Talking Meme #10

[thisbluespirit]

For the Talking Meme, from hamsterwoman: How about something about Discworld? Favorite characters, favorite books, your history with the series, whatever you want to talk about, really.

Starting backwards (but not), my history with the series - well, given that I managed to start on Doctor Who with Silver Nemesis, I continued that trend by starting Discworld with Eric, the first one I randomly picked up in the YA section at the library. I think I had also been reading the Nomes trilogy, so gave it a whirl on that basis. (There was, I seem to recall, a Nomes adaptation on CITV around this time.) It wasn't the best place to start, but I liked it enough to try the next one I came across, and that was it, really. I think probably I met the Witches or Death next (I'm pretty sure it was longer before I stumbled over a Watch book).

Favourite characters? Probably Granny Weatherwax, the witches generally, and Death. And Vimes. But I am pretty sure Granny Weatherwax and Death were the ones I first latched onto. And Granny really is the best (just so she won't be the worst). My favourite moment for her is probably where she Weatherwaxes the vampires, but there are so many, for all of them. And Discworld is one of the few things where Death's appearances are always welcome. I was very annoyed on finding a new one if Death only appeared once in passing. (At least twice, please, Pterry; preferably more.)

As to favourite books, I've always had a soft spot for some of the one-offs, and particularly The Truth. I'm not sure if I could even say why - maybe because it's even more overtly about the power of words and truth and lies ("A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.") than usual, as well, of course, as being a tale of amusingly shaped vegetables and Discworld screwball comedy. (My only long-ish straight-up Discworld fic is an NYR William/Sacharissa fic that was the very last thing I did before I was ill.) And Otto and the terrible lure of flash photography for a vampire; a passion worth undying for every time.

In other things about Discworld, I think I grew up next to the model for the River Ankh* (otherwise known as the River Parrett in Somerset. (My home town, ladies and gentlemen and others, and its charmingly brown river. It's silt, I promise. It looks even better when it comes out at Burnham-on-Sea and you have blue sky (if you're lucky) and brown sea, but let's not get started on Burnham-on-Sea again.)

Also once in rl, I stood this near to Terry Pratchett. *holds out arms* He looked just like his pictures and had the hat. (It was the Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Award ceremony and he was a guest as a previous winner, but he was already under siege from teenage CKG shadowing groups.)

I don't know what else I have to say, except that I'm glad we had Pterry for a while and that we still have all the books with their mix of wit, wisdom, anger, compassion and puns, and all the characters who inhabit them. I found out that Pterry had Alzheimer's one December in York when I was meeting my two sisters (from London) to go Christmas shopping together. Over lunch, they told me they'd heard it on the news. And then stared at me in surprise to find I was actually upset and got worried about me.


I wanted to end with some quotes, and had no idea how you'd narrow it down, so I went for a few from The Truth (and then one from Hogfather I couldn't leave off):

William wondered why he always disliked people who said 'no offense meant.' Maybe it was because they found it easier to to say 'no offense meant' than actually to refrain from giving offense.

“Ah," said Mr Pin. "Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'.

Just for a moment there was an unusual feeling of bliss. Strange word, he thought. It's one of those words that described something that does not make a noise but if it did make a noise would sound just like that. Bliss. It's like the sound of a soft meringue melting gently on a warm plate.

Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough.

“Character assassination. What a wonderful idea. Ordinary assassination only works once, but this one works every day.”

And from Hogfather:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY. .... YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?"


* Obviously, it owes a lot to the state of the Thames before Bazalgette, but for rl modern models in a county Pterry lived in, I give you my brown river...

Comments

[persiflage_1]

That quote from Hogfather gets me every time.

[thisbluespirit]

*nods* It had to be the last word(s) for the post, really.

[sarren]

So much love, I still have a bunch of his later books still to read. I don't want (him) to be over.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, I can understand that. I still have the last few, but also because I'm not entirely sure I want to see his progression to the end, either. :-/

[hamsterwoman]

Granny Weatherwax, as you saw, is one of my big fvorites also. I'm quite fond of Death, too, if not necessarily as into the Death-centric books. But he is just so... decent, and you want to give him a hug -- I definitely hadn't expected that, going in.

And Otto and the terrible lure of flash photography for a vampire; a passion worth undying for every time.

Ha! I like the The Truth a lot, and Otto is my favorite thing about it :)

Oh dear, that is a very brown and fairly solid-looking river.

And I'm very jealous that you got to stand next to Pratchett! I generally don't go to author readings and events, even for authors I like, but I wish I'd had a chance to see Pterry in the flesh.

Love all of the quotes, but especially the Hogfather one. It's one of those that just sneaks up on you and changes your worldview; Pterry was so good at those.

(All my Discworld icons live on LJ, but just imagine I'm responding with the lilac one <3)

[thisbluespirit]

But he is just so... decent, and you want to give him a hug -- I definitely hadn't expected that, going in.

Ha, no, but I think we all feel like that before the end!

Oh dear, that is a very brown and fairly solid-looking river.

It is very brown. It's a special river! It also has extremely dangerous undercurrents and a spring bore that is quite something. :-D

I did, literally, just get to stand near Pterry; he wasn't even speaking at the event or anything. I have been lucky enough to see quite a few authors as a children's librarian, though my big regret is my near miss at seeing Diana Wynne Jones. But I did get to stand *this* far from Pterry, it's true.

Love all of the quotes, but especially the Hogfather one. It's one of those that just sneaks up on you and changes your worldview; Pterry was so good at those.

*nods*

[kerkevik_2014]

Nanny Ogg; Sam Vimes & Brutha in that order.

Small Gods; Night Watch & Wyrd Sisters in that order.

Written 2 BtVS/Discworld x-overs as well :-)

Also (and I cannot recall whether it was late 80s, or early 90s) I bought Terry Pratchett & Iain Banks a drink at a small; very small (as in more guests than attendees- or so it seemed) student SF society con at Exeter Uni (i wasn't a student, but went with a couple of friends to two, maybe three *very long time ago now).

kerk

[thisbluespirit]

Ha, I like how perfectly back-to-front your favourite characters and your favourite books are!

Oh, and that is cool about buying Pterry a drink.

[executrix]

But can the truth afford a good-quality pair of boots to not put on in time?

[thisbluespirit]

Does it have to be a good quality pair? They only have to last the one circumnavigation! ;-)

(Good question.)

[astrogirl]

Discworld! Discworld is just the best. I am wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Death on it right now. He is eating curry. :)

[thisbluespirit]

But are you also eating curry, that is the question? If not, why not? ;-p

Discworld is wonderful, it's true.

[astrogirl]

Alas, no curry for me. If I want curry in this town, I have to cook it myself, and cooking is annoying. Also, I'm still recovering from my recent dental implant, and am avoiding subjecting my still-healing gums to anything too spicy. Which is a pity, because, like Death, I could murder a curry. :)

[thisbluespirit]

Aww, sorry! I hope it improves soon AND you get a curry.

(And, ha, if I didn't cook everything myself, I would starve. So, I cook. But I'm used to it.)

[astrogirl]

I kind of hate to cook. But, despite that, I do have a couple of decent curry recipes. Once I am feeling up to it again, dentally and otherwise, I will have to make some. :)

[jhall1]

Ready meals are a wonderful thing, as far as I'm concerned. :)

[sovay]

And Otto and the terrible lure of flash photography for a vampire; a passion worth undying for every time.

I am very fond of Otto von Chriek. My favorite Discworld turned out to be Going Postal.

[thisbluespirit]

Otto is great! Going Postal came along far too late to earn favourite, but it is a very good one indeed, maybe the last really great one. (With chapters! Amazing. What are those?)

[sovay]

Going Postal came along far too late to earn favourite, but it is a very good one indeed, maybe the last really great one.

It's a screwball heist romance with golems. I loved it.

The Truth and Going Postal both belong to the stage of Discworld that I wish Pratchett had been able to explore more without Alzheimer's, because he had finally built the world up to the point where he could do just about any genre he felt like in it without ever losing the precise and piercing satire and that included all sorts of contemporary points. My inaugural Discworld was Moving Pictures followed by Reaper Man, so I had a much harder time going back to pick up the initial sword-and-sorcery parodies than maybe if I'd started with them (I also remain skeptical that The Colour of Magic is actually all that good. The Light Fantastic is the first book where the Discworld really feels like itself). It took me until late in the series to notice, but the more modern, Dickensian mode is the one that worked best for me.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, I think The Light Fantastic is much better than The Colour of Magic, but then that was a one off parody that then became a series, and it's finding its feet as that by the second, I suppose.

The Truth and Going Postal both belong to the stage of Discworld that I wish Pratchett had been able to explore more without Alzheimer's, because he had finally built the world up to the point where he could do just about any genre he felt like in it without ever losing the precise and piercing satire and that included all sorts of contemporary points.

Yes, indeed. But we did have it there, for a bit. For more than one book even!

[jhall1]

The Sky version of Going Postal is available on DVD and is very good. (In fact that applies to all the Sky adaptations of Discworld novels, perhaps because Pterry was - I believe - quite closely involved himself with them). Clare Foy, before she became famous, plays Adora Belle Dearheart, and I thought she was especially good.

If/when you come into the necessary funds, all the Sky DVDs are worth getting IMO. The Wyrd Sisters one has the bonus of June Whitfield playing Nanny Ogg.

[thisbluespirit]

I saw Hogfather (which was shown on one of the Freeview channels) this Christmas and that was good - I'll have to keep an eye out for if they show any of the others, too.

[justice_turtle]

I once read Sir Pterry’s entire works (as of then) over Christmas break in Indiana while ill and incredibly sleep-deprived. It was the most mind-bending experience of my life. ^_^ I don’t remember much about it — I wouldn’t, anyway, since it was 2010 and I wasn’t forming coherent memories — but I kept finding notes afterward that would have been terribly profound if I could have figured out what I’d been trying to say. Which... I don’t know if that sounds like a compliment, but to me, that’s Pterry: insightful, wise on a whole other level, and even if you don’t agree with him or can’t figure out what he’s on about, he does things to your head.

I say often that Tolkien isn’t for everyone. He fits my own brain exactly, but he isn’t for everyone. Pterry is, uniquely, for everyone.

[thisbluespirit]

Aw. I suppose it's as well it was Pterry, then, at least? *hugs*

I say often that Tolkien isn’t for everyone. He fits my own brain exactly, but he isn’t for everyone. Pterry is, uniquely, for everyone.

I think Pratchett is for more people than realise it (who haven't read him), but nobody is for everyone. I know a couple of people who have bounced off him hard, and not just for starting with The Colour of Magic.

That's why we need all the words and all the stories by all of the people. We're all so pernicketty and weird in our own ways and we need our own things to work stuff out with, or escape into, or whatever. <3

[unsentimentalf]

Yes, I count myself as rather ambivalent about Pratchett. I've read most of them at some point or another and I can see how good they are in all sorts of ways, but I never really want to jump on the next one out and read the hell out of it and I never get round to rereading them. I'm not sure what they are missing for me, but I do know that Neil Gaiman must have it since Good Omens is the one that I do like enough to go back to.

But there's a lot of shared culture coming out of Discworld that it would have been a pity to miss out on!

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, nobody is for everybody! Life just doesn't work like that. We're all such awkward so-and-sos built up out of our own unique experiences.

And conversely, I've never bothered to re-read Good Omens, because whatever it is Terry has, Gaiman doesn't!

[jhall1]

They are both on a pedestal for me. Or perhaps that should be on separate pedestals, although I'm sure that they wouldn't mind sharing.

[beccadg]

I think Pratchett is for more people than realise it (who haven't read him), but nobody is for everyone.

I resisted reading any Pratchett for a long time, and to this day the only book entirely by him that I've read is Guards! Guards!. I had a feeling we wouldn't click, but I read Good Omens because I'd read some Gaiman I enjoyed, and I'd had people telling me for years to try Pratchett. I enjoyed GO enough to try GG which people had been suggesting I try. I love dragons, and there's no denying it has dragons. I liked Sam Vimes enough that I've thought about giving Night Watch a try, but it hasn't gone beyond thought. I think it's important for everyone to understand that the version of Sturgeon's law that simply goes, "Ninety percent of everything is crap," is talking about a subjective 90%. Everyone's golden 10% is different, and it's only 10%.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes. I've been a librarian - nothing is for everyone is important to know when you're finding books for people all the time!

(OTOH, I think that law is rather harsh and untrue, or certainly in this sort of context. 90% of fanfic may well be crap because of the nature of it, but I'm not at all sure it's true of very much else - and certainly not Pratchett, not even to the people who don't like him. To claim that everything we don't like is crap and the 10% is the good bit is just... not true. I can hate absolute classics of literature and still acknowledge they're well written and very good, they're just not for me. It's okay to not like things without condemning them. We all enjoy different things for different reasons, and sometimes we enjoy the crap even when we know it's crap.)

[beccadg]

It's okay to not like things without condemning them. We all enjoy different things for different reasons, and sometimes we enjoy the crap even when we know it's crap.

Another thing to remember about the "law" is that he was attempting to assert that "genre fiction" wasn't any more rife with "crap" than anything else. That 10% isn't actually about what is simply "good" but about what makes people's Top Tens. That's why it's only 10%. I personally have never paid much attention to it because I thought the whole reason for it was silly. Who cares if some "True Literature" elitists put down all "genre fiction" as crap? That doesn't make it crap, it just makes them sad small individuals with very short "good" lists. I've never had much sympathy for Margaret Atwood's discomfort with having works of hers called "science fiction." That's her hang up not readers who can appreciate any good book.

[thisbluespirit]

Ah, Isee. And, yes, it is silly to be precious like that about genre - a good book is a good book and we may all disagree about that, of course, but it's not genre that makes it good or not. *nods*

[beccadg]

Yeah, apparently, while the first time it can be cited in print was 1958, there are claims of him having used it as far back as 1951. Sturgeon didn't state it as a law. What he stated as a law was, "Nothing is always absolutely so." Sturgeon called it a revelation. It's gotten so people call it his law. One of the pre-1958 claims says Sturgeon said, "When people talk about the mystery novel they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,' and they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important. And the ten percent of science fiction that isn't crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere." The way he talks about the mystery novel and the western in that version of his expressing the revelation helps to show how the 10% he was talking about was the Top Ten stuff.

[liadt]

I've seen the back of Terry Pratchett's head. He was inside a bookshop signing and I didn't have the time to stop due to work to see the front!

[thisbluespirit]

How are you sure it was him and not an imposter?

[liadt]

It was a book signing event and there was a poster and very long queue outside the building. He could have had a double to sign book for him, who knows;p

[jhall1]

For my favourite characters it would be easy to list about a dozen. But I think Sam Vimes has to be at the top, with Susan Sto Helit and Tiffany Aching not far behind. My favourite book is even harder to choose, but possibly "Thud".

About thirty years ago a work colleague lent me the first two Discworld books - "The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fantastic" and, although they were amusing enough, I wasn't overwhelmed. The plots and characterisations weren't that great. So I nearly turned down the loan of the third book, "Equal Rites". I was very glad that I didn't because I thought it was fantastic. IMO, this was where Pratchett really hit his stride, with an excellent plot and - in Granny Weatherwax and Esk - great characters, in addition to the humour. There was a stretch of about fifty pages early on where there weren't any jokes at all, but the writing was so good that it didn't matter. So from that point on I was a devout Discworld follower.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, Equal Rites was definitely a step up! But sometimes a series does take a while to get going, and there's a lot of great stuff in most of them. :-)

[arcanetrivia]

I did it as much in order as I could, subject to availability at the local used bookstore, with the aid of a reading order guide. I still haven't gotten around to the Chalk books, though, partly because said local used store bowed to the high rent on their street and moved 45 miles away last year, and I haven't been back since. (The next closest such store is not exactly burdensome to travel to, but requires a specific trip rather than happening to be located on a street we're often on anyway, so that doesn't happen very often.)

[thisbluespirit]

Ha, yes, inconveniently moving away wouldn't help! Still, you've still got a few to look forward to one day - not a bad thing.

[paranoidangel]

This is making me want to re-read The Truth (I have a signed copy). I like the Watch books because I like police dramas, but I also really like Going Postal because it taught me a lot about how the post office works, and I loved the characters.

The first book I had signed was The Science of Discworld. He came to my uni because his co-authors worked there. They did a talk and a signing. I sort of accidentally jumped the queue because I came across a friend in it, who was a 6'6" tall fencer. Another friend of mine happened to have his maths text book with him, written by Ian Stewart. He got to push into the queue because he had a good idea: he went up to the table, bypassed Pterry and asked Ian Stewart to sign his text book (then Pterry signed it as well). Ian Stewart remembered the incident a few years later - it gave him a laugh.

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, that is cool - and pretty funny!

(And, yes, re-read The Truth, why not?)

[dimity_blue]

Pterry was an amazing and insightful writer. I love and envy the ability he had to play with words.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, indeed.