In an age of open hostility, Terry Pratchett’s militant decency is more urgent than ever

Ten years ago today, Terry Pratchett died. He was one of the bestselling authors of his generation, knighted for services to literature. A man who responded to an Alzheimer's diagnosis by making it a political issue, working for increased funding and awareness while campaigning to legalise assisted dying, something he did while authoring or co-authoring another 10 novels. In his own words, he was, "from birth to death, a writer".

Pratchett was often minimised and dismissed because he wrote fantasy novels — he was very proud of that. They were about wizards and witches, incarnations of Death, talking rats, giant turtles and tortoise gods and, on one occasion, a sentient cheese. Those books have sold over a hundred million copies. And because they were fantasy, and funny, and, above all, because they were popular and bought by the sort of people who read them on the Tube and swapped them down the pub, he was often ridiculed. "A complete amateur," snorted the poet Tom Paulin on BBC's Newsnight Review in 1994. "Doesn't even write in chapters." This epithet was added to the back cover of Pratchett's next book.

Paulin's broadside sums it up. While the likes of William Burroughs and Irvine Welsh can break the form of the novel and be hailed as geniuses, Pratchett, as he once said himself, put in "one lousy dragon" and was deemed a hack.

What the more supercilious literati overlooked was that Pratchett wrote about people. He used fantasy to reveal the weirdness, cruelty and everyday brilliance of humanity. Readers didn't respond because his books were set in a flat world carried through space by a turtle but because they were achingly, and often ridiculously, human.

They were also angry. At Pratchett's core was a finely tuned sense of injustice that powered his best work. He couldn't abide bullies, pettiness, or bureaucracy that saw people as "things" – an attitude that he once described as being the very definition of sin.

Those who studied his work describe his approach as "militant decency," though he never used the phrase himself. His books are deeply moral but never sanctimonious. They burn, yet are tempered with warmth and wit. They understand the world's cruelty but insist that people are neither fundamentally bad nor good but "fundamentally people".

Pratchett’s characters fought against injustice through small, persistent acts of goodness. The cop Sam Vimes refused to let the powerful grind down the weak. The witch Granny Weatherwax gave people what they needed, not what they wanted. Her young colleague Tiffany Aching learned that being a witch wasn't about magic, but about looking after those who had no one else. Pratchett's books hammered home the message that doing the right thing is often difficult, exhausting, and thankless, but that doesn't mean you don't do it. This was a man who, when knighted by the Queen in 2009, forged his own sword – his rationale being that if you’re going to be a knight, you ought to act like one.

That spirit underpinned everything he wrote. His books cut through hypocrisies with razor-sharp clarity, not just by pointing them out, but by showing how they could be fought with determination, wit, and decency. His characters weren’t perfect, but they tried. In Pratchett’s world, trying mattered. In an age of lies that spread around the world "before the truth has got its boots on" and open hostility towards marginalised groups, Pratchett's militant decency feels more urgent than ever. He understood that kindness isn't passive but an active, radical stance. His books remind us that it's not enough to be good in our hearts, we must also be good in our actions. We must stand up, speak out, and refuse to accept a world defined by pettiness and indifference.

Ten years after his death, we don't just miss Terry Pratchett's writing. We miss his voice; his wisdom, wit, and ability to cut to the heart of things. But people live on in the stories they leave behind. Pratchett's stories, full of fire, compassion, and a stubborn refusal to let injustice go unchecked (and also some deeply, deeply silly jokes), still have so much to teach us.

The world is still ridiculous. It is still cruel. And we still need people who refuse to treat others as things.

Now more than ever, we need Terry Pratchett.

Marc Burrows is the author of The Magic of Terry Pratchett