A Stroke of the Pen Is an Unexpected, Heartfelt Gift to Terry Pratchett Fans
Beloved author Terry Pratchett very famously had his hard drives destroyed by a steamroller after he passed away in 2015. This was, ostensibly, to prevent the posthumous publication of his work. As a result, we’ll never know what he might have had planned for his Discworld universe, and we’ll only ever be able to learn any sort of details about what he and Neil Gaiman might have planned for a Good Omens sequel through whatever manages to get worked into the events of the Prime Video series. Maybe it’s that feeling of finality, that sense of a definitive endpoint—there is only this much and no more—that makes the short story collection A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories feel like such an incredible gift.
No, these aren’t miraculously unearthed Pratchett stories found in a box or high up on a closet shelf somewhere. Instead, this collection features stories from early in the author’s career, written by Terry Pratchett before he became the man we knew Terry Pratchett to be. Originally published in the 1970s and 80s under a handful of pseudonyms and often appearing in various small newspapers that no longer exist, these stories represent some of the author’s earliest fiction. And, since they’ve technically already been published elsewhere—even if most of us never realized they had been, the author’s estate decreed they don’t violate the “no publishing of unpublished material” rule Pratchett himself laid down.
These stories are brief and fairly insubstantial, and a surprising number of them are concerned with Christmas themes and settings. (There are no less than three stories specifically about Santa or a Santa-adjacent figure.) Pratchett is an author who excelled at long-form fiction and is clearly hemmed in a bit by the word counts and other restrictions necessitated by writing to a newspaper publisher’s specifications. But, for most of us—especially for anyone who has loved any piece of Pratchett’s writing—his voice here is unmistakable, unformed though it may be. And hearing it again is something I expect most of us had assumed we’d never get the chance to do.
A Stroke of the Pen is full of the linguistic and thematic flourishes that fans associate with Pratchett’s writing: His unique, indomitable humor. (Several of these stories are laugh-out-loud funny.) His gift for creative world-building even in these tiny, hemmed-in spaces. You can see hints of the stories he’ll one day tell in this book, and it’s weirdly like watching a star being born. A privilege, even, to know what this will all one day become.