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Not Kicking the Kitten
Jul. 27th, 2014 05:48 pmFeb 2014
Raising Steam - Terry Pratchett - Doubleday, 2013
* * * *
I shall never forget reading The Colour of Magic when I was a teenager. The combination of laugh-out-loud one-liners, the gentle satire of well-known fantasy series (Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, Anne MacCaffrey's Pern and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) and an original setting where the consequences were thought through (for example, that a world that was a disc would have an edge that you could explore, and if you were unlucky, fall off) was like nothing else I had encountered. This tension between humorous invention and world-building has permeated every one of the subsequent thirty-nine books in the sequence, and the various admixtures have led to the different strands, with the greater social realism of the Ankh-Morpork-based Vimes and Moist von Lipwig novels being balanced by the funnier and more whimsical "witches" and "death" novels. Being a fan of anything that can make me laugh, I generally much prefer the latter to the former, and it is a sadness to me that Pratchett seems to have chosen to focus exclusively on the realistic mode (a case in point - Discworld has become so real that it now has a proper map showing where Quirm, the Ramtops and Uberwald are in relation to each other, which does not accord with my imagined version of it). But Pratchett is a genius, and even without the jokes and the invention that characterise his best work, this take on the coming of steam and its consequences is an interesting read with important things to say.
( Read more... )
Raising Steam - Terry Pratchett - Doubleday, 2013
* * * *
I shall never forget reading The Colour of Magic when I was a teenager. The combination of laugh-out-loud one-liners, the gentle satire of well-known fantasy series (Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, Anne MacCaffrey's Pern and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) and an original setting where the consequences were thought through (for example, that a world that was a disc would have an edge that you could explore, and if you were unlucky, fall off) was like nothing else I had encountered. This tension between humorous invention and world-building has permeated every one of the subsequent thirty-nine books in the sequence, and the various admixtures have led to the different strands, with the greater social realism of the Ankh-Morpork-based Vimes and Moist von Lipwig novels being balanced by the funnier and more whimsical "witches" and "death" novels. Being a fan of anything that can make me laugh, I generally much prefer the latter to the former, and it is a sadness to me that Pratchett seems to have chosen to focus exclusively on the realistic mode (a case in point - Discworld has become so real that it now has a proper map showing where Quirm, the Ramtops and Uberwald are in relation to each other, which does not accord with my imagined version of it). But Pratchett is a genius, and even without the jokes and the invention that characterise his best work, this take on the coming of steam and its consequences is an interesting read with important things to say.
( Read more... )