I don't often write blog posts (hence the lack of a blog) - which will be vaguely surprising to a lot of the people mentioned in the first few parts of this text.
I am, however, a programmer - That's why this got posted to Github.
On Thursday night, very late as I just getting to sleep, I saw the following tweets (in stereo, as I follow both Rhianna Prachett and her father)
- AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER
- Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
- The End.
At that point I knew what had happened.
My memory isn't the greatest, and so while I can remember how I met some of my early high school friends, I have no idea how I met Anthony. I changed friend groups completely when I went to High School and thusly had to get a completely new set of friends. At some point pretty early in Year 8 he was reading a hilarious comic involving a really terrible wizzard, a strange Japanese tourist, and some vicious luggage. What I didn't realize at the time was that:
a. It wasn't originally a comic b. It was my entry point to one of the most prolific and perceptive authors of my time
I'm sure I would have discovered him eventually but as with most life-long tastes, the teenage years are where we are most susceptible. As we were teenagers at a public scool - no-one (at least none of my friends) was buying hardcover books - especially not at the rate he was putting them out at this point. There was a running competition to see who could read the latest ones first (often involving bothering the high-school librarians incessantly), but we were always very good (at least as far as I can remember) about not revealing spoilers until everyone had read them. I remember working through much of the books prior to 1995 at a reasonable clip.
Somewhere during this period I encountered the line "What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man". Those that know me from high school (who didn't before) now know the origins of my original online nickname (from which my current one derives). Something about Death's continual attempts to understand the human condition, but his fundamental failure to connect, spoke to me at that age (and to a large extent: it still does)
Unfortunatley, my supply of these books was about to be cut off. To this day, of the post 1995 novels, I have only read a handful.
I moved, again, to an International school in Jakarta. Again this meant I needed to completely re-establish friend groups (for those reading this who weren't at an international school, here's some information.). Despite the fact that it was an "international" school, there was an enormous american slant to the Speculative Fiction and Fantasy contained at JIS's library. I remember finding it difficult to get ahold of any of these novels during this period. There were, however, many authors available who weren't available at my high school in Perth.
The nickname stuck however, and to this day, many of my JIS friends refer to me as "Reaper", or "Reaps". I don't know how many I introduced to the adventures of said wizzard, a certain captain of the watch, or a set of hedologists but - given the linking that went on on the 13th - I'm sure that many of them associate me with said adventures.
When the information came out that he had Alzheimers - I was shocked. This incredibly prolific author now had a progressive, degenerative condition that would prevent him from doing the thing he quite obviously loved and eventually kill him. It was extremely likely at this point that I'd never meet him and that there was a possibilty (now seemingly obviated) that someone else would start writing in his world - something I couldn't honestly see anyone else doing justice to. I had, for some reason, always though there would be new novels by him - and now I realised that there weren't.
I spent most of that morning in a haze. Reading the memorials and seeing the constant reminders of his passing were hard. Some other unrelated announcments had also occured that day - most of which were bad, but fortunatley the latest part of an adventure game I had kickstarted provided an escape (when I should have been writing software. This will cause some people I know to roll their eyes.) but when I saw one of my friends from JIS link me to his post, I knew I would have to write something as an attempt to explain and deal with his news.
I'd like to thank him for his works, and the joy and friendships he brought to me via discussions about those works. I'd like to thank him for introducing me to another very good writer. I'd like to thank his daughter for safeguarding his works and continuing to translate them into other media in the future. This text doesn't deal with Rhianna's own (extremely awesome) career as she is amazing in her own right and it makes me very angry when people assume she's riding her father's coat-tails.