> This shift coincided with a decrease in adjective TTR below a defined threshold, occurring approximately ten years before Pratchett’s formal diagnosis.
The diagnosis was announced in 2007, meaning the shift occurred in 1997. 1997 was after Jingo and before Carpe Jugulum and The Last Continent, and 2007 was after Making Money and before Unseen Academicals.
The Last Continent is the first identified in the paper as below the cutoff for adjectives which they use to identify the start of the decline.
My own feeling is that many of his strongest works were before 2000, though he had several excellent ones after (the City Watch and first two Moist von Lipwig; I know the ongoing Tiffany Aching series are good, but in terms of writing I found them not as intricate as his earlier books.) I found Snuff harder to read, and Raising Steam, sadly, very difficult. I could tell the genius was there, but my memory of the writing was that it used much longer sentences, had less intricate plotting, and far fewer puns and wordplay. It was this book that made me really feel a sense of grief for what was happening to him, and it was this one where I first felt there was an observable threshold that was crossed.
I have sometimes wondered if it would be respectful if another author was brought into assist in editing or rewriting his last two novels. I know his unpublished works were destroyed, and any writing assistance is not his own voice. Yet I feel, in a sense, seeing books with such clear decline could in itself have let his legacy down. I don't know what his own view was or would be. While I admire Sanderson' continuance of the Wheel of Time, I would not wish such a drastic change in tone for some similar effort for the last of Pratchett's works. Yet I deeply wish that his last books were, somehow, different, more representative of him that I feel they were, in that his illness (in a sense, of course!) let him down. They cause me sadness.
GNU Terry Pratchett. (My own site sends this too.)
Personally I just ignore them(Raising Steam and Snuff). There are too many inconsistencies with how Vimes and Lipwig are characterized in those books, that I can't see them as the same characters. I haven't started the Shepherd's Crown for the same reason.
I don't think that any fan of his is under any illusion that those books are up to his standard, but he has so many good books that his legacy will be safe.
> My own feeling is that many of his strongest works were before 2000
Interestingly he hired Rob Wilkins in the year 2000. So, did Rob's presence affect the books? Or did Terry hire Rob because he subconsciously knew he needed to compensate for a decline that started to become apparent, by offloading some tasks?
my two favourite works of his are "night watch" and "going postal". it's honestly super impressive that they were written so long after he started to decline and were still so good.
I'm currently in the middle of a complete chronological reread of the discworld books, just finished "thud" and "wintersmith" back to back and while they were definitely weak in places it's amazing how much of his genius still shone through. feeling a little apprehensive about the later books though, I remember some of them being really bad, especially "snuff" :(
Night Watch is definitely as good as the peak 90s City Watch books. Thud had bits of standout quality too. Some of the weaknesses of later books might be less pure weaknesses and more people distinctly remembering the same characters encountering similar characters with a similar message before.
They do acknowledge that in the notes, referencing one other study (n=3) with one healthy aged author that did not exhibit these signs.
>Relatedly, as this is a single-case study, without a control author, it remains possible that the decline in lexical diversity reflects natural ageing. But note that previous research [15] has found that healthy authors can maintain stable linguistic diversity into their late 80s, suggesting that the decline observed in Pratchett’s TTR is indicative of pathology rather than typical ageing.
IMO still all very inconclusive but an interesting avenue to explore.
Yep. The most jarring changes of style, worldbuilding, themes and characters are in the first four books (Pratchett once responded to a question about whether "the Patrician" in The Colour of Magic was the same man as Vetinari by saying yes, but he wasn't the same writer). The non Alzheimer's explanation for changes in vocabulary around the turn of the century is that he'd started writing Young Adult Discworld books (he'd written for younger audiences before, but in very different worlds) and for better or worse some of the changes bled through to his other works. Of course, that's also compatible with him having less capability to write complex books, but then I'm not really convinced Thud is less complex than The Colour of Magic...
True. I've noticed this in authors like M.A.R.Barker and Ursula LeGuin, their later works when they were older were very, very different from their earlier ones (in Barker's case the 20-year gap between the two groups probably made it a lot more obvious). If I'd encountered them as being from some random unknown author I probably wouldn't have read them.
I hope they've controlled it for an increasing proportion of the later books being aimed at Young Adult audiences...
(Though I guess that cuts both ways and you could argue that writing more simply using the established parts of your legendarium is exactly what you might aim for if you were less consistently able to handle complex plot threads and novel worldbuilding)
> Eight titles were excluded from the analysis due to them being either shorter than the other full-length novels (Eric, 1990; The Last Hero, 2001), or because they are part of his titles for younger readers (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, 2001; The Wee Free Men, 2003; A Hat Full of Sky, 2004; Wintersmith, 2006; I Shall Wear Midnight, 2010; The Shepherds Crown, 2015).
He seemed pretty curious about the world, and was pretty candid about his disease. Not to put words in his mouth, but I suspect he'd have been interested in this. I can imagine him have Lord Vetinari detect a decline from someone's writing and make some subtle move as a result!
Didn't the Oblivion NPC he contribute to get a bunch of features to help him deal with the problems he faced playing the game? I never met the man, but I think he'd be appreciative of the studies if they help people who suffer from dementia and/or Alzheimer’s.
I met Sir Terry Pratchett only once, briefly, at a book signing, and got scolded for a bad joke (and for letting him sign his first book, which he did not like), i think it's really hard to guess what he would have wanted at that time. This happened around 2006, after he knew about the dementia, but well before i or the public knew about it.
The younger Terry, unencumbered by dementia, would likely have loved the idea of analyzing his writing for most scientific purposes, he co-wrote multiple scientific fiction books together with physicists and other science communicators.
I actually regret making him upset, i did not know about his troubles at the time and i would not make the same (completely unrelated to his ailment) joke knowing about it, neither would i have brought his first book if i knew he disliked it.
Just imagine having your head full of a world you created, a world filled with more stories than you could ever write down, and realizing that you will never get a chance to do so and that it will all fade before you can share it. That experience must be extremely painful and for sure leads to changes in personality traits.
Right before i had my turn he signed the book of my girlfriend and he also signed her journal even though there was a strict "only one book per person" rule. When she asked him if he would sign the journal as well he said
"I would even sign your hand, madam". This is the Terry i will remember, the charming and incredibly witty person that bestowed upon me the best stories i have ever enjoyed.
I never spoke to the man, but reading the oodles and oodles of words he put out for the public over the years gives me the impression that he would find something like this mostly neat and worthwhile while still being a bit disquieting and weird.
> This shift coincided with a decrease in adjective TTR below a defined threshold, occurring approximately ten years before Pratchett’s formal diagnosis.
The diagnosis was announced in 2007, meaning the shift occurred in 1997. 1997 was after Jingo and before Carpe Jugulum and The Last Continent, and 2007 was after Making Money and before Unseen Academicals.
The Last Continent is the first identified in the paper as below the cutoff for adjectives which they use to identify the start of the decline.
My own feeling is that many of his strongest works were before 2000, though he had several excellent ones after (the City Watch and first two Moist von Lipwig; I know the ongoing Tiffany Aching series are good, but in terms of writing I found them not as intricate as his earlier books.) I found Snuff harder to read, and Raising Steam, sadly, very difficult. I could tell the genius was there, but my memory of the writing was that it used much longer sentences, had less intricate plotting, and far fewer puns and wordplay. It was this book that made me really feel a sense of grief for what was happening to him, and it was this one where I first felt there was an observable threshold that was crossed.
I have sometimes wondered if it would be respectful if another author was brought into assist in editing or rewriting his last two novels. I know his unpublished works were destroyed, and any writing assistance is not his own voice. Yet I feel, in a sense, seeing books with such clear decline could in itself have let his legacy down. I don't know what his own view was or would be. While I admire Sanderson' continuance of the Wheel of Time, I would not wish such a drastic change in tone for some similar effort for the last of Pratchett's works. Yet I deeply wish that his last books were, somehow, different, more representative of him that I feel they were, in that his illness (in a sense, of course!) let him down. They cause me sadness.
GNU Terry Pratchett. (My own site sends this too.)
Personally I just ignore them(Raising Steam and Snuff). There are too many inconsistencies with how Vimes and Lipwig are characterized in those books, that I can't see them as the same characters. I haven't started the Shepherd's Crown for the same reason.
I don't think that any fan of his is under any illusion that those books are up to his standard, but he has so many good books that his legacy will be safe.
The Sheperd’s Crown is not at all like Snuff and Raising Steam. Please read it, it’s a heartbreaking self send off.
> My own feeling is that many of his strongest works were before 2000
Interestingly he hired Rob Wilkins in the year 2000. So, did Rob's presence affect the books? Or did Terry hire Rob because he subconsciously knew he needed to compensate for a decline that started to become apparent, by offloading some tasks?
my two favourite works of his are "night watch" and "going postal". it's honestly super impressive that they were written so long after he started to decline and were still so good.
I'm currently in the middle of a complete chronological reread of the discworld books, just finished "thud" and "wintersmith" back to back and while they were definitely weak in places it's amazing how much of his genius still shone through. feeling a little apprehensive about the later books though, I remember some of them being really bad, especially "snuff" :(
Night Watch is definitely as good as the peak 90s City Watch books. Thud had bits of standout quality too. Some of the weaknesses of later books might be less pure weaknesses and more people distinctly remembering the same characters encountering similar characters with a similar message before.
Sample size of n=1
Did they compare to authors with long careers who did not develop dementia?
Maybe "decreased lexical diversity" is simply natural artistic progression, and not a bad thing, or symptom of disease.
They do acknowledge that in the notes, referencing one other study (n=3) with one healthy aged author that did not exhibit these signs.
>Relatedly, as this is a single-case study, without a control author, it remains possible that the decline in lexical diversity reflects natural ageing. But note that previous research [15] has found that healthy authors can maintain stable linguistic diversity into their late 80s, suggesting that the decline observed in Pratchett’s TTR is indicative of pathology rather than typical ageing.
IMO still all very inconclusive but an interesting avenue to explore.
Yep. The most jarring changes of style, worldbuilding, themes and characters are in the first four books (Pratchett once responded to a question about whether "the Patrician" in The Colour of Magic was the same man as Vetinari by saying yes, but he wasn't the same writer). The non Alzheimer's explanation for changes in vocabulary around the turn of the century is that he'd started writing Young Adult Discworld books (he'd written for younger audiences before, but in very different worlds) and for better or worse some of the changes bled through to his other works. Of course, that's also compatible with him having less capability to write complex books, but then I'm not really convinced Thud is less complex than The Colour of Magic...
True. I've noticed this in authors like M.A.R.Barker and Ursula LeGuin, their later works when they were older were very, very different from their earlier ones (in Barker's case the 20-year gap between the two groups probably made it a lot more obvious). If I'd encountered them as being from some random unknown author I probably wouldn't have read them.
I hope they've controlled it for an increasing proportion of the later books being aimed at Young Adult audiences...
(Though I guess that cuts both ways and you could argue that writing more simply using the established parts of your legendarium is exactly what you might aim for if you were less consistently able to handle complex plot threads and novel worldbuilding)
Yes, they did.
> Eight titles were excluded from the analysis due to them being either shorter than the other full-length novels (Eric, 1990; The Last Hero, 2001), or because they are part of his titles for younger readers (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, 2001; The Wee Free Men, 2003; A Hat Full of Sky, 2004; Wintersmith, 2006; I Shall Wear Midnight, 2010; The Shepherds Crown, 2015).
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken. GNU Terry Pratchett.
Or a thing for that matter, like Cthulhu, or Has&^*##NO CARRIER
Poor Ea-Nasir will never know peace.
Loved the paper. Would like to try to reproduce it with intelectual political leadership soon.
Politicians have speechwriters, though, so you wouldn't be analyzing who you think you're analyzing.
Speakers go off script, and some do it a lot.
I think it would work ok.
As Donald Trump comes to rely on the teleprompter more and more, his apparent intelligence will only increase.
That's what he comes out with while using the teleprompter??
He seems to stop following it often. Boredom? Changing his mind?
Yeah, but some actually do write most their own words for the most part. It would require some critical analysis for each individual for sure.
The US has some candidates for your research
Eg
https://youtu.be/6ing_Ibuw6s?si=hJXXkAoMArNinfgT
https://youtube.com/shorts/eZLku9hJPR8?si=d54L6OWWBnkLvz9-
Even just doing presidents would give a good dataset, Reagan, Bush Jr, Biden, Trump.
I can't help but feel this is a useful analysis for humanity, but somehow saddening for a fan of the person being analyzed. Almost overly invasive.
Would Sir Terry have appreciated or approved of this?
He seemed pretty curious about the world, and was pretty candid about his disease. Not to put words in his mouth, but I suspect he'd have been interested in this. I can imagine him have Lord Vetinari detect a decline from someone's writing and make some subtle move as a result!
Didn't the Oblivion NPC he contribute to get a bunch of features to help him deal with the problems he faced playing the game? I never met the man, but I think he'd be appreciative of the studies if they help people who suffer from dementia and/or Alzheimer’s.
I met Sir Terry Pratchett only once, briefly, at a book signing, and got scolded for a bad joke (and for letting him sign his first book, which he did not like), i think it's really hard to guess what he would have wanted at that time. This happened around 2006, after he knew about the dementia, but well before i or the public knew about it.
The younger Terry, unencumbered by dementia, would likely have loved the idea of analyzing his writing for most scientific purposes, he co-wrote multiple scientific fiction books together with physicists and other science communicators.
I actually regret making him upset, i did not know about his troubles at the time and i would not make the same (completely unrelated to his ailment) joke knowing about it, neither would i have brought his first book if i knew he disliked it.
Just imagine having your head full of a world you created, a world filled with more stories than you could ever write down, and realizing that you will never get a chance to do so and that it will all fade before you can share it. That experience must be extremely painful and for sure leads to changes in personality traits.
Right before i had my turn he signed the book of my girlfriend and he also signed her journal even though there was a strict "only one book per person" rule. When she asked him if he would sign the journal as well he said "I would even sign your hand, madam". This is the Terry i will remember, the charming and incredibly witty person that bestowed upon me the best stories i have ever enjoyed.
GNU Terry Pratchett, for Death can not have him!
I never spoke to the man, but reading the oodles and oodles of words he put out for the public over the years gives me the impression that he would find something like this mostly neat and worthwhile while still being a bit disquieting and weird.
Now everybody just needs to amass a corpus of 40+ beloved fantasy novels and we will finally have a dementia early warning system.
Doesn't load for me, try https://archive.is/dT8Tx
I don't know about this field, but in many parts of Computer Science, MDPI journals have a very, very bad reputation.