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Trin Tragula posted:One person's obvious resonance is another person's lateral leap. My favorite one -- probably because I somehow made the connection all on my own -- is the Selachii and Venturi families of Ankh-Morpork, who hate each other. They get a page or so in the spotlight in Night Watch, I believe them and their feud is mentioned in passing a couple of times in earlier books. Anyway, their family names refer to sharks and jet engines, so it's a stealth West Side Story reference. As for Miss Flitworth and the Revenoo, I got that and I got references there and in other books to Death being "the other one", but I never made the connection that the Auditors were truly the other part of that joke.
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Dec 1, 2021 07:41
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The Sweet Hereafter posted:If it helps, think of Soul Music more as the first Susan story, as it's her character that really starts to progress from there on. Hogfather and Thief Of Time are very much Susan books, with Death more as a secondary character who needs her to do something. I have a soft spot for Soul Music simply because it's one of the few Pratchetts I had when I was young and I've read it so many times, but I agree the story is a bit of a halfway house between the type of Death story you've described, and the Susan-gets-things-done stories coming up. It also relies on a lot more specialist jokes, as you say - I loved Moving Pictures for the cinema jokes but I know a lot of people who bounced right off them. Yeah, Soul Music can be fun, but it's an "every sentence is a reference or pun or both, the ones that aren't are just ones you missed" sort of humor that can feel like it's sacrificing the characters for the sake of the joke when usually he goes the other way. I mainly like it because it feels like every time I re-read it I spot something new, it's so dense with references.
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Dec 1, 2021 07:48
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I vaguely recall enjoying the Soul Music cartoon when I stumbled on it, if only due to how they handled the "we're bigger than cheeses" line. Really do wish that we had more cartoons than that and Wyrd Sisters.
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Dec 1, 2021 16:08
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Bruceski posted:Yeah, Soul Music can be fun, but it's an "every sentence is a reference or pun or both, the ones that aren't are just ones you missed" sort of humor that can feel like it's sacrificing the characters for the sake of the joke when usually he goes the other way. I mainly like it because it feels like every time I re-read it I spot something new, it's so dense with references. Yeah some of the individual jokes or references are pretty funny, I think that's just not what I like about Discworld so books like it, Moving Pictures, and actually Pyramids really wore on me. They're still good, and the general feeling I have about all the Discworld books I've read so far is that even the weakest of them is above-average by both fantasy and comedy novel standards. Also I guess it depends on the person as to whether the particular subject matter or media is going to really be an entertaining one to see referenced for an entire book. I'm a big music fan but some of the jokes have kind of fallen flat for me, but on the other hand I work in live theater and absolutely loved Wyrd Sisters and Lords and Ladies, and I could see some of the more obscure references being totally lost or just not funny for someone else.
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Dec 1, 2021 16:35
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MockingQuantum posted:Yeah some of the individual jokes or references are pretty funny, I think that's just not what I like about Discworld so books like it, Moving Pictures, and actually Pyramids really wore on me. They're still good, and the general feeling I have about all the Discworld books I've read so far is that even the weakest of them is above-average by both fantasy and comedy novel standards. Likewise, having never been to Australia, never having watched (back when I read it) any of the Mad Max or Crocodile Dundee movies or Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Lost Continent was a real slog to get through. EDIT: The Last Continent. See? Can't even get the name of that bloody book right. Dave Syndrome fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Dec 1, 2021 |
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Dec 1, 2021 18:33
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citybeatnik posted:Really do wish that we had more cartoons than that and Wyrd Sisters. I love the animation on those. It's grungy, but in a fun way. Did they (or someone else) do Reaper Man as well? I have some images in my head... Fake edit: looks like a pilot was done but never finished, it's on some of the Soul Music DvDs. MockingQuantum posted:Also I guess it depends on the person as to whether the particular subject matter or media is going to really be an entertaining one to see referenced for an entire book. I'm a big music fan but some of the jokes have kind of fallen flat for me, but on the other hand I work in live theater and absolutely loved Wyrd Sisters and Lords and Ladies, and I could see some of the more obscure references being totally lost or just not funny for someone else. With that background I think you'll either love or hate Maskerade, if you haven't read it yet.
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Dec 1, 2021 23:23
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Bruceski posted:I love the animation on those. It's grungy, but in a fun way. Did they (or someone else) do Reaper Man as well? I have some images in my head... Indeed, it was a proof of concept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9PLHIOwBeg
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Dec 2, 2021 13:04
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thetoughestbean posted:Just shortlisted a handful of Discworld books for the store I work at. I wish we could have a bigger section for his works but for some reason his stuff doesn’t sell too well/get new printings like other authors Well without any decent film adaptations, corporate promotion, merchandising, or the appropriate-for-kids reputation of Harry Potter, it's sadly hard to see where new Discworld fans are going to come from. And if new fans are adults, they're probably going to buy the books on Kindle instead of collecting 40-odd dead tree editions. It would be nice to see them get the deluxe collector edition hardcover treatment for the old grogs though.
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Dec 3, 2021 14:33
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Imagined posted:Well without any decent film adaptations, corporate promotion, merchandising, or the appropriate-for-kids reputation of Harry Potter, it's sadly hard to see where new Discworld fans are going to come from. And if new fans are adults, they're probably going to buy the books on Kindle instead of collecting 40-odd dead tree editions. It would be nice to see them get the deluxe collector edition hardcover treatment for the old grogs though. I mean, I buy new copies when my old ones fall apart, but I do tend to try and hunt down the old Corgi Press ones with the Josh Kirby illustrations, because the current trend towards minimalist cover design leaves me totally cold. Give me weird maximalist fantasy scenes with people who look like they're made of old rope, dammit! 
Strange Cares fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 15:04
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Imagined posted:Well without any decent film adaptations, corporate promotion, merchandising, or the appropriate-for-kids reputation of Harry Potter, it's sadly hard to see where new Discworld fans are going to come from. And if new fans are adults, they're probably going to buy the books on Kindle instead of collecting 40-odd dead tree editions. It would be nice to see them get the deluxe collector edition hardcover treatment for the old grogs though. I taught Pratchett in a class in 2004, and over half the students were already fans. I taught a whole class on Pratchett this year, and only one student had read any of his stuff before. In the second week, a bunch of people were comparing him to Brian Sanderson. A lot of them did have friends who were fans. I’ll add that these were mainly English majors, so predisposed to like Pratchett, and they did love his stuff, they just hadn’t tried him. I’d hope Good Omens would be generating some Pratchett interest, but maybe it’s just driving Gaiman sales?
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Dec 3, 2021 16:30
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Imagined posted:It would be nice to see them get the deluxe collector edition hardcover treatment for the old grogs though. The new hardcover versions with the ribbon bookmarks are really nice. They last one came out in like September of this year.
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Dec 4, 2021 08:46
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YPc8YSzKds
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Dec 4, 2021 12:47
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That looks sweet, which I don't usually associate with Pterry.
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Dec 4, 2021 12:56
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https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1467122006470668294?s=20
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Dec 4, 2021 14:23
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Kirby's covers are the best
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Dec 5, 2021 17:14
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Xarn posted:Kirby's covers are the best I know I'm in a minority here, but Josh Kirby's covers prevented me from reading the books for literally years when I saw them in stores. To me, the covers always suggested madness, chaos and mayhem, with people and objects being flung around left and right, suggesting incoherent slapstick comedy. It took a two-in-one-edition of The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites with a more or less generic fantasy cover that had nothing to do with either books' plot to get me hooked.  Even later as an avid fan, I always felt slightly embarrassed to read the books with the Kirby covers in public (and let's not even go into literally-four-eyed Twoflower). It's a shame Paul Kidby got into the game so late. In many ways, his portraits of the characters are the definitive versions for me.
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Dec 5, 2021 18:16
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Dave Syndrome posted:It's a shame Paul Kidby got into the game so late. In many ways, his portraits of the characters are the definitive versions for me. Kidby (1996-2016) was an official Discworld artist for longer than Kirby (1983-2001) and did more illustrations overall.
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Dec 5, 2021 22:39
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Jedit posted:Kidby (1996-2016) was an official Discworld artist for longer than Kirby (1983-2001) and did more illustrations overall. Huh. I stand corrected then.
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Dec 6, 2021 08:02
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I was reading the PYF Media That Hasn't Aged Well thread and came across thisAcute Grill posted:Yeah, there's some scenes, especially in Making Money, that could be read as Moist being tested as a potential next Patrician or being tasked to set up the city in a way that it wouldn't need a next Patrician. Which made me think of the potential future of the Discworld as of Vetinari and Lipwig's ongoing modernization drive. I personally think, based on no evidence at all other than my reading of the characters of Vetinari and Moist (and to a lesser extent Vimes), that the Patrician's end game was a political system that could carry on indefinitely without him there to guide it, and that had he lived there's a good chance that the last Moist novel would have been about the first Ankh-Morpork elections. It certainly seems at various times that Vetinari was setting up Moist (and/or Vimes) as the next Patrician, but the thing about the system of Patricians as it exists is that even if the next one's a good one, as I'm sure Moist would be, there's no guaranteeing that his successor will be and there's no recourse other than violence if he's not. Obviously many characters have expressed skepticism about democracy over the course of the series, but if you're looking at a modernizing society that wants to avoid chaos and destruction after the current leader dies or retires there really aren't many better options. Plus I just think it would be fun to see a Lipwig vs. Vimes election.
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Dec 6, 2021 14:59
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I think that's possibly a bit overthinking it and Pratchett just worked backwards from 'I want to write a book about how tech monopolies are bad' and 'I want to write about how the gold standard isn't a thing and how credit works' and Vetinari deciding to reform those systems in Ank-Morpork is a reasonably easy vehicle to do so. The modernisation drive arc is about reflecting the real world issues and uncertainty caused by the 4th industrial revolution and Pratchett would have taken it wherever it needed to go to reflect those issues. He would definitely have had something to say about Trump and the collapse of shared truth, but it's difficult to imagine what because there's already loads of commentary on those sorts of problems throughout his work.
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Dec 6, 2021 15:37
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Alchenar posted:I think that's possibly a bit overthinking it and Pratchett just worked backwards from 'I want to write a book about how tech monopolies are bad' and 'I want to write about how the gold standard isn't a thing and how credit works' and Vetinari deciding to reform those systems in Ank-Morpork is a reasonably easy vehicle to do so. Oh, I'm absolutely certain I'm overthinking things but between the Watch, the Post Office, the Mint, the Clacks, and, to a lesser extent the railway there's a clear move toward establishing or reestablishing institutions in such a way that they won't necessarily depend on extraordinary individuals to keep them going. Vetinari, Vimes, Lipwig, and the creators of the clacks and the railway are absolutely extraordinary individuals but they all seem to recognize that the institutions they're building are bigger than themselves and need to be self-sustaining if the city is going to continue functioning after they're gone and I think this concern for what happens next came more and more to the fore in the later novels. It just seemed like setting up an electoral system would be just the kind of thing that could ensure the continuation of those institutions and also just the type of thing that Lipwig could be trusted to BS his way into succeeding at.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:22
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I feel like Going Postal happened specifically because Terry Pratchett was mad at his telecom bill.
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Dec 6, 2021 16:56
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Jedit posted:Kidby (1996-2016) was an official Discworld artist for longer than Kirby (1983-2001) and did more illustrations overall. I learnt a really sweet fact about Night Watch the other day. The Night Watch cover is based off the famous Rembrandt portrait, and there's a character in the background who's assumed to be Rembrandt himself. In the Discworld version, you'd forgive Kidby if he slipped himself into Rembrandts position in the painting. But no, he puts Kirby there instead 
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Dec 6, 2021 18:22
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I learnt a really sweet fact about Night Watch the other day. That's pretty cool to be honest
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Dec 7, 2021 12:49
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I learnt a really sweet fact about Night Watch the other day. That's incredibly sweet. I never bothered to research why they did the switch from Kirby to Kidby (in my teenage stupidity I just always assumed that the people in charge were, like me, unhappy with Kirby's art style). Turns out Kirby died in 2001.
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Dec 7, 2021 12:54
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Sneak peek at Snow Baby https://twitter.com/terryandrob/status/1468183576156028935?s=20
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Dec 7, 2021 12:55
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To be honest a lof of the bits of the Watch books that generally start with "A copper is/does/doesn't..." haven't aged very well for me. They all seem to come from a point-of-view that assumes that at least some police are 'good guys', or at least that such a beast as a 'good cop' could exist in a more ideal world, when -- as we know -- the very premise of a modern police force is fundamentally flawed and ACAB.
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Dec 7, 2021 23:20
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The Watch is just as much a fantasy as the Wizards
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Dec 8, 2021 00:05
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And as much of a fantasy as The Benevolent Dictator. It's part of the joke
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Dec 8, 2021 00:36
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:The Watch is just as much a fantasy as the Wizards This is very true but doesn't preclude the idea that not all law enforcement types are bad. And hey, there are bad cops in discworld, Quirke, Cable St etc.
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Dec 8, 2021 13:24
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Andoman posted:This is very true but doesn't preclude the idea that not all law enforcement types are bad. And hey, there are bad cops in discworld, Quirke, Cable St etc. Also when you see the watch from other characters point of view they seem a lot less good. Like, in The Truth they are definitely overstepping their bounds, joking(?) about how William is not to fall down the stairs to the cells, spying on him etc. They're treated a lot more like normal police were viewed in the late 90s UK which probably wasn't as bad as US cops, right? But still distrusted by most everyone (except for Carrot of course)
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Dec 8, 2021 15:40
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Total Meatlove posted:Sneak peek at Snow Baby Am I the only one who thinks tweeting as a dead person with a checkmark is sick and wrong? Is this the world now?
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Dec 8, 2021 19:32
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Beachcomber posted:Am I the only one who thinks tweeting as a dead person with a checkmark is sick and wrong? Is this the world now? I hate it but it's not all that unusual now, unfortunately. Herman Cain and the Devil Went Down to Georgia/"Benghazi ain't going away" guy have both been tweeting posthumously for a while now too
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Dec 8, 2021 19:54
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Imagined posted:To be honest a lof of the bits of the Watch books that generally start with "A copper is/does/doesn't..." haven't aged very well for me. They all seem to come from a point-of-view that assumes that at least some police are 'good guys', or at least that such a beast as a 'good cop' could exist in a more ideal world, when -- as we know -- the very premise of a modern police force is fundamentally flawed and ACAB. pratchett was a white boomer, and they mostly trust cops, because cops are usually nice to them
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Dec 8, 2021 20:20
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Vimes and his reforms in the Watch are also modeled less off of modern policing and more what Robert Peel did - it's why there's the reference to Sammies in The Fifth Elephant. It's a romanticized view of that sort of Victorian policing. They're still underfunded and undermanned and even in The Night Watch you have Vimes bemoaning how recruits still go on patrol with the old street monsters. He's just smart enough to realize that making people behave like a copper would - basically everyone sitting very quietly in a dark room with their hands on the table - doesn't really work. And he's still frantically trying to make a tiny raft on a roiling sea of evil like Vetinari called out in Guards!, Guards!. People are people, and all people have a design flaw where they bend at the knees too easily.
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Dec 9, 2021 00:02
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Beachcomber posted:Am I the only one who thinks tweeting as a dead person with a checkmark is sick and wrong? Is this the world now? Nope and apparently yes.
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Dec 9, 2021 08:34
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Beachcomber posted:Am I the only one who thinks tweeting as a dead person with a checkmark is sick and wrong? Is this the world now? I think in this case where it's clearly Terry & Rob, and is the voice of his estate, it's different.
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Dec 9, 2021 10:37
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Total Meatlove posted:I think in this case where it's clearly Terry & Rob, and is the voice of his estate, it's different. The '& Rob' isn't in bold next to the checkmark.
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Dec 9, 2021 10:52
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When Terry travelled to Dignitas with a BBC crew following him to 'see if it was for him', Rob was there with them. I would be awfully cautious about commenting from the outside on the appropriateness of someone who was part of a friendship like that.
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Dec 9, 2021 10:53
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Alchenar posted:When Terry travelled to Dignitas with a BBC crew following him to 'see if it was for him', Rob was there with them. I would be awfully cautious about commenting from the outside on the appropriateness of someone who was part of a friendship like that. And who was literally given the job of managing Pterry's post mortem social media presence in the will. He had been clear on this when he was alive, for that matter - when he couldn't attend the 2014 Convention, Rob was sent to appear in his place. Rob also gets membership number 2 at the Conventions, #1 having been left unused since 2016. (#666 is still given to Silas T Firefly, though.)
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Dec 9, 2021 12:00
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