The Magic of Terry Pratchett is a well written and engaging biography of the inimitable and sadly missed master fantasist, written by Marc Burrows. Tentatively due out 30th July 2020 from Pen & Sword on their White Owl imprint, it's 224 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats.

I was unfamiliar with the author's other work (as a comedian, writer, entertainer) (sorry!) and admit to some trepidation going in. I'm a massive fan of Pratchett's work, both the canonical Discworld series, as well as his other series and standalones and was worried that nobody could really do his biography justice. I worried needlessly, as it turned out, because this is a genuinely funny and sensitively written biography. There was quite a lot of information included with which I was previously unfamiliar, especially about Pratchett's early life and writing and career choices.

I liked and appreciated the gently humorous voice of the book, peppered with asides and footnotes of which Sir Terry would likely have approved. Burrows also points out often in the book those places where strictly factual anecdotes and retellings might be in doubt (Pratchett was renowned for self-mythologizing during his lifetime - and the stories have only grown since his passing). There are numerous photographs included and it's apparent just how much he was loved and lauded during his too-short lifetime.

I really enjoyed this biography and recommend it unreservedly to fans of Pratchett, Discworld, and his other works. It's written humorously and well in an entertaining (if not rigorously academic) style.

Five stars. Well worth a read.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

By some cruel twist of fate, Terry Pratchett wasn't my uncle*. That statement clearly shows my bias for the subject matter, so we'll move on to the book itself. Marc Burrows has managed to pack a whole (but far too short) lifetime into "The Magic of Terry Pratchett" and there were a lot of things I didn't know. Throughout reading this book, I felt a desperate pull to start re-reading the Discworld books** but I resisted. I don't think I've ever cried at a non-fiction book before*** but the end found my eyes leaking****. Marc Burrows has managed to write with a skill and humour that Sir Terry himself would be proud of, I'm sure. Absolutely wonderful. *****

*Something I will lament forever.
**Nice job, Marc!
***Who does?!
****And they're still a bit damp now.
*****Apologies for all the footnotes. Fans will understand!

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advance copy to review. This review is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

I had low expectations of this book. The title, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, nudged me into anticipating a fan’s hagiography from which I would learn little. How wrong I was. This biography is superb. In fact, it’s better than that.

The book shows us how Terry’s youth shaped his impatience with petty authority such as school headmasters and managers. Burrows’s research is thorough and really illuminates Terry’s development as a writer. I knew about the fan letter he wrote to Tolkien, but didn’t know he’d written about Smith of Wootton Major rather than Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit. Tolkien was overjoyed to receive Terry’s letter and replied quickly, stating it was the first correspondence he’d received about that work. Nor did I know that Terry’s first story was published when he was fourteen – and he received £14 for it. Being a professional published author gave him the confidence to ignore the ignorant teachers who didn’t think he would amount to anything.

It isn’t just stuffed with anecdotes, both ones told by Terry and by people who knew him, it also contains highly perceptive comments, showing how the novels mature with Terry’s development as an author. I was pleased to see that the non-Discworld books are treated with as much respect as the canon.

Burrows warns us to treat the anecdotes with a degree of suspicion as Terry’s journalistic instincts steered him towards polishing tales, possibly at the expense of 100% accuracy. I met Terry a couple of times and had the privilege of buying him a drink each time. One anecdote that isn’t in the book is from the Wincanton convention that Bernard Pearson decided ought to have a cabbage theme. People were invited to make foodstuff with a cabbage twist and Pterry would judge them all – poor devil! Terry praised my wife’s cabbage cake, saying with delight, “That was actually really good cake”, but I had the impression that the cabbage beer (or was it wine?) wasn’t such a hit. I can’t remember whether that was the occasion that someone sent Terry some special brownies and Terry dutifully munched them. He told us that it wasn’t until he started hallucinating that he realised in what way they were “special”.

If you enjoy Discworld, you will learn a lot from The Magic of Terry Pratchett. I recommend it without reservation. And you’ll love that Burrows uses footnotes just as Terry did – to add excruciating puns and witty asides. One example notes the existence of a second Carpet People story from 1967, enquiring whether this makes it a carpet offcut?

I have weirdly mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is lovely to learn more about Terry, who was a completely fascinating person. There are some great stories here that I really enjoyed.

On the other hand, it's very technical in spots. I didn't really need to know which book company bought the book company who used to publish Terry's books. The Kidby/Kirby bits were interesting at least. I'd heard a lot of the information here in bits and pieces before, but it's nice to have it collected here in chronological order, and the pictures at the back are really interesting.

Overall it's really good and I really want to start a reread now. The only question is, which one to start with?

The Magic by Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows succeeds as an exceptional biography of a well loved author. There's a lot of pressure on a biographer has a subject who is as well as Pratchett is. He has rabid fans, lived a charitable public life, and had a sad and frustrating death. It's hard, in light of these merits, to give an honest portrait of a human subject, but Burrows succeeds. He takes us through his subject's strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, and never skimps on the details. I'm very satisfied with this as a fan, and I can't wait to add it to my shelf.

The Magic of Terry Pratchett is an interesting biography, especially considering that the author never met the man himself. Instead, everything is based on interviews from various people who did work with him across the years. Additionally, given that Pratchett has a very strong following, it was surprising to find that the author here is not a rabid fan. He's definitely a fan, but not so much as to be completely enamored by the subject. This leads to an almost clinical review of the life (well, mostly bibliography) of Sir Terry. Personally, I found this to be mostly a good thing. While I consider myself something of a fan (I think I've read all discworld books twice), I'm not enough of one to want to shift through the minutia of his life, or pages and pages of glorification of his works.

The biography is laid out in clear parts: first the early history of the man, which is quite interesting and even reaches a level of narrative that seems too accurate. When Sir Terry moves on to be an established author the focus shifts more to the books themselves, publishing deals and becoming famous. The last part deals with his battle with Alzheimers which is handled with just the right amount of gravitas.

I read the whole biography in one sitting, which could be one of the first times I've done so on a non-fiction piece. I very much liked the approach the author took and almost never got bored with too much detail - yet also rarely felt that something was skimmed over. The beginning and the end of the biography are the strongest, and there is a fascinating insight into publishing in the middle. And just enough of a touch on all the best Discworld novels to bring up good memories. Reviewed from an advance reader copy provided by the publisher.

I’ve been a fan of Terry Pratchett’s work since shortly after the publication of the first Discworld book. The idea of a biography appealed a lot. This starts with a very good foreword by Helen O'Hara. It’s a concise round up of Pratchett in some ways. The author then gives an introduction to his book. He too is a fan and suggests that this book may be an opportunity to "meet" Terry Pratchett or at least "a" version of him.

I found the early chapters a little disappointing. The writing seemed rather basic - rather like an episode of "This is your life". First he did this, then he did that. However the book got going for me properly after that. While I may not have been convinced initially the more I read the more this book grew on me. It makes for a very good overview of Terry Pratchett's work for me. I certainly gained insights into aspects of his life and work that I was not aware of. I also found out things that I had not previously been aware of.

The fact that I generally agree with the author's views may be worth bearing in mind while reading this review. However I do have some slight caveats with this book. I’m not sure I really agree with the footnotes idea as used here - Pratchett did it his way and brilliantly. The author here uses some conventionally and some in Pratchett’s style. Another issue is that this has mostly been gleaned from external sources it seems. This leads to some uncertainty about some of the stories.

A fundamental uncertainly is simply the fact that Pratchett tended to embroider his own version(s!) of events over the years - he was a story teller after all! This was actually quite entertaining to me and was one of those insights that I enjoyed. Definite a book that fans will be interested in reading.

A sincere thank you to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing me with an ebook copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This is not my usual genre, I’m more into crime/thriller books and even psychological thrillers too so I am extremely pleased and grateful to them for opening up my mind to something totally different.

The Magic of Terry Pratchett is a humorous and moving biography of a fascinating man. I laughed out loud at many of the more eccentric anecdotes, but I was also moved to tears by the description of Terry's prolific writing and outstanding work ethic in his later years whilst living with early-onset Alzheimers.

Marc Burrows' use of footnotes seems to be a deliberate choice to echo Terry Pratchett's wit. I would recommend this book to Pratchett fans and to anyone who would like to learn more about the mind of someone who was able to create their own entire universe.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pen & Sword for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A must read for all Pratchett fans. If you love Pratchett you will be sure to love the magic of this book!

Those of you who know me personally will probably know by now that I love Terry Pratchett's books. Having read every one of his books, I was delighted to have the opportunity to read this biography of Sir Pterry.

I will state now that this is not an official biography, but Marc Burrows is a fan who has done his research very thoroughly. Interviewing people who knew the great man, he brings us closer to knowing what Terry was like as a person, as well as talking about the success of each book individually. The book also has some fantastic photographs throughout and is, in my opinion, a great tribute to a writer who always makes me smile, even when I'm not feeling at my best.

This clearly read as a fan biography, but you can feel the writer's love for Terry Pratchett on every page of this fascinating book. In my opinion, it's one for people who are already fans, but if you have always wondered what the life of a writer is like, this could be for you as well. It's the first biography about Pratchett, and certainly not the last.

'The Magic of Terry Pratchett' is described as 'the first full biography of Sir Terry Pratchett ever written' by journalist, comedian and fan Marc Burrows. By his own admittance, Burrows has never met his idol but like so many (myself included) is a devoted and lifelong fan of the novelist.
Burrows has taken a chronological approach to his work and follows the life of Pratchett from his birth in Beaconsfield, and early life with his parents, through to his time at school and initial story-writing. Burrows has interviewed numerous people from Pratchett working life and goes into detail about his time as a journalist and how this work impacted on his development as an author. Following his approach, Burrows discusses each of Pratchett’s works from ‘Business Rivals’ (published while attending High Wycombe Technical School) to ‘The Shepard’s Crown’.
Burrows has an engaging, conversational style to his writing which makes the biography particularly easy to read. His addition of regular footnotes are reflective of Pratchett's own style. And indeed, some of the humour glimpsed in these footnotes are echoes of his style.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and even if I was not a fan of Pratchett, this book would have made for a highly engaging read. The chapter titles are amusing, and there are plenty of hilarious antidotes scattered throughout the book that will entertain existing and new fans alike.
I have been incredibly fortunate to receive an ARC of this book from Pen & Sword via Netgalley in return for an honest review.

trigger warning
[ terminal illness and losing your parent to one, violent death]

This is the story of Terry Pratchett, how he came in touch with sci-fi and fantasy, started to write, became a journalist and his growth as an author. Because he always was one.

Normally, I would not rate a biography, because it feels like I am somehow rating someone's life. If I do rate a biography, it's about the writing, how the author worked with what he had, and I feel like Marc Burrows did the best job possible.
This is not a scholarly version of writing a biography, this is a nerd who gathered all the information about one of his idols and invites you to nerd about them with you. It's fun - it even has footnotes!

We start out with a description of Pterry's parents, to get to know the environment he was raised
in, are shown how he fell in love with speculative fiction and became an author. How he was troubled at school because the system was too strict for creative minds, how he became a journalist just to flee the toxic environment he was placed in against his will. I didn't know all of this, and in fact I was told he had been a spokesperson for a specific atomic reactor before switching to full-time writing, which is plain wrong.
The parts about journalist-life were most boring, but still illuminating in regards to some influences we see in the Discworld novels.

Since I am in my twentys, I only saw the end of Pterry's career, and while I read all of the Discworld novels and some books beside, it was interesting to get some background - especially regarding the switch of the German publishing house, which I've always wondered about since I started reading in German before my English became good enough to switch to the untranslated versions. Heyne, you messed up very badly. Not as bad as the Australian publishers, but come on!

The bibliography is huge and I am tempted to look up some of these articles mentioned, despite having no time for any extra research outside my current projects.

The author of this biography tells you quite clearly if the information he gathered is unclear, and what are his own suspicions, while using every instance possible to make a joke that shows, well, that he spent a lot of time on Discworld. I can't remember when was the last time I laughed so much while reading a biography.
And then I cried straight from the Alzheimer's diagnosis to the end of the book. While it was hard to read, I liked the thorough and understandable explanation of that illness, what exactly is meant by "Pratchett had a rare case of Alzheimer's" and how it affected him and everyone around him.
I knew he switched to dictating his novels and then stopped writing more than his name when signing novels, but that's about it.

Having been treated with condescension for reading "those fantasy novels" because they're "not real book" even by my father, who adores Tolkien's work, it felt good to read the parts about how his image underwent changes over the years.

So, yeah, I got a lot from this one. I'd recommend it to every Pratchett fan, even if they normally wouldn't touch non-fiction or specificly biographies.
Now I want to re-read all the books. Well, I always want to re-read them, but now it's more urgent.

I recieved a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Magic of Terry Pratchett by Marc Burrows is a fantastical, engaging, and incredibly easy read for any fan of the man himself, Terry Pratchett. Burrows conversational and captivating style is suited for any fan - the casual Discworld devotee, a middling Lance Corporal of the City Watch, or a dedicated Pterry-head. There is something to be found for everyone in this biography.

Marc Burrows freely admits that he never met Terry Pratchett, which is just the level of irony for a Pratchett biography. To his credit, Burrows undertook an incredible amount of research to write this beautiful narrative of the man who brought us so many works of fantastic fiction. Of course, this will not be the definitive biography, but it will be a book to pair with some of Terry's work to get a better picture of the beloved author.

From beginning to end, I enjoyed this book. The footnotes provided just the right amount of research (I love a good footnote) and humor to keep the lightness and serious, but not serious tone that Terry frequently used. The chapter titles made me laugh, and I found myself quite emotional at points.

I loved the quick dives into Terry's novels with parallels drawn here and there, showing the influence of his childhood reading on his work. Of course, Terry Pratchett did exist outside of Discworld, though it may be what he is most known for. Burrows would have been remiss if he didn't include those titles in this biography. There is, indeed, another world of literature beyond Discworld and I am so excited to experience it.

The nods to the publishing industry, it's ups and downs, and working with other media outlets really gives an inside look at the history of those industries as experience by Terry Pratchett and his peers. Licensing, publishing, film rights, etc. are all part of a world I knew existed, but had not understood to any real extent. All of these collected experiences offer us a glimpse into the world in which Terry existed professionally.

Overall, I highly enjoyed this book and would recommend to fans of Terry Pratchett's work, those who have been fans for ages and those who don't know who Terry Pratchett is. As an introduction to Terry Pratchett's work, this book is par for the course. Marc Burrows brings us into Terry's life, while not quite touching it. As a first, in-depth look at our friend Pterry, this is a winner.

I received a galley copy of this title from the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

As a child who was brought up in a house of Discworld stories, with a stepfather who (still) proudly displays the Clarecraft Rincewind figurine which bears an uncanny likeness to him, and a mother who has a matching Nanny Ogg (it bears no likeness but let’s just say encompasses a couple of her characteristics), this was an ARC that I was frankly desperate to read. I have to thank Netgalley and Marc Burrows for granting me this opportunity. My opinions are enthusiastic, and entirely my own.

As a 32 year old female, mother and accountant you may be forgiven for expecting my book reviews to be based around chick-lit or classical novels and, although it is the case that I own several very well-read copies of Pride & Prejudice, I am wholly a child of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Terry Pratchett novels sit alongside George RR Martin, Terry Brooks, David Eddings and Ursula Le Guin in my house; I owned and loved Discworld computer games and probably know every word to the film Labyrinth.
It could therefore be said that I would find Marc Burrow’s biography fascinating regardless: however, I am ashamed to say that, before reading this book, I knew very little about the life of the author whose books I admire so much.

Burrows structures his writing predictably enough, running through the life of Terry Pratchett chronologically, from his working-class upbringing; his career in journalism; the progression in popularity of his novels; his knighthood all the way up to his untimely death from Alzheimer’s. However, this is where an affiliation to any standard biography ends.
It is immediately apparent that Marc Burrows is an avid Terry Pratchett fan, even without reading his foreword, due to the inclusion of footnotes: a writing style which is synonymous with Pratchett. This allows Burrows, as it did with Pratchett, to provide little notes and details which cannot be in the main text without limiting the reading experience. It also allows both authors to inject a large amount of humour into their writing.
It should also be mentioned that no book has gripped me from the introduction in a long time, although I am fairly sure no other book would use the word “crotch” before we even reach Chapter One!

‘The Magic of Terry Pratchett’ is a clever, well-informed biography which perfectly encompasses the humour of the Discworld creator whilst educating the reader of his journey to becoming the icon that he is today. I have no doubt that this has been a labour of love for Marc Burrows: when the kindle says you have 20 minutes reading time left and you have reached the bibliography, you know that a whole lot of research has been done!
It is important to note that this book transgresses the existence of Discworld and “the business with the elephant” and encompasses all of Sir Terry’s work: from short stories in the local paper to his TV documentary on assisted death. The reader will also learn of the involvement of Rhianna Pratchett in her father’s work and discover that the “man in the hat” was not always the easiest man to work with.

Yes, it is an ARC on an e-reader so the format is awful: it always is! Also, I would possibly move the photos before the bibliography, unless they are a treat for those who commit to reading that far? Nevertheless, this is a book in which I cannot find any criticism.
I am going to need at least 3 copies upon release- can we preorder?

Although the wonderful Terry Pratchett is no longer with us, he still has a myriad of fans around the world and I hope they are going to love this work. It is a chronological look at his life and his work and we can see how his style and thought processes developed and changed over the years. Living in the south west of England I feel a strong connection to some of the backgrounds that he creates and it reminds me what a lovely part of the world it is. The author obviously has a great affinity to the great man and his love of the books shines through. we are shown Sir Terry as a real person; a true family man and yet someone who does not suffer fools gladly. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anybody who loves the great man and Discworld in particular

Excellent biography of a wonderful writer

I loved this book. I’ve read all the Discworld novels and am a big fan of Terry Pratchett. I felt that the biography did justice to this amazing writer. Marc Burrows points out Pratchett’s strengths and faults and takes the reader on a journey through Pratchett’s writing, including his children’s literature and science fiction. I felt that the tone and style of Burrows’s writing fit well with that of Pratchett, down to clever and fun footnotes. I strongly recommend this book for any fan of Pratchett.
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley for review purposes.

Every once in a while, not often too often though, you come across a book that you can hardly put down. When you do, you can't wait to pick it up again and you just feel completely immersed in it when reading. This is one of those, I absolutely adored this book.
I learnt so much about Terry as this biography covers everything from his birth until he passed away. Along the way we learn of his relations, teachers, associates, friends, colleagues, assistants, fans and the effect they had on him and his career and vice versa.
The amount of research that must of gone in to this book was vast as could be seen from the appendix and acknowledgements and is really something to be marvelled at.
Right from the beginning I was sucked straight in learning that his many ideas for Discworld were inspired from his visit to a department store in London with his Mum when he was 5 to see Father Christmas. This place became a dream world for him and sparked his imagination whilst riding an escalator as to what could go on inside when it was closed. I laughed when we learnt Terry had also thought when passing an old quarry as a child about the prehistoric fish that would be in it, as the book stated "It showed his imagination added a unusual shape and spin to the world creating possibilities and scenarios quit different from the mundane reality" and that I think summed Terry up perfectly.
As a fan also of Neil Gaiman I revelled in the chapters that talked about there initial meeting, friendship and collaboration. Through this book I took so many screenshots of things I wanted to remember such as the history behind words used within the fandom or books and it was fascinating to read Marc Burrows dissect his books and offer his opinions and show the links to others or characters previously. It was so insightful. We got glimpses in to Terry Pratchett's personality with people relieving memories where he would show emotion, temper & quirks etc. The book talks of his favourite authors, artistic side, religious views, fashion, ethos, fathering, marriage, monetary views basically everything that makes you up as person is in here and to learn all that about one of your favourite authors is truly fascinating. This book has encouraged me to dip back in Discworld and when I do I am pretty sure my eye's will be far more open than ever before knowing all the background.
I am pretty sure every person who reads this book regardless of how much a fan they may be will take something from it, I for one took a huge amount. Word of warning though, just be careful of the onion fairies at the end!.
My thanks go to the publishers, author and Netgalley for providing this arc in return for a honest review. I truly am indebted to you for my favourite book read so far in 2020!.

~ARC received in exchange for an honest review~

'The Magic of Terry Pratchett' is described as 'the first full biography of Sir Terry Pratchett ever written' by journalist, comedian and fan Marc Burrows - pretty much the perfect person to undertake this project given Pratchett's pre-Discworld career, and needless to say no biography of the man should ever be guilty of taking itself too seriously. As a fellow Discworld appreciator this is honestly a joy to read, Burrow's discussion of each of the Discworld novels has me itching to jump back in and continue with my quest to finish the series in publication order (as many do after beginning with some of the later installments.)

I'm looking forward to purchasing this title upon it's release as it's something I can easily see myself dipping in and out of as a companion to my Discworld reading adventure. A warm, affectionate, funny and thoroughly researched homage to the late great Sir Pterry. I recommend to any Discworld fan, it's most definitely a worthwhile read.

~ Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this title ~

An immensely readable survey of the great man's life and works, striking a good balance between revisiting old favourites and supplying new information (or new to me, at any rate, as someone who's a big fan but has never really engaged with fandom per se). Burrows has the sense to know that, while you can't necessarily write a 'comic biography' as such (not least because they all end the same way, and this one sadder than some – I still cry at those last tweets), a life of Terry Pratchett without jokes of its own would never do. And yes, some of the best ones are in the footnotes. I was particularly fond of the information that when Pratchett was a child, his mum named the family tortoise Phidippides after the runner of the original marathon: "Terry was raised with a working definition of irony plodding slowly around the back garden eating lettuce." But for all that, and the "summer's day that never ended" aspects of a childhood which would go on to inspire some of the loveliest bits of Good Omens, you also have the sort of brutal and dismissive schooling to which our glorious leaders would doubtless love to return, where "a boy was beaten so hard with his own T-square it actually broke, and he was forced to stay behind for several evenings to make a new one". Where a doctor's note excusing boys from games would see them shovelling coal in the boiler room instead, and where a headteacher would quite happily rely on his instincts to sort boys aged 6 or 7 into 'sheep' and 'goats' – terms he'd use in front of them, unabashed. Pratchett, thanks to the unstinting support of his family, being the only child in his year to confound the predictions by passing the 11+, and then go on to confound them even more thoroughly over the next half-century.

The basic outlines of the story from there are familiar, but Burrows has done a great job of filling it out, and also of pointing out the holes. He acknowledges from the off that Pratchett was prone to polishing his anecdotes, and has put a great deal of work into cross-referencing them with the available facts, noting where they don't seem to stand up in their best-known form, but doing so without it feeling the least bit mean. After all, it's understandable why Pratchett would do this; we all do to some extent, even those of us who aren't storytellers on anything like the same level. And it's not as if Pratchett was one of those writers with a hugely dramatic life, all affairs and addictions; he married young, stayed faithful, had a series of pre-success jobs where he'd always do his best to be at a desk, and only very occasionally end up having to deal with a dead body or radioactive swan. Then, after ticking along as a fairly minor author for a handful of books, Nigel Hawthorne read one on Radio 4 and Pratchett quietly became the country's bestselling writer. One of the most interesting strands of the book is Pratchett as an early example of the now widespread phenomenon where stuff is still treated as cult and infra dig even once it's demonstrably the mainstream and also dead good, the bookshops who still wouldn't shelve him with the 'proper' bestsellers he outsold, the articles which insisted there was still a stigma attached to reading him and in doing so perpetuated it. Pratchett all the while trying not to bite, yet often not entirely succeeding because as many who knew him note, he didn't suffer fools, and that sort of snobbish short-sightedness is a very British type of foolishness, close kin to the other failings he'd skewer in his work.

It's the work that's at the heart of this, obviously. How "Discovering The Lord of the Rings, like discovering extreme music, religious fundamentalism and sex" will always hit hardest in your teens, but how Pratchett would then pick at the genre's conventions in different ways right from his earliest attempt at a long piece, the much-revised Carpet People. Gradually realising "how desperately battles and kings should be avoided", coming up with moral taxonomies that authors far more 'literary' could never hope to match, like the immortal passage about treating people as things. Burrows laments not having more space to address all the books, and if few are likely to regret the relegation of The Unadulterated Cat to a footnote, I was surprised there wasn't more on Jingo, surely a key text in this. Or that, when talking about the very specific and partial softening of some of Pratchett's views on religion, there's no mention of the parallel with one of the bits I always found most impressive in the whole of Pratchett's work, where in Carpe Jugulum Granny Weatherwax questions the reformed Omnian and one of the series' moral centres points out the downside of one of its most agenda-led earlier books, the broadside against fundamentalism in Small Gods, and it feels like a valid continuation of an intellectual inquiry rather than the horrible late Wordsworth flatulence which normally results when an ageing writer gets gentler about religion. Still, for all the limits of space, there is plenty on most of the books, their themes and techniques as much as the surface stuff that first grabbed us, and if I don't agree with all of it (I'm a much bigger fan of Sourcery, for one thing) I can nevertheless see it's all solid analysis.

No writer works in isolation, of course, and Burrows also examines the ecosystem Pratchett came out of, as well as the ones which would grow up around him. There's the influence of the local bookshop selling import SF to cover for their main trade in porn - an ecological niche which survived at least into the noughties, somehow. There's the love of local hero GK Chesterton, who'd prove an important point on which Pratchett would bond with the first person ever to interview him, a young jobbing journalist called Neil Gaiman – who at that point was the one wearing the hat (though there are a surprising number of pictures of a bare-headed Terry Pratchett in here, it must be said). Without whom Pratchett might have stuck with his original plan to put Discworld on the back burner after Equal Rites and get started on what was eventually to become The Long Earth, had Gaiman not said he'd love to read a book about Death... There's the whole side-story of Josh Kirby, whose lively art was such a part in conveying the spirit of early Discworld, for all that it was frequently completely inaccurate in its details, to the extent that Pratchett's bizarre German publisher would basically slap any Josh Kirby picture on any Pratchett book, but who turns out to have also worked in lots of other styles earlier in his career – who knew? It's in the more peripheral stuff that such few errors as I noticed tend to creep in, though they're generally fairly minor ones of emphasis, like using 'sword and sorcery' as a catch-all for fantasy after describing a bunch of high fantasy the young Terry had been reading, or the make-up of a typical issue of Analog. Beyond that I could only point to a few repetitions and homophones, and those classic subbing bugbears 'Revelations' and 'Meatloaf', and hopefully in the interval between my reading the Netgalley ARC and the finished edition coming out, those will have been fixed. And set against those, so many gems, from the Serbian literary empire founded on one fan's desire to get Pratchett translated, to the Pratchett-specific craft terms 'sherbet lemons' and 'cigarettes'. There's the meeting between Terry Pratchett and Roald Dahl when neither was yet a bestselling novelist, to the extent that Pratchett introduces Dahl to readers as "the husband of Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal". There's the realisation that most people who've read Reaper Man will have read the paperback, and so not got the benefit of its best typographical trick, which apparently was fouled up there. There's Pratchett's 1996 interview with Bill Gates about the future of the Internet, where Gates is the naive optimist and Pratchett, far too familiar with human nature, foresees the present hell of fake news. Above all there's the reminder of just how good Pratchett was, and how missed he is. Maybe it was him going in 2015, not Bowie the next year, that marked our crash into the wrong trouser-leg of time?
(Disclaimer: I do know the author a bit, and his other half better. But I could definitely have got away socially with enthusing less than this if it weren't a dead good read)