A long time ago there were three books in school that I used to read regularly and they were called Truckers and Diggers and Wings.
A short time after that someone pushed me towards the Discworld series and I read Men At Arms. I can't remember how I got hold of it, but I suspect it was from a library. I'm lucky to now own it and it sits on a shelf next to almost every other Discworld book in existence.
In Men At Arms there is a passage during which the likeable tyrant of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari, watches someone fall into a hoho (which is like a haha but deeper), as designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson. It is still the single funniest passage of literature I have ever read.
Less time ago, though still a decent while into the past, I was standing in a school as a naive student teacher. I expressed the opinion to the regular teachers that I thought Terry Pratchett would one day be taught in more schools than he was not. There was general tittering at the oik in the corner. Some time later I decided that teachers weren't for me and it was probably best I not become one.
Terry Pratchett made our world better by showing it how stupid it really was and trying to suggest how it could undergo a self-improvement course.
Today, many people have comforted themselves and others and me at the news of his death by sharing quotations uttered by his version of Death and reading his stories. This is fine and natural. Stories are there to comfort as much as to confront. They are also there to be angry.
In Pratchett's Discworld, Death was still hugely inconvenient but at least he was polite and tried to be fair. He was, 'just very good at his job'.
Vetinari, like many tyrants, was personable and charming, and acted on deep-seated self-interest. At least though he never masqueraded as anything as dishonest as democracy. His aims occasionally overlapped with what might be called 'good' and eventually he fell into the mantle of anti-hero. He also watched people fall into hohos and made us laugh.
Vetinari existed because nice, functioning tyrants do not (but should). Death was pleasant, funny and a realist because Death is not (but should be). Terry Pratchett wrote things that were funny but also that were angry because the world was not as it should be and he saw that fact with perfect clarity. To the casual observer Discworld is a Comedy but look a little deeper and it is a polemic.
Today though is not a day to go any further into analysis of how great a writer Terry Pratchett was. Today is a day to reflect on how unfair the world is, and how much better the suggestions in his stories made it.
(This by Neil Gaiman from September 2014 is the best thing you will read on Terry Pratchett today.)
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