According to the BBC, as many as 10 unfinished novels from fantasy great Terry Pratchett were permanently erased from this good earth in appropriately foolish fashion: by an old-timey steamroller running over a hard drive.
Normally news of an acclaimed, beloved author’s work that hasn’t seen the light of day being erased would be depressing. It’s the end of potential. It’s a bunch of words in a particular order that we’ll never get to see. It’s a shame.
But we’re also in an era where AI is writing George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire because he’s “too slow,” and new “Agatha Christie” books are on shelves, and J.D. Salinger’s purposefully hidden tomes may get published, so you know what? Good on you, Mr. Pratchett. Kudos to Rob Wilkins, long-time assistant to the late, great author, who ensured that books that Pratchett never intended to meet the public will, in fact, never meet the public.
We’ll never get to see into the worlds of these ten obliterated works, but we’ll also never have another writer “finish” the books on Pratchett’s behalf. It was Pratchett’s intent that we never read them, and that no one else work on them, so it’s fitting and just that his wishes were carried out.
It’s also not like Pratchett left us without a gigantic pile of other books to read. From Disc World to collaborations with Neil Gaiman and Stephen Baxter, Pratchett wrote 70 novels.
Plus, it’s not wholly accurate that we can never see those unfinished books. We can’t read them, sure, but we can see the crushed hard drive at a Pratchett exhibition at the Salisbury Museum starting in September.
How silly is that?
