Terry Pratchett and me · 11:44pm Mar 14th, 2015
What to blog about this week? For once there is no shortage of news tags. Last Sunday was International Women's Day—I did start writing another post on feminism, but put it to one side so I could finish my entry for the write-off. It is now the start of British Science Week, which surely calls for more ponies and science; and it's pi day, so we should have some mathematics from Pinkie. But all this is eclipsed—oh and there will be an eclipse next Friday, mustn't forget that—by the sad news of Terry Pratchett's final meeting with Death. Everything else will have to wait.
It's been quite moving reading all the comments on this site from Pratchett fans. He clearly was a huge inspiration for many of us. I hadn't thought too much about it before this week, but thinking it over, I believe he had more influence on me than I realized.
Sir Terry's books were reinterpreting fantasy in a modern (or post-modern) way. Discworld was a land of magic, wizards, trolls, dwarves, but one which had to deal with issues of labour relations, equal opportunities and such like. He thought rationally about decidedly irrational things, with hilarious results. He throws in all sorts of obscure literary references, some of which we miss, but that makes his books fun to reread as we spot new things each time. And it's all done with a brilliant sense of humour.
This is all the sort of thing which I do (in my own amateurish way). As do many fimfiction writers. We reinterpret My Little Pony, as Terry was redefining fantasy, taking it in directions which it was never designed to go, but in a way which respects the original, and remains true to its spirit.
All my stories use the pony world to parody some aspect of our own. I wasn't conscious of it at the time, but I created my version of an Equestrian newspaper industry in Breaking News and Weather, not unlike (for instance) how modern music is parodied in Soul Music, cinema in Moving Pictures, and so on. Would I have done it if I had never read any Pratchett? Quite possibly not. Of course he wasn't the only writer to do this sort of thing, but he is certainly the one who sticks in my mind.
And I have to say something on the Science of Discworld, because he got this so right. A lesser writer would have tried to produce a technobabble “theory” of magic in the fashion of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, as if it could all be explained by a different set of fundamental interactions. But that's not how magic works. Terry and his co-writers explain, “Dragons don't breath fire because they've got asbestos lungs—they breath fire because everyone knows that's what dragons do.” Discworld magic does not run on a set of rules like the laws of physics, it runs on narrative imperative—the power of story.
Which is not to say that you can't use such a world to say something about real world science, or economics, or whatever. That's what thought experiments are. The Science of Discworld is a really innovative work of science communication, as well as a fun read.
But I do wish he had written that book on the nuclear industry.
This is an amazing line.
Everyone knows of the great god Om, because tortoises can fly.
Wierd rules. Its been proven that for the law of truely large numbers, the sort of rule where the sum of all numbers is -1/12, that million to one chances turn up 9 times out o 10, and that the impossibly remotest chance has to occur almost instantly.
I have a comic strip in a book called Welcome To Sellafield. It was drawn up in the 80s, but given the news thats turned up in the 30 years since, it looks like an operation manual.
As for what Terry would do next in an infinite desert? Well, apart from enjoy the Pink Pony Of Death party time?
xkcd505 meets Pinkie.
The best part about analyzing magic is that you can always be right, no matter how simple or how elaborate you make your explanation. But Terry Pratchett's narrativium model was perhaps the most elegant I've ever seen. He was a brilliant man, and he will be dearly missed.