Tag: terry pratchett

Just finished watching “Going Postal”…

…on Blu-Ray, and it was very good.  It’s based on the Discworld book by the same name by Terry Pratchett, and it turned out to be a reasonably good adaptation of the novel*; the characters (and actors) were engaging, the quasi-Victorian sets were excellent and the original book’s themes about technology, innovation, and how both can be pretty cool came across pretty well.  I liked it: check it out.  If you’re a Terry Pratchett fan, you should like this.

And if you’re not a Terry Pratchett fan already… well.  There are a lot of people out there with your condition, and many of them go on to live reasonably full and meaningful lives.  So, you shouldn’t give up hope, or anything.

Moe Lane Continue reading Just finished watching “Going Postal”…

Book of the Week: A Song for Arbonne.

It being Sunday, we replace Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals with Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne – a older book, but a fine one, and an excellent introduction to Kay’s work.  Given that he’s finally given out information about his next book (Under Heaven, drawing from Tang Dynasty China, due in Spring of 2010), this gives some of you plenty of time to get up to speed on the author, and why you’ll want this one in hardback.

Book of the week: Unseen Academials (Discworld)

And so, we go from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline to Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals. No, it’s not out yet. But it will be, in about a month – which should be enough lead time for me to be able to splurge on the hardcover.

Hey, it’s Pratchett.

Unpacking Discworld.

Being known for being a stone-cold Terry Pratchett fan – particularly of the Discworld series – I’ve been asked for recommendations about where someone should start if somebody was interested in the series.  The answer is… it depends.

Essentially, the Discworld has gone through at least 3 upgrades since it was created.  Version 1.0 was pretty much a straightforward comic treatment of the sword-and-sorcery genre, complete with various good-natured parodies of other fantasy series.  Somewhere around Small Gods (in my personal opinion) we got version 2.0, which is where Pratchett started contemplating the Discworld as a place where serious (yet comical) stories could be told (as opposed to straightforwardly comic ones).  At some point – probably around the time that the Science of Discworld series came out – we got version 3.0, which is where we start seeing a fully-conscious examining of the implications of Discworld.

None of these iterations are necessarily superior to any other; but it does mean that new readers may be confused by the sometimes wide divergence in styles between any two books.  I therefore suggest that you go by the sub-series, which I’ll discuss below.  I’m not going to list every book in said sub-series: there are a lot of Discworld books, and they sometimes cross over into each other’s narrative thread. Continue reading Unpacking Discworld.