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Taear posted:Lancre is Lancashire. Or at least I always assumed it was. Pratchett was born and raised in Buckinghamshire though, so I guess it might not be. I think the witches are something very very english and it's hard for readers from other countries to relate to them. I was brought up in a rural town in Derbyshire and every single archetype from the novels is there. It's like reading your childhood, but with magic. I'd argue that. Growing up in rural midwestern America, I relate to the witches just fine. Small town life isn't that different here, after all. 
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Jun 16, 2008 05:57
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shadok posted:I think this is mostly true with perhaps one exception: you don't really understand the crucial and central importance of tea, and why putting the kettle on is the correct response to any crisis. I think that chart may have disregarded the all-importance of iced tea.
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Aug 8, 2008 07:42
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magimix posted:I bought a Kindle the other day, and 'christened' it by buying my favourite Discworld books[1], plus I Shall Wear Midnight. From what I've seen having read three of them, the formatting is fine. In terms of footnotes, what they do is have the footnote number as a hyperlink. You navigate to, and click on, the link and it takes you to the footnote text. Thereafter, just hit the Back button to return to where you were. Seems an elegant enough solution. I can second this as well. Other than Monstrous Regiment, which for some reason didn't do the footnotes properly on my phone, all the kindle versions I've read have been great.
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Feb 6, 2011 16:19
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Decius posted:Can't really agree, ISWM was one of my favourite books in the last 10 years and I enjoyed it very much (so much that it made me reread all the witches books again) without anything sound "off". Unseen Academical less so to be honest. I'd agree with you there. ISWM didn't feel off to me at all, it just had more internal narrative on Tiffany's par, and she has picked up a lot from Granny in training. Since we almost never see what's really going on inside of Granny's head, just what Nanny or the other one see of it, someone with a similar perspective is a bit different. I really liked UA as well, because it really seemed like the sort of thing that just crops up in Discworld, thanks to the way magic works, so of course it will it at UU. File alongside Moving Pictures and Soul Music.
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Feb 12, 2011 15:35
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SeanBeansShako posted:I think thats what Terry intended with the title. Also, Rincewind is pretty loving bitter in that book too. I just re-red Eric as well, and yeah, early Rincewind is crazy bitter. Not that he doesn't have good reasons to be. Of course, Eric's still in the days of Dead Mens' Shoes at UU, with a coherent Bursar, so things have clearly changed since.
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Feb 16, 2011 09:26
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There's a reason for that. Harry's getting old. He wants to actually relax and be the patriarch of a family rather than a busted knuckle scrapper day in and day out.
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Dec 13, 2013 21:29
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Owlkill posted:This is hitting me harder than I'd expected. I was all over these books between the ages of like 11 and 18, to the extent of starting reading each book again as soon as I finished them. While I don't really go back to the older books now, I was still always buying each new Discworld novel as they came out, and I'm sure they played a big role in forming me as a person. Sir Terry was a truly good egg and will be sorely missed. Read Tiffany Aching. It's YA, but it's honestly got more heart than most anything else.
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Mar 12, 2015 17:47
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The hardest part is going to be reading the last Discworld book when it comes out later this year. It's 'The Shepard's Crown', the end of the Tiffany Aching series. I don't know how I'm going to take reading Granny Weatherwax written by a Terry who clearly saw his own end coming soon.
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Mar 12, 2015 17:50
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Vermain posted:I hope I'm not the only one who mostly appreciates these books for how they never tried to shy away from uncomfortable issues. Pratchett knew how to leaven the darker moments of his books with an appropriate amount of humor (e.g. when he kills Wolfgang at the end of The Fifth Elephant), and he rarely let the things descend into pure silliness. More than that, he specifically wanted to deal with the sort of things that most fantasy authors were content to let pass by. Yes, there were themes of love, and sacrifice, and all the other stock standard elements, but these were books that also dealt heavily with racism, nationalism, police violence, faith, revolutions, politics, economics, feminism, and a whole bevvy of other topics that most people would be afraid of bringing up. They would occasionally dip into outright sermonizing, but were otherwise built with that kind of subtle, fantastical style of Johnathan Swift that Pratchett inherited. Even the "preachy" parts, to me, were part of what made the books interesting and worth reading. Pratchett wasn't shy about letting his ethics poke through his work, and you could tell that he saw engaging with the issues of his times as part of his author's duty, rather than trying to present a "disinterested" or "neutral" artistry. This is one of the things that always amazed me most. Look at The Hogfather. The premise is absurd, but it works amazingly well because Pratchett made his readers care about his characters, and the world they lived in.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:39
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Kurtofan posted:I wouldn't mind if she wrote a few Discworld novels, it won't be the same but it would made me feel She's writing a feature film adaption of Wee Free Men, too. 
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Mar 13, 2015 03:23
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a bit.
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End Of Worlds posted:Lords & Ladies and Carpe Jugulum are also identical storylines with different antagonists If you simplify enough, every story is the same story. Go make yourself familiar with 'The Hero With A Thousand Faces'.
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Mar 28, 2015 04:27
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Nihilarian posted:There's a lesbian couple in Snuff. Madame Sharn and Pepe from Unseen Academicals might be LGBT in some way, but I can't remember if they ever get explicit about it. I don't think they ever do, but one does not inquire about what goes on behind closed doors. It would not be healthy, given Pepe's attitude.
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Mar 29, 2015 16:36
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sebmojo posted:This is me too, though I got probated for saying that earlier in the thread, haha. Poor bugger just wasn't very good at writing in the latter stages of his illness Less that and more that Pterry's writing style included exhaustive iterative revision. He couldn't do that anymore, and it shows in his later books, as they are a lot less polished. Skippy McPants posted:It was and excellent book! Pin and Tulip were some of Prachett's best heavies, with up there with Teatime and Carcer. Otto was an excellent addition to his menagerie of humanized monsters, and the dwarfs were good as they always are. The book covered civic and social bureaucracy, which was one of Prachett's strong suits (I maintain that the Vimes' rumination of the knife-edge operation of Ankh-Morpork in Night Watch is one of the best things he's ever written.) The New Firm are even better if you're familiar with where they come from. Gaiman's Neverwhere, to be precise, in the form of Mssrs. Croupe and Vandemar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIRE3Zuyyy4 Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Aug 3, 2015 |
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Aug 3, 2015 21:44
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Konstantin posted:One issue with late Pratchett is that it reads like a first draft. No good book is written alone, and a lot of what makes Pratchett great is how refined his writing is. For example, someone should have had a discussion with him about why a character who was written as a pacifist is killing a bunch of bandits. The disease may have made that kind of collaboration and review much more difficult, which is a shame. He lost the ability to read a year or two before he passed. His last books were only rough proofed because that was the best he could do when he had to have them dictated to him, and he wasn't strong enough to spend the months doing iterative revisions that he used to.
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Aug 23, 2015 05:01
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ZeusJupitar posted:Finished The Sheperd's Crown yesterday. It definitely felt like it needed another few revisions - lots of repetition, too many plot threads to develop in this wordcount. Because a witch is still a witch. She hasn't gone to the bad, so there's no reason to take her down, and she's one of Granny's rivals. The very last thing Granny Weatherwax will ever do is stomp someone for just being contrary, because it's exactly what her sister would do, and she can't be having with any of that.
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Aug 31, 2015 06:45
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BizarroAzrael posted:Joanna Scanlan could be Sybil too. I'm not sure Vimes should be played by a comedian. And Jack Dee should be Professor Whiteface. I've always imagined Whiteface as Angry Old John Cleese. 
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Sep 18, 2015 01:05
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BizarroAzrael posted:I would accept painting over it Caesar Romero style. I would demand painting over it Caesar Romero style.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:41
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VagueRant posted:This just in: Monstrous Regiment is still amazing and kinda underrated and I really need to grab a paper copy of it at some point. That's the secret about Jackrum. A lot of people who really shouldn't like him do, and he does well by his people despite being a total bastard. ConfusedUs posted:Thud is legitimately one of my favorite Discworld books. The Guarding Dark might be the purest pinnacle of Vimes' characterization. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 08:39
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That's what he's doing, though. That's Vimes' whole theory of leadership. He can't be everywhere, but he can turn out a whole generation of coppers with him in the back of their heads, ready to kick them if they so much as think about stepping off the right and true and not doing their duty.
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Jan 20, 2016 02:28
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Yeah, poor guy had a stroke a couple years back and is still wheelchair bound last I knew. Worse, it affected his speech. 
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Mar 25, 2016 07:40
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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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Tunicate posted:like I thought he was gonna go with something about hte orc hivemind vs being part of a sports group and that just fizzled The Orc plot was, I believe, intended to tie in to whatever he was doing with Uberwald, probably for the next Moist book that will never be written. dordreff posted:Even the Brain Problems books like Snuff and Raising Steam are worth reading, they're just not up to the normal exceedingly high Discworld standard. Read them all. That's the killer, and Rob goes into it in the Afterword to Shepard's Crown. Pterry's whole writing process was about iterative revision. He'd write whatever parts of a story stood out to him at the time, then go back at it over months or years and tweak, add to, polish, and connect the bits until a publisher hit him with a brick and stole the manuscript for publication. It's heartbreakingly obvious where in his writing he hit the point of no longer being able to keep a dozen stories in his mind at a time, and realized he just plain was running out. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jul 28, 2016 |
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Jul 28, 2016 09:05
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Dirty Frank posted:Because you like Baxterley you probably like big ideas, so I'd say Small Gods. it's one of prattchet's best and it's totally stand alone. If u like it, look to some reading guides after that and start one of the arcs. He wrote a huge amount of great books you've got tons to look forward to! Good Omens.
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Aug 30, 2016 18:16
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chiasaur11 posted:Sam Vimes spends a lot of time noticing how much people love and trust Carrot. Let's be fair. Since he quit drinking, the sole and only thing Sam Vimes has been thrilled with is his wife and kid, and those rare occasions when he gets to chase someone or frustrate Vetinari momentarily.
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Sep 12, 2016 04:50
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Khizan posted:I wish he'd done more with Carrot and Vimes. My favorite Carrot moment is in The Fifth Elephant where Vimes was thinking about the way that Carrot's destiny warps the world around him, and wondering how he'd stand up to it if he had to. I wish that he had had to. That would be a hell of a thing. Carrot, convinced the city needs a King for it's own good (say because Vetinari finally decided he was officially Too Old For This poo poo and took off to Uberwald to retire as a vampire), and Vimes ready willing and able to go nose to nose in favor of populism.
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Sep 29, 2016 09:16
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VagueRant posted:Yeah, Jackrum is definitely charismatic but the book very much shows you that you maybe SHOULDN'T like him. Straight up murderer associated with hellish imagery. It quite acknowledges the "badass" problem. Hell, Jackrum himself acknowledges that he has done very, very bad things in name of Borogravia, and people like him who probably shouldn't. "... I've been to a lot of foreign countries and met some very interesting people, who I mostly subsequently killed before they could do me over good and proper." Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Oct 21, 2016 |
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Oct 21, 2016 23:48
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dordreff posted:By the time UU becomes properly relevant it's not a place where wizards kill each other to rise through the ranks anymore, though. Ridcully and his faculty are continuously silly, though that's not all there is to them, and before they came along the only wizard who mattered was Rincewind (and maybe that one who dropped out to become a Moving Pictures star, but the key there is that he dropped out). A lot of that is played as being due to Ridcully being essentially unkillable, due to being the setting's equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt.
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Jan 5, 2017 05:31
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I think what I took away from Night Watch is that it is more explicit than any other Watch book about just how much Vimes is a noir protagonist. He has, deep down in his heart, the makings of a monster. He's ridden and driven to drown in a bottle by the futility of trying not to be... but is hanging on my his fingernails to at least the semblance of a conscience. It's part of why the modern Vimes is such a hard-rear end about his Watch. He wants an Ankh-Morpork where a copper doesn't have to decide between their duty and their life every day.
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Mar 14, 2017 07:19
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Paul.Power posted:This is actually a thought that's been percolating in my brain for a while. Not Carcer specifically, but a lot of Pratchett villains, while entertaining, are quite flat, and frequently straight-up psychopaths or sociopaths with little no real explanation or motivation. I think that's the defining characteristic of Pratchett's true villains. They are psychopaths or sociopaths. Look at Reacher Gilt, for example. He puts on all the airs of being a silent-film Evil Rail Baron/Pirate, but those are all a cover over a character who down at the base is an amoral corporate raider with zero concern for the lives of others except as they benefit him personally. I mean, you have to remember the setting. The Discworld is not a nice place. Ankh-Morpork is probably the most progressive place on on the Disc, and it still keeps the Assassins around and has wretched poverty and street crime on the level of Victorian London at best. Even the Unseen University was still doing Dead Man's Shoes promotion within a decade or two. Hell, it's only since Vetinari and Ridicully took over their respective posts that the semblance of civilization has really been hammered into the city at all. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 11:40
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Flipswitch posted:I'm watching Soul Music on YouTube and there's a scene when they're touring the cities where some animator has snuck in a girl in the crowd who gets her tits out. Only appropriate.
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Apr 14, 2017 22:27
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freebooter posted:He's also infuriating because (like Clarkson) he's pigheaded and obstinate while still sometimes grazing upon the truth. Jones is correct that Pratchett doesn't have an above-average prose style, and he's also correct that this is par for the course in the SFF genre. He misses that the Discworld books are about a) dialogue, and b) the sum of their parts being greater than the whole. I get really tired of hearing this complaint levied at SF, especially older SF, from critics who don't seem to have any grasp of the pulp background that the genre grew out of. In Pratchett's case, as you said, he deliberately writes in a very conversational style because it suits the tone he's trying for. Neither his writing nor the setting take themselves seriously right up until the brief moment that they do, and we get an epic moment of a character being true to themselves.
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Apr 14, 2017 22:30
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Gaiman's working it, and has absolutely zero qualms about diverse casting (see Neverwhere and AmGods), so I'll happily give the benefit of the doubt there.
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Aug 22, 2017 15:12
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I think the whole climax of Reaper Man is right up there with that Cable Street bit. “ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS. Death took a step backwards. It was impossible to read expression in Azrael's features. Death glanced sideways at the servants. LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?”
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Aug 23, 2017 04:35
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Jerry Cotton posted:[quote="Bum the Sad" post="476353808"] At least in Eddings' case his series were only series because doorstoppers weren't seen as viable in the early 1980's. I think it did him a service, though, as his attempt to do the whole story in a single book with The Redemption of Althalus came off as rushed and much less polished.
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Sep 14, 2017 05:02
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precision posted:It was in dire need of a good hard editing Yeah, it's the one where I started to get sad, because it was clear he couldn't do his iterative pass editing anymore.
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Oct 1, 2017 01:29
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Yeah, I took it as Vimes' long-term discomfort with being someone who is served rather than serving eventually leading to a certain loss of formality. But the bit with Pessimal is great. Nobody out-does the British for being aggressively over-formal to people they dislike.
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Oct 31, 2017 03:15
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Cicadalek posted:I mean, horses kind of suck. Especially in a city where mostly all they do is piss and poo poo everywhere in between kicking and trampling people. Yeah, that's kind of the thing. Vimes hates horses because they are a pain in his rear end as traffic, and as a foot constable he's probably spent years almost getting run over by them and walking in what they leave. Carrot's a dwarf, hating horses is Traditional. Horses hate Angua because they know what she is and are afraid she'll eat them. Outside of that, the Wizards are generally too fat to ride, the Witches prefer broomsticks when they have to travel outside of walking distance, and Moist -likes- horses.
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Jan 31, 2018 15:12
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Screaming Idiot posted:There will never be a good adaptation of Pratchett's work and I would be pleased if they stopped trying. On one hand, yes, but on the other hand explaining Dwarf gender roles in a visual medium could be very, very fraught. Especially for an audience not necessarily coming from a high fantasy background where dwarves always only seem to come in male and beardy.
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Oct 31, 2018 18:16
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BizarroAzrael posted:Are any of those markedly different from the standard audio books? Subscriber numbers are how they sell advertising, which is the bulk of their revenue IIRC.
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Nov 2, 2018 06:41
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A human heart posted:are you aware that all that stuff happens under secular governments as well? I always wanted a perfect example to encapsulate whataboutism, and that fills it nicely. Yes. Secular governments do terrible poo poo too. Both of these things can be true at the same time, and Pratchett is deeply critical of both of them repeatedly across the series.
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Mar 14, 2019 13:21
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