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Looks like a show produced and scripted by people who deep down, in their heart of hearts, don't believe that Terry Pratchett's setting or humor would work on TV in 2021. Which makes one wonder why they licensed the setting to begin with, if not to trick people who like Discworld into watching.
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Dec 11, 2020 01:00
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Staggy posted:I think this one line by itself is enough to make me glad I rejected all further knowledge of this when the trailers dropped. Good god, how do you miss the mark so badly? Simple: be the sort of person who thinks that line is both funny and clever.
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Jan 1, 2021 23:39
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feetnotes posted:Just imagine a total misinterpretation of Granny Weatherwax's relationship with her cat You, where she's grumpy and the cat is cutesy and they go on adventures that reveal Granny really has a heart of gold and has to learn to smile again. Or like imagine a Death that is always intervening to make sure cute kids and kindly old folks aren't meeting their untimely ends from a runaway cart or whatever because that would make the audience feel bad. At least we aren't facing a bunch of that, right? The show's Death talks like he's Quoth. How badly do you have to misread the books to confuse those two?
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Jan 4, 2021 00:17
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Liquid Communism posted:You want some whiplash, try to imagine this Death doing the monologue from Reaper Man. Death, doing a Cheech Marin impression: “YOU KNOW HOW THEY TALK ABOUT THE CHILL OF THE GRAVE? WHAT WE NEED NOW IS LESS GRAVE AND MORE CHILL.”
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Jan 12, 2021 17:10
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Megazver posted:I haven't read them, but the vibe I got from the whole thing was PT knew he was dying and wouldn't be able to write this idea he had, so he asked a friend to expand on what he had so far. This way, he got to at least read some of the story as written by someone else and the friend got to sell way more books than he usually does. (Not that he's a slouch himself. But it's several hundred reviews per book on his own books versus ~2K reviews on Long Earth.) Having read them, read the original Pratchett short story, and reread some of the late Pratchett novels (especially Raising Steam), I suspect there's more of Pratchett in the Long Earth series than you'd think, even if the details did get fleshed out by Baxter. I never stop being surprised at how many Pratchett fans think his neurological state is responsible for the shift in tone in his late novels. While no doubt a factor, I'd think at least as big a factor would be the difference in writing those novels post-diagnosis. Doing the same thing you always did, especially when you can't, would seem less appealing when you don't know how many more books you can write. Good Omens is another collaboration, and every time I reread that I end up concluding that there's more Pratchett and less Gaiman than I had thought. The substrata of his writing isn't footnotes and clever puns, it's humanism and anger, and there's plenty of both in both collaborations, though perhaps not enough in the Long Earth series.
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Feb 22, 2021 04:04
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ChubbyChecker posted:yeah, the angel and demon were the only good things about the series They're the reason for the sequel. By current accounts, the sole reason. If it gets Sheen and Tennant on screen together again, I'm OK with it, I'm just not going to pretend it's a Terry Pratchett joint.
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Jun 29, 2021 18:50
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Phenotype posted:It definitely does some overtly supernatural stuff, and tells Vimes things that he wouldn't be able to know by himself. Pretty sure there's a passage in Snuff where he's going into a tunnel with Constable Upshot and Upshot's like "oh poo poo it's pitch black in here" and Vimes realizes he can still see perfectly. I never saw that as a continued occupation/possession, but as an indication that whenever you're in pitch darkness, the Summoning Darkness is there. It doesn't really have anybody else to talk with.
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Jul 18, 2021 00:12
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It's possible to read the dwarf story-line as being about women forced to present as men, which plays into a certain kind of feminism pretty effectively, and I can imagine these TERFs insisting that because the biology/genitalia matches up with the female gender performance, by definition these stories can't be about trans-people. Complete nonsense, of course. When I taught an entire semester of Pratchett, I had multiple stories assigned covering the Cheri/Cheery story, through and including Raising Steam, but I was planning to soft-pedal the trans context because I didn't want to proscribe a single way of reading the books. But then I ended up with a classroom full of students who had never read Pratchett; the only fan (who'd read almost everything) was trans, and was willing to talk and write about it, and he opened my eyes (as well as the other students' eyes) to just precisely how Pratchett is clearly and calculatedly exploring the trans experience of gender performance through the changes to dwarf culture. By the time we got to Feet of Clay, I was just drawing the students' attention to how early the publication date was in terms of cultural discourse about gender identity, and we all got to marvel at how far ahead of the curve Pratchett was. In fact, Angua's story also plays interestingly with concepts of gender and bodies, and it's interesting to see that, after helping Cheri redefine herself over the course of Feet of Clay, it turns out that Cheri is actually far more comfortable with living as who she actually is than Angua is. Angua's not only not comfortable being a werewolf, she's not very comfortable being a woman, which is why she has all this clothing she isn't using and can loan to Cheri. An interesting aside about Rowling/Harry Potter: I was having a conversation the other day, and the upshot of it was that Rowling's Harry Potter falls neatly in line with her present TERF behavior down to the level of the structure and design. As something that's fundamentally a mystery, the story tries to lock everything down at the end: "all is well," the few terrible evil people who didn't end up loyal to the guy worse than Hitler receive a bit of recognition for being not that evil and their being terrible is forgotten, and the "puzzle" at the heart of the books has been resolved. Nothing more need be said. Everything worked out. Of course, the House-elves are all still slaves, the Goblins are apparently still treacherous and evil and that justifies the wizarding world treating them as subhuman, and God knows what the centaurs are supposed to be, but they aren't enfranchised either. In fact, none of these subspecies even WANT more rights, except the Goblins, and gently caress them, amirite? So "all is well" applies even though appalling race-based evil is still being done by mainstream wizarding society. Thanks, JK. Compare to Discworld mysteries. Feet of Clay is a great example: the lot of golems has been slightly improved, perhaps, but that's an issue that will need to be worked on through the remaining books. Cheri's gender presentation is just the start of a slow revolution. And the villain of the piece may have had his undeath's work ruined, for now, but he still occupies an influential position and he can afford to bide his time. Kingship and class haven't been eliminated, they've just been dealt a temporary blow. We can feel satisfied at the conclusion of this story, but all is definitively not well, and the work has to continue. And then, in subsequent novels, it does! In Pratchett, the mystery EXPOSES something, a larger source of decay and rot within culture, government, society, etc, and while the resolution makes a meaningful difference, it does not solve the problem, merely creating the possibility of working slowly and persistently towards a solution. In Rowling, the resolution of the mystery REVEALS Harry's essential goodness, and that's pretty much all that's required to solve the problem in a fairly conclusive way. Evil is still out there, but Harry is still fighting it, so we have nothing to worry about. In Pratchett, then, goodness is an action, an ongoing process of behavior (and changing behavior) over time that depends upon the relationships between people, including neighbors, families, foreigners, strangers, tourists, and beings not traditionally treated as human. In Rowling, people are pretty much what they are, essentially, and behavior is a layer plastered over that essence that can either reveal or conceal who someone really is. Choices matter, sure, but while Harry chooses to be good, he also IS good, and there's no hint that Voldemort has the choice to not be evil, just that he has the choice to repent and be redeemed (by whom, exactly? God? Harry Christ?). Dumbledore talking with Snape implies, not that Snape was evil and has slowly changed his ways, but that he was essentially good the whole time and it just wasn't obvious yet. And goodness, apparently, isn't determined by how you treat others, because Hermione's attempts to free the House-Elves are ridiculed even by our hero, who treats Dobby well across most of the series but is abominable in his treatment of Kreacher; when that changes, apparently we are being taught that if you treat a slave well, he will be happy and become good, not that treating ANYBODY as a slave is wrong even if that's the way it works right now. The Golden Rule, for Rowling, seems to involve treating people nicely until they screw you over (Griphook) and then wishing them dead because they are evil in essence. Nobody claims at the end of the HP series that they should return Gryffindor's sword to the Goblins now. It is obviously, and essentially, owned by the dead human who paid for it, even though it just as clearly has no specific human owner. No surprise, then, if Rowling is a gender essentialist, too. Or that she seems increasingly convinced that anyone disagreeing with her is evil, not just wrong.
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Jul 31, 2021 19:28
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Vetinari is essentially "What if Machiavelli's Prince, but genuinely interested in the well-being of the polity," at least at the start. By the end, you can see that while he technically wields the powers of a tyrant, he does not generally function like one. Jingo is a partial exception, but the vast majority of the time, Vetinari is not the reformer himself, but the cause of another character or characters stepping up to do whatever Vetinari wants done. A genuine tyrant distrusts allowing anyone else the power to implement his directives, because such a person becomes a potential threat. Vetinari is an expert game player. He understands that you ultimately win the game by playing the other players, not the game itself. His breakthrough as leader is that he usually doesn't need to play the game: Vimes, or von Lipvig, or someone else, will get the job done. Hell, in Feet of Clay he solves part of the mystery himself and deliberately refrains from tipping Vimes off, trusting that he'll work things out on his own (though prepared to provide hints if he doesn't). I'm hard-pressed to find an example of a real-world "Dear Leader" who doesn't insist on taking the full credit for everything good that happens, including things they have no control over at all. In Vetinari's case, he can just start a process going, let someone else see it through, congratulate them on success, and publicly refuse to accept any of the credit himself, and still have everyone thinking "that wily Patrician, we all know he's responsible for what just happened." He's sometimes shown to be in a position of precarity that gets ignored by the end because so many protagonists are working to prop him up. Unseen Academicals makes fairly clear that he's in deep peril if other people don't work everything out for him, and it's ultimately the appreciation of many of the other people that things work out right with him still in charge that keeps him in his place. In stories where events are beyond his knowledge or influence, he's a non-factor: Thief of Time, for example, sees the world potentially end, and Vetinari plays no part whatsoever in saving it.
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Aug 3, 2021 19:18
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I made a note to post in the thread about Vimes and the Summoning Dark when I reread Snuff and I am finally doing that. In my hardback edition, page 120: Stinky the Goblin is clinging to Vimes and asking for just ice: "Not panicking now, the goblin pointed a claw at Vimes's left wrist, looked him in the face, and said 'Just ice?'" Goblins live in the dark, of course, and Stinky pointed to the Summoning Dark scar. He's not just asking Vimes for justice here. Page 121: "And again Vimes remembered the darkness and the thirst for vengeance, in fact vengeance itself made sapient and hungry [ie. the Summoning Dark]. And the litter bugger had touched him on that arm. It all came back, and he wished that it hadn't, because while all coppers must have a bit of villain in them, no copper should walk around with a piece of demon as a tattoo." So the goblin first invokes the Summoning Dark, and, called, it returns to Vimes and is with him later when he walks into the darkness. That's perfectly consistent with the ending of Thud! and it makes sense that the Dark comes to think of Vimes as a sort of partner following their encounter in that story.
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Aug 16, 2021 19:57
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Later Snuff report: turns out that the Watchman puts in an appearance as well closer to the end (342-3 in my hardback):Terry Pratchett posted:The Vimes in the mirror said, You know he doesn't just want to kill you. That wouldn't be good enough for a bastard like that, not by a long way. He wants to destroy you and will try everything until he does. Looks like Vimes, and warns him to watch everywhere? We know who that is (if you read Thud!, anyway).
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Aug 18, 2021 22:49
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Imagined posted:Now I'm on Thief of Time. It's one I almost never hear anyone mention as a favorite or least favorite, but I'm really enjoying it. I think I really enjoy the jokes poking fun at the tropes of orientalism and kung-fu movies. I particularly love every Lu-Tze joke about 'is it not written...?' that then references something an old British landlady would say. It is an extremely complex novel and a genuine achievement. You can even forget that only one of the main characters actually qualifies as human. I think Nation is his best book, but Thief of Time is definitely in the running. Almost all of Pratchett's interests jammed into a single story, from the nature of the universe to commentary on museums and kinds of chocolate sweets.
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Nov 12, 2021 19:41
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Jedit posted:When I get off work I'll dig out the 5 minute clip from Hogfather which has both Serafinowicz and Nighy in it. I'm not totally sold on Serafinowicz, to be honest - he has more of a gravelly sound than the heavy flat tone I associate with Death - but he's not terrible. Serafinowicz has a bit more expressiveness, which does work for me, but I agree, the heaviness just isn't present. Not as sepulchral as the other Death versions. Then again, I wouldn't want to compete with Ian Richardson or Christopher Lee, so taking a different approach is pretty much the only alternative.
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Nov 16, 2021 20:23
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Andoman posted:I think that was the biggest issue for me is that the other TP adaptions have been of a pretty high standard and so I went into this one with, it turns out, unrealistically high expectations - it made it a double whammie of a rubbish series and a massive disappointment at the same time. Tiffany Aching series (but maybe hold off on the last one). Nation would be great as a stand-alone but it would be very difficult to shoot live-action and the risk of some bullshit whitewashed casting is very real. (I have still not forgiven the Wizard of Earthsea adaptation.) I’d second the Witches series. Monstrous Regiment is another interesting possibility.
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Nov 30, 2021 16:34
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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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Why is the debate in a Pratchett thread about real-world cops and not about whether Sam Vimes is a bastard? Because I’m pretty sure he’s depicted as a bastard who just happens to be interested in justice. Carrot is the copaganda character if the thread wants to discuss that, on top of being the pro-monarchy character, arguably. I’d argue that latter point shows Pratchett indicating that a rightful and wise monarch would refuse the position, but the former is more complex and interesting. The Fifth Elephant certainly offers some evidence that Carrot is a bastard, for instance, but he’s off-duty.
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Dec 13, 2021 16:13
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ConfusedUs posted:Nation may be my favorite of all his books. Nation is most of the best bits from all his other books thrown together coherently with lots of other good bits unique to that text. It really doesn't put a foot wrong.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:44
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My favorite Pratchett pun? "Ars Enixa Est Candelam."
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Jan 26, 2022 01:38
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IBroughttheFunk posted:Nation was actually the first Pratchett book I ever picked up and read, and ended up loving it so much that I quickly made my way to Discworld soon after. Nation is fantastic. I think, besides Long Mars, that Dodger was the last Pratchett book I hadn’t read. I got about halfway through and quit reading. Unless you really like Dickens and the Victorian era I’m not sure how compelling it is in comparison to his Discworld equivalents.
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Jul 1, 2022 00:58
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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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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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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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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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I think the tonal difference is partly due to scope and partly due to his work on The Long Earth series. I'd always figured "co-written" meant Terry came up with the ideas and Baxter did the writing, but the latest biography establishes pretty clearly that Terry was much more involved than that, and I think the tone and approach are much closer: the later Long "X" books go more and more for "sweep of history" perspectives and the introduction of new characters who may or may not feature for very long, both things that happen in Raising Steam as well. To a certain extent, it feels like a book that continues some of the work of Nation, but which (atypically for Terry) takes a focus on ideas, technological progress, and their effect on people and society much more than focusing on people. If we reverse Granny's "people as things" formulation, Raising Steam is as much about things as people as it is about the characters we want it to be focused on. The extent to which golems play a part in the novel may reinforce that, especially the extent to which Terry seems to suggest that social movements depend much more upon technology and technological advancement than generally gets acknowledged. Again, it's not an argument you'd expect from someone as humanist as he'd been; I'm not sure if Raising Steam qualifies as a "post-humanist" story, but it does feel like the positive-but-cynical take on something that Shepherd's Crown approaches in a much less cynical way. That doesn't change that you can see he simply didn't spend the same amount of time polishing and perfecting from scene to scene, and while I think some of the disjointedness is purposeful, I'm unsure whether the purpose preceded or followed problems with the story and its shape and pacing. At least the possibility that the story got out of Terry's control goes hand in hand with some of the themes.
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Jan 4, 2023 23:08
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Skios posted:I've only read Raising Steam once. What was really jarring is the complete 180 the Patrician seemed to do, going from the sly manipulator to the barking tyrant. I read that as misdirection. After all, he not only pulls off the massive misdirection that solves the plot, he manages to go undercover so he can play with his train for a while. By looking like he’s done a 180 he completely fools the people who expect him to act exactly like that. What’s missing are the scenes that show us what Vetinari is up to. Well, and the book itself is either unsubtle or frustratingly elusive.
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Jan 8, 2023 06:30
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I thought the Raising Steam Deus ex machina was heavily and obviously foreshadowed, so chalk that one up to different readers, I guess. Nation is fantastic. Shepherd’s Crown is like going back to your childhood amusement park thirty years later. There’s still some magic, but a pall of tragedy and age hangs over the whole experience.
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Jan 11, 2023 16:57
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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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I am presently reading the sci-fi series Children of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and he's clearly deeply influenced by Pratchett. In addition to one or two pretty direct lifts, he's managed to somehow justify within a mostly hard sci-fi setting having a version of Hex.
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May 24, 2023 18:58
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I’m not so much disappointed with Unseen Academicals, Snuff, and Raising Steam as I am astonished and amazed at how well the later Tiffany Aching books are, even the obviously unfinished Shepherd’s Crown. I’ve now read the complete works except for Dodger, which I gave up on halfway through. That one is stylistically distinct, following in a form I don’t enjoy, and suffers the twin disadvantages of not having characters I like and not being particularly funny. Snuff and Raising Steam aren’t especially funny, either, but the messages and characters are enough to carry me along and I still find them more interesting than some other authors’ best stuff.
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Dec 23, 2023 23:02
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My impression is that Wilikins in the country behaves differently from Wilikins in the city, though there’s no doubt Pratchett’s handling of his characters declined over this period.
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Dec 25, 2023 01:29
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sebmojo posted:Anyone who's read the biography will be nodding all the way through this article lol The voice acting is distinctive enough that I could recall immediately on seeing one of the article screenshots which old man was voiced by Jon Pertwee. It isn’t always good, mind you, and they probably could have hired more than one woman to do voices, but memorable and generally enjoyable. OTOH, hearing the phrase “That doesn’t work” read by Eric Idle again might send me into a berserk frenzy. IMO they’re all worth playing. Discworld 2 is probably the most forgettable, but you can also probably finish it without a walkthrough.
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Feb 22, 2024 16:39
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Yeah, I don't think UE is a bad book, it's just not as good as the preceeding ones. Raising Steam is somewhere between an OK book and a good book, it’s just bad Pratchett. If it had been written by a fan author deliberately wanting to continue some of the thematic aspects of Discworld while, out of respect for Pratchett, employing a different perspective and style, it’d look like a credible effort. Or, if Pratchett hadn’t been suffering the embuggerance and had just made the decision to drastically experimemt with style and plotting, we’d probably call it a failed experiment. It’s only the specific circumstances of its writing that renders it a disappointment or even a personal affront. It’s a monument to losing Pratchett while he was still alive, as opposed to The Shephard’s Crown, which is a memorial.
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Apr 5, 2024 18:54
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