It is hard to believe that
it has already been eight years since Terry Pratchett passed away. During his
writing career, he produced (usually) at least one book a year, and they were (incredibly)
all of a rather high quality. We fantasy-readers were spoiled for decades, and
suddenly soon after his death we were forced to go cold turkey. As Neil Gaiman
points out in the Preface to this book, also during these eight years phantom
images have developed of Pratchett among his fans, images sometimes
diametrically opposed to one another, depending on the ideals and opinions of
the fans themselves. “What Would Terry Pratchett Think” becomes an unprovable
thesis without the real Terry Pratchett to check such assumptions, an idea
Gaiman has had to confront with his involvement in the television development
of their common property, Good Omens.
In the meantime, there has been a hunt on to somehow
continue the very profitable Pratchett franchise. In an effort to stymie such
corpse-grinding efforts, Sir Terry left directives that no-one should be allowed
to write any more Discworld novels (which would almost certainly be inferior efforts
without his genius) and to further discourage the idea he had the hard drive
where he kept stored many story notes and works-in-progress physically
destroyed under a steamroller (one of his favorite enthusiasms). Thus he
protected the future of his legacy, but did not protect the past. Perhaps he
couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t.
Since
2016, with the publication of The Dragons of Crumbling Castle, there
have been anthologies of Terry Pratchett’s journeyman work as a teenage
newspaperman, which included writing short stories simply to fill vacant page
space. In these short tales can already be seen the seeds of ideas that would
be developed in his later work. In seeking to find a ‘lost work’ called “The
Quest for the Keys” researchers ran across an unexpected trove of tales, most
under the pseudonym of ‘Patrick Kearns’ (Kearns being Pratchett’s mother’s
maiden name). In “The Quest for the Keys”, the last story in this anthology,
many fantasy elements are used, including the ‘evil, ancient, foggy city of
Morpork,’ which would surely go on to be the pattern for one-half of the
Discworld’s capital city, Ankh-Morpork.
This
book is being touted as the last, the very last, a positively final appearance
of Pratchett’s writing. Oh, how I very much doubt but also fear that this is
true. There are a few Pratchett books I
do not have, like The Long Earth series produced with Stephen Baxter (I
tried the first two volumes and did not really care for them; no telling how
much Pratchett actually did) or Shaking Hands with Death, the
transcription of his lecture defending voluntary suicide and euthanasia (which
I watched), the premises to which I am completely philosophically opposed and
see no reason to buy. And now, perhaps, there will be ‘no more shows like this
show.’
Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood is another Penguin ‘horror’ anthology and another volume edited and annotated by S. T. Joshi. It kept coming up in suggestions on my Amazon page, no doubt generated by my buying similar books by M. R. James and Clark Ashton Smith. Blackwood’s work has never greatly appealed to me, but he has several very notable tales in weird fiction, including ‘The Willows’ (often cited as a passing influence on Tolkien) and ‘The Wendigo’ (ditto on Lovecraft). I decided to go ahead and get an inexpensive copy of this ‘literary and culturally significant book’ to fill out this run of Penguins; in fact, I am expecting a similar volume next week, The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen, again edited by Joshi and with a Foreword by Guillermo Del Toro. Do I really need these? Maybe not, but they fulfill a rather nagging itch.
