Foreward

- a celebration of - Fifty Years of Pratchett

Fifty years ago, a young British journalist published his first book, The Carpet People, and the world was never the same; it became flat, round, and smelled of turtles. Ten years later, in 1981, I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club {how geeky is that?}and they sent me the recent work of a little known (on this side of The Pond) British author named Terry Pratchett. The book, Strata, still has an honored location in my library, PTerry, as he was known in the internet’s infancy, a strange and mysterious realm named Usenet, taught me several things in that book - people can build planets and sometimes they come out flat, Death is a cool dude, and The Broken Drum is an awesome pub {you can’t beat it}.

Two years later, it was followed by The Colour of Magic, and I was hooked. I out-geeked the other geeks at the weekly Dungeons & Dragons games by insisting that our world rest on the backs of four elephants who, in turn, were riding on the back of a giant turtle. In the third discworld novel, Equal Rites, PTerry explored what would happen if a girl became a wizard. In that book, he mentions the existence of what he called an enchantress if just momentarily, and then he never mentioned the enchantress again. Top witch Granny Weatherwax describes enchantresses as “being no better than they should be,” but all we know about enchantresses is that they are female magic users, but we don’t know if they are witches, warlocks, or wizards. It’s assumed that a witch wears more clothes than an enchantress.