Discworld

Discworld by Terry Pratchett

Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Faust Eric, Reaper Man

I’ve been re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, mostly because they’re funny, and a quick read. I know I’m missing quite a few books, but I’m buying them when I find them.

Pyramids
ROC (1999)
Teppic, son of the pharaoh of the Kingdom of the Sun, realizing that the kingdom perhaps needed an income to pay for all those pyramids, decided to get an education at Ankh-Morpork’s assassins’ school (Easy to get into, easy to get out of, although harder to get out upright). Does this prepare you for running a kingdom and making the sun rise every morning? Perhaps.

All assassins had a full length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed.

Teppic examined himself critically. The outfit had cost him his last penny, and was heavy on the black silk. It whispered as he moved. It was pretty good.
…
He sighed and opened the black box and took out his rings and slipped them on. Another box held a set of knives and Klatchian steel, their blades darkened with lamp black. Various cunning and intricate devices were taken from velvet bags and dropped into pockets. A couple of long-bladed throwing tlingas were slipped into their sheaths inside his boots. A thin silk line and folding grapnel were wound around his waist, over the chain-mail shirt. A blowpipe was attached to its leather thong and dropped down the back of his cloak; Teppic picked a slim tin container with an assortment of darts, their tips corked and their stems brailled-coded for ease of selection in the dark.

He winced, checked the blade of his rapier and slung the baldric over his right shoulder, to balance the bag of lead slingshot ammunition. As an afterthought he opened his sock drawer and took a pistol crossbow, a flask of oil, a roll of lockpicks and, after some consideration, a punch dagger, a bag of assorted caltrops and a set of brass knuckles.

Teppic picked up his hat and checked it’s lining for the coil of cheesewire. He placed it on his head at a jaunty angle, took a last satisfied look at himself in the mirror, turned on his heel and, very slowly, fell over.

Guards! Guards!
ROC (1989)
Carrot the Dwarf is sent off by his father to Ankh-Morpork to associate with others of his kind, and to join the Night Watch, in the (mistaken) belief that this is a noble profession. But before Ankh-Morpork becomes acclimatized to a member of the Night Watch who takes his job seriously, someone releases a noble dragon upon the city.

It wasn’t only the fresh mountain air that had given Carrot his huge physique. Being brought up in a gold mine run by dwarfs and working twelve-hours days hauling wagons to the surface must have helped.

He walked with a stoop. What will do that is being brought up in a gold mine run by dwarfs who thought that five feet was a good height for a ceiling. He’d always known that he was different. More bruised for one thing. And then one day his father had come up to him or, rather, come up to his waist, and told him that he was not, in fact, as he had always believed, a dwarf.

It’s a terrible thing to be nearly sixteen and the wrong species.

Faust Eric
ROC (1990)
Rincewind is back! Called, or rather summoned, back to Discworld by a budding demonologist who wants his three wishes.

And it would have gone badly for him if the Librarian had been a human being. Fortunately, he was currently an orang-utan. With so much raw magic sloshing about the Library it would be surprising if accidents did not happen sometimes, and one particularly impressive one had turned him into an ape. not many people get the chance to leave the human race while still alive, and he’d strenuously resisted all efforts since to turn him back. Since he was the only librarian in the universe who could pick up books with his feet the University hadn’t pressed the point.

The Librarian is one of my favorite characters in Discworld. However I think it would be difficult to write a book centered around a character whose dialogue tends to be “Oook!”

Reaper Man
ROC (1991)
Can you really fire Death?

The sun was near the horizon. The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching.
“You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,” one of them said.
“You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.
“It were higher too.”
“It was. You’re right.”
“And nymphs and larvae showed you a bit of respect.”
“They did. They did,” said the other mayfly vehemently.

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