In my own defense, I went to a used bookstore not far from school. Where I live, the closest large bookstores are about half an hour away. Next time I place an order from Amazon, I’ll be sure to check out the later books.
Robin
Nothing wrong with The Color of Magic as long as you keep in mind it’s a non-subtle straight-up fantasy parody. But using it as a representative of what Terry Pratchett can do is like trying to get a feel for Pixar Animation studios by focusing only on “Geri’s Game.”
Actually, that’d make an interesting question: if you could introduce a newcomer to Terry Pratchett with only two novels, which two would you pick to give a representative example of his range? Small Gods and The Last Continent? Men-At-Arms and Maskerade?
And to hijack this thread even further… the bulk of my Pratchett collection is currently in mass-maket paperbacks, mostly from the UK (gotta get those covers!). Do folks think it’d be worth it for me to get new books hardcovers instead? And can my wallet endure the pain of rebuilding a 30-plus-novel collection using imported UK hardcovers? :eek:
MsRobyn, it’s already been mentioned, but I recommend reading Night Watch. It’s not the first in a series, and it’s not even the first Discworld book I read, but it’s definitely my favorite, and the one that got me interested in the series. Even though it references many of the other books, it stands on its own. You don’t have to know everything about what’s going on to appreciate the book, and when you read the others later, you’ll make the connections and it’ll seem even more interesting.
I’d also second Lynn Bodoni’s suggestion of Good Omens, because it’s just one of my favorite novels.
Well to be fair, that’s one line from the first couple of pages of one of Adams’ books, not his greatest insight into the human condition. It’d be like saying that Pratchett’s greatest insight is “Australians like beer and fighting and they give their cities funny names.”
It seems kind of pointless to me to be comparing Adams and Pratchett based on their novels, because everything I’ve ever read about or from Adams suggests that he became a novelist “by accident.” He was always interested in a variety of stuff like radio plays, computer games, travelogues, and so on, which explained the varying forms and lack of continuity of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series.
But all that said, I will say that just based on their works that I’ve read, Pratchett strikes me as clever, while Adams seems truly insightful. The Discworld series does have an interesting take on the nature of gods and religion, mythology, free will, destiny, and so on, but it’s stretched out and repeated over several books. Because Pratchett is such a strong novelist, his stories are all tidily wrapped up with neat conclusions – for a series that’s about atheism and a chaotic universe, everything turns out orderly. His messages are given ample set-up and a satisfying (but not always predictable) pay-off. When weird stuff happens, it happens for a reason, or at least serves as a satisfying allegory. And when he makes a clever turn of phrase, I get the sense of his laboring over just the right way to set it up and deliver it.
Adams’ work, on the other hand, seems like it came from someone who really saw the world in a different way. His plots didn’t really make sense, he used stories in his novels that he’d already used in interviews, and he’d go off on long tangents about some new thing he was interested in – IIRC, half of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was about how great Macintosh computers were. It all seemed like he was making it up as he went along, and that he was genuinely excited about it. So when he did come up with a really clever turn of phrase (like his most famous one about the spaceships hanging in the air exactly the way that bricks don’t), it felt more immediate, as if it was just something that had popped into his head, instead of a carefully-constructed way to make you laugh.
What a serendipitous thread! Because of the mentions that he has gotten here, I decided to pick up a Terry Pratchett book at the library. They had about 7 books on the shelf, mostly all from the Discworld series, so I figured I had better get the earliest I could find, which was Moving Pictures. I’ve read a little ways into it, and I think I’ll like it, but I also picked up How to be Good, by Nick Hornby, and I am really enjoying that.
I also picked up de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, but I am somewhat ashamed to say it will have to wait until I get through the first two.
If you’re looking to be introduced to Discworld and what it’s like, then whatever you do, do NOT read “Night Watch”!! It’s completely atypical of a Discworld book, and more importantly, it has baggage attached to it (as do most of the other later books) where you should already be familiar with the characters and world before reading it. You should read at least two of the other “City Watch” books before hitting that one.
For the record, I consider “Night Watch” one of my least favourites, it’s in my bottom five - I really don’t like Vimes.
Disregard GuanoLad completely! 
Nightwatch is Pratchett at his finest…serious Literature, there.
As you can see, tastes vary. For every Fan of PTerry (The Chosen People) there is someone who, for some misbegotten reason, likes Adams (The Benighted Ones).
To address rjung’s question: The UK covers are all of a style, so they look very nice all lined up on the shelf. Interesting artwork (much more so than the abyssmal US covers) and standardized trim. I have every book since Mort in UK 1st Edition hardback (thank you amazon.uk!) and most of them are signed. 
Pricey, that. But worth it.
That’s a first in my experience, that someone dislikes Vimes. I agree it’s an atypical Discworld book, though; there’s almost no humor in it, except perhaps where Nobby is concerned. And it does more or less help if you have a basic understanding of who the characters are and their recent history, because the plot requires a good deal of sympathy for the characters to really get a lot out of it (unlike, say, the Rincewind or other Unseen University books). It’s one of the very few Discworld books that probably shouldn’t be read ahead of the earlier ones.
I happen to think it’s an excellent book, however.
Of course, if you prefer to listen rather than read, BBC 7 broadcasts readings from Pratchett’s books, among lots of other good stuff. You can listen free online.
I think that’s a fair summation into Pratchett’s insights about Australia, but then, The Last Continent is probably my least favorite Pratchett book.
I think that’s mostly a pretty apt comparison, and I think it highlights why I think Adams lags in comparison to Pratchett. Pratchett seems much more of a craftsman in his writing, creating tightly written, multilayered stories. I like that sort of care and attention to detail in writing, and value it over the looser, more stream-of-cnsciousness-ish writing of Adams.
As for insights, I never really found any in HHGttG, except for “Authority figures and beauracracy are pretty stupid.” Which was a sentiment I really appreciated when I first read the books, around the age of thirteen or fourteen, but it wasn’t telling me anything I wasn’t already thinking. Pratchett regularly makes me sit up and think, “Jesus, I’d never thought of it like that before!” And often, it makes more sense than how I’d been thinking of it before. That’s about the best thing you can get from a book, in my experience.
Care to share some examples?
If that’s all you got from the statement then you’re either missing the context or missing the point. Back when Adams wrote the Hitchhiker’s’s radio script (1978) digital watches were still commonly of the LED variety, i.e heavy, expensive, limited (showed only hour and minute), and worst of all, required the off-hand in order to operate, as the display was not continuous; hence, a digital watch was far less useful and functional than a standard analog watch. And yet, people were buying and wearing them, demonstrating the human desire to latch on to the newest shiny thing, even when it is actually a step backward. Today, of course, LCD-type digital watches are more durable, functional, and less expensive than their analog counterparts, and the context of the joke (as with Ford Prefect’s name) is lost on the audience. The idea is that humans think themselves to be very sophisticated and advanced, but are actually laughably primitive in their adoption of technology.
I’m a little surprised as the number of Adams-bashers here. It’s true–and Adams so admitted–that plotting wasn’t his strong point. The strongest novel he had in that regard was Life, The Universe, and Everything, and even it was fairly simplistic (and fatalistic–the heros actually fail to foil the plans of Hactur by their own actions and only ultimately succeed owning to Arthur’s athletic incompetence), but then, Adams wasn’t trying to be a novelest–he was trying to write technically-literate Pythonesque science-humor. (Hitchhiker’s started out, conceptually, as a series of episodes each ending in the destruction of the planet, tenatively titled The Ends of the Earth.) It probably doesn’t help that really getting some of the jokes in Adams works requires at least a survey knowledge of modern physics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, as well as the then-modern English culture.
The appeal in Adams’ novels is in the clever juxtoposition of hard science with absurdist humor, and in his amusingly tortured prose. Like P.G. Wodehouse, the plot developments just serve as a closeline on which to hang satire of social conventions and detailed, exaggeratedly humorous descriptive prose. Some of his best writing was actually in the form of Guide entries, which was a wonderful narrative device for his type of humor that, absent in the Gently novels, left them grasping for an expositor, which became particularly obvious with The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul.
I’ve read a couple of Pratchett novels (the widely acclaimed Small Gods and…I forget the other), and I’m just…not that impressed. Pratchett does have a good handle on plotting although I think his characters are kind of thin, but his humor comes off as more of a chuckle than an actual laugh. His literary and cultural references seem to exist more as an attempt to grant greater depth than because they’re actually amusing. I wouldn’t so much compare him to Adams, actually, as I would to Joseph Heller or Thomas Pynchon, and to both somewhat unfavorably.
But to each his or her own. I haven’t found much enthusiasm for the alleged humor of Iain Banks, either.
Stranger
I imagine it’s difficult for an author to write 30+ novels and not repeat himself after a point.
That’s the Narrativum working.
And the other day I ran across an interesting new (to me) book: Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, a collection of essays analyzing Pratchett’s work from a literary criticism perspective.
Even better you can get books of the illustrations by Paul Kidby, who does the cover art work for the latest books.
The Art of the Discworld
Or you can get the illustraions by Josh Kirby who did the covers for the books up to The Thief of Time.
The Josh Kirby Discworld Portfolio
Oh, I’m familiar with the background to the joke. And it’s not a bad joke, as far as it goes. I just don’t think it’s a particularly staggering insight, is all. Humans like gadgets, even if the gadgets aren’t really practical. It’s not really an original insight, and he doesn’t, as I recall, do much with it. Compare it with Pratchett’s Thief of Time, which is, in part, concerned with the astonishing hubris of inventing the clock in the first place, and the way in which our perception of time is distorted by the way we measure it.
I suppose another large part of why Adams doesn’t really work for me is that I disagree with his conclusions. Inefficient watches mean we’re laughably primitive? Compared to what? Mice and dolphins? Digital watches were only a bad idea when compared to analog watches… which are another human invention. What does it say about humans that we can invent both the analog watch (presumably useful) and the LED digital watch? What does it say about the LED watch that it led to the LCD watch? It just seems that Adams would start with a decent observation about human nature, but then just adopt the most pessimistic interpretation of it without giving it any real investigation.
But what he ended up with was a novel, and I think it is fair to criticize it as such.
No different than Pratchett, then. And I’d like to think that I do have at least a survey knowledge of at least three out of four of those topics.
No argument there, except in so far as his relative success at his goals, which is purely subjective.
Just curious, but when you say his characters are thin, how do they compare with Adams’ characters, in your view? One of my chief complaints with Adams is that his characters don’t have much character. They’re vapor-thin and almost instantly forgettable, with only one or two notable exceptions. Marvin is certainly a stand-out, and Zaphod was at least interesting in potential, if not execution. But the rest of the cast… hell, I’d forgotten Trillian even exsisted until I saw the recent movie.
Man, what I wouldn’t give to be compared to Heller or Pynchon only “somewhat unfavorably”! That’s like praising with faint damnation!
I tried to read a Banks novel once, one of his SF numbers. I don’t think I lasted a hundred pages. Can’t remember a damned thing about it, now. Not even the title.
Am I the only person who really intensely disliked Josh Kirby’s illustrations? The only good thing I could say for him is that he made the abominable Darryl Sweet covers of the early US paperbacks seem not quite so bad.
Nope. I thought they were poorly done and gave away too many plot points.
Well, Adams most vivid characters (aside from Ford Prefect, who I immediately and forever envisioned as a hyperkinetic Eric Idle) were those that he based upon himself, specifically Arthur Dent, Richard MacDuff, and Dirk Gently. Most others seemed to be built upon specific traits (Zaphod’s maniacal hedonism, Marvin’s relentless pessimissim, Slartibartfast’s quixotic activitism) that drive the story. And yeah, Adams didn’t have a clue as to what to do with Trillian; her first class degrees in mathematics and astrophysics aside, she was the quintessential supernumerary. But the characters all left a distinct impression, even if they weren’t fully developed as characters, which is more than I get from Pratchett. Admittedly, I haven’t read the bulk of Pratchett’s work and so can’t really make a comprehensive judgement.
Well, I suppose that’s true. But Adams always struck me as more original and unique; the closest in terms of style I’ve found is Wodehouse (who Adams claims not to have read before he became a novelist) or Cervantes. Ultimately, of course, you like what you like, no justification needed.
You and me and nobody else; everybody seems to love Banks and think “The Culture” to be highly inventive. I struggled through Consider Phlebas and gave up on The Business and another of his mainstream novels.
Stranger
That’s the one!
(Who the heck was Richard MacDuff, anyway? I recongize all the other names, at the very least, but that one doesn’t ring any bells.)
I think that’s spot on. If I was to think of the two in TV show terms (go with me for a sec), I’d have Pratchett as “Fraiser” and Adams as “Seinfeld”. Fraiser is a great show with a lot of smart cultural and literary references, a good plot, but always gave me more chuckles than laughter. Seinfeld, OTOH, had basically no plot (a show about nothing) with the character growth not really a part of the story, but gave me far more belly laughs and I remember it far more fondly.
I just wanted to say that I agree with this view wholeheartedly as well. There is just something about Adams’ zanyness that captures me in a way Pratchett doesn’t.
MacDuff was the Mac programmer in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency… you know the guy who has the sofa stuck in the stairwell and works for Gordon Way?