The bestselling SF writer talks about the rush to finish the Long Earth series, being the order to Terry Pratchett’s chaos and how maths helps him write
In the summer of 2013, Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett published The Long War, the second volume of their Long Earth science-fiction series, about parallel worlds that can be “stepped” into. By the end of that year, the two authors – both prolific by any standards – had completed drafts of the remaining three novels in the series. It was an astonishing rate of work, but there was a deadline that needed to be met: Pratchett had announced his diagnosis with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s in 2007. By the summer of 2014, he would pull out of a Discworld convention, citing “The Embuggerance”, which was “finally catching up with me”. He died in March this year.
“I think Terry was aware he was running out of time, and he wanted to do other things as well,” Baxter says. “So we rushed through it a little bit. Terry’s basic vision was the first step, but he also wanted to have a huge cosmic climax at the end, which would be book five ... We had no idea how to get there but we knew where we were going.”
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