I don't want to pick on a man with Alzheimer's, but considering that Nation managed to avoid most of these pitfalls, I think Terry can still do better than this
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That's amazing for ANYONE sick or not, but it is a wonder and we can be thankful that Pratchett enlightened our world with his amazing wit and fantasy. It is a big loss that his disease set on so early and it is understandable that the new book isn't as good as the others. It is the last step to a long, long series and the author has a very author-unfriendly disease. We can all be thankful for how long it lasted.
Terry Pratchett recently wrote in his blog "I'm not dead yet." But honestly, we can be lucky for that, it isn't a matter of course.
I rather agree with you that these are all flaws in the book; but I enjoyed it anyway, I think perhaps mostly because I really love the wizards and UU. So even though I wasn't vastly taken with the new characters, or their romances, and while I kind of wish that if Pterry will insist on using shiny supernatural deus exes then he'd at least work them into the plot properly this struck me also about Thud when I recently reread it -- that the Summoning Dark subplot could quite safely have been dropped without making any real difference (well, that was my impression?) -- and I have a feeling he's done this in a couple of others as well, I really did have a lot of fun just reading about all the familiar faces.
Hm. I think perhaps as a long-term reader with a particular bias for the setting, it's hard for me to judge. It might be an interesting experiment to hand a totally Pterry-innocent person a copy of the book and see what they have to say about it. I do tend to prefer some of the middle-period stuff, though, I must admit.
I can't really see that introducing the foot-the-ball element weakened the book. OK, we might have 36 books about Discworld, but the subject just hasn't come up yet. It would be possible to read 36 books about our own world without seeing references to, say, cricket, Michael Buble, Jimmy Choo shoes or Van Gogh, yet they might still be a ligit plot hinge for book 37
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36. fucking. books.
That's amazing for ANYONE sick or not, but it is a wonder and we can be thankful that Pratchett enlightened our world with his amazing wit and fantasy. It is a big loss that his disease set on so early and it is understandable that the new book isn't as good as the others. It is the last step to a long, long series and the author has a very author-unfriendly disease. We can all be thankful for how long it lasted.
Terry Pratchett recently wrote in his blog "I'm not dead yet." But honestly, we can be lucky for that, it isn't a matter of course.
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Hm. I think perhaps as a long-term reader with a particular bias for the setting, it's hard for me to judge. It might be an interesting experiment to hand a totally Pterry-innocent person a copy of the book and see what they have to say about it. I do tend to prefer some of the middle-period stuff, though, I must admit.
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