book review

[calimac]

Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard

After three previous failures, I finally found a Terry Pratchett book I enjoyed reading enough to finish it. But it's not a novel: it's his "collected nonfiction". I read the whole thing despite its being extremely repetitive, as frequently several pieces will cover the same points.

I'd had an impression of Pratchett as being somewhat removed from the details of the f&sf publishing genre, but in his essays on writing and publishing I find that's not so. He was clued in even to the ideas and major works of hard SF, which he didn't write at all. I particularly enjoyed his accounts of his own personal discoveries of literature, some of which I found funny, an experience I hadn't much had with earlier Pratchett books. Why, as a boy he liked heroic fantasy so much that "I even bought and read all the Narnia books in one go, which was [a] bit like a surfeit of Communion wafers."

The last part of the book is sufficiently memorable and important that it may make you forget the rest: it's his pieces on his Alzheimer's, on his determination to demystify the disease, on the proper treatment and the role of the NHS. He made these points to many audiences, so this section is particularly repetitious: if you read just one piece from here, make it his Richard Dimbleby Lecture.

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Terry may not have written "major works" of hard SF but he had long been a fan before he hit the Big Time. I don't know if you ever came across his earlier SF works in which his sense of humour is expressed in a playful fashion among the tropes of hard SF; for example "The Dark Side of the Sun" has biological starships, emancipated robots, a biomechanical ecology, heirs to vast empires, escape and pursuit, a search for the Progenitors, aliens who are alien to both humans and other aliens, black holes as antipersonnel weapons, immortality drugs etc. etc. in a single 200-page odyssey. It still may not be to your taste, of course.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I know very little about Pratchett's fiction, as I've never been able to get more than two chapters into any of it. Possibly in my ignorance I had unconsciously conflated him with J.K. Rowling, whose work I got much further into before giving up, and who - though she also read fantasy from childhood on - does not have a fannish or genre-based background.