December Days 18: things I believe in (balsamandash)

[alexseanchai]

"All right," said Susan, "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."

No. Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"

Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

Yes. Justice. Duty. Mercy. That sort of thing.

"They're not the same at all!"

Really? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged:

"Yes. But people have got to believe that or what's the point?"

My point exactly.

nb: never actually read Hogfather. Or more than a few pages of any Pratchett besides Good Omens. Planning to change that, though; I've got a hold on a library copy of Hogfather. (Also thinking about reading Discworld for my tentatively planned fiction-book-a-week project in 2015. Forty books published per Wiki; that should last me most of the year.)

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

Also: The one problem with publication order for Discworld is that the first book is much less good than subsequent books. I've never actually been able to get through The Color of Magic, and I let that deter me from reading the whole series for a while. So don't worry too much if you don't enjoy the first one. Most of the rest are awesome.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, there's a distinct improvement through the early books. Guards! Guards! is possibly where he really hit his stride.

And as various people have noted, it took him a long while to be able to write young women as well as he could everyone else. Tansy Rayner Roberts has a really good set of essays on 'Pratchett's Women'.