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The Terry Pratchett Thread

Gawdzilla said:
So which path would you start down first? (Hindsight allowed, of course.)
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Equal Rites is set somewhat earlier than Guards, Guards or Mort, if I recall correctly so I'd go ER/M/GG and then along each path in turn.
 
catsmate1 said:
Equal Rites is set somewhat earlier than Guards, Guards or Mort, if I recall correctly so I'd go ER/M/GG and then along each path in turn.
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Equal Rites is one of the witch series, and Guards, Guards is one of the the watch series. Either one (or both) are fine for starting.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
Oh yeah, this. Dunno quite what you mean by that, but Pratchett enjoys a kind of similar style of anachronistic technology, mostly in the Watch and Industry books.

Instead of cameras, say, his characters use boxes with imps that paint pictures very, very quickly. The wife of one protagonist perpetually buys him newfangled "personal daemon assistants" like the Gooseberry mk 5, which can remember and hum up to a thousand of his favorite tunes but still calls him "Insert Name Here" because he threw away the manual with the setup incantations.

That and a good dose of clockpunk.
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I never heard of SteamPunk until a week or so ago when they held a convention here in Bellevue. It's a fiction genre with some kind of Victorian era steam powered fantastic vehicles and beyond that I know little except the convention was large, the people mostly in costumes that were all over the map, and beyond that I know as much as a quick Google search reveals.

"Clockpunk"...that's cute. :D
 
I think Equal Rites is a good start. It eases you in, although Mort does that as well. Guards! Guards! is a bit more immersive (IMO) - though I think it is the best book of the three.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
Oh yeah, this. Dunno quite what you mean by that, but Pratchett enjoys a kind of similar style of anachronistic technology, mostly in the Watch and Industry books.

Instead of cameras, say, his characters use boxes with imps that paint pictures very, very quickly. The wife of one protagonist perpetually buys him newfangled "personal daemon assistants" like the Gooseberry mk 5, which can remember and hum up to a thousand of his favorite tunes but still calls him "Insert Name Here" because he threw away the manual with the setup incantations.
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And there's Hex, of course.
 
Would you consider the economic modelling thingummy in "Making Money" to be a computer or a mechanical program?
 
Skepticemea said:
Would you consider the economic modelling thingummy in "Making Money" to be a computer or a mechanical program?
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Neither; it's an analog computer. The concept of a program isn't applicable to analog computers, because the functionality is built into the hardware, so that an analog computer can only solve a single problem or class of problem, but can solve it extremely efficiently. The device in "Making Money" is clearly based on MONIAC, which was originally used to model the British economy in 1949.

Dave
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
I never heard of SteamPunk until a week or so ago when they held a convention here in Bellevue. It's a fiction genre with some kind of Victorian era steam powered fantastic vehicles and beyond that I know little except the convention was large, the people mostly in costumes that were all over the map, and beyond that I know as much as a quick Google search reveals.

"Clockpunk"...that's cute. :D
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No, I'm familiar with steampunk. I didn't know if Gawdzilla was using it in the "hooray steampunk" sense or the "I am so sick of damn steampunk" sense.

You have it in a nutshell, though. The term descended from "cyberpunk," and while it originally carried over the implication that the protagonists were punks, now it's a purely aesthetic term, there's very little else beyond that.

The -punk suffix is occasionally applied to any fashion/tech period taken to fantastic extremes and named after its power source. I'm quite fond of dieselpunk.
 
Sigh. I've started 2 Pratchett books (Jingo and The Thief of Time) and put them both down. I still have the starter books on hold at the library but they aren't available yet. The other two were on the shelf. Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy. Creative imagination but I must be missing whatever else you all find there. I will still try the ones I have on hold but I doubt they will be my current kind of fantasy.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
You mean the L-space site that I posted in answering Gawdzilla's queries?

:D

I think both catsmate and I beat Gawdzilla to mentioning a very well-known (though not recently updated) Pratchett site.
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And I will never forgive you for that!
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Skeptic Ginger said:
Reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy. Creative imagination but I must be missing whatever else you all find there. I will still try the ones I have on hold but I doubt they will be my current kind of fantasy.
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Yes, it's very similar to Douglas Adams in writing style. I suspect that's the matter of taste you don't care for: the wry (dry) British humor.

It might be that it's an acquired taste too. And Pratchett definitely grows on you. (See again the annotated Pratchett files also on the L-space site for a sampling of the many often very obscure references made without explanation in the text.)
 
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