Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Just came across this on Goodreads. “Discworld #14.5; City Watch #1.5” - how cute is that?
If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a City Watch short story, here’s the link to where it is hosted The L-Space Web (by Sir Terry’s own kind permission: “I don’t want to see it in distributed print anywhere but don’t mind people downloading it for their own enjoyment.”)
Terry Pratchett started his career as a crypto-monarchist and ended up the most consistently humane writer of his generation. He never entirely lost his affection for benevolent dictatorship, and made a few classic colonial missteps along the way, but in the end you’d be hard pressed to find a more staunchly feminist, anti-racist, anti-classist, unsentimental and clear-sighted writer of Old White British Fantasy.
The thing I love about Terry’s writing is that he loved - loved - civil society. He loved the correct functioning of the social contract. He loved technology, loved innovation, but also loved nature and the ways of living that work with and through it. He loved Britain, but hated empire (see “Jingo”) - he was a ruralist who hated provincialism, a capitalist who hated wealth, an urbanist who reveled in stories of pollution, crime and decay. He was above all a man who loved systems, of nature, of thought, of tradition and of culture. He believed in the best of humanity and knew that we could be even better if we just thought a little more.
As a writer: how skillful, how prolific, how consistent. The yearly event of a new Discworld book has been a part of my life for more than two decades, and in that barrage of material there have been so few disappointments, so many surprises… to come out with a book as fresh and inspired as “Monstrous Regiment” as the 31st novel in your big fantasy series? Ludicrous. He was just full of treasure. What a thing to have had, what a thing to have lost.
In the end, he set a higher standard, as a writer and as a person. He got better as he learned, and he kept learning, and there was no “too late” or “too hard” or “I can’t be bothered to do the research.” He just did the work. I think in his memory the best thing we can do is to roll up our sleeves and do the same.
This post seems to be making the rounds again so here it is on the word blog
just learned about a building in london that is so poorly designed it becomes a death ray that melts cars and creates a downdraft effect with wind so powerful that it knocks full grown adults to the ground
imagine being knocked over by a gust of wind from this ugly ass building and then being cooked TO DEATH by the sun reflection like what a way to go
i learned about this like last year or somethign and this building is literally th satan come alive. building that tries to fucking kill you and fry you like an egg
top ten buildings that Want To Harm You
this building is like I Will Flip You Over Like A Hamburger And Fucking Cook You
The use of the present tense isn’t quite accurate because they did fix the issue immediatly after this so its no longer a death ray but yes it did partially melt a very expensive Jaguar. Its nickname ‘the walkie talkie’ got beautifully bastardised to ‘the walkie scorchie’ following this. Its also widely accepted to be the ugliest of London’s skyscrapers.
And I just wanna bring up the fact that this is not the only monstrosity built by Rafael Vinoly - he’s also responsible for the eyesore of Manhattan that is 432 Park Avenue.
Residents here have repeatedly complained about the realities of living in this haunted pool noodle, including ‘catastrophic’ floods, loud bangs and creaks, and an elevator that refuses to work when its windy.
I would say we should stop letting this guy make buildings, but he only seems to fuck over millionaires so I’m not in a hurry to end his career just yet.
@branovices it’s my pleasure to inform you that the Vdara ‘death ray’ Hotel is also the work of Rafael Vinoly
For those of you who doubt why anyone would keep hiring B. S. Johnson in Sir Pterry’s books… There’s this guy and rich people keep paying him to make badly thought out monstrosities just to flex.
I gotta wonder if Mr Pratchett knew about this before we did, or if it’s life imitating art, or one of those one in a million things that crop up nine times out of ten…
Terry Pratchett’s 2001 Carnegie Medal Winner Speech
I’m pretty sure that the publicists for this award would be quite happy if I said something controversial, but it seems to me that giving me the Carnegie medal is controversial enough. This was my third attempt. Well, I say my third attempt, but in fact I just sat there in ignorance and someone else attempted it on my behalf, somewhat to my initial dismay.
The Amazing Maurice is a fantasy book. Of course, everyone knows that fantasy is ‘all about’ wizards, but by now, I hope, everyone with any intelligence knows that, er, what everyone knows…is wrong.
Fantasy is more than wizards. For instance, this book is about rats that are intelligent. But it also about the even more fantastic idea that humans are capable of intelligence as well. Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewellery into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting that the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. In the book the rats go to war, which is, I hope, gripping. But then they make peace, which is astonishing.
In any case, genre is just a flavouring. It’s not the whole meal. Don’t get confused by the scenery.
A novel set in Tombstone, Arizona, on October 26, 1881 is what– a Western? The scenery says so, the clothes say so, but the story does not automatically become a Western. Why let a few cactuses tell you what to think? It might be a counterfactual, or a historical novel, or a searing literary indictment of something or other, or a horror novel, or even, perhaps, a romance – although the young lovers would have to speak up a bit and possibly even hide under the table, because the gunfight at the OK corral was going on at the time.
We categorize too much on the basis of unreliable assumption. A literary novel written by Brian Aldiss must be science fiction, because he is a known science fiction writer; a science fiction novel by Margaret Attwood is literature because she is a literary novelist. Recent Discworld books have spun on such concerns as the nature of belief, politics and even of journalistic freedom, but put in one lousy dragon and they call you a fantasy writer.
This is not, on the whole, a complaint. But as I have said, it seems to me that dragons are not really the pure quill of fantasy, when properly done. Real fantasy is that a man with a printing press might defy an entire government because of some half-formed belief that there may be such a thing as the truth. Anyway, fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days. When you can by a plastic Gandalf with kung-fu grip and rocket launcher, you know fantasy has broken through.
But I’m a humourous writer too, and humour is a real problem.
It was interesting to see how Maurice was reviewed here and in the US. Over there, where I’ve only recently made much of an impression, the reviews tended to be quite serious and detailed with, as Maurice himself would have put it, 'long words, like “corrugated iron.”’ Over here, while being very nice, they tended towards the 'another wacky, zany book by comic author Terry Pratchett’. In fact Maurice has no wack and very little zane. It’s quite a serious book. Only the scenery is funny.
The problem is that we think the opposite of funny is serious. It is not. In fact, as G K Chesterton pointed out, the opposite of funny is not funny, and the opposite of serious is not serious. Benny Hill was funny and not serious; Rory Bremner is funny and serious; most politicians are serious but, unfortunately, not funny. Humour has its uses. Laughter can get through the keyhole while seriousness is still hammering on the door. New ideas can ride in on the back of a joke, old ideas can be given an added edge.
Which reminds me… Chesterton is not read much these days, and his style and approach belong to another time and, now, can irritate. You have to read in a slightly different language. And then, just when the 'ho, good landlord, a pint of your finest English ale!’ style gets you down, you run across a gem, cogently expressed. He famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.
In Maurice, the rats have to confront them all: real monsters, some of whom have many legs, some merely have two, but some, perhaps the worse, are the ones they invent. The rats are intelligent. They’re the first rats in the world to be afraid of the dark, and they people the shadows with imaginary monsters. An act of extreme significance to them is the lighting of a flame.
People have already asked me if I had the current international situation in mind when I wrote the book. The answer is no. I wouldn’t insult even rats by turning them into handy metaphors. It’s just unfortunate that the current international situation is pretty much the same old dull, stupid international situation, in a world obsessed by the monsters it has made up, dragons that are hard to kill. We look around and see
foreign policies that are little more than the taking of revenge for the revenge that was taken in revenge for the revenge last time. It’s a path that leads only downwards, and still the world flocks along it. It makes you want to spit. The dinosaurs were thick as concrete, but they survived for one hundred and fifty million years and it took a damn great asteroid to knock them out. I find myself wonder wondering now if intelligence comes with its own built-in asteroid.
Of course, as the aforesaid writer of humourous fantasy I’m obsessed by wacky, zany ideas. One is that rats might talk. But sometimes I’m even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas, such the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I’m really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I’m just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo Sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we’ve tried everything else.
Writing for children is harder than writing for adults, if you’re doing it right. What I thought was going to be a funny story about a cat organizing a swindle based on the Pied Piper legend turned out to be a major project, in which I was aided and encouraged and given hope by Philippa Dickinson and Sue Coates at Doubleday or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, and Anne Hoppe of HarperCollins in New York, who waylaid me in an alley in Manhattan and insisted on publishing the book and even promised to protect me from that most feared of creatures, the American copy editor.
And I must thank you, the judges, in the hope that your sanity and critical faculties may speedily be returned to you. And finally, my thanks to the rest of you, the loose agglomeration of editors and teachers and librarians that I usually refer to, mostly with a smile, as the dirndl mafia. You keep the flame alive.
You know the joke in Men at Arms about the billiard balls? They’re made of “elephantless ivory” by the alchemists, but they have a nasty habit of exploding when used.
This was an actually real-world thing.
Owing to the high price of ivory (and, y’know, the over-hunting of elephants to the brink of extinction), in 1869 a billiards supply manufacturer offered $10,000 to whoever could make a synthetic ball that met the same specifications as ivory. A guy named John Wesley Hyatt came up with a nitrocellulose ball – nitrocellulose being both the basis of celluloid film and certain kinds of rocket fuel. Hyatt’s balls were extremely flammable, and even hitting them together too hard could cause a small explosion that sounded like a gunshot.
(Yes, in hindsight, that sentence was hilarious.)
So Discworld’s exploding alchemical billiard balls had a Roundworld equivalent, albeit not as dramatic. God damn it, Pterry.
And here I thought it was an extension on celluloid itself, also highly flammable.
