Talk about ABANDONMENT!
/When Sir Terry Pratchett died of complications of Alzheimer's in 2015, the internet blew up. I was only vaguely aware of his work, mostly that he wrote 41 fantasy novels set in an alternate universe on a flat world riding on the back of four elephants riding on the back of the Great A'Tuin, a gigantic turtle swimming through the cosmos. This Discworld was suspiciously like our own, it was said.
Despite my devotion to Tolkien and some of the earlier fantasists that were hurriedly rushed into reprint in the 70s, I've never actually been a huge fan of the genre, especially those who require a commitment over multiple volumes. When Game of Thrones started to be a thing, I dutifully bought the first volume to give it a go, but hurled it across the room when not thirty pages in I was required to keep up with seven sons of Stark in addition to all the other families out there. (Had I known the speed with which George R. R. Martin dispatches his characters, I might have stuck with it.)
(I also exempt Ursula LeGuin from my disinterest; she writes philosophy, not sorcery.)
At any rate, the internet blew up at Sir Terry's death, and that intrigued me. The entire universe (this one at any rate) was of the opinion that it was an enormous crime against humanity: his work was satirical, his world airtight, his characters beloved. So I thought I would give him a shot.
Well.
Pratchett's Discworld novels are magnificent perfection. Read them all. Each one is an incredible construction of mystery, style, and razor-sharp social satire. You may have noticed that I didn't say "fantasy"; despite their setting with wizards and witches and small gods, there's not much "fantasy" to speak of. Each novel is self-contained, so you're not trying to follow heroes and armies all over some map—until late in life, Pratchett never bothered to map his world at all—and each one manages somehow to take on some very familiar aspect of our world and skewer it in the most hilarious, if sometimes disturbing, ways.
For example, Jingo, which I just finished, has horrifying application to our current immigrant situation, and it was written in 1997. When the Klatchian teenager wheels on his father as the family is fleeing Ankh-Morpork and says, "Why should we leave? This is my home. I've never even been to Klatch!"—all you can do is grimace.
So what does this have to do with Lichtenbergianism?
Ever since modern copyright law in both the U.S. and the E.U. extended copyright protection to an author's work for 70 years after the author's death, literary estates have become big business. God bless Christopher Tolkien for his career of finishing his father's unfinished tales, but on the whole this gambit of hiring other writers to finish a dead author's work (and often keep going with it) smacks of vampirism.
And Sir Terry was having none of it. His will left no wiggle room: anything he was working on at the time of his death was to remain not only unfinished but destroyed—by steamroller. Last week, his wishes were carried out in typical Discworld fashion.
There's something very sad about letting go, but ABANDONMENT is part of the process. We can't create new work if we cling to the old. (Did you hear that, copyright vampires?) Sir Terry thought this was a lesson worth teaching.
As Death, one of everyone's favorite characters, might say: "AH. I EXPECT YOU WILL GET OVER IT."
