Because Going Postal was quite good. As usual.
This is a nonpolitical open thread.
40 thoughts on “The Jesurgislac Memorial Terry Pratchett Open Thread”
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"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
Because Going Postal was quite good. As usual.
This is a nonpolitical open thread.
Comments are closed.
All italics, all the time?
Damn, that didn’t work.
Fixed it.
Oh well.
Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is brilliant, by the way.
Where’d your baseball correspondent go? I mean, I don’t really care for the Red Sox, but dang, forcing a 7th game with the chance to be the first team to ever come back from an 0-3 deficit to win an LCS. That’s incredible!
Baseball post here, crionna,
deceptively titled “Game Seven”
;p
hmmm link should have been Game Seven
preview is my friend…
Saw it. You’d think I’d have learned to at least read all of the day’s titles first, huh?
How’s the cold?
How’s the cold?
stuffy, achy, feverishy, and extra extra mucousy…feel like this guy
Actually, bought a new humidifyer last night, but not sure it did much good…and with that, I realize I’m jacking this thread…and back to Practhett…sorry Jes…
I actually really don’t like Terry Pratchett’s stuff. Pratchett consistently mistakes being clever and cute for being smart and funny, and as much as he’s been called “fantasy’s Douglas Adams,” he does less with actual fantasy concepts and tropes than he does simply tooling around with the various characters from previous books. I honestly don’t find the Ankh-Morpork Guard very interesting – certainly not interesting enough to warrant the three, four, five-plus books books Pratchett’s spent on them so far – or the witches or the university wizards, for that matter. That said, I liked Small Gods.
I found Postal to me merely an average Pratchett. I wrote in my blog:
I’ve not read PTerry for a bit. First I read was Mort (no, first I really got into was Mort; read Guards! Guards! first).
My favourite is still Lords and Ladies.
I’ve been lucky enough to be in bookshops on two occasions when Himself was a-signin’.
The other day I posted some links, including to some older British fan pictures, including the young Terry Pratchett and an anecdote of his from back in Sixties fandom here. (Also a picture of the 18-year-old-me, the year I was one of several people running the 1977 Worldcon, if anyone cares.)
I read Reaper Man recently, and although it had one or two laugh-out-loud moments and quite a bit more in the vein of mild amusement, it was a struggle to get through.
The $1 silver certificates that the previous owner had apparently used as bookmarks (and, obviously, forgotten about) were met with much more enthusiasm. Even though they’re not worth much more than a dollar.
Haven’t read any Pratchett – which one do you read if you’re going to read just one?
The first Discworld book I read was “Pyramids,” and that was all I needed to become a forever-devoted fan.
“Mort” is also very very good.
For a great, non-Discworld intro to both Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, though, I HIGHLY recommend “Good Omens.” It’s quite accurately summed up as “‘The Omen’ meets Monty Python.”
The one that got me definitively hooked was Equal Rites, but there were fewer available then. Now there’s a whole stack of interlinking series within the main universe – what you could call the Unseen University series (usually starring Rincewind), the Granny Weatherwax series (the witches of Ramtops), the City Guard series (usually starring Sam Vimes, Corporal Carrot, and an expanding collection of trolls, dwarves, and undead), and the Death series (starring Death, Albert, and often Susan Sto-Helit). Plus there’s a handful of stand-alones.
I frankly find Rincewind very tiresome, which is why I never got into Discworld when it was just The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. The Granny Weatherwax series of books (which I like very much) really begins with Wyrd Sisters*. The Sam Vimes series of books (Night Watch, the latest, is one of the best) begins with Guards, Guards. The Death series begins with Mort, but Susan Sto-Helit isn’t in it. You can drop into any of the books independently, of course, but IMO you get a lot more out of the series if you start from the start.
The two stand-alone books which I think are the best are Small Gods and The Truth. I think Pyramids and Monstrous Regiment are pretty funny, though. Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is aimed at children, but don’t let that fool you: it’s pretty damn good.
*Technically Equal Rites is the first Granny Weatherwax. But in fact it seems to take place in an alternate universe. This happens a lot on Discworld.
Forgot to add that if you’re a fan of early Hollywood, Moving Pictures (technically part of the Unseen University sequence, practically a stand-alone) will keep you happy for hours spotting the in-jokes.
If you’re that kind of person, anyway.
“It has no belly laughs to speak of…”
Hmmm … both my wife and I let loose a number of loud belly laughs while reading Going Postal, so we’ll have to disagree. I do agree that this is the most successful of his books using the “new technologies” plot template.
I’ll second the nomination of Small Gods for a standalone Discworld novel. Many of the others assume some familiarity with the characters and environs of Discworld.
Jesurgislac – I think a lot of Pratchett’s books are filled with those little incidental-to-the-plot in-jokes. For example, in Going Postal you have Smoking Man + Lone Gunmen + GNU/Linux = The Smoking Gnu, for a simultaneous satire on the X-Files and hacker culture. In The Truth, you have Mr. Pin & Mr. Tulip, the “new firm”, as a take-off of Gaiman’s Mr. Croup & Mr. Vandemar, the “old firm”. Someone could probably do a whole website full of nothing but Pratchett’s in-jokes & sly references.
The best thing I can say about Pratchett is that he is not Piers Anthony.
The best thing I can say about Pratchett is that he is not Piers Anthony.
Now that got me a belly laugh.
Someone could probably do a whole website full of nothing but Pratchett’s in-jokes & sly references.
Someone probably has. Or will.
But a lot of Pratchett’s injokes are from fantasy/science-fiction tropes: Moving Pictures is a good example of injokes that are more mainstream, the novel itself is virtually standalone, and it’s pretty good. (The Lost Continent is chockablock with injokes about Australia, but I don’t like it nearly as much as I like Moving Pictures.)
Jesurgislac, a lot of those Australia injokes are UK-specific, I think.
“The best thing I can say about Pratchett is that he is not Piers Anthony.”
You should have been at the editorial meeting, with the other 14 of us, at Avon Books, where he was far and away our #1 sf/fantasy best-seller, in the mid-Eighties, when the manuscript came in with the title “The Color of Her Panties.”
Further this deponent saith not.
Small Gods is definitely one of the better ones, and has the advantage of not really being tied into any of the other books. I’d suggest that Interesting Times is another good candidate.
Heh, Piers Anthony and Terry Pratchett – those are two names I haven’t heard in a while.
I think I need to thank them for hooking me on my reading habit at a young age. (Although I soured on the Anthony Xanth series after the first few books, the Incarnations was really addictive, that other one – the sci-fi/fantasy one with the game was good too).
Of couse now for my escapist fiction I turn to classical historical fiction. Colleen McCullough may be a bad writer, but she’s done her homework.
In my memory, Anthony’s Macroscope was far and away his best. But that’s the memory of a boy who read it right when it came out. The Xanth books started out clever, but Anthony’s far less adept a punner than, say, Spider Robinson, so they palled quickly.
Oh, go on Gary! I’d love to hear more about that meeting! Anthony is pretty damn disturbing, and not in a good way. I always wondered if he was as creepy in person as he was in print.
Not surprising that an author would put something like that on a manuscript. What’s surprising is that it’d get published with that name.
In order: Macroscope was, indeed, a praiseworthy, ambititious, earlier work by Piers. I don’t think it was entirely successful (mind, I’m working on decades-old memory, myself), but it was truly had ambititious reach, with a lot going for it, and there are far worse things than saying a book is flawed.
I’m not going to talk much about internal editorial meetings, even though the odds aren’t overwhelming that I’ll either be moving back to NYC and starting to climb the internal editorial ladder anywhere, or that if I did, someone would read this; those meetings were (and are) held with a presumption of strict corporate secrecy, and although since this was nearly twenty years ago, I don’t feel compelled to that absolutely, I’m not comfortable going into much detail, either; it’s my “professionalism” gene, or something.
But I mentioned a matter of public record: Piers was our #1 fantasy/sf best-seller. Xanth, which we then owned, having bought it away from… my memory weakens — Del Rey, I think — was a guaranteed NY Times and other list best-seller; no one else in our large sf/fantasy program came close to that on a regular basis, including Roger Zelazny and the Amber series, which we also then owned. Amber did, and this is also more or less public info, half the sales of Xanth, for all that it did very nicely indeed. And we had about four other series going with PA, as well, a couple of which also hit the best-seller lists. “Bio Of A Space Tyrant” was doing okay. And we had a ton of backlist, from the “Cluster” series to Macroscope, Rings of Ice, Omnivore, Orn, Ox, Battle Circle, and so on.
But in NYC publishing, if you have a series that’s a guaranteed lock to hit the Times, PW (Publisher’s Weekly), and other lists and stay there a few weeks, you’ve got gold, and the editor who has that has the key to keeping their job for while that lasts, and the Editorial Director/Editor-in-Chief who has a few of those gets the key to not being fired from the publisher. And in NYC publishing, a highly volatile industry in most areas at most times, you worry about keeping your position a lot.
As I mentioned, the entire editorial staff, from Editorial Director, to lowliest editorial assistant, was 14 people, covering every department: romance — still the meat and potatoes of Avon — mysteries, literary fiction, self-help, business books, the Latin American line (transitioning from “Bard Books”; “One Thousand Years of Solitude,” anyone?), the Vietnam nonfiction and fiction line (Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” anyone?), and just, well, general nonfiction and fiction, all sorts of books; whatever we thought we could sell in the mass market or in trade paperback (we were at that time strictly paperback, but owned by the Hearst Corp, who at that moment owned both the hardcover company of Morrow Publishing, and the hc company of Arbor House, which, unsurprisingly, was eventually folded into Morrow, despite, of course, years of denial they’d ever do that — but everyone always knew they would, as owning two separate hardcover houses was redundant — but I digress; eventually they moved us all into one building on Fifth Avenue, so it was easy to just get on the elevator and go up to the 24th floor to consult with our partners on joint hardcover/paperback deals, which were becoming more and more the norm, but I digress again; eventually the whole megillah was sold off to HarperCollins, but that was after my time).
Out of the 14, there were three of us in the “sf fantasy department.” A senior editor, an associate editor, and I got to be the junior assistant editor (with a handful of books of my own, and various independent duties reporting directly to the Editorial Director; it was also a bit anomalous because I knew about 100 times more about sf/fantasy, the field, the writers, and its history than the associate editor, so there was a bit of tension there at times, but we made it mostly work).
Anyway, what this all boils down to is that with no untoward implications towards Piers Anthony, but merely the norm of power imbalance present in publishing at those levels, essentially, if Piers had a whim, we’d all fall over ourselves to make it happen, because although we had Iron-Clad Contracts written by Heap-Big Hearst Lawyers, the fact is that if he wanted to break them and go elsewhere, he’d more or less be able to do so, and it’s not as if he was stupid enough to sign contracts locking him in for eternity, either.
A matter of complete public record, though admittedly the early days source material remains largely in small press publications, um, “fanzines,” such as Dick Geis’ various named “Science Fiction Review/The Alien Critic” of the late Sixties and early Seventies, though also written up in more widely circulated publications, is that Piers Anthony had some experiences back in the Sixties and early Seventies that left him feeling extremely badly treated by the publishing world. He felt very much that the field was full of thieves and liars (not precisely entirely untrue) and that he had personally been taken advantage of, as well as lied to a lot, and not supported in the way he felt he had both been told he would and that his writing deserved to be.
As I say, he wrote long essays about this to let everyone know just how bitter and angry he was, and to warn others of the perfidy of people in the publishing biz, so I’m revealing no secrets here.
By the Eighties, Piers had achieved considerable economic success. He, and again, he’s written about this at length in essays, and even in introductions to a few of his books, so it’s no secret — made a conscious choice by that time to write to be commercially successful, whatever that took, because he wanted to make sure he could send his kids to college and provide a good life to him, and he dedicated himself to doing whatever it took to be as commercially successful as possible, although, of course, he also felt strongly that he was always being artistically successful as well.
Piers was always also, well, let’s say that — no, let me back up a moment.
Very very loosely speaking, writers tend to fall to a large, though imperfect, degree into one of two categories: terminally insecure, and terminally secure.
Talent has no correlation with this; the number of crap amateurs who can’t put a sentence or paragraph together to save their life, but who are absolutely convinced they’re brilliant, and it’s only because of the evil cronyism in publishing that they can’t break in is near infinite; some of the most award-winning, and deservedly so, famous writers I could name and you’d know them, are terminally insecure, break down in tears if they read a negative review in a fanzine written by a subliterate 14-year-old which is seen by twelve people, and are convinced at the drop of a hat that all they can write any more is crap, and it was an accident they got away with it up to now.
And, of course, there are great writers filled with self-confidence, and, fortunately, poor writers who are also insecure. The mix leaves all kinds, to be sure.
Piers, it is no secret, has great faith and confidence in himself — at least, insofar as he acts towards the outside world; I can’t read his mind. Combine that with his bitterness over his early years, and it makes him, and this is no secret (my refrain here), very very very suspicious towards his editors/publishers, and wary, and, well, let’s just say that, as I’ve previously set up, his editors and publisher are left feeling a very great need to attempt to alleviate any worries or bumps of any sort.
Now, normally, the title of a book is the publisher’s business. Naturally, authors tend to have one of their own (though not always; you’d be surprised), but the fact is that it’s the publisher who is putting the money on the line to sell the thing, and the publisher who has the experience in the market to know how to sell the thing, and the title and cover are the first main selling tools (after the author’s name, if the author is well-known, but if not, not, of course).
So having the Right Title is a key element the publisher (I say that referring to the group entity, because this is the sort of thing ultimately agreed upon by a marketing meeting at which the editor, although a strong voice, is merely one included with the head of publicity, promotion, marketing, the head of the editorial department [whatever the title], and the publisher her/himself [more often she than he; the majority of people who work in publishing are female, in case you didn’t know]) hashes out, in consultation with the editor, but except in cases where the author is in unusual, best-selling, circumstances, the publisher has the last word.
I trust I’ve now given sufficient background to note that Piers Anthony, at Avon Books, in the mid-Eighties, had those “unusual…circumstances.”
(There was other stuff going on here I won’t go into about various people worrying about jobs and why, and various merry-go-rounds at various publishers, and certain ploys individuals engaged in, that also came strongly into play.)
So. Xanth has a very high percentage of sales to young kids. Lots of sales in the South, despite the “demons” aspect, and the Christian Coalition peaking. 12-year-old girls a heavy part of the buying demographic.
Manuscript comes in: “The Color of Her Panties.”
It’s called what!
You’re shitting me!
Panic. Gasping, fainting, writhing in coils. Meetings. Phone calls. More meetings. Larger meetings. Smaller meetings again. Phone calls. Yes, Piers is absolutely adamant that the title must stay. Don’t even say another word.
Meetingsphonecallsmeetingsphonshitmeetahhhhh!
And to say more would now go into that sort of internal stuff I said I wouldn’t. I simply note that the book was published with that title, and Avon Books survived. Piers Anthony published various further books with Avon, although I ceased tracking him closelyby the end of the Eighties when I was gone from Avon, and free-lancing at various houses.
I never found him at all “creepy”; extremely businesslike and professional, intolerant of fools, kind to small children, and like many, though not all, writers, a bit shy in situations calling for smalltalk with strangers. Very dutiful about making public appearances and promoting his work, however; he regarded it as simply another absolutely necessary part of his job, although I never had a sense he regarded it as in any way a pleasure. But I’m starting to go into mind-reading there, and am probably over-stating, and should stop.
Now, don’t get me started on working on Whitley Strieber’s Communion, and having to keep my mouth shut then about that….
Incidentally, although I mentioned the “sf/fantasy department, in fact, the way the business worked, we all worked on a vast number of other lines as well; I assisted my senior editor boss with all his lines, and also independently worked directly for the Editorial Director on creating line of science non-fiction, which I spent a year on, and she never got around to actually publishing, and, well, it’s complicated. But I worked heavily on mysteries (Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, J.A. “Judy” Jance, Charlotte McLeod, etc., etc.), Latin American, Vietnam, WWII nonfiction, military non-fiction, general nonfiction, general fiction, and, well, it’s easier to list the few types of books I didn’t work on: cookbooks, sports books, and children’s books.
The story of being assigned to be one of the two specialists in what is technically called in publishing (or was then) “woo-woo books,” which is to say, “New Age,” or as some are given to pronounce it, “newage,” with a kind of sneeze, which is to say, channelling, auras, UFOs, herbal healing, astrology, numerology, and you get the idea, is yet another story; some of it was amusing; much of it was mind-numbing; occasionally it was eye-popping. And the one manuscript I wanted to buy, sightings of Elvis after he was dead (but only allegedly!), I couldn’t get the Editorial Director to buy, and sure enough it became a best-seller for the company that did it.
Gary:
Why on Earth aren’t you still in publishing?
Or is that overly personal? If so, please disregard.
Thanks for the story. I used to be read each and every new thing that Anthony wrote (as I said, the Xanth series palled, but such as On A Pale Horse were still good stuff), and it’s good to have some of the behind-the-scenes. Even if I don’t have him on my bookshelf anymore.
Thank you from me too, Gary.
I read some of those essays and forewords that you referred to, and they were more-or-less the last straw for me as far as Anthony was concerned. It was obvious that he was very bitter, and thought his work had been grossly and unfairly neglected. At the time, having read a lot of his later work, I was not terribly sympathetic. Maybe that was unduly harsh. I’d also started to develop a deep dislike for some of his themes, and Anthonology, I think it was, kinda pushed me over the edge there.
“Even if I don’t have him on my bookshelf anymore.”
It’s just as well. He wouldn’t fit, and he might break it.
And the feeding costs are noticeable.
“that other one – the sci-fi/fantasy one with the game was good too”
Robot Adept
To elaborate on the disdain that triggered a wonderful conversation and great revelations from Gary, I was at one point a very bored and literate high school student, so I decided to read the sci-fi/fantasy section of the high school library in alphabetical order. Imagine going from Aasimov and Douglas Adams to Anthony.
I thought just nearly all of his stuff was hackneyed and incredibly dependent on easy categories and archetypes (look, there are 7 wizards. . a blue one that likes snow, a green one that likes trees. . the same sort of lazy creativity that props up bad anime and video games). The Xanth punning got old by the 3rd book. Bio of a Space Tyrant was a juvenile and simply offensive attempt at what Stephen Donaldson accomplished in the Gap series. You can imagine how relieved I was when I was able to move on to Bova, etc.
I hope you didn’t miss Poul Anderson and Robert Asprin, sidereal. They were bracketing Anthony when I was working my way through the library shelves, and IMO were far superior.
but such as On A Pale Horse were still good stuff
That was the Incarnations series I mentioned. I think that if I were to pick them up today I would probably still enjoy them. One of the reasons I think it is a better series (there were 7 – death, time, fate, war, nature, satan, god) is because they actually seemed to have a story arc over the whole series, instead of trying to stretch every last buck out of the readers with endless additions (yes Robert Jordan, I’m looking in your direction!)
P.S. Great story, Gary.
. . . the Unseen University series (usually starring Rincewind) . . .
I object — the real star of the Unseen University books is clearly the Librarian.
Ooook!
Thanks for the stories there,tonydismukes: Someone could probably do a whole website full of nothing but Pratchett’s in-jokes & sly references.
Look for the Annotated Pratchett File. It used to be housed in the Netherlands, but I think it’s moved since I last looked at it.
[Fun fact: I think there was a brief time in the early 90s, around the time Moving Pictures was published, when the AFP was almost as long as the novels themselves.]
James Casey: I’ve not read PTerry for a bit.
Man, Pterry takes me back. I was once dubbed alt.fan.pratchett’s first Zen poster back in 1995 or so due to a “feature” in our version of rn. I got badly sick for a week that fall and the only thing I could do to occupy my time was surf USENET, so I ended up reading each and every one of afp’s 2000+ messages per day.
Needless to say, I haven’t done that since.
Finally, I’ll add a recommendation for Small Gods. It’s probably my favorite thing he’s ever written — and you don’t *really* need to know any background to appreciate the gags. After that, go back and read them from the beginning like a proper sf fan 😉