Terry Pratchett, creator of the Discworld, volunteers as assisted suicide test case

He has a rare form of Alzheimer’s and not much hope, it seems. The Alzheimer’s  Society’s comment  here. Pratchett’s own post on the matter is here. In the picure he looks like Windle Poons, the undead wizard from Reaper Man. Could be intentional.

King of the Golden River

Youy’ve read nearly all Terry Pratchett’s books, and book-in, book-out laughed out loud and sniggered and reread your favoties (I’ll count mine down for you sometime.) You enjoy the recurring characters and just when you think you’ve seen the extent of his brilliance he whacks you over the head with a passage that no one else could have written. Admittedly this is an unsavory character  but quite a necessary one in the lowest levels of city services, the city being Ankh-Morpork, first city on the Discworld.

From The Truth:

“He was called King of the Golden River. This was a recognition of his wealth and achievements and the source of his success, which was not quite the classical river of gold. It was a considerable advance on his former nickname, which was Piss Harry.

“Harry King had made his fortune by the careful application of the old adage: where there’s muck there’s brass. There was money to be made out of things that people threw away. Especially the very human things that people threw away.

“The real foundation of his fortune came when he started leaving empty buckets  at various hostelries around the city center, especially those that were more than a gutter’s length from the river. He charged a very modest fee to take them away when they were full. It became part of the life of every pub landlord, they’d hear a clank in the middle of the night and turn over in their sleep content in the knowledge that one of Piss Harry’s men was, in a small way, making the world a better-smelling place.

“They didn’t wonder what happened to the full buckets but Harry King had learned something that can be the key to great riches: there is very little, however disgusting, that isn’t used somewhere in some industry. There are people out there who want large quantities  of ammonia and saltpeter. If you can’t sell it to the alchemists then the farmers probably want it. If even the farmers don’t want it then there is nothing, nothing, however gross, that you can’t sell to the tanners.

“Harry felt like the only man in a mining camp who knows what gold looks like.”

No one does satire better. Unfortunately Pratchett announced in January that he has an unusual early onset type of Alzheimer’s.

Hopefully he’ll able to hold it off, so the world is not closed off from such a fertile and agile mind.