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TERRY PRATCHETT was, Feedback guesses, the favourite fiction author of many of our readers. What can one say when the person who invented Death dies? The vicissitudes of weekly publication prevented our making a timely tribute to his encounter on 12 March with the anthropomorphic personification that he made a grim fictitious celebrity (and what other kind is there?) and that speaks in CAPITAL LETTERS.
We turn therefore for asynchronous inspiration to his book Thief of Time, so titled for the proverb that begins "procrastination is..." and the plot of which centres on the conceit that devices called "procrastinators" can stretch time as necessary or, for dramatic effect, unnecessarily. In this he remarked that "No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them ...
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