Terry Pratchet, My Stepfather, And All The Stories We are

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I’m getting tired of writing these “a great influence on geek” has passed articles.  I’m tired of writing about people lost.

We lost Terry Pratchett last week. The man behind Discworld, a person who took satire into that realm of homage and exploration, a great writer, and a great person. It’s hard to explain or honor everything he meant to people.

Me I’ve got a Pratchett story that really illustrates what he did.

I discovered the Discworld books back in the 80’s, in college. I had experienced fantasy parody before, with Myth Adventures and the Ebenezum “trilogy”, but Discworld was it’s own thing. More a parody than Myth Adventures, more respectful than a simple joke, it was something different. If anything is similar to it today, it’s The Venture Brothers and Galaxy Quest.

So of course it was funy, but it was also insightful and extremely well written. Pratchett’s books were little bundles of writing lessons on to of being damned good reads. His ability to make you laugh and think with just a few words was amazing. Such enlightening twists of language, such wit, was an influence on my own writing

(The other influences, if you must know, were Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Dave Barry.)

Pratchett was there with me for decades. Always amusing, always insightful, always amazing.

Now that he’s gone, we have stories.

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Way With Worlds: Race – Getting The Setting

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people identity

(Way With Worlds is a weekly column on the art of worldbuilding published at Seventh Sanctum, Muse Hack, and Ongoing Worlds)

And now, with the issue of race and species cleared up by largely just giving up (and using race for everything, including species), let’s talk designing races. Please note that in this case I will discuss race as an inclusively interbreeding, defined group – essentially species, as noted earlier.

Now I’ve covered some of this under previous columns on writing intelligent life – which I assume is largely what we’re covering here. In this case, we’re going to get into the nitty gritty about race creation.

Races start with the setting. Before you “run the race” you need to know the landscape.

OK, not the best joke, stick with me here.

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