{"id":83586,"date":"2015-03-12T12:12:02","date_gmt":"2015-03-12T16:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=83586"},"modified":"2015-03-12T12:27:03","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T16:27:03","slug":"terry-pratchett-1948-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/12\/terry-pratchett-1948-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry Pratchett, 1948\u20132015"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"terrypratchett\"<\/a>

The T-shirt Pratchett wore to conventions. Image via Fashionably Geek<\/p><\/div>\n

The BBC has just reported that Terry Pratchett has died at sixty-six<\/a>. Pratchett wrote more than seventy books, most of them part of his Discworld series: satirical, philosophical fantasy novels that earned him a wide readership, sometimes at the expense of the critical attention his work merits. \u201cTerry Pratchett is not one to go gentle into any night, good or otherwise,\u201d his friend Neil Gaiman wrote of him last June, as he was beginning to slip away to Alzheimer\u2019s. \u201cHe will rage, as he leaves, against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness, not just the dying of the light \u2026 Terry Pratchett is not a jolly old elf at all. Not even close.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a bit from Pratchett\u2019s 2007 essay, \u201cNotes from a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep it Real.\u201d It speaks to genre fiction\u2019s unique position as a vehicle for social commentary, and to the set of logic puzzles a fantasy novelist faces in trying to build a new world. You can find it in A Slip of the Keyboard<\/a><\/em>, a collection of his nonfiction published last year. <\/p>\n

\n

World building is an integral part of a lot of fantasy, and this applies even in a world that is superficially our own\u2014apart from the fact that Nelson\u2019s fleet at Trafalgar consisted of hydrogen-filled airships. It is said that, during the fantasy boom of the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please \u2026 there is no need to go that far.<\/p>\n

There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly \u201cbad\u201d races, magic that works like electricity, and horses that work like cars. It\u2019s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can\u2019t tell it apart from all the other EFP.<\/p>\n

Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson\u2019s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock making or the mail coach system. Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.<\/p>\n

Apply logic in places where it wasn\u2019t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn\u2019t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works.<\/p>\n

[\u2026] G. K. Chesterton summed up fantasy as the art of taking that which is humdrum and everyday (and therefore unseen) and picking it up and showing it to us from an unfamiliar direction, so that we see it anew, with fresh eyes \u2026 the genre offers all the palettes of the other genres, and new colors besides. They should be used with care. It only takes a tweak to make the whole world new.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the Web editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The BBC has just reported that Terry Pratchett has died at sixty-six. Pratchett wrote more than seventy books, most of them part of his Discworld series: satirical, philosophical fantasy novels that earned him a wide readership, sometimes at the expense of the critical attention his work merits. \u201cTerry Pratchett is not one to go gentle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[17370,2300,17369,2890,7002,3340,11989,7479,200,17368,17371],"class_list":["post-83586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-a-slip-of-the-keyboard","tag-bbc","tag-british-authors","tag-fantasy","tag-genre-fiction","tag-neil-gaiman","tag-obituaries","tag-satire","tag-science-fiction","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-world-building"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTerry Pratchett\u2019s Advice for \u201cKeeping It Real\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The fantasy author has died at sixty-six\u2014here\u2019s some advice he gave to aspiring writers in 2007.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/03\/12\/terry-pratchett-1948-2015\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Terry Pratchett, 1948\u20132015 by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 12, 2015 \u2013 The BBC has just reported that Terry Pratchett has died at sixty-six. 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