I'm equal parts amused and bewildered that this author with so many interesting thoughts has managed not to see what pretty much every other serious reader of Lord of the Rings has pointed out over decades - the entire story is about a weak and almost completely unknown set of people who were "chosen" only by the most inexplicable series of events anyone could imagine - who through no inherent power of their own manage to save the world by nothing more or less than the choice to be kind to a pitiful (though clearly treacherous) creature... and who then go right back home where they belong, dismissing any notion of chosenness beyond the ordinary sort where everyone is chosen to do what is good for their neighbors.
the Hobbits pursued not greatness or destiny, but took the only path toward life available to them and then returned to let the rest of the world get on with living.
DennisP 1 days ago [-]
Exactly. Here for example, the author's point seems to just be "don't be Sauron."
> What I have a problem with is people trying to live forever as part of a Chosen One script which involves them trying to carve up all of the world into the dead empires of a dystopian Great Game world run according to a totalizing script.
I'm confident Tolkien would agree.
I also think any evaluation of LoTR should take into account Tolkien's background as a veteran of the trenches in WWI. In 2025 America, maybe that makes LoTR seem less relevant to our world. To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.
t-3 1 days ago [-]
> To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.
You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with, especially when there's no convenient ring to throw in a volcano?
The black-and-white starkness of LotR is what makes it unfit for use as an analogy to the real world! There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing, even if it may be a comforting and inspiring story to tell ourselves.
variaga 23 hours ago [-]
>> To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.
> You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with
"The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate? ... I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. Snowmane and Hasufel and the horses of my guard are in the inner court. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song – if any be left to sing of us hereafter.
'I will ride with you', said Aragorn"
-The Two Towers
Seems like it fits to me...
Aeolun 4 hours ago [-]
> There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing, even if it may be a comforting and inspiring story to tell ourselves.
To use the example already given, how about Ukraine? I have a very hard time not placing that in a good vs evil framing.
It’s true that Ukraine isn’t perfectly good, and Russia isn’t purely evil, but it’s pretty damn close.
Here’s a nation that was just keeping to themselves and growing closer to the ones that didn’t want to annex them (surprise surprise) and the evil overlord thought that was too threatening and decided to pre-emptively annex them.
t-3 2 hours ago [-]
Emotionally it makes perfect sense, and it's great for propaganda purposes, but rationally it has no appeal. How does making Russia into an enemy that needs to be obliterated and destroyed for the safety of the world help anybody or serve to end the conflict? If you say they are evil and don't want to destroy them totally, what is the point of labeling other than for propaganda?
mnsc 4 hours ago [-]
Ok. Russia evil, Ukraine good. Now what? Do we sit around and wait for the chosen one? Is Zelensky the one? How much time should we give him? Maybe Trump is the one?
Don't get me wrong, I'm swede and like most here I'm firmly on Ukraine's side and see the pure evil shit Russian military does _every _day without any illusions. But this framing of good vs evil does not seem to pan out. A common sentiment is just to wipe out Russia from the map. And tempting as it might be, that doesn't seem very noble/good and the alternative, "Russian people finds the good in them and throw out the oligarchy forcefully and install democracy", is very naive. I mean even the US, a fully armed populace of strong freeminded men can't seem to see that they are treading the same path as Russia and take action. How reasonable is it then to have that expectation of a people systematically disempowered for decades.
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
"Throw the Russians out of Ukraine" would suffice. No need to wipe anything out. (Except what logistically is needed to achieve said goal.)
Good vs evil is simplistic, but it serves as shorthand for "it's worth fighting for".
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
"Good vs evil is simplistic, but it serves as shorthand for "it's worth fighting for"."
Are you in Donbas currently? If not, you are not fighting anything.
diggan 1 hours ago [-]
> Are you in Donbas currently? If not, you are not fighting anything.
That's a very simplistic world-view. One does not have to be on the frontlines to help an effort. People donating to https://ukrainedefensefund.org/ are still "fighting", even though they aren't literally gunning people down in Donbas.
m4rtink 15 hours ago [-]
For one the demographic curve for the Russia vs the Orcs is much more dire - it was bad already when they started the senseless war and it is much worse now. Their soldiers are not made in spawning pits & they will run out of the willing/forceable sooner or later. With all the consequences for their country which they gambled for the imperial fever dream.
fifticon 5 hours ago [-]
well, they've got an orange unprincipled opportunist and his 'friends' on their team now, so it appears they will be able to pull through
Tade0 4 hours ago [-]
The jury is out on that.
Little known fact: a while ago Russia doubled the sign-in bonus fot contractors to approximately $4.5k to keep the flow of people going. With Trump taking office this produced a wave of recruits who are betting on the chance that the war will be over before they finish training and actually arrive to the front.
Some of them are already there and the results are not good (for them).
I'm not saying the situation isn't difficult, but it doesn't serve the free world to see Russia as this unstoppable force, as it paints efforts at helping Ukraine as pointless.
heavymetalpoizn 8 hours ago [-]
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Muromec 17 hours ago [-]
>especially when there's no convenient ring to throw in a volcano?
We tossed the ring away in the 90ies, it turned out to be not the smartest idea
lolinder 22 hours ago [-]
> There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing
This may or may not be true, but Ukraine vs. Putin is absolutely one of those times where it's 100% accurate and useful.
Putin invaded Ukraine unprovoked, motivated by visions of restoring an empire to its former glory. He cannot be reasoned with, he cannot be appeased. The only hope that any of the formerly-occupied countries have is to defeat him, and any and all efforts to make the issue appear to be more grayscale than that will necessarily lead to disappointment and to further wars and bloodshed.
GMoromisato 19 hours ago [-]
While I agree with you that Ukraine vs. Putin is clear-cut, morally speaking, I don't think we can apply pre-Atomic Age logic to the situation. I just watched this scene in Crimson Tide:
XO Hunter: "...I just think that in the nuclear world, the true enemy can't be destroyed."
Captain Ramsey: "Attention on deck. Von Clausewitz will now tell us exactly who the real enemy is. Von?"
XO Hunter: "In my humble opinion... in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
I think that's the difference. In WWII, appeasing Hitler was a mistake because it only emboldened him. Even back then, Tolkien had reservations about how far to take the war. While he abhorred Hitler, he initially supported Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" policy.
But today, a nuclear Russia cannot be defeated the way Germany was. "In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.
The question everyone is wrestling with is, how do we save Ukraine while preventing nuclear war? Unfortunately, we don't know the answer, and the risk of getting it wrong is catastrophic.
shoubidouwah 1 hours ago [-]
A good refresher on deterrence seems necessary here.
https://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1570
There's a very real, game theoretic reason why nuclear riposte is fully automated with no way for even commanders to cancel.
A rogue actor _menacing_ nuclear attack as a tool of invasion and war of aggression is an obvious case study for this.
And finally:
"We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Ukraine win the war" is foremost in russian minds, no?
dragonwriter 19 hours ago [-]
> We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.
As soon as you decide this, and let others know you have, you have lost everything. Because if that logic applies to Ukraine it applies equally to Poland, to Alaska, France, to Washington, D.C., to your hometown. You've committed to surrender everything to any power that has the potential to escalate to nuclear war.
(It's even worse if you don't believe this -- or if you think you do but would think differently if the thing to surrender was closer to home -- and let people think you do, because that makes it almost inevitable that things will escalate beyond your trigger point, resulting in nuclear war.)
danenania 18 hours ago [-]
How does the logic “apply equally”?
It’s only rational to start a nuclear war if a country faces a direct existential threat: i.e. a significant percentage of the population will be killed or conquered and enslaved. The perceived outcome of nuclear war (widespread devastation) has to be preferable to what would happen otherwise.
Conflicts over territories at the far fringes of a great power’s sphere of influence (or desired sphere of influence) obviously don’t meet the bar. If it’s trivial to call your bluff, it’s probably better not to bluff.
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
Nobody said "start a nuclear war". They said "maybe we shouldn't roll over for the nuclear power just because they want something and make insincere threats involving nukes"
The logical consequence of disagreeing with this is that every country that doesn't want a significant percentage of their population killed or conquered or enslaved should get their own nukes, because nobody else wants to help them. And I'm not sure every country acquires nukes is a safer world than maybe we don't let Putin have everything he wants
danenania 17 hours ago [-]
Putin’s threats are not obviously insincere though is the problem.
He knows it would be strategically impossible for the US or Nato to respond in kind to a nuclear attack on Ukraine. It can be rational for him to climb the escalation ladder if he knows his enemy will have to back down before he does because they have less to gain and more to lose.
I don’t like this situation at all, and I understand the point about rolling over to threats. Unfortunately, this is just how nuclear game theory works whether we like it or not. You can’t win in a conflict under MAD against an opponent who has more at stake than you.
notahacker 17 hours ago [-]
They are obvious insincere, because they've been idly making them about every minor gesture the West has made in Ukraine's favour. And ultimately it is strategically impossible for there to be any good outcomes of a nuclear attack on Ukraine for Russia, never mind "better than conventional war Russia have marginal advantages in" or even "better than retreat to pre-2014 borders".
danenania 17 hours ago [-]
If they were obviously insincere, they could just be ignored. But we can see that in practice, US/Europe have been hesitant to escalate too much or get directly involved with troops. Which is part of the reason for making those threats over and over. While each one is most likely posturing, they cannot be blanket ignored, because Putin has an advantage in an escalation scenario. Making those threats is a way of repeatedly emphasizing that fact.
And of course there can be an advantage for Russia in using nukes. They could destroy Ukraine's entire army, kill all its leaders, destroy all its infrastructure, etc. with no risk of (nuclear) retaliation. There would be many negative consequences too, so it's not likely to happen unless the conventional war is going very badly for Russia, but it's certainly a card they hold.
Aeolun 4 hours ago [-]
The idea that there would be no nuclear retaliation the moment Russia launches any known nukes is ridiculous. If they actually launch a nuke, any non instantaneous retaliation will be too late.
The reason the EU countries don’t just waltz into Ukraine probably has more to do with the knowledge they’re not dealing with a rational person, but with a bunch of ego. It’s not hard to predict how Putin will respond if his ego is threatened, but how the rest of Russia will respond to the command to launch nukes.
It’s not unlike the US, except it’s currently still fairly easy to predict that any US commander will just say no when ordered to fire on the EU.
danenania 3 hours ago [-]
The US would not start a nuclear war with Russia over an attack on Ukraine, nuclear or otherwise. Do you really think it would?
bbarnett 2 hours ago [-]
If Russia nuked the Ukraine, I would be astonished if the West didn't invade Russia. The primary goal being the end of Putin, and all those who aided him. If resisted, and Russia threatened more nuking, then Russia would need to be nuked.
(I expect a first response would be a single city, with warnings to evacuate.
A show of what's next.)
The goal would be that Russians assist in taking out an out of control, lunatic who will destroy us all.
Understand, this isn't just about today. Over the next 100 years, every country will obtain the capacity for nukes. Every person on this planet needs to see, and know that using them indiscriminately means you lose.
The consequences are too dire otherwise.
stickfigure 9 hours ago [-]
> with no risk of (nuclear) retaliation
Putin doesn't know that. Putin doesn't know quite what the repercussions would be. That's why he hasn't used them so far.
wongarsu 17 hours ago [-]
Ukraine has crossed many of Putin's red lines, and all that happened was Putin drawing a new red line, or revising nuclear doctrine, or whatever they call it at the time.
The game theory works roughly like this: Putin wins the most if his threats work. If they don't work, he has the choice between drawing a new red line, launching a limited nuclear attack on Ukraine, or full-on nuclear war. The last option is obviously out (guaranteed destruction is in no proportion to the reward). A limited nuclear attack would likely make him a pariah on the world stage and make it even more difficult to find trading partners. So instead he redraws the line.
If he ever went for the limited nuclear attack option Ukraine might give up, and the west would have to choose between war against Russia (high risk, low reward) or just tightening economic sanctions to the max and punishing anyone who dares to trade with him.
If we assume rational actors I don't see how this would ever escalate to nuclear war. And as long as Ukraine doesn't find a way to decisively push Russian troops out Russia has no incentive to climb the escalation ladder. Even as prolonged war leads to internal instability
inetknght 14 hours ago [-]
> Ukraine has crossed many of Putin's red lines, and all that happened was Putin
Ukraine can cross as many of Putin's "red lines" as they wish. Ukraine did not start this war.
TheBicPen 13 hours ago [-]
Sure, but that's irrelevant to the question at hand. In a discussion of cold game theory, morality doesn't apply. I'd even say that explicitly excluding morality from the discussion is much of the point of boiling a scenario down to game theory in the first place.
GMoromisato 18 hours ago [-]
Agreed! That's the key problem: we are not going to blow up the world to save Ukraine.
But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.
Unfortunately, I think the rational thing to do is to apply increasing pressure to Putin until he either backs down or proves that he is willing to blow up the world over Ukraine. If the latter, then we back down. Of course, the risks of that strategy are all too obvious.
roca 4 hours ago [-]
> But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.
Russia's nuclear arsenal is a perfectly adequate guarantee of Russia's security. Putin knows this, which is why he's happy to leave Russia's western border with NATO practically undefended while he pursues Ukraine. (This also disproves the "Putin invaded Ukraine because he's afraid of NATO" lie.)
It's more plausible that Putin's survival depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war. But "mad Putin blows up the world" is as much a problem for the Russians as anyone else.
zdragnar 18 hours ago [-]
Ukraine didn't have nuclear weapons. America does, as do many others, which is largely why none of them have put boots on the ground beyond "training". If they did, they would actually be entering the war, and nuclear weapons are back on the table.
That's also the reason why Alaska and France are safe, why Iran wants nukes, and is the best argument against disarmament you can find. The cat is out of the bag, and the attempts to put it back are starting to leave scars.
arkx 18 hours ago [-]
Ukraine did have Soviet-era nuclear weapons at the time of their independence, which they let go of in exchange of US, UK and Russia security guarantees in 1994. It is amazing to me how this fact is being memoryholed.
The only assurance of assistance built into the agreement is that parties would complain to the UN security council.
The Obama administration let Russia violate the agreement when they took Crimea. Putin's justification that Ukraine isn't a nation but a historically Russian territory only works if Russia pretends it was never a signatory, since recognition of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign nation was a part of it.
In short, pieces of paper do not trump the fear of nuclear weapons.
s1artibartfast 17 hours ago [-]
>It is amazing to me how this fact is being memory holed.
Because every time it is brought up it is easily demonstrated that nobody actually agreed to defend Ukraine. They each agreed not to invade Ukraine.
t-3 13 hours ago [-]
It's also the best argument for nuclear weapons you can find. If every country had nukes, invasions wouldn't be very likely for states with any semblance of rationality.
dragonwriter 14 hours ago [-]
> Ukraine didn't have nuclear weapons. America does
So? If nuclear war is always an intolerable choice for America, then America's nuclear weapons will never be used in any case, and any aggressor who can plausibly threaten nuclear war is free to seize anything from America with that threat.
If nuclear war isn't always intolerable, then, well, we've eliminated the premise off the upthread argument about Ukraine, and are in a different discussion.
wongarsu 17 hours ago [-]
It has become very clear over the last couple of years that Putin doesn't want nuclear war either. Lots of nuclear threats, all of them backtracked. If we marched on Moscow the way we marched on Berlin that might change his mind. But If we push Russia back to Ukraine's rightful border and build a line of fortifications there, Russia has no point where launching nukes is actually advantageous to them.
If anything, nukes only remain an option because of the lack of Western troops in Ukraine, allowing Putin to make a limited nuclear attack that hits Ukrainians but isn't worth war a nuclear war for the West. And even that is a trigger Putin has repeatedly refused to pull, preferring to win the war the conventional way even if that takes years
m4rtink 15 hours ago [-]
This is exactly how you make sure EVERYONE will get nuclear weapons.
And it was just so simple - provide Ukraine with all the weapons necessary to help them defend itself from the clear Russian agression. Or, you know, do that before the Russians started their main war in 2022, there was long enough warning from 2013, including hundreds of inocents murdered in an airliner the Russians show down...
Aeolun 3 hours ago [-]
> including hundreds of innocents murdered in an airliner the Russians shot down
As much as I felt the Dutch marines should have marched in there to retrieve the bodies when the Russians were faffing around, I do think the shooting down itself was an accident. Zero upside to doing that.
twoWhlsGud 19 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, MAD likely requires that you can't let Putin have Ukraine. And if MAD fails, well then we're all screwed anyway.
Scarblac 19 hours ago [-]
That's assuming Putin would use nukes in case Ukraine succeeds in winning back their territory.
Which he won't do if mutually assured destruction is credible. He's not going to destroy the world including himself and everything he loves for Ukraine.
Once there are doubts that use of nuclear weapons will be punished, then all bets are off.
danenania 18 hours ago [-]
The problem is that it’s simply not credible on its face. No matter what is said, there is no possibility of US leaders launching nukes over Ukraine.
It’s a bad idea to bluff in situations like this, because when the obvious bluff is called and you are forced to back down, it makes enemies more likely to test all your commitments and “red lines”.
While Putin might not be willing to risk MAD either over Ukraine, it’s a lot more believable that he would than that the US would. There have been direct kinetic attacks on Moscow and parts of Russia have been invaded. There have been assassination attempts against people close to him. This is not some far away conflict for him. He’s already taking on a huge amount of risk, a lot more than the US has taken on in a long time—even in WW2 there was no direct attack on the continental US.
StormChaser_5 17 hours ago [-]
If it's not such a far away conflict then why isn't Putin looking for a way to stop? If anything the war shows how little Putin cares about his own people, even those close around him and how willing he is to spend their lives to burnish his legacy. In that case why would you think that any backing down on Ukraine leads to anything other than him or his successors wanting to swallow more?
Personally I don't see any real chance of nuclear escalation over Ukraine on both sides. The war needs to end but to do that Putin needs to be given a way to deescalate and claim a win at home. But that can only be allowed to happen if Ukraine is made safe and secure once again and if Putin is willing to swallow that. And I see no evidence of that being true.
danenania 16 hours ago [-]
There's definitely a chance it does lead to Russia wanting to "swallow more", which is a terrible thing, but that doesn't really change the strategic dynamics. Until they try to swallow territory that is as important to a nuclear-armed enemy as it is to Russia, they will have an advantage and it will be difficult to stop them.
qznc 17 hours ago [-]
Putin created a system of carefully balanced violent psychopaths around himself. Showing any weakness (like losing against little Ukraine) can quickly lead to a coup there. I can very well imagine Putin think "if I'm going to die, I want the whole world to die with me".
DennisP 15 hours ago [-]
Fortunately, unlike the US, Russia does not give a single person the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Putin would need one of those other psychopaths to go along with him.
> We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.
No. We cannot let people just walk over other nations even at the cost of nuclear war
Anything else means the evil ones eventually win.
t-3 2 hours ago [-]
In the case of nuclear war, everyone loses everything. For most of us in the US, and I'm guessing most people not directly impacted by the war, that's not an acceptable outcome (not that Russia seems to be able to take any more than already have anyway).
femiagbabiaka 15 hours ago [-]
I mean we need to speak plainly: Ukraine certainly didn’t provoke Russia, but the U.S. did, using Ukraine as a pawn. Thats what makes Trump and Vance’s actions so terrible: Ukraine would be a lot better off if the U.S. (and Europe to a lesser extent) had never interfered with its affairs.
lolinder 11 hours ago [-]
This is pure Russian propaganda that seeks to justify an unjustifiable war.
DennisP 24 hours ago [-]
Aside from the lack of convenient ring I'd say that sometimes it's quite a useful framing. To avoid derailing into politics I'll use Nazi Germany as another example.
t-3 24 hours ago [-]
Funny you bring them up, I was going to use them as an example but didn't want to Godwin.
The Nazis had a black-and-white ideological viewpoint and seemed to believe themselves to be heroes fighting to save their people from evil Jews and their brainwashed minions. Do you see why those narratives are so dangerous now?
variaga 23 hours ago [-]
In opposition to the Nazi tenets (and your characterization of it as being "black and white"), LOTR explicitly counsels mercy and not being too confident in your judgements.
"What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!
Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.
I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.
Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends."
-The Two Towers
nathan_compton 24 hours ago [-]
I guess it strikes me as weird that we can't just say "Well, yes, 'both sides' thought they were right but in fact one (the Nazis) was wrong."
To be sure, there are situations where there is some genuinely complicated moral situation. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend to be moral morons and sagely nod our heads and say "Yes, but Nazis thought they were right too, hmm, hmm."
fulafel 22 hours ago [-]
Before they started a war they were mainstream-acceptable in the USA. Henry Ford, Charles Couglin, Friends of New Germany etc. It can be argued the mainstream culture / value system doesn't reject Nazism because it's evil, but because they were "the enemy" in WW2.
nathan_compton 21 hours ago [-]
All this tells me is that your average american is a moral midget, which is not surprising to me.
DennisP 17 hours ago [-]
The average Americans went to war and defeated the Nazis.
antihipocrat 12 hours ago [-]
The average person can be fooled into supporting anything most of the time. The list of bad wars Americans have supported (at least initially) is longer than the good ones.
Normative language used as shorthand for current consensus for whether the conflict was justified given the likely alternative outcomes for not engaging.
majormajor 20 hours ago [-]
"things changed as more and more facts came out"
is learning and changing hypocrisy?
7 hours ago [-]
t-3 23 hours ago [-]
You're not even wrong. No sane person has said we can't judge Nazis for what they did and believed. What we shouldn't do is set ourselves up to fall into the same trap by using binary narrative framings.
squigz 23 hours ago [-]
Falling into the other trap of treating both sides of every conflict as equally valid is probably just as dangerous, no?
t-3 23 hours ago [-]
We can start by not separating everything into two sides, one of which we must take. Look at each conflict as a whole rather than a sports game with a winner and a loser or a Good and an Evil or a My Team and Their Team. Maybe one side really is actually very bad and needs to be stopped. Maybe there are other ways.
squigz 23 hours ago [-]
There are times when this is true and admirable - "us vs them" rhetoric in political discourse is indeed harmful and only serves to help those in power - but there are times when it's more dangerous to treat both sides as equally valid that we should both listen to - like when a superpower invades another country and wages a war for years.
xandrius 23 hours ago [-]
They both thought they were right but only one knee they were doing good. I cannot believe any Nazi thought they were actually "good", I would understand if they thought their action were needed but definitely killing millions of non-combatants cannot be seen as good; in the right light it can be seen as non-evil given the circumstances.
wat10000 22 hours ago [-]
If one truly believes that it’s “us or them,” and that your enemies are inherently, genetically irredeemable, then exterminating them is good.
The problem, of course, is that belief. It’s catastrophically wrong. And it’s the sort of thing that black and white good vs evil thinking can lead you towards.
We can simultaneously say “the Nazis thought they were good” and “the Nazis were profoundly evil.” We can acknowledge the relativity of perspective without needing to apply a relativity of good and evil.
A necessary element of true goodness is a willingness to consider new ideas, a constant reevaluation of one’s beliefs, and an acknowledgment that the world is complicated and messy. Someone who does these things can justifiably conclude that they’re good and the other guys are evil, but you have to maintain that openness and reevaluation or you can slide into Good vs Evil where you can see no wrong on your own side, and that leads to disaster.
computerthings 21 hours ago [-]
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DennisP 18 hours ago [-]
Well, yeah, but they also started a giant war of conquest and killed nine million civilians in gas chambers, so I'm still gonna say they were on the evil side even if they used similar narratives themselves. There's a point where the "both sides" thing finally breaks down. If we don't have enough moral clarity to say the Nazis were bad, then we're really in trouble.
Woodi 23 hours ago [-]
> Do you see why those narratives are so dangerous now?
Only when they are "narratives". When they are caution stories from historical facts we want to avoid repiting then they are not so stigmatising but a warnins.
Nobody should trow that storises again and again and some behaviour schamas should be always avoided. Unluckily that stories need to be reminded from time to time.
Even better: people should not only know about WWII-nazi-communism works but should know broad historical contects - what bring that evilness to Earth: communistic imperialism wanting to take over globe and using Germany poor situation (eg. sponsoring nazi party) after WWI to make attempt at concuering Europe (first).
Or maybe it was just another part of "Great Game" and reaults with using new technologies are worse and worse...
swiftcoder 24 hours ago [-]
> Here for example, the author's point seems to just be "don't be Sauron."
Sadly, it seems like this particular point was missed by several prominent tech folks who took notes from LotR...
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
A more accurate reading of LOTR would give us startups with names like Nazgul and Saruman...
Quite apart from not wanting people to try to be Sauron, Tolkein just didn't like industry very much.
wat10000 22 hours ago [-]
One could instead take the point to be, if you’re Sauron, keep a better hold on your ring.
jon_richards 23 hours ago [-]
My favorite analysis of lotr is this:
> good does not need to destroy evil; good needs only to resist evil, and when it does that, evil destroys itself
xandrius 23 hours ago [-]
In LotR, good did indeed destroy evil (or rather its boss) by destroying the one ring.
lolinder 22 hours ago [-]
No. Good took the ring all the way to Mount Doom, resisting its Evil all the way up until the end, and then once more the Good person failed to destroy the Ring. Frodo stood at the precipice and took the Ring for himself.
The only way the Ring was destroyed was by accident when Gollum attacked Frodo to claim the Ring. The Evil that the ring stoked in the hearts of those it touched is what ended up destroying it in the end, not the Good people who took it to Mount Doom.
jon_richards 10 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, the author of my quote also mentions this:
> Tolkien in his letters insists that Frodo did not fail – that his captivity to the Ring was inevitable
Cornbilly 22 hours ago [-]
If you read Tolkien’s other works, you’ll find that evil cannot be destroyed as Melkor/Morgoth corrupted the very nature of the world and that evil will remain until the end of the world.
Trasmatta 18 hours ago [-]
You have to go deeper than that, though. Eru Ilúvatar said this to Melkor:
> No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
The idea being that the evil that Melkor commits ultimately just builds towards the creators greater and secret purpose. It's kind of an attempt to deal with the "problem of evil".
ViktorRay 18 hours ago [-]
Worth mentioning that Tolkien was a devout Catholic and the idea you are talking about is something Catholic theologians would probably agree with.
(I’m not a Christian though so somebody please correct me if I am wrong)
vitus 23 hours ago [-]
> and who then go right back home where they belong, dismissing any notion of chosenness
Well, except for Aragorn, who turns out to be the true king of Gondor.
allturtles 22 hours ago [-]
Aragorn can't defeat Sauron, though, and he knows it. His role in the final victory is to distract Sauron, who assumes that the ring will be used against him by a "somebody" like Aragorn, rather than destroyed by nobodies.
hollerith 23 hours ago [-]
And Gandalf, who is not a man, but rather an angelic being or minor god (Maiar) sent to Middle Earth to oppose Sauron.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 23 hours ago [-]
Their point seems to be strengthened by these facts. The story is about these people without any inherently powerful qualities performing a duty and going home without aggrandizing themselves. The fact that this happens in a world which has a “true King of Gondor” and these angel-wizards drives home how mundane and down-to-Middle-Earth Hobbits are.
22 hours ago [-]
vitus 23 hours ago [-]
I mean, yes, the hobbits go back home where Sam becomes the mayor of the Shire for 50 years, and Gimli and Legolas sail off together into the sunset.
But it's also unambiguous that Aragorn, who was previously a nobody raised by elves, turns out to be the long-lost king and definitely does not just go back to whatever he was doing previously.
lolinder 22 hours ago [-]
> does not just go back to whatever he was doing previously.
He absolutely does. Being the future king was a core part of his character, everything in his life was preparing him for it. The book version of Aragorn doesn't have the hesitance to accept his duty that the films portray, he doesn't have to be prodded into it: his whole life has revolved around his future kingship.
In a lot of ways the book Aragorn is just as superhuman as Gandalf is. He's an archetype, not a perspective character. The hobbits are the only normal humans.
giraffe_lady 14 hours ago [-]
Aragorn begins Fellowship as the reigning monarch of "the rangers," actually a dispersed nation. They call him Chief to outsiders but his people know who he is and what he hopes to become. I reread the books pretty recently and this was one of the most surprising things that I forgot/got overwritten by movie characterization. He was never a nobody, by the time we meet him he is 40 years into the project of preparing himself for a great trial and then kingship.
Swizec 23 hours ago [-]
> And Gandalf, who is not a man, but rather an angelic being (Maiar) sent to Middle Earth to sort out Sauron
But that’s just what all wizards are and always have been. It’s the only way to be a wizard. It isn’t, like, a hidden fact or anything. Wizard is a race not a profession. Like elf or dwarf or hobbit.
hollerith 23 hours ago [-]
My point is to contradict the notion that
>the entire story is about a weak and almost completely unknown set of people who were "chosen" only by the most inexplicable series of events anyone could imagine.
I don't know what your point is.
lukev 16 hours ago [-]
This exactly.
Interesting to note that Peter Thiel has never named a company "Hobbiton"
kulahan 16 hours ago [-]
The entire LOTR trilogy is meant to be “unapologetically Christian”. The intended point was basically the concept of having a cross to bear, as well as the importance of apost— er, friends.
protocolture 6 hours ago [-]
I think its got to do more with the whole "Im a sad king in exile" thing Aragorn has going on rather than the hobbits story.
19 hours ago [-]
majormajor 20 hours ago [-]
There's a whole lot more going on in the story than just the hobbits.
And I think movie-LOTR-fans in particular are there at least as much for the Great Big Hero Chosen People Of Destiny aspects and battles as for the hobbits.
isoprophlex 20 hours ago [-]
In terms of the positions of the characters in the narrative, yes, you're right. but in terms of the worldview you take home with you after reading... (or well rather a worldview that tech bros alledgedly leech themselves onto, if you will, because i don't necessarily agree that LOTR is all that bad)
Anyway. my take of tfa: in discworld, the whole system is designed for pluralism and messy progress. in middle earth, the entire universe is designed for epic quests and magical solutions from wise old wizards.
frodo might be a humble hobbit, but he's still caught in a deterministic prophecy machine where the fate of the world depends on ONE RING and ONE QUEST
rob_c 13 hours ago [-]
Possibly the best description of why I find the story so appealing. Thank you
gostsamo 17 hours ago [-]
And all this gentle falk bent before the chosen king and sang his praises, and some of them went to live in the immortal land of the god's chosen people beyond the curve of the world. Let's be honest, there are both heroes of might and humble hobbits in the book, but if Tolkin published only the Frodo chapters from books 2 and 3, Lotr wouldn't be the legend it is today.
22 hours ago [-]
heavymetalpoizn 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
YeGoblynQueenne 12 hours ago [-]
>> I have a rule-of-thumb: The more seriously you take Discworld, the smarter you get about Roundworld.
Oh come off it.
I've read all the Discworld novels. I've also read every other book that Terry Pratchett ever wrote [1]. All, that is, except for one that I've left for... later [2].
If Pratchett were still with us and heard anyone making such pompous statements about Discworld he'd slap the culprit in the face [3]. See, the thing to understand about Terry Pratchett is that he was quintessentially British, and by that I mean the good British [4]. As such his greatest fear was that someone might take what he wrote seriously and try to follow it like some kind of life advice.
Remember what he quipped when he was knighted for "services to literature":
"I suspect the 'services to literature' consisted of refraining from trying to write any"
And that, as they say, is that.
______________
[1] Yes, even "Where's my Cow?".
[2] Problem is, I don't remember which one so I'll have to read them all again to be sure. Hey, win-win.
[3] Gently. He was a gentle man.
[4] Think Lord Byron, not Lord Elgin. But without all the drinking and womanising, just the big heart.
dcminter 3 hours ago [-]
I saw or read an interview with Terry once where he said something like: "If at 16 you don't think LotR is the best story in the world then there's probably something wrong with you, and if at 45 you still think it's the best story in the world then there's definitely something wrong with you." (Quotation marks, but not verbatim I'm sure)
I don't think he meant it as a criticism of LotR, more pointing to the wealth of other literature that you might need a bit of maturity to get into.
It's funny how some people idolise "the classics" and yet if you actually read them then mostly they're just the popular fun stuff from an earlier era. Poor old Terry, he'll probably be a question on an A-level English exam one of these days.
qqqult 8 hours ago [-]
4 foot notes?
This guy Pratchetts.
YeGoblynQueenne 4 hours ago [-]
My notes aren't that tall :P
(That was so good this Sunday morning. Thanks :D)
MezzoDelCammin 3 hours ago [-]
SQUEAK!
swyx 8 hours ago [-]
god i love the way you write. you Get Pratchett more than vgr.
you dont seem to have a blog. please have a blog.
YeGoblynQueenne 4 hours ago [-]
I don't have a blog sorry.
... I write stuffy academic papers?
crowselect 1 days ago [-]
As someone who deeply loves LOTR - if you try to apply the rules of LOTR to this world, you will make this world worse. This is true. Inheritance and monarchy does not make for a good government, and we know this.
But LOTR is about vibes not facts. Friendship, loyalty, hope, doing the right thing with what power you have, appreciating what is good and green and gentle in the world, etc.
> the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld
The more seriously you take the rules of LOTR, yes. But you can take LOTR seriously without taking the rules seriously - by taking the vibes seriously.
fc417fc802 24 hours ago [-]
> Inheritance and monarchy does not make for a good government, and we know this.
Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record. The problem isn't that you can't get good results, but rather the extreme variance.
quink 13 hours ago [-]
Which can be mitigated by making the monarch powerless.
I’m in Australia and the Trump presidency will be the thing for the next century that we can point to and say that this is why we are not going to ever, ever, ever get rid of the king or queen, in favour of a local president. I suspect that Canada and other countries feel much the same.
etothepii 12 hours ago [-]
I agree that Monarchs are great if they realise their long term legacy is best served by doing very little-to-nothing but still bringing the Prime Minister to account once a week (the A/UK/CA/NZ evolutionary model). However, even the ceremonial power is proving problematic in a world where the government of UK wants King of UK to have Trump for tea and the government of CA wants King of CA to spit in it.
cyberax 12 hours ago [-]
> Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record.
The best monarchs were the ones deposed by the revolutionaries, or the ones who abdicated the real power. There are 2 problems:
1. _Nobody_ should be ruling for more than 8-10 years.
2. You can't have a real monarchy without feudalism. And feudalism _always_ sucks.
quink 10 hours ago [-]
lol. I lived under the same monarch, QEII, who has ruled for seventy years, and I assure you that I and my compatriots feel far, far, freer in practice and guided more well than any single American ought to feel currently.
cyberax 7 hours ago [-]
The UK monarchs don't rule. They are for show only.
quink 5 hours ago [-]
> or the ones who abdicated the real power
Missed that part in your parent reply originally, you're right of course, cheers :)
crowselect 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Ichthypresbyter 14 hours ago [-]
Or to a slave in a Republic (whether that's the Confederacy, Rome or Athens).
crowselect 14 hours ago [-]
What does that have to do with monarchy?
Ichthypresbyter 14 hours ago [-]
The same thing that serfdom has to do with monarchy.
In other words, nothing.
crowselect 13 hours ago [-]
Monarchy does not prevent enslavement. In fact, serfdom is a relatively common feature of monarchy. That’s what those two things have to do with each other.
defrost 13 hours ago [-]
The UK, under a monarch, abolished slavery and set the Royal Navy to blockade slave ships.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
crowselect 12 hours ago [-]
The UK abolished slavery by an act of parliament. A parliamentary monarchy is a historical quirk that does not need the monarchy to function.
defrost 11 hours ago [-]
Good that you agree slavery was abolished by a country with a monarch ... you skipped over the second point; the country most associated with industrial scale slavery in the world had no monarch.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
crowselect 11 hours ago [-]
Slavery was “abolished” in the UK while that same nation continued to traffic and profit from enslavement for quite a long time it’s “abolition”. Is your point that monarchy is good, or that slavery is associated with all forms of government?
quink 13 hours ago [-]
There’s no serfdom anywhere in the world currently. There are plenty of monarchies in the world.
Meanwhile, currently, slavery is far more common in non-monarchies than monarchies.
Your “relatively common” is literally zero in the current reality, unless there’s countries you’re aware of that the rest of us aren’t.
cyberax 12 hours ago [-]
> There’s no serfdom anywhere in the world currently.
Tell that to guest workers in Saudi Arabia. Or to people in North Korea.
> There are plenty of monarchies in the world.
There are very few _real_ monarchies where the monarch has absolute power, with hereditary power transfer: Saudi Arabia, Oman, North Korea.
quink 10 hours ago [-]
"guest workers" as a term completely excludes serfs. Serfs are attached to the land, guest workers on the other hand come from a completely different place. North Korea is not a monarchy, and what's happening there is forced labour, or slavery.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
cyberax 6 hours ago [-]
Serfs were forced to work for little to no wages, and often can't leave the country because their employers confiscate their passports. That's about as close to modern serfdom as you can get.
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
quink 5 hours ago [-]
OK, let's consult the article, starting right at the beginning:
> Serfdom was
Huh.
fc417fc802 11 hours ago [-]
Perhaps absolute would be a better wording. After all there are also very few absolute democracies, absolute free markets, etc, etc.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
Admittedly it's possible that might run afoul of a dictionary definition or three. I'm not sure. I suppose it's all largely pointless speculation anyway since someone with a long enough term is going to be incentivized to modify the system to officially become hereditary if it isn't already.
> Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
Officially though?
Contrast with your other example, North Korea, where many of the abuses are indeed officially recognized.
There's plenty that the laws (or at least enforcement) in the western world fail to stop. In many cases you can argue that it's intentional (and I might even agree with you). But that doesn't make it official in that it isn't what's written down or what the electorate explicitly agreed to.
olddustytrail 2 hours ago [-]
> For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know.
Mikhail Mishustin. The Prime Minister of Russia takes over in the event of the President being indisposed and acts as temporary President until the President recovers or a new one is elected.
crowselect 12 hours ago [-]
Relatively common in history.
fc417fc802 11 hours ago [-]
It's almost as though the global political landscape has varied significantly over these thousands of years and various societal features (including monarchy, serfdom, slavery, etc) aren't inherently linked to one another.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
crowselect 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that’s the ol’ philosopher-king argument. I get it, but I don’t really buy into it. I.e. if the next monarch is a despot, their rule is a part of the previous monarch’s actions… so even a truly good king will inevitably harm the people under them.
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
You don't actually seem like you're disagreeing with me though? I spoke only to the form of government as it pertains to end results, not to how we should attribute "points" to a given ruler or politician. Credit assignment is similarly difficult when it comes to voters and elected leaders.
The end result is higher variance over a long period of time as a dictatorship switches between good and bad leadership. Meanwhile democracies consistently fail to execute on large scale visions. There's a reason corporate structure generally resembles a dictatorship, and that same reason is what eventually leads many of them to fail.
paulddraper 24 hours ago [-]
LOTR+universe was meant to be a mythology for Western Europe. Purposefully impractical/fantastical.
King Arthur vibes. Royalty, wizards, magical objects, heros and villains, destiny, romance, fealty, etc.
But obviously dispensing swords from lakes is no sound system basis for government.
tombert 20 hours ago [-]
At least in the Once and Future King, the only real King Arthur story that I've read, I got the impression that Arthur pulling the sword from the stone was more of a metaphor of him "being ready" to be king more than just genealogy or anything like that.
When Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, he was remembering all the stuff that Merlyn taught him about the different ways that animals run their societies and how it informed how he would lead if he were in charge.
That might be TH White's flavoring to it though.
paulddraper 5 hours ago [-]
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (Howard Pyle) is in my mind the most "classic" King Arthur telling. [1]
It's also notably light on the "prosaic" aspects. It just says that elves "dwelt" here and made a kingdom there. But as GRRM said: what was Aragorn's tax policy?
Animats 20 hours ago [-]
The author alludes to a general problem with popular culture - the cult of the Chosen One.
Pixar has some in-house rules for stories. One of them is:
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___
That sums up a Chosen One story. Chosen One protagonists do not work their way up. They are special snowflakes.
Star Wars is an extreme case of Chosen One popular culture. So is the Marvel Overextended Universe. (Note that Star Trek is not. Starfleet people start at the bottom and work up.)
The top 8 highest grossing films of all time, unadjusted for inflation, [1] are all Chosen One movies.
Overexposure to Chosen One stories predisposes people to look for a Strong Leader, one who is somehow special.
This seems to be a problem. Historically, the United States didn't work that way, having rebelled against a European monarchy which did. But I digress.
The stories you are talking about, also known as The Monomyth, have been part of every recorded culture and civilization.
It seems that the Chosen One stuff is not a result of stories. It is a fundamental part of our species and that is reflected in our most popular stories. From ancient times all the way to today.
YeGoblynQueenne 12 hours ago [-]
Allegedly. The monomyth has to be stretched very thin to fit over some of the greatest stories told by humans to each other.
Take the Iliad. Where's the monomyth? Achilles is an asshole, he gets into a fight with his boss, causes his bestie to get killed and then gets killed himself. There's a wooden horse. End of story.
No monomyth there, guv'nor.
Nor in the Odyssey. Smart guy wins the Trojan war with impossile stratagem. He pisses off the God of the Sea and takes 10 years to reach home, losing all his companions along the way. A little massacre to clear the air and they live happily ever after. End of story.
No monomyth.
I could go on. But, you know, that's the Iliad and the Odyssey. Should be enough.
dwighttk 9 hours ago [-]
no wooden horse in The Illiad
Detrytus 19 hours ago [-]
I fail to see how "Titanic" is a Chosen One story...
dyauspitr 9 hours ago [-]
I would love to read a story about a protagonist that is incompetent in spite of being earnest and trying hard.
alamortsubite 3 hours ago [-]
Read Jude the Obscure.
karaterobot 22 hours ago [-]
> I won’t get into whether Discworld is better or worse as a fictional universe than Middle Earth.
"I won't get into which book is better, today I am only evaluating these books according to a set of rules I am making up, to see which succeeds at something neither author set out to achieve, and which most readers don't know or care about, and which is ultimately just an analogy for something else. Intrigued? Read on!"
ChrisMarshallNY 1 days ago [-]
I always loved Sir Terry's depictions of Ankh-Morpork.
It was a crazy, deeply dysfunctional city, full of crazy, dysfunctional people, but he obviously loved it, and the reader ends up loving the city, as well.
I think that's a fairly accurate way to look at the world around us.
I believe that Tolkien's depictions of Mordor and the Shire, came from his own personal experiences in the trenches of WWI, so I'd argue that LOTR actually has some fairly significant reflection on the real world.
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” is also worth reading. It’s set in, essentially, a _bad_ Ankh Morpork; like Ankh Morpork it’s a vast chaotic fantasy city (both are probably based on London) but New Crobuzon is _nightmarish_.
(I’ve always been curious to what if any extent one influenced the other; Discworld is older, but Ankh Morpork gets fleshed out a lot later. Given how small a world UK sci-fi/fantasy is they’d almost certainly have been aware of each others’ work.)
dcminter 3 hours ago [-]
They seem very distinct to me - the mutual affinity with London seems much stronger than any cross literature bonds there.
I do remember thinking Kraken was a little Gaimanesque though so that suggests at least a transitive link to Pratchett, so perhaps ...?
btw your blog link in your profile doesn't work for me (we seem to have similar taste in literature so I thought I'd see what you've written)
robertlagrant 1 days ago [-]
> I believe that Tolkien's depictions of Mordor and the Shire, came from his own personal experiences in the trenches of WWI
Yes, and the general impinging of mechanisation and automation on rural life.
ChrisMarshallNY 19 hours ago [-]
From all accounts, Mordor seems to be a more pleasant place, than 1916 Somme.
bix6 1 days ago [-]
Please don’t let the few who have co-opted LOTR ruin it for the rest of us. It is a shame though, I wear my Palantir shirt very infrequently now.
I’m currently on book 2 of Discworld and finding it ludicrously enjoyable. Its absurdity makes it feel like an antidote to many things.
It feels more fantasy than “hardest of hard sci fi” to me though? And I think the space suit was broken so is it a good model for tech?
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
The first few books are straight-up parody fantasy. The first one which even _verges_ on feeling like Discworld is the third, Equal Rites, but really you probably won’t see what he’s talking about til Wyrd Sisters and Guards, Guards if you read chronologically.
Macha 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the first two books especially were very clearly intended as "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but fantasy". They're a good read, but they're not quite what the series became
InkCanon 1 days ago [-]
One of the marvelous things about Discworld is that although it is absurd, it is one of those logical abstractions of technology I've seen. For example he describes in an incredibly lifelike way the clacks system (basically a kind of internet) and it's many properties - the network effects of internet infrastructure, it's used in commerce, the importance of information, the "hackers" who manipulate it, etc. Discworld is almost really hard scifi sometimes.
dcminter 23 hours ago [-]
There were real semaphore systems used for communication. Then he layered a lot of early telegraph stuff on top of that, popped some of his own invention into the mix and finally used the rest to parody internet and mobile phones. It's magnificent really.
Speaking of sci fi - have you read Strata and Dark Side? They're pastiches of Asimov and Niven and so on, but he has some really neat ideas in there as well. I particularly like his notion of vacuum tube technology taken to its limits in Strata.
If ever I needed proof of the non-existence of a benign all powerful god then the fact that someone who loved writing that kind of intricate and clever sophisticated humour would be so cruelly struck down with Alzheimers would suffice.
"A life with footnotes", the biography of him by Rob Wilkins is excellent and very moving.
One of the major recurring themes of r/discworld is that so much of the amazing ideas in Discworld were actually real things.
bloopernova 23 hours ago [-]
The Clacks, the Disorganiser, Dwarf-discovered Devices, and L-Space are all wonderful ideas. I'm a huge fan of the City Watch series, with Thud! being my absolute favourite.
I envy those reading the series for the first time!
Tuna-Fish 16 hours ago [-]
To greatly oversimplify, the first 4 Discworld books are about fantasy. The ones after that are about other subjects, using the fantasy world of Discworld as a vehicle. And Pratchett really does this masterfully.
IsTom 1 days ago [-]
> on book 2
All the books were written over span of 30+ years and they changed over the time during this.
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
I love Discworld, both its universum and characters like Death and Vimes, yet author first proves that they lack cognitive abilities to understand and position Tolkien's work, then gives hints that their understanding of Roundworld is as superficial as is the character of Discworld, which is no less a work of escapism as is Middle-Earth.
People tend to mistake sarcasm and satire with realistic and valuable insight. If, for example, you want to understand something about war in our Roundworld, do not read LotR or Jingo. Read Thucidydes.
travisgriggs 20 hours ago [-]
As I scroll through the various discworld commentaries here, one of the things I haven't seen surface much yet is Pratchett as a dialog artist. My dad and I were both discussing just the other day how we’re honestly happy just picking up any Discworld book, opening it anywhere, and having a listen on what the characters are saying to each other at the moment. I’m not sure what others have created dialogue like that. Maybe Michael Sullivan in his Theft of Swords series.
i_don_t_know 18 hours ago [-]
The dialogs and the interaction between characters are also driving the story in a natural way. It’s like those screwball comedies from the 30s (His Girl Friday etc). Pratchett had a good ear for how people talk, and he managed to put it on page.
There are no lengthy stilted lectures (characters explaining stuff to other characters) as in some other books by other authors, and only few (and usually short) descriptions of what happens when and then this and then that and then something else.
dcminter 3 hours ago [-]
Stephen Briggs, who adapted several of the works for the stage, said the dialogue was an absolute gift for that.
Think of how the "Dread Portal" scene in Guards Guards! would play out on stage and one sees exactly what he means.
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
How he sets up "Minge drinking" is a very good example.
swyx 7 hours ago [-]
which book is that? what about it?
ggm 7 hours ago [-]
"Thud" The women coppers go out for a drink. Fred and Nobbs observe and make comment. Pratchett knew he wanted the pun(e) and I think worked out how to get it into dialogue
travisgriggs 1 days ago [-]
“The more seriously you take Discworld, the smarter you get about Roundworld.”
Love that.
I love LoTR too. I would never feel the need to pick one OR the other. It’s not about WHICH. Much better to love BOTH. AND is the correct operator to place between these two great sets of works.
I think an under appreciated subset of Discworld is the Tiffany Aching series. If you really want to see Pratchett’s notions of “good morality” on display, these model it the best IMO.
Macha 21 hours ago [-]
> I think an under appreciated subset of Discworld is the Tiffany Aching series.
Yeah, the author indicates he skipped them, probably because of the YA moniker, but honestly, _maybe_ Wee Free Men exempted, they're equally as mature as any other discworld books, with really the only YA thing about them being their underage protagonist.
Scarblac 18 hours ago [-]
The main thing with his YA books is that the themes are darker and they're scarier than the regular stuff, imo.
dmd 18 hours ago [-]
My 10 year old - who has never really been exposed to religion, much less the 'WWJD' meme - told me a few months ago that when she wonders what she should do in a situation, she asks herself what Tiffany Aching would do.
zem 20 hours ago [-]
yeah the tiffany aching subseries is perhaps the most consistently good one. loved every book in it.
mulakosag 23 hours ago [-]
I don't think anybody is asking to choose one over the other. You can love both or either of them.
lolinder 22 hours ago [-]
TFA explicitly sets out to contrast the two:
> The Lord of the Rings on the other hand — the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld.
> ...
> The thought I began with, that The Lord of the Rings, whatever its merits as a fantasy tale, is brain-rot for the technological mind, is one that I find so obvious it feels barely worth stating.
It's honestly hard to read the piece because of how clearly visible the author's sneer towards those who love Tolkien is.
Ygg2 23 hours ago [-]
> The more seriously you take Discworld, the smarter you get about Roundworld.”
Depends where. Getting serious about Discworld would make you think thinking something makes it real. Which is a different set of crazy.
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
Tolkien himself said to beware allegorical readings. He said had he sought allegory, by book III the rings of power would have been seized for good or ill, and the Hobbits discarded as irrelevant or enslaved. Likewise the palentir (!)
Tolkien also faced extensive criticism from Christians for a non catholic fictive world, something he easily disregarded as trite. He was a loyal devout catholic in every respect.
His biography by Humphrey Carpenter goes into all this.
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977
megadata 1 days ago [-]
There are many ways of rightly praising Discword without sucker punching LOTR.
hummingn3rd 3 hours ago [-]
I thought this was going to be about all the physics rules in the discwolrd, like how light travels, the rule of the one chance in a million, or that cats can see the eight color or Death etc. I'd love to see a list of all of them, I haven't noticed any inconsistencies so far but I haven't read that many novels yet.
thih9 24 hours ago [-]
> Now, for those of you who haven’t read the Discworld series, it is basically the anti-LOTR.
This seems very wrong. Discworld heroes value the power of legends, LOTR heroes live for everyday life and sillines. While different on the outside, the essence of these books can be quite similar.
Barrin92 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is very wrong. The Discworld series isn't that far from LOTR in spirit. It's just that Pratchett takes the modern secular humanist perspective and LOTR was a deeply Catholic work. Discworld is more meta, ironic, less overtly moral but does teach not so dissimilar lessons, which isn't particularly uncommon.
The anti-LOTR has always been Dune, which Tolkien himself was aware of. It's one of the few stories he was uncharacteristically openly negative about.
IsTom 1 days ago [-]
> Roundworld isn’t even modeled in the Middle Earth cosmology
Middle-earth is a fantasy history of England and we're in sixth age (or something like that) of it.
It becomes round with the third age.
samirillian 10 hours ago [-]
1) inconsistent argument: Frodo is just as mediocre as Rincewind.
2) I don’t respect the bald claim that all chosen ones are bad, or the implicit claim that we can somehow avoid them. Universals always have exceptions. If we’re being “real” here about our agential change, we must admit that species evolve by natural selection we might say genetic chosen ones. And anyway I do think there are some special people so sue me.
3) consider the names of Peter Thiel’s companies: palantir, mithril. Thiel, I’m sure ironically, named his companies after objects possessing exactly that moral ambiguity that the author claims does not exist in Tolkien’s world. Thiel is telegraphing it straight to you via Tolkien: do not trust me, I will use these objects for my own gain.
4) Discworld can afford to be light and playful because it was written in easy times. In one preface, Tolkien wrote that all the world’s great powers would obviously have tried to turn the ring into a weapon if it really existed.
Vsolar 23 hours ago [-]
I always found Pratchett's novels to be amazing sources of humor and creativity. I'm glad I'm not alone on that one.
patrickmay 23 hours ago [-]
Terry Pratchett hasn’t been an escapist writer for quite some time.
He’ll amuse you, sure, but he won’t tell you that things are great just the way they are or that they’re hopeless and there’s nothing you can do. He’ll tell you that you — yes, you — should make them better.
And then he’ll do something even more radical. He’ll make you think you can.
-- randombrethren, Tumblr
roter 23 hours ago [-]
One of his (Sir Terry) sources for inspiration was Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable [0]. Indeed he wrote a foreword for one of them.
[0] Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
dcminter 1 days ago [-]
I mean addressing the initial proposition - of course a work of satire/parody of the real world is going to be a better basis for thinking about the real world than a work of escapism!
The rest of it, I think, won't persuade anyone to read Discworld novels who's resisted them so far. Those who have and love them will find it a pleasant enough survey.
Oh and I personally think that Equal Rites is the best entry point to the series rather than Sourcery. But then I was reading them in publishing order anyway and eagerly waiting for each new one to come out. Damn I miss being able to look forward to a new Pratchett novel; he was a Wodehouse for my generation.
tsumnia 24 hours ago [-]
I followed the prescribed unofficial Reading Order graphic when I started the series (only 10ish books in), and I've jumped around between all the different protagonists. Color of Magic, Mort, Guards Guards, and the Equal Rites do well enough to show you what the Disc is all about, the absurdity of normalcy, and some of the crazy antics people get into. I think it may be more a matter of what "type" of fiction are you looking for - a constantly terrified Rincewind in a world of magic, a new to the job Mort where no one believes HE is Death, a tired Sam Vimes trying to understand a world that is changing faster than he can keep up, or the witches the reject all the social rules of the land. Really the only one I wouldn't recommend first is Small Gods, but mostly because its very self contained to the Klatchian region while the others are on another continent.
cyberax 12 hours ago [-]
> I wouldn't recommend first is Small Gods, but mostly because its very self contained to the Klatchian region while the others are on another continent.
For the same reason, "Small Gods" is actually a great introduction to the series. I think it's really my favorite book in the series.
lc9er 1 days ago [-]
Wodehouse is a great comparison. I typically suggest people start with “Guards! Guards!”, but the Witches or Night Watch books are both great starting points - Granny Weatherwax and Sam Vimes are probably the most explored characters, followed by Death, Tiffany, and Moist.
If you like “Guards! Guards!” or “Equal Rites”, then go back and start from the beginning. The first two novels are fun, but sound like Pratchett was channeling Monty Python and Douglas Adams. It took a few books before his own voice really shined through.
teddyh 1 days ago [-]
“Equal Rites” is the first in the “witches” series, but is, IIUC, considered a very weak entry. The rest of the witches series don’t really acknowledge the events in it, and they start off the next book with a blank slate, not assuming that you have read the first one. If you really just want to read the witches series, I’d suggest that you instead start with the second book, “Wyrd Sisters”.
dcminter 1 days ago [-]
His very last book has Esk in it.
I understand the view, I just don't agree. It has lots of nice subtle jokes in it and was the first to have a bit more depth to the story rather than being a slightly scattered and episodic parody of thr fantasy genre.
But then I like Dark Side and Strata a lot too.
Edit to add: incidentally there are a lot of minor throwaway jokes throughout the series that require you to have read the preceding books to get them. That in itself is IMO enough reason to aim to read them in publication order. But you do you, he was very prolific, I can see why someone coming in after the fact might choose not to tackle the whole lot from beginning to end.
nsbk 1 days ago [-]
What entry point would you recommend to a total newcomer to the series?
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
Wyrd Sisters (first Witches novel in which the characters have more or less settled down to what they’ll be for the rest of the series) or Guards, Guards (first Vimes novel, and first ‘normal’ Ankh Morpork novel; an Ankh Morpork shows up in earlier novels but that version is more or less entirely retconned away quite quickly.)
nsbk 23 hours ago [-]
Both sound great, I’ll probably read both and decide which series to cover first. Thanks!
zabzonk 1 days ago [-]
"Lords & Ladies", and then expand out in both/all directions.
Horrible elves, Granny at her best (and Nanny), Magrat the killer queen, Morris dancing, stupid wizzards and lots of other stuff - what's not to like?
Probably just because it's my fave. But you can read them and enjoy in any order.
cancerhacker 22 hours ago [-]
The only reason I disagree is that L&L jumps in with some very well established characters that had been built up earlier. But I do love his (historically accurate by lore?) description of elves. He put a lot of research into re-establishing the myths and lore of his little corner of the world.
(Along those lines I would also recommend Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell” which builds its own parallel history set in the early 1800s Britain, with Fairies taking the same role as elves in discworld.
dcminter 22 hours ago [-]
I think Susannah Clarke is the only living author I can think of who would inspire the same enthusiasm from me upon news of a new book from them. Alas, she is not quite as prolific as PTerry :)
Mustn't grumble though, it's not like Jonathan Strange was a pamphlet!
rsynnott 22 hours ago [-]
> But I do love his (historically accurate by lore?) description of elves.
Yeah, more or less. The “elves/fairies are nice, or at least _good_” thing is a fairly modern creation (owing a lot to Tolkien, really).
nsbk 23 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a lot of fun indeed! Thanks for the advice
mulakosag 20 hours ago [-]
Small Gods. It is a self contained book which I think truly shows the humor and philosophy of Pratchett.
24 hours ago [-]
asjir 1 days ago [-]
Why not start with Colour of Magic?
For context, I started with it, then Light Fantastic and I'm finishing Sourcery now.
dcminter 24 hours ago [-]
I did too (a long time ago when I was 13). But I think there was a change in tone with and continuing after Equal Rites, in that the characters and story were a bit more thorough rather than being, essentially, a sketch-show vehicle for parody and quips.
Besides, it introduces Granny Weatherwax, who is IMO one of his two greatest creations (the other being Vimes of course).
Edit: Oh, by the way, if you're just now working your way through them then (a) I envy you and (b) I recommend reading the Annotated Pratchett File for each book - after you finish each of course: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
> I recommend reading the Annotated Pratchett File for each book - after you finish each of course: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/
Sadly, it’s pretty sparse or non-existent for the later books, but the TVTropes pages on them are usually very good, and cover a lot of the same ground.
asjir 20 hours ago [-]
Ahh, I see, thank you (and other commenters)
I was a bit surprised by the change in tone in a way I probably wouldn't've been if I'd read chronologically.
kemayo 22 hours ago [-]
Main argument against starting with Color of Magic would be that it's different enough from the rest of the series that it's not entirely useful for knowing whether you'll want to read the rest.
It and Light Fantastic are both fantasy-parody travelogues, which are mostly about the protagonists moving through a sequence of largely disconnected pastiches of other fantasy works. After this the series rapidly switches to fantasy as metaphor for real-world situations, with the fantasy elements being more broad tropes rather than specifics references.
travisgriggs 20 hours ago [-]
They are by far the most Monty Pythonesque of the books. If you enjoy that, look for all of the Rincewind books. If you like less of that, avoid the Rincewind books (IMHO).
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
Many of the cultural references are to other fantasy books and comics from the 1980s, so they're increasingly lost on current readers.
I generally recommend starting with Wyrd Sisters, since many people are familiar with Macbeth.
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
You certainly _can_, but they’re more or less straight-up parody fantasy, and _very_ different to the rest of the series.
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
I’d agree on Equal Rites; Sourcery is a _weird_ Discworld book, though I think it’s the one that most blatantly hits the theme, which shows up more subtly elsewhere, that “great men (TM)” are _a bad thing_.
thaumasiotes 22 hours ago [-]
> Sourcery is a _weird_ Discworld book
He must have liked it; he rewrote it later as Good Omens.
rsynnott 22 hours ago [-]
Oh, yeah, I’m not saying it’s bad, but it’s… kind of what TVTropes calls Early Installment Weirdness; it feels very different to what comes later.
dcminter 22 hours ago [-]
Could you explain? I don't see much similarity between them.
Detrytus 19 hours ago [-]
In both protagonist is a super powerful boy, unintentionally bringing the world on the brink of Armageddon?
dcminter 18 hours ago [-]
Well, I guess...? Tonally they feel completely different and Good Omens draws a lot of its DNA from The Omen (and, wonderfully, Richmal Crompton) whereas I don't see any of that in Sourcery.
I find it hard to see Good Omens as a do-over of Sourcery, but I guess they do have something in common.
trowawee 16 hours ago [-]
Probably worth noting that Pratchett wrote most of the "Adam and the gang" sections of Good Omens, while Gaiman was responsible for the riders and the more "mythological" parts. So I do see a pretty clear throughline from Sourcery to the Pratchett parts of Good Omens.
protocolture 6 hours ago [-]
I quite like the Most Von Lipwig stuff.
But honestly KJ Parkers novels are better again.
rkagerer 13 hours ago [-]
Pratchett's series of books are the only ones I've reread more than half a dozen times, in some cases. Love his work.
cancerhacker 22 hours ago [-]
I love discworld and prosetyilize its virtues when and where I can, but two thoughts about this:
1 - why not both?
2 - via MST3K “If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, And other science facts...(la! la! la!) Then repeat to yourself its just a show, I should really just relax...”
popalchemist 16 hours ago [-]
Reading LOTR as about technology is like reading Alice in Wonderland as about tea time ettiquette. For fuck's sake.
LOTR makes its theme and conceits explicit - it is about the appeal of power to the ego. Industrialization is an expression of that will to power, and its ability to magnify man's already-present distorted relationship with nature. That industry relies on technology does not make technology the central topic or even the target of critique.
Bone-headed take.
golergka 16 hours ago [-]
Reading is a creative process. You should not be bound by author's intention or by conventional knowledge about the material. If you approach it with a new perspective and get new ideas out of it, or even if it just means you have a good time, then it's worth it.
In fact, Alice in Wonderland relationship to ettiquette, both at a tea table and in royal court, is a curious theme.
popalchemist 16 hours ago [-]
While you can read anything as anything, not all readings are equally meritorious. Making an unmeritorious reading into the basis of a critique is a form of straw man.
yapyap 1 hours ago [-]
How’s about not looking to fantasy books for inspiration on how real world socities should interact with technology?
You’re basically basing your whole technology worldview off a fantasy world created by a single person
taocoyote 14 hours ago [-]
The stories in Discworld books are character driven. LOTR is much more plot driven. I feel like this is an apples and oranges comparison.
It also feels a bit like the false dichotomy arguments from my teenage years, where you could like either Star Trek or Star Wars, but not both.
DarkNova6 1 days ago [-]
The inherent misconception of the author is about “seriousness”. His hypothesis is that taking Discworld serious is “good”, while taking LOTR as serious is “bad”.
No, it’s really about taking either universe at face value, which is the problem. And with Discworld, its overt absurdity and humor forces you to think about it more deeply.
LOTR doesn’t make an effort to explain what it is about. But knowing just a little about history and the author goes a long way.
breckenedge 24 hours ago [-]
How does it compare to the Culture series? I’ve been reading that lately and enjoying it. Almost done though, so looking for the next series to pick up.
swiftcoder 24 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of the author's points about Discworld hold true also for the Culture. Both works are steadfastly utopian, and build their conflicts around the intersection of that utopia with other, less utopian societies. Both have a strong suspicion of the Chosen One, and tend to rely on the actions of an ensemble of imperfect characters to drive forward the plot.
Where I hesitate is that I'm not sure Discworld's humour will land with everyone. It's a very dry form of absurdist British humour - if you enjoy Douglas Adams, you will probably get along with Terry Pratchett.
breckenedge 23 hours ago [-]
Great, I love Douglas Adams!
zabzonk 23 hours ago [-]
Well, they are both series, but the Discworld books have a bunch of recurring characters, and are basically comedic, whereas the Culture books do not, though Special Circumstances agent Diziet Sma pops up a few times. And the Culture books are much darker - the Culture is very morally ambiguous.
Discworld is a very funny place - I'm sure you would enjoy it.
shkkmo 23 hours ago [-]
The article ends with section called "Discworld Rules vs. Culture Rules" that you would probably find worth reading.
breckenedge 23 hours ago [-]
:facepalm: thanks for pointing that out
Pfhortune 21 hours ago [-]
The idea of crypto as a force for plurality is baffling. Crypto is just as controlled by the “sourcerers” of round world as state controlled fiat currency. Distributed ledgers make no difference here. It’s still just “chosen ones” projecting their power.
And the jab at “wokism” is pretty ironic, as the right has been making a very overt push for rendering culture into a grey goo, by quashing diversity.
rdtsc 23 hours ago [-]
> And it only gets sillier from there.
That’s exactly where it fails for me: it is too cute, like a longer than necessary joke.
It’s just not my cup of tea to read and think “oh yeah, I see they inverted the thing, very cute, they even have the elephants and the turtles”. It’s ok but maybe for a short essay or a comic book only.
hyperman1 18 hours ago [-]
There is a split in discworld around 'Mort'. The first 2 books are at their core a critique on all the tolkien clone books repeating these same old boring cliches. The 3rd is a critique around the lack of gender equiety in fantasy.
The 4th book, Mort, is Terry dealing with the fact that he has a successfull series running, so he might as well start writing his own stories. He's not primarily reactionary at this point. This is for me the first 'real' discworld book.
In fact, I find the first 3 books a string of stand alone gags if you don't see them as critiques of the genre. Funny but shallow. Small Gods has real depth, but the author still stands at the sidelines. The Truth or Nightwatch are even deeper, and I suspect they are both autobiographic and cathartic on some level.
dcminter 22 hours ago [-]
This sounds like you might have read only the early novels which, yes, were mainly silly. Try Night Watch perhaps? There's a bit of background silliness - residual from all the world building that's gone on before - but to me it's one of his most thoughtful novels.
It's perfectly ok for them not to be your cuppa of course; my Mum and I loved them but my Dad never got into them despite trying quite a few times. Funny because generally our tastes intersected quite thoroughly.
lelanthran 22 hours ago [-]
Night watch is probably my favourite, but for me Jingo is the one with the most depth.
stevekemp 21 hours ago [-]
I can see why you'd choose it, but if picking a standalone "Small Gods" is the one I'd always choose.
(To be honest I'm lying, the standalone book I prefer myself is Pyramids, but the one I'd recommend to others is Small Gods.)
dcminter 19 hours ago [-]
"The trouble with you, Ibid, is that you think you're the biggest bloody authority on everything" :D
So many good gags in that one. I love the cinematic flashback scenes while Pteppic is falling off the wall. Plus it's where the "Pterry" nickname comes from of course.
travisgriggs 20 hours ago [-]
Thief of Time is my fav of the standalones. Always wish there had been more of that.
If you like Death, Hogfather is my first recommendation.
Cosi1125 20 hours ago [-]
Night Watch is really dark. Also, The Monstrous Regiment. But the books I love the most are the ones with an "Alistair MacLean vibe" to them: Thud! (MacLean's Fear is the Key) and The Truth (Discworld version of All the President's Men?).
dcminter 19 hours ago [-]
The Truth definitely spends some time parodying ATPM (a film I adore) and is one of my favourite PTerry novels. I re-read it last week as it happens.
rdtsc 20 hours ago [-]
Thank you for the suggestion. I might even have it in my library, someone gifted it to me.
zem 20 hours ago [-]
be warned that night watch is perhaps the least standalone of the discworld books, though. to my mind it is unquestionably the pinnacle of an already brilliant series, but it builds upon the earlier watch books.
allturtles 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, I have tried to enjoy Pratchett and have the same feeling. I read Guards, Guards! and found it amusing for about 50 pages, then it became tedious, hitting the same notes over and over. I would have enjoyed a short story about Carrot, I think.
the_af 24 hours ago [-]
I advice everyone not to follow the TFA's author's example and do read Tiffany Aching series, which is one of the best. Yes, it's marketed as YA fiction, but disregard: it's exactly the same style and themes as the rest of Discworld, and as good or better.
Also, the author does a disservice to Small Gods (also, oddly names the god Om as GamesStop, was that humor?), but this novel is one of the best ones in my opinion -- self-contained and both humorous and strangely moving.
sundarurfriend 17 hours ago [-]
> I advice everyone not to follow the TFA's author's example and do read Tiffany Aching series, which is one of the best. Yes, it's marketed as YA fiction, but disregard: it's exactly the same style and themes as the rest of Discworld, and as good or better.
To each their own, but to me the Tiffany books definitely felt weaker and felt like Terry Pratchett was restricting himself in terms of worldbuilding, human complexity (which Discworld usually portrays very well), and narrative. I hadn't knownn they were meant as YA fiction, but looking back, that would explain the mild feeling of lack-of-Discworld-richness to the books.
They aren't bad books by any means - just today, I was thinking about the "third thoughts" idea from one of these books and how interesting a mental model it is - but they certainly have a different feel from the rest of them.
awinter-py 24 hours ago [-]
small gods is about how history could go either way + about developing critical thinking skills through reading
agree that it's one of the best
dcminter 22 hours ago [-]
Not to mention that it's also about the difference between religion and the church!
awinter-py 16 hours ago [-]
atheists like Simony are almost as good as believers
Lyngbakr 23 hours ago [-]
Small Gods is my favourite so far. I think it's a great example of how Sir Terry could be silly and funny whilst making very interesting points about (usually) serious matters.
awinter-py 22 hours ago [-]
hoping not to spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it, but a line that has stayed with me:
'you don't know what they mean / they know what they mean'
cancerhacker 22 hours ago [-]
“It takes a long time for a man like Vorbis to die” - is my favorite, but the book is chock full of brilliantly executed philosophy.
awinter-py 17 hours ago [-]
at the end of the desert is judgment
the_af 15 hours ago [-]
I even found Vorbis' end strangely moving, though in large part due to Brutha, of course.
ttepasse 19 hours ago [-]
Small Gods postulates that Discworld gods get their power through the amount of belief in them.
Memestocks get their value not through some form of fundamentals but how many people believe in them.
the_af 14 hours ago [-]
Why GameStop though?
Also, I find it slightly distasteful to refer to works of literature I like with the fad term du jour.
I can't say I liked this article overall.
joeconway 22 hours ago [-]
“As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed”
> As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical
Tolkien himself in the foreword to fellowship
This person needs to cool it with the pseudo intellectualism and let people enjoy things
InkCanon 1 days ago [-]
Seems like this "Chiang's law" would fail in Discworld, where both people and technology are strange.
t-3 1 days ago [-]
> (except the Tiffany Aching ones)
Those are actually some of the better ones among the later books though! If you're going to skip, skip the Moist von Lipwig books. They're substantially worse than the other books in the series, IMO. Not too big a fan of the Watch books after Night Watch either (Night Watch was definitely peak Vimes though!).
> These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young.
Other than maybe missing one or two sex jokes, not really?
> The only story revolving consequentially around gods is Small Gods, about a meme-stock god named GameStop, whose power crashes, and who ambitiously plans to pump himself back up to a new high.
Did an LLM hallucinate or is this supposed to be a joke? The god's name is Om.
stevekemp 1 days ago [-]
I think your comment just goes to show we all have different tastes - I love Moist, and his chain-smoking girlfriend.
There's only one Discworld book I don't like, and it is unseen academicals - the football one - I struggled to finish that, and it's the only one I've read only a single time. Every other discworld book I've read numerous times over the past 20+ years.
Macha 20 hours ago [-]
> I think your comment just goes to show we all have different tastes - I love Moist, and his chain-smoking girlfriend.
The one thing I'll fault the Moist books on is they're sort of the same book 3 times if you're in it for the story. If you enjoy the post/finance/rail exploration, that's enough to get past it, and I certainly did, but I can't blame others who didn't.
sundarurfriend 17 hours ago [-]
I voted you up because I don't fully disagree, but the "if you're in it [only] for the story" part is an important conditional. Once you get beyond the story outline similarities, the books feel different in fundamental ways.
For eg., Going Postal and Making Money have the same basic setup, and a one-line story description would sound very similar. But Going Postal is about themes of past and future, regret and risk, connecting to the past while bringing in the future; while Making Money feels like a constant tug-of-war between order and chaos, and hence ultimately about balance.
dcminter 22 hours ago [-]
I'm with you on Moist. As for Unseen Academicals - yes, I think that was one of the ones where Alzheimers was really getting its teeth into him. Raising Steam is similar.
There's a point where you get a lot of rather similar monologues from his characters. I presume these are from the period after he had to dictate as he couldn't write directly any more. If so it's amazing that they're as good as they are.
What an embuggerance (as he said himself).
rsynnott 23 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure it’s a joke. Gods in Discworld are, essentially, scams based on belief; an unkind person might posit that meme stocks are similar.
DennisP 1 days ago [-]
Also, Hogfather is another one. The Hogfather is a god, essentially Discworld's Santa Claus, and the whole story is about a plot to kill him off.
Ekaros 16 hours ago [-]
What makes Hogfather interesting is that I might argue that he is not a god. At least for taken meaning of what a god is and acts like in/on Discworld. He is more so a force of nature like Death. Or a thing like tooth fairy.
Such entities have a special existence on Discworld.
import_awesome 1 days ago [-]
Why not both? LLMs are hilarious when they aren't trying to be funny. They are pretty bad at jokes normally, but when LLMs hallucinate more than normal it has the right amount of absurdity to be funny.
dcminter 22 hours ago [-]
Did you get all the fonts and other printing terms in The Truth? Did you get all the philosopher and academia jokes in Pyramids? Did you really understand all of Vimes' middle-aged gloom as a youth?
More power to your elbow if so, but I didn't. Fortunately the broader slapstick and parody was right up my alley and I grew into (at least some of) the rest.
ben_ 22 hours ago [-]
> Their ideology is something like the Wokism of Discworld, a deadening, stifling, faceless force of intersectional lifelessness.
What? Do words even have meaning anymore? How is that anything to do with being "woke"?
notahacker 18 hours ago [-]
I think Pratchett probably revolved in his grave at the idea that the lifelessness of the Auditors came from lack of contempt towards minorities...
egypturnash 24 hours ago [-]
> The Auditors of Reality are particularly interesting. They are the Discworld edition of what I’ve called the Great Bureaucrat archetype elsewhere. Their ideology is something like the Wokism of Discworld, a deadening, stifling, faceless force of intersectional lifelessness.
what
Man this dude sure has a definition of “woke” that is completely alien to the roots of that term.
> I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.
what
Dude they are comic fantasy, yes Pratchett has Things to Say about the world in them, more and more as the series goes on, but I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen and the series was a constant delight through my college years and beyond. Yes there are things in
Discworld that will zoom right by a kid and only land when you come back to it as an adult. That’s part of why they’re good books. There’s things like that in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Cycle (Book of Three, Black Cauldron, etc) that hit me like a ton of bricks when I pick up those little books forty years after I first read them as a kid and completely missed those parts. Stories can speak to multiple ages on multiple levels.
dcminter 23 hours ago [-]
> I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen
I read Colour of Magic when I was 13 I think. It might have been a year or two later; a friend's mother had heard the Radio 4 "Woman's Hour" reading of Equal Rites and recommended them to me as she knew I liked Douglas Adams.
Adams and Pratchett had this in common - they had sufficient layers of jokes in them that they could appeal to both me in my early teens, and a friend's mother in her 40s (roughly). I missed a huge number of gags on the first read through. I like to re-read familiar books, though, and I used to get a few more each time through.
Until I read the APF there were still a bunch of historical gags or similar that I was missing by a country mile! I'm sure there are plenty more that have still gone over my head.
I honestly think that Pratchett was a better writer than Wodehouse, even though that's practically heresy for a Brit.
floren 18 hours ago [-]
The Discworld books are great but yeah, they're very much at the level of say a bright 15 year old. I've been reading them since I was that age, and I always find plenty to enjoy, but I think they're really at their best for teens.
notahacker 17 hours ago [-]
tbh you probably get more out of some of them in your mid teens, especially the ones which really aren't trying to make serious points (the first two especially) and the ones that were explicitly written as YA fiction. The sophisticated bits are references, not stuff you won't understand until you've been married and the social commentary isn't exactly hard to digest. (Or maybe it is if you wait until your 40s and conclude that the Auditors are 'woke'!)
Pratchett wrote good kids books earlier in his career too
Macha 20 hours ago [-]
> Wokism of Discworld
That comment also raised some eyebrows when I read it. Discworld is pretty "woke". The female dwarves are a bunch of LGBT analogues, a huge chunk of the watch series is about racism, Night Watch and Jingo are both pretty anti-populism.
jfengel 24 hours ago [-]
That is how "woke" is used now. Any resemblance to the original use is completely lost. It is merely "things I don't like".
And it has become a convenient shibboleth: anyone using the word that way has nothing of value to say to me on any topic.
tacitusarc 23 hours ago [-]
Perhaps ironically, that’s not actually what shibboleth means.
jfengel 22 hours ago [-]
"A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth." (Wiktionary).
If you mean to restrict it to the Biblical usage of pronunciation, it generalized past that centuries ago.
olddustytrail 19 hours ago [-]
It's exactly what it means. Don't try and correct people if your English is limited.
galacticaactual 19 hours ago [-]
An utterly uncalled for hit piece on a much beloved piece of work (LOTR).
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
It's not the first and it won't be the last. Remember the inklings used to groan when he wanted to read another chapter. So even in drafting his friends were agin him.
Lewis wanted beer and belches. Strange how his own sermonising is so boring.
satisfice 18 hours ago [-]
I can't take Discworld seriously. It doesn't even take itself seriously. I read the first book, which was full of random deus doing ex machina all over the place, and tapped out.
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
It's OK not to like things and it's OK to change your mind. I didn't like discworld and I changed my mind. It's also OK not to read things. I've never finished Ulysses or seen the point of Finnigans wake or Buddenbrooks or heaps of other great works.
I love Mansfield Park. My partner hates it. Even in Austen you can pick and chose which bit of ivory to pick up.
defrost 9 hours ago [-]
Make 2025 the year of not reading At Swim-Two-Birds !!
ggm 9 hours ago [-]
I did read it, many years ago but I may decide not to re read it.
Unlike wake, it's usefully short
Regrettably it's not about a bicycle or de selby
defrost 8 hours ago [-]
Pffft, readers, mar ná beidh ár leithéidí arís ann, who's got that kind of time anymore?
the Hobbits pursued not greatness or destiny, but took the only path toward life available to them and then returned to let the rest of the world get on with living.
> What I have a problem with is people trying to live forever as part of a Chosen One script which involves them trying to carve up all of the world into the dead empires of a dystopian Great Game world run according to a totalizing script.
I'm confident Tolkien would agree.
I also think any evaluation of LoTR should take into account Tolkien's background as a veteran of the trenches in WWI. In 2025 America, maybe that makes LoTR seem less relevant to our world. To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.
You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with, especially when there's no convenient ring to throw in a volcano?
The black-and-white starkness of LotR is what makes it unfit for use as an analogy to the real world! There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing, even if it may be a comforting and inspiring story to tell ourselves.
> You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with
"The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate? ... I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. Snowmane and Hasufel and the horses of my guard are in the inner court. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song – if any be left to sing of us hereafter.
'I will ride with you', said Aragorn"
-The Two Towers
Seems like it fits to me...
To use the example already given, how about Ukraine? I have a very hard time not placing that in a good vs evil framing.
It’s true that Ukraine isn’t perfectly good, and Russia isn’t purely evil, but it’s pretty damn close.
Here’s a nation that was just keeping to themselves and growing closer to the ones that didn’t want to annex them (surprise surprise) and the evil overlord thought that was too threatening and decided to pre-emptively annex them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm swede and like most here I'm firmly on Ukraine's side and see the pure evil shit Russian military does _every _day without any illusions. But this framing of good vs evil does not seem to pan out. A common sentiment is just to wipe out Russia from the map. And tempting as it might be, that doesn't seem very noble/good and the alternative, "Russian people finds the good in them and throw out the oligarchy forcefully and install democracy", is very naive. I mean even the US, a fully armed populace of strong freeminded men can't seem to see that they are treading the same path as Russia and take action. How reasonable is it then to have that expectation of a people systematically disempowered for decades.
Good vs evil is simplistic, but it serves as shorthand for "it's worth fighting for".
Are you in Donbas currently? If not, you are not fighting anything.
That's a very simplistic world-view. One does not have to be on the frontlines to help an effort. People donating to https://ukrainedefensefund.org/ are still "fighting", even though they aren't literally gunning people down in Donbas.
Little known fact: a while ago Russia doubled the sign-in bonus fot contractors to approximately $4.5k to keep the flow of people going. With Trump taking office this produced a wave of recruits who are betting on the chance that the war will be over before they finish training and actually arrive to the front.
Some of them are already there and the results are not good (for them).
I'm not saying the situation isn't difficult, but it doesn't serve the free world to see Russia as this unstoppable force, as it paints efforts at helping Ukraine as pointless.
We tossed the ring away in the 90ies, it turned out to be not the smartest idea
This may or may not be true, but Ukraine vs. Putin is absolutely one of those times where it's 100% accurate and useful.
Putin invaded Ukraine unprovoked, motivated by visions of restoring an empire to its former glory. He cannot be reasoned with, he cannot be appeased. The only hope that any of the formerly-occupied countries have is to defeat him, and any and all efforts to make the issue appear to be more grayscale than that will necessarily lead to disappointment and to further wars and bloodshed.
XO Hunter: "...I just think that in the nuclear world, the true enemy can't be destroyed."
Captain Ramsey: "Attention on deck. Von Clausewitz will now tell us exactly who the real enemy is. Von?"
XO Hunter: "In my humble opinion... in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
I think that's the difference. In WWII, appeasing Hitler was a mistake because it only emboldened him. Even back then, Tolkien had reservations about how far to take the war. While he abhorred Hitler, he initially supported Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" policy.
But today, a nuclear Russia cannot be defeated the way Germany was. "In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.
The question everyone is wrestling with is, how do we save Ukraine while preventing nuclear war? Unfortunately, we don't know the answer, and the risk of getting it wrong is catastrophic.
And finally: "We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Ukraine win the war" is foremost in russian minds, no?
As soon as you decide this, and let others know you have, you have lost everything. Because if that logic applies to Ukraine it applies equally to Poland, to Alaska, France, to Washington, D.C., to your hometown. You've committed to surrender everything to any power that has the potential to escalate to nuclear war.
(It's even worse if you don't believe this -- or if you think you do but would think differently if the thing to surrender was closer to home -- and let people think you do, because that makes it almost inevitable that things will escalate beyond your trigger point, resulting in nuclear war.)
It’s only rational to start a nuclear war if a country faces a direct existential threat: i.e. a significant percentage of the population will be killed or conquered and enslaved. The perceived outcome of nuclear war (widespread devastation) has to be preferable to what would happen otherwise.
Conflicts over territories at the far fringes of a great power’s sphere of influence (or desired sphere of influence) obviously don’t meet the bar. If it’s trivial to call your bluff, it’s probably better not to bluff.
The logical consequence of disagreeing with this is that every country that doesn't want a significant percentage of their population killed or conquered or enslaved should get their own nukes, because nobody else wants to help them. And I'm not sure every country acquires nukes is a safer world than maybe we don't let Putin have everything he wants
He knows it would be strategically impossible for the US or Nato to respond in kind to a nuclear attack on Ukraine. It can be rational for him to climb the escalation ladder if he knows his enemy will have to back down before he does because they have less to gain and more to lose.
I don’t like this situation at all, and I understand the point about rolling over to threats. Unfortunately, this is just how nuclear game theory works whether we like it or not. You can’t win in a conflict under MAD against an opponent who has more at stake than you.
And of course there can be an advantage for Russia in using nukes. They could destroy Ukraine's entire army, kill all its leaders, destroy all its infrastructure, etc. with no risk of (nuclear) retaliation. There would be many negative consequences too, so it's not likely to happen unless the conventional war is going very badly for Russia, but it's certainly a card they hold.
The reason the EU countries don’t just waltz into Ukraine probably has more to do with the knowledge they’re not dealing with a rational person, but with a bunch of ego. It’s not hard to predict how Putin will respond if his ego is threatened, but how the rest of Russia will respond to the command to launch nukes.
It’s not unlike the US, except it’s currently still fairly easy to predict that any US commander will just say no when ordered to fire on the EU.
(I expect a first response would be a single city, with warnings to evacuate. A show of what's next.)
The goal would be that Russians assist in taking out an out of control, lunatic who will destroy us all.
Understand, this isn't just about today. Over the next 100 years, every country will obtain the capacity for nukes. Every person on this planet needs to see, and know that using them indiscriminately means you lose.
The consequences are too dire otherwise.
Putin doesn't know that. Putin doesn't know quite what the repercussions would be. That's why he hasn't used them so far.
The game theory works roughly like this: Putin wins the most if his threats work. If they don't work, he has the choice between drawing a new red line, launching a limited nuclear attack on Ukraine, or full-on nuclear war. The last option is obviously out (guaranteed destruction is in no proportion to the reward). A limited nuclear attack would likely make him a pariah on the world stage and make it even more difficult to find trading partners. So instead he redraws the line.
If he ever went for the limited nuclear attack option Ukraine might give up, and the west would have to choose between war against Russia (high risk, low reward) or just tightening economic sanctions to the max and punishing anyone who dares to trade with him.
If we assume rational actors I don't see how this would ever escalate to nuclear war. And as long as Ukraine doesn't find a way to decisively push Russian troops out Russia has no incentive to climb the escalation ladder. Even as prolonged war leads to internal instability
Ukraine can cross as many of Putin's "red lines" as they wish. Ukraine did not start this war.
But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.
Unfortunately, I think the rational thing to do is to apply increasing pressure to Putin until he either backs down or proves that he is willing to blow up the world over Ukraine. If the latter, then we back down. Of course, the risks of that strategy are all too obvious.
Russia's nuclear arsenal is a perfectly adequate guarantee of Russia's security. Putin knows this, which is why he's happy to leave Russia's western border with NATO practically undefended while he pursues Ukraine. (This also disproves the "Putin invaded Ukraine because he's afraid of NATO" lie.)
It's more plausible that Putin's survival depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war. But "mad Putin blows up the world" is as much a problem for the Russians as anyone else.
That's also the reason why Alaska and France are safe, why Iran wants nukes, and is the best argument against disarmament you can find. The cat is out of the bag, and the attempts to put it back are starting to leave scars.
The only assurance of assistance built into the agreement is that parties would complain to the UN security council.
The Obama administration let Russia violate the agreement when they took Crimea. Putin's justification that Ukraine isn't a nation but a historically Russian territory only works if Russia pretends it was never a signatory, since recognition of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign nation was a part of it.
In short, pieces of paper do not trump the fear of nuclear weapons.
Because every time it is brought up it is easily demonstrated that nobody actually agreed to defend Ukraine. They each agreed not to invade Ukraine.
So? If nuclear war is always an intolerable choice for America, then America's nuclear weapons will never be used in any case, and any aggressor who can plausibly threaten nuclear war is free to seize anything from America with that threat.
If nuclear war isn't always intolerable, then, well, we've eliminated the premise off the upthread argument about Ukraine, and are in a different discussion.
If anything, nukes only remain an option because of the lack of Western troops in Ukraine, allowing Putin to make a limited nuclear attack that hits Ukrainians but isn't worth war a nuclear war for the West. And even that is a trigger Putin has repeatedly refused to pull, preferring to win the war the conventional way even if that takes years
And it was just so simple - provide Ukraine with all the weapons necessary to help them defend itself from the clear Russian agression. Or, you know, do that before the Russians started their main war in 2022, there was long enough warning from 2013, including hundreds of inocents murdered in an airliner the Russians show down...
As much as I felt the Dutch marines should have marched in there to retrieve the bodies when the Russians were faffing around, I do think the shooting down itself was an accident. Zero upside to doing that.
Which he won't do if mutually assured destruction is credible. He's not going to destroy the world including himself and everything he loves for Ukraine.
Once there are doubts that use of nuclear weapons will be punished, then all bets are off.
It’s a bad idea to bluff in situations like this, because when the obvious bluff is called and you are forced to back down, it makes enemies more likely to test all your commitments and “red lines”.
While Putin might not be willing to risk MAD either over Ukraine, it’s a lot more believable that he would than that the US would. There have been direct kinetic attacks on Moscow and parts of Russia have been invaded. There have been assassination attempts against people close to him. This is not some far away conflict for him. He’s already taking on a huge amount of risk, a lot more than the US has taken on in a long time—even in WW2 there was no direct attack on the continental US.
Personally I don't see any real chance of nuclear escalation over Ukraine on both sides. The war needs to end but to do that Putin needs to be given a way to deescalate and claim a win at home. But that can only be allowed to happen if Ukraine is made safe and secure once again and if Putin is willing to swallow that. And I see no evidence of that being true.
https://www.ucs.org/resources/whose-finger-button
No. We cannot let people just walk over other nations even at the cost of nuclear war
Anything else means the evil ones eventually win.
The Nazis had a black-and-white ideological viewpoint and seemed to believe themselves to be heroes fighting to save their people from evil Jews and their brainwashed minions. Do you see why those narratives are so dangerous now?
"What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!
Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.
I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.
Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends."
-The Two Towers
To be sure, there are situations where there is some genuinely complicated moral situation. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend to be moral morons and sagely nod our heads and say "Yes, but Nazis thought they were right too, hmm, hmm."
Normative language used as shorthand for current consensus for whether the conflict was justified given the likely alternative outcomes for not engaging.
is learning and changing hypocrisy?
The problem, of course, is that belief. It’s catastrophically wrong. And it’s the sort of thing that black and white good vs evil thinking can lead you towards.
We can simultaneously say “the Nazis thought they were good” and “the Nazis were profoundly evil.” We can acknowledge the relativity of perspective without needing to apply a relativity of good and evil.
A necessary element of true goodness is a willingness to consider new ideas, a constant reevaluation of one’s beliefs, and an acknowledgment that the world is complicated and messy. Someone who does these things can justifiably conclude that they’re good and the other guys are evil, but you have to maintain that openness and reevaluation or you can slide into Good vs Evil where you can see no wrong on your own side, and that leads to disaster.
Only when they are "narratives". When they are caution stories from historical facts we want to avoid repiting then they are not so stigmatising but a warnins.
Nobody should trow that storises again and again and some behaviour schamas should be always avoided. Unluckily that stories need to be reminded from time to time.
Even better: people should not only know about WWII-nazi-communism works but should know broad historical contects - what bring that evilness to Earth: communistic imperialism wanting to take over globe and using Germany poor situation (eg. sponsoring nazi party) after WWI to make attempt at concuering Europe (first).
Or maybe it was just another part of "Great Game" and reaults with using new technologies are worse and worse...
Sadly, it seems like this particular point was missed by several prominent tech folks who took notes from LotR...
Quite apart from not wanting people to try to be Sauron, Tolkein just didn't like industry very much.
> good does not need to destroy evil; good needs only to resist evil, and when it does that, evil destroys itself
The only way the Ring was destroyed was by accident when Gollum attacked Frodo to claim the Ring. The Evil that the ring stoked in the hearts of those it touched is what ended up destroying it in the end, not the Good people who took it to Mount Doom.
> Tolkien in his letters insists that Frodo did not fail – that his captivity to the Ring was inevitable
> No theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
The idea being that the evil that Melkor commits ultimately just builds towards the creators greater and secret purpose. It's kind of an attempt to deal with the "problem of evil".
(I’m not a Christian though so somebody please correct me if I am wrong)
Well, except for Aragorn, who turns out to be the true king of Gondor.
But it's also unambiguous that Aragorn, who was previously a nobody raised by elves, turns out to be the long-lost king and definitely does not just go back to whatever he was doing previously.
He absolutely does. Being the future king was a core part of his character, everything in his life was preparing him for it. The book version of Aragorn doesn't have the hesitance to accept his duty that the films portray, he doesn't have to be prodded into it: his whole life has revolved around his future kingship.
In a lot of ways the book Aragorn is just as superhuman as Gandalf is. He's an archetype, not a perspective character. The hobbits are the only normal humans.
But that’s just what all wizards are and always have been. It’s the only way to be a wizard. It isn’t, like, a hidden fact or anything. Wizard is a race not a profession. Like elf or dwarf or hobbit.
>the entire story is about a weak and almost completely unknown set of people who were "chosen" only by the most inexplicable series of events anyone could imagine.
I don't know what your point is.
Interesting to note that Peter Thiel has never named a company "Hobbiton"
And I think movie-LOTR-fans in particular are there at least as much for the Great Big Hero Chosen People Of Destiny aspects and battles as for the hobbits.
Anyway. my take of tfa: in discworld, the whole system is designed for pluralism and messy progress. in middle earth, the entire universe is designed for epic quests and magical solutions from wise old wizards.
frodo might be a humble hobbit, but he's still caught in a deterministic prophecy machine where the fate of the world depends on ONE RING and ONE QUEST
Oh come off it.
I've read all the Discworld novels. I've also read every other book that Terry Pratchett ever wrote [1]. All, that is, except for one that I've left for... later [2].
If Pratchett were still with us and heard anyone making such pompous statements about Discworld he'd slap the culprit in the face [3]. See, the thing to understand about Terry Pratchett is that he was quintessentially British, and by that I mean the good British [4]. As such his greatest fear was that someone might take what he wrote seriously and try to follow it like some kind of life advice.
Remember what he quipped when he was knighted for "services to literature":
And that, as they say, is that.______________
[1] Yes, even "Where's my Cow?".
[2] Problem is, I don't remember which one so I'll have to read them all again to be sure. Hey, win-win.
[3] Gently. He was a gentle man.
[4] Think Lord Byron, not Lord Elgin. But without all the drinking and womanising, just the big heart.
I don't think he meant it as a criticism of LotR, more pointing to the wealth of other literature that you might need a bit of maturity to get into.
It's funny how some people idolise "the classics" and yet if you actually read them then mostly they're just the popular fun stuff from an earlier era. Poor old Terry, he'll probably be a question on an A-level English exam one of these days.
This guy Pratchetts.
(That was so good this Sunday morning. Thanks :D)
you dont seem to have a blog. please have a blog.
... I write stuffy academic papers?
But LOTR is about vibes not facts. Friendship, loyalty, hope, doing the right thing with what power you have, appreciating what is good and green and gentle in the world, etc.
> the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld
The more seriously you take the rules of LOTR, yes. But you can take LOTR seriously without taking the rules seriously - by taking the vibes seriously.
Monarchy makes for some of both the best and worst governments on record. The problem isn't that you can't get good results, but rather the extreme variance.
I’m in Australia and the Trump presidency will be the thing for the next century that we can point to and say that this is why we are not going to ever, ever, ever get rid of the king or queen, in favour of a local president. I suspect that Canada and other countries feel much the same.
The best monarchs were the ones deposed by the revolutionaries, or the ones who abdicated the real power. There are 2 problems:
1. _Nobody_ should be ruling for more than 8-10 years.
2. You can't have a real monarchy without feudalism. And feudalism _always_ sucks.
Missed that part in your parent reply originally, you're right of course, cheers :)
In other words, nothing.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
Meanwhile, currently, slavery is far more common in non-monarchies than monarchies.
Your “relatively common” is literally zero in the current reality, unless there’s countries you’re aware of that the rest of us aren’t.
Tell that to guest workers in Saudi Arabia. Or to people in North Korea.
> There are plenty of monarchies in the world.
There are very few _real_ monarchies where the monarch has absolute power, with hereditary power transfer: Saudi Arabia, Oman, North Korea.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
> Serfdom was
Huh.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
It's a term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_monarchy
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
Admittedly it's possible that might run afoul of a dictionary definition or three. I'm not sure. I suppose it's all largely pointless speculation anyway since someone with a long enough term is going to be incentivized to modify the system to officially become hereditary if it isn't already.
> Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
Officially though?
Contrast with your other example, North Korea, where many of the abuses are indeed officially recognized.
There's plenty that the laws (or at least enforcement) in the western world fail to stop. In many cases you can argue that it's intentional (and I might even agree with you). But that doesn't make it official in that it isn't what's written down or what the electorate explicitly agreed to.
Mikhail Mishustin. The Prime Minister of Russia takes over in the event of the President being indisposed and acts as temporary President until the President recovers or a new one is elected.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
The end result is higher variance over a long period of time as a dictatorship switches between good and bad leadership. Meanwhile democracies consistently fail to execute on large scale visions. There's a reason corporate structure generally resembles a dictatorship, and that same reason is what eventually leads many of them to fail.
King Arthur vibes. Royalty, wizards, magical objects, heros and villains, destiny, romance, fealty, etc.
But obviously dispensing swords from lakes is no sound system basis for government.
When Arthur pulled the sword out of the stone, he was remembering all the stuff that Merlyn taught him about the different ways that animals run their societies and how it informed how he would lead if he were in charge.
That might be TH White's flavoring to it though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_King_Arthur_and_H...
Pixar has some in-house rules for stories. One of them is:
Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___
That sums up a Chosen One story. Chosen One protagonists do not work their way up. They are special snowflakes.
Star Wars is an extreme case of Chosen One popular culture. So is the Marvel Overextended Universe. (Note that Star Trek is not. Starfleet people start at the bottom and work up.) The top 8 highest grossing films of all time, unadjusted for inflation, [1] are all Chosen One movies.
Overexposure to Chosen One stories predisposes people to look for a Strong Leader, one who is somehow special. This seems to be a problem. Historically, the United States didn't work that way, having rebelled against a European monarchy which did. But I digress.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films
The stories you are talking about, also known as The Monomyth, have been part of every recorded culture and civilization.
It seems that the Chosen One stuff is not a result of stories. It is a fundamental part of our species and that is reflected in our most popular stories. From ancient times all the way to today.
Take the Iliad. Where's the monomyth? Achilles is an asshole, he gets into a fight with his boss, causes his bestie to get killed and then gets killed himself. There's a wooden horse. End of story.
No monomyth there, guv'nor.
Nor in the Odyssey. Smart guy wins the Trojan war with impossile stratagem. He pisses off the God of the Sea and takes 10 years to reach home, losing all his companions along the way. A little massacre to clear the air and they live happily ever after. End of story.
No monomyth.
I could go on. But, you know, that's the Iliad and the Odyssey. Should be enough.
"I won't get into which book is better, today I am only evaluating these books according to a set of rules I am making up, to see which succeeds at something neither author set out to achieve, and which most readers don't know or care about, and which is ultimately just an analogy for something else. Intrigued? Read on!"
It was a crazy, deeply dysfunctional city, full of crazy, dysfunctional people, but he obviously loved it, and the reader ends up loving the city, as well.
I think that's a fairly accurate way to look at the world around us.
I believe that Tolkien's depictions of Mordor and the Shire, came from his own personal experiences in the trenches of WWI, so I'd argue that LOTR actually has some fairly significant reflection on the real world.
(I’ve always been curious to what if any extent one influenced the other; Discworld is older, but Ankh Morpork gets fleshed out a lot later. Given how small a world UK sci-fi/fantasy is they’d almost certainly have been aware of each others’ work.)
I do remember thinking Kraken was a little Gaimanesque though so that suggests at least a transitive link to Pratchett, so perhaps ...?
btw your blog link in your profile doesn't work for me (we seem to have similar taste in literature so I thought I'd see what you've written)
Yes, and the general impinging of mechanisation and automation on rural life.
I’m currently on book 2 of Discworld and finding it ludicrously enjoyable. Its absurdity makes it feel like an antidote to many things.
It feels more fantasy than “hardest of hard sci fi” to me though? And I think the space suit was broken so is it a good model for tech?
Speaking of sci fi - have you read Strata and Dark Side? They're pastiches of Asimov and Niven and so on, but he has some really neat ideas in there as well. I particularly like his notion of vacuum tube technology taken to its limits in Strata.
If ever I needed proof of the non-existence of a benign all powerful god then the fact that someone who loved writing that kind of intricate and clever sophisticated humour would be so cruelly struck down with Alzheimers would suffice.
"A life with footnotes", the biography of him by Rob Wilkins is excellent and very moving.
One of the major recurring themes of r/discworld is that so much of the amazing ideas in Discworld were actually real things.
I envy those reading the series for the first time!
All the books were written over span of 30+ years and they changed over the time during this.
People tend to mistake sarcasm and satire with realistic and valuable insight. If, for example, you want to understand something about war in our Roundworld, do not read LotR or Jingo. Read Thucidydes.
There are no lengthy stilted lectures (characters explaining stuff to other characters) as in some other books by other authors, and only few (and usually short) descriptions of what happens when and then this and then that and then something else.
Think of how the "Dread Portal" scene in Guards Guards! would play out on stage and one sees exactly what he means.
Love that.
I love LoTR too. I would never feel the need to pick one OR the other. It’s not about WHICH. Much better to love BOTH. AND is the correct operator to place between these two great sets of works.
I think an under appreciated subset of Discworld is the Tiffany Aching series. If you really want to see Pratchett’s notions of “good morality” on display, these model it the best IMO.
Yeah, the author indicates he skipped them, probably because of the YA moniker, but honestly, _maybe_ Wee Free Men exempted, they're equally as mature as any other discworld books, with really the only YA thing about them being their underage protagonist.
> The Lord of the Rings on the other hand — the more seriously you take Middle Earth, the dumber you get about Roundworld.
> ...
> The thought I began with, that The Lord of the Rings, whatever its merits as a fantasy tale, is brain-rot for the technological mind, is one that I find so obvious it feels barely worth stating.
It's honestly hard to read the piece because of how clearly visible the author's sneer towards those who love Tolkien is.
Depends where. Getting serious about Discworld would make you think thinking something makes it real. Which is a different set of crazy.
Tolkien also faced extensive criticism from Christians for a non catholic fictive world, something he easily disregarded as trite. He was a loyal devout catholic in every respect.
His biography by Humphrey Carpenter goes into all this.
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977
This seems very wrong. Discworld heroes value the power of legends, LOTR heroes live for everyday life and sillines. While different on the outside, the essence of these books can be quite similar.
The anti-LOTR has always been Dune, which Tolkien himself was aware of. It's one of the few stories he was uncharacteristically openly negative about.
Middle-earth is a fantasy history of England and we're in sixth age (or something like that) of it.
It becomes round with the third age.
2) I don’t respect the bald claim that all chosen ones are bad, or the implicit claim that we can somehow avoid them. Universals always have exceptions. If we’re being “real” here about our agential change, we must admit that species evolve by natural selection we might say genetic chosen ones. And anyway I do think there are some special people so sue me.
3) consider the names of Peter Thiel’s companies: palantir, mithril. Thiel, I’m sure ironically, named his companies after objects possessing exactly that moral ambiguity that the author claims does not exist in Tolkien’s world. Thiel is telegraphing it straight to you via Tolkien: do not trust me, I will use these objects for my own gain.
4) Discworld can afford to be light and playful because it was written in easy times. In one preface, Tolkien wrote that all the world’s great powers would obviously have tried to turn the ring into a weapon if it really existed.
He’ll amuse you, sure, but he won’t tell you that things are great just the way they are or that they’re hopeless and there’s nothing you can do. He’ll tell you that you — yes, you — should make them better.
And then he’ll do something even more radical. He’ll make you think you can.
-- randombrethren, Tumblr
[0] Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The rest of it, I think, won't persuade anyone to read Discworld novels who's resisted them so far. Those who have and love them will find it a pleasant enough survey.
Oh and I personally think that Equal Rites is the best entry point to the series rather than Sourcery. But then I was reading them in publishing order anyway and eagerly waiting for each new one to come out. Damn I miss being able to look forward to a new Pratchett novel; he was a Wodehouse for my generation.
For the same reason, "Small Gods" is actually a great introduction to the series. I think it's really my favorite book in the series.
If you like “Guards! Guards!” or “Equal Rites”, then go back and start from the beginning. The first two novels are fun, but sound like Pratchett was channeling Monty Python and Douglas Adams. It took a few books before his own voice really shined through.
I understand the view, I just don't agree. It has lots of nice subtle jokes in it and was the first to have a bit more depth to the story rather than being a slightly scattered and episodic parody of thr fantasy genre.
But then I like Dark Side and Strata a lot too.
Edit to add: incidentally there are a lot of minor throwaway jokes throughout the series that require you to have read the preceding books to get them. That in itself is IMO enough reason to aim to read them in publication order. But you do you, he was very prolific, I can see why someone coming in after the fact might choose not to tackle the whole lot from beginning to end.
Horrible elves, Granny at her best (and Nanny), Magrat the killer queen, Morris dancing, stupid wizzards and lots of other stuff - what's not to like?
Probably just because it's my fave. But you can read them and enjoy in any order.
(Along those lines I would also recommend Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell” which builds its own parallel history set in the early 1800s Britain, with Fairies taking the same role as elves in discworld.
Mustn't grumble though, it's not like Jonathan Strange was a pamphlet!
Yeah, more or less. The “elves/fairies are nice, or at least _good_” thing is a fairly modern creation (owing a lot to Tolkien, really).
Besides, it introduces Granny Weatherwax, who is IMO one of his two greatest creations (the other being Vimes of course).
Edit: Oh, by the way, if you're just now working your way through them then (a) I envy you and (b) I recommend reading the Annotated Pratchett File for each book - after you finish each of course: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/
Sadly, it’s pretty sparse or non-existent for the later books, but the TVTropes pages on them are usually very good, and cover a lot of the same ground.
I was a bit surprised by the change in tone in a way I probably wouldn't've been if I'd read chronologically.
It and Light Fantastic are both fantasy-parody travelogues, which are mostly about the protagonists moving through a sequence of largely disconnected pastiches of other fantasy works. After this the series rapidly switches to fantasy as metaphor for real-world situations, with the fantasy elements being more broad tropes rather than specifics references.
I generally recommend starting with Wyrd Sisters, since many people are familiar with Macbeth.
He must have liked it; he rewrote it later as Good Omens.
I find it hard to see Good Omens as a do-over of Sourcery, but I guess they do have something in common.
But honestly KJ Parkers novels are better again.
1 - why not both?
2 - via MST3K “If you're wondering how he eats & breathes, And other science facts...(la! la! la!) Then repeat to yourself its just a show, I should really just relax...”
LOTR makes its theme and conceits explicit - it is about the appeal of power to the ego. Industrialization is an expression of that will to power, and its ability to magnify man's already-present distorted relationship with nature. That industry relies on technology does not make technology the central topic or even the target of critique.
Bone-headed take.
In fact, Alice in Wonderland relationship to ettiquette, both at a tea table and in royal court, is a curious theme.
You’re basically basing your whole technology worldview off a fantasy world created by a single person
It also feels a bit like the false dichotomy arguments from my teenage years, where you could like either Star Trek or Star Wars, but not both.
No, it’s really about taking either universe at face value, which is the problem. And with Discworld, its overt absurdity and humor forces you to think about it more deeply.
LOTR doesn’t make an effort to explain what it is about. But knowing just a little about history and the author goes a long way.
Where I hesitate is that I'm not sure Discworld's humour will land with everyone. It's a very dry form of absurdist British humour - if you enjoy Douglas Adams, you will probably get along with Terry Pratchett.
Discworld is a very funny place - I'm sure you would enjoy it.
That’s exactly where it fails for me: it is too cute, like a longer than necessary joke.
It’s just not my cup of tea to read and think “oh yeah, I see they inverted the thing, very cute, they even have the elephants and the turtles”. It’s ok but maybe for a short essay or a comic book only.
The 4th book, Mort, is Terry dealing with the fact that he has a successfull series running, so he might as well start writing his own stories. He's not primarily reactionary at this point. This is for me the first 'real' discworld book.
In fact, I find the first 3 books a string of stand alone gags if you don't see them as critiques of the genre. Funny but shallow. Small Gods has real depth, but the author still stands at the sidelines. The Truth or Nightwatch are even deeper, and I suspect they are both autobiographic and cathartic on some level.
It's perfectly ok for them not to be your cuppa of course; my Mum and I loved them but my Dad never got into them despite trying quite a few times. Funny because generally our tastes intersected quite thoroughly.
(To be honest I'm lying, the standalone book I prefer myself is Pyramids, but the one I'd recommend to others is Small Gods.)
So many good gags in that one. I love the cinematic flashback scenes while Pteppic is falling off the wall. Plus it's where the "Pterry" nickname comes from of course.
If you like Death, Hogfather is my first recommendation.
Also, the author does a disservice to Small Gods (also, oddly names the god Om as GamesStop, was that humor?), but this novel is one of the best ones in my opinion -- self-contained and both humorous and strangely moving.
To each their own, but to me the Tiffany books definitely felt weaker and felt like Terry Pratchett was restricting himself in terms of worldbuilding, human complexity (which Discworld usually portrays very well), and narrative. I hadn't knownn they were meant as YA fiction, but looking back, that would explain the mild feeling of lack-of-Discworld-richness to the books.
They aren't bad books by any means - just today, I was thinking about the "third thoughts" idea from one of these books and how interesting a mental model it is - but they certainly have a different feel from the rest of them.
agree that it's one of the best
'you don't know what they mean / they know what they mean'
Memestocks get their value not through some form of fundamentals but how many people believe in them.
Also, I find it slightly distasteful to refer to works of literature I like with the fad term du jour.
I can't say I liked this article overall.
> As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical
Tolkien himself in the foreword to fellowship
This person needs to cool it with the pseudo intellectualism and let people enjoy things
Those are actually some of the better ones among the later books though! If you're going to skip, skip the Moist von Lipwig books. They're substantially worse than the other books in the series, IMO. Not too big a fan of the Watch books after Night Watch either (Night Watch was definitely peak Vimes though!).
> These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young.
Other than maybe missing one or two sex jokes, not really?
> The only story revolving consequentially around gods is Small Gods, about a meme-stock god named GameStop, whose power crashes, and who ambitiously plans to pump himself back up to a new high.
Did an LLM hallucinate or is this supposed to be a joke? The god's name is Om.
There's only one Discworld book I don't like, and it is unseen academicals - the football one - I struggled to finish that, and it's the only one I've read only a single time. Every other discworld book I've read numerous times over the past 20+ years.
The one thing I'll fault the Moist books on is they're sort of the same book 3 times if you're in it for the story. If you enjoy the post/finance/rail exploration, that's enough to get past it, and I certainly did, but I can't blame others who didn't.
For eg., Going Postal and Making Money have the same basic setup, and a one-line story description would sound very similar. But Going Postal is about themes of past and future, regret and risk, connecting to the past while bringing in the future; while Making Money feels like a constant tug-of-war between order and chaos, and hence ultimately about balance.
There's a point where you get a lot of rather similar monologues from his characters. I presume these are from the period after he had to dictate as he couldn't write directly any more. If so it's amazing that they're as good as they are.
What an embuggerance (as he said himself).
Such entities have a special existence on Discworld.
More power to your elbow if so, but I didn't. Fortunately the broader slapstick and parody was right up my alley and I grew into (at least some of) the rest.
What? Do words even have meaning anymore? How is that anything to do with being "woke"?
what
Man this dude sure has a definition of “woke” that is completely alien to the roots of that term.
> I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.
what
Dude they are comic fantasy, yes Pratchett has Things to Say about the world in them, more and more as the series goes on, but I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen and the series was a constant delight through my college years and beyond. Yes there are things in Discworld that will zoom right by a kid and only land when you come back to it as an adult. That’s part of why they’re good books. There’s things like that in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Cycle (Book of Three, Black Cauldron, etc) that hit me like a ton of bricks when I pick up those little books forty years after I first read them as a kid and completely missed those parts. Stories can speak to multiple ages on multiple levels.
I read Colour of Magic when I was 13 I think. It might have been a year or two later; a friend's mother had heard the Radio 4 "Woman's Hour" reading of Equal Rites and recommended them to me as she knew I liked Douglas Adams.
Adams and Pratchett had this in common - they had sufficient layers of jokes in them that they could appeal to both me in my early teens, and a friend's mother in her 40s (roughly). I missed a huge number of gags on the first read through. I like to re-read familiar books, though, and I used to get a few more each time through.
Until I read the APF there were still a bunch of historical gags or similar that I was missing by a country mile! I'm sure there are plenty more that have still gone over my head.
I honestly think that Pratchett was a better writer than Wodehouse, even though that's practically heresy for a Brit.
Pratchett wrote good kids books earlier in his career too
That comment also raised some eyebrows when I read it. Discworld is pretty "woke". The female dwarves are a bunch of LGBT analogues, a huge chunk of the watch series is about racism, Night Watch and Jingo are both pretty anti-populism.
And it has become a convenient shibboleth: anyone using the word that way has nothing of value to say to me on any topic.
If you mean to restrict it to the Biblical usage of pronunciation, it generalized past that centuries ago.
Lewis wanted beer and belches. Strange how his own sermonising is so boring.
I love Mansfield Park. My partner hates it. Even in Austen you can pick and chose which bit of ivory to pick up.
Unlike wake, it's usefully short
Regrettably it's not about a bicycle or de selby
(Available on StageFlix: https://irishplayography.com/play?playid=31428 )
Pratchett himself said so and that is mentioned in the article.