On Pratchett
Well, that was a full weekend. My cat is in hiding, my garage is once more my own and is half way through a massive reorganization, my house is slightly but significantly emptier of stuff I don't want - the last of Kjersti's stuff that I'm not actively using is gone. Oh, and I might just have sold my first book.
But what I thought I'd put here today was a little bit of a message from an email list I'm on, about why I love the writing of Terry Pratchett.
An acquaintance was saying that he rates Guards, Guards as one of the very best of TP's books, along with Carpe Jugulum, The Last Continent, Maskerade, The Truth, Witches Abroad and Wyrd Sisters - and also Nanny Ogg's Cookbook - and much better than Small Gods. I had to reply...
Small Gods is one of my very favourites among Pratchett's novels, and he is the single writer whom I buy most consistently and re-read the most. By this measure - how much of his stuff I own & how much i reread it - you could justifiably call him my favourite writer.
But for me, Guards! Guards! is just another "Watch" book - all right, but pretty much forgettable. I enjoy the Watch books - I enjoy all his books - but they're amongst my least-favourite of the Discworld canon.
Pyramids is also a good 'un, though my favourite Discworld novel remains the first, and I rate The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata higher than any and all Discworld stuff.
All, of course, IMHO, and de gustibus non est disputandum applies in spades.
Why?
Well, I find Carpe Jugulum a fun romp - I did like the rebellious teenage vampire wearing bright coloured clothes with flowers on - but a bit of a one-gag show.
The Last Continent is for me an almost tiresome roundup of every Australian gag ever, but nicely respectful of the Australian Aborigines. I also liked the god of evolution. And I have made a meat pie floater (from a Holland & Barrett Porkless Pork Pie) and lo, it was good. Well, it was interesting, anyway.
Maskerade has two all right gags - the fat bloke who isn't actually exotic at all, and the difference in treatment of the fat girl who can sing and the thin pretty one who can't. Otherwise, I found it a bit of a damp squib.
The Truth was sadly forgettable. Newspapers in Ankh-Morpork. Far too reminiscent of the one about guns in AM and the one about reviving the post in AM and the one about...
The original Witches trilogy I find enjoyable chiefly for things like Nanny's reactions to travel, and the very disrespectful Shakespeare riffs. And the fearsome Lancre Stick & Bucket Dance. Witches Abroad also has what I think is Pratchett's best-ever vampire gag. (The ballistic garlic sausage, plus Greebo.)
As for the cookbook - well, best not go there.
So I found these to be interesting choices. Don't get me wrong - I love TP's stuff - but this chap clearly gets something very different out of it to me. All his favourites are the ones that seemed to me to be almost irritating one-joke-extended-as-far-as-it-will-possibly-go efforts.
I like Pyramids because of the sheer silliness of Djelibeybi ("Lit., 'Child of the Djel'." Wonderful! Like a Round the Horne or Carry On movie gag - you see it coming a mile off, it's so obvious you groan, but it's done so well that you have to laugh. "Jelly Baby" = "Child of the Djel". Amazing what you can get away with when you're a famous successful author!)
I like Small Gods because, perhaps more than any of his books, and they are all social commentaries, it says Big Important Things about the world, things that are not often enough said. Such as that all religions are lies, even if they were based in a germ of truth, and that you should never, *ever* trust priests.
I love The Colour of Magic because it's not only bursting with ideas, but full to bulging with affectionate fantasy parodies, from the dragons that are only there if you believe in them enough to the barbarian hero who can't add 1 and 2 but does have a magic sword, but all this is well written - little touches like "an astral plane that was never meant to fly" and "a small vein started to pulse in his forehead" when Withel the Thief works out how much money Twoflower is worth. It's a brilliant parody, it's also stuffed full of originality, and it's done well. One could hardly ask for more! The later novels aren't parodies any more, mostly - they're just comic novels, set in his own increasingly-well-realised world. When he does do parody, he now does extended riffs on simple gags, like, say, bringing guns or movies or rock'n'roll to his mediæval fantasy world; bringing in anachronistic outside elements from our world and plonking them down on the Disc, to see what happens. It's educational and it gives him a great platform to observe people from, but it doesn't push my buttons as well as Terry Pratchett the idea-smith.
Above all these, I love The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata, because they're not parodies or comedies at all, yet they are still bursting with original ideas. Concepts such as googoo and probability math and Ways the robot designed to be lucky from TDSOTS, and from Strata, the company scrip (Days of life as the ultimate hard currency) and the terraforming machines and the careful technological explanations of demons and flying carpets and flying horses and everything, these are, I feel, amongst SF's all time great gadgets and inventions. Plus both have great denouements; Neal Stephenson, watch and learn!
Couple this with aliens human enough to talk to but still very alien, like Hrsh-Hgn the Phnobic scholar, and Silver, and Marco, the alien poetry, Charles Sub Lunar (one of the team of the poet and the mad computer which decoded Joker Linear A), the First Sirian Bank, and the stars of the shows, Dom Sabalos and Kin Arad, great, memorable, likeable-but-real, flawed, characters...
Phnobic poetry, Janglic versus jaw-breaking Phobic ("Ah! A scholar!", said [the eternally damp] Hrsh-Hgn, dryly), robot spiders eating robot flies in robot woodlands, shamswords, hunters pursuing giant elk through a spacecraft in hyperspace, sarcastic robots singing electronic paeans of superior intelligence, the rise of the sundog pups from the shores of an intelligent sea (done, for my money, miles better than Stanislaw bloody Lem)... There are enough ideas in that first adult novel to propel lesser writers through an entire career. Yet Pratchett's never bothered to go back to any of them and most of the fans just want more Discworld. It's so very sad.
Gods, I cannot praise those books enough.
They are priceless.
But what I thought I'd put here today was a little bit of a message from an email list I'm on, about why I love the writing of Terry Pratchett.
An acquaintance was saying that he rates Guards, Guards as one of the very best of TP's books, along with Carpe Jugulum, The Last Continent, Maskerade, The Truth, Witches Abroad and Wyrd Sisters - and also Nanny Ogg's Cookbook - and much better than Small Gods. I had to reply...
Small Gods is one of my very favourites among Pratchett's novels, and he is the single writer whom I buy most consistently and re-read the most. By this measure - how much of his stuff I own & how much i reread it - you could justifiably call him my favourite writer.
But for me, Guards! Guards! is just another "Watch" book - all right, but pretty much forgettable. I enjoy the Watch books - I enjoy all his books - but they're amongst my least-favourite of the Discworld canon.
Pyramids is also a good 'un, though my favourite Discworld novel remains the first, and I rate The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata higher than any and all Discworld stuff.
All, of course, IMHO, and de gustibus non est disputandum applies in spades.
Why?
Well, I find Carpe Jugulum a fun romp - I did like the rebellious teenage vampire wearing bright coloured clothes with flowers on - but a bit of a one-gag show.
The Last Continent is for me an almost tiresome roundup of every Australian gag ever, but nicely respectful of the Australian Aborigines. I also liked the god of evolution. And I have made a meat pie floater (from a Holland & Barrett Porkless Pork Pie) and lo, it was good. Well, it was interesting, anyway.
Maskerade has two all right gags - the fat bloke who isn't actually exotic at all, and the difference in treatment of the fat girl who can sing and the thin pretty one who can't. Otherwise, I found it a bit of a damp squib.
The Truth was sadly forgettable. Newspapers in Ankh-Morpork. Far too reminiscent of the one about guns in AM and the one about reviving the post in AM and the one about...
The original Witches trilogy I find enjoyable chiefly for things like Nanny's reactions to travel, and the very disrespectful Shakespeare riffs. And the fearsome Lancre Stick & Bucket Dance. Witches Abroad also has what I think is Pratchett's best-ever vampire gag. (The ballistic garlic sausage, plus Greebo.)
As for the cookbook - well, best not go there.
So I found these to be interesting choices. Don't get me wrong - I love TP's stuff - but this chap clearly gets something very different out of it to me. All his favourites are the ones that seemed to me to be almost irritating one-joke-extended-as-far-as-it-will-possibly-go efforts.
I like Pyramids because of the sheer silliness of Djelibeybi ("Lit., 'Child of the Djel'." Wonderful! Like a Round the Horne or Carry On movie gag - you see it coming a mile off, it's so obvious you groan, but it's done so well that you have to laugh. "Jelly Baby" = "Child of the Djel". Amazing what you can get away with when you're a famous successful author!)
I like Small Gods because, perhaps more than any of his books, and they are all social commentaries, it says Big Important Things about the world, things that are not often enough said. Such as that all religions are lies, even if they were based in a germ of truth, and that you should never, *ever* trust priests.
I love The Colour of Magic because it's not only bursting with ideas, but full to bulging with affectionate fantasy parodies, from the dragons that are only there if you believe in them enough to the barbarian hero who can't add 1 and 2 but does have a magic sword, but all this is well written - little touches like "an astral plane that was never meant to fly" and "a small vein started to pulse in his forehead" when Withel the Thief works out how much money Twoflower is worth. It's a brilliant parody, it's also stuffed full of originality, and it's done well. One could hardly ask for more! The later novels aren't parodies any more, mostly - they're just comic novels, set in his own increasingly-well-realised world. When he does do parody, he now does extended riffs on simple gags, like, say, bringing guns or movies or rock'n'roll to his mediæval fantasy world; bringing in anachronistic outside elements from our world and plonking them down on the Disc, to see what happens. It's educational and it gives him a great platform to observe people from, but it doesn't push my buttons as well as Terry Pratchett the idea-smith.
Above all these, I love The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata, because they're not parodies or comedies at all, yet they are still bursting with original ideas. Concepts such as googoo and probability math and Ways the robot designed to be lucky from TDSOTS, and from Strata, the company scrip (Days of life as the ultimate hard currency) and the terraforming machines and the careful technological explanations of demons and flying carpets and flying horses and everything, these are, I feel, amongst SF's all time great gadgets and inventions. Plus both have great denouements; Neal Stephenson, watch and learn!
Couple this with aliens human enough to talk to but still very alien, like Hrsh-Hgn the Phnobic scholar, and Silver, and Marco, the alien poetry, Charles Sub Lunar (one of the team of the poet and the mad computer which decoded Joker Linear A), the First Sirian Bank, and the stars of the shows, Dom Sabalos and Kin Arad, great, memorable, likeable-but-real, flawed, characters...
Phnobic poetry, Janglic versus jaw-breaking Phobic ("Ah! A scholar!", said [the eternally damp] Hrsh-Hgn, dryly), robot spiders eating robot flies in robot woodlands, shamswords, hunters pursuing giant elk through a spacecraft in hyperspace, sarcastic robots singing electronic paeans of superior intelligence, the rise of the sundog pups from the shores of an intelligent sea (done, for my money, miles better than Stanislaw bloody Lem)... There are enough ideas in that first adult novel to propel lesser writers through an entire career. Yet Pratchett's never bothered to go back to any of them and most of the fans just want more Discworld. It's so very sad.
Gods, I cannot praise those books enough.
They are priceless.