“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away—until
the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished
its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of
someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”
Terry
Pratchett – Reaper Man
Its been a year already, but the ripples have yet to fade.
Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.”
And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.
Someone I know recently got their Canadian citizenship. They told her that she could choose her own holy book to swear on, so she swore her oath on Terry Pratchett.
That is a level of panache that I can only aspire to.
Normally I try not to bug copperbadge TOO much, but I feel this is something Sam should be aware of.
Small Gods taught me more about faith and religion than any religious text I’ve encountered. Really I’d take an oath sworn on a Pratchett novel way more seriously.
I mean, I’ve never broken any of Pterry’s rules….
How he would laugh. 😀 (And not scornfully, either.)
-An angel who is so goddamn lazy that he makes a deal with the demon he’s supposed to be thwarting so that neither of them have to do any work and he has more time to spend running his bookshop, and who wants to stop the Apocalypse because he loves sushi
-A demon who pretends to be suave and cool but who really just geeks out over his car and loves James Bond and listens to nothing but Queen and thinks gluing coins to the sidewalk is proper demonic activity
-This angel and demon are probably not gay for each other but I mean they’re holding hands on the cover art.
-This angel and demon try to stop the apocalypse but they fuck up so badly that they do literally nothing useful the whole book and somehow it’s still all about them.
-Technically it was the Satanic Nuns who fucked up, but we don’t really talk about that.
-Death (the horseperson) playing a trivia videogame in a diner.
-The four extra horsepersons that were never mentioned in Revelation.
-The antichrist who almost destroys the world because he wants to save the whales
-The only piece of fiction I have ever seen besides Supernatural that somehow manages to include both the Judeo-Christian apocalypse and space aliens.
-The context of the phrase “gayer than a tree full of monkeys high on nitrous oxide.”
Nae laird! Nae master! We will nae be Fooled agin! This wan, fur them Keldas Them Zeldas Deid bonnie lasses Fightin’, bitin’ Geein’ it yaldi in big toun Got blootered wit Daft Wullie Gon’ wallap meself, cowp meself doon
Ach, crivens! (Wha hae!) Kicked the police in the baws, aye Ach, crivens! (Wha hae!) If ye bring a lawyer, we say “Nae!” Ach, crivens! (Wha hae!) Shoot oour name, ye ken us well, aye? Ach, crivens! (Wha hae!) Oi, wee Hags? ‘Boot that Scumble… Bring it naow!
Coo-beasties will get snaffled (Moo!) Coo-beasties will get snaffled (Moo!) Coo-beasties will get snaffled (Moo!) An’ Wee Free Men gon’ leave ya baffled An’ Wee Free Men gon’ leave ya baffled An’ Wee Free Men gon’ leave ya baffled T’ursday nite, and we’re t’irsty, aye? Nac Mac Feegle, wha hae! (Crivens!) Nac Mac Feegle, wha hae! Nac Mac Feegle, wha hae! Nac Mac Feegle, wha hae! Nac Mac Feegle, wha hae! Nac Mac Feegle, wha hae! Oi, oi, oi, oh!
Hawd Wait a minnit Fill me cup, put some Scumble in it Ooh, ye can gie us a tad bigger nip than tha’, cannae ye? Mebbe half a pint more, and then anudder pint, tae keep chummy wit it? Roit then, jess leave the bottle, wyedon’tcher
(At this point, the entire song-and-dance routine devolves into a drunken brawl, or rather: an even more drunken and violent brawl than it started out as. Incidentally, you may wish to peruse one of the many lists of Scottish slang and jargon available online whilst reading these lyrics. You can learn all manner of fascinating new words and phrases, and deeper meanings of ones you already knew. For example, did you know that “Zelda” means “warrior woman”?)
As you might be able to see from the drawing above, I imagine that Ponder Stibbons would probably settle for a pointy hat with a large pocket in front, complete with the traditional nerdy pocket protector and assortment of useful pens, whereas Adrian ‘Big Mad Drongo’ Turnipseed and his fellow student wizards would probably come up with something similar to the Pyrus cap (so they could wear it back to front):
*No relation to Funkfreed, although they probably sound quite similar when they go “doh do-doh”.
Aw Yiss 