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Main thing I noticed for Raising Steam was that nobody had different voices. Usually you could just have the dialogue of a Pratchett book and follow along mostly fine. It's a sad but interesting example of how much effort goes into the editing and polish that he simply didn't have the bandwidth for any more.
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# ? Jan 12, 2023 10:20 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 18:57 |
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The Shepherd's Crown is significantly better than Raising Steam. It's not perfect, there are some minor flaws here and there, and I feel like it retreads a lot of the plot ground from Lords and Ladies and The Wee Free Men but the character development and arc it gives Tiffany are good, and it's a suitable sendoff for the Discworld and especially for the witches, something like an afterword for Raising Steam. I have no complaints that are worth posting about and frankly if it wasn't for the fact that The Shepherd's Crown depends quite a bit on Raising Steam's world developments, I'd say that if you're only going to read one of the two, go for The Shepherd's Crown. One question it raised for me is if the original germ of the Tiffany Aching idea when he first began that series was if it were an Esme Weatherwax origin prequel which in early revision became a new character.
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# ? Jan 15, 2023 16:16 |
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And now I'm all-but-finished Nation - I just have the epilogue chapter left (I really needed to go to sleep last night). I don't expect much can happen in the epilogue to change my overall assessment much: First-rate, excellent book. I've read Robinson Crusoe in pretty close detail lately (and I will be again soon) and I quite appreciate the fine-resolution and detailed parody that Pratchett is working with here. I can see that his reading and critique of Crusoe is quite close to my own. Though now for all I know the epilogue will involve a battle against a bunch of wolves or something like that and then I won't be sure what to think.
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# ? Jan 18, 2023 06:13 |
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CommonShore posted:And now I'm all-but-finished Nation - I just have the epilogue chapter left (I really needed to go to sleep last night). I don't expect much can happen in the epilogue to change my overall assessment much: I have never read Robinson Crusoe; I'd love to hear more details about the parody aspect of Nation. It's one of my favorite books, for sure.
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# ? Jan 18, 2023 08:43 |
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DontMockMySmock posted:I have never read Robinson Crusoe; I'd love to hear more details about the parody aspect of Nation. It's one of my favorite books, for sure. So it's parody less in the Weird Al sense and more in the reconfiguring ideas sense - Broadly speaking Robinson Crusoe is a bit of an idiot who gets extremely lucky and the book has thick layers of narrative unreliability, but this hasn't stopped three centuries of readers from reading him as a genius hero. So Robinson's broad story arc is that he ignores all warnings from his family and probably God, gets shipwrecked in the Oroonoko delta, scavenges (hoards?) enough stuff from the ship to build himself a little home on the island, makes (and names) an Indigenous friend, dodges headhunter cannibals, contends with mutineers, saves the day, gets rescued, goes home to great wealth and fortune (from the sale of slaves he owned, while he was away). The "luck" aspect is important because much of it is framed as providential (Defoe was of a nonconformist family and experienced persecution) that he gets through and gets out, but much is also framed (by Robinson, the plucky first-person narrator) as his genius. Lots of it is white supremecist, too, in the sense that he's perpetually congratulating himself for his European and especially English excellence (watch out for those shifty Spaniards!). Now my own reading of RC is that Defoe - one of the all time great masters of irony and voice - is taking the piss to Robinson. So I won't go through every scene in the book, but lots of scenes in Nation play with the same events and challenges as RC but work through similar parameters with differnet results, many of these divided between male Mau and English Daphne and get superimposed on their relationship in different ways. This will just be a list off of the top of my head: In both cases the trauma of the disaster leads to reflections on the will of God(s) and providence. Robinson is cartoonishly resillient in this respect (stiff upper lip, get on with it) with the exception of a few really interesting chapters of true meditative reflection (which are among the first to get cut from abridged editions, along those where Robinson traffics slaves) whereas Mau especially turns the trauma into the motivating focus of his entire life. Part of my reading, but which I haven't validated through additional research is that Defoe was anti-slavery and that Robinson's trials are something of divine punishment for those horrors. Robinson names Friday; Daphne renames herself and not Mau. Robinson had renamed Friday for the day of the week when they met, but doesn't even reflect on this when at rescue he discovers that his calendar was wrong; Daphne resists renaming by her grandmother at the end. Mau remains with his people when Daphne goes home; Friday goes to Europe even though his father is also a chieftan. Robinson gets Friday's eternal service by saving his life, but that isn't reciprocal when Friday (repeatedly) saves Robinson. Mau and Daphne have a reciprocal relationship of support which doesn't degenerate into comical servitude even though Mau's culture also has customs about saving lives. While we're on that, Robinson's internal monologue is constantly harping on about how cruel and barbaric the natives are. He's in a constant struggle about whether it's okay to kill them in self-defense, though. He kills quite a few. In Nation the worst barbarians are the Europeans. Even the raiders have their own laws, customs, and diplomacy. Oh Robinson is the one who stomps around shooting everything he sees, whereas in Nation Cox conspicuously has that characteristic. Robinson scavenges the ship's carpenter's chest as well, but he's comically useless as a builder or carpenter while congratulating himself on being super good at it. He's like "I'm so hardcore I built a dugout canoe" but then he can't get it to the water. He will hew a tree into a single plank with an axe to make a single shelf. In Nation the canoe is built by a boy (and it survives a tsunami while Robinson nearly gets swept away the one time he gets away from shore with his). That the log left for him at the beginning is well seasoned stood out to me this way as a nod that there is knowledge and technique that just blasts by Robinson. Characters in Nation look at tools they don't understand and say "I don't understand that one; leave it aside." There are two caves in Crusoe. One he builds himself, as a fort and home. The other is a hidden one in the middle of the island... which gets used as a prison in the climactic battle. I know I'm forgetting a detail of that second cave right now. And the last one for now, Robinson goes into states of deep paranoia at the thought of other people coming to the island, in some cases hiding in his little fort for days straight. Nation is significantly about the need for togetherness and cooperation and the need to take the risk of letting others into your spaces and ignore the animal fear/urge to lash out, because if you do you'll just remain scared hiding in a hole while the world moves on without you. There are way more interesections between the books, to the extent that it feels to me like Pratchett was in a way rewriting Crusoe. This is literally just miscellaneous points off the top of my head and I need to go do some other things irl right now. Crusoe is a good read though - just don't get an abridged version.
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# ? Jan 18, 2023 16:32 |
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Very interesting; thanks!
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# ? Jan 18, 2023 22:14 |
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DontMockMySmock posted:Very interesting; thanks! My pleasure! I'm actually due to reread and take notes on Crusoe in the next month. Would you like another (better organized) post about its intersections with Nation?
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# ? Jan 18, 2023 22:29 |
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Sitting down to organize my thoughts for my first lecture on Crusoe this week and on my reread two things came up - The cycles of struggles with God and the framing of his shipwreck as divine punishment seem to have a very strong conversation with Nation - Nation would be a very good novel for me to use the next time I teach a first-year modern lit course.
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# ? Feb 13, 2023 17:47 |
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I didn't care for Nation (or Dodger or the Long books), but I understand that he had to write it because it was clogging up the creative pathways until he did. A lot of people seem to like it, though, so maybe I've changed enough in a fortyear to appreciate it differently. Trying not to see it as a missed opportunity for more Discworld.
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# ? Feb 14, 2023 11:15 |
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CommonShore posted:Likewise, the golems at the climax came out of nowhere. I don't remember those super golems from the end of Making Money being mentioned anywhere in the text before they Save The Day and get explained after the fact. That also seemed to me like something that would have been either written into the previous plot somehow, or resolved differently. The Goblin subway, with the goblins's compulsive tinkering seemed like a dangling, frayed thread that was pointing in that direction, either from an earlier draft, or something that was being developed to fill in or interact with the golems somehow. However, the tone of the book was noticeably different but seeing as it's Terry I didn't give a poo poo I ate it up because I loved him.
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# ? Feb 15, 2023 04:15 |
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LegoMan posted:Almost positive they were hinted at as people would hear rumblings underfoot and Vetinari specifically mentioning them. See as I was reading I thought the rumblings underfoot were the goblin subway which also had been hinted. The way that Vetinari mentions them and then the way that they resolve the action it just felt like a solution looking for a problem.
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# ? Feb 15, 2023 04:27 |
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Beachcomber posted:I didn't care for Nation (or Dodger or the Long books), but I understand that he had to write it because it was clogging up the creative pathways until he did. Nation is one of his best books. Dodger was okay, and I didn't read the Long books, but Nation is a very good book.
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# ? Feb 15, 2023 07:36 |
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I started reading the Discworld novels in the nineties and stopped at the time of Pratchett's death, missing only the last two books. I decided it's time to reread them all for the first time and finally finish the series. My old paperback of "The Color of Magic" was not an english copy so I picked up both a secod-hand original copy and a digital version to continue reading at work. To my surprise, there's a big difference between the two, part of the prologue is missing in one version (the part of the gods playing their board game). I'm not sure if this was scene added in a later version of the book or it's just a faulty copy. I wonder if there's any other missing parts.
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# ? Feb 15, 2023 15:28 |
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Angry Lobster posted:I started reading the Discworld novels in the nineties and stopped at the time of Pratchett's death, missing only the last two books. I decided it's time to reread them all for the first time and finally finish the series. Hey I'm sort of the same situation. I was young and poor when I started reading Discworld in the early aughts and got most of my fix from dubiously sourced notepad files. Where can I get the physical books? I'm reading some reviews on Amazon and some editions sold there appear to have poor binding. One user recommended Discworld emporium. Anyone here has had any experience with them?
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# ? Feb 15, 2023 22:55 |
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The Emporium was (until recently) run by the incredibly lovely Bernard Pearson and his wife Isobel, but now the physical location has closed and it’s all online. Bernard still keeps his eye on it all, and it’s one of the best online fandom shops you could hope for.
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# ? Feb 16, 2023 00:17 |
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The_Doctor posted:The Emporium was (until recently) run by the incredibly lovely Bernard Pearson and his wife Isobel, but now the physical location has closed and it’s all online. Bernard still keeps his eye on it all, and it’s one of the best online fandom shops you could hope for. There was a physical location? I'm going to kick myself if I was nearby and missed my chance.
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# ? Feb 16, 2023 00:28 |
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It was in Wincanton in Somerset.
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# ? Feb 16, 2023 00:30 |
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About to finish up The Last Continent. Ridcully is such a gift of a character. Immensely likeable in spite of all of him being what he is.
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# ? Feb 20, 2023 01:44 |
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BigglesSWE posted:About to finish up The Last Continent. Ridcully is such a gift of a character. Immensely likeable in spite of all of him being what he is. I think part of Ridcully's strength (as it is with all characters like him in the books) is that not only does the book recognize him for what he is but so does the character. Self-awareness (or the lack thereof) seems to be one of the flags that makes a Discworld character a protagonist or antagonist. Moist v Reacher, de Worde v the wealthy, Vimes v everybody.
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# ? Feb 20, 2023 18:09 |
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https://twitter.com/RobocopFacts/status/1627565666935922688 A post about Sir Terry's Oblivion mod that he worked on is doing the rounds on twitter. I hadn't heard the story behind Vilja and it's very sweet.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 09:09 |
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He absolutely would love getting in trouble because his donkey kept eating things it wasn’t supposed to, wouldn’t he
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:21 |
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When the Salisbury Museum had the recreation of his study and desk, i think that mod was running on screen number 6.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:12 |
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Testekill posted:https://twitter.com/RobocopFacts/status/1627565666935922688 This is so incredibly
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 06:22 |
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Total Meatlove posted:When the Salisbury Museum had the recreation of his study and desk, i think that mod was running on screen number 6. Not when I was there.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 09:23 |
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Now that's some cool stuff, Terry knows cool.
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# ? Feb 23, 2023 01:32 |
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Terry Pratchett posted:Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
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# ? Feb 23, 2023 01:48 |
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Army of Darkness ("This... is my BOOMSTICK!") beat Doom by two years, iirc
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# ? Feb 23, 2023 01:50 |
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uhm, akchewally, Pterry, the double barrel shotgun wasn't in the first doom game Kesper North posted:Army of Darkness ("This... is my BOOMSTICK!") beat Doom by two years, iirc AoD came out early '93, Doom 1 in late '93, and Doom 2 in late '94. Really, it's Evil Dead 2 that should get the credit, being a prequel to AoD and also cited as a direct inspiration for the Doom devs.
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# ? Feb 23, 2023 02:02 |
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If we want to be extremely technical, Evil Dead 2 is also the first film to feature a double-barreled shotgun in a demon-exorcizing role:quote:The Shotgun first appeared in the 1981 film The Evil Dead, where it was a single-barreled Winchester 37A 20-gauge. When the shotgun returned in Evil Dead II, the Winchester model was replaced with a 12-gauge double-barreled Stevens 311-C model. In Army of Darkness, the shotgun (now a IGA Stoeger Coach Gun) earned it's more famous nickname of The Boomstick. https://evildead.fandom.com/wiki/Boomstick
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# ? Feb 23, 2023 02:15 |
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Kesper North posted:Army of Darkness ("This... is my BOOMSTICK!") beat Doom by two years, iirc There was also an Army of Darkness WAD for Doom that replaced the SFX with samples from the movie and changed Doomguy into Ash. It was fun for at least half an hour.
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# ? Feb 23, 2023 08:58 |
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I'm choosing to believe that Terry Pratchett wasn't cheekily making an excuse to play videogames but genuinely doing research on goblins and hanging out with them in a cave while playing Oblivion was the most sensible option he could imagine.
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# ? Feb 27, 2023 17:02 |
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https://twitter.com/bbcnews/status/1630297240907526147?s=46&t=hOQe1ng4wve0xyuJt-34sA
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# ? Feb 27, 2023 21:10 |
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I picked up the biography by his assistant and it's excellent, dudes a good writer and the tone is spot on: clearly loved him utterly but is very open about what an irascible bugger he could be and generally was. He quotes a bunch of the autobiography that pt had started writing, along with the hilarious signing tour reviews terry would send to his publisher explaining how they had hosed up this time. I have just got to the part where the disease hits and I had to put it down for a bit though
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# ? Feb 27, 2023 23:06 |
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sebmojo posted:I picked up the biography by his assistant and it's excellent, dudes a good writer and the tone is spot on: clearly loved him utterly but is very open about what an irascible bugger he could be and generally was. He quotes a bunch of the autobiography that pt had started writing, along with the hilarious signing tour reviews terry would send to his publisher explaining how they had hosed up this time. It gets more and more unflinching as the biography goes on. But the Pratchett-Granny Weatherwax points of comparison get framed in a slightly different way after finishing. I understand why it was written this way, but my only disappointment was not having more about his wife Lyn, especially after Discworld took off big-time. Her role in Terry's life can feel marginalized and its hard to tell whether that's a PoV issue or a privacy thing or whether their closeness was of the sort where they spent most of each day apart.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 02:27 |
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sebmojo posted:I picked up the biography by his assistant and it's excellent, dudes a good writer and the tone is spot on: clearly loved him utterly but is very open about what an irascible bugger he could be and generally was. He quotes a bunch of the autobiography that pt had started writing, along with the hilarious signing tour reviews terry would send to his publisher explaining how they had hosed up this time. I want to get a copy of Rob's book at some point, but I know it will just wreck me. Narsham posted:I understand why it was written this way, but my only disappointment was not having more about his wife Lyn, especially after Discworld took off big-time. Her role in Terry's life can feel marginalized and its hard to tell whether that's a PoV issue or a privacy thing or whether their closeness was of the sort where they spent most of each day apart. Lyn is intensively private, having quite successfully stayed out of the spotlight happily letting Terry take it. I think I've only met her on one occasion that I can recall, and if you asked me to ID her in a lineup, I'd probably fail. Please enjoy this photo of a ridiculously young Terry and Lyn on their wedding day.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 02:50 |
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The_Doctor posted:I want to get a copy of Rob's book at some point, but I know it will just wreck me. The first page contains Terry's letter to Rob (to be opened in the event of the former's death), and it broke me. Off to a good start.
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 06:19 |
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CommonShore posted:Sitting down to organize my thoughts for my first lecture on Crusoe this week and on my reread two things came up i was going to be all "someone did a really good crusoe/nation comparison post the other month" and link it, until i realised that it was you who made it lol
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# ? Feb 28, 2023 12:15 |
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So in the wake of the sudden discovery of these 'new' Terry Pratchett short stories, my first cynical thought was that I hope these aren't something ai generated that someone is trying to pass off. Then, in the spirit of inquiry I signed up for ChatGPT and, well Edit: read this one instead Please write a funny Discworld short story in the style of Terry Pratchett about the wedding of Captain Carrot Ironfounderson and Sgt. Angua von Uberwald posted:It was a beautiful day in Ankh-Morpork, and the streets were lined with eager spectators. The wedding of Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson and Sergeant Angua von Uberwald was the talk of the town, and everyone who was anyone had turned out to watch. Ok, I really like the bit with Nobby and the other bit with Aunt Bertha. Please write a Discworld short story in the style of Terry Pratchett featuring Captain Carrot Ironfounderson and Sgt. Angua von Uberwald posted:
So not great, but more comprehensible than I would have guessed. I'm pretty sure PTerry would have spent days playing with this thing. Beachcomber fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Mar 3, 2023 |
# ? Mar 3, 2023 08:51 |
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Dammit the bit about Nobby stealing cakes actually got a chuckle out of me.
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 09:11 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 18:57 |
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feels a bit like something geared towards somewhat younger readers
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# ? Mar 3, 2023 10:24 |