Once More With Footnotes

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A cknowledgments
     
    Living in the future is neat: it has taken the labor-intensive act of producing a book out of the specialist realm and put it within reach of anyone with a personal computer, provided that person is crazy enough to brave Titivillus, bane of medieval scribes and the original printer's devil.
     
    Producing a book is still a labor-intensive endeavor, though, and many people have helped with this one: I'd like to thank Terry Pratchett for agre eing to do a Noreascon 4 Guest-of-Honor book and for mining his archives for, and providing introductions to, the material it contains; MCFI, the Noreascon 4 Committee, and NESFA Press for making the book possible and letting me work on it; Omar and Sheil a Rayyan for the beautiful cover; Esther Friesner for writing the introduction; Colin, Geri, Claire, Pat, Jan, and everyone else who helped track things down; Priscilla, Mark, Deb, Mike, George, Tony, Sharon, Bob, Paula, and all the other members of NESFA w ho helped out in various capacities.
     
    — Sheila M. Perry
    June 2004
     

 
                  Terry Pratchett was born in England in the small town of Beaconsfield, currently being engulfed by London's sprawl, and now lives with his wife Lyn in Wiltshire, close enough to Stoneh enge to find it boring. Their daughter Rhianna is a journalist, on the basis that it worked for her dad.
     
                  Since writing was his hobby, he doesn't actually have one now. However, he reads a lot, grows things, and last year achieved a boyhood dream by build ing an astronomical observatory in his garden. In 1998, he was awarded the OBE in the Queens Birthday Honours List for "services to literature." He suspects, however, that the best service he has done for literature is deny that he writes it.
     
                 
     
                  Omar & S heila Rayyan were both born somewhere at some time years later met while they were attending the Rhode Island School of Design as Illustration majors. They moved to the island of Martha's Vineyard soon after graduation and haven't left since b ecause neithe r of them knows how to sail. Luckily with the advent of the Internet and email they have been able to reconnect s omewhat with the outside world. They share their studio with a cat, t wo budgies, and a se lection of fish. To view s ome of their creations, visi t their web site at www.studiorayyan.com.
     
                 
     
    Dust jacket illustration c 2004 by Omar Rayyan
    Dust jacket design by Omar & Sheila Rayyan
     

Over the years, in addition to his wildly popular Discworld, Johnny Maxwell, and Nome books, Terry Pratchett has also written an assortment of short stories, articles, introductions, and ephemera. These have appeared in books, magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and program books, many of which are now hard to find.
     
    Here in one convenient volume, with introductory notes from Mr. Pratchett, are such elusive pieces as: The Hades Business, Once and Future, The Secret Book of the Dead, Hollywood Chickens, Turntables of the Night, Final Reward, Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting, and more.
     
     
     
     
     
                  "Pratchett's h umour is based on solid observation, the ability to view gobbets of the commonplace through the distorting microscope of fantastic comedy, to make the grotesque seem familiar and the familiar grotesque." — Tom Holt in SFX Magazine
     
                  "Pratchett is the funnies t parodist working in the field today, period." — The New York Review of Science Fiction
     
                  "Terry