They didn’t like the cover to Mort-the fourth Discworld novel-for some reason, so instead they used the cover for the next book in the series, Wyrd Sisters. The stuff in the mid-’80s and ’90s, it’s genuinely funny. The German publisher butchered Pratchett’s work. But yeah, he would always give his stories a bit of polish … He just had a knack for knowing how to tell a story, and why not apply that to your own life? No one’s checking until after you’re dead and some chump comes along and writes a book about you. He’d been a journalist, so he knew exactly what to say. He’s really quotable in interviews, because before he started the press for a new book, he would prepare lines that he knew would be great pull quotes. It made him a very entertaining interview-he prepared for interviews rigorously.
He was an amazing storyteller, and he could never resist the urge to give his own anecdotes a polish. Marc Burrows on Terry Pratchett anecdotes: And check out some highlights from the discussion below. Listen to the complete interview with Marc Burrows in Episode 501 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). “So I’m hoping that rather than disproving or making mine redundant, they’ll actually work together.” “I like the idea that the two books will actually complement each other, and that mine will be a really nice appendix to the official story,” he says. Burrows is looking forward to seeing what insights the new volume brings. “Which I think he was very, very pleased about on the one hand, but on the other hand he always defended himself as a genre writer, and always felt that rather than saying he was more than a fantasy writer-more than a comic fantasy writer or a sci-fi writer-it was the genre of fantasy and science fiction itself that was worthy of praise.”Ī second Terry Pratchett biography, Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, will be released later this year, written by Pratchett’s longtime friend and assistant Rob Wilkins. “He started to get the big awards and the critical acclaim,” Burrows says. By the end of his life Pratchett had achieved bestseller status, inspired a devoted fan following, and been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Over dozens of books he used fantasy and young adult literature as a playground to explore a wide range of serious topics such as discrimination, authoritarianism, and mortality. “That’s the elevator pitch for the first Discworld novel.”īut as the Discworld series developed, Pratchett’s approach became more and more thoughtful. “The reason Pratchett took off is because fantasy was popular, and he had the idea of doing for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for sci-fi,” Burrows says. The decade was a high point for the “funny fantasy” movement, in which authors like Pratchett, Robert Asprin, and Craig Shaw Gardner poked fun at the fantasy genre’s many absurdities. Pratchett rose to popularity in the mid-1980s with humorous, pun-filled novels such as The Colour of Magic.
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