Terry Pratchett was Britain's most popular author of the 1990s and is one of the world's leading writers of fantasy fiction. Most famous for his Discworld series, he continues to publish for vast audiences world wide, yet thus far critical recognition has not been as forthcoming as commercial success.
Born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and educated in High Wycombe Technical High School rather than the local grammar school (because he felt “woodwork would be more fun than Latin”) Pratchett cites his major source of education as the Beaconsfield Public Library, a fact that goes some way to explaining the extraordinary range and breadth of reading that is evident throughout his work. At the age of 13 his short story “The Hades Business” was published in the school magazine and later commercially published when he was just 15. In 1965 – the same year that the short story “Night Dweller” was published in New Worlds – Pratchett left school with five 'O' levels to pursue a career in journalism, starting work at the Bucks Free Press where he famously saw his first corpse three hours after starting work, “work experience meaning something in those days”. While with the Press Pratchett interviewed the co-director of the Colin Smythe Ltd. publishing house, Peter Bander van Duren, using the opportunity to mention that he himself had written a book called The Carpet People and asking whether Duren would consider it for publication. Duren passed the book on to Colin Smythe who decided to publish it, even though they did not usually publish fiction. On taking a position with the Western Daily Press in 1970, Pratchett moved to a cottage in Rowberrow, Somerset with his Wife, Lyn, whom he had married in 1968. His daughter Rhianna was later born there.
After several delays, The Carpet People was published in 1971 to a handful of rave reviews. Like the later Bromeliad, this novel, which sees everyday objects with Lilliputian eyes, creates an effect that the Russian Formalists would call defamiliarisation; an effect that Pratchett himself invokes when he cites G. K. Chesterton's view of fantasy: “to take that which is familiar and everyday and therefore no more seen, and pick it up and turn it around and show it to the reader from a new point of view, so that once again they see it for the first time”. The ways in which Pratchett uses parody in his later work are also traceable to this novel; the plot of which resembles Lord of the Rings on a bathetic scale (though it is not strictly speaking a parody of Lord of the Rings).
The Carpet People was followed by The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981). These two science fiction novels show the development of Pratchett's comedic style, which would later become a defining characteristic of his work. Humour, a minor concern of The Carpet People, becomes a major feature of The Dark Side of the Sun, with its Larry Niven-esque aliens, and many of the comedic conceits that would later appear in the Discworld, are played out in Strata, in which creator gods leave fake fossils on the worlds they have created to baffle their inhabitants.
In 1980 Pratchett was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board with responsibility for four nuclear power stations, an experience he says he'd write a book about, if he thought anyone would believe it. It was whilst he was working for the CEGB (now Powergen) that the first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, was published by Colin Smythe in 1983.
The Discworld is a disc shaped world that rests on the back of four elephants, which, in turn, stand on the back of a gigantic turtle. The idea of the world being carried on the back of a turtle along with the idea of the caryatids has documented precedents in Indian, Australian and European mythology. Pratchett, however, takes this idea to its logical conclusions; of course the inhabitants of this world are concerned with what the turtle is thinking and where it is going. In The Colour of Magic we see the citizens on the edge of the Disc launching a manned space program in an attempt to learn the sex of the gargantuan world-turtle.
The Colour of Magic relates the adventures of Rincewind, a cowardly and inept wizard who inadvertently becomes the Discworld's first tour-guide to a wealthy but naïve tourist from foreign climes named Twoflower. The picaresque adventures of this duo, moving from the Disc's most populous city of Ankh Morpork to the Rim, the edge of the disc shaped world and then over its edge, resembles a fantastic Don Quixote, with Rincewind acting as a cynical and practical Sancho Panza to Twoflower's bookish and romantic Don. Like The Carpet People, The Colour of Magic is a parody without an incipit. Parody generally requires some familiarity with the original that is being lampooned, but this is not the case with the Discworld, which never has a single point of origin. Just as The Carpet People resembles the Lord of the Rings, the first book of the Discworld spoofs aspects from the works of Fritz Lieber, H. P. Lovecraft and Anne MacCaffrey without ever directly parodying them. Rather, the comedy works because we see the commonplaces of fantasy subverted; a perverse sense of mundane reality is introduced into a fantastic world and deconstructs the romantic idea of fantasy. This is a device that operates throughout Pratchett's work, becoming more pronounced in The Light Fantastic and reaching a plateau in Witches Abroad.
The turning point in Pratchett's career was the republication of the first Discworld novels by Corgi books in 1985. It was at this point that Pratchett's works first began to sell in large numbers, and this necessitated a change in publishers in order to maximise his sales potential. In 1986, after the publication of The Light Fantastic, Colin Smythe became Pratchett's agent, and in 1987 Pratchett decided he could afford to dedicate himself to full time writing and gave up his job at the CEGB. Between 1988 and 1996 he was extraordinarily prolific, writing a minimum of two books every year in addition to world-wide book signing tours.
Between 1983 and 2002 there have been 28 Discworld novels, and although there is no space to list the distinctive features of each of the novels here, it is important to note the main characteristics of this expanding fictive universe. The novels of the Discworld can be roughly divided into five groups defined by their protagonists. The Rincewind series follows the adventures of the inept wizard and resembles traditional fantasy. Like Odysseus, Rincewind is forced to travel the world, the underworld, and even other worlds, perpetually, introducing readers to far-flung places that resemble countries in their own world. The Granny Weatherwax series introduces one of the most popular and ambiguous characters of the Discworld: a witch of unrivalled power, with the pride and single-mindedness to go with it. This series is less peripatetic than the Rincewind novels and those novels in the series that feature travel are more focused on psychological journeys than the outside world. The City Watch series is a unique piece of genre blending: a police procedural set in a fantasy world. The plots of these novels tend to focus on the city of Ankh Morpork, and depict the attempt to enforce justice in a city where humans, dwarfs, trolls and the undead keep an uneasy peace. The Death group of novels centres on Death himself, and his peculiar relationship to humanity. Over the course of these novels Death becomes less a force of nature, and more a personality whose attempts to understand humankind create humorous pathos. The final group of novels can be seen as 'stand-alone' Discworld novels, which do not need to be understood as part of a series. Moving Pictures, Pyramids (which won the British Fantasy Award for best fiction in 1989), Small Gods, The Truth and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents do however share a common theme: all these novels are stories about belief, from the religious overtones manifest in Pyramids and Small Gods to the analysis of the way stories create belief in Moving Pictures and The Amazing Maurice.
The Discworld borrows copiously from myth, folklore, fairy tale and the fantasy genre for its ideas. Rather than inventing new creatures, Pratchett utilises those that are already familiar, from vampires, witches and werewolves to yeti and bogeymen. It is not only fantasy creatures and that are incorporated into this secondary world, real world historical and fictional figures often turn up in recognisable forms. The patrician, Lord Vetinari, is recognisably based upon Lorenzo De Medici, and Cohen the barbarian parodies the questing hero typified by Robert E. Howard's Conan. In this respect, the Discworld resembles a postmodern version of Menippean Satire, a genre where the great heroes and demigods of myth and legend are depicted jostling and brawling in a contemporary environment. These creatures and historical characters too are subject to the subversion Pratchett applies to the fantasy genre; vampires living in Ankh Morpork set up a temperance movement, and pressure groups such as “The Campaign for Equal Heights” lobby for Dwarf equality. The Discworld is a world of technological as well as social progress; since the first novel readers have witnessed the invention of the camera, firearm, cinema, tank, submarine and computer, to name just a few. The city of Ankh Morpork is a heady blend of renaissance Florence, Victorian London and present day New York, these periods all occurring at the same time to create an amusingly chaotic environment.
Although Pratchett is best known for the Discworld books, his other novels are equally noteworthy. In addition to The Unadulterated Cat and the Neil Gaiman co-authored Good Omens, Pratchett has written two trilogies of children's fiction, The Bromeliad and The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy. The former is about 4 inch high 'nomes', who landed on earth 15,000 years ago and caused the development of humankind by teaching humans how to use tools. At the beginning of the trilogy the nomes have forgotten their history, and, living in a department store, believe the department store is the entire world because of its motto “everything under one roof”. The trilogy depicts the nomes' exodus back into space, and uses the viewpoint of the nomes to defamiliarise the human world. The Johnny Maxwell trilogy follows its eponymous lead as he undergoes several strange experiences whilst his parents go through the process of divorce. Only You Can Save Mankind is complex anti-war story, in which Johnny is sucked into a video game because the on screen aliens surrender to him. Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb both depict Johnny's realisation that he belongs to a local community with a unique history; in the former Johnny converses with local ghosts whose cemetery is under threat and in the latter a time-travelling shopping trolley throws him and his friends back into Second World War Britain, where he manages not to kill his grandfather.
Terry Pratchett was awarded an OBE in 1998 and an honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt.) from the University of Warwick in July 1999. He later received the same honour from the University of Portsmouth in 2001. He won his first major literary award in July 2002 when the Carnegie medal for children's fiction was awarded to The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the first Discworld book to be targeted at a younger audience.
Citation:
Smith, Kevin P.. "Terry Pratchett". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2002
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5185, accessed 28 January 2017.]
