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dordreff posted:Carrot hasn't had a major role in a book since like The Fifth Elephant. That's not right! He was a major character in the Last Hero 
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May 2, 2016 15:26
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My Lovely Horse posted:I thought it was Carrot's. Vetinari may know who everyone is, but I think Carrot knows who everyone is but also gets to know everyone. Vetinari might be able to find out the things about you that you don't want people to know, but Carrot will be so damned personable that you'll tell him yourself. I think that this probably has to do with Carrot's unassailable Belief in the Law.
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May 2, 2016 16:14
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dordreff posted:Carrot hasn't had a major role in a book since like The Fifth Elephant. Its not like it was that much more to say about him.
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May 2, 2016 18:56
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Thud's been the only Watch book since then anyway. Night Watch and Snuff were both Vimes books.
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May 3, 2016 07:43
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MikeJF posted:Thud's been the only Watch book since then anyway. Night Watch and Snuff were both Vimes books. Kinda a bummer to see that the Vimes books consist of a major contender for the best Discworld novel, and a book that's mediocre at best.
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May 3, 2016 12:30
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I've just marathoned this thread over the past week and oh god how sad it is when you know where it's going. I started reading Discworld when Colour of Magic was released because, love him or loath him, Josh Kirby covers really leap at you off the bookshelves. I've devoured everything Terry ever wrote and even the not-so-good ones are still at the top of fantasy literature. Even Moving Pictures. Possibly not the Long Earth sequels - but I can blame the co-author. I have a theory about Raising Steam. I firmly believe Terry had only managed a rough outline of the characters and story and that somebody else did the composition. It just isn't Pratchetty enough. There's far too many callbacks, repetitions of funny observations from previous books. To me, it's like a collection of Discworld cameos. Buggrit, I enjoyed it just the same, just not as much as a "proper" Terry tale.
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May 9, 2016 12:25
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snograt posted:
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May 9, 2016 17:22
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Alhazred posted:Or maybe Pratchett knew that he wasn't going to be able to write that many more books and wanted to make sort of "last hurrah". I think that Pratchett would've been honest enough to say that he didn't write all of it. Or, and this is the actual answer, Pterry wasn't capable of reviewing the entirety of what he'd written. It's why Rob gets a prominent shout out on the later books; as his embuggerance progressed Pterry needed to have his work read back to him in order to sound it out. The last few books became segmented because it was being reviewed by the paragraph rather than in the greater context, and some jokes got repeated because Pterry didn't remember he'd used them before and he couldn't check so easily.
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May 9, 2016 18:40
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Yeah. He was a writer who worked by an endless process of refinement, and he became unable to do that. I don't even know if he would've written Raising Steam if he hadn't really wanted to get the Train book he'd been building up to for like the last dozen done.
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May 10, 2016 04:43
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snograt posted:Possibly not the Long Earth sequels - but I can blame the co-author.
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May 10, 2016 16:23
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DACK FAYDEN posted:That series is so weird. Both of the authors are great individually and yet somehow the collaborative product is borderline unreadable to me. I normally enjoy his characters that just happen to know everything, and are secretly controlling things behind the scenes, but in The Long Earth Lobsang is just intolerable, as is Sally(?) to a large extent.
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May 10, 2016 18:39
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I liked The Long Earth, and the sequels less so, but I think I mostly liked the concept of the long earth itself. The characters were just sort of there, doing everything perfectly at all times.
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May 10, 2016 23:39
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Jedit posted:Or, and this is the actual answer, Pterry wasn't capable of reviewing the entirety of what he'd written. It's why Rob gets a prominent shout out on the later books; as his embuggerance progressed Pterry needed to have his work read back to him in order to sound it out. The last few books became segmented because it was being reviewed by the paragraph rather than in the greater context, and some jokes got repeated because Pterry didn't remember he'd used them before and he couldn't check so easily. Yeah, that's the thing. He'd talked about his writing process before, and it involved dozens of exhaustive editing passes. The books got rougher once he couldn't read, and had to settle for less polish. Towards the end, he couldn't really edit like that anymore, because he couldn't keep the whole thing in his head at once. 
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May 11, 2016 00:10
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angerbeet posted:I liked The Long Earth, and the sequels less so, but I think I mostly liked the concept of the long earth itself. The characters were just sort of there, doing everything perfectly at all times. Same, I enjoyed the first one alright as it introduced a neat concept, but the sequels were pretty bad. I never read past the second one technically, but it was bad enough that I didn't want to pick up the third.
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May 13, 2016 13:27
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subx posted:Same, I enjoyed the first one alright as it introduced a neat concept, but the sequels were pretty bad. I never read past the second one technically, but it was bad enough that I didn't want to pick up the third. Yeah, I kinda had issues with the first one towards the end, with the switch from "Oh, hey, cool. The US government's being kinda logical on how to handle the issues arising from a near-infinite multiverse." to "Aaand now we're going full X-Men.", but it had a lot of neat things in with the problems. The sequel... When a book is called "The Long War", you expect, you know. A war. I admit, I was kind of curious how the logistics would be handled, security measures, any new weapons built to take advantage of the inherent properties of stepping. I mean, wars are horrible, but fictional wars are neat, even if the setup was contrived. I was expecting something at least mildly interesting. Not something stopped by a sit-in. I mean, for gently caress's sake. You say that wars are solved forever by infinite resources after spending the rest of the book highlighting that wars are just as often matters of ideology! Oh, and it was great how, after the first book spent so long showing that in the Long Earths there was nothing like humans and every other "smart" species thought very differently, that there were now dozens of aliens who you could just sit down and talk to, because that's so much more interesting that the idea of being terrifyingly alone in a vast cosmos with creatures that are, in a very real way not like you. Cripes. And that's ignoring how most of the book was just endless pointless subplots.
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May 14, 2016 10:27
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I'm trying to read through Shepherd's Crown. It manages to replicate the horrible experience of talking to a relative suffering from Alzheimer's in text form. Why am I doing this to myself?
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May 14, 2016 18:28
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Xander77 posted:I'm trying to read through Shepherd's Crown. It manages to replicate the horrible experience of talking to a relative suffering from Alzheimer's in text form. Oh good, yet another reason why I will not read that book, the first being the death of Granny Weatherwax. My grandmother passed away recently, but she'd been gone for years before that. Alzheimer's is, in many ways, the worst disease a person can suffer from because it takes away what makes a person a person, and leaves us someone broken and lost. EDIT: Sorry about the broken tag! Screaming Idiot fucked around with this message at 18:56 on May 14, 2016 |
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May 14, 2016 18:34
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Screaming Idiot posted:spoilers
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May 14, 2016 18:53
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angerbeet posted:I liked The Long Earth, and the sequels less so, but I think I mostly liked the concept of the long earth itself. The characters were just sort of there, doing everything perfectly at all times. It's a great world in which a great story could happen but doesn't. It mostly just reads like a worldbuilding bible being walked through by the characters. If you read the short in A Blink of the Screen (or was it A Slip of the Keyboard) that was the proto-long-earth, that shows what it could have been. Xander77 posted:I'm trying to read through Shepherd's Crown. It manages to replicate the horrible experience of talking to a relative suffering from Alzheimer's in text form.
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May 14, 2016 20:44
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thespaceinvader posted:Because Pterry deserves it, and so do you. it's a grand send off for him i felt. The end of Thud! was a good sendoff. The rest is listening to the EEG's beeps grow slower.
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May 15, 2016 05:26
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Xander77 posted:I'm trying to read through Shepherd's Crown. It manages to replicate the horrible experience of talking to a relative suffering from Alzheimer's in text form. Shepherd's Crown certainly had some problems (plot threads being resolved far too quickly, or dropped entirely, for example) but it at least was more coherent than Raising Steam.
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May 15, 2016 08:05
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Shepherd's Crown is still on my shelf, with the rest of the collection. I'll read it someday, when I'm ready.
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May 17, 2016 04:01
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dordreff posted:Shepherd's Crown certainly had some problems (plot threads being resolved far too quickly, or dropped entirely, for example) but it at least was more coherent than Raising Steam. Shepherd's Crown didn't have an ending really, well it had an ending, but not a resolution. Was goat-dude supposed to be the First Shepherd or whatever, and why did it matter? The whole book seemed like pTerry had something he really wanted to say about the nature of modern masculinity, but he never quite wrapped it up.
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Jun 1, 2016 15:43
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Even without context I'd have a really hard time ever recommending anyone, ever, read Raising Steam. It's just quite bad.
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Jun 4, 2016 03:12
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Blind Melon posted:he never quite wrapped it up.
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Jun 5, 2016 13:47
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Whatever happened with that mysterious Facebook image anyway? About the thing happening in May?
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Jun 5, 2016 17:17
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Wee Free Men adaptation coming.
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Jul 19, 2016 16:37
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I'm almost done with Shepherd's Crown. Have to put it down every few paragraphs and go read something that isn't... quite as much of a wreck. You know what's a better final tribute? Nelly Cootalot. Yeah, really. It wears its Monkey Island influence on its sleeve, but as I've re-read most of Discworld over the last few, it's really obvious how much of the humor and setup-payoff style is based on the better Discworld books. Every time SC bungles that most basic setup and delivery, I flash back to NC and how well it did in taking up the Pratchett style and applying it to its own settings and characters.
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Jul 19, 2016 17:04
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The railway one is actually the only one where Pratchett's mind death shows. All the other ones are more or less fine but not all brilliant.
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Jul 19, 2016 19:47
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Jerry Cotton posted:The railway one is actually the only one where Pratchett's mind death shows. All the other ones are more or less fine but not all brilliant. The degradation started around Unseen Academicals and became undeniable by Snuff. I wish I'd never read the latter.
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Jul 19, 2016 21:06
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Oxxidation posted:The degradation started around Unseen Academicals and became undeniable by Snuff. I wish I'd never read the latter. I liked Snuff  But Unseen Academicals was about football which is why I loathed it 
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Jul 19, 2016 21:07
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I don't actually think anything was wrong with Unseen Academicals except that it was chock-full of references that only make sense to British people, more than any other Discworld book I could name.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:13
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Finally finished Shepherd's Crown, and for all the problems with it I was quite torn up by the end. Especially by the Afterword. Vale, Pterry.
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Jul 19, 2016 22:28
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't actually think anything was wrong with Unseen Academicals except that it was chock-full of references that only make sense to British people, more than any other Discworld book I could name. It had that weird orc plot that kind of came out of nowhere and didn't go anywhere. And the Patrician being weirdly obsessed with a random baker, to the point where he puzzles out her secret cheese and onion pie recipe. Other than that, its only crime was being British as git.
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Jul 19, 2016 23:55
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Kajeesus posted:It had that weird orc plot that kind of came out of nowhere and didn't go anywhere. And the Patrician being weirdly obsessed with a random baker, to the point where he puzzles out her secret cheese and onion pie recipe. Other than that, its only crime was being British as git. The orc plot feels like it fits into the theme of "you can't just be nice and hope people will like you, you have to demand that they do." Also I'm obsessed with good pies, so the Patrician should be, too. Meanwhile, I'm rather irritated that the quality of Pratchett's books on audible.com is much lower than the quality of the same books from the same publisher on audible.co.uk.
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Jul 20, 2016 03:04
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like I thought he was gonna go with something about hte orc hivemind vs being part of a sports group and that just fizzled
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Jul 20, 2016 04:52
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Kajeesus posted:It had that weird orc plot that kind of came out of nowhere and didn't go anywhere. And the Patrician being weirdly obsessed with a random baker, to the point where he puzzles out her secret cheese and onion pie recipe. Other than that, its only crime was being British as git. I still think it was odd that he did the book about goblins after the book where a major plot point is that a character is initially thought to be a goblin, but is later revealed to be an orc. (I think prior to Unseen Academicals the only statement about Goblins in Discworld was "A goblin is a gnome while it is underground. A gnome is a goblin coming up for air" back in the Light Fantastic.)
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Jul 20, 2016 12:28
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So I got around to reading The Long Cosmos and my overall reaction to it was: ...meh.
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Jul 21, 2016 13:30
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Jerry Cotton posted:I liked Snuff I like the ideas behind Snuff. The stuff about the Goblins and the dreadful algebra of necessity was good, but the actual writing craft was sorrowful.
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Jul 21, 2016 15:05
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EvilTaytoMan posted:So I got around to reading The Long Cosmos and my overall reaction to it was: ...meh. This worries me. The series lost it's lustre as it progressed and I was hoping the final book would be better. It's on my shelf but I have to admit the last few Pratchett books have made me a little gun shy.
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Jul 21, 2016 17:30
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