With crushing of computer Disk works are lost for ever as the late fantasy novelist had instructed
The unfinished books of Sir Terry Pratchett have been destroyed by a steamroller, following the late fantasy novelist’s fantasies.
Pratchett’s hard drive was crushed by a classic John Fowler & Co steamroller named Lord Jericho in the Great Dorset Steam Fair, ahead of the opening of a new exhibition about the author’s life and work.
Pratchett, famous for his colourful and satirical Discworld series, expired in March 2015 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Following his death, fellow fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, Pratchett’s close friend and collaborator , told the Times that Pratchett had wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all”.
On Friday, Rob Wilkins, who oversees the Pratchett estate, tweeted from an official Twitter account that he was “about to fulfil my obligation to Terry” along with an image of a whole computer hard disk — following up with a tweet which revealed the hard disk in pieces.
The symbolism of the moment, which captured something of Pratchett’s unique sense of humour, was not lost on fans, who responded on Twitter with a wry melancholy, although some people expressed surprise that the writer — who’d previously discussed churning through computer hardware at a rapid rate — would have saved his unfinished work within an apparently older version of hard drive.
The hard disk will go on display as part of a major exhibition about the author’s life and work, Terry Pratchett: HisWorld, which opens in the Salisbury museum in September.
The author of over 70 novels, Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007.
He became an advocate for assisted dying, giving a moving lecture on the subject, Shaking Hands With Death, in 2010, and presenting a documentary for the BBC called Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die.
Publish and he continued to write, increasingly with the assistance of others, until his death in 2015. Two novels were published posthumously: The Long Utopia (a collaboration with Stephen Baxter) and The Shepherd’s Crown, the final Discworld novel.
The Salisbury museum exhibition will run from 16 September until 13 January 2018.