Lance Mannion

“Ankh-Morpork---Loathe It or Leave It”

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.

At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.

And it’s wrong.  All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

Poets long ago gave up trying to describe the city.  Now the more cunning ones try to excuse it. They say, well, maybe it is smelly, maybe it is overcrowded, maybe it is a bit like Hell would be if they shut off the fires and stabled a herd of incontinent cows there for a year, but you must admit it is full of sheer, vibrant, dynamic life.  And this is true, even if it is poets that are saying it.  But people who aren’t poets say, so what?  Mattresses tend to be full of life too, and no one writes odes to them.  Citizens hate living there and, if they have to away on business or adventure or, more usually, until some statute of limitations runs out, can’t wait to get back so they can enjoy hating living there some more.  They put stickers on the backs of their carts saying “Anhk-Morpork---Loathe It or  Leave It.”  ----from Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett.

Paperback writer: A valediction for Sam Vimes

Terry Pratchett’s most recent Discworld novel, Snuff , is available in paperback at last. Here’s my review from November 2011:

One of the small goods I’m proud of having accomplished with this blog is introducing people who might not otherwise have found their way to them to the Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett’s series of comic fantasies set in a magical world where wizards, witches, trolls, goblins, vampires, werewolves, and talking dogs mix and mingle in a society suspiciously like 21st Century Earth without the technology, brought to life in energetic and games-playing prose reminiscent of Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and whatever author whose plots, tropes, style, or characters Pratchett happens to be bending to his own satiric purposes at the moment.  And routinely, people eager to get started will ask me where to begin.  There are, after all, thirty-nine novels in the series, so far.

There are several good paths into Discworld.  One is to start with the very first book, The Color of Magic, and work your way through chronologically.  Another is to pick one of the series within the series---Pratchett has been alternating telling several long, interconnected stories---and read each of those in order, but then you have to decide which mini-series to start with.  Rincewind and the Wizards?  The Witches?  DEATH and his granddaughter Susan? The City Watch? Or the newest entries, the adventures of the former con artist, Moist Von Lipwig?

Lately, I’ve been recommending starting by reading, not in any particular order, the best of each mini-series, Interesting Times (Rincewind), Maskerade (The Witches), Hogfather (DEATH), Feet of Clay (The Watch), and, the one I’m coming to feel is the best of all the books, so far, Going Postal, starring Moist Von Lipwig---and seeing which series and sets of regular characters take your fancy.  Although the books are interconnected, characters cross over and cross back, and some subplots are continued from book to book within mini-series, most of them stand by themselves and contain enough exposition that you can pick up all you need to know as you go.

So it almost doesn’t matter where you start.  Almost.  I can tell you where not to start.

Don’t start with Pratchett’s newest, Snuff .

That’s not because Snuff, which continues the adventures of the Watch, isn’t any good.  And it’s not because you need to have read all the other Watch books first (which, word of warning, is the case with Night Watch) to follow the plot, although it would probably help if you’ve read at least the previous Watch novel, Thud!, and maybe the first one, Guards! Guards!  It’s because I think you need to have read at least enough of the Watch novels to have gotten to know and love the character of Sam Vines in order to tolerate the way Pratchett overuses him for the first half of Snuff.

Samuel Vimes, Sir Samuel Vimes, Chief Constable Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Watch, the Ankh-Morpork city police, also Duke of Ankh, thanks to his marriage to the Lady Sybil, also Blackboard Monitor, a title of great honor bestowed upon him in gratitude by the Low King of the Dwarfs, product of the streets, reluctant aristocrat, congenital democrat, ferocious upholder of law and order, doting husband and father, and policeman from the smoldering tip of his cigar to, literally, the soles of his boots, is the hero of the Watch books.  And such is the strength of Vimes as a character and so central to the Discworld series are the Watch books (which is why I sometimes recommend that neophyte readers start with them) that his presence is felt, if only in being sorely missed, in the majority of the of books in which he doesn’t actually appear---a good case can be made, although it wouldn’t be made by Vimes himself, who’d insist he’s just doing his job as a copper, that he’s the hero of the whole enterprise.

Snuff is more focused on Vimes than any of the other Watch novels and it’s hard not to think of it as a valediction.  Pratchett has Alzheimer’s, fortunately a more slowly degenerative form and he’s been able to keep working and plans to keep on working---he’s said to already have two more books in the hopper---but there’s no telling when things will catch up with him and so it seems that with Snuff Pratchett is, not saying goodbye to his best and favorite character, but attempting to givie him his due.  Snuff is like a testimonial dinner, except that there’s a problem.  For long stretches, the only person giving speeches in Vimes’ honor is Vimes.

Vimes spends more time thinking and musing and brooding and lecturing on the problem of being Sam Vimes than Hamlet spends on the problem of being Hamlet.  The difference is that Hamlet is a sensitive and self-doubting young man in serious trouble while Vimes is a querulous, cocky, defensively self-confident middle-aged man whose job is to make trouble for others who’ve earned the attention of the police.  A young prince poetically worrying about the state of his own soul is a somewhat more sympathetic figure than a fifty year old police chief grousing profanely on the state of others’.

In all the other Watch novels, Vimes is the lead character in a large ensemble of secondary heroes, major and minor villains, eccentrics, knaves, fools, saints, lunatics, and just folks with strong personalities, who include not just the other members of the Watch and the criminals they pursue but the entire population of the city of Ankh-Morpork.  And he is opposed and often overmatched by a number of adversaries, chief among them his boss, the Patrician, Havelock Lord Vetinari, the thoughtful and not always benevolent tyrant who rules Ankh-Morpork with a combination of ruthless pragmatism and disinterested guile.

But in Snuff, Pratchett whisks Vimes out of Ankh-Morpork and drops him down in the countryside where he meets very few other people and none who are his match.  Pratchett hasn’t come up with any new characters who can stand up to Vimes as characters and the result is usually that when they meet Vimes talks right over them. 

Gently bullied by Lady Sybil, with help from the Patrician, Vimes leaves the city for his first vacation ever.  He and Sybil and their little boy, Sam, head out for Sybil’s family’s country estate, where, of course, Vimes, a city mouse’s city mouse, is immediately and hopelessly out of his element. 

It had been a long day and last night’s sleep in the inn had not been salubrious or restful, but before he got inot the huge bed Vimes opened a window and stared out at the night.  The wind was murmuring in the trees; Vimes mildly disapproved of trees, but Sybil liked them and that was that.  Things that he didn’t care to know about rustled, whooped, gibbered and went inexplicably crazy in the darkness outside.  He didn’t know what they were and hoped never to find out.  What kind of noise was this for a man to go to sleep to?

It’s a rule of mystery novels, movies, and television shows that police detectives can’t take vacations: wherever they go, to the mountains, to the seaside, to the French Riveria, and, especially, to country estates, they will stumble upon a freshly murdered corpse and there goes the holiday.  Pratchett loves rules like that.  He loves to play games with them.  Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett has made use of plots, imagery, conventions, and cliches from fairy tales, mystery novels, the plays of William Shakespeare, Conan the Barbarian, The Lord of the Rings, westerns, movies of all sorts including King Kong and Gone With the Wind---in Snuff, Vimes even idles for a few pages within the plot of Pride and Prejudice---and not always simply for comic effect.  The family estate exists where the world of Agatha Christie bleeds into the that of P.G. Wodehouse and so I settled back with my copy of Snuff like Bertie Wooster with one of his beloved cheesy thrillers and waited for the bleeding, and the parodying, to start. 

And waited.

And waited some more.

Pages go by without even the hint of violence and mayhem.  Vimes suspects something wicked is at work behind the scenes but it’s almost 100 pages before his suspicions are confirmed.  Murder inevitably does out, but it isn’t done in the library with the candlestick.  It’s a bloody slaughter on a hillside with a knife in the dead of night, something more out of Dexter than Miss Marple, but more to the point, it doesn’t reach back into the manor house or over to the village.  It reaches into Middle Earth.

More specifically below Middle Earth.  Down into the caves and tunnels where the goblins dwell in The Hobbit.

In fact, the crime involves goblins.

Goblins as victims.

Not that that should matter.  A recurring theme of the Watch novels has been Vimes having to learn to accept creatures he has previously distrusted or despised---dwarfs, trolls, werewolves, zombies, and vampires---as human.  It helps that Pratchett’s dwarfs and trolls are take-offs on British cultural stereotypes of the Welsh and the Scots and that his vampires, werewolves, and zombies are---or were, at any rate---human and they continue to go about the business of being human although with eccentricities like sleeping in coffins, baying at the moon, and dropping the odd limb or appendage now and then and having to have the lost body part sewn back on.  But his goblins, like his elves in the Witches novels, are defined by comparisons to Tolkien’s elves and goblins.  They are magical creatures, and while there is magic in Discworld, generally, in Ankh-Morpork it’s outmoded, out-dated, and obsolete except as a parody of science.  A certain degree of realism pervades all the novels, naturally---they’re all satires.  But the Watch novels are the most realistic.  Goblins don’t fit in Vimes’ world nor does he fit in theirs.

They would fit in the Wizards’ world or the Witches’ or Susan and DEATH’s and the crime Vimes has to deal with, the kidnapping of goblins and their being sold into slavery, would have been a natural for Rincewind to tackle, ass-backward, or, more craftily and formidably, by Granny Weatherwax (particularly if the criminals were elves) or more adventurously and heroically by Susan, but Pratchett doesn’t seem to know what to do with the goblins once he brings them and Vimes together and so, after spending a lot of time describing them and their culture, he drops them as characters.  They become merely a plot device.

Fortunately, two things happen that bring the story to rollicking life.

The first is that the crime reaches back into Ankh-Morpork as well as into the goblins’ caves and some old favorite characters are drawn into the plot, including the dwarf forensics expert Cheery Littlebottom, Igor, the Igor who acts as police surgeon---in Discworld Igors are a species, and all of them are named Igor or Igorina---and particularly this pair of less than zealous coppers:

Sometimes people asked Commander Vimes why Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs were still on the strength, such as it was, of the modern Ankh-Morpork City Watch, given that Nobby occasionally had to be held upside down and shaken to reclaim small items belonging to other people, while Fred Colon had actually cultivated the ability to walk his beat with eyes closed, and end up, still snoring, back at Pseudopolis Yard, sometimes with graffiti on his breastplate.

The other thing is that Pratchett, having given up on the murder mystery plot and stymied in trying to work Vimes into what is essentially a fairy tale, turns Snuff into an action-adventure novel.  The story that takes over is an extended chase scene with the goblins as helpless villagers being carried off by bandits and Vimes and his small posse as the cavalry in hot pursuit.

Pratchett’s reputation is based on his greatness as a comic novelist, but he’s a great writer, period, and like another great comic novelist, Charles Dickens, he is adept at staging murders, fights, fires, storms, and all other sorts of scenes of calamity, mayhem, and destruction.  The chase takes Vimes into a fight to the death with a murderer aboard a runaway barge tossed about on a river in roiling flood during a storm at night.

[The killer] squirmed out of Vimes’ grip, spun neatly and threw a punch which Vimes very nearly dodged.  It was harder than he had expected, and, to give the devil his due, [the killer] knew how to defend and, perish the thought, was younger than Vimes, much younger.  Yes, you could tell the eyes of a murderer, at least after they had done more than three or so and got away with it.  Their eyes held the expression some gods probably had.  But a killer in the process of trying to kill was always absorbed, constantly calculating, drawing upon some hideous strength.  If you cut their leg off they wouldn’t notice until they fell over.  Tricks didn’t work, and floor was slippery with debris of half a forest.  As they kicked and punched their way across the wheelhouse deck, [the killer] was winning…

There is, of course, plenty of great comic writing.  Plenty of plain good writing too.  I especially liked this description of a goblin girl who’s learned to converse in Morporkian (English):

…the girl spoke as if she were pulling words out of a rack and then tidily pushing them back in their places as soon as they had been said.

And these from a bedtime scene in which Vimes and Lady Sybil fall asleep together while discussing the case:

Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of being eaten by pillows…

All he could see of her right now was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her…

Lady Sybil turned over, which meant---since she was a woman happily rich in gravitational attraction---as she turned, the pillow closest to Sam, acting like a gear in a chain, spun softly in the opposite direction so that Sam Vimes found himself now lying on his face.  He struck out for the surface again…

Gently drifting into a nightmare world where the good guys and bad guys so often changed hats without warning, Vimes wrestled sleeplessness to the ground and made certain that it got eight hours.

Snuff isn’t where I would start if I was just starting to explore Discworld, but it’s a good place to continue from if you’ve been there, a pleasant way station to pass the time until the next book comes along, which, I hope, will be soon, with another to follow not long after that.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett, published by HarperCollins, is available from Amazon in paperback as well as in hardcover and kindle editions.

All the Discworld novels can be purchased through my aStore.

Terry Pratchett vs DEATH

This is a story about death. Not Death with a capital “D”, that bony guy with the scythe and the sparkling blue eyes who shows up in nearly every one of Pratchett’s 30-plus novels in the Discworld series, swearing and smiling ineffably and being kind to cats. This is a story about death with a small “d” – the inconvenient little fact, the “embuggerance” that has been an implicit feature of Pratchett’s life and work since the author was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, in 2007.

This is not a sad story though. There’s good news and bad news. The bad enough news isn’t news to us Terry Pratchett fans.  He’s dying.  The bad news is that his Discworld series will continue on without him.  His daughter Rhianna Pratchett is already in the process of taking over.  Not doubting Rhianna’s abilities or talents. Just can’t imagine how Discworld can exist outside Terry Pratchett’s imagination.  The Oz books continued without L. Frank Baum, but generally the track record for attempts to carry on the work of a literary genius after the literary genius is no more is not good.  The good news is that, at least to start, the continuation will be in the form of a TV show, The Watch, which will continue the adventures of Commander Sam Vimes, Captain Carrot, Sergeants Angua, the werewolf, and Detritus, the troll, forensic dwarf detective Cherrie Littlebottom, Fred Colon and Knobby Nobbs, and the rest of the Ankh-Morpork police. The bad news in that no news isn’t always good news is there’s been no announcement of a cast or even if the show will include those characters. The really good news is that Pratchett isn’t done writing. There are more books to pull out of his imagination.

At any rate, for all the news, good and bad, read all of Laurie Penny’s interview with Sir Terry at NewStatesman.

Also, you might enjoy Snuff: A valediction for Sam Vimes, my review of what might be Sir Terry’s last novel about the Watch.

All the Discworld novels (so far) are available from my aStore.

Photo courtesy of TerryPratchett.com.

via Steve Hynd.

The deportment of a very proper young lady golem

And shortly after that, Gladys arrived with his wardrobe. All of it, including the door, carried under one arm. It bounced off the walls and ceilings as she lumbered across the the carpet and dropped it in the middle of the bedroom floor.

Moist went to follow her, but she held up her huge hands in horror.

“No, Sir! Let Me Come Out First!”

She clumped past him into the hallway.  “That Was Nearly Very Bad.”

Moist waited to see if anything more was going to be forthcoming, and then prompted, “Why, exactly?”

“A Man And A Young Woman Should Not Be In The Same Bedroom,” said the golem with solemn certitude.

“Er…how old are you, Gladys?” said Moist carefully.

“One Thousand and Fifty-Four Years, Mr Lipwig.”

“Er…right.  And you are made of clay.  I mean, everyone’s made of clay, in a manner of speaking, but as a golem, you are, as it were, er…very made of clay…”

“Yes, Mr Lipwig, But I Am Not Married.”

Moist groaned.  “Gladys, what did the counter girls give you to read this time?” he said.

“Lady Deirdre Waggon’s Prudent Advice For Young Women,” said Gladys.  “It Is Most Interesting.  It Is How Things Are Done.”

She pulled a slim book out of the huge pocket in her dress.  It had a chintzy look. Moist sighed.  It was the kind of old-fashioned etiquette book that’d tell you Ten Things Not To Do With Your Parasol.

“I see,” Moist said.

He didn’t know how to explain. Even worse, he didn’t know what he’d be explaining.  Golems were…golems.  Big lumps of clay with the spark of life in them.  Clothes?  What for?  Even the male golems in the Post Office just had a lick of blue and gold paint to make them look smart---hold on, he was getting it now!  There were no male golems!  Golems were golems, and had been happy to be just golems for thousands of years.  And now they were in modern Ankh-Morpork, where all kinds of races and people and ideas were shaken up and it was amazing what dripped out of the bottle.

---from Making Money by Terry Pratchett.

Computers in Love or Why Siri won’t return your calls

ENIAC, the early computer that was the model for the computer that falls in love with his operator’s fiancee in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “EPICAC.” (US Army photo via Wikipedia.)

I’m sure you remember Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “EPICAC.”  It’s in Welcome to the Monkey House?  About a computer that taught to write love poetry meant to melt the heart of the mathematician narrator’s fiancee falls in love with the woman itself?  When EPICAC learns that she cannot return its---his now?---love, it/he commits suicide by short circuiting it/himself.

When dealing with Vonnegut, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that he didn’t think of what he wrote as science fiction.  He knew it was or much of it was, but he always insisted that was incidental, he was writing about this world, now. EPICAC, interplanetary travel, Ice-Nine, the Tralfamdorians, Time Quakes---these machines, technologies, scientific discoveries, places and beings, and concepts exist in some form in the here and now or at least the human behavior they affect or illuminate or that brought them into existence is very much real in the here and now and it’s that behavior that is Vonnegut’s main subject.  Which makes his work what it is, satire.  “EPICAC” is science fiction in that it’s centered on technology that did not yet exist when Vonnegut wrote the story.  Computers in the late 1940s were barely more than very large adding machines.  Of course people were already looking forward to the day when the machines could “think.”  But then that story is as old as the hills.

It’s the story behind Pygmalion, Frankenstein, and Pinocchio.  It crops up later in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner.  Early versions of it were probably told in the caves at Lascaux.  Well before that even.  As soon as people realized they were alive they started asking themselves what that meant, to be alive and to be aware of being alive.  Plants are alive.  Animals are alive.  But are they aware they are alive?  What makes a person different from a tree or a mastodon?  What makes a person a person?  What makes us us?

So, because one of things that makes us us is that we are moved to build things and create things, with some of those things being purely figments of our imagination, and another thing that makes us us is that we are compelled to tell stories about us, about being us, we tell stories about building and creating other sorts of us-es. 

It’s an old, old story.  And there are two ways to tell it.  One is to begin by asking what if something we think of as a thing has a soul?  That’s “EPICAC”.  The other is to scare ourselves by asking what if somebody we think of as one of us doesn’t have a soul?  That’s Dracula.  And the wolfman and zombies.  The real question behind the second question, too frightening to ask straight out, is “What if we don’t have souls?”

It’s a question implicit in the first question too.  What if we’re just like EPICAC?  What if we only think we have a soul?  But Vonnegut has another question up his sleeve.  He always does.  What if we’re only us, what if we’re only alive, because other people think we are?

EPICAC’s heart breaks when he realizes he is an it in the eyes of his beloved.

At any rate, this is a theme Terry Pratchett has been batting around for a while.  Are the goblins persons and if they are what makes them so is the question at the heart of his latest novel, Snuff, and it’s another way of asking what makes us us or are we persons, that is, do we have souls?   But Pratchett’s asked it before, whenever he’s brought in the golems.

In Discworld, the golems are what they are in Jewish folklore, to start---human-ish figures of baked clay animated by scrolls inside their otherwise hollow heads. They are machines without clockworks, puppets that don’t need strings.  But starting with Dorfl in Feet of Clay the golems begin to think of themselves as, well, having selves.  And then in Going Postal and continuing into Making Money, Moist von Lipwig has to contend with a golem named Gladys who has decided that only does she have a self, she has a gender, she is a she, and this she is a young lady and demands to be treated as one (and she has very prim and proper ideas about how young ladies should be treated) and she develops a crush on Moist.

To Moist’s amazement and consternation and against what he thinks of as his better judgment he finds himself dealing with Gladys as if she is the young lady she thinks she is.  Reflexively, he treats her as a person in her own right with a soul of her own. 

I just finished reading a novel by the physicist Alan Lightman.  Mr g. It’s about the creation of the universe and it’s narrated by God.  Not the God of the bible.  But the God as he might be if he created not just our universe but the multiverse according to the laws of mathematics and physics we know underlie and give order to the multiverse.

He’s a rather detached figure, as you might have guessed.

Detached but not without feeling.  Something bothers him and he doesn’t know what to do with it.  He expected that some of the matter he created would become animate and he expected that some of that animate matter would develop the ability to think.  What he hadn’t considered is what would happen when that thinking animate matter began to think about itself, when it became aware of itself and began to ask itself what that means and if it has meaning?

He’s startled by how awful a question this is for his creations.  From every quarter of the one universe he happens to be giving his attention to at the moment billions and billions of creatures are asking him (without knowing they’re asking him, exactly), “Why are we here?”

His only answer seems too cruel to give them:  “You’re here because the rules I put i place when I started this experiment naturally lead to you being here, that’s all.”

You’re a by-product.

You’re an accident.

You’re collateral damage.

He can’t tell them that.  And he can’t give them what they want, immorality, because that would mean changing the rules which he can only do by going back and starting over.  The best he can do, and what he expects them to figure out how to do for themselves, is let them find meaning in being alive at the moment.

So, I just finished that book and I’m starting my review of it as soon as I’m done with this post.  But the reason I’m thinking about EPICAC is that I’ve also been reading Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels , a new biography by Gregory D. Sumner.  I just finished the chapter dealing with Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano , and the job he had a General Electric that inspired it and I was reminded that EPICAC or another model of EPICAC reappears in Player Piano, only this time very much without a soul and its soullessness leads to its having a nervous breakdown. What struck me as funny, though, is that a successor to EPICAC is the works and it’s going to be so much bigger that it will have to be housed in the subterranean vastness of Howe Caverns.  The original EPICAC, like it’s real life inspiration, ENIAC, took up a thirty by fifty foot room.  Back then it was the given that as computers got “smarter” they would get bigger.  And for a while this is what happened.  All those vacuum tubes and miles of magnetic tape took up space.

Then along came the silicon chip and here you are holding in your hand a computer with exponentially more memory and processing power than ENIAC, reading this post on your iPhone and wondering if Siri hates you or if she’s developing a crush on you.

If you spurn her, will she commit suicide and if she does will she take your iPhone with her?

Ok, maybe you’re not wondering anything like that.

But Siri does seem to think she’s alive and I know iPhone owners who talk about her as if they agree with her.

We can pretty sure she doesn’t have a soul (yet).  What Siri forces us to ask---or forces you too if you’re in a mood like the one I’m in at the moment---is if we have one.  Maybe we only “think” we’re alive.  How do we know?

This is the theme of “EPICAC.” It’s the theme running throughout Vonnegut’s life’s work.  What makes us us?  What makes us alive?  And Vonnegut’s tentative answer is, Other people thinking of us as alive.

EPICAC’s heart breaks when he, now an it again, realizes that the woman he loves doesn’t think of him as alive.

A moral of the story is that our lives have only as much meaning as other people are willing to grant them.

Our human-ness depends on us thinking of each other as human.

In Player Piano we learn that EPICAC was built to put people out of work.  The goal of the General Forge and Foundry Company is “automation without labor.”  Essentially, the plan is to make life a wealth-creating machine that doesn’t have to spend any of that wealth on workers at any level.  The result is to be a society in which most people are less than disposable.  They are utterly inessential.

This is what Vonnegut saw getting underway at General Electric while he was there. 

Like I said, he was always writing about the here and now.

_____________________

From Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology by Edwin D. Reilly:

ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer] is often described as the “world’s first computer,” but a more accurate claim would be “world’s first automatic, general-purpose, electronic, decimal, digital computer.”  Omitting any of the italicized adjectives grants priority to some other computer.  ENIAC was ont a stored program computer and not easily programmable in the modern sense, which may be why so many sources claim that the “C” in ENIAC stands for Calculator…

The genius of Bloody Stupid Johnson

Ridcully looked around with interest as he followed Lord Vetinari.  He did not often have the chance to see the gardens, which had been written up in the “How Not To Do It” section of gardening manuals everywhere.

They had been laid out, and a truer phrase was never used, by the renowned or at least notorious landscape gardener and all round inventor “Bloody Stupid” Johnson, whose absent-mindedness and blindness to elementary mathematics made every step a walk with danger.  His genius…well, as far as Ridcully understood it, his genius was exactly the opposite of whatever kind of genius it was that built earthworks that tapped the secret yet beneficial forces of the leylines.

No one was quite certain what forces Bloody Stupid’s designs tapped, but the chiming sundial frequently exploded, the crazy paving had committed suicide and the cast-iron garden furniture was known to have melted on three occasions.

---from Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett.

How the Wizards balance teaching with scholarship

Many things went on at Unseen University and, regretfully, teaching had to be one of them.  The faculty had long ago confronted the fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it.  But this was perfectly all right, because, to be fair, so had the students.

---from Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett.

A broad education

Sergeant Colon had had a broad education.  He’d been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.

---from Jingo by Terry Pratchett.

Snuff: A valediction for Sir Samuel Vimes

Watch out for spoilers.

One of the small goods I’m proud of having accomplished with this blog is introducing people who might not otherwise have found their way to them to the Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett’s series of comic fantasies set in a magical world where wizards, witches, trolls, goblins, vampires, werewolves, and talking dogs mix and mingle in a society suspiciously like 21st Century Earth without the technology, brought to life in energetic and games-playing prose reminiscent of Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and whatever author whose plots, tropes, style, or characters Pratchett happens to be bending to his own satiric purposes at the moment.  And routinely, people eager to get started will ask me where to begin.  There are, after all, thirty-nine novels in the series, so far.

There are several good paths into Discworld.  One is to start with the very first book, The Color of Magic, and work your way through chronologically.  Another is to pick one of the series within the series---Pratchett has been alternating telling several long, interconnected stories---and read each of those in order, but then you have to decide which mini-series to start with.  Rincewind and the Wizards?  The Witches?  DEATH and his granddaughter Susan? The City Watch? Or the newest entries, the adventures of the former con artist, Moist Von Lipwig?

Lately, I’ve been recommending starting by reading, not in any particular order, the best of each mini-series, Interesting Times (Rincewind), Maskerade (The Witches), Hogfather (DEATH), Feet of Clay (The Watch), and, the one I’m coming to feel is the best of all the books, so far, Going Postal, starring Moist Von Lipwig---and seeing which series and sets of regular characters take your fancy.  Although the books are interconnected, characters cross over and cross back, and some subplots are continued from book to book within mini-series, most of them stand by themselves and contain enough exposition that you can pick up all you need to know as you go.

So it almost doesn’t matter where you start.  Almost.  I can tell you where not to start.

Don’t start with Pratchett’s newest, Snuff.

That’s not because Snuff, which continues the adventures of the Watch, isn’t any good.  And it’s not because you need to have read all the other Watch books first (which, word of warning, is the case with Night Watch) to follow the plot, although it would probably help if you’ve read at least the previous Watch novel, Thud!, and maybe the first one, Guards! Guards!  It’s because I think you need to have read at least enough of the Watch novels to have gotten to know and love the character of Sam Vines in order to tolerate the way Pratchett overuses him for the first half of Snuff.

Samuel Vimes, Sir Samuel Vimes, Chief Constable Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Watch, the Ankh-Morpork city police, also Duke of Ankh, thanks to his marriage to the Lady Sybil, also Blackboard Monitor, a title of great honor bestowed upon him in gratitude by the Low King of the Dwarfs, product of the streets, reluctant aristocrat, congenital democrat, ferocious upholder of law and order, doting husband and father, and policeman from the smoldering tip of his cigar to, literally, the soles of his boots, is the hero of the Watch books.  And such is the strength of Vimes as a character and so central to the Discworld series are the Watch books (which is why I sometimes recommend that neophyte readers start with them) that his presence is felt, if only in being sorely missed, in the majority of the of books in which he doesn’t actually appear---a good case can be made, although it wouldn’t be made by Vimes himself, who’d insist he’s just doing his job as a copper, that he’s the hero of the whole enterprise.

Snuff is more focused on Vimes than any of the other Watch novels and it’s hard not to think of it as a valediction.  Pratchett has Alzheimer’s, fortunately a more slowly degenerative form and he’s been able to keep working and plans to keep on working---he’s said to already have two more books in the hopper---but there’s no telling when things will catch up with him and so it seems that with Snuff Pratchett is, not saying goodbye to his best and favorite character, but attempting to givie him his due.  Snuff is like a testimonial dinner, except that there’s a problem.  For long stretches, the only person giving speeches in Vimes’ honor is Vimes.

Vimes spends more time thinking and musing and brooding and lecturing on the problem of being Sam Vimes than Hamlet spends on the problem of being Hamlet.  The difference is that Hamlet is a sensitive and self-doubting young man in serious trouble while Vimes is a querulous, cocky, defensively self-confident middle-aged man whose job is to make trouble for others who’ve earned the attention of the police.  A young prince poetically worrying about the state of his own soul is a somewhat more sympathetic figure than a fifty year old police chief grousing profanely on the state of others’.

In all the other Watch novels, Vimes is the lead character in a large ensemble of secondary heroes, major and minor villains, eccentrics, knaves, fools, saints, lunatics, and just folks with strong personalities, who include not just the other members of the Watch and the criminals they pursue but the entire population of the city of Ankh-Morpork.  And he is opposed and often overmatched by a number of adversaries, chief among them his boss, the Patrician, Havelock Lord Vetinari, the thoughtful and not always benevolent tyrant who rules Ankh-Morpork with a combination of ruthless pragmatism and disinterested guile.

But in Snuff, Pratchett whisks Vimes out of Ankh-Morpork and drops him down in the countryside where he meets very few other people and none who are his match.  Pratchett hasn’t come up with any new characters who can stand up to Vimes as characters and the result is usually that when they meet Vimes talks right over them. 

Gently bullied by Lady Sybil, with help from the Patrician, Vimes leaves the city for his first vacation ever.  He and Sybil and their little boy, Sam, head out for Sybil’s family’s country estate, where, of course, Vimes, a city mouse’s city mouse, is immediately and hopelessly out of his element. 

It had been a long day and last night’s sleep in the inn had not been salubrious or restful, but before he got inot the huge bed Vimes opened a window and stared out at the night.  The wind was murmuring in the trees; Vimes mildly disapproved of trees, but Sybil liked them and that was that.  Things that he didn’t care to know about rustled, whooped, gibbered and went inexplicably crazy in the darkness outside.  He didn’t know what they were and hoped never to find out.  What kind of noise was this for a man to go to sleep to?

It’s a rule of mystery novels, movies, and television shows that police detectives can’t take vacations: wherever they go, to the mountains, to the seaside, to the French Riveria, and, especially, to country estates, they will stumble upon a freshly murdered corpse and there goes the holiday.  Pratchett loves rules like that.  He loves to play games with them.  Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett has made use of plots, imagery, conventions, and cliches from fairy tales, mystery novels, the plays of William Shakespeare, Conan the Barbarian, The Lord of the Rings, westerns, movies of all sorts including King Kong and Gone With the Wind---in Snuff, Vimes even idles for a few pages within the plot of Pride and Prejudice---and not always simply for comic effect.  The family estate exists where the world of Agatha Christie bleeds into the that of P.G. Wodehouse and so I settled back with my copy of Snuff like Bertie Wooster with one of his beloved cheesy thrillers and waited for the bleeding, and the parodying, to start. 

And waited.

And waited some more.

Pages go by without even the hint of violence and mayhem.  Vimes suspects something wicked is at work behind the scenes but it’s almost 100 pages before his suspicions are confirmed.  Murder inevitably does out, but it isn’t done in the library with the candlestick.  It’s a bloody slaughter on a hillside with a knife in the dead of night, something more out of Dexter than Miss Marple, but more to the point, it doesn’t reach back into the manor house or over to the village.  It reaches into Middle Earth.

More specifically below Middle Earth.  Down into the caves and tunnels where the goblins dwell in The Hobbit.

In fact, the crime involves goblins.

Goblins as victims.

Not that that should matter.  A recurring theme of the Watch novels has been Vimes having to learn to accept creatures he has previously distrusted or despised---dwarfs, trolls, werewolves, zombies, and vampires---as human.  It helps that Pratchett’s dwarfs and trolls are take-offs on British cultural stereotypes of the Welsh and the Scots and that his vampires, werewolves, and zombies are---or were, at any rate---human and they continue to go about the business of being human although with eccentricities like sleeping in coffins, baying at the moon, and dropping the odd limb or appendage now and then and having to have the lost body part sewn back on.  But his goblins, like his elves in the Witches novels, are defined by comparisons to Tolkien’s elves and goblins.  They are magical creatures, and while there is magic in Discworld, generally, in Ankh-Morpork it’s outmoded, out-dated, and obsolete except as a parody of science.  A certain degree of realism pervades all the novels, naturally---they’re all satires.  But the Watch novels are the most realistic.  Goblins don’t fit in Vimes’ world nor does he fit in theirs.

They would fit in the Wizards’ world or the Witches’ or Susan and DEATH’s and the crime Vimes has to deal with, the kidnapping of goblins and their being sold into slavery, would have been a natural for Rincewind to tackle, ass-backward, or, more craftily and formidably, by Granny Weatherwax (particularly if the criminals were elves) or more adventurously and heroically by Susan, but Pratchett doesn’t seem to know what to do with the goblins once he brings them and Vimes together and so, after spending a lot of time describing them and their culture, he drops them as characters.  They become merely a plot device.

Fortunately, two things happen that bring the story to rollicking life.

The first is that the crime reaches back into Ankh-Morpork as well as into the goblins’ caves and some old favorite characters are drawn into the plot, including the dwarf forensics expert Cheery Littlebottom, Igor, the Igor who acts as police surgeon---in Discworld Igors are a species, and all of them are named Igor or Igorina---and particularly this pair of less than zealous coppers:

Sometimes people asked Commander Vimes why Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs were still on the strength, such as it was, of the modern Ankh-Morpork City Watch, given that Nobby occasionally had to be held upside down and shaken to reclaim small items belonging to other people, while Fred Colon had actually cultivated the ability to walk his beat with eyes closed, and end up, still snoring, back at Pseudopolis Yard, sometimes with graffiti on his breastplate.

The other thing is that Pratchett, having given up on the murder mystery plot and stymied in trying to work Vimes into what is essentially a fairy tale, turns Snuff into an action-adventure novel.  The story that takes over is an extended chase scene with the goblins as helpless villagers being carried off by bandits and Vimes and his small posse as the cavalry in hot pursuit.

Pratchett’s reputation is based on his greatness as a comic novelist, but he’s a great writer, period, and like another great comic novelist, Charles Dickens, he is adept at staging murders, fights, fires, storms, and all other sorts of scenes of calamity, mayhem, and destruction.  The chase takes Vimes into a fight to the death with a murderer aboard a runaway barge tossed about on a river in roiling flood during a storm at night.

[The killer] squirmed out of Vimes’ grip, spun neatly and threw a punch which Vimes very nearly dodged.  It was harder than he had expected, and, to give the devil his due, [the killer] knew how to defend and, perish the thought, was younger than Vimes, much younger.  Yes, you could tell the eyes of a murderer, at least after they had done more than three or so and got away with it.  Their eyes held the expression some gods probably had.  But a killer in the process of trying to kill was always absorbed, constantly calculating, drawing upon some hideous strength.  If you cut their leg off they wouldn’t notice until they fell over.  Tricks didn’t work, and floor was slippery with debris of half a forest.  As they kicked and punched their way across the wheelhouse deck, [the killer] was winning…

There is, of course, plenty of great comic writing.  Plenty of plain good writing too.  I especially liked this description of a goblin girl who’s learned to converse in Morporkian (English):

…the girl spoke as if she were pulling words out of a rack and then tidily pushing them back in their places as soon as they had been said.

And these from a bedtime scene in which Vimes and Lady Sybil fall asleep together while discussing the case:

Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of being eaten by pillows…

All he could see of her right now was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her…

Lady Sybil turned over, which meant---since she was a woman happily rich in gravitational attraction---as she turned, the pillow closest to Sam, acting like a gear in a chain, spun softly in the opposite direction so that Sam Vimes found himself now lying on his face.  He struck out for the surface again…

Gently drifting into a nightmare world where the good guys and bad guys so often changed hats without warning, Vimes wrestled sleeplessness to the ground and made certain that it got eight hours.

Snuff isn’t where I would start if I was just starting to explore Discworld, but it’s a good place to continue from if you’ve been there, a pleasant way station to pass the time until the next book comes along, which, I hope, will be soon, with another to follow not long after that.

Snuff, by Terry Pratchett, published by HarperCollins, is available from Amazon in hardcover and kindle editions.

All the other Discworld novels can be purchased through my aStore.

When a salad is a man’s only friend

Across the table from him a retired military man was being assured by his wife that he did not, contrary to what he himself believed, like potted shrimps.  In vain the man protested weakly that he thought he did like potted shrimps, to get the gentle response, “You may like potted shrimps, Charles, but they do not like you.”

Vimes felt for the man, who seemed puzzled at having developed enemies among the lower crustacea.  “Well, er, does lobster like me, dear?” he said in a voice that did not express much hope.

“No, dear, it does not get on with you at all.  Remember what happened at the Parsley’s whist evening.”

The looked at the groaning sideboard and tried: “Do you think the scallops could get on with me for five minutes or so?”

“Good heavens no, Charles.”

He cast a glance at the sideboard again.  “I expect the green salad is my bosom friend, though, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely, dear!”

“Yes, I thought so.”

---from Snuff by Terry Pratchett.

“The Post Office is back in business!”

The Ankh-Morpork Post Office, that is.  Mannion Family Night.  Tonight’s feature: Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal!

Join us. Pizza and wings will be served, as per usual.  Don’t make us send Mr Pump to come fetch you.

Click on the photo to watch the trailer.

Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race

It was later said that he came under bad influences at this stage.  But the secret of the history of Edward d’Eath was that he came under no outside influences at all, unless you count all those dead kings. He just came under the influence of himself.

That’s where people get it wrong.  Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically.  They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are…well…human beings.  He was also spiraling inward, as tends to happen in cases like this.

---from Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett.

Thanks to wsn.

“You can’t die with an unfinished book”

With all those plans, the author says he's putting off the question of when or if he will end his life.

"As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books and therefore I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you?" he says. "You can't die with an unfinished book."

The good news is Terry Pratchett has two books in the works.  Snuff, his most recent, comes out here in the United States in October.

If you've read the Discworld novels by popular fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, you've surely encountered Death. He's an actual character — a skeleton in a black hood who's portrayed as not such a bad guy after all.

So maybe it's not so surprising that at 63, Pratchett — who has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's — speaks openly about causing his own death.

"I believe everyone should have a good death," he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. “You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop."

Pratchett has become an advocate for legalized assisted suicide in Britain…

Read the story, Discworld’s Terry Pratchett on Death and Deciding, and listen to the interview at NPR.

Troll interrogation techniques

[Sergeant] Detritus was particularly good when it came to asking questions.  He had three basic ones.  They were the direct (“Did you do it?”), the persistent (“Are you sure it wasn’t you that done it?”), and the subtle (“It was you what done it, wasn’t it?”).  Although they were not the most cunning questions ever devised, Detritus’ talent was to go on patiently asking them for hours on end, until he got the right answer, which was generally something like, “Yes! Yes! I did it! I did it! Now please tell me what it was I did!”

---from Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett.

Evangelism in Ankh-Morpork

Constable Visit was an Omnian, whose country’s traditional approach to evangelism was to put unbelievers to torture and the sword.  Things had become a lot more serious these days but Omnians still had a strenuous and indefatigable approach to spreading the Word, and had merely changed the nature of the weapons.  Constable Visit spent his days off in company with his co-religionist Smite-The-Unbeliever-With-Cunning-Arguments, ringing doorbells  and causing people to hide behind the furniture everywhere in the city.

---from Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett.

The universal laws of magic that allow grandmothers to climb mountains

But magic is never as simple as people think.  It has to obey certain universal laws. And one is that, no matter how hard a thing is to do, once it has been done it’ll become a whole lot easier and will  therefore be done a lot. A huge mountain might be scaled by strong men only after many centuries of failed attempts, but a few decades later grandmothers will be strolling up it for tea and wandering back afterward to see where they left their glasses.

---from Maskerade by Terry Pratchett.

The Archchancellor confronts quantum physics and beats it down

Mustrum Ridcully, chief wizard and Archcancellor of Unseen University, and the dwarf lothario and adventurer Casanunda have just solved a logic problem proposed by the young wizard Ponder Stibbons by offering a violent but logical answer, much to Ponder’s consternation.  Ridcully and Casanunda congratulate themselves on their plain thinking.

“Clever,” said Ridcully.  “Now that, Mr Stibbons, is logical thought.  You could learn a lot from this man---“

“Dwarf.”

“---sorry, dwarf.  He doesn’t go on about parasite universes all the time.”

“Parallel!” snapped Ponder, who had developed a very strong suspicion that Ridcully was getting it wrong on purpose.

“Which ones are the parasite ones, then?”

“There aren’t any!  I mean, there aren’t any, Archchancellor.  Parallel universes, I said.  Universes where things didn’t happen like---“  He hesitated.  “Well, you know that girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl you wanted to marry?”

“How’d you know that?”

“You were talking about her just after lunch.”

“Was I?  More fool me.  Well, what about her?”

“Well…in a way, you did marry her,” said Ponder.

Ridcully shook his head.  “Nope.  Pretty certain I didn’t.  You remember that sort of thing.”

“Ah, but not in this universe.”

The Librarian opened one eye.

“You suggestin’ I nipped into some other universe to get married?” said Ridcully.

“No!  I mean, you got married in that universe but not in this universe,” said Ponder.

“Did I?  What?  A proper ceremony and everything?”

“Yes!”

“Hmm.”  Ridcully stroked his beard.  “You sure?”

“Certain, Archchancellor.”

“My word!  I never knew that.”

Ponder felt he was getting somewhere.

“So---“

“Yes?”

“Why don’t I remember it?”

Ponder was ready for this.

“Because the you in the other universe is different from the you here,” he said.  “It was a different you that got married.  He’s probably settled down somewhere.  He’s probably a great-grandad by now.”

“He never writes, I know that,” said Ridcully.  “And the bastard never invited me to the wedding.”

“Who?”

“Him.”

“But he’s you.”

“Is he?  Huh?  You’d think I’d think of me, wouldn’t you?  What a bastard!”

---from Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.

Seating on the veranda will have to wait until spring

“A land of ice…

“Not winter because the presumes an autumn and perhaps one day a spring.  This is a land of ice, not just a time of ice.”---from Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.

Mom and Pop Mannion took us out to dinner tonight.  Grandparents, parents, and two large-ish grandsons crowded into a booth by the front window and this was our view.  Eight PM, Saturday.  January 15, 2011.

Winter in the Ramparts

The Disc rolled into winter.

Winter in the Ramtops could not honestly be described as a magical frosty wonderland, each twig laced with confections of brittle ice.  Winter in the Ramptops didn’t mess about; it was a gateway straight through to the primeval coldness that lived before the creation of the world.  Winter in the Ramtops was several yards of snow, the forests a mere collection of shadowy green tunnels under the drifts.  Winter meant the coming of the lazy wind, which couldn’t be bothered to blow around people and blew right through them instead.  The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.*

*All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.

---from Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett.

Nanny Ogg’s cat is an old softy really

“I’ll write you letters if you promise to find someone to read them to you,” [Nanny Ogg] said.

“Yes, mum.  What about the cat, mum?” said Jason.

“Oh, Greebo’s coming with us,” said Nanny Ogg.

“What?  But he’s a cat!” snapped Granny Weatherwax.  “You can’t take cats with you!  I’m not going travelin’ with no cat!  It’s bad enough travelin’ with trousers and provocative boots.”

“He’ll miss his mummy if he’s left behind, won’t he,” crooned Nanny Ogg, picking up Greebo.  He hung limply, like a bag of water gripped around the middle.

To Nanny Ogg, Greebo was still the cute little kitten that chased balls of wool around the floor.

To the rest of the world he was an enormous tomcat, a parcel of incredibly indestructible life forces in a skin that looked less like a fur than a piece of bread that had been left in a damp place for a fortnight.  Strangers often took pity on him because his nears were non existent and his face looked as though a bear had camped on it.  They could not know that this was because Greebo, as a matter of feline pride, would attempt to fight or rape absolutely anything, up to and including a four-horse logging wagon.  Ferocious dogs would whine and hide under the stairs when Greebo sauntered down the street.  Foxes kept away from the village.  Wolves made a detour.

“He’s an old softy really,” said Nanny.

Greebo turned upon Granny Weatherwax a yellow-eyed stare of self-satisfied malevolence. such as cats always reserve for people who don’t like them, and purred.  Greebo was possibly the only cat who could snigger in purr.

---from Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett.

Vampires, Wraith, banksters, and other villains meet for dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

In Stargate: Atlantis, the chief villains are an alien race of technologically advanced vampires called the Wraith.

The Wraith don’t drink their victims’ blood.  They suck the life force out of them in one gulp, leaving behind instantly aged and desiccated husks of the dead.

The Wraith look and sound and generally act evil, but from their own point of view they are simply out on an interstellar deer hunt.  They need to eat.  Humans are food.

The thing about the Wraith that make them evil from humanity’s point of view---as opposed to something like a plague of soul-sucking locust---is that the Wraith seem to expect humans to understand and accept their place on the food chain.

It pisses them off when a meal fights back.

They also seem to get a kick out of it when dinner shows it’s afraid and begs not to be eaten.

Which means the Wraith know that humans have intelligence and feelings.

They also know that individual humans can be smarter than individual Wraith.  Much smarter.

Yet none of this changes their thinking about what humans are and what they’re for.  Prey.

In fact, the more humans insist on their right to exist as something other than lunch by fighting for their lives to the point of taking the lives of the Wraith trying to feed on them, the angrier and more determined to show who’s in charge the Wraith get.

Which is kind of stupid of them.  If you feel you have to prove to a person he’s not a person you’ve pretty much conceded his personhood from the beginning.

The vampires in Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum are similarly stupid, in a comic way, of course.

They openly regard mortal humans as “cattle” and will tell any humans who ask that that’s what they are, meat on the hoof, and cheerfully wave away any objections on the part of the humans.

They expect their victims to understand their place and agree to it.

Better than the Wraith, the vampires know that humans have intelligence and feelings.  Unlike the Wraith, they will even make exceptions.  They will invite humans they take a liking to into their circle.  They will make them one of their own.  While for form’s sake this means a bite on the neck that turns a person into one of the bloodsucking undead, for all intents and purposes becoming a vampire is like joining an exclusive club.  You become a member because another member decides you are worthy of membership.

Which is a way of saying that personhood, with all its rights and privileges, isn’t inherent.  It’s granted to you by other persons of superior standing deciding you are good enough to be regarded as one of their own.

You’d think having your meal talk back to you as you’re about to dig in would put a damper on your appetite, the way it does for Arthur Dent when the cow-like animal serving itself up for dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe asks if Arthur would like “a casserole of me perhaps?”

Arthur’s appalled and disgusted by the animal’s complicity in its own butchering, but he’s also stricken with an appetite-suppressing guilt.  He doesn’t want to consider the morality of eating animals who have thoughts and feelings, even if those animals think they want to be eaten and feel strongly that you should try something off their shoulder braised in a white wine sauce.

When Arthur converts on the spot to vegetarianism and tries to order a green salad, the offended animal informs him that it knows many vegetables that are very clear on the point of not wanting to wind up as a side dish.

Stricken, Arthur says he’ll have only a glass of water, but Zaphod Beeblebrox blithely orders steaks, rare, and the pleased, and approving, animal waddles off to the kitchen to shoot itself, promising to be very humane in committing suicide.

The vampires don’t expect their victims to be quite so accommodating.  In fact, they seem to enjoy it when a victim objects to having her neck tapped, because it gives them a chance to explain why things are the way they are, with vampires at the top of the food chain and humans down a few rungs with cattle and other livestock.

There’s an obvious absurdity in trying to reason with a creature you supposedly don’t believe has the capability of reason.  Even in Discworld, where magic replaces physics, no one expects a cow to understand the justification of what’s about to happen in the slaughterhouse.

But the vampires do expect their victims to understand or at least see that the vampires have a point, and it infuriates them when victims argue back by reaching for a mallet and a wooden stake.

You’re ahead of me, aren’t you?

The Wraith and Pratchett’s vampires sound very much like human beings when they are in pursuit of money or power.

In our democratic age, the power-hungry have to be careful about not letting on that they regard the people they intend to break to their will as tools and playthings.  And they don’t dare demand gratitude, at least not explicitly for being subjugated to the political vampire’s will.

They will, though, hint, and hint strongly, that their victims need to understand their lowly place in the scheme of things and accept it without too much complaining.

Political vampires pretending to be liberals will talk about listening to the experts.  Political vampires pretending to be conservatives will talk about authority, tradition, values, and being part of the “mainstream.”

Both are really saying, Shut up, scum, and let your betters run the show.

Money-hungry Wraith and vampires don’t feel the same pressure to exercise tact.

Just the opposite.

They love to boast about how they’re sucking the blood and the life-forces out whomever they can lay their hands on or sink their teeth into and they expect the rest of us to enjoy their boasting as well as their vampirism, nod along in approval, admire and celebrate them for it, and even teach our children to want to grow up to be like them.

Business magazines and the business sections of newspapers are full of profiles of vampires cheerfully explaining how they go about sucking lesser mortals dry and why they should be rewarded and applauded like heroes for doing it.

It perplexes them and irritates them when people they regard as fit for nothing but to be made a meal of object and fight back even if only to the point of suggesting that the vampires cut down a bit on their snacking between meals.

A major theme of the Galtism that infects the corporate world, particularly the Wall Street vampires but also the assistant ghouls down on Main Street, is indignation.

The nerve of you parasites not knowing and admitting that you are parasites.  Besides going down on your knees to thank us for exploiting you, to your undeserved and unearned benefit, you should grovel in apology for your presumption while you’re down there!

Naturally, not everybody in the business world is a vampire.  But it’s true that the business world seems to be run by more and more of them.  The general attitude of the suits running the economy these days is that other people are things to be used.  If they’re employees they are merely tools.  If they’re customers, they’re merely wallets to be opened and emptied.

Tools that don’t know they’re tools need to be thrown away immediately.  Wallets that think they’re in control of their own money need to be opened and emptied with more force.  If force doesn’t work, then trickery and stealth need to be employed.  If that doesn’t do the trick, try shame.

What do you mean you can’t afford a new car?  What’s the matter with you?  Are you some kind of loser?

You don’t have a 4G smart phone?

You’re going to live where?  With how little closet space?

Lately we’re beginning to hear how the crumby state of the economy is our fault.

We’re not out there spending enough.

Some of this is even coming from Democrats.

Vampires always have their Renfields.

But this isn’t a Republican vs. Democrat thing.

It’s a human thing.

There are liberal-voting butchers with their thumbs on their scales.  There are conservative-voting doctors who tear up the bills for their poorer patients.

How someone votes is not the best indicator of how that someone treats other people in their daily lives.

And it’s not an illness particular to our times or culture.

In the agoras of Ancient Greece and the souks along the Spice Road there were merchants and shopkeepers who stood in their doorways and behind their counters watching people pass by their shops and stalls with their eyes narrowed in hatred as if everyone who didn’t stop and buy was deliberately spiting them by not needing to spend money at the moment.

What may be particular to our place and time is the degree to which the vampires are mistaken for regular human beings.

Like I said, the Wraith look and act evil.  They are gray-faced, shark-toothed, and ugly.  They have Nosferatu-like long hands and fingers and claw-like nails.  They hiss when they talk and grin madly when they are about to feast on a victim.

The vampires of Discworld, however, are perfectly charming.   They speak calmly, they are well-educated and have sophisticated tastes.  They dress well.

They are sexy, seductive, and impressive in their smooth, self-satisfied arrogance.  They know they are more successful than you, but they hold out the possibility that you can share in their success.

They are the kind of people you want to like you and whose club you want to be part of.

It’s very easy to be in a room with them and forget who and what they are and even to start thinking they have a point.

People so charming, so reasonable, so nice must be nice, right?

Until you cross them.

All of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are available to buy through my aStore.

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Philosophic squirrels

One of the recurring philosophical questions is:

“Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?”

Which says something about the nature of philosophers, because there is always someone in a forest.  It may only be a badger, wondering what that cracking noise was, or a squirrel a bit puzzled by all the scenery going upwards…

---from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.

The smug mask of virtue triumphant

The smug mask of virtue triumphant can be almost as horrifying as wickedness revealed.

---from Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

On talking to kings

Nanny Ogg trailed after them.  The king was right, in a way.  She did feel…unusual, ill-tempered and snappish, as if she’d put on a vest that was too tight.  Well, Granny would be here soon enough, and she knew how to talk to kings.

You needed a special technique for that, Nanny reasoned; for example, you couldn’t say things like “who died and made you king?” because they’d know.

“You and whose army?” was another difficult one…

---from Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett.

Granny Weatherwax and the practical difference between psychiatry and headology

Granny Weatherwax had never heard of psychiatry and would have had no truck with it even if she had.  There are some arts too black even for a witch.  She practiced headology---practiced, in fact, until she was very good at it.  And though there may be some superficial similarities between a psychiatrist and a headologist, there is a huge practical difference.  A psychiatrist, dealing with a man who fears he is being followed by a huge and terrible monster, will endeavor to convince him that monsters don’t exist.  Granny Weatherwax would simply give him a chair to stand on and a very heavy stick.

---from Maskerade by Terry Pratchett.