Basic Information:
Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBE (born April 28th, 194 cool is an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971, and since his first Discworld novel (The Colour of Magic) was published in 1983, he has written two books a year on average. His latest Discworld book, Snuff is the third fastest selling novel since records began in the United Kingdom selling 55,000 copies in the first three days. Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s, and as of August 2010 had sold over 65 million books worldwide in thirty-seven languages. He is currently the second most-read writer in the UK, and seventh most-read non-US author in the US. Pratchett was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for services to literature" in 1998. In addition, he was knighted in the 2009 New Year Honors. In 2001 he won the Carnegie Medal for his young adult novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. In December 2007, Pratchett publicly announced that he was suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease and, subsequently, made a substantial public donation to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, and filmed a program chronicling his experiences with the disease for the BBC.
A Wee Bit About His Style:
Pratchett is known for a distinctive writing style that includes a number of characteristic hallmarks. One example is his use of footnotes, which usually involve a comic departure from the narrative or a commentary on the narrative. Pratchett has a tendency to avoid using chapters, arguing in a Book Sense interview that "life does not happen in regular chapters, nor do movies, and Homer did not write in chapters", adding "I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults."However, there have been exceptions; Going Postal and Making Money and several of his books for younger readers are divided into chapters. Pratchett has offered explanations for his sporadic use of chapters; in the young adult titles, he says that he must use chapters because '[his] editor screams until [he] does', but otherwise feels that they're an unnecessary 'stopping point' that gets in the way of the narrative. Characters, place names, and titles in Pratchett's books often contain puns, allusions and culture references. Some characters are parodies of well-known characters: for example, Pratchett's character Cohen the Barbarian, also called Ghengiz Cohen, is a parody of Conan the Barbarian and Genghis Khan, and his character Leonard of Quirm is a parody of Leonardo da Vinci. Another hallmark of his writing is the use of capitalized dialogue without quotation marks, used to indicate the character of Death communicating telepathically into a character's mind. Other characters or types of characters have similarly distinctive ways of speaking, such as the auditors of reality never having quotation marks, Ankh-Morpork grocers never using punctuation correctly, and golems capitalizing each word in everything they say. Pratchett also made up a new color, octarine, a 'fluorescent greenish-yellow-purple', which is the eighth color in the Discworld spectrum—the color of magic. Indeed, the number eight itself is regarded in the Discworld as being a magical number; for example, the eighth son of an eighth son will be a wizard, and his eighth son will be a "sourcerer" (which is one reason why wizards aren't allowed to have children). Discworld novels often include a modern innovation and its introduction to the world's medieval setting, such as a public police force (Guards! Guards!), guns (Men at Arms), submarines (Jingo), cinema (Moving Pictures), investigative journalism (The Truth), the postage stamp (Going Postal), and modern banking (Making Money). The "clacks", the tower-to-tower semaphore system that has sprung up in later novels, is a mechanical version of our modern Internet, with all the change and turmoil that such an advancement implies. The resulting social upheaval driven by these changes serves as the setting for the main story and often inspires the title. [Courtesy Of Wikipedia]
I love Terry Pratchett and find his writing simply hilarious in so many ways. I was wondering how many Diskworlder's were on Gaia? I have tried to read as many of his books as I could get my hands on but since I am low on funds this means using the local library which often leaves much to be desired in the fantasy section. So here are the questions: Have you read any of his works? If so which one(s)? Have you seen any of the films based on his books? If so which one(s)? Other than that feel free to generally discuss all this Prachett here!
