GNU Sir Terry Pratchett - And Another Friend

This post has links to Amazon and qualifying purchases could see me rolling in pennies. I mean, earn me a commission.

I think one of the things I love most about FB is that you can find your specific flavor of fandom fairly easily. And when you do, you can extend that mythical world into this one, and vice versa. People on the fan page just "get" the references, and you can have an inside joke run for miles! 

One of my very favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, has a well-deserved few fan pages on Facebook. I ran across both the Ankh-Morpork Times and the Discworld memes page a while back, to my delight. I've been a fan of his Discworld novels for probably thirty (*gasp!* thirty?!) years, now, and have run across very few people in person, in the roundworld, who know the books or the author, so finding the fan pages was like coming home.

A rendering of The Mended Drum, Ankh-Morpork's
most notorious watering hole.

Pratchett, you may remember, was a friend of and often a co-writer with Neil Gaiman (most recently of Good Omens fame). He had a strong grasp of the human condition, politics, and irony, and crafted them all into a shape of humor and love that the rest of us could easily relate to. His worlds and his characters are addicting.

The anniversary of Terry Pratchett's passing (by the Embuggerance, as he called it, of Alzheimer's) was a few days ago. The fandom on Facebook remembered him with a GNU on the clacks, which was spawned in the Discworld and lives on in our internet. I also ran across an excerpt from Pratchett's book, Going Postal (the screen adaptation can be purchased on Blu-Ray or streamed on Amazon and is well worth the money, if you love British humor), which I share below. 

#GNU_Sir_Terry_Pratchett

28 April 1948 - 12 March 2015

She was known as Princess to the men on Tower 181, although she was really Alice. She was thirteen, could run a line for hours on end without needing help, and later on would have an interesting career which . . . but anyway, she remembered this one conversation, on this day, because it was strange. Not all the signals were messages. Some were instructions to towers. Some, as you operated your levers to follow the distant signal, made things happen in your own tower. Princess knew all about this. A lot of what travelled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. It was instructions to towers, reports, messages about messages, even chatter between operators, although this was strictly forbidden these days. It was all in code. It was very rare you got Plain in the Overhead. But now . . .

‘There it goes again,’ she said. ‘It must be wrong. It’s got no origin code and no address. It’s Overhead, but it’s in Plain.’

On the other side of the tower, sitting in a seat facing the opposite direction because he was operating the up-line, was Roger, who was seventeen and already working for his tower-master certificate.

His hand didn’t stop moving as he said: ‘What did it say?’

‘There was GNU, and I know that’s a code, and then just a name. It was John Dearheart. Was it a—’

‘You sent it on?’ said Grandad. Grandad had been hunched in the corner, repairing a shutter box in this cramped shed halfway up the tower. Grandad was the tower-master and had been everywhere and knew everything. Everyone called him Grandad. He was twenty-six. He was always doing something in the tower when she was working the line, even though there was always a boy in the other chair. She didn’t work out why until later.

‘Yes, because it was a G code,’ said Princess.

‘Then you did right. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Yes, but I’ve sent that name before. Several times. Upline and downline. Just a name, no message or anything!’

She had a sense that something was wrong, but she went on: ‘I know a U at the end means it has to be turned round at the end of the line, and an N means Not Logged.’ This was showing off, but she’d spent hours reading the cypher book. ‘So it’s just a name, going up and down all the time! Where’s the sense in that?’

Something was really wrong. Roger was still working his line, but he was staring ahead with a thunderous expression.

Then Grandad said: ‘Very clever, Princess. You’re dead right.’

‘Hah!’ said Roger.

‘I’m sorry if I did something wrong,’ said the girl meekly. ‘I just thought it was strange. Who’s John Dearheart?’

‘He . . . fell off a tower,’ said Grandad.

‘Hah!’ said Roger, working his shutters as if he suddenly hated them.

‘He’s dead?’ said Princess.

‘Well, some people say—’ Roger began.

‘Roger!’ snapped Grandad. It sounded like a warning.

‘I know about Sending Home,’ said Princess. ‘And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.’

‘Who told you that?’ said Grandad. Princess was bright enough to know that someone would get into trouble if she was too specific. ‘Oh, I just heard it,’ she said airily.

‘Somewhere.’ ‘Someone was trying to scare you,’ said Grandad, looking at Roger’s reddening ears.

It hadn’t sounded scary to Princess. If you had to be dead, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. But she was bright enough, too, to know when to drop a subject.

It was Grandad who spoke next, after a long pause broken only by the squeaking of the new shutter bars. When he did speak, it was as if something was on his mind. ‘We keep that name moving in the Overhead,’ he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent. ‘He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind in the rigging and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”?’

 

Another friend of mine passed away last week. He was ripe in age and experience, and his passing was expected, but even so, he'll be missed.

Out of respect for the privacy of those he left behind, I won't share his name here, but if you're a certain age, you probably know at least one or two of his works, whether you realize it or not. He was a family friend, an associate of my dad's and someone I knew for pretty much the entirety of my life. I will miss him and his dry humor.

I like to think his name will live on in the clacks. 

GNU, my friend. GNU.