Book review: The Long Mars

Terry Pratchett's final novel has been published, but I'm still a couple of books behind, including the series he co-wrote with Stephen Baxter. To be honest I've never felt that Pratchett had a huge amount of input into the actual writing of the Long Earth novels - I know the idea of parallel worlds that could easily be visited was his, so that could be the only reason his name remains on the books. It makes sense that with Pratchett's failing health while the series was being written, Baxter would do most of the heavy lifting, and there's never been much hint of Pratchett's style in them - either in terms of humour or of story. Instead the books seem primarily concerned with creating a universe based on the initial conceit, rather than having particularly involved stories take place in it. So as the name suggests, the third book The Long Mars expands that further to include a trip across the various versions of Mars. But these don't run parallel to the Long Earth, instead stretching out into yet another different series of alternate universes. As usual there's also various storylines going on across the Earths as well, including the rise of a possible new evolution of humans. With the series nearly over I might as well continue to the end (although I guess Baxter could keep going on his own, in which case I'll bail out) but this sweeping look across the whole of a new universe doesn't really leave much room for the kind of story development I was hoping for.

Twitaceous Era 53: 21st century urchin

This week on my Twitter feed, that accent is apparently called "Multicultural London."

You know the accent Harry Melling does in peddling? What do you reckon actors call that on their Spotlight page?
10:46 AM - 11 Mar 2015

@Weez I'm basically asking what the Charmian Hoare-approved, non-offensive term for "chavvy accent" is.

11:03 AM - 11 Mar 2015

 

@Weez "21st century urchin."

11:06 AM - 11 Mar 2015

Book review: A Blink of the Screen

As he mentions a number of times in his notes accompanying them, short stories aren't something Terry Pratchett finds particularly easy to write, so there aren't many books of them. A Blink of the Screen collects those short stories he was commissioned to write for other collections or magazines, and even a few pieces of writing done for Discworld conventions, spanning his whole career. In fact the first story, "The Hades Business," is from a school project when he was 13.

The book's separated into Discworld stories and non-Discworld stories, the latter including one from 1986, "The High Meggas," which decades later would come back as the basis for the Long Earth series. My favourite of these has to be "Final Reward," in which a fantasy writer kills off the hero of his long-running series, only to find him on his doorstep having come to "meet his maker."

Of the Discworld stories, the longest one is probably the best, "The Sea and Little Fishes" following a terrifying day when Granny Weatherwax starts being terribly nice to everyone. But there's also a sweet Cohen the Barbarian story, "Troll Bridge," and I liked the lyrics to the Ankh-Morpork national anthem, the only national anthem to deliberately include a load of mumbling in the second verse since that's all anyone would sing anyway.

Twitaceous Era 26: #sotheatre #muchreviewing #wow

This week on my Twitter feed, more celeb spots, with a bit of free food thrown in.

RSC 2015, Hugh Quarshie as Othello, Lucian Msamati as Iago. Interesting, I've never seen one where Iago's also black.
11:33 AM - 3 Sep 2014

@Weez @RobbieHand I want to see if they can do Jew of Malta without the audience spending the whole play like this pic.twitter.com/JCc4bh6die
12:24 PM - 3 Sep 2014

Our project ends this month, as do our jobs. We now officially have an "ignore this and hope it goes away" email folder.
4:43 PM - 3 Sep 2014

Book review: The Long War

The second book in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's Long Earth series that takes place over a multitude of parallel universes is The Long War. It's a bit of a deliberate misnomer as an all-out war in the "stepwise" Earths proves to be impossible, but there's a lot of tensions, some to do with the US government's schizophrenic approach to how hands-on it wants to be with the alternate Americas; as well as issues with how to deal with the life forms found in the alternate Earths. I did think after the lengthy setup of The Long Earth that for the next book we'd get something a bit more focused, but this is still a bit of a rambling story taking place over multiple dimensions with various casts of characters, and it never quite got me gripped. I also can't quite buy the central conceit that, within a couple of decades of discovering how to "step," humanity would already be skimming over Earths millions of steps away in each direction, without actually having properly explored the ones nearest to the Datum. The book's enjoyable enough all in all, but doesn't quite get going as much as I expected the sequence to have done two books in.

Book review: Raising Steam

The latest terry Pratchett novel, or at least the later Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, sees the railways arrive in Ankh-Morpork in Raising Steam. Over the years the Discworld books have become the story of a society in a state of unstoppable progress, its landscape unrecognisable from the cod-mediaeval swords-and-sorcery spoof it started out as. Pratchett is the gently genial voice supporting progress and Raising Steam has particularly little patience for the Luddites and reactionaries of this world or his own: The arrival of trains on the Sto Plains proves the last straw for a breakaway group of religious dwarfs who start a terror campaign against the railway and the clacks machine (the telecommunication system introduced a few books ago.)

Of course racism, or at least speciesism, is behind a lot of this, and the recent integration of the goblins into Ankh-Morpork has put a lot of backs up. Pratchett's metaphors for the real world are getting, if anything, even less subtle than ever, but it's hard not to like how eloquently and passionately he argues against the sort of people who fight against change on principle. This isn't one of his funnier books unfortunately, and a lengthy buildup in the second half of the book ends in anticlimax, although that's kind of the point. Still enjoyable though.

Book review: The Long Earth

Terry Pratchett only seems to have got more prolific in recent years; The Long Earth, which he co-writes with Stephen Baxter, is the first in a planned new fantasy series that plays on the ever-popular theme of parallel universes. But where quantum theory sees every decision spin off into a different reality, so that infinite universes exist with tiny differences, The Long Earth is a multiverse where our Earth - here called the Datum Earth - is the only one that's inhabited, by humans at least. And the multiple other Earths stretch out to a notional East and West. A few years into the future, blueprints for a mysterious device are posted on the internet, and the result is a "Stepper," a machine that allows people to move along by one Earth at a time. Faced with a seemingly infinite number of fresh new planets just as the original one's resources are starting to run out, humanity's instinct is to colonise.

The main thrust of the novel follows Joshua, a young man born between worlds who's acquired a natural affinity for stepping as a result, and his journey with Lobsang, a disembodied entity who claims to be a reincarnated Tibetan, but may in fact be a computer program that's become sentient. They travel West through the Long Earth, partly to research the different realities but partly to be the first to travel millions of steps away from the Datum. There's a few plotlines running through their journey but largely this is a scene-setting novel that builds up the writers' fictional universe, and given how little hard plot it has I found it very entertaining. Beyond things like the design of the Stepper device (it requires a potato to work) there's little of the comic side of Pratchett, but instead there's an interesting central relationship between the loner Joshua and the rather smugly omnipotent Lobsang.