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Andoman posted:That would be pretty cool, especially if it persuaded a couple of people like myself who got a bit jaded to pick up the books. Every Discworld fan should read them, but (spoilers for personal opinions on the last few books, in case you want to go in blind) be prepared for profound sadness when it's obvious how Pterry's terrible disease was taking away his wit and prose. The last few books read more like fanfic. I know it's Pterry's last goodbye to us, which makes it worse.
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Oct 9, 2022 18:39
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Canuckistan posted:Every Discworld fan should read them, but (spoilers for personal opinions on the last few books, in case you want to go in blind) be prepared for profound sadness when it's obvious how Pterry's terrible disease was taking away his wit and prose. The last few books read more like fanfic. I know it's Pterry's last goodbye to us, which makes it worse. Agree with the spoilered part, disagree with the visible.
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Oct 10, 2022 06:05
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Moist's adventures with Vimes in Raising Steam was mildly entertaining at least, and Snuff has the bit where one song by a goblin brought the Pateician basically close to tears. Aa for the Crown i agree with the spoiled part as well. Still read it all because by god i owed it to him to see it through.
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Oct 10, 2022 15:47
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I have a completely different take on the final books. It is absolutely true that it isn't the same Pterry, and you can tell the embuggerance has had a major effect on his writing. But there's some major tonal differences between multiple other Discworld novels. The first few, for example. There's a huge difference between Wyrd Sisters and Maskerade. The Truth has a very different style from, say, Moving Pictures. Pratchett was always willing to change his style and approach based upon the book he was writing. To think that he would somehow be completely oblivious to the effects his condition had on him as a writer and completely disregard it in making stylistic decisions just doesn't seem fair to him. Snuff still has some tonal continuity with the Vimes series as a whole; I'd argue Vimes in Thud! has more in common with Vimes in Snuff than Vimes in Guards! Guards!. Raising Steam is a seismic change of voice and approach, with the narrator coming across more as an historian chronicling events than the narration of prior Discworld books. But that's pretty clearly a choice, and Pratchett pretty clearly has decided to encapsulate everything he wanted to get across in his Discworld Industrialization plotline in a single book with a single representative technology. While the resulting book isn't as funny/witty and has a shocking lack of the kind of back and forth dialogue for which Pratchett is well-known, in many regards it's a lot closer to Dodger or Nation than it is to some book written by someone not Pterry. When I taught Raising Steam as the last book in a semester's seminar on Pratchett, with only one student who had read any Pratchett before in the class, none of them felt it was a huge departure because they'd encountered several of his previous stylistic changes in compressed form throughout the class. The experience really made me rethink my own first reading of the book, and having to teach the thing made me rethink what Pratchett was up to and really appreciate the level of design: Raising Steam isn't about characters in the way the other Discworld novels are, it really is about the steam engine and how it changes a world. The scale and approach are radically different, and what's changing isn't the individual characters but everything. It's just the sort of book a man who knows he will have to leave this world behind would write for himself, before he sits down to write the last book for his fans. I could see skipping Snuff, I guess, but it's a fantastic concept (Vimes is out of the city, so who is he now) that stops being a Vimes book and becomes a something-else book about 100 pages before you notice. Once you figure out that Vimes is a supporting character, it all plays out much better. But while I can see not liking the tonally different Raising Steam, if you love Pratchett, I think it may be one of the most Pratchett of the Discworld books. Just don't think of it as the satirist writing comic fantasy with an underlying message, think of it as a "Last Lecture" style argument about how to approach the world, that's serious because the author is running out of time and knows his last book can't deliver these messages because it has to be about people, not history. Edit: The Last Shepherd is obviously unfinished, and its afterward explains that. (It also says he wrote much of it while writing Raising Steam, which is very different in voice and tone.) But I think what gets lost in seeing it as Pterry's last Discworld novel/last novel is that it's actually the conclusion of the Tiffany Aching series. Which both is and profoundly is not a series aimed at young adults (and especially girls/young women). As the last Discworld novel, The Last Shepherd is a disappointment. But even if unfinished, it is an amazing conclusion to the Tiffany Aching series, with a powerful message aimed only secondarily at those of us who've been Pratchett fans and readers since the 80s. Narsham fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Oct 10, 2022 |
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Oct 10, 2022 19:22
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That is somewhat borne out by Terry's later comment that Discworld technology would never advance further than it had in Raising Steam. However, he then added, "... but they do have all the technology they need for crystal radio". So it was less a "last word" than it was the writing of a man who knew he only had so many more stories to tell - none, as it turned out - and was pitching camp where he wanted to be. In fact he'd probably been pitching that camp for a while before Raising Steam, setting up a post-Vetinari Ankh-Morpork centred on Moist as chief administrator, the protagonist of Twilight Gardens as a foil to (and possible replacement for) Vimes, and William de Worde keeping the others in check by reporting on them.
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Oct 10, 2022 19:35
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Jedit posted:That is somewhat borne out by Terry's later comment that Discworld technology would never advance further than it had in Raising Steam. However, he then added, "... but they do have all the technology they need for crystal radio". So it was less a "last word" than it was the writing of a man who knew he only had so many more stories to tell - none, as it turned out - and was pitching camp where he wanted to be. Discworld invents crystal radios, next thing you know trolls invent cyberware Human supremacists send offensive messages to the cyber-enabled trolls, an act known as "trolling"
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Oct 10, 2022 22:58
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I think it would be the other way around, and the other races would call it 'humaning' or something like that.
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Oct 11, 2022 01:49
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Kesper North posted:Discworld invents crystal radios, next thing you know trolls invent cyberware I think it would be more like that thing where people claim they can pick up radio stations on the fillings in their teeth.
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Oct 11, 2022 09:15
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Or they use the UU for their antenna and the radio waves start doing funky magical stuff. Oh, and the Wizards and the Librarian all become DJs.
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Oct 11, 2022 10:45
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I'm picturing a literal Wolfman Jack with a werewolf refugee from Überwald accidentally broadcasting Imp y Celyn's harp performance.
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Oct 11, 2022 12:58
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I was just rereading 'Lords and Ladies' and noticed this exchange between Weatherwax and Ridcully: "I was young and foolish then." "Well? You're old and foolish now." Is this a known TMBG reference (Lucky Ball & Chain)? Flood came out in 1990 and Lords and Ladies came out in 1992.
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Oct 12, 2022 05:48
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Very likely, Terry was a fan of them.
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Oct 12, 2022 05:51
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It wouldn't be the first time. Foul Ol' Ron got his catchphrase from Pterry feeding tmbg lyrics into a text generator, along with the menu from a Chinese restaurant, iirc. And Soul Music had a band called We're Certainly Dwarves.
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Oct 12, 2022 06:11
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Jedit posted:the protagonist of Twilight Gardens
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Oct 12, 2022 14:24
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Xander77 posted:The who of what? Twilight Gardens was the last Discworld novel to enter the full draft phase, and it was never completed. It centred on a man who, like Moist, had been sentenced to death and secretly reprieved to work for the Patrician. Except where Moist was a conman whose talents were being used to reorder public services, this man - whose name I forget, sorry - was the angriest man on the Disc, convicted of murder for a justified killing. His rage at injustice was to be channeled into fighting crime in places where the Watch couldn't safely act even through the Particulars, to give them complete deniability. And I'll bet you can figure out how Vimes would have felt about that. E: my memory may be slipping and it might have been called Twilight Mansions.
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Oct 12, 2022 14:45
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Twilight Canyons was the working title.
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Oct 12, 2022 15:05
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The_Doctor posted:Twilight Canyons was the working title. Drat it, thank you.
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Oct 12, 2022 15:34
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Jedit posted:It centred on a man who, like Moist, had been sentenced to death and secretly reprieved to work for the Patrician. Except where Moist was a conman whose talents were being used to reorder public services, this man - whose name I forget, sorry - was the angriest man on the Disc, convicted of murder for a justified killing. Oh, did Mr Tulip finish up being a bookworm, then?
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Oct 12, 2022 16:33
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Canuckistan posted:Or they use the UU for their antenna and the radio waves start doing funky magical stuff. Oh, and the Wizards and the Librarian all become DJs. Well, the Dean certainly would.
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Oct 12, 2022 17:53
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Mad Hamish posted:Well, the Dean certainly would. The Dean went to Sto Lat(?) didn't he? Narsham posted:I have a completely different take on the final books. It is absolutely true that it isn't the same Pterry, and you can tell the embuggerance has had a major effect on his writing. The tone of the book doesn't bother me so much as characters losing their humanity and becoming caricatures. The big one I remember is Willikins in Snuff, but it's all over to greater and lesser degrees.
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Oct 19, 2022 04:09
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Narsham posted:I have a completely different take on the final books. It is absolutely true that it isn't the same Pterry, and you can tell the embuggerance has had a major effect on his writing. I strongly disagree with this, until the late stage pratchett books all have a basically identical style. Even the YA stuff is just different in having chapters.
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Oct 19, 2022 11:37
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Beachcomber posted:The Dean went to Sto Lat(?) didn't he? The Dean tends to get quickly sucked into whatever Weird New Thing the faculty is dealing with (Soul Music, Hogfather, Moving Pictures etc) so considering how little time it took him to get a leather robe with DEAN BORN TO in studs on the back, I assume he would have rad mirror shades and be flipping records while IDK beatboxing almost immediately. I have an extremely clear mental image of the Dean and the Librarian DJ'ing at some kind of dance party / rave in Ankh-Morpork and it's delightful.
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Oct 21, 2022 16:11
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Mad Hamish posted:I have an extremely clear mental image of the Dean and the Librarian DJ'ing at some kind of dance party / rave in Ankh-Morpork and it's delightful. Orbital with the flashlight-glasses, but one of them is an ape 
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Oct 21, 2022 21:56
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That just made me think of CMOT Dibbler trying to sell non-fungible tokens. All his apes gone.
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Oct 21, 2022 22:09
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Mad Hamish posted:The Dean tends to get quickly sucked into whatever Weird New Thing the faculty is dealing with (Soul Music, Hogfather, Moving Pictures etc) so considering how little time it took him to get a leather robe with No, he went to be Archchancellor of a new magic school, I believe. I think Sto Lat, could be one of the other plains cities. Happened just before Unseen Academicals.
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Oct 22, 2022 01:41
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GodFish posted:That just made me think of CMOT Dibbler trying to sell non-fungible tokens. All his apes gone.
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Oct 22, 2022 02:37
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There's the Pork Futures warehouses and Dibbler is famous for selling things that don't belong to him or even exist
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Oct 22, 2022 02:42
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Beachcomber posted:No, he went to be Archchancellor of a new magic school, I believe. I think Sto Lat, could be one of the other plains cities. Ah, my bad! It's been a while since I read Unseen Academicals and I've only read it once.
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Oct 22, 2022 14:17
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sebmojo posted:I strongly disagree with this, until the late stage pratchett books all have a basically identical style. Even the YA stuff is just different in having chapters. Try reading Equal Rights and Masquerade back to back. Or Moving Pictures and then The Truth. The voicing is the same, but the characterization changes across books, as does the degree to which they're themed around a concept versus being themed around a message (Soul Music and Moving Pictures are the most obvious "concept" pieces). I freely admit that the word "style" can be broadly defined. The Carpet People and the Tiffany Aching series are both YA stuff with tiny people, but they are dramatically different works. For that matter I Shall Wear Midnight is not drastically different from the earlier Aching books despite being written during the Embuggerance. Even the relationship between Granny and Nanny shifts significantly between Wyrd Sisters and the later witch books. Pratchett was never afraid of change.
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Oct 22, 2022 22:43
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They are all still basically the same, imo. Lots of subtle differences but the overall style is consistent from color of magic to thud.
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Oct 23, 2022 22:03
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sebmojo posted:They are all still basically the same, imo. quote:Lots of subtle differences but the overall style is consistent from color of magic to thud. 
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Oct 23, 2022 22:12
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Xander77 posted:Sure. Color of Magic and Thud are basically... At a certain point, the gap between two people's understanding of what constitutes "style" is clearly so wide that there's not much point in continuing the conversation. In other news, I'm working my way through Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes* and just passed a reference to a scene in Making Money where a mob comes to the bank. There's no detail beyond that in the biography, to avoid spoilers. After flipping back and forth through my copy of Making Money, I'm still not sure which scene is being referred to. Wilkins describes the context as Terry "bringing an angry mob with pitchforks through the streets to the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, intent on retribution from the troubled Vice Chairman..." There's two scenes where crowds show up at the bank, so maybe it's the second one? Only Wilkins also says Moist "threw open the bank's door to find . . . well, at that exact moment, nobody in the world, including the author, knew what lay on the other side of that door that could spare Moist a dire end." Perhaps I am overthinking: in both instances, Moist is inside the bank and throws open the doors to admit the mob, so it's the dire end on the other side, not the thing that can save Moist. But it is bugging me to no end and I don't want to stop reading the biography while I reread Making Money in its entirety to confirm that there's no scene that quite matches what Wilkins describes.
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Oct 26, 2022 19:21
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Narsham posted:Only Wilkins also says Moist "threw open the bank's door to find . . . well, at that exact moment, nobody in the world, including the author, knew what lay on the other side of that door that could spare Moist a dire end." Sounds like a good time to to take a 5 minute break for nourishing soup.
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Oct 27, 2022 05:04
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Narsham posted:
You are overthinking. I just got my copy of the biog yesterday - the signed copies were delayed - and I agree it's a little sad in the reading. The bit about Terry being addicted to crystal radio as a kid touches differently when you know a Disc story about it was one of the many ideas that he never had a chance to complete. But I called my mum to let her know that I'd got it, and she asked how it was; when I said "I got it half an hour ago, I'm only one chapter in" I could hear Pterry's amused tut. He was always a little bit bemused that fans devoured his books so quickly that in some cases they'd seemingly read them before he'd written them. It would have tickled him to hear one fan half expecting another to have finished his biography the instant they'd bought it, and that other fan admitting that they'd only managed 40 pages. There's a quote in Reaper Man which runs, roughly, "Nobody is really dead unti the ripples they left in the world fade away... The span of a man's life is only the core of his existence." That tiny mental chuckle from a ghost sums it up for me: the ripples Pterry left will never fade, certainly not as long as I'm alive and probably not for long after that. I aten't dead.
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Oct 27, 2022 11:06
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Jedit posted:You are overthinking. The fact remains that the biography describes an exciting moment during the writing of the novel and I can't share it in vicariously because I can't tell which of two potential moments is being discussed! I'm much further along in the book, so I assure you, Terry would have been livid. Of course, he'd probably have ended up chortling at it later. It's a good biography: you can admire Terry while also registering the human parts of him, the imperfections not always evident to fans. In particular, he seems to have had a goodly amount of the angry, sometimes bullying side of Granny.
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Oct 28, 2022 00:15
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It sounds like the scene where Harry King shows up to put (more?) money in the bank.
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Nov 1, 2022 23:31
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Jedit posted:There's a quote in Reaper Man which runs, roughly, "Nobody is really dead unti the ripples they left in the world fade away... The span of a man's life is only the core of his existence." That tiny mental chuckle from a ghost sums it up for me: the ripples Pterry left will never fade, certainly not as long as I'm alive and probably not for long after that. GNU pterry
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Nov 1, 2022 23:42
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I finished volume 2 of Gibbon so I'm back into Pratchett and I should be able to finish the last four Discworld novels before the end of the year. I'm going to post about them as I go. I'm just about finished with I Shall Wear Midnight (I'm past the climax and I'll probably wrap it up and start the next one tonight) and I'm consistently blown away with just how good the Tiffany Aching books are. I'm a sucker for ancient folklore stories and sublime terrors from outside of the fringes of history, and the witches are my favourite characters in Discworld, so I may be focusing more on its strengths than weaknesses. It's so much stronger of a plot than Making Money or So because of the poor reviews I've read here and elsewhere of Snuff and Raising Steam, I was expecting to see some of that decline here too, as I see beginning in those three previous "main" books which are definitely weaker, but nope. Was there something different in the creative process for the Aching books? CommonShore fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 05:55
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CommonShore posted:So because of the poor reviews I've read here and elsewhere of Snuff and Raising Steam, I was expecting to see some of that decline here too, as I see beginning in those three previous "main" books which are definitely weaker, but nope. Was there something different in the creative process for the Aching books?
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Dec 22, 2022 09:29
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Xander77 posted:You just like the characters enough not to notice the flaws (random new love interest with no characterization, a villain that's menacing on paper whom the plot treats like an utter random nuisance). Thud (for example) is generally regarded as one of the best Discworld books. Really. Huh. I might have gotten some titles crossed late at night then then - is Thud the murder mystery with the dwarves and trolls (good) or the one with the ton of golems (less good)... That's making money too isn't it. Yep. I should have refreshed my memory. I had put the last third of Making Money onto the end of the plot of Thud. I'm off to a great start here. e. I'll edit the initial post CommonShore fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Dec 22, 2022 |
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Dec 22, 2022 15:53
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