GNU Terry Pratchett
I was greatly saddened today when I heard that Terry Pratchett had died. My Dad introduced me to the Discworld books when I was young and since then I have read almost all of them multiple times. In particular I remember having The Science of Discworld bought for me when we visited Birmingham Airport. Being 12 years old and obsessed with both science and the Discworld books at that point, I was desperate to read it. Rather than being one of those "how could Star Trek technology really work?" kind of things, it was instead concerned with how Discworld wizards would study our world (Roundworld), having accidentally created it. The book interleaved chapters of scientific explanations (including the idea of "lies-to-children") with the wizards' reactions to those discoveries. It was the start of a series of those types of books that Pratchett and his scientist co-authors wrote, but that was merely the most extreme example of how he used his fiction to help readers see things from a different perspective. His writing was insidiously educational, and he was obviously a person who spent a lot of time just thinking about everything. His books will continue to be an inspiration for me (as I have been re-reading them recently) and for anyone else who is lucky enough to read them. For that reason I choose to remember him not with the traditional RIP, but instead with GNU. If you read Going Postal you will understand.
“WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?”