Great Discworld Re-Read: Eric and Moving Pictures

We're back for the next two books in the Discworld series, both of which fall into the category of "Oh, yeah, I forgot about that one!" Let's be honest, when there are 41 books in a series, they aren't all going to stick out perfectly.

First up is Eric (1990), which is more of a novella than a full novel. It's a take on the story of Faust as seen through the lens of Discworld and Rincewind. Eric, a teenage practitioner who wants to summon a demon to do his bidding, ends up getting Rincewind instead. (As you may recall, Rincewind ended up in the Dungeon* Dimension at the end of Sourcery, which puts him in the wrong place at the right time for a summoning circle.) We switch back and forth between Eric and Rincewind, who has unexpected powers of wish fulfillment, and the head of the demons who had originally planned to send one of his best demons to Eric when the summoning finally worked, and now has to deal with Rincewind instead.

This is one of the books that I know I've read before, but I have absolutely no memory of doing so. It's fun, and I like Pratchett's take on the corporate world as seen with the demons (even more now that I'm a few years' removed from my time in a major corporation), but it doesn't do much for the overall lore of Discworld other than bringing Rincewind back out of the dungeon dimension.

Next is Moving Pictures (1990), the first in what's called the "Industrial Revolution" sub-series. We discover that Holy Wood is a place that has a history, and needs to be watched carefully lest its power take over the lives of many of the people on the Discworld. When the last watcher dies, we see the power of Holy Wood creep its way into Ankh-Morpork, and the chaos that ensues.

We get to spend some quality time with Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler for the first time, and see that "mercenary" is one of the best ways to describe him. He's in it for the money, and he has no qualms about taking money from other people to get his. While he can come across as affably money-grubbing in other books like Guards! Guards!, here we can see that he's not that affable.

Pratchett clearly has some Thoughts about the Hollywood machine, and he uses the characters to show us that the quest for fame can be incredibly damaging to both the people seeking it and the people around them. Watching the wizards try to deal with the magic of the movies and only succeeding with the help of the movies themselves is a fantastic climax.

These are two solid, if not exciting, entries in the Discworld series. Next time we revisit Death with Reaper Man.

*While both Sourcery and Eric say that Rincewind went to the Dungeon Dimension, Eric also specifically mentions that demons are in a completely separate dimension from the Dungeon Dimension. How Rincewind got there to go through the summoning circle is one of those things that doesn't get explained and will niggle at me forever.

Great Discworld Re-Read: Guards! Guards!

It's been a minute since I've gotten to talk about the Discworld re-read project - holidays, the world on fire, all those things conspire to keep me from posting to the blog. But I've finally made it to the next few books! The first is one of my favorite books to start getting into the Discworld series in general, Guards! Guards! (1989). It's the first book of the City Watch sub-series, and shows a whole different side of Ankh-Morpork that we have only seen glimpses of so far. It's also one that deserves a blog post all by itself.

The dedication says who the book is for - the people who, in the course of a book or movie, are the ones that line up to be attacked by the hero, or run after the bad guy as he goes speeding through the streets. The faceless Watch or police who certainly didn't ask for things to be as exciting as they suddenly became, but here they are.

The men of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch certainly didn't sign up for excitement. We see them right after the funeral of one of their own, a watchman who had the bad luck of running after a miscreant and catching him. The fact that they see his death as avoidable, if only he hadn't run so fast, is a good indicator of what kind of Watch is running the place. They aren't, in fact, running anything.

Ankh-Morpork as a city is a fascinating bundle of guilds and people with interesting ideas of a right and wrong glued together by a healthy fear/minimal respect for the Patrician. The Watch, by the time we see them, are basically a vestigial organ of the city - at one point, they had been useful, but the evolution of the city means that they aren't really needed the way they had been. They certainly don't have the respect of the citizens, until something bigger than what the guilds can handle shows up in the form of an ancient dragon.

I really enjoy how Pratchett takes the old ideas of fantasy - the hero who shows up to save the city in danger at just the right moment, the dragon being used as the example of a city under threat - and turns it on its head. What if someone forced the issue? What if someone made the conditions just right to bring the hero to rescue them about? Would it work?

Well, sort of. The dragon shows up, the man they've chosen to be the "king" comes and "destroys" the dragon, and everything's ready for a new era of Ankh-Morpork...except the dragon comes back, and that is not something the secret society that summoned it was ready for. To be fair, who expects the dragon to return after it's been banished?

In addition to being the introduction to the City Watch, this book is where we meet Sam Vimes. He's not in a great place when we first find him drunk in a gutter, but it's a great place to start - he has one of the greatest character arcs of any I've ever read, which means he needs to start from somewhere near the bottom in order to grow to the heights he will achieve.

There are some bits of this book that hit differently in the current climate. Specifically, there's a passage near the end where the Patrician is talking to Vimes about good and bad people:

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." ...

"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness...Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no." ...

[Vimes] shrugged. "They're just people," he said. "They're just doing what people do, sir."

Lord Vetinari gave him a friendly smile. "Of course, of course," he said. "You have to believe that, I appreciate. Otherwise you'd go quite mad."

Pratchett really has a way of putting the knife in and hitting where it hurts. I've heard that Vimes is essentially the character closest to Pratchett himself, which explains a lot about the anger we see.

It's another book that is evergreen in a lot of ways, and there are definitely lessons to be learned 30+ years after it was originally published.

Great Discworld Re-Read: Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids

Continuing with the Great Discworld Re-Read, I'm moving along in publication order and starting to get to what I consider the "good stuff." This is where I first started falling in love with Pratchett's writing and the Discworld itself.

First we have Wyrd Sisters (1988), the next book in the Witches subseries. I am an unabashed Shakespeare fangirl, so having Pratchett's take on Macbeth is a joy and a delight all by itself. It manages to hit a lot of the aspects of the Scottish Play that Shakespeare smooths over - like, how do the players handle the play showing the duke murdering the king? How does the duke actually react to being called out like that? (Spoiler: not well!) And what do the witches think of all this?

Watching Granny Weatherwax see a play for the first time is an utter delight. She takes on the aspect of someone who is seeing what is, to be frank, an incredibly weird premise - a bunch of people are pretending to be other people and killing each other in front of a bunch of witnesses, but the people who are being killed aren't dead and sometimes pretend to be someone else entirely. It's a bizarre concept when you think about it, and Granny Weatherwax is the woman on the spot to think about it for us.

Seeing Magrat come into her own is also a joy, because she's not one to stand up for herself at first. She starts realizing her own power, in part because no one else believes in her, and she's not about to put up with that for another moment. I like that she becomes queen in the end, because while she may not be the traditional Lacre witch, she is a formidably powerful woman in her own right, and being on the throne gives her the opportunity to wield that power.

This is probably the first book that has shown me definitively that every time I read a Discworld book, it's like reading a new book. There are so many references in here that I completely missed the first time(s) I read it, simply because I didn't know much about British humor. Now that I've watched The Goes Wrong Show multiple times, I have been exposed to much more of the tropes of British humor that I never saw before, which means there are jokes I get this time. It's marvelous.

The thing that does bug me, especially so soon after reading Equal Rites, is that once again threads that were left dangling at the end of one book are simply dropped as if they never happened. Whatever happened to the idea that Granny Weatherwax would teach at Unseen University, or that the wizards would come to Lancre to study on occasion? That could have been a fun cross-over that we simply never see. However, that's a small niggle in an extremely fun book.

Finally we comes to Pyramids (1989), one of my all-time favorites of the series. As much as I am an unabashed Shakespeare fangirl, I am (and always have been) an even bigger fan of ancient Egypt. Something about the pyramids and the mummies and the pantheon just caught my imagination as a kid and never let go. So, naturally, Pratchett + ancient Egypt = a heartful of love from me. This is also the first of the "stand alone" books that aren't tied to a separate subseries, which makes it a good starting point for people just getting into the Discworld.

Teppic is the son of the king of Djelibeybi, a tiny kingdom along the river Djel. He's sent to good old Ankh-Morpork to train to become an assassin because, frankly, the kingdom is in debt up to the top of their hundreds of pyramids, and someone needs to make some money. On the night of his final exam (which he passes in spite of himself), his father dies, and he becomes god-king in a most embarrassing manner. He goes home and discovers that some patterns are harder to change than he could ever have imagined.

I. Love. This. Book. Watching Teppic go from spoiled child of a king to a trained assassin and learning about parts of the world outside of his tiny kingdom, only to go back home and discover that he no longer fits into the space that he was born into, feels incredibly honest as a way of viewing growing up. Watching him interact with the family's high priest, and fighting against thousands of years of Tradition, it's simultaneously hilarious and frustrating as all hell. And then the gods appear.

It's one thing to believe in the gods when they're far off and not paying attention. When they're actually right there, right in front of you, and doing absolutely nothing that you want them to do, well, that's an entirely different story. An entertaining one, at the very least, and one that we see just enough of to wince at the frustrations of the priests and others.

There's a lot that can be (and has been) said about Pratchett's take on religion, but I'll just note that he certainly takes the idea of gods being created by man and runs with it. The high priest even acknowledges in the end that he came up with the gods to find a way to make certain things Important, and so when they blatantly disregard him and turn out to be completely different from how he originally imagined them, it's a gigantic blow to his ego and his worldview. I have no doubt that there's a lot that can be pulled from this with regards to religious deconstruction and such, but that's not what I'm here for.

Overall, this was a glorious pair of books. I feel like this is where Pratchett starts coming into his own in the Discworld, laying down some of the themes and painting the backdrops that will come up again and again in the series. And next time, we'll look at the first book of the City Watch, Guards! Guards! I can't wait.

Great Discworld Re-Read: Mort and Sourcery

I realize it's been a minute since I've posted about the re-read, so I'm back with updates! As a reminder, I'm building up to reading the last book in the Discworld series by re-reading all* of the books in publication order.

Our next entry is Mort (1987), the first book centering on the character of Death. Death appears in every book in the Discworld series, but this is the first book where he is one of the central characters. I can't say he's the main character here, because while he sets the plot in motion, he's not the one doing all the heavy lifting. That would be Mort, his apprentice.

Mort is a bog-standard human who's very earnest, but not particularly good at anything. His father is worried about him, because he's coming into adulthood and who's going to hire a kid that's earnest but not particularly skilled? So he takes him into town to find an apprenticeship, and at the very last strike of the clock, Death appears to take Mort on.

Seeing Death as a character is a marvel. Yes, he's the personification of the natural ending of life, but he also has likes (cats, Klatchian food) and dislikes (people who are unkind to cats). He's curious, he's trying to figure out how to do things Properly, and he has a daughter that was adopted under unknown circumstances, indicating that he's willing to bend the rules when he sees fit. He has something in common with Mort, in that he's also earnest, but not always very good at what he's trying to do.

Watching Mort grow and develop is also a wonder. He starts off as the standard Awkward Teen, and he grows and develops into an adult, while taking a side path into being Death for a little bit while Death himself takes a break (which he'd never done before, and was very confused by in the beginning). We get to see him grow into himself and find a way to make his earnestness a strength while also developing the skills he was lacking in the beginning. It's a satisfying book overall, and makes it clear that there's more to Death that we originally thought.

Finally (for this entry) there's Sourcery (1988), and we're back with the wizards. This time we encounter something beyond a wizard, a sourcerer - someone who can access the source of magic itself. There used to be sourcerers before the Magic Wars, but after nearly destroying the Discworld, rules were put in place and wizards established themselves as the primary magic users in the Disc, mostly by not doing magic at all.

The sourcerer in question is a child, raised in no small part by his wizard father who earthed himself in his wizard's staff. By the time the child shows up at Unseen University to take his "rightful place" as Archchancellor, he's been told repeatedly that he is the one true magic user, and thus all others should bow before him. Well, him and his father, who's the one actually pulling the strings - after all, he's still just a child.

This book makes me uncomfortable. When the sourcerer appears, he demonstrates more magic than the wizards had been able to access in generations, which leads most of them to allow him to take the lead, even though - and I cannot stress this enough - he is a CHILD. While he has phenomenal cosmic power, he has the mind of a 10-year-old, and everyone around him is trying to steer that mind to their own purposes. It takes far too long for people to realize that the power he has access to (and that he's able to give them access to) is incredibly dangerous.

And then there's Rincewind again. He appears mostly because he was the only wizard not at the University when the sourcerer appeared, so he's the only one outside of his influence in the beginning. There's a whole side quest with the Archchancellor's hat and Cohen the Barbarian's daughter, which feels a little forced and like he was being added because people like the character, not necessarily because he's the best/worst man for the job.

Once again with the wizards, the book ends with a whimper - the sourcerer goes off into a world of his own creation (again, a CHILD), and everything goes back to the way it was. There doesn't seem to be any growth or development in the characters - this was just a thing that happened, and now it's done.

On that note, I'll be writing up the next two books (Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids) soon, so stay tuned!

*Except the supplemental books

Great Discworld Re-Read: The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites

Welcome back to the Great Discworld Re-Read! I've decided it's been long enough, it's time for me to re-read through the entire* Discworld series of books in publication order and finish by reading The Shepherd's Crown, the last book written by Terry Pratchett which was published ten years ago and which I have never read.

                                               

Next up to bat is The Light Fantastic (1986), which is the direct continuation of The Colour of Magic. As far as I can remember, this is the only true duology in the series where one picks up almost immediately where the other ends. The fact that he and his publishers made readers wait three years to find out what happened to Rincewind and Twoflower seems a little cruel to me, but I live in a time where a book a year is pretty common for series (with some exceptions, of course). Hell, I don't even like having to wait a week for the next episode of The Great British Baking Show, so, you know, I'm impatient like that.

Rincewind and Twoflower are dealing with the after-effects of The Colour of Magic, and discovering that the world has more in store for them than just letting them fall off the edge of the Disc. We learn a little more about the magic of the wizards, and we meet the greatest hero in the Disc, Cohen the Barbarian. I love seeing what happens when a hero ages, and how he handles listening to Twoflower tell of his exploits from his younger days. It's a lovely touch.

I'll be honest - the wizards are probably my least favorite of the characters of Discworld. They're pompous, arrogant, and just plain irritating most of the time, and I don't quite understand why so many people want to join their ranks. Still, watching Rincewind stand on the sidelines of what he feels like he should have had, I can see it a little bit.

This leads me into the next book, Equal Rites (1987). Here we meet one of the more formidable characters of the Disc, Granny Weatherwax. We're still dealing with the wizards, but now we're coming at them from a different angle.

And what an angle it is! Being able to see the two distinctly different magic systems in play, and how they're not just different systems, but entirely different ways of looking at magic, is a master stroke. It's something that Sir Terry keeps up throughout the series, with the witches more focused on headology and the ways in which you don't use magic while the wizards are bent on gaining as much power as they can and using it in as many flashy ways as they can. Both groups are very intent on making sure everyone else knows that they are a witch or a wizard - the hats are critical in identifying a magic user on the Disc - and the ways people respect (or don't) those hats is fascinating.

Eskarina, the first woman wizard, has a lot to overcome in order to become a fully-fledged wizard. While there are some great pieces in this book, it's a bit of a let-down when you see that there's a lot of the internalized misogyny on the Disc. The wizards, of course, are convinced that a woman can't become a wizard, because that's simply not done, but Granny Weatherwax also has a lot to overcome in order to take Esk to the Unseen University for wizard training. Even then, there are pieces where it feels like Granny loses a bit of herself as she becomes more of a "fashionable" witch in the city, and it feels like she stops being the character I know her to be. The end of the book seems to indicate that she'll lecture for the Unseen University, and that she'll date (!) the arch-chancellor, both of which are things that are dropped in later books and are never heard of again, from what I remember. It just doesn't feel like Granny.

This is the danger of reading such a long-running series again - I know the characters as they've developed over time, and so going back to their first appearances feels like reading the rough drafts, before they've had a chance to get some polish on them. To a certain extent, that's exactly what it is - again, I have to remind myself that this is one of the first books of 41, and if I were to look back at my own writing from thirty years ago, well, it wouldn't be pretty. (Honestly, looking back at my own writing from five years ago ain't that great, either.)

Either way, both of these lay some groundwork for the world and the characters, and it's always fun to go back to their roots and see how far they've come. Now, on to Death's first prime-time appearance in Mort (1987).

*Except the supplemental books

Great Discworld Re-Read: Overview and The Colour of Magic

Anyone who knows me knows that the Discworld books by Sir Terry Pratchett are some of my favorite books of all time. The series is mighty, weighing in at 41 core books and assorted related books (like the Science of Discworld series), and it's not the kind of series where every book has to be read in order to be able to understand what's going on. There are sub-series within the main books, as several books focus on different characters, and you do get to see the characters grow and develop over the books. (Hi, we're Discworld fans - let us show you our flow charts!)

You thought I was joking, didn't you?

Sadly, Sir Terry passed away in March 2015. The last book that he finished, The Shepherd's Crown, was published in August 2015, and as much as I love the series, I have never read the last book. So long as it remained unread, there was still a "new" Discworld book for me to discover, and I could pretend it wasn't over.

Recently, however, articles were coming up about the tenth anniversary of the publication of The Shepherd's Crown, and there was a message from Rob Wilkins, Sir Terry's longtime assistant. The message read, in part, "I also know that Terry wanted his books to be read and enjoyed far more than he wanted them kept on a shelf. And as time passes it becomes ever more apparent how much the Discworld books reward re-visiting, perpetually revealing something new, literary gems Terry had hidden away for a second or third, or even more, re-read. Every Pratchett is to some degree an unread Pratchett, including the ones you've already enjoyed and including The Shepherd's Crown."

This made me realize that it's time. But, because I'm me, I can't just jump to the last book - that almost feels like cheating, somehow. So I'm starting from the beginning, and going through them all* in publication order. It's been ages since I've touched some of them, and just a few months for others - if I did all my reading with physical books, there are a few that would be falling apart by now because of how often they've been read. I'm also taking the opportunity to update the audiobook versions I have to the newest editions - much as I love the Nigel Planer and Stephen Briggs versions, having Bill Nighy read all the footnotes in all of the books has a pleasant continuity that I'm looking forward to.

I started at the beginning with The Colour of Magic (1983). Here's where it all begins - the introduction to the Discworld, the Great A'Tuin, Rincewind, the wizards, all the things. It's where the world starts!

And it's...OK. One thing that I've learned as a writer is that the more you write, the better you get, and it's unfair to compare one of Sir Terry's first books against the ones he wrote, you know, thirty-some books down the line. The ideas and the characters are there, and there are breadcrumbs that he drops here - in book ONE - that pay off again, thirty-some books down the line. He manages to develop a world that is different enough from the "average" fantasy world to be interesting (light moves slower than sound! The world is a disc carried on the back of four elephants which are riding a giant turtle!) while still being familiar to fantasy readers (wizards doing magic, trolls, references to the gods who have a direct hand in the affairs of mortals). His turns of phrase haven't gotten the polish that they'll develop, but (and it might be because I know what it will become) I can see the potential underneath.

I admit that Rincewind, the failed wizard who is the main character of this book (along with the Disc's first-ever tourist, Twoflowers) is not my favorite character. At least, he hasn't been in the past. This time through, I feel a little bit more for the guy - he has the ability to see just how badly things can and will go, and realizes that there's not really anything he can do to stop it, but he's going to try (usually by running away). He's the ultimate pessimist/realist. Twoflowers, on the other hand, is the epitome of an optimist - he's certain that nothing bad can really happen to him, because he's not directly involved in what's going on, and really, everything can be settled if people just sit down and behave "sensibly." The combination of the two mindsets is the engine that drives the book, and it's a solid machine.

The book ends on a cliff...well, not quite hanger, since they've fallen off the cliff, but you know what I mean - the story is obviously going to continue in the next book. And I'll be following right along with it.

*There are probably one or two books that I'll end up skipping because I know I don't like them very much, and I don't intend to hit the related books in this read-through.

My WorldCon, let me show you it (Seattle WorldCon 2025)

It's taken a couple of days, but I feel like I've recuperated a bit from WorldCon. I definitely learned a few lessons.

Not the longest string of badge ribbons by a long shot, but a solid effort

• I overscheduled myself like crazy. I was on two panels, took part in one workshop, and was the solo lead of a second workshop, and I volunteered for a total of about 12 hours. For some people, this would be a workable schedule; for me, it was on the verge of too much. I missed out on things and people that I would have loved to spend my time doing and meeting because I was simply drained. I need to guard my energy more carefully.
• Having said that, I am capable of more than I think I am. I was able to be on a panel with Gail Carriger, and tell a room full (!) of people about the history of tomato ketchup off the cuff. I was able to lead a workshop on my own, teaching a full (!) room of people how to cross stitch and do blackwork embroidery, and get some of them excited about the crafts.

I taught under keen surveillance.

• Seeing friends from the internet in 3D will never not be awesome. There were a number of members of the Lady Astronauts' Club who found each other and spending time with them off-screen was simultaneously super-exciting and incredibly soothing. There are few things I enjoy as much as being around my people.
• Getting business cards printed (shout out to Moo was a random idea and, it turned out, a very good one. There were several times I was able to hand over a card and make connections on the spot, and it also gave me an easy way to point people here for links to the resources I put together for my panels and such.

Overall, now that I've had a couple of days to rest and think back on things, I'm glad I did as much as I did. I'm always more comfortable at a convention when I'm doing something, rather than just attending, and now I have "WorldCon panelist" as something to add to my list of achievements. That, I must admit, is pretty danged neat.