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Keshik posted:I think it's been rather obvious from day one that Carrot came to town that the Patrician and he had a completely unspoken understanding. If Carrot ever wishes to seek the throne, the Patrician will certainly step down - but Carrot will never seek the throne, because that is not in Ankh-Morpork's interest. Knowing Vetinari, I wouldn't be surprised if he talked Death into giving him an extension, should he want one. There's an idea to consider - Vetinari versus Granny Weatherwax in the field of headology. If there was ever a Discworld Clash of the Titans...
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Aug 16, 2007 04:27
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PresterJohn posted:Hey you're both wrong; the worst discworld novel is Eric. What's wrong with Eric? The Tezuman section drags a little, but everything after that is solid gold. Especially Pratchett's digression on high-degree boredom during the Hell section.
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Oct 15, 2007 18:53
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PresterJohn posted:I didn't like it. I liked Moving Pictures more. I liked Monstrous Regiment much more than either. No, I'm actually curious. Usually in Pratchett topics I get nothing but across-the-board adoration (except for where Equal Rites and Monstrous Regiment are concerned), so I'd like to hear issues taken with some of his other books. That sort of opinion can be useful. If it were not for that sort of opinion I would still think Stephen King was universally adulated.
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Oct 15, 2007 23:16
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Forty pages into Snuff right now and it's depressing the hell out of me. The narration and dialogue alike is a rambling, wandering, patchwork mess, especially with Willikins and Vetinari, who usually prefer to speak through implication and understatement but here are firing off monologues of a girth I don't remember ever seeing in any of his books prior. The characters as a result feel more like walking word dispensaries than characters, and as for the narration, it's clotted with so many asides and flavor phrases (hate to say it, must be said, don't you know) that some sentences feel like they're wheezing by the time they reach a full stop. I guess this is a consequence of Pratchett's condition and writing the book mostly through dictation, but I was hoping it wouldn't be this pronounced. Does some of the fat start dropping off as it goes on? I'm going to finish it anyway, but it would be nice to know if it eventually finds its legs. e: also, this is more subjective, but I really don't like his sudden laser-like focus on Willikins' delinquent history. He spent the whole series as a meticulously high-class and subservient gentleman who would only bust out his street talents where absolutely necessary, and now he's strolling and chatting with Vimes like they're schoolyard mates. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jan 5, 2012 |
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Jan 5, 2012 23:46
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DontMockMySmock posted:His characterization isn't even especially different from the other books; he's just got a bigger part and his relationship with Vimes has grown since the last time he had a really big part in the story (Jingo, I think). His characterization is enormously different. In every other book he seemed deeply reticent about his thuggish upbringing and immediately switched it off whenever Vimes was in earshot. That led to the priceless scene in Jingo where he kept swapping between snarling army sergeant and impeccably polite butler in an attempt to match two sets of expectations at once. And in Thud!, after the ice knife incident, he was nearly pleading for Vimes to believe that his fatal stabbing of the dark guards was just the result of unfortunate circumstances. In Snuff, he swaggers around with his hoodlum side on his sleeve, to the point where it eclipses his entire personality. It's incredibly jarring, and gets downright galling when Pratchett uses him to re-enact, almost line for line, the final confrontation between Pepe and Andy Shank. I know that Pratchett's condition is probably forcing him to take a few shortcuts in terms of plotting and characterization to get his stories out, but really, that just makes it even more depressing.
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Feb 17, 2012 09:29
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Nilbop posted:I'd rather they were stricter to him than his work suffers from problems they can prevent, and I think the Terry from before he was diagnosed would want that too. Snuff's writing quality fell off a loving cliff, even compared to very recent works like UA. Characters shout and monologue so often they sometimes sound like they strode out of an Ayn Rand novel. Personalities are reduced to caricatures, wit Sybil and Willikins taking it especially hard. Time and place are often murky, which is really unusual, since Pratchett's always been fantastic at establishing setting. He spends half the book casting around for a plot, seizes one for maybe fifty pages when Vimes first reaches the goblin settlement (incidentally the only part when the book regains the lovely brisk pace that all Watch books share), and, again, the resolution for the villain is a nearly note-for-note copy of what happened in UA. It's not just a matter of excess language or dialogue or anything like that. It feels like someone straining to capture the style of Discworld and never quite getting a grip on it.
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Feb 17, 2012 19:46
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SeanBeansShako posted:Being right doesn't excuse comparing a dying mans writing style to that reptillian thing and her nonsense. He could have said the writing style has just degraded. A painfully apt analogy is still an apt analogy. I don't like making it any more than you like hearing it.
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Feb 17, 2012 20:04
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DontMockMySmock posted:You can not like Snuff. That's fine. But you shouldn't attribute that to his illness, either directly or indirectly (through editors not challenging him because of his illness). First of all, I don't think that works of art, such as books, should be evaluated in terms of their creators. They should be evaluated in terms of their readers/viewers/whatever. It doesn't matter what Fitzgerald meant the eyes on that billboard to mean, it matters what they mean to you. Similarly, it doesn't matter why Pratchett wrote Snuff a certain way, it matters why you didn't like it. Secondly, we have absolutely no evidence that his illness is causing any changes we might see in his writing. No one is well-equipped to say how much his illness is affecting his writing except the man himself. I have very little patience with death of the author even when it's being used properly, and you're using it in the warped "internet argument" way that's usually dragged out when someone needs to scramble away from backing up their opinions. The author and their works are related. The end. This relation does not have to be the end-all be-all of literary analysis, and other interpretations separate from the author's condition or even their personal opinions on the work are still valid, but when a writer's quality nose-dives after they freely confess that their process has been adversely affected by, let's not dance around it, a neuro-degenerative illness, it is not terribly loving difficult to draw the line between point A and point B. As for the examples of other books you brought up, all of them miss the point. Monstrous Regiment mostly draws flak for its relatively hamfisted messaging (similar to Equal Rites) and kind of silly plot twist, but the language pops, same as always. Ditto with Eric, which has the same brisk flow and imagery as any of Pratchett's other Rincewind books, problems with its length or content aside. Making Money didn't have the same relentless forward movement as Going Postal and its plot elements (Fusspot, Hugo and his machinery, the Lavishes' machinations) didn't gel as well as they used to, but if you can't see the difference between its writing and that of Snuff, then that's a deficiency on your part. You could flip to almost any page and any passage in that book (and some people in this thread have done exactly that) and see the way Pratchett's writing has changed, and it's not an "evolution." It's degradation. So yeah, for people like me who have an entire shelf dedicated to Pratchett books (one that ran out of horizontal space two years ago) that have mostly been read almost in half, it's kind of a real loving bummer and hard not to see Snuff as the beginning of something inevitable, given overwhelming evidence about the author's condition. You want to believe that this was just a rough patch or that none of the problems were really that pronounced, fine. But you don't get to shittalk or condescend to anybody because of your inability or unwillingness to discern the obvious. Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Feb 18, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 23:13
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Mokinokaro posted:Yeah that bit always bugged me. I mean it's something I could see Cheery doing, but definitely not Angua. Angua has always struck me as one of the weakest, most tedious characters in the Watch books, which are normally tight as a drum. Her every subplot consists of her whining about her lycanthropy, and there's rarely much variety in the flavor of angst she presents. It was understandable in Men at Arms and The Fifth Elephant couldn't have done without her due to the Uberwald thing, but she's usually much better as an ancillary character who can just act as a plot device or gag fodder.
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Apr 21, 2012 21:05
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Raising Taxes or whatever he's planning for Moist would be best. Nearly all of the other characters have been wrapped up to some extent. Rincewind is happily living a desperately boring life; Vimes ended with a literal snapshot in Thud! (I ignore Snuff because it was depressingly bad); Cohen is Viking'ing the poo poo out of space; Granny Weatherwax had a perfect finish in Carpe Jugulum, disregarding her minor role in Tiffany's story, which also finished well. Moist's story is pretty much the story of Ankh Morpork and its future, and I think it's where Discworld's denouement should be. My main concern is we'll end up with a repeat of Snuff, where the prose was so awful it devalued the characters in my mind.
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Jan 11, 2013 05:09
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SeanBeansShako posted:I've got to read Snuff and stop reading this thread for a bit as I got it for a christmas present and every time I check this thread is seems to be sliding lower and lower down on the appreciation scale. You'd really be better off just leaving it on your shelf and not opening it. I'm serious. At best it's a below-average Discworld entry, at worst it will taint your impressions of previous books just by existing. It's a little harder for me to enjoy Night Watch, Thud! et al knowing that the possible terminus of the Vimes series is that book.
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Jan 11, 2013 06:15
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rejutka posted:The antagonist was apathy. That's a stupid antagonist.
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Jan 12, 2013 17:56
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rejutka posted:By stupid do you mean quite common in real life? Many, if not all, of the Watch books have some kind of general societal prejudice as an antagonistic force that runs through the whole of the story, and usually supercedes the actual "villain" of the book. The thing is, those antagonists still exist, and are usually at least fun to read about even if their personalities aren't terribly deep. Snuff's main villain wasn't only terrible, he was a note-for-note ripoff of Andy Shank (normal guy who's just a right bastard, y'know), right down to the way he was dispatched in the ending (with another horrible monologue from Willikins, thanks ever so much for that. Real-life applicability means nothing if the writing is bad. Snuff's writing, with the exception of maybe forty-fifty pages, was that of someone desperately trying to grasp the feel of Discworld and doing a poor job of it.
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Jan 12, 2013 18:07
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bunnyofdoom posted:Planes, trains and/or automobiles? Vetinari's Undertaking is heavily implied to be an Ankh-Morpork equivalent of the London Underground, using the Devices unearthed in Thud! So he's got that covered.
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Jan 17, 2013 03:39
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FactsAreUseless posted:Oh, that's who it reminded me of. Inigo Skimmer. I think that was his name. Inigo Skimmer was at least a bit reticent. Mhm, mmm. Snuff-model Willikins never shut the gently caress up, much like every other character in Snuff.
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Jan 26, 2013 02:48
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Jedit posted:If more people enjoyed the marriage as much as the courting, there wouldn't be a 50% divorce rate. There is not a 50% divorce rate. That makes this saying stupid. Think I'm going to give Raising Steam a miss. I genuinely hated Snuff and this is looking like more of the same, only this time it torpedoes characters related to Moist as well as Vimes. Making Money wasn't exactly the best conclusion to Moist's story, but I'm comfortable leaving it there.
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Dec 7, 2013 06:35
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Zephyrine posted:That seemed more like a fluke. He seems mostly confused in the scene where he meets Vimes and nothing like that happens again for three nightwatch books. Maybe go back and re-read that scene. He's not confused, he's embarrassed to show such abject bloodthirst to the man he butlers.
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Sep 26, 2014 22:02
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VagueRant posted:What's the general take on the Hogfather TV adaptation? I just got through the audiobook and have been looking into it a little. (I always thought David Jason was playing Rincewind on TV. Albert makes a lot more sense!) Maybe English people have different standards, but speaking as an American it was unbearably trashy even before you factor in the cut-rate Johnny Depp-Wonka performance for Teatime.
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Feb 10, 2015 22:56
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Mad Hamish posted:Death is just bad at games. He can't play bridge, he forgets how the knights move in chess, and I can only imagine that the Disc's version of Monopoly didn't go well either. That was in the Light Fantastic, right? Death is good at games but bad at chess, which is why he insists that people don't pick that one. Remember that he once threw a game of cards with Granny because he "only had four ones."
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Apr 26, 2016 19:29
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thespaceinvader posted:Because Pterry deserves it, and so do you. it's a grand send off for him i felt. The end of Thud! was a good sendoff. The rest is listening to the EEG's beeps grow slower.
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May 15, 2016 05:26
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Jerry Cotton posted:The railway one is actually the only one where Pratchett's mind death shows. All the other ones are more or less fine but not all brilliant. The degradation started around Unseen Academicals and became undeniable by Snuff. I wish I'd never read the latter.
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Jul 19, 2016 21:06
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Alhazred posted:I honestly think you're seeing character development where there isn't one. Death has always been on our side against the auditors. Death is fundamentally against the Auditors just because of what he is. Death is an agent of change. The Auditors are agents of stasis.
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Aug 1, 2016 14:44
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Jerry Cotton posted:He kills Cruces because Cruces knows. Well, that and because he shot a bunch of people.
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Sep 15, 2016 13:33
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Jerry Cotton posted:Did you... did actually you read any of the books with Carrot in them? Yes? It's the scene with that "good man/evil man" bit that everyone can't stop quoting. Cruces' knowledge of the succession was a factor, but the fact that he'd shot Vetinari, killed another copper and had Vimes under the barrel as well probably didn't help his chances either.
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Sep 15, 2016 13:51
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pratchett's take on religion isn't atheist but a pretty generic humanism, placing the power and authority inherent to religious belief in its believers rather than the external sources of authority professed by the religion itself (gods, etc). you can chalk this up to the sort of feel-good wishy-washiness inherent to many of his contemporaries but since his entire mythos revolves around objects of belief becoming literally realized his treatment of religious belief also naturally falls under that umbrella. it doesn't mock the concept of religious faith so much as encourage one to first examine the origins and aims of religion before incorporating it into one's own ideas of morality, which is probably especially useful today, since we're at the end of the world and moreso than ever any prominent people who express fervent religious belief tend to be psychopathic grifters still, yes, it's a shallow treatment of the subject. easily digestible, like a biscuit the only passage i've read that put forth a convincing argument for non-humanist religious belief is the mormon priest's story from cormac mccarthy's The Crossing - "god requires no witness." i'm on the record as being deeply unimpressed with dostoevsky's piety and while i've only read Foucault's Pendulum eco seems to take the same humanist tack to conspiratorial thinking as pratchett does to religion (agliè's numerology scene in particular comes to mind). need to check out White Teeth tho Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Mar 14, 2019 |
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Mar 14, 2019 17:10
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it’s working well enough for me
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Mar 14, 2019 17:32
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the first two discworld books i read were the last continent and night watch, bought from a mall bookstore for some reason. must have been 13-14 years ago probably not the best jumping-off point but it didn't matter much, i must have looked very foolish bent over and giggling on one of the benches
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Mar 14, 2019 22:40
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one of the downsides of discworld being split up into a number of discrete mini-series is that later works in each sequence tend to iterate on ideas in previous ones it's especially clear in lords and ladies because most of that is pratchett still getting a handle on the witches and their parodically pastoral setting, and then carpe jugulum takes that formula with the characterization detailed in the intervening works and uses it to portray basically the same conflict but with larger stakes and more investment in the protagonists' own safety (until the vampires enter the scene, weatherwax has been comically invincible while wagging her finger at immortal and unchanging beings, and jugulum is the first novel where she has to confront her own mortality, which probably gives her the impetus to hand the storyline over to tiffany aching whose books i have never read) it's sort of the same thing with the rincewind books, where the first two stories starring him were attempts at a lighthearted but more generic fantasy series and then pratchett just decided to make his globetrotting (disctrotting?) into an excuse to use him as the point-of-view character in a series of novel-sized international pastiche shitposts Oxxidation fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 06:33
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also it's probably necessary to approach these books as more than just their overarching themes, because they're also vehicles for comedy and much of what distinguishes one story from another is the gags they trot out not all of them are successful (i dislike virtually everything involving angua), but reaper man's undead-rights brigade and american gothic pastiche is still distinctly separate from hogfather's holiday jokes
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Mar 16, 2019 06:37
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trying to picture what'd happen to someone who ripped a book in half in U.U.'s library and my imagination just chuckles weakly and shuts down
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Mar 27, 2019 21:57
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Tunicate posted:Yeah a lot of authors did that because Marion Zimmer Bradley is a horrible person and a liar. TL;DR, she offered to buy a fanfic from a fanfic writer for a couple hundred dollars, the fanfic writer said 'okay so long as I get a coauthor credit, since I wrote it'. In response, Bradley sued the fan, then spun a story to all her author friends that SHE had been the one who got sued, and it was because a fan had written a fanfic that was close to a published book and the fan got mad. well that link took me on a journey
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Aug 23, 2020 22:23
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:From the polygon review, it sounds like they kill off Detritus.. So on top of everything else, there’s that. closing my eyes, steepling my fingers, taking deep breath thru my nose
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Dec 19, 2020 05:59
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my first contact with pratchett was buying the last continent and night watch at a mall bookstore when i was sixteen or something. sat down at a bench and went through most of the last continent right there lot of passersby that day probably wondering why this kid appeared to be having a nervous breakdown in public. there were points i was quiet-laughing so hard my body bent like a stapler
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Mar 11, 2023 07:06
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iirc while rincewind’s post occasionally involves mortal peril, that’s mostly because he’s still rincewind. otherwise it consists of sorting rocks and dirt samples, exactly the sort of pointless tedium that’s his idea of paradise
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Mar 22, 2023 13:42
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A Moose posted:I suppose the position was open since the beginning of The Last Continent, wasn't that the professor that got eaten by a dinosaur in the past? he was clandestinely vacationing on the god of evolution’s island/workshop and got et by an alligator-ish thing there it tried to do the same for the rest of the wizards but then became a chicken because the faculty were feeling peckish
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Mar 22, 2023 21:46
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