Terry's All Gold

Chris Hallam remembers Sir Terry Pratchett

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One afternoon, in 1990, I briefly met author Terry Pratchett. I had come straight from school to attend the book signing which took place at Peterborough's Queensgate shopping centre. Pratchett was there with the young writer Neil Gaiman to publicise their new book, Good Omens, but gamely agreed to sign my own copy of my favourite Discworld novel, Mort, which I had brought from home.

At the time, as a tall, socially awkward 13-year-old boy, I was pretty much the perfect stereotype of a typical Terry Pratchett reader although, even by then, he was becoming so popular that this stereotype no longer really rang true. The man I briefly met was a pleasant, bearded man in his early 40s, still in the early stages of his success and still dressed ordinarily rather than in the Johnny Cash-style all-black fedora and outfit which he would adopt for public appearances later.

He was, in fact, enjoying the most prolific period of his entire career: between 1988 and 1992, he published 17 novels. He was fast becoming a publishing sensation. By 1992, WH Smith claimed 10% of its science fiction and fantasy sales came from Pratchett novels. By the end of the decade, 6.5% of all new hardback books in the UK were his. He would ultimately become the UK's bestselling author of the 1990s.

The key to Pratchett's enormous success lay in the Discworld novels, the first of which,