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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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Jerry Cotton posted:Anyway I've read all the Pratchett books what do I read now? All of them? Even the Mappes? Even the limited edition Mappes?
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Jul 28, 2016 06:54
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Jerry Cotton posted:I was buying a present for my nephew for his birthday and I guess everyone in Finland who reads Pratchett reads it in English because there were basically no Finnish translations in the book stores. loving nerds I'd say it's pretty reasonable, assuming you can read English. A lot of jokes revolve around how Pratchett played with the language. You'd need a top-notch localizer to get similar quality out of a translation, and for all I know, the Finnish translation is well below par.
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Jul 29, 2016 09:16
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Jerry Cotton posted:Does this mean you haven't read any of the Finnish translations or that you haven't read any of the originals? You caught me. Despite posting in a Pratchett thread, discussing the details of his work, and bringing up specific points in the very post you quoted, I have never read Discworld. In fact, I cannot read in general, typing these posts by mashing my face against the keyboard at random. I've never confessed this before. Perhaps... perhaps I feel willing to tell you because I find a kindred spirit. (Also, the "translation loses something, no matter how well done" bit is older than anime nerds. It's kind of a thing with, say, classics scholars discussing fundamental works of western literature. Writing isn't just about what you say, but how you say it, and different languages cover the same concepts differently. For a quick example, Chinese has a lot of similar sounding words, making for a lot of puns that don't work as well in other languages. It means that a fair number of Pratchett's puns, being heavily based in the weirdness of the English language, have to be replaced. And considering half the reason you'd read Pratchett is the jokes...)
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Jul 30, 2016 03:23
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GodFish posted:That works for Mort and Soul Music, but Susan isn't in Mort. In the other two Susan books Death tricks her into solving the problems that he can't because of the rules. It also doesn't work for the good half of "Reaper Man" where Death is the lead character. He gets the arc, he deals with the problems, he develops and deals with his new mortality.
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Jul 31, 2016 00:09
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YggiDee posted:It never goes away entirely, I think. Thief of Time opens with a reference to the Titanic movie. Thud has a reference to the London Underground's logo towards the end. Gets less common, and more subtle, but it's too ingrained in the Discworld to go away entirely.
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Aug 7, 2016 23:52
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YggiDee posted:I was never sure! The books always talk about how everyone knows Carrot and everyone trusts Carrot and how much everyone in Ankh Morpork loves Carrot so I figured maybe I was missing something. Sam Vimes spends a lot of time noticing how much people love and trust Carrot. You don't get the idea he's thrilled with that fact.
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Sep 12, 2016 00:58
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Screaming Idiot posted:No, Carrot is just The Worst Dwarf. He's tall and handsome and a genius but so very simple and likeable and lovable and it's totally not weird at all that Angua thinks of herself as his dog and everyone loves him and on and on and on. He's a parody that accidentally turned into an example of what Pratchett was parodying. I let out a little cheer when Wolfgang went Goku on his rear end. I really liked Carrot in Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms, but he got a little insufferable after that. Uh, no. It's hosed up. It's something Angua constantly has issues with because it's weird and kind of hosed up, and part of the problem is, because Carrot is Carrot, it's hard to tell how much of that is on him, and it's something that can't be addressed like you could with anyone else, because Carrot's whole charismatic hard to argue with thing is so intrinsically tied into his nature. Like, the central problem with their relationship is that it's nearly impossible to tell how much of liking Carrot is that you like Carrot, and how much is that Carrot is not-exactly-supernaturally likable. Someone like Vimes or Vetinari can more or less get through, because they have the absurd levels of cynicism and personal distrust that mean they don't let their thought go free anyway, so Carrot just adds one more reason they shouldn't trust themselves. Someone like Colon or Nobby is fine, because they don't much bother with that kind of question. But Angua is at ground zero, and she's at the exact wrong level of awareness, because it only tangles her in deeper.
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Sep 12, 2016 10:10
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SystemLogoff posted:I got through Color of Magic, then picked Thief of Time for my second book. My first Discworld was "Pyramids". A decent starting place, I think. Standalone, good enough to not be a turnoff, but not so good as to make the next book disappointing, and late in enough that Ankh Morpork was starting to feel proper. The next one was Men at Arms, followed by Night Watch. The time gap between the two was a BIT disorienting, but Night Watch made up for it by being so very good. Still my pick for top Pratchett.
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Sep 29, 2016 07:22
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iajanus posted:Finally filled in the missing gap in my bookshelf. God drat whoever borrowed Men At Arms all those years ago and never gave it back. Look, when you lend out a Pratchett book, you should accept up front that you're never going to see it again. It's the way of the world.
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Aug 21, 2017 02:44
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Eric the Mauve posted:
I've always thought half of Reaper Man is top tier. It's just the Windle Poons stuff drags it down.
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Sep 9, 2017 01:00
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Hogge Wild posted:yeah And they're so disconnected, too. Like, they share an inciting incident, and DEATH shows up again at the end. That's it. Yes, it's said the shopping mall thing is from DEATH being on holiday, supposedly, but there's plenty of things like that mess when he's around, too. It's weird.
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Sep 13, 2017 09:41
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Skippy McPants posted:All around, Pratchett's pun game was on point in Soul Music. So many puns. It was pun dense even by Pratchett standards.
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Oct 28, 2017 12:33
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The_Doctor posted:Yes but before Snuff, he wasn't written like that. He was always written as a gentleman's gentleman, who just happened to have a rather nasty side in street violence when needed. In Snuff he's not written like that at all, and is basically written as just another working class member of the Watch. Yeah. Up to Snuff, he was a Jeeves type who happened to have been a bit of a rough customer in his youth, and still remembered the trick of it. In Snuff, he was a street tough who happened to be working as a gentleman's gentleman. Didn't really work as well.
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Oct 31, 2017 12:25
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fluppet posted:I'm sure I've owned a copy of all the Discworld books but now my kids are old enough to start reading them there's an awful lot missing from my bookshelves You probably loaned them to someone. Happens to the best of us.
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Jan 30, 2018 07:48
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Shoehead posted:Charles Dance as Vetinari?? poo poo I'm gonna have to track this down. It especially stands out because Freds and Nobbys were universal constants. Pratchett said that at signings, every time he met police of any kind they said that their precinct had a Fred and a Nobby. Sometimes, he heard this from people who clearly were their station's Fred or Nobby, even if they personally were unaware of the fact.
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Jan 29, 2020 07:59
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:The concept IS interesting, but midway through book two you can't help but realize that the basic concept is all they had when they started and now they're just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and then they wrote three more books after that. The thing that was really damning about the series, for me, was reading "The High Meggas", the 1986 short story that Pratchett wrote that forms the basis for the whole thing. It's just... so much better. The characters are more vivid, the premise is more compelling, the writing is snappy instead of a trudge, and generally, it's just a much more entertaining read. Makes the flaws of the Long Earth stand out more.
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Feb 17, 2021 11:56
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Lugubrious posted:I think the Chinese restaurant menu was just one of the things Pratchett said he'd fed into the Markov chain, but "millenium hand" is a lyric from a They Might Be Giants song, and he was a big fan of theirs so he probably put some of their lyrics in there too. He did. It was a combination of Particle Man and a Chinese restaurant menu fed to an atrocity generator.
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Apr 16, 2021 23:21
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