Going Postal, I think it was), so aside from hazy memories of Colour of Magic, I haven't seen any of them. I really need to track them down on DVD at some point.

@Thraka: Take a look on Ebay/Amazon/2nd hand bookshops and you'll probably find all but the newer ones very cheap, simply as they're everywhere! If you want some suggestions on where to start:

Mort: The first real 'novel' that isn't just establishing the setting, features the character Death heavily (he's one of the best) and is quite short.

Going Postal/Making Money/Raising Steam (the last one published): The adventures of Moist Von Lipwig, in turn taking satirical stabs at the postal, financial and transport institutions.

The Weird Sisters: Think Macbeth, but with more hilarity. The titular Witches show up a lot in other books as well.

On the other hand, the Sky adaptions do have:

David Jasen (Del Boy), Sean Astin (Sam Gamgee), Tim Curry, Jeremy Irons, Christopher Lee, Tony Robinson (Baldrick) and Charles Dance...

Anything featuring Tim Curry has to be worth viewing.

He was great as Trymon.

 Paradigm wrote:
The Weird Sisters: Think Macbeth, but with more hilarity. The titular Witches show up a lot in other books as well.

Hur hur, he said titular

I read Wyrd Sisters just before I did Macbeth at school. Mine was a very different assignment than the rest of the class did.

I can see why the US versions never got made. Good Omens was another, even with Neil Gaiman's knowledge of the US way of entertaining. Even the Sky adaptations were tinkered with, but TP had a big hand in the screenplays.

There are lots of genres that Terry P's book fall into.
The Vimes books are vaguely detective novels at some level.
The witches books often cover moral dilemmas.
There are lots of one-offs, like Small Gods.
And then there are the non-Discworld books...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld

 Skinnereal wrote:

 Paradigm wrote:
The Weird Sisters: Think Macbeth, but with more hilarity. The titular Witches show up a lot in other books as well.

Hur hur, he said titular

I read Wyrd Sisters just before I did Macbeth at school. Mine was a very different assignment than the rest of the class did.

I can see why the US versions never got made. Good Omens was another, even with Neil Gaiman's knowledge of the US way of entertaining. Even the Sky adaptations were tinkered with, but TP had a big hand in the screenplays.

There are lots of genres that Terry P's book fall into.
The Vimes books are vaguely detective novels at some level.
The witches books often cover moral dilemmas.
There are lots of one-offs, like Small Gods.
And then there are the non-Discworld books...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld

Moist von Lipwig somehow manages to be a caper, without breaking a single law...

Those sky adaptation's where split into two parts and each part was essentially a film unto itself though.....

 master of ordinance wrote:
Those sky adaptation's where split into two parts and each part was essentially a film unto itself though.....

That never works well . . .

If anyone is looking to get started on the books, there's a reader's guide rolling around on Facebook:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/13229392632300902/

I always like to recommend Pyramids as a good starting point. It's stand-alone but still has a wee bit of Ankh-Morpork in there, it's riotously funny(I'm so embarrassed it took my eight-year-old self until the third reading to "get" the name of the kingdom; Djelibeybi, oh Pterry...), and everyone has absorbed a bit of Ancient Egypt-esque history at some point so there are familiar tropes at play.

This is the second of my favourite authors to die recently just before what it turns out will be their final novel is released. I choked up a wee bit when I closed The Hydrogen Sonata and it hit me I'd never have the chance to read an Iain M Banks novel for the first time ever again, it's so sad to think about the same thing happening with Terry Pratchett.

No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?
~Going Postal

Looks like he'll be around for quite some time, then. Can't C&P the whole article at the moment, but basically several large web servers are going to be including a reference to him in the coding of any site they operate (inspired by something from Going Postal, where they do a similar thing with a Semaphore/'Clack' operator).

Web servers enrolled in Pratchett tribute - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31907768

Who the hell was he? A rapper?















*bring on the rage!

The best rapper,

"I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean
and turf and I'm mean and turf,
And me an' my friends can walk towards you with our
hats on backwards in a menacing way,
Yo!"

Great man. His books will allways be in my memory and my library. Too bad there will be no stories about old and young Sams now.

There's a 41st book he wrote that is coming out this summer...

Pratchett's last published Discworld novel was 2013's Raising Steam. Last August, Pratchett's official Facebook page confirmed that the 41st Discworld novel and fifth in the Tiffany Aching series would be called The Shepherd's Crown.

Probably no more Sams though.

 Paradigm wrote:

No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett

Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?
~Going Postal

Looks like he'll be around for quite some time, then. Can't C&P the whole article at the moment, but basically several large web servers are going to be including a reference to him in the coding of any site they operate (inspired by something from Going Postal, where they do a similar thing with a Semaphore/'Clack' operator).

Web servers enrolled in Pratchett tribute - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31907768

 Yodhrin wrote:

This is the second of my favourite authors to die recently just before what it turns out will be their final novel is released. I choked up a wee bit when I closed The Hydrogen Sonata and it hit me I'd never have the chance to read an Iain M Banks novel for the first time ever again, it's so sad to think about the same thing happening with Terry Pratchett.

The copy of The Hydrogen Sonata I have has an interview in the back with Banks where he says he is looking forward to writing more Culture novels. That was a tough thing to read.

 Mozzyfuzzy wrote:
The best rapper,

"I'm mean and turf and I'm mean and turf and I'm mean
and turf and I'm mean and turf,
And me an' my friends can walk towards you with our
hats on backwards in a menacing way,
Yo!"

That bit always cracked me up

I honestly think he's better than Dickens.

 Albatross wrote:
I honestly think he's better than Dickens.

I'm pretty sure I can't argue with that (and I say that as a big fan of Dickens)! Without a doubt, he was one of the finest literary minds of our age, and quite possibly one of the greatest of all time, rivalled only by a handful across human history in terms of the quality, scope, scale, breadth and depth of his body of work.

It's one thing to do comedy, political satire, parody, genre novels and everything else he's covered, and it's quite another to have built an entirely new setting in which to stage them.

To quote a review I saw on the back of one of his novels the other day, 'in a better world, Pratchett would be remembered as a great author, not just a successful one'. Perhaps in recent years he has got the recognition he deserves, but I think it's criminal to treat him as anything other than the Shakespeare/Dickens/Chaucer of our age in terms of what he's achieved in writing. Sadly, the 'stigma' attached in some literary circles to anything Fantasy might mean that never happens, but he is certainly owed that prestige.

 Paradigm wrote:

 Albatross wrote:
I honestly think he's better than Dickens.

I'm pretty sure I can't argue with that (and I say that as a big fan of Dickens)! Without a doubt, he was one of the finest literary minds of our age, and quite possibly one of the greatest of all time, rivalled only by a handful across human history in terms of the quality, scope, scale, breadth and depth of his body of work.

It's one thing to do comedy, political satire, parody, genre novels and everything else he's covered, and it's quite another to have built an entirely new setting in which to stage them.

To quote a review I saw on the back of one of his novels the other day, 'in a better world, Pratchett would be remembered as a great author, not just a successful one'. Perhaps in recent years he has got the recognition he deserves, but I think it's criminal to treat him as anything other than the Shakespeare/Dickens/Chaucer of our age in terms of what he's achieved in writing. Sadly, the 'stigma' attached in some literary circles to anything Fantasy might mean that never happens, but he is certainly owed that prestige.

While I absolutely agree, the man himself seemed pretty sanguine about the whole acclaim dealio. I think the two things that more than anything else made me like him as a person rather than just as an author were the line from his bio blurb that "occasionally he gets accused of literature", and the way he responded to some snobbish Radio 4 reviewer berk by putting the quote from the review about how amateur his writing was and how terrible it is he doesn't write in chapters on the covers of all his paperbacks afterwards

 Paradigm wrote:

 Albatross wrote:
I honestly think he's better than Dickens.

I'm pretty sure I can't argue with that (and I say that as a big fan of Dickens)! Without a doubt, he was one of the finest literary minds of our age, and quite possibly one of the greatest of all time, rivalled only by a handful across human history in terms of the quality, scope, scale, breadth and depth of his body of work.

It's one thing to do comedy, political satire, parody, genre novels and everything else he's covered, and it's quite another to have built an entirely new setting in which to stage them.

To quote a review I saw on the back of one of his novels the other day, 'in a better world, Pratchett would be remembered as a great author, not just a successful one'. Perhaps in recent years he has got the recognition he deserves, but I think it's criminal to treat him as anything other than the Shakespeare/Dickens/Chaucer of our age in terms of what he's achieved in writing. Sadly, the 'stigma' attached in some literary circles to anything Fantasy might mean that never happens, but he is certainly owed that prestige.

Well said.

 Yodhrin wrote:

While I absolutely agree, the man himself seemed pretty sanguine about the whole acclaim dealio. I think the two things that more than anything else made me like him as a person rather than just as an author were the line from his bio blurb that "occasionally he gets accused of literature", and the way he responded to some snobbish Radio 4 reviewer berk by putting the quote from the review about how amateur his writing was and how terrible it is he doesn't write in chapters on the covers of all his paperbacks afterwards

The "occasionally accused of literature" thing always made me smile. Apparently, he'd often wear this t-shirt at conventions: