She did have the sign, IIRC?
I can see Vimes agreeing to King Carrot only if the King was basically powerless and spent all his time doing the stuff vimes hated- cutting ribbons, kissing babies and so forth.
That’s what I was implying @DrDeth, social influence, but minimal political power - so technically less power than he has in the Watch, but a chance to give everyone a role model to look up to. Not that he hasn’t already done this already. But enough about my theory, I’d love to hear from others.
So far, a few agreements with Moist as a new Patrician, but with support from Vimes and Carrot. Does anyone have another fun one?
Vimes’ objections aren’t about the degree of political power. They’re about the very nature of Kingship. The Patrician is in effect a monarch in the literal sense of sole ruler. But he’s not a King because he’s not set apart as somehow divinely or magically suited to rule.
Carrot of course is the heir to the throne, and does have this aura of specialness, which is why he agrees he should be a humble Watchman and not on any kind of pedestal.
“No more kings. Vimes had difficulty in articulating why this should be so, why the concept resonated in his very bones. After all, a good many of the patricians had been as bad as any king. But they were…sort of…bad on equal terms. What set Vimes’s teeth on edge was the idea that kings were a different kind of human being. A higher lifeform. Somehow magical.”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
“The King doesn’t have any power, he’s just this really special guy everyone looks up to” - this is anathema to Vimes.
“Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: “Kings. What a good idea.” Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.”
But what if it was Carrot. Vimes doesn’t just like Carrot, he knows he’s a good man, right?
‘Listen! We probably had good kings, once! But kings breed other kings! And blood tells, and you end up with a bunch of arrogant, murdering bastards! Chopping off queens’ heads and fighting their cousins every five minutes! And we had centuries of that! And then one day a man said 'No more kings!’ and we rose up and we fought the bloody nobles and we dragged the king off his throne and we dragged him into Sator Square and we chopped his bloody head off! Job well done!’
'Wow,’ said Carrot. 'Who was he?’
'Who?’
'The man who said 'No more kings.“
People were staring. Vimes’s face went from the red of anger to the red of embarrassment. There was little difference in the shading, however.
'Oh… he was Commander of the City Guard in those days,’ he mumbled. 'They called him Old Stoneface.’on Old Stoneface | Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
Note this is specifically about the role of King. A triumvirate with Moist as the agent of change, Vimes keeping things stable and Carrot as the “face” would work well. But Vimes and Kings are incompatible.
Pratchett moved Ankh-Morpork from medieval city-state with the Patrician and Guilds to a quasi-Victorian industrial city with corporate interests, a solid financial system, newspapers and written communications ( implying a literate society), and a population capable of activism in pursuit of sub-groups (dwarves, golems) rights and interests. It’s not hard to see something quasi-democratic arising out of that. There is certainly going to have to be a means for all these interests to have a voice and to have their point of view taken seriously (at least to keep people off the streets) and a means for balancing all of these in pursuit of some broadly acknowledged all-Ankh-Morpork goals.
The council already exists; you can see that elections (corrupt ones, obviously, this is A-M) for the role of council representative could easily emerge within one or two communities. You could even see the emergence of new communities defined along different lines - class, perhaps. Where is the voice for the common people we saw in Unseen Academicals?
The Patrician has essentially been holding the political development of Ankh-Morpork back by being so good at his job. In his absence, a lot of stuff is going to happen very quickly and when the dust settles OMOV will be over.
This has always been one of my favourite Pratchett quotes, right up there with Death’s bit on Little Lies and Big Lies.
Yeah, and both of those speak volumes about Pratchett’s take on humanism
The Beggars Guild and various aristos first, probably. The aristos already band together in various conspiracies, so I could easily see them trying to gain a bigger voice in the council (under Moist) by staging rigged elections. The Beggars Guild is a democracy already, I think, as are many of the artisan guilds like Bakers.
Yeah - I mean, if I were capable of producing Pratchett-level world-building I’d be considerably richer, but I can imagine Pterry writing a post-Patrician handover novel in which an aristo making the running as champion of the people: in insincere, populist mode most likely, but it would be really quite interesting to have a “good” aristo who believed in duty, service, noblesse oblige and all that, as well as fixed social hierarchy and the innate quality of people from the right background. We’ve seen Rust - he’s a privileged idiot. An antagonist who was privileged but also smart, charismatic, insightful would make for an interesting opponent.
I’m pretty much of the school that says that it would have been best if Pterry had realized that he needed to step away from Discworld a little sooner – his last offerings were getting weaker, IMHO. I certainly wish that he would have lived a lot longer, just finding other things to write about.
Anyhow: if in fact there was nothing wrong with the antagonist’s motivation or ideas, there wouldn’t be much of a plot. If nothing else, there needs to be some subplot showing again how good intentions and unexpected consequences can go horribly wrong. I loved the final scene in Making Money where the bank vault starts filling with gold dust.
Would Carrot be on the scene? We’ve already had one example where the antagonist tried to convince Carrot that a new political order would be better (Men At Arms). Carrot responded with a strong counter-thrust, putting the sword through the stone – after first running through the antagonist.
Say, for the new plot, Angua senses the threat and corners the antagonist, but hesitates. She desparately wants to kill the bastard but knows that if she does, she’ll never trust her own self-control again. Gaspode charges in and gets the bastard to step back under a falling piano. (Gaspode possibly earlier saw the bastard kick a dog out of sheer mean spirit, revealing the bastard’s true nature.)
But Pterry would write it much better.
Moist was an interesting character when he first appeared, but I felt subsequent books featuring him started to get a bit repetitive. Perhaps Terry was starting to lose his edge a bit from the alzheimers by that stage, alas.
Joining this thread very late on its revival … but I suspect Pratchett had no specific plan in mind. He’d have taken his world in a direction that satirized some aspects of the real world as that world changed. So maybe a tangent?
What of today’s world would rise to the top of his list and where would he have taken his world in service of his humanistic and loving skewering of it?
Welcome to the thread! Well, I’d have my suspicions as well, but I want people to share their fun thoughts, as it’s all ‘head-canon’ anyway. So do Ptratchett proud and tell us what sort of tangent he would have done. Perhaps, just perhaps, our resident Ape of the Academy suddenly found himself running for Chancellor despite not intending to do it seriously? And everyone listens to him Oook loudly and read far too much into it?
See? This is the fun part.
I’ve not the genius of Pratchett but I think he’d be reacting to the rise of nationalism and the increasing othering within societies, maybe to the rise of disinformation as well. Perhaps the Patrician dies (or is thought to anyway) and a new figure uses some of what has been created to subvert what he created, pulling away from the alliances built.
The tension is over monarchy vs this new populist force vs some twist on it that forces Vimes be something yet more than he wants to be. Maybe ends with a witch as Patrician, now an elected position.
BTW I don’t have a copy to hand but in the afterword to The Shepherd’s Crown some of Pterry’s planned future books were mentioned, including one set in Howandaland (The Dark Incontinent). I don’t recall anything specifically about the Patrician, although I think there was another Vimes book planned.
Sybil: ‘Sam, a lot of my friends keep saying that I should convince you to run for the Patrician position’.
Sam: ‘I’m not doing it. I can’t stand all that false friendliness and real back-stabbing the guilds and aristos get up to. I’d lose my rag on the first day’.
Sybil: ‘I told them that. So they suggested I do it’.
Yeah, and I hated his GF, she was annoying as hell.
I feel like climate change or something else environmental was on the cards. He’d already touched on this kind of thing with the magic dumps at UU, but with all the new tech and accelerating advancement, I feel like it would be ripe for a new take on it. Maybe a foreign delegation arrives at A-M from Krull (remember them?) complaining about increased pollution from A-M fouling their nets or something. And it only gets worse from there.
Vetenari would have set up an Ankh-Morpork food and drug administration. And he would have put in charge the one person who knew more about adulterated food than anyone else in A-M.
You know, we’ve all thought a lot about how current events and trends play into TP’s books. Considering what has gone on in the US, I think it would have been great to have a Night Watch / Vimes novel about police violence, especially as it varies according to class/race. Vimes has repeatedly been stressed that the nobs and members of the powerful guilds were largely beyond his reach (although he went after them as much as could within the rules). He also was emphatically on the side of the poorest folks, the ones who were most at risk of violence.
So I could totally see a novel where he found members of the watch were abusing people, or extorting them. While I doubt it would happen in ‘modern’ A-M, the watch system was being exported to surrounding city states. I could almost see a scene in which a young man or woman comes to Vimes advising of abuse, but that city authority stands firm in denial, and Vimes going ‘undercover’ to find out what’s what. And one of the traits I like about Vimes is his ability to reflect - he might see that his view of everyone in the world from a copper’s perspective may be blinding him in ways as well.
Are you suggesting that there might have been something else in those top-quality Rats on a Stick?