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Death and What Comes Next

Death and What Comes Next

Short storyFantasyHumor
Pages
1
Published
2002
Language
English

Synopsis

Death sits down to play chess with an elderly philosopher. The philosopher, however, insists on arguing about the rules. A brief, clever philosophical dialogue in which the figure of Death encounters a man who refuses to accept the standard terms of the conversation, and who has thought more carefully about the nature of time, observation, and existence than Death has accounted for. Originally published online on the Discworld website.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

FunnyPhilosophicalThought-Provoking
Reluctant HeroRivals

Genres

Fantasy Humor Short Stories

About the author

T
Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) was an English author best known for the Discworld series, a sequence of forty-one comic fantasy novels set on a flat world carried through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle. Across four decades, the Discworld grew from a parody of sword-and-sorcery fantasy into one of the most sustained works of social satire in English literature, examining politics, religion, science, gender, race, capitalism, and the nature of stories themselves. Pra...

Characters

Death (Discworld)Protagonist

The Disc's anthropomorphic personification of Death — a skeletal figure who speaks in capital letters — here drawn into a chess-and-quantum-mechanics argument with a dying philosopher who refuses to accept that he has lost.

All characters in Death and What Comes Next

Frequently asked questions

  • What is Death and What Comes Next?

    A very short story (approximately 800 words) in which Death plays chess with a philosopher who reframes the game using quantum mechanics. Originally published online on the Discworld.com website and later collected in A Blink of the Screen (2012).

  • Is this a standalone story?

    Yes. No prior Discworld knowledge is required, though familiarity with the character of Death — specifically his chess-playing habits, a running joke in the series — adds a layer.

  • What philosophical concept does the story engage?

    The story plays with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: the idea that every quantum event branches into all possible outcomes, and that therefore every possible game of chess is simultaneously being played. The philosopher uses this to argue that he cannot technically lose.