A third child is born in the hospital at the same time there is “a golden-haired male baby we will call Baby A … a golden-haired male baby we will call Baby B a golden-haired male baby we will call the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness”. Except, in this version, there’s a cock-up. An American diplomat’s wife gives birth at a British religious hospital, but the baby is then swapped without her knowledge for a demonic child of Satan. Its beginning is familiar to anyone who has seen The Omen. Gaiman, “because I was not stupid, and because that was the nearest I was ever going to get to Michelangelo phoning to ask if I wanted to paint a ceiling with him”, said “write it together”. By 1987, he’d churned out three more, and felt able to give up puffing the nuclear industry to write full time. Space Voyager folded in September of that year, but Pratchett’s novel, The Colour of Magic, spawned his Discworld series, which would go on to include another 40 books and sell 80 million copies. The two got on they drank, they chatted a short interview emerged.

At that point, Pratchett was still working as a press officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board, trying to do PR for four nuclear power stations. The first writer was a journalist, Neil Gaiman the second, Terry Pratchett, who had just published his fourth novel. The book in question, Good Omens – now an Amazon/BBC TV series starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant – is a marvellous, blasphemous mishmash of the two men’s different yet complementary styles and a whole melting-pot of takeoffs, from classic horror to Just William. It sparked a lifelong friendship, and – perhaps more importantly – one of the great works of late-20th-century English comic literature.

The first was interviewing the second for a short-lived sci-fi-and-futurism magazine called Space Voyager. In 1985, a young writer and another, slightly less young, writer met in a Chinese restaurant, probably somewhere in the Home Counties.

Neil gaiman terry pratchett death