We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thought. With our thoughts, we make our world.

Terry Pratchett

Very funny and very serious all at the same time. Compared to Dickens, the most read and published author of this era. Fans are loyal. Others are dispassionate. He's ahead of his time.

Mostly satire in the Discworld, but if you want to get a feel for how science and reality work hand in hand try the "Science of Discworld" or the "Science of the Discworld 2" both easy reads that explain the universe and humanity in a human way.

An extract from his work on Being Human..

Real life is stranger than fiction ... Jingo.

A great link is the library .

Biography by Colin Smythe, his agent.

Pratchett Facts from the BBC.

Terry Pratchett: Discworld & Beyond (Excerpted originally for LOCUS online from Locus magazine's December '99 issue)

''Discworld started as an antidote to bad fantasy, because there was a big explosion of fantasy in the late '70s, an awful lot of it was highly derivative, and people weren't bringing new things to it. The first couple of books quite deliberately pastiched bits of other writers and things - good writers, because it's the good ones most people can spot: 'Ah, here's the Anne McCaffrey bit.' I was rapidly stitching together a kind of consensus fantasy universe, and the one trick was, 'Let's make people act.' I remember a description Mad magazine did about The Flintstones: 'dinosaurs from 65 million years ago, flung together with idiots from today.' I tried to do something like that with Discworld. Not everyone on Discworld is entirely a modern character, but they are recognizable to us. Their concerns are more like 20th-century concerns. But they also seem to me to be aware - I've invented things like 'narrative causality,' which practically says, 'the characters know that they are in a story.' What they do know is that they have roles to play.

''I make notes all the time. Writing the Discworld novels is almost a kind of journalism. It may be journalism that takes place two or three years after the fact, but the last 10 books maybe, have been subtly influenced by moderately current affairs

''In Jingo, one of the things I wanted to explore was just how quickly apparently peaceful populations can be persuaded to go to war. A friend of mine who has a French wife asked her, on my behalf, how long it would take to get France and England to go to war, and she said, 'About 20 seconds.'

''I have no great hopes of space habitation. Too many things can go wrong. The nice thing about planets is, comparatively small things can go wrong, and checks and balances come into play. I'm not quite certain how you do that on a moon base. Remember, I worked for eight years in the nuclear industry. I know that if you put a handle on a door and mark it 'Pull,' six people will pull, three will push, and one will say, 'Do you want me to pull or push?' I would hate to have to bank the human race's survival on a generation ship, because when it was being constructed, some guy at some point was anxious to get off early on a Friday afternoon, and something he didn't do then, some washer he didn't put on, is just going to be lurking there for a few hundred years, until finally the nut drops off and the screw falls out, and the piece of cladding comes loose, and another wire presses against a second wire - and suddenly you're going around in circles!

''On the other hand, it's worth a try, because there's nowhere else to go, and the planet will be made uninhabitable no matter what we do"...