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The Terry Pratchett Thread

Gaspode reappears in the upcoming Making Money. Also, remember that just after The Fifth Elephant he is leading the Canting Crew.
 
Yllanes said:
I'm kind of hoping Carrot will die soon. The character doesn't have much more to add, I think, and it would make for an interesting story.
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Hmmm. . . if there's enough narrativium around, I think Carrot has to pull a sword out of a stone and become King of A-M.

I'm not sure how much the Patrician knows about Carrot. . . .
 
Or to paraphrase from Jingo (since I don't have that copy nearby at the moment):

"Carrot, if you were shooting those arrows in an abandonded cellar at midnight, Vetinari would have asked you 'but wasn't it awfully dark down there?' in the morning."


Edited to add: Also, Carrot has already pulled a sword out of a stone. A stone in which he pushed the sword into first, in fact. Which, as sergeant Colon noted, is definitely a feat more worthy of a real king. Re-read Men at Arms to check this.
 
Hawk one said:
Actually, the final scene with Gaspode is that he uses his powers of speech to hitchhike a trip with a coal wagon headed for Ankh-Morpork.

And the very last scene is with Carrot and Angua getting back to the office and putting things back to where they were in the Watch.

Also, it's Gavin's death. Bum was just the lone wolf who'd been captured by some villagers.
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You're right. I suck at names.
 
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Jekyll said:
No, he lands on another wolf.
IIRC, His final scene in that book is him howling for Bum's death and then wandering off.
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But he's close to death, isn't he? Or is it only Gavin who talks to Death?

The really shameful part is that it's only a few months since I reread Fifth Elephant...
 
Hawk one said:
Oh, you don't need to worry too much about that. Because in Night Watch, you'll notice how the Watch's Igor was in fact telling he could have revived the killed dwarf officer, but Vimes had put his foot down.
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As far as I recall, it wasn't Vimes who put his foot down,but the officer's family who refused for religious reasons.

Hawk one said:
So he won't just use them as an excuse for any miracles. And heck, in "Going Postal", Grout was sent to the hospital (which we indirectly and later finds out employs its own Igor), and the miracle was rather that he didn't need much healing after all.
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Had forgotten that scene, am now chuckling at the memory. Everyone at work thinks I'm mad.

Hawk one said:
And more importantly, Pratchett has only let two important characters survive throughout the whole book, and then dying in another one: Mort and Ysabell. Really, go take a check. If they're alive when the book ends, odds are really, really good that they'll keep on living throughout all other books they appear in. And this happened long before Igors came onto the scene.

Of course, now that you know this, you might feel that there won't be much risk to any lead characters whenever you read a new book. :D
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Oh, I wouldn't be so certain about that, there are a few passages in Wintersmith (I think) where Tiffany notices how old Granny is starting to look, and I don't think Terry would resist killing off characters if he felt it was necessary.

Last Hero spoiler below, in defference to Broidski...

Just thought, if Cohen counts as an important character (And I think he does) then that's three, even if he does become a god, maybe, perhaps.
 
Kotatsu said:
But he's close to death, isn't he? Or is it only Gavin who talks to Death?

The really shameful part is that it's only a few months since I reread Fifth Elephant...
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Gaspode pees on Death's legs and talks with him. Gavin doesn't talk with death at all, including his ethereal shape. He was just being dead.
 
3point14 said:
As far as I recall, it wasn't Vimes who put his foot down,but the officer's family who refused for religious reasons.
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Point. It still was a death that Igor said he could fix, though, and Pratchett denied him this just to get an officer back on track, whatever the reason. Whether or not this marks the trend that there's a limit to what Pratchett allows Igors to treat remains to be seen. But so far, it only seems like they've been making for a speedier recovery to what could have been treated anyway (by anyone but Ankh-Morpork doctors, that is). At least with regards to the main characters.

Had forgotten that scene, am now chuckling at the memory. Everyone at work thinks I'm mad.
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Whereas we know it. ;)

Oh, I wouldn't be so certain about that, there are a few passages in Wintersmith (I think) where Tiffany notices how old Granny is starting to look, and I don't think Terry would resist killing off characters if he felt it was necessary.
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In 6 days, I'll hopefully be able to buy those books (plus The Last Hero) and see for myself. Then we can talk about that in more detail.

But for now, let me stress that I'm only saying odds are very, very good, and not certain. That is a small difference that nevertheless is important, right? ;)
 
I have to chime in and say that Terry is one of my favorites as well.

They are books you can enjoy rereading over and over.
 
Another dedicated TP fan here, so I'm typing this after reading OP. Heard him give a talk in Salisbury a few years ago - excellent.
I am so pleased to see that there is a new book due out - I have been feeling seriously deprived of a new TP book since there seems to have been a long gap since the 'Wintersmith'.

ETA: I have so much enjoyed reading through this thread. I owe my introduction to TP to a child in my class once who asked if I had read 'Truckers'. He was amazed that I did not know it, so I read it. To start with I couldn't understand where it was going but I was on a train and had nothing else to do. Half-way through I was laughing out loud! From then on, I just read everything in order.

People who don't read TP say things like, 'Oh, I don't like Science Fiction.' It is hard to explain to them what it really is.

There is one question I have never worked out: Are there layers of meaning in the name Ankh-Morpork?

Oh, and I've heard TP on radio expressing his atheist views. (99.9% certain here.)

(Off to Bournemouth now - to see/peer at(!) the Red Arrows display.)
 
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SusanB-M1 said:
There is one question I have never worked out: Are there layers of meaning in the name Ankh-Morpork?
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Well here's lots of things that it could be, maybe, parhaps, is or is not.:rolleyes:

Terry has said that the name 'Ankh-Morpork' was inspired neither by the ankh (the Egyptian cross with the closed loop on top), nor by the Australian or New Zealand species of bird (frogmouths and small brown owls, respectively) that go by the name of 'Morepork'.

Since I first wrote down the above annotation, there have been new developments, however. In The Streets of Ankh-Morpork and The Discworld Companion we are shown an illustration of the Ankh-Morpork coat of arms, which does feature a Morepork/owl holding an ankh. But from Terry's remarks (see next annotation) I feel it's safe to say that neither bird nor cross were explicitly on his mind when he first came up with the name Ankh-Morpork.

Finally, many readers have mentioned the resonance that Ankh-Morpork has with our world's Budapest: also a large city made up of two smaller cities (Buda and Pest) separated by a river.

- [p. 9/9 COM] "[...] two figures were watching with considerable interest."

The two barbarians, Bravd and Weasel, are parodies of Fritz Leiber's fantasy heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The Swords series of books in which they star are absolute classics, and have probably had about as much influence on the genre as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

The Swords stories date back as far as 1939, but more than sixty years later they have lost none of their appeal. Both The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are, in large part, affectionate parodies of the Leiberian universe, although I hasten to add that, in sharp contrast to many later writers in the field, Leiber himself already had a great sense of humour. Fafhrd and the Mouser are not to be taken altogether serious in his original version, either.

Given all this, I can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Terry intended Ankh-Morpork to be a direct parody of the great city of Lankhmar in which many of the Swords adventures take place. However, Terry explicitly denied this when I suggested it on alt.fan.pratchett:

"Bravd and the Weasel were indeed takeoffs of Leiber characters -- there was a lot of that sort of thing in The Colour of Magic. But I didn't -- at least consciously, I suppose I must say -- create Ankh-Morpork as a takeoff of Lankhmar."

source
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Sham Harga had run a succesful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits.
TP - Men at Arms

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I enjoyed the mini-series, shown last christmas time on sky. Yet I have not got around to reading the books.
 
SusanB-M1 said:
Oh, and I've heard TP on radio expressing his atheist views. (99.9% certain here.)
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You have a slight doubt that it was him, or a slight doubt that he's an atheist?

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.
 
Rasmus said:
You have a slight doubt that it was him, or a slight doubt that he's an atheist?

The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.
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Or eat them.
 
3point14 said:
Interestingly, large numbers of the earlier discworld books were written very quickly indeed, for a good few years there was one published every six months.
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And funnily enough it was those books that put me off being an avid reader. After I read Equal Rites - which I loved - I gathered every book I could as they appeared, and I think it scunnered me. I do still read the occasional book and enjoy it, but I didn't feel that his very busy period produced invariably great work. Having said that, some of his books are amongst my very favourites, and I do enjoy reading 'em. Favourite: Good Omens, I think. Clever, funny stuff. Reaper Man stands out for me. I also enjoyed Truckers/Diggers/Wings. But Moving Pictures et al left me cold.

SusanB-M1 said:
Oh, and I've heard TP on radio expressing his atheist views. (99.9% certain here.)
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Mostly, it seems.
 
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