How dare Terry Pratchett release his new book, Snuff, next week, on top of the new stuff from Dawkins and Pinker? Hasn’t he been paying any attention to my schedule?
It’s an Inspector Vimes novel, too.
Yes, I’ve preordered it. I cannot resist temptation.
(Also on Sb)
Looking forward to the audio book version too. The man who reads Vimes does a very good job.
I wonder, considering Prachett’s health, if this will be the last Vimes book and if he tries to wrap up sublots with other characters.
Next week?? I thought it wasn’t coming out till late november. Awesome, I’ll even have enough money to buy the kindle version next week!
I can’t wait until it arrives next week! I’m trying to read my current book more slowly than usual, because I don’t want to have to decide between starting a new book that I won’t be able to finish before next week (thereby delaying my starting Snuff; obviously this is out of the question!) and just not reading anything for a few days.
Dude, he’s not exactly got all the time in the world. :|
@Alverant
I was discussing this with a friend the other night. PTerry knows he has limited time left to him, so will he wrap up characters and storylines. OR, will his say, “fuck it!” and carry on as he has been. Leaving us one day with a lot of loose ends and no way to tie them up?…
I cannae wait for Snuff, I too have preordered it!
…well, midterm grades are going to be late. Oh well.
I also preordered it. It hasn’t been shipped yet, but my copy of Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True is already on it’s way. I am hoping to be able to read most of it before my pratchett book shows up.
New discworld book means it must be my birthday soon! He will go on as he has, don’t see him giving characters an ending unless it suits him. Well the bursar has been retired in the last book on the wizards so who knows.
Great. Now I have yet another one on my ‘to read’ list. Damn to the seven levels of the netherhells whoever it was here who finally convinced me to try a Discworld book as it is now a major timesuck. (I just finished The Fifth Elephant and The Unseen Academicals (and yes, I am doing them out of order but it doesn’t seem to matter so far)).
I’m inclined to think that some characters will reach milestones (ie Carrot and Angua formally getting together – but that can just be my own wishful thinking) but still going on. The character’s lives don’t end just because Prachett’s will. But just in case no one picks up the Discworld torch, at least we would have a sense that the world will live on. I heard there is a BBC series based on the watch in development.
I’m also hoping to see “Raising Taxes” at some point. What the world needs is a better understanding of what taxes are for and what they should be for.
Just started a new college course, wih tonnes of reading to do, this could not have come at a worse time…
Oh well…
[Disclaimer: I am NOT a corporate shill but any stretch]
Loving the Kindle pre-order function… two clicks today, and it will be on my tablet on the 11th. Hardly any trees or oil will go in to getting it in to my hands.
Every once in a while, I really like living in the future. :)
BY any stretch.
I have soooo been waiting for this. I was disappointed with Unseen Academicals because I really don’t care for the wizards. (Yeah, I said it.) Although the recent Tiffany Aching ones more than made up for it.
I haven’t checked out the actual list yet, but this is a kind of neat flowchart to deciding which book in NPR’s top 100 sci-fi and fantasy novels list to read.
I’m so far behind on my Discworld-reading that another book makes little difference :)
Book 38 isn’t it?
@8472, with this one it’s 39 books
@Carlie I don’t like the wizards either. I much prefer ones directly involving the Watch, Death’s granddaughter, and the Time Monks. UA was OK, but seemed to plod along too much and was in serious need of a good editor. I would rather Pratchett spend his limited time working on existing characters instead of making new ones and introducing a new element into the world (orcs).
But it did have some good lines; “The Librarian was not poisoned. Because if he was, we at the University would not only make the poisoner’s life as horrible and they can imagine, it would be made as horrible as _I_ can imagine and I’m already thinking of how to do it.”
Why didn’t they put the new Dawkins book on Kindle? That’s really annoying, enough that I’ll be getting the hardcover from the library instead of buying the book outright.
Ack! I have work to do too and love the Guards books! Eek. So much so that each time a new one comes out I tend to go through and read all of the other related books again. I am already behind on my grading and have a paper that I have to submit for a conference proceedings by the end of the month. Will have to exercise self-control.
Excitement! I’m off to pre-order. Terry Pratchett has planned on at least one more Discworld book, after I Shall Wear Midnight and Snuff, Raising Taxes.
Father Ogvorbis is advised to re-read the entire Discworld series in order of publication. The plots are in chronological sequence and though the individual titles aren’t particularly tightly linked to those preceding and following, Discworld works as a long, single narrative.
It’s not Inspector Vimes, it’s Commander Vimes, or to be precise, His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh.
These trivial details are important to us OCD folks.
Obviously closing italics tags are not important to me. :-þ
Caine, have you heard anything new about ‘Raising Taxes’? I understand that book was supposed to have been written well before ‘Snuff’ (and maybe before others) but got delayed due to some form of writer’s block. Now I despair of ever seeing it, and that would be a shame. After Moist built up his fan base in Ankh Morpork by giving people a working service they love (the Post Office) and revolutionizing the economy by changing the basis of the currency I wanted to see him handle the challenge of heading the least popular arm of government. I was also hoping to see the completion of his transformation from someone completely self-serving to someone who learns to love the city of Ankh Morpork and prioritize the good of the city over his own wants (which would be a requirement if Vetinari is thinking of Moist as his potential heir).
Great, another book to read. Oh… The dear wife asked what the dear offspring could get me as a prize for completing another orbit. Problem solved. Thanks Terry and PZ!
I wonder if Vetinari is even planning to die? Perhaps, being the sort of person that he is, he is planning to not die?
We have a couple of examples of zombies who seem to have arisen from sheer force of will. But zombies appear to be rather fragile; I suspect that Vetinari might prefer something a little less prone to falling to pieces.
Vampires appear to be effectively immortal, and are able to sustain themselves without blood, as long as they have something else to focus on. And does Vetinari not focus on running Ankh-Morpork? And is Lady Margolotta — a vampire — not his good friend?
Just a thought.
I got an advanced copy of it. It was one of the better Vimes stories, I think (but of course, I’m more fond of the Von Moist and the witches Lancre). I did like seeing more of young Sam.
I’ll also note that the same day there’s a new Vernor Vinge book scheduled to come out, “The Children of the Sky”, set as a sequel to his Hugo-Winning “A Fire Upon the Deep” (and thus its Hugo-winning prequel, “A Deepness In the Sky”).
Signed copy preordered from the UK, can’t wait till it gets here.
Snuff is my birthday present to myself.
That’s two pre-orders in one week!
Please.
His Grace, His Excellency, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes. Not Inspector. Don’t think he’s been a mere Inspector since Men At Arms
Owlmirror:
I don’t know if I’d use “friend” while describing any of Ventinari’s relationships. (Although it does fill me with giggles to think of Ventinari having a special lady friend.) I re-read all of the Watch books* this past spring (in order), so everything’s kind of blending together at this point– I could be wrong about Lady Margolotta’s relationship to Vetinari.
If Ventinari is to die, I would like to see him go gently into the good night. He is always full of surprises. What would be more surprising than a quiet death?
Anyway, since I’ll have Snuff on the 11th, I’ll have to find the time to finish up John le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy, so I can start it right away!
*And the Death cycle. This was before I declared that this was the summer (now year, apparently) of spy novels.
(Sorry if this posts twice. FtB is being a douche today.)
PZ,
Find you can’t resist temptation, I have the answer for you. It’s poverty!
That’s right, the less money you have, the easier it is to resist temptation. And by donating to a good cause (me, for example), you can quickly and easily cut down on the currency you have available for giving in to temptation.
Give to a good cause (I’m raising money for new dentures for example) and watch as available cash just vanishes.
You can’t give into temptation when you don’t have the money for it.
And I will be attaneding a reading (and hopefully a signing!) on Tuesday. And I don’t care how long the line is! (It is weird that the location is an old church, where a few weeks ago I listened to Neal Staphenson. Stephenson and Paratchett are just not very church-y. And man are those pews uncomfortable!)
I just discovered Terry P. and I’m on my second book now A looong way to go baby. I love his wit and style.
Intellectual peer?
Good-natured rival?
Frenemy?
All I have in mind is that she likes for him to be around to make things interesting for her. And that she might be willing to do whatever is necessary to make it possible that he is around for as long as possible.
Antigone, what did you think about the harp scene? Think I got some dust in my eye reading that.
Ha! Frenemy! That’s more like it!
Can anyone please tell me what band ‘surreptitious fabric’ is supposed to represent? It’s been bugging me for 15 years.
>Can anyone please tell me what band ‘surreptitious fabric’ is supposed to represent? It’s been bugging me for 15 years
Velvet Underground.
Notkieran
“If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. . .”
For the rest, you have to read Good Omens, by Pratchett & Gaiman, clearly the best fictional take on religion I’ve ever come across, bar none.
Poverty is indeed the answer to temptation. I will continue my school work uninterrupted by this longed-for novel. But fortunately, both my birthday and Christmas are very near the end of term. And you all left off Vimes’ favorite title.
It’s Blackboard Monitor Vimes, actually, not Chalkboard Monitor.
Unless that got changed in the US version for some reason maybe?
Well you have a number of options: you could wait to read Snuff, you could cut down your workload or you could post less on this blog.
I think we all know what the sensible option is… call into work sick and spend the day reading Snuff. Post on your blog about how sick you are in case anyone is suspicious. Problem solved.
Incidentally, Discworld fans in London (whether resident or visitors) should consider coming to The Broken Drummers, which meets on the first Monday of every month. Email [email protected] for more information.
I always thought Margolotta was some sort of relative to Ventinari – aunt, or older second cousin, something like that.
And Vimes hates to be called by those titles. :p
I ordered my copy. It should arrive just before I have to do 121 report cards. The comments will be sparse this term.
@36 I always though it was more of a Strategic Alliance.
Such things can range from very distant Frenemies, ready to turn once an objective have been reached, to the sort of thing that was going on with the oil industry and the Dept of Interior Land and Minerals Management Office (ick ick ick – I can’t picture Ventinari involved in anything like that – too untidy.)
@Carlie
No. Margolotta is a vampire with whom Vetinari had a…fling as a young man. This is not ambiguous at all.
If poverty is resisting the temptation to buy a book, check your library.
Yay! Vimes is my literary hero. Now if only I can find a bookshop that’s still open here in Australia
Having abandoned Amazon, I supported my local bookshop by ordering two copies. Now if “Samantha Vimes, Chalkboard Monitor” would like my second copy I’d be glad to send it to her.
Pre-ordered mine ready for pick up in the middle of a week of my annual leave….
The guy who reads the audio books here in the UK is Tony Robinson, aka Baldrick from Blackadder. He is also the manic host of Time Team on Channel 4 here.
Whenever I listen to one of the audio books and he does Nobby Nobbs I get visualisations of a younger Tony in that role in a TV series, he would have been perfect…..
Thanks, Pterry! The timing is perfect for me; I’ve just finished rereading the Guards novels.
J @43
Don’t know if it’s true of the Discworld novels, but I ran across an American copy of one of Jasper Fforde’s, and they do indeed Americanise the vocabulary. Considering it was set in Reading, it seemed rather odd. Quite disconcerting, too, as it takes away much of the British ‘flavour’, as well as kind of patronising in that it seems to show an assumption that American readers can’t understand such minor cultural differences.
pj:
I seriously don’t remember this. I recall the two of them *ahem* dancing around the subject, but not directly saying what the relationship is/was.
Sweet hell, it looks like I need to re-read the Watch books again.
I’m sure I remember reading that the Johnny Maxwell trilogy was Americanised, and I know the Bromiliad was (because I have an American edition, with a joke about JCB not being pronounceable (a riff on the Tetragrammaton) removed and replaced with a reference to John Deere), but the Discworld novels aren’t.
I have Snuff on order from my local bookshop (we still have two in this town!).
TRiG.
@Audley,
Pterry is really coy in all matters romantic (I guess it is the “no sex please, we’re British” -thing) so things are described in a circumspect manner. Do you remember the scene in The Fifth Elephant where Vetinari has intercepted Margolotta’s clack and thereby become again aware of her presence in the world? The way he talks about her and their past relationship? I think it would take a huge leap of imagination to interprete it to have been a nonromantic one.
As for the present state of the relatinship, who knows for sure? They are certainly close, are often seen together, and the populace of Ankh-Morpork takes them to be an item. But Vetinari being such a cerebral fellow, who e.g. preferes reading music on the sheets to hearing it performed, it would make sense that he and Margolotta are platonic these days. Personally I like to think they are not “just friends”, but that’s because I have a thing for him…:)
pj:
Yes, now that you mention it, I do. And I think you’re totally right.
I love Ventinari too, but he’s third behind Death and Vimes. :P