4 ms·
It might have brought joy to millions of people?
by mihaic 3y ago
It might have brought joy to millions of people?
- master-lincoln 3y agoMaybe, but against his will. That seems pretty privacy invasive to publish private notes against one's will
- anotheryou 3y agoWell we also don't force nude pictures of celebrities to be published at any point. If he didn't want to share it, we should respect that wish. Even if it's just for our peace of mind that our wishes might be respected.
- Freak_NL 3y agoReleasing a bunch of unfinished novels might have disappointed many people too. Either by having a negative effect on his published works, or on their own. It could reflect badly on his estate which manages the IP and presumably acts in good faith to preserve his legacy and reputation. In the end its up to the creator and the executor of their will to decide how their remaining artefacts are to be treated.
- Ekaros 3y agoIt is not rarely when the unpublished works don't really work out so great or compare well to published works. And with Terry I have to admit that the last works I have read were not as good as works sometime before them. So these might have been even less representative of his work.
- defrost 3y agoIn December 2007, Pratchett announced that he had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. This was eight years before his death in 2015. I have no doubt that he continued writing from habit and I also have little doubt that what he wrote increasingly looked like word salad. He was very likely all too aware that his unfinished works needed a strong overhaul from an editor in close partnership to tease out portions that were utterly at odds with what he had intended to say or thought he had written. In the event of death apply steamroller seems like a wise choice.
- NeoTar 3y agoIndeed - the final few novels lacked the finesse of the earlier works. I believe Pterry, in common with many authors, would produce a basically complete manuscript, and then relentlessly iterate on it - removing inconsistencies, adding detail, etc, until the final result was a truly excellent reading experience. In his last years I believe Pterry was not actually physically writing himself, but working through an amanuensis. I can easily imagine that this massively complicated the revision process and the novels, probably from Unseen Academicals onwards read to me more like earlier drafts than finished productions.
- ben_w 3y ago> Unseen Academicals Now you mention it, something did feel off with it. I only really got pushed out of my suspension of disbelief with Raising Steam, specifically that the words "molybdenum disulphide" absolutely do not belong in any Discworld story.
- drewcoo 3y agoNeil Gaiman, who had previously collaborated with Pratchett, was trying to save them and presumably would have cleaned up and finished the stories. He wouldn't have wanted works that would diminish his friend's legacy.
- semanticist 3y agoThat's not the story - Neil Gaiman just happened to be making an unrelated phone call that nearly delayed them enough to miss the opportunity to steamroll the hard drive. It's not clear that they even mentioned to Gaiman what they were doing, and I suspect Gaiman wouldn't have wanted to disrespect Pratchett's wishes anyway.
- another-dave 3y agoIf he thought he wishes weren't going to be respected maybe he would've stopped writing earlier & just destroyed it himself, which would've brought less joy to people.
- simondotau 3y agoOr he could have moved to a device which is encrypted at rest, such as any modern Mac.