Nothing much had changed, except everything.

These are the things I realized back in 1985:

Terry knew a lot. He had the kind of head that people get when they’re interested in things, and go and ask questions and listen and read. He knew genre, enough to know the territory, and he knew enough outside genre to be interesting.

He was ferociously intelligent.

He was having fun. Then again, Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes writing, not having written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen. At the time we met, he was still working as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board. He wrote four hundred words a night, every night: it was the only way for him to keep a real job and still write books. One night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred words still to go, so he put a piece of paper into his typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next novel.

(The day he retired, to become a full-time writer, he phoned me up. “It’s only been half an hour since I retired, and already I hate those bastards,” he said cheerfully.)

This was something else that was obvious in 1985. Terry was a science fiction writer. It was the way his mind worked: the urge to take it all apart, and put it back together in different ways, to see how it all fit together. It was the engine that drove Discworld. Not a what if . . . or an if only . . . or even an if this goes on . . . ; it was the far more subtle and dangerous If there was really a . . . , what would that mean? How would it work?

In the Nicholls-Clute Encyclopedia of Science Fiction there was an ancient woodcut, of a man pushing his head through the back of the world, past the sky, and seeing the cogs and the wheels and the engines that drove the universe machine. That’s what people do in Terry Pratchett books, even if the people doing it are sometimes rats and sometimes small girls. People learn things. They open their heads.

So we discovered we shared a similar sense of humor, and a similar set of cultural referents; we had read the same obscure books, took pleasure in pointing each other to weird Victorian reference books.

A few years after we met, in 1988, Terry and I wrote a book together. It began as a parody of Richmal Crompton’s William books, which we called William the Antichrist, but rapidly outgrew that conceit and became about a number of other things instead, and we called it Good Omens. It was a funny novel about the end of the world and how we’re all going to die. Working with Terry I felt like a journeyman working alongside a master craftsman in some medieval guild. He constructs novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch. There is art, of course, but that’s the result of building it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in constructing something that does what it’s meant to do—to make people read the story, and laugh, and possibly even think.