{"id":9957,"date":"2015-03-13T05:40:06","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T09:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9957"},"modified":"2015-03-13T05:40:06","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T09:40:06","slug":"terry-pratchett-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/03\/13\/terry-pratchett-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry Pratchett, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sir Terry Pratchett, author of some mind-boggling number of books, mostly the comic-fantasy Discworld series, died yesterday<\/a>. He had been diagnosed with a kind of early-onset Alzheimer’s back in 2007, a particularly cruel fate for a writer, but faced it with an impressive degree of grace, and kept writing almost to the end. And, indeed, somewhat past it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His work was a great comfort to me in some past bad times– see this book review from 2001<\/a>— so his passing hits harder than for a lot of other authors. Not quite sure what to read to get past that…<\/p>\n

(Actually, that’s not entirely true; I still haven’t read the most recent Discworld, not for any particularly good reason. I should probably pick that up, but then again, maybe not…)<\/p>\n

Anyway, he was one of the greats, and would be worth remembering just for the funny books. But he also provided me with things like the concept of lies-to-children, the explanation of the importance of the Hogfather, and Granny Weatherwax’s definition of sin, all of which have been tremendously influential on the way I look at the world. And as hundreds of other people are saying the same thing all over my social media feeds, I think that counts as a pretty damn fine legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sir Terry Pratchett, author of some mind-boggling number of books, mostly the comic-fantasy Discworld series, died yesterday. He had been diagnosed with a kind of early-onset Alzheimer’s back in 2007, a particularly cruel fate for a writer, but faced it with an impressive degree of grace, and kept writing almost to the end. And, indeed,… Continue reading Terry Pratchett, RIP<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,2,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-personal","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}