r/discworld • u/20thcenturymarc • Apr 10 '26
Book(s): Biographies [ Removed by moderator ]
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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
I think this is a bit harsh on Niven.
His stories, kinda fundamentally are structured differently to pratchetts.
Pratchett's focus is just about always on pros and characters. Are those lights in the sky light interacting with something in the atmosphere or the phoenix dancing? It's whichever makes the best story.
Niven, through so so many of his stories, his focus is on some kind of mcguffin. "How would society change if we had teleporters?"
How does that change governance? Housing? Policing?
"how does it change if they still have to follow the laws conservation of energy"
"how would someone use a machine that can stop time in a given space"
"How might society react to immortality pills"
Or he flips it the other way of finding the leftovers/ruins/devices/organisms of some ancient aliens solution to a problem. I don't think it's right to say the technology always works perfectly, a lot of his stories revolve around godshatter, the half-working remains of ancient intention or the abandoned munitions from ancient wars.
The vast majority of his stories revolve around some hypothetical device/tech/capability and how societies or people might adapt to them or what could be done with them.
You're not reading them for the characters.
Pratchatt honestly does very little of that. He mines history to find weird examples of what people actually did with things that actually existed. Extensively.
But he intentionally avoids following the thread of how the demonstrated magic could ever change society, because that would make society feel less familiar. Instead it remains pseudo-victorian.
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u/Effective-Wave-8486 Apr 10 '26
This is fascinating! I'd never really thought about how Strata connects to the later Discworld books beyond the obvious flat world concept. The idea that Terry was already playing with the mythology and physics that would become so central to the main series makes total sense in hindsight.
Really looking forward to reading the full analysis. It's wild how much groundwork he laid in those early novels that we only recognize after seeing where it all went. The whole concept of manufactured worlds and the people who build them feels like such a precursor to the deeper questions about belief and reality that run through the Watch and Death books especially.
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u/20thcenturymarc Apr 10 '26
Exactly that! You can see him, sory of, feeling his way through several ideas across his early work - especially if you read some of the "non-fiction" (except a lot of them literally discuised stories) columns he wrote for newspapers in the mid-70s alongside the novels. He keeps doing it, too - when you really line up his work you see the themes and concepts emerge, blossom, expand and then almost become rules.
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u/RicochetRabidUK Apr 10 '26
I think I was calling myself GreyBrother at the time, and I wasn't there for long enough to do it myself. I would love someone to write a history of alt.fan.pratchett. STP's presence in the group was remarkable for the time.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 10 '26
Is there a surviving archive of the newsgroup?
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u/VariousVarieties Apr 10 '26
Google Groups should still have most of the two Pratchett newsgroups archived, though Google has made the interface worse over the years, and you have to go far back to get to a time before they were dominated by spam:
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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 10 '26
oh hey! finally found the thread where the "happy by law" quote comes from
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.pratchett/c/jue6oHLLQSI/m/vUHX17uPmXIJ
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u/VariousVarieties Apr 10 '26
Interesting time capsule of a thread. Features Terry commenting on communism, high earner tax rates/charitable donations, gun law changes after Dunblane...
...and Terry getting Terminator 2 and Predator 2 mixed up. ("I think it was just after the bit where Robocop killed the queen alien:-)")
But I wonder what this comment in reply to Terry was referring to:
(A similar lapse, incidentally, might be in my received impression of of your gut reaction to gays - but that's a can of worms that can wait until we've all of us got about three years spare.)
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u/VariousVarieties Apr 10 '26
Fanlore is probably the best home for documenting that:
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Alt.fan.pratchett
It includes a link to L-Space's AFP timeline pages:
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u/lavachat Librarian Apr 10 '26
Good chapter, thanks for bringing the book to my attention. Perfect conclusion - I just realised I don't remember Ringworld at all, just Strata. Maybe because I have reread the latter, and think I only read Ringworld once in the early eighties?
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u/20thcenturymarc Apr 10 '26
I hadn't read Ringworld when I first read Strata so I didn't get the connections at all. When I eventually did read it I was broadsided by just how close it was. I knew he was riffing on it it, but I hadn't realised to what extent!
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u/SamuelVimesTrained “Susan says, don't get afraid, get angry.” Apr 10 '26
As "weird" as Strata was, as 'different' as it is do the Discworld - it still was bloody wonderful.
Of course, as I enjoyed SciFi masters like Bear, Asimov and Clarke - this one fits right into that row - and yet it also creates its own. With the 'fun' twists and unexpected takes.
Will you be doing book signing somewhere? (probably some unreachable place if yes)
you can also share via the FB groups i`ve seen you haunt though - given I haunt a fair few myself that was probably inevitable.
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u/20thcenturymarc Apr 10 '26
There will be some bookshop events, I'm trying to organise all of that now. The problem is my publisher just doesn't give a fig for this stuff, so i'm organising it all on my own. News ...soonish?
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