From The New York Times:
Terry Pratchett, the well-known British fantasy author, had a wish fulfilled two years after his death: A hard drive containing his unpublished work was destroyed by steamroller.
Mr. Pratchett, a wildly popular fantasy novelist who wrote more than 70 books, including the “Discworld” series, died at 66 in 2015. That year his friend, the writer Neil Gaiman, told The Times of London that Mr. Pratchett had wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all.” Mr. Gaiman added at the time that he was glad this hadn’t happened.
Now, though, it has. Mr. Pratchett’s estate manager and close friend, Rob Wilkins, posted a picture of a hard drive and a steamroller on Aug. 25 on an official Twitter account they shared.
Link to the rest at The New York Times (Steamroller photos at the link)
PG will note there are other methods of destroying information on a hard drive, but they don’t result in very interesting photos.
At least one of his last books was written in conjunction with his daughter.
I’m sure someone copied the drives in the two years since then, prior to this.
That’s what I was thinking. When you can rent a terabyte of space on Google Drive for $9.99/month, and for all I know find it cheaper elsewhere, why risk having anything just in one place? Especially if you’re, well, Terry Pratchett, one of the bestselling authors of the past thirty years.
Good grief, I got 200 gigabytes added to my Google account for free as a toss in for the next few years simply by virtue of buying a Chromebook and an Android phone.
Dropbox is $8.25 a month for 1TB.
Office 365 offers 5 1TB accounts plus 5 installs of MSoffice for $8 a month ($99 a year) along with free mobile apps.
Amazon is $60 a year for 1TB.
Cloud storage is cheap.
Even cheaper (free) if all you need is a few GB to store manuscripts so it is possible to store your manuscripts on all of the above.
I expect the oh-so-public demolition was intended to de-legitimize any such “discoveries”.
Nice to see some people respect a dead author’s wishes. Good for them.
Good for him!
Hopefully, now there will be no chance of a Harper Lee incident for Terry Pratchett.
This^
At least he kept the vultures from benefiting from his death.
Exactly what I was thinking. Especially anything from his youth (when he would be less skilled by default) or anything after his diagnosis (when he may have felt his abilities diminished below his own standards). It’s cruel to a creator to release work he didn’t believe worthy of release.
Maybe now they can be shot out of Hunter S. Thompson’s cannon, too.