I Miss Terry Pratchett

Summary

There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs. Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way: Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture. I was sixteen when I first read that sentence. I was sitting in the back row of a French classroom, next to my friend Mathieu, and the teacher was explaining something important about a comma. The pocket edition was cheap, the cover was lurid, and Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not. The sentence has been in my head ever since. It refuses to leave. Occasionally it kicks over the furniture. The library at the back of the class There is a kind of reading you only do at fifteen, and only really in places you are not supposed to be reading. The back of a classroom counts. So does the bottom of a sleeping bag, the wrong bus, and the ten minutes between someone announcing dinner and dinner actually arriving. The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty. This is, I think, the secret nobody mentions about him: he wrote books that were the right size for hiding. A whole cosmology, a whole flat world balanced on a turtle, and you could slide it inside a maths textbook with a centimetre to spare. A brief theory of why he worked on teenagers Most fantasy, at the time, took itself extremely seriously. It had...