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mygif

Starting to become, like, the Barney’s Version of Pratchettry.

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mygif

This would be great for Christmas gifts, but Amazon lists the release date as March. Are they wrong, or did you get a pre-release copy? (Lucky!)

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mygif

I just ordered it off Amazon and it showed up on Friday. Living in the Commonwealth has its rewards.

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mygif

I ordered it off Amazon.ca and got it Monday..
(And now MGK and I are probably tempted to start quoting Red Rose Tea ads.)

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mygif

I would say that Unseen Academicals and Nation are at least equals to anything in the pre-Thud period, but you are right in general. Snuff was actually painful for me.

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mygif

I was very disappointed with Unseen Academicals, and I found Snuff to be just… depressing.

MGK, I really, really hope you’re right about this one.

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mygif

Snuff was not depressing; it was annoying.

I expect better of Pratchett than some warmed-over White Messiah bullshit.

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Enlight_bystand said on December 18th, 2013 at 4:55 pm

Pronoaic: the new Pratchett inevitably drops in September or so. Might what you’re seeing for March be the paperback?

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FeepingCreature said on December 19th, 2013 at 4:04 am

I have to disagree on this one, sadly, as I felt the book was narratively retreading ground well worn, to the point where the Patrician has actually figured out the basic trope of the Lipwig Book and is exploiting it to full effect. If your smarter characters can predict the plot by rote, maybe it’s time to step back a bit. Also, by the time I read the first description of the engine, I basically sighed and went “Ah, another Moving Pictures” and then the rest of the book wholly failed to convince me otherwise. It just felt .. formulaic.

(Also, the by-now-expected Big Social Issue [in this book, isolationism, traditionalism and xenophobia] is starting to grate on me as well, especially considering it was played out by characters with no redeeming traits whatsoever)

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mygif

Enlight_bystand, I just checked: amazon.ca released it Dec. 9, while amazon.com and Barnes and Noble release it March 18.

I can wait!

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mygif

I think Unseen Academicals is unfairly maligned. I liked it better than Snuff by far. It wasn’t Pratchett’s best, and the ending was a bit rough, but I thought it was pretty good. I definitely liked it better than, say, Eric, and I think it’s more memorable than the Last Continent. It may be that I just don’t prefer Rincewind very much and so having him be relegated to a minor character is a good thing in my mind.

Snuff was just hard to read. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t get British rural culture enough to really follow, or if there’s an old-fashioned literary style that he’s actively imitating that I just don’t know, but I had so much trouble getting into that book.

As for the “Big Social Issue” bit, that’s a staple of Ankh Morpork books (the guards, Moist, The Truth, and the Wizards books that aren’t Rincewind books). The Witches books (with the exception of Equal Rites, which is really a wizards book despite being Granny Weatherwax’s first appearance) are about literary observation and the structure and telling of stories. The Rincewind books are about parody of genre tropes. The Death books are harder to categorize, but tend to be about the nature of humanity and mortality. If you don’t like the big social issue books, skip the Anhk Morpork books.

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mygif

To me, Snuff read like a first draft of Unseen Academicals, hastily rewritten to include Vimes and a small amount of parody of the more rural murder mystery. You know, like “A Murder Is Announced” or “Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” The biggest problem is that they focused more on the racism issue (which they didn’t do all that well, anyway) and not enough on the rural setting. Which is a shame: moving Vimes to the country and having him play with the tropes from those Christie stories I mentioned could have been a lot of fun.

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mygif

I’ll second the idea that Nation is one of his best works, though.

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mygif

I can handle “great but different.”

Waiting until March to get it in the US, on the other hand, is bullshit.

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mygif

WTF is the deal with American release dates on his books lately anyway?

We STILL haven’t got A Blink on the Screen here in the USA yet. Did Canada ever get that one?

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