It's kind of hard to avoid Sir Terry's works, given that on top of his Discworld novels he has that collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, that was turned into a mini-series on Amazon Prime. Back when I actually participated on Facebook there were days I saw quotes from Sir Terry's works every couple of hours.*
The strange thing is that I don't get people proselytizing me to read the Discworld novels like, oh, people reading Robert Jordan back in the day. Maybe that's an acknowledgement that Sir Terry's works aren't for everyone.
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| This feels rather uncomfortably like people proselytizing about FF XIV. From Reddit; the original poster got it from a Discworld FB group. |
So I kind of drifted along, with the Sir Terry memes on the edges of my vision, and not really wanting to read the books. After all, reading over 40 books is a bit of a commitment, no matter what people say.
Then Modiphius released the Kickstarter for the Discworld TT RPG.
It looked interesting, but given that I'd never read the books there wasn't that much of a pull on me. However, the Kickstarter raked in over $3 million in USD, which caused me to sit up. Maybe I ought to go check out these books for myself.
Having read my share of Douglas Adams, when I read the descriptive term "British SF&F humor" I have a reference already in place. And that is the standard I compare others against. Is that fair? No, it's not, but since Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came first, that's what happens.
***
So, what did I think of the book?
It was a light read. Fun in spots, tedious in others, and I spent far more time recognizing the characters and situations Terry poked fun at than simply enjoying the book. I know this book was written for people like me because I recognized Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser**, Conan, Elric (okay, elements of Elric), the Dragonriders of Pern, D&D's quirks (the Luggage and spellcasting), and even any stereotypical fantasy city with lots of backstabbing this and that, so... Lankhmar, Sanctuary (from Thieves' World), Tarantia (Conan), and others.
Yes, I put this here for that quote at the beginning.
From The Scorpion King.
Every person that our two companions Rincewind and Twoflower came across, I kept trying to figure out what story Terry was poking fun at. Maybe that's not a fair thing to do, but after having run across so many classic Fantasy references, it came to me quite naturally. I'm pretty sure that the gothic horror elements of the novel were relating to both H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror as well as other touchstones of the 19th century, such as The Time Machine, Frankenstein, and Dracula.
The novel does end on a literal cliffhanger, so I presume Sir Terry had intended to write multiple novels when he started Discworld. What I've seen in some other authors is that they write, hoping to get a sale, and then once a book finally sells, they then have to scramble to write more in that world. Kristen Britain's Green Rider series comes to mind, because her first book Green Rider is pretty complete as it is. You can tell in the narration that the second novel came about after the first novel sold; that doesn't mean it was a poor book, but it's just that you spend so much effort to make that first sale that when you finally do and the publisher says "okay, what happens next?" you have to scramble a bit.
One thing that I do realize is that these books aren't very dense at all. This is good, because I could go for more light reads, and it kept me preoccupied on my 2 to 3 hour layovers at the airport in Charlotte last week.
I do have the next book published in the series, The Light Fantastic, and if it reads as quickly as this one then I can spend a few hours here and there, reading it while I take care of other things around the house.
Such as taxes.
*I guess you could tell that I hung around a lot of geeks. Shocking, I know.
**I always considered Fritz Leiber's creations --and the city of Lankhmar-- as a spoof of the sword and sorcery genre, so.... a spoof of a spoof?
Let me put on my professional bookseller's hat a moment...
ReplyDeleteSo, when I'm talking to a customer who's toying with the idea of reading some author who's well-known for writing a long-running series and they inevitably start asking which is the first book and how many there are altogether, the first thing I say is "Don't start at the beginning".
Seriously, just don't. Not unless you're already committed to the idea and determined to carry it through. If you're just curious to find out if it soemthing you *might* enjoy, don't start with the first book - start with one of the good ones. Sometimes that might also be the first one but not very often. Most long-running series take a while to get going, not least because the author frequently doesn't know who the characters are yet. A series of, say, ten books, probably took a dozen years to write. That's a long time for the author to have been thinking about things and also to be learning and/or improving their craft.
In the case of Discworld, the early novels are jolly romps but when Pratchett was writing them he was mostly satirizing the concept of fantasy novels and not necessarily very sympathetically, either. He was an established, professional writer with several other series already published, so it's not like the first two or three Harry Potters, which are barely competent even after the edits, but the early Discworlds are not really very much like the middle ones and those aren't that much like the late ones, either.
Discworld does actually break out nicely into sub-sets based on specific characters, so you have the "Death" books, the "Witch" books, the "NIght Watch" books, the "Technology" books etc etc. They were even badged and marketed like that at one time. They all have a setting and many characters in common but it's very easy to pick up one of the sets and just read that with full enjoyment. I always used to recommend starting with the Night Watch, the first of which is Guards! Guards!.
Every book is a standalone story and while it makes more sense to red them in continuity, you can very happily read them in any order. My thinking, as a bookseller hoping to get someone hooked on a new series, is that someone starting with a good book in the middle of the series is far more likely to get hooked than someone who begins with the shaky, unrepresentative first title. They'll also be much more likely to be sympathetic to the flaws and weaknesses when they go back and begin at the start, not least because they know it can and will get better.
Anyway, that's my recommendation. I'm not a paricular fan of Pratchett but he's a solid writer who gets better as he goes along, until the unfortunate illness towards the end of his life sets him back somewhat. There's a very good couple of dozen books in the middle of that forty though - any one of them better than anything the highly-overrated Douglas Adams ever wrote, at least in my opinion.
I hoped you'd respond, as I really value your opinion here. I didn't want to put a big "BHAGPUSS PLEASE RESPOND" on the title, but I figured anything with reading ought to pique your interest.
DeleteSomething I've wondered over the years with advice such as yours is whether it would work in a series that are stand alone novels or even with an actual chronological series. Lord of the Rings doesn't count since it was originally conceived as a single novel, but I was wondering whether that would work with, say, Robert Jordan (his inability to stay focused in the middle half dozen of books notwithstanding). I suppose a good author would have enough catch-up material in a book so that wouldn't be as much of an issue, but I do wonder whether missing the start of a tightly knit series would impact your enjoyment if you started in the middle.
The Discworld books are still marketed in the States by both the chronological order and the subsets of "Wizard" books, "Witch" books, etc. I'm one of those anal-retentive people who prefer to start at the beginning and work their way through the way they were published, because, well... I guess I'm that sort of person. (And yes, I'm the sort who absolutely has to have the books in a series all have the same cover design, and not from a mixture of different printings. This can be a real curse at times.)
As far as Douglas Adams goes, I thought the first two Hitchhiker's books were pretty good, but after that... Not so much. However, the curse of being read first still applies here, because Adams was first so everything is compared to him.
I'm the right age --and more importantly have read the right books-- to "get" Pratchett in The Color of Magic. More importantly, while I can "get" British humor, it doesn't mean that I think it's laugh out loud funny, either. I think I laughed out loud only a couple of times while reading The Color of Magic, because while I thought the humor itself was good, a lot of humor in general can seem like someone is trying too hard to be funny, and the amusement doesn't seem to come naturally. (See: 95% of all movie and television comedies.)
Anyway, thanks for the input. I think I might branch out and do the subsets along the way, but we'll see what happens after The Light Fantastic.
The Light Fantastic was the first Discworld novel I ever read (as a teenager), and in hindsight it's quite fascinating how strongly it managed to get its hooks into me, considering that I was completely lacking the lead-in from Colour of Magic and that the first two books are really not among the best in the series. I really loved what came after though and how Pratchett seemingly came up with a completely new way to use the setting in each novel that followed. I recall loving Pyramids for example and was low-key disappointed when I found out that it was a stand-alone with no sequels. I also wrote a book report about Equal Rites for English class. The later books fell off for me a bit because the humour got increasingly sacrificed in favour of ever sharper social commentary, which felt a bit awkward to me.
ReplyDeleteStill, it's been a long time now; I should really re-read the whole series at some point...
Good to have a vote of confidence about The Light Fantastic. I read a few pages of it last night while I waited for dishes to finish up, and it feels more polished than Color of Magic.
DeleteThe "Night Watch" subseries was where I got started with Discworld as they were the stories that were coming out freshly at the time. I read most of the earlier books, too. When I read "The Colour of Magic", I could tell that Pratchett was spoofing on all sorts of things, I just didn't know what most of the references actually were. I still enjoyed them, though.
ReplyDeleteI stopped keeping up with the newer releases about the time that "The Truth" came out -- mostly because I didn't want to pay for hardcovers, but I also didn't want to wait for either library hold queues or the paperback edition -- and never quite got around to catching up with the later Discworld stories, except for the trio of YA-marketed Tiffany Aching books (I haven't yet read the posthumous fourth Tiffany Aching book).
I can appreciate not wanting to pay for hardcovers. Especially when he was cranking out these novels at a high enough rate to put Brandon Sanderson to shame. Actually, my biggest beef these days is that mass market paperbacks are harder and harder to find. It's often better to just get the trade paperback because the cost differential isn't that great.
Delete"Especially when he was cranking out these novels at a high enough rate to put Brandon Sanderson to shame." LOL!
DeleteI get you about wanting to have editions with matching cover designs. I was at a bookstore of the mixed new and secondhand business model about a month ago shopping for my oldest's upcoming birthday. I wanted to get him the first three Narnia books -- not the first three by chronological sequence of Narnian history, as they are numbered now, but the first three by order of publication, as they were numbered when I was a kid -- and it bugged me that I wasn't able to find them all with the same cover style.