In 2011, he told NPR, 'I believe everyone should have a good death.

Sooner or later, everybody talks to their computers they say, 'You bastard!' 'Īfter his diagnosis, Pratchett became an inspiration to dementia patients and an advocate for physician-assisted suicide for those suffering terminal illnesses. It's really not a problem, he told NPR in 2013: 'I'm a bit of a techie anyway, so talking to the computer is no big deal. Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007, a situation he referred to with characteristic humor as his 'embuggerance.' The disease left him unable to read or write, but he soldiered on using special dictation software. But his imagination didn't stop at creating an entire world - he wrote books about cats, meditations on JRR Tolkien and, famously, a 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, called Good Omens, about what might have happened if the Antichrist had been raised as an ordinary little boy.Īuthor Interviews With Fading Memory, Terry Pratchett Revisits 'Carpet People' His first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, came out in 1983. The stories became his first novel, The Carpet People. He left school at the age of 17 to write for his local paper, where, among other things, he wrote a series of stories about the tiny people that live in your carpet.

Pratchett originally wanted to be a journalist. He allowed them to be fully human, even if they were rocks who walked.' 'He was just so compassionate, even to the most horrible of his characters. 'He really had the gift of making fun of human foolishness without being cruel,' says fantasy author Delia Sherman, who has taught college classes on Pratchett's work. How?įew writers were as insightful and just plain good as Pratchett was at winkling out all the secret scraps of human nature and then disguising them as broad comic fantasy. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Color of Magic Subtitle A Novel of Discworld Author Terry Pratchett

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