Tag: terry pratchett

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The glorious 25th of May

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

The scent rolled over him.

He looked up.

Overhead, a lilac tree was in bloom.

He stared.

Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett, 2002

Lilac blooms with the sun shining through them
Lilac, photo by MattysFlicks@Flickr CC BY

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have[…] a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc, etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have ‘lost’. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, 1979

Photograph of a towel draped over an arm, with a thumb up to hitch a ride
Have towel, will travel, photo by Kreg Steppe@Flickr CC BY-SA

Vetinari [said:] “As one man to another, commander, I must ask you: did you ever wonder why I wore the lilac?”

“Yeah, I wondered,” said Vimes.

“But you never asked.”

“No, I never asked,” said Vimes shortly. “It’s a flower. Anyone can wear a flower.”

“At this time? In this place?”

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett, 2002

Photograph of German editions of The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Night Watch, together with a lilac towl and a sprig of lilac
Remembering Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchtett, photo by Gytha69@Flickr, CC BY

Remembering Douglas Adams (1952–2001) and Terry Pratchett (1948–2015), both of whose work meant a lot to me at various times.

Image credits:

Lilacs, lighting and lens flare by MattysFlicks on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Thumbs up by Kreg Steppe on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike.

25.Mai Towel Day- Handtuchtag in Gedenken an den genialen Schriftsteller Douglas Adams (1952-2001) und ‘Wear a lilac if you were there day- Trag Flieder, wenn Du dabei warst- Tag im Gedenken an die Glorreiche Revolution in Ankh-Morpork by Gytha69 on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution, cropped and colour adjusted by the author of this post.

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In memoriam: Terry Pratchett, and a Discworld reading history

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

A fussy baby woke me at 5am and I found that the news of Terry Pratchett’s death came overnight.

Hoyden About Town has had several previous threads on Pratchett’s work: Belated Friday Hoydens: The Witches of Lancre, Gratuitous Pratchett Appreciation thread: Crivens!, Sunday Series: Discworld and it’s hard to work out what to say on top. Perhaps my own me-and-Pratchett-novels stories will need to do.

I was aware of Pratchett for as long as I can remember, because I was a teenager in the 1990s and he had a good amount of shelf space in my local mainstream book store, but the Josh Kirby cover era was always instinctively offputting to me as a teenager and into adulthood. I never got so far as consciously thinking “should I read Pratchett?” I thought it was clear from the covers that it was bawdy humour aimed to men, not one of my genres. So it took two pushes to read him: the first was a recommendation from a friend and the second was a recommendation from a friend that happened to take place on a camping trip in 2000 to which I hadn’t brought enough books. (I love me some ebook era, but I think transmission of Pratchett fandom would now be less likely in such circumstances.)

The book in question, because it happened to be there in someone’s bag, was Hogfather, which as I wrote in 2012 is not a bad introduction to Discworld in that it’s fairly self-contained and has a pretty comprehensive drill into the way magic and divinity work on the Disc. Its main failing was that it meant I hoped for a while that Susan Sto Helit was the main character in all the novels. (I didn’t end up really liking any of her other novels, eg the writer M is correct about Susan in Soul Music, although I think the portrayal of the immature rationality-supremacist geek girl was intentional!)

I then read many of the Discworld books in whatever order I came across them in my friends’ libraries (the ebook era would win here!), so I met the witches about halfway through in Lords and Ladies and was perpetually disappointed that it turned out to be about halfway through. I always wanted to know the end of Magrat’s story, when she finally, inevitably (in my opinion!) outgrows Granny and they both know it. (Apparently I always trust the designated irritating woman to grow up to win.) And what will Esmerelda the Younger become?

But, despite being a Hoyden, my heart ended up in Ankh-Morpork, in the Watch subseries which I happily read in more or less publication order. Honestly, partly this is because Vetinari is a ridiculous trope who just happens to be one of my very favourite ridiculous tropes in the entire world, but it’s also because Pratchett took his frustrating and increasingly sidelined comic sidekicks, went back in time, wrote a novel largely about men doing heroic man things with one of his favourite creations in the rescuer role, niggled at me politically a couple of times in a way he normally doesn’t, and made it the heart of the series for me anyway: Night Watch, the first Pratchett I believe I bought in hardback, and what a good choice that was.

It isn’t yet the glorious 25th of May, I’m in the wrong hemisphere, and there’s no lilac anywhere near me in any case. But it will always be the image that comes to mind when I remember the heart of Terry Pratchett’s work to me.

Here’s a few Pratchett links worth visiting today:

Featured image credit: Lilacs, lighting and lens flare by MattysFlicks on Flickr, CC BY.

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Sunday Series: Discworld

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Warning: highly opinionated post follows. Friendly disagreement more than welcome.

It’s been a couple of years since an entirely gratuitous Terry Pratchett thread, and a Twitter discussion asked about favourite Pratchett novels, with a focus on readers new to Pratchett. What think you?

My overall favourite is Night Watch, but I think it would be a terrible place to start reading: you need the context of the earlier Night Watch sub-series for background. Night Watch follows Guards! Guards!, Men At Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo and The Fifth Elephant. You could possibly skip Feet of Clay and Jingo and have most of the background, but that’s still a fair commitment. You want The Fifth Elephant because it introduces the major characters in an ongoing multinational inter-species political struggle (Monstrous Regiment, Thud!, Unseen Academicals, Snuff), but it’s also probably not strictly necessary as background to Night Watch.

The Night Watch sub-series is also interesting technically, as Pratchett has created two absurdly powerful political characters in this series (Vimes, the head of police, and Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork), and has to come up with increasingly aggressive scenarios to actually challenge them. He has written elsewhere about finding this annoying when he wants to write interesting stories in Ankh-Morpork without Vimes sticking his nose into them.

It’s worth warning that Night Watch is one of the darker novels, with offscreen torture and onscreen immediate-aftermath-of-torture. Small Gods has similar warnings (religiously inspired torture), if you’re OK with that it is good and very self-contained, and has also served as an entry point for a number of people.

The first Discworld I ever read was Hogfather and I think it’s actually not a bad starting point, since it’s a fairly self-contained story and contains a bunch of core Discworld themes concerning how magic and divinity work. It also has a great heroine who unfortunately, in my opinion, otherwise appears in pretty mediocre Discworld novels.

Probably for most Hoyden readers I’d recommend starting with Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters and reading through the Witches novels, which is where I went after Hogfather. The Tiffany Aching books didn’t exist at the time, but they’re very much in the spirit of the Witches novels, except that the Witches seem much more organised in them: Pratchett can’t leave well enough alone when it comes to creating power structures. See tigtog’s post about the Witches for more.

I find the Rincewind/wizards sub-series pretty unworthwhile, and still haven’t actually read all of it, so I can’t speak to that fairly.

Edited to add: there is a well-known reading order guide, which lays out the various sub-series in a flowchart style, but I cannot find an accessible version. Hence this post refers directly to the sub-series wiki pages.