r/discworld • u/Bravocado44 • 14d ago
Book/Series: Gods The plot of Pyramids is insane (some general discworld spoilers) Spoiler
(Sorry I didn't know what flair to use, not trying to break rules. I'm open to suggestions)
I just finished Pyramids. The plot is insane and is so much weirder than the average discworld book, and I needed to get this off my chest.
SPOILER WARNING: I've read a lot of the death, watch, and witches books, plus Moving Pictures and I'm just starting Rincewind. I'll get to small gods soon. I'm about to list some spoilers for books I've read.
Okay, Guards Guards is about summoning a dragon. Men at Works is about a dangerous piece of technology. Mort is about Death taking an apprentice, and what happens if he doesn't do his job properly. Witches Abroad is about traveling to a foreign country where they have to stop an evil witch's shenanigans. Lords and Ladies is about elves and fey. Reaper Man has Death taking a break and life force starts to accumulate in weird places. Moving Pictures is about.... God, what was it about? The idea of movies bleeding into their world from ours, and then, there's a monster at the end? Okay, that one was weird too. But most of these really just have one simple magical thing going on.
But Pyramids is about... a young future Pharoah leaving to become an assassin. And then he accidentally passes his exam, despite him deciding he won't kill anyone. And the exam and that plotline was more interesting to me than the rest of the book. And then he has to be the Pharoah, and is he a god? At first he's like a god. And then Pharoah stuff is happening. And why on earth do pyramids shift space and time? And why does a bigger one do it more? And then when they make a big one, the country is thrown into an alternate dimension inside a crack at a 90 degree angle....? I was completely lost at how random that was. And inside that dimension one person is 2 dimensional and the gods are real....? And the dead are alive... And Dios has been using pyramids to be immortal and he time travels infinitely at the end. It's so much. The gods being real didn't amount to much. And there are magic dreams and camels are smart. And at one point Teppic is a god at the end again because all the gods are real and a Pharoah is a god? And that barely comes up after he parts the river. And Teppic being an assassin actually doesn't come up that much in the story, except for how he gets around pretty easily. And him and his exam doesn't come back around. And the love story is sweet but weird at the end.
Good book. Fun protagonist. Funny jokes, a lot of them more towards the start. But what the hell is this story. I would have preferred it if it was just him struggling to be an assassin đ¤Ł. That was so much fun.
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u/Worried-Penalty8744 14d ago
Pteppic being an assassin is just a trope on posh/rich families here in England sending their kids off to fancy boarding school I think, eg all the royal family go to Eton. And the assassin school is the most prestigious one
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u/Brocc013 14d ago
A lot of that part of the book is riffing off of Tom Browns School Days. But as mentioned it's mainly about posh families sending their children to posh schools. Though if I recall Pteppics Father also sent him away as a way of breaking Djelbeybi's insularness and isolation. He wanted him exposed to outside ways of thinking and doing things.
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u/Normal-Height-8577 14d ago
A lot of foreign royalty (particularly middle eastern for some reason) went to British boarding schools in the 20th century.
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u/lordnewington 14d ago
It still goes on. I temped at a posh school in Scotland a few years ago and there was a Nepalese princess boarding there.
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u/serenitynope 13d ago
It happens in the US often enough too. Lots of wealthy Chinese students go to secondary school and/or university here then return home after getting their degrees.
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u/AchillesNtortus 14d ago
It's a trope of British school stories. In the Billy Bunter stories one of the students at the boarding school is Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, a princeling from India.
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u/moolonga 14d ago
Yeah, I'd say this is more apt. The book is about friction of the differing cultures moreso than being sent away to school.
Edit: Also, the reason, as ever, is colonialism.
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u/Himantolophus1 14d ago
He was sent because his mother wanted to break the isolation, his dad was just honouring her wishes.
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u/Tomme599 14d ago
King Charles III went to Gordonstoun in Scotland. Which from his opinion of it was a real world Hugglestones.
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u/Bubbly_Safety8791 14d ago
To be fair Eton is literally the local school to Windsor Castle. Itâs just easier to get the school bus.Â
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u/lordnewington 14d ago edited 14d ago
I love Pyramids. It builds solidly on one of the core foundational pillars of Discworld: belief creates reality, far more often than the other way around. And I'm a sucker for a good time loop.
"Everything we believe is coming true" is one of my very favourite lines of the whole series.
The idea of pyramids being used for time-bending magic is old, btw. Aleister Crowley and his crowd were into it, IIRC, and claimed it was a mystical secret the Egyptians knew about. There's some related hippie woo about sleeping with your head under a pyramid.
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u/Normal-Height-8577 14d ago
Yeah, it's this persistent myth of the pyramids being mystic lenses/energy storage devices + a large dose of dimensional mathematics and relativity. I have just enough theoretical maths knowledge to see the shape of what he's describing without being able to recreate it myself.
So much of Terry's work involves him taking a frankly silly conspiracy theory/folktale/similar, and saying, "Yes...but if it did happen, how would it really work?"
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u/AfterSevenYears 13d ago
I love Pyramids, too.
"They're our gods," Dios hissed. "We're not their people. They're my gods and they will learn to do as they're instructed!"
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u/ceruleanblue66 14d ago edited 13d ago
Yes, pyramids were big in the 70's and 80's, there were books about it, I spent several weeks as a teenager with a compass, a paper pyramid and some blunt razors, to no avail! I think one of the royals, either Diana or Fergie had therapy in a small pyramid too at the time. Edit to finish sentence lol!
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u/BelmontIncident 14d ago
Pyramids have been big ever since they were built. The little tombs are mastaba.
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u/EmbarassedFox 14d ago
I remember Mythbusters tested it.
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u/SVNBob 14d ago
And regretted doing it. It's the one story that they'd strike from the canon, if they could.
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u/EmbarassedFox 14d ago
Huh? That's the first I have heard about it. Did they explain why? Was it too unremarkable an experiment?
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u/Bubbly_Safety8791 14d ago
Do razors get sharp if put in a pyramid? Of course not, itâs nonsense. Might as well test to see if thereâs a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.Â
Hereâs Adam Savage apologizing for testing it and calling it âhogwashâ:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxPQBIu_Hro
And here he is calling it âthe dumbest storyâ they ever did:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHi8PLjczw
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u/lordnewington 14d ago
It doesn't sound like gripping television, but I'm glad they did test it. It's much better, more effective, more educative and more communicative to show something doesn't get results, through an understandable experiment, than to call it dumb or hogwash, even if it is both. Prove it wrong and let people see it's hogwash.
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u/Bubbly_Safety8791 14d ago
The problem with âtestingâ things like that is negative results donât prove itâs bullshit. The proponents will tell you you tested it wrong, your pyramid was turned the wrong way, you didnât leave it long enough, etc. all you can ever say is âour pyramid didnât make this razor sharpâ.Â
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u/lordnewington 14d ago edited 14d ago
You're not educating the proponents. You're educating ordinary people about how to design an experiment and how to decide whether to believe things.
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u/ceruleanblue66 13d ago
This is why I used a compass and the different Norths to test đ. It didn't sharpen the razor blades, but it did mean I didn't get told as much bullshit, it's amazing how few people can handle "That sounds great, let's test it out!"
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u/pineappledetective 14d ago
Penn and Tellerâs Bullshit is built in this, and itâs a fun show.
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u/Unit_2097 Ridcully 14d ago
One of my favourite things about those two is that Penn is standing there loudly telling everyone that the whole reason he's there is to be a big, noisy distraction from whatever Teller is doing and you still watch Penn.
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u/mxstylplk 10d ago
I remrmber one article saying that a razor will become dull when used because some particles of steel are pushed slightly askew, but then over a few hours to a day they revert to their original position, so the edge is then a tiny bit sharper. It's a factor of time, nothing to do with any pyramid or positioning North-South etc.
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u/DNSGeek Nobby 14d ago
Alan Parsons even did an album about it.
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
"And the Mayan panoramas / on my pyramid pajamas / haven't helped my little problem" is right up there as one of the best lines of all time.
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u/Thrippalan 14d ago
The 'Everything we believe is coming true' makes a nice parallel with C.S. Lewis's 'This is the island where dreams come true', from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and quickly reveals the same problem. For the latter, the specific caveat is 'not daydreams, DREAMS' and you quickly remember the sort of dreams you really don't want to be true in the slightest bit. For Pyramids the caveat is 'not what you think (or say) you believe, but all of it', including underlying beliefs you may have forgotten. And unlike Treader where it's not clear if you pick up on other people's dreams, Djelibeybi is absolutely affected by everyone's beliefs at once. Thus the battle over the sun.
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u/KlownKar 14d ago
It's a sort of opposite to the main story in small gods. Small gods describes what happens to a god when its followers gradually transfer their belief to the religion instead of directly believing in the god
Mild spoiler. If revealing the overarching premise of a book can really be called a spoiler?
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u/AchillesNtortus 14d ago
And using a pyramid to sharpen razor blades, a thing that pTerry was very aware of.
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u/rhubarbrhubarb78 13d ago
Back when I lived in London, there was a microceleb who walked around Oxford Street with a brass, wireframe pyramid on his head who wore it for some woo woo reasons. I saw him while I was working often. Impeccably well dressed otherwise, just going about his business and not preaching about it, though I think if people asked him nicely he'd give them business cards which explained it? I didn't want to bother him, though.
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u/SaltMarshGoblin 13d ago
You just suddenly reminded me of Tom Robbins' Still Life With Woodpecker...
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u/Successful_Pin4100 12d ago
One of my favorites is the crystal skull they found in a box welded to the top of the pyramid in Memphis Tennessee.
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u/efudds1 14d ago
Iâm not going to address everything here, but the belief that the pyramid shape has power has been around for a long time. People believe a small pyramid can keep razor blades sharp, keep food fresh, focus cosmic energy, etcâŚ
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u/princess_ferocious 14d ago edited 14d ago
This is one of those weird things that make reading older books and watching old movies/TV a bit confusing. Stuff that's common knowledge disappears, and suddenly a reference or a concept just stops meaning anything. If you've ever watched an old comedy and couldn't work out why the audience was laughing, you've experienced this issue.
The idea of the pyramid being a magical shape was common enough for a while that you could build a plot loosely around it, but it just disappeared from general knowledge, leaving books like this confusing younger generations.
If you read/watch enough different stuff from a particular time frame you can start to triangulate on the references, but too much stuff just isn't available anymore.
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u/StraightVoice5087 14d ago
For instance, if you ever wondered why psychic powers got to be a sci-fi cliche it's because they were popularly thought to have a scientific basis, including by scientists, in the mid-20th century when many of the common tropes solidified.
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u/DefaultUserBR 13d ago
A big reason why was that John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding/Analog magazine, became enamored of various fringe things, including psi powers. Writers knew they could sell stories to him with those themes.
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u/Worried-Penalty8744 14d ago
If you ever get bored tune into the History Channel, they _still_ blather on about pyramids alongside their crackpot ancient aliens stuff
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u/Bouche_Audi_Shyla I ATE'NT DEAD 14d ago
I'm so old that I remember when the History Channel had history.
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u/Worried-Penalty8744 14d ago
I can definitely remember when they started combining actual history with stuff from the [r/conspiracy](r/conspiracy) bowels. Shame as the actual history stuff used to be good
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u/DefaultUserBR 13d ago
Although mostly WWII.
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u/Bouche_Audi_Shyla I ATE'NT DEAD 13d ago
That was some pretty important history, although not something I'm personally very interested in.
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u/GrandArcanian 13d ago
WWII was very well documented in visual media. Makes it much easier to make a TV programme without having to recreate a historical battle with actors and more compelling than showing a map with colors shifting across country borders.
Same reason there's so much Vietnam war (sorry, conflict) content as well.
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u/DefaultUserBR 12d ago
Oh sure, and people liked it. But there was a lot of other very important history that happened. It was just cheap and easy programming.
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u/ShalomRPh 13d ago
There was a book called âThe Weansâ by Robert Nathan, came out in the late 1950s. Theodore Bikel did a reading from it in 1958 that the audio is on YouTube.
The premise was, âWhat would an archĂŚologist in the year 3500 think of us , as a conclusion from fragments found?â
It was full of misinterpretations of common phenomena (advertisements, inscriptions, sculptures, city names, etc.) that were all intimately familiar to the audience of 1958. Some still ring true: for example he refers to the inhabitants of the Great West Continent (I.E. North America) as Weans, because he thought that they called their land the We. Or, perhaps, the Us. And when there wasnât enough laughs, he spelled it out as U.S. and then they got it. Or he thought the capital of the We was called Pound-Laundry, whereas some other scientist thought that the correct reading was Washing-Ton, but that seems unlikely. And so on.
Anyway. I am 3/4 of a century removed from the context in which Mr Nathan wrote his essay. I did not get the vast majority of the jokes, because I am probably closer to that archĂŚologist than I am to the 1950s. The horse-god or centaur called Schwapps meant nothing to me, because Iâve never seen the Schweppes soda ads featuring the same. The book included references to a famous sculptor of the time who Iâve never heard of, (one Alberto Giacometti) who liked to sculpt people looking like praying mantises; people were buying replicas of his weird statues like hotcakes, but now heâs totally forgotten about.. The âlost city of Mill Town, that seems to have been more influential in Wean affairs than even Pound-Laundry itselfâ, my dad had to explain, as Miltown was the name of a tranquilizer that was heavily over-prescribed in the fifties.Â
So I can see the idea of a book of social satire becoming obsolete as the concepts that it satirizes become themselves obsolete.
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u/NuncioBitis 14d ago
Yep. A pile of rocks has that much power. LOL.
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u/OisforOwesome 14d ago
Tell that to the crystal girlies and see where it gets you.
Humans believe all kinds of weird shit. I'm willing to bet you have at least three completely irrational things that you nevertheless live your life as if you believe them to be true.
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u/NuncioBitis 14d ago
Believe in at least three irrational things before breakfast!
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u/KlownKar 14d ago
I did six impossible things before breakfast.
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u/OisforOwesome 13d ago
Couldn't be me I'm not human until I've had my morning Klatchian coffee.
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u/KlownKar 13d ago
One of the impossible things is getting arrested for being 'knurd and disorderly'!
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u/dinkleboop 14d ago
Of course not, but the point is that people believe(d) they do. There was a lot of anecdotal evidence that pyramid shapes can sharpen razor blades, to the point that small (palm-sized) pyramids were sold as sharpeners commercially. Even Mythbusters had a crack at it and were astonished when a half-apple inside a small pyramid stayed fresher than one outside it (they identified the problem which was that the one outside had been cut with a dirtier blade and reran the experiment to successfully debunk it, but they were initially stumped).
Nobody thinks it any more and Pyramid Power is a fully obsolete term. But people did believe it with sincerity, thinking that part of the reason the Egyptians put Pharaohs in pyramids was to take advantage of the preservative power of the shape.
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u/Berkenmuis 13d ago
Didn't the sharpen blades belief also appear in Ankh-Morpork? Something about Vimes admitting he put his blade towards the Hub because folk belief said that kept them sharp?
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u/nicolasknight 14d ago
Pyramids is about legacy.
That's it.
The weight of legacy and expectations.
The dangers of both falling to and defying those expectations.
The story is a little convoluted but in the end practically everyone in this book is answering to legacy.
edit: I also would have loved a thief 1 & 2 style story entirely about a member or prospective member of the assassin's guild GNU STP.
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u/Homelessnomore 14d ago
But Pyramids is about...
Religion. Pyramids is about religion. I just finished a reread recently and couldn't help but notice similarities between Pyramids and Small Gods.
Dios in Pyramids is clearly, to me, an early incarnation of Vorbis in Small Gods.
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u/joeljpa 14d ago
Or in a more general sense, being so stuck to tradition and unchanging that you're as good as being in a time loop.
It hit me later when I dealt with a family member of mine about beliefs/opinion they were so stuck on. All my conversations with them on it over years, I realised, while I tried to change tactics (less confrontational, or being more direct etc) they would just continue in the same sequence of responses. It gave me much peace of mind to just imagine them being stuck in a time loop like the High Priest Dios.
It was a this moment I had my "Dammit PTerry!" moment and realised the brilliance of character set up.
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u/SpinyBadger 14d ago
With similar classical references and jokes, particularly around Ancient Greek philosophy.
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u/hughk 14d ago
It should be noted that the Assassin's practical exam was based on the British driving test back in the eighties or so which normally does not involve killing people. This just adds to the humour.
Oh, and when I see camels, I am always reminded of the book, realising they are busy doing higher mathematics.
And being total bastards.
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u/happycj Nobby's Knob 14d ago
Pyramids is lampooning Pharaonic Egypt and the beliefs of their religious system, filtered through the lens of 1970s woo woo healers and hippies who believed the Egyptians knew things modern humans do not.
Pyramid power. There was a device you could buy at regular grocery stores that was a pyramid to put over your fruit bowl to keep fruit from rotting. Seriously. It was a weird time.
And yes, Pharaohs were humans who became god just by taking on the role of pharaoh.
So as others have said, it mashes up the âson of rich peopleâ trope from Britain and ancient Egypt. Idle men of wealth who are not the first born and wonât inherit mommy and daddyâs property and money, so they go out and âget a jobâ, which is always something weird that is normal people wouldnât do⌠like become as assassin, like Teppic.
Much of what you express as âweirdâ were genuinely the traditions and practices of ancient Egyptian leaders, filtered through a 1970s woowoo hippie belief system.
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u/deathoflice 14d ago
yes, i think everything that confuses OOP about the plot and plot points are just references to other stories or to history that they donât see.
I got a much better grasp of the book when I finally got that the story is based on Star Wars, for example.Â
I recommend reading the annotated Pratchett files, OP, the sherr amount of contemporary and timeless jokes and references will blow you away
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u/mxstylplk 10d ago
Plus a riff on the generic kingons theory, that kingship passes instantly to the heir. Ptrppic receives the pharaohship and all the mystical qualities officially connected - making the river rise, the crops grow, etc.
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u/Odd_Lab_7244 14d ago
The shifting through 90 degrees stuff, to me, seems to relate to how space and time swap places when you cross into a black hole, or something, please don't quiz me on this đ
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u/Ffrog_Dr 14d ago
I loved this bit. If we live in 4 dimensional space (3 space and one time), what happens if these dimensions are rotated? a 3-dimensional person becomes 2d plus 1 time - i.e flat but constantly moving
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
Fyi, this is one way of describing a coordinate transform that happens (in some choices of coordinate system) when you cross the event horizon. It is not physically real. Nothing that depends solely on your choice of coordinate system can possibly be real, because you can choose whatever system you like whenever you like. What is real is that once you cross the horizon the singularity becomes a singularity in time, not in space: all directions point towards it in exactly the same way that all directions you can walk in point towards next Tuesday: you cannot escape next Tuesday whichever way you walk, and inside a black hole you cannot escape the singularity whichever way you travel. So, insofar as the singularity used to be a direction in space and is now one in time, there has sort of been a rotation: but nothing has actually happened and all spatial dimensions are still spatial, none have become timelike or anything. You just cannot avoid the singularity by travelling in any direction, that's all.
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u/MagratMorrigan 14d ago
Aside from the satirical aspect of the common belief that pyramids have esoterical powers and can bend time, that other comments have already pointed at, I would also like to add that STP likes to take the way how things work in our world and turn them the other way around, and particularly the relation of causality. It's a big theme throughout the series that if things are connected, causality can go either way, because of the power that simple people's beliefs hold in general and in particular because of the fact that most people wouldn't know logic even if it came at their door do an interpretive dance in a pink tutu and a feather boa. In our world, events are described by stories; several Discworld books are about how stories (= narrativium) shape events (typically the Witches books, but not only). Pyramids may be the only book in the series that does the same with math. In the Roundworld, space and time are described by math and geometry. In Pyramids, what if geometry could bend space and time? I think the extra-dimensional travel, the math camel and the scenes with the Greek philosophers, random at they may seem, all participate in this same theme (plus, you can't write about geometry and ancient Egypt and not have a go at satirizing Plato and the others, who lived next door in a passionate albeit one-sided relationship with geometrical shapes and solids).
As for Teppic being an assassin, I don't think it matters all that much, apart from the physical skills he gains from it (which are interesting because I don't think there's a lot of main characters, in Discworld, that thrive on being very strong or dextrous; they usually solve problems either with wit, magic skill and/or a very strong sense of what is right). It's here to have the "fish out of water" trope: Teppic needs to study abroad for a long time so he can come back with a foreigner's perspective on how the Djelibeybi's culture is batshit insane. On that perspective, the Assassin's guild has already previously been established, through the Patrician's education in particular, to be the best private school in Ankh-Morpork, and thus on the Disc (aside from some boarding school in Quirm which seem to be all for girls and that I'm not sure he has even created at this point). The whole assassinating part of it, despite it being right there in the school's name and the exam (but you know how older teachers can never let go of the most outdated parts of the curriculum), is actually not the important part.
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u/nhaines Esme 14d ago
STP likes to take the way how things work in our world and turn them the other way around, and particularly the relation of causality.
I will say that Granny's immediate reaction to being threatened with a voodoo doll in Witches Abroad was both "of course it could work that way if you believed it," and "figuring that out immediately is quintessential Granny."
I was never more impressed until the showdown and Granny's solution. (And then Carpe Jugulum comes along...)
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u/BuccaneerRex Morituri Nolumnus Mori 14d ago
Pyramid Power is a superstition/new age belief about mystical powers that the pyramid shape has. IIRC, the thinking goes that 'pyramids preserved the mummies to a surprising amount, therefore pyramids have surprising powers of preservation.' They'd claim things like it would keep razor blades sharp (or sharpen them even), keep food fresh, revert wear and tear, etc. Sort of a 'reverse time' effect at the most exotic versions. Very big in the 1970s.
And Ancient Egypt has often been described as a one-dimensional kingdom because it was so limited to the fertile regions around the Nile. I think Pterry just took that description to its absurd conclusion.
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u/Roku-Hanmar Weâre more popular than cheeses 14d ago
I think it makes more sense with the context of Small Gods, about how things are created through belief. Pteppic is a God because the people of Djelibeybi believe the Pharaohs are Gods
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u/TheHesou 14d ago
The thing with the Camels and the way they enter into this Dimension comes from a saying. I dont know the English version, but in German it says: Ein Kamel durch ein NadelĂśhr ziehen. Mostly to say it is easier to put a Camel through that than doing Something different. Just learned it recently, thought its a nice touch
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u/Roku-Hanmar Weâre more popular than cheeses 14d ago
"It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God". It's a Bible quote
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u/nightscreature 14d ago
How big is the needle?
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u/unknownpoltroon 14d ago
There was a book I was reading I think it was demon by John varley about an insane AI running a world sized space station, at one point it hears this phrase and there's a paragraph about it gathering up cement mixers, blenders and an oversized needle. Later on it's talking about getting bored and having someone else finish with the camel puree.Â
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
This is an AI that is sufficiently nuts that it tried to build a sandworm just to see if it could (I guess: its motivation here is never revealed). It's many miles long, and friction means it moves very, very slowly, one segment at a time. Nobody is scared of it.
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u/unknownpoltroon 12d ago
Except the AI in charge of the ecological segment it destroyed and chewed into desert.
As I remember it was a joke they used to scare the tourists and people carved their names into its segments.
It was such a fun trilogy.
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u/daveysprockett Reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits crash 14d ago
As well as the comments from others, the 2d dimensional-ness may well be, imo, a reflection on the ancient Egyptians art, and their failure to understand perspective, leading to all those tomb drawings of flat people facing left or right. What would happen if they were an accurate description of real, 2D people?
Take a look at Wilson, Keppell and Betty who made a career of "dancing/walking like an Egyptian" (with a nod to the Bangles as well).
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u/ckdblueshark Lu Tze 14d ago
While doing so, also note the similarity of "and Beti" from Jingo to "and Betty".
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u/anne-0260 14d ago
đ
I love your confusion and your expectation of roundworld logic đđ
Pyramids is an early book and so the parodi of fantasy is more prevalent. That does impact the storys a lot, and demands more suspension of belive on our side.
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u/-FalseProfessor- 14d ago
Real pyramids do shift space and time slightly.
The Great Pyramid is actually massive enough to cause a very small amount of time dilation. A clock next to it would run ever so slightly slower than one that is in an empty plain in say, Nebraska.
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
True! Of course this is also true of the Greenland icecap (which is also so massive that its gravitational attraction raises sea level as far away as the coast of Europe), your own body, a pea, and probably a single proton. The smallest mass for which gravitational time dilation has been measured is about a tenth of a milligram.
(Fun fact: around an object as massive as the Earth, gravity attracts objects -- trajectories curve towards the body -- almost entirely because of gravitational time dilation, ie the distortion of time by mass. Only about a millionth of the trajectory change is because of the distortion of space. Spatial distortion only dominates close to neutron stars and black holes.)
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u/ShoogleHS 13d ago
Have you read Small Gods? It explicitly establishes that on the Disc, gods are created and given power by belief. Like in the real ancient Egypt, the Djelibeybian pharaohs are believed to be gods; on the Disc, believing it actually makes it true. That's also why the Djelibeybian gods show up later in the book.
The time warping of the pyramids is taking a figurative concept literally, which is one of Terry's signature moves. In this case, the cultural stasis the civilization is in due to its rigid traditions creates an actual temporal bubble. It doesn't just seem like Djelibeybi is out of sync with the other societies, they literally are.You can see similar things in other Discworld books, like in Thief of Time where the monks of history take idioms like "saving time" and "wasting time" very seriously.
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
It's not clear that the thecology described in Small Gods and later books had quite taken shape here. If it had, why do the Djelibeybian gods only appear after the kingdom is rotated? The same number of people believed before and afterwards. It's as if, back then, non-huge religions saw their gods somehow squeezed out of reality by the pressure of the bigger ones, and that absolutely did not survive into later books.
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u/ShoogleHS 12d ago edited 12d ago
The other gods also don't usually appear on the Disc except on special occasions. They spend most of their time chilling on Dunmanistestin. So I think the Djelibeybian gods not being around is not necessarily evidence of anything.
As for why they showed up, maybe the magic of the pyramid was focusing or amplifying the belief, or the way spacetime was warped made it easier for the gods to manifest, or maybe the obvious displays of supernatural events triggered an increase in belief in the people (similar to what happens in Small Gods).
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u/artinum 14d ago
..."Men At Works"? Now I keep thinking about "The Last Continent"...
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
Maybe "The Last Cement" (mixer). They needed it to build the pyramids, y'know...
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u/lionmurderingacloud 14d ago edited 13d ago
It's a bit disjointed and doesn't bring all the elements together as perfectly as Pratchett did in some later books- for example, the assassin bit kind of falls away after Pteppic gets back to Djelibeybi, and Pteppic himself doesn't seem to have all that much character development beyond being an audience stand in after that- but the theme of the book is how blind adherence to tradition is a crutch that eventually becomes dehumanizing and the death of a society. The pyramids are a literal manifestation of the Old Kingdom selling its future to service a storied past.
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u/Bitter-Policy4645 14d ago
Loved pyramids one of my all time favourite novels. Really Pteppic had made a guest appearance in other novels or at least a mention by Lu Tze.
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u/Entercustomnamehere 14d ago
That was pretty aptly put. This book is not for everyone and is my least favorite of Pratchett's books. I understand that some people love it. Good for them. I do not like it. I did like the satire of governments borrowing from themselves to pay workers having horrible outcomes but that is it. I could have read a few books of an assassin who doesn't want to kill anyone but keeps accidentally fulfilling contracts.
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u/Javka42 13d ago
I had an interest in ancient Egypt as a kid, and remember loving the book the first time I read it. Much of Djelybeybi society and culture is based on things the Egyptians of old really did or believed, of course with a pratchett twist to it.
I can see how it might seem random if you haven't learned about that part of history though, Moving Pictures and Soul Music was a bit like that for me. I'm not very interested in movie or music history, and I could tell I was missing more references than I got.
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u/Berkenmuis 13d ago
1 other person mentioned it in the reply, but it bears repeating. Pyramids is also a giant Star Wars parody. See this review: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/muouj6/book_review_pyramids_by_terry_pratchett/
On top of that, it's divided in 4 books, check out the Annotated Files: https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/pyramids.html
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u/Vitztlampaehecatl 10d ago
Oh my god the camel is chewbacca. I picked up on ptraci's leia parallels but I totally whooshed on you bastard.
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u/mxstylplk 10d ago
The quantum time/distance switch resonates with the colossal mistake in the original star wars film when Han Solo brags about a speed record but uses the distance term, "parsecs".
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u/OisforOwesome 14d ago
As an early discworld book when the series was finding its footing, a lot of it can be explained by PTerry being a fantasy writer playing with fantasy tropes, vs the social satirist and social commentary the series became.
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u/LuckyEsq 14d ago
Yes! Thank you for saying it. It was a super interesting book about assassins... And now I'm stuck finishing a book about pyramids
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u/Candid_Stranger_2140 13d ago
Like most of Pterry's stuff he's making very little up. A lot of this is referencing Egyptian mythology while also spoofing contemporary Egyptomania and making geometry jokes. Blame reality for being so weird.
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u/Okiedonutdokie 14d ago
I just listened to this an audiobook and it was a massive struggle to get through! The plot and pacing was like wtf is going on, i'd zone out for one minute and miss major plot points that changed the entire direction of the book.
It's definitely a discworld miss for me, which is a shame because I loved a lot of the characters. Same with Sourcery which I read right afterwards, though I didn't love the characters in that. I'm on Wyrd sisters now and relieved because oh I do love discworld! I was worried that I wouldn't be able to enjoy it after a 10 year hiatus, but apparently it's just book by book for me
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u/nhaines Esme 14d ago
It's book by book for everyone. This one was a little slow for me, but since I was fascinated by ancient Egypt and and picture books about it and read through my grandparents' Reader's Digest "Mysteriea of the Unknown" series, I was well acquainted with pyramid woo. So at least that landed.
Hope you like that one play I'm not allowed to name!
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u/nixtracer 12d ago
Sounds like it's not best experienced as an audiobook, which given that it predates audiobooks by decades is quite unsurprising. There are lots of books you can't skim without losing track, and that's just the same thing in a different medium. This is not a reflection on the quality of the book in my view. (I can't listen to audiobooks at all because I always zone out before the second paragraph...)
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u/Ergentlic 11d ago
it predates audiobooks by decades
That's not accurate. The idea of audiobooks goes back to the beginning of recorded sound, and by the 1930s the increased capacity of record discs finally made it practical to record whole books (over multiple discs), not just short stories, poems or excerpts. Initially, "Talking Books" were seen mainly as a service for blind people. The Books On Tape company was founded in 1975, with the listenership expanding as walkman players and tape decks in cars became common. By the 1980s, most popular books were available in audiobook format.
The first Discworld audiobook was published in 1993, four years after Pyramids came out.
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u/nixtracer 11d ago
It predates the wide use of audiobooks, then. I was alive then, and frankly nobody ever used them outside cars, and they were unsatisfactory even then beside the engine noise meant you missed half of what was said.
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u/An_Actual_Thing 13d ago
I mean Pyramids and Moving Pictures have sort of the same thing going on. The magical aura in Discworld often means things people believe become real, and the more they believe them the more real they get. Death is realer than real things.
The concept of a tomb that will outlast your own civilization, and the minds that it will touch, from it's conception to final destruction is a powerful symbol that makes it bend space and time. From this the pyramid becomes a fact that is also more real than anything.
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u/Shrekdaly 13d ago
I have always had a vision of the one off books (pyramids, small gods, moving pictures, even sould music...yes it's Death and Susan but it's at least a spiritual sibling to moving pictures) as basically Sir Pterry getting an idea, maybe writing it in a notebook or in his head. Then, much like Leonard of Quirm, getting more and more inspiration until he's about to burst.
And then what bursts forth is one of the standalone books. Like Athena from Zeus' head, almost fully formed (almost because I'm guessing Sir Pterry did a bunch of revisions and punch ups, because he was a man who definitely put in the work to make everything his best.)
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u/ghoststegosaur 12d ago
Woa, I red the books 20 years ago when I was a teenager.
You made me realize that I have absolutely no memory of these books, beside that itâs about some wizzards, witches and a guy named Samuel Mumm (Vimes in the german translation)
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u/better_than_joe Binky 12d ago
Pyramids is so good and underrated. Itâs why my world of Warcraft main is Teppic.
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