Stroke Of The Pen: The Lost Stories by Terry Pratchett (book review).
The fact Terry Pratchett died back in 2015 hasn’t stopped him from releasing new books. ‘A Stroke Of The Pen’ is a collection of 20 short stories written early in his career, before he became famous for his ‘Discworld’ novels. They were written in the early 1970s and published in either the ‘Bucks Free Press’ or the ‘Western Daily Press’, mostly in serialised form and often under a pen name, Patrick Kearns.
As the introduction by Colin Smythe makes clear, Pratchett eventually moved on from those serialised stories and turned his attention to writing novels. So it was then that these earlier stories disappeared, languishing under an unknown name and only existing on newspaper clippings and microfiche records of regional newspapers. What that does mean, though, is that this posthumous collection isn’t unfinished leftovers scraped off a hard drive, but honest-to-goodness stories that Pratchett was sufficiently pleased with he sent them off for publication.
What’s even better is that these stories have all the charm and wit we’ve come to expect from Pratchett. As a former palaeontologist, my attention was immediately drawn to ‘The Fossil Beach’, a story that has a couple of fossil collectors discover what appears to be a deckchair and a radio in Jurassic sediments. There’s a Science Fictiony explanation, of course, but not without references to postcards from the past and homely pubs for time travellers. It’s just lovely.
Satire is one of things Pratchett does best with most, perhaps all, of his ‘Discworld’ novels satirising one thing or another. ‘How It All Began…’ is about a smart caveman, Og, who invents fire and how this affects his clan. On the plus side, they’re warm and well-fed but, before too long, the fire gets out of control and the leader of the clan kicks Og out. It’s silly stuff, of course, but there’s a warning here about the difficult relationship between technological progress and the living world.
If there’s criticism to be made, it’s that these stories are all relatively short, a dozen pages at most and tend towards the same sort of reality-bending punchline at the end. That’s fair enough given that these were humorous stories sent for publication in local newspapers. But that does make the book something to be dipped into rather than consumed from start to finish. A few stories take place in the fictional town of Blackbury, hinting at the sort of world-building that would become the ‘Discworld’ universe but, otherwise, these are very much short stories to be quickly read and enjoyed, on their own, for what they are.
Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable collection of fantastical tales, and a perfect Christmas present for a Pratchett fan.
Neale Monks
November 2023
(pub: Doubleday/Penguin/Random House, 2023. 240 page hardback. Price: £20.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-85752-963-3
check out website: www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk
