The Heart of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2007

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. The first Valor novel was a replay of every mil-sf writer’s favourite Zulu War siege, while the second took on an equally venerable plot: the “let’s investigate a mysterious derelict alien space ship” one. And now, with The Heart of Valor, the third novel in the series, Tanya Huff once again takes on an old mil-sf standby, the march upcountry across a hostile planet, though she doesn’t go for the full Anabasis. In short, it looks like Tanya Huff is working her way through the Big Book of Stock Mil-SF Plots, but I’m not complaining. The general outlines might not be original, but as with everything, it’s all in the execution.

It helps if you have a strong character to hang your story on of course, and I like gunnery sergeant Torin Kerr. She’s a hardbitten, cynical career soldier keeping an eye out for her people, weary of her superiors and their inevitable fuckups. She also somebody we met in the first book waking up from a tryst with a di’Taykan, a somewhat randy alien species who never say no to a one-night stand, a di’Taykan that later turned out to be her commanding officer. Huff lets the reader spent a lot of time in sergeant Kerr’s skull and she comes across as smarter than she presents, conscientious and slightly paranoid. The latter is probably not surprising, considering her previous adventure on a very alien spaceship.

The Heart of Valor starts with Kerr recently promoted from staff to gunnery sergeant, being debriefed over her adventures on Big Yellow, the alien spaceship and bored out of her skull. So when major Svensson suggests she joins him as a temporary aide de camp on an expedition to the marine training planet Crucible, she jumps at the chance. The good major wents to check how his almost entirely rebuild body functions under combat circumstances, having only recently been detanked after almost having been killed. Gunny Kerr will be there to keep the major and his civilian doctor safe, while they join a group of recruits off for a twenty day survival course. By pure coincidence, the same di’Kaytan staff sergeant Beyhn who was there when Kerr through her tour, is also in charge of this batch of recruits.

On Crucible, the platoon of 120 day recruits is supposed to survive for twenty days while fighting various combat scenarios against combat drones and other AI directed threats, all overseen by a staff of instructors safe inside an orbital platform. Major Svensson, his doctor and gunny Kerr will tag along. It all sounds simple, but of course things go wrong quickly. First there’s staff sergeant Beyhn who carries a secret that could kill him and makes him fall ill at the worst possible moment. Then the Combat Processsing Node directing the “enemy” forces goes haywire and starts attacking with real life ammunition. Suddenly it’s up to Kerr and the major to sheepherd the rookie marines to safety…

Meanwhile, in a subplot carried over from The Better Part of Valor, gunny Kerr is still worrying about Big Yellow, the alien ship she encountered and some of the things that happened after they had gotten off the ship, things that don’t make sense, like a disappearing escape pod only she and Craig Ryder –the civilian salvage contractor she fell in love with — remember.

The marines in which Kerr serves are multispecies, with humans, Kaytan and Krai all serving, these three races having been brought into the Confederation especially because of their aggressive natures, to fight its wars against another multispecies alliance, the Others. Not that any of these warrior species is much respected for their nature by the supposedly more evolved and pacifistic Elder and Middle races. It’s a familiar setup we’ve seen in other sf novels. Both the Krai and the Kaytan are stereotypical alien races with one or two defining characteristics: the Krai are omnivores eating everything they can get their hands on, including fellow marines if need be, while the Kaytan are omnisexual and ready to hump anything that’s willing and stands still long enough. For the various Krai or di’Kaytan marines this is the main thing that distinguishes them from their human counterparts: they either eat everything or fuck everything. Apart from that, they’re marines.

I’ve got a fairly low standard for military science fiction: as long as the battles are good and all the military bits sounds plausible I’m not too worried about the writing or characterisation, which is why I can still enjoy David Weber’s novels. Tanya Huff is a much better writer however and hence The Heart of Valor is much better than it needed to be, as a lightweight mil-sf romp. It’s not world changing science fiction by a longshot, but it’s the kind of novel you inhale in one long sit, then run out to get the sequel.

Hammered
Elizabeth Bear
324 pages
published in 2005

Elizabeth Bear is a newish science fiction writer who I’ve been aware off, but hadn’t read anything off until now. Hammered is her first novel, published in 2005 along with its two sequels, Scardown and Worldwired. It was well recieved, with Bear winning both the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Both are well deserved, as this is one of the better first novels I’ve ever read. Elizabeth Bear is in complete control throughout and it reads like the work of a much more experienced writer.

Hammered starts out in the most cyberpunk posssible way, with local gangster boss Razorface bringing a kid overdosing on an army combat drug called Hammer to Maker, Jenny Casey, a UN combat veteran of what wasn’t WWII, now left with a cyborg left arm and prosthetic left eye, to see if she can save him. Razorface has mouth full with “a triple row of stainless steel choppers”, hence his nickname, while Jenny has hers because she fixes things. Neither is fond of Hammer, a dangerous drug even when pure and the batch the kid o.d. on is anything but. Some corporation is leaking tainted drugs in their city (Hartford, Connecticut) and together they have to stop them. Meanwhile, an online multiplayer game in which the best players get a chance at piloting a virtual star ship is infiltrated by an AI, who suspects the game is more than just entertainment. It’s 2062, climate change and the wars resulting from it have wrecked the world, China and Canada are locked in a Cold War and somebody’s after Jenny Casey. It might even be her sister.

But while the setting might be cyberpunk, Jenny Casey’s life lacks the glamour a heroine in a Gibson story would’ve had. Her metal arm suffers from phantom pains, fucks up her shoulder and back where it attaches to the rest of her and while her artificial eye is an advantage in a low light situation, it’s a pain most of the rest of the time. She has had to live with her cybernetic implants, not just the arm and eye but also the enhanced nervous system that can make her reaction speed inhumanly fast when needed, for some twentyfive years and now that she’s pushing fifty, she’s suffering for it. She’s no Molly, cool cyberchick, but a woman who has had to learn to live with the limitations of her body.

She’s not the only great female character in this novel. There’s also Dr. Elspeth Dunsany, who spent the last twelve years in prison for violation of the Military Powers Act, released so she can do what she refused to do twelve years ago, built a tame AI for Unitek, the most powerful corporation in the world, brought back by colonel Valens, the villain of the piece, the spider in the web who is also an old ‘friend’ of Jenny and who is moving all the players together for his project. Elspeth allowed him to get her, both to get out of prison but also because her father is dying. Like Jenny, she’s not a young woman anymore and like her, she also has to live with what her history has brought her.

Not that Bear neglects her male characters. Apart from Valens, who isn’t quite the black and white villain you see him as in the first half of the book, there’s also Gabe Castaign, the man who actually saved Jenny from that burning APC in South Africa that cost her her arm, now also working for Valens. There’s Razorface of course, somebody else who has to struggle with his personal history and his status as number one gangster in Hartford with younger and more ruthless ones coming up to challenge him. But most of all there’s the AI, Richard Feynman, personality based on the American mathematician. There’s always a temptation for a cyberpunk writer to use an AI as deux ex machina, but Bear mostly avoids this.

One of the dirty little not so secrets of first wave cyberpunk was how much it shared the obsession with getting into space and off Earth as the salvation of humanity with classical science fiction, only slightly more realistic (ie with all the politics and crime it nicked from the hardboiled detective genre). This idea is at the heart of Hammered too, the one thing in which it followds older cyberpunk like Neuromancer unreservedly. In most other aspects, Hammered subverts or rejects the stereotypical cyberpunk tropes, as with Jenny’s cyborgisation above. These aren’t low punks with high techs, disaffected teens and twentysomethings looking cool, but real grownups dealing with real grownup problems, as well as the legacy of everything they fucked up in their lives when they were twentysomething themselves. It reminds me of Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, another book that took the easy cliches of the underground hacking elite and looked at them with an adult eye.

I read the first third or so of this book the way I normally read, in short bursts inbetween doing other stuff, but the last twothirds I read in one big gulp, everything else forgotten. And once I’d finished, I read the other two books in the same way. Higher praise than that I cannot give.

Gabriel’s Ghost
Linnea Sinclair
447 pages
published in 2005

I’d never heard of Linnea Sinclair before I picked Gabriel’s Ghost up in a secondhand bookstore, but the cover and plot looked interesting. Also, I’m still trying to read more female authors. Googling Sinclair made clear she’s a science fiction romance writer and indeed Gabriel’s Ghost won the 2006 Romance Writers of America’s RITA award for Best Paranormal Romance. Neither this nor the title however means there’s anything paranormal about this novel. Rather, it’s a science fiction adventure story with a somewhat greater emphasis on the romance between the two main characters than usual, which does have some consequences for the rest of the plot.

Gabriel’s Ghost starts imperial fleet captain Chasidah Bergren banished to the prison planet Moabar for crime she didn’t commit. Barely arrived, she had to kill a guard who tried to rape her and only then the real danger began, as the next person she met turned out to be somebody from her past, somebody she thought long dead. Gabriel Sullivan is a rogue and a smuggler she had clashed with repeatedly when she was still a frigate captain, until he died a few years ago. Now he’s back and offering her escape, if she helps him with one little job…

It turns out that somebody high in the empire’s hierarchy is once again breeding a long outlawed biological super weapon: the jukor, a murderous animal originally bred to destroy alien telepaths. Sullivan needs Chasidah for her knowledge of how the imperial navy thinks to help him infiltrate the project and destroy the jukors. She’s not the only one on his team; there’s also one of those alien telepaths, Ren, a Stolorth. In the mepire these are the creatures of nightmares, mindstealers, even seen as demons by the Englarian church and yet this same church has raised him from childhood. It helps that he’s blind and hence unable to use his powers; the Stolorth themselves normally kill their blind kind.

Between Chasidah and Gabriel Sullivan there’s a sexual tension from the start. They not only share a past as nominal enemies, but Gabriel also hides a dark secret he needs to get Chasidah to know and trust him about. He clearly sees her as much more than just a tool; she is skeptical and suspicious and needs to learn to trust him, but it’s hard when he doesn’t tell her even half of what she needs to know and worse, might be actively manipulating her. Ren might not be the only telepath on the team…

Basically then Gabriel’s Ghost has two separate plots running. The first is that of the blossoming romance between Chasidah and Gabriel, while the second is a science fiction adventure of escaping prison planets, stealing spaceships and infiltrating imperial space stations to blow up genetic labs. The two are not always integrated successfully, with the latter at times coming to a halt to explore Chasidah and Gabriel’s romance more.

To be honest, the whole jukor threat doesn’t make much sense anyway. They’re basically hard to kill super predators, but they’re still just animals and you can’t help but think a decently equipped modern day army platoon could make mincemeat of them. They’re certainly not convincing as something that could upset the balance of power in the empire. What also doesn’t make sense, for such a secret project is that so many people know or suspect about it. Chasidah’s almost rape actually turns out to have been attempted because the jukor project uses alien Takan women as brood mares for them, with the poor women dying while giving birth. Apparantly the Takan know this is going on and some of them have decided to rape human women as revenge.

The romance also has some problems. Since Gabriel’s Ghost is told purely through Chasidah’s point of view, we never really get to know just why Gabriel Sullivan is and seemingly always was so in love with her. She herself certainly isn’t clear on this. She thinks she’s plain looking at best, not all that interesting or smart and yet at the same time not only has Gabriel after her, there also turns out to be an ex-husband who still loves her even though she divorced him to choose her career over his wish to get children. Not to mention that Ren the Stolorth, who’s described as being a very male sort of alien, also has something of a thing for her, even if only platonic.

There are also some consent issues playing a role here, as Gabriel not only insists that she asks him no questions about who or what he is, but several times manipulates her perception and memory. It’s not out and out mindrape and she does take him to task for it later on, but it’s uncomfortable and she is slightly too forgiving of it to my taste. It all is a bit too reminiscent of certain outdated romance cliches.

There’s also a lack of female characters other than Chasidah. There’s a jealous ex of Gabriel who shows up in one scene, the ship’s cook who gets a couple of lines and a cliche religious fanatic who turns up on the villain’s side. It barely passes the Bechdel test and emphasises how unique Chasidah is to be able to keep up with the boys.

Despite these flaws, which made Gabriel’s Ghost into a lesser novel than it could’ve been, I still enjoyed reading this. Linnea Sinclair is a good enough writer to keep you engaged throughout the story and it’s only afterwards that you start thinking, hang on, that’s a bit dodgy. What for me in the end made the novel was Chasidah who, while sometimes taking a turn to the cliche, still is a smart, interesting character. She’s unsure of herself, but she does take charge when she needs to and keeps a cool head in danger. Ultimately she is the hero of her own story and she is instrumental in stopping the plot to breed jukors. I wouldn’t mind spending more time with her.

Dragonsong
Anne McCaffrey
192 pages
published in 1976

Dragonsong is the first novel in the Harper Hall trilogy of novels that Ann McCaffrey wrote in 1976-1978 as a continuation of the original Pern novels, cite>Dragonflight and Dragonquest, weaving in and out of the main series. The heroine of the series, Menolly, would also show up in the later Dragonriders books, e.g in The White Dragon as a supporting character, occassionally hinting at her adventures in her own series. I hadn’t actually read this particular subseries before, as I never came across them until recently. All I knew was that the Harper Hall books had been consciously written for a young adult audience, unlike the original Pern books.

And reading Dragonsong that impression turned out to be right. This is as close to the platonic ideal of a certain kind of adolescent power fantasy as I’ve ever read. It’s even better than Harry Potter in this regard. You have the young heroine, on the verge of becoming an adult, with a special talent that’s not only unappreciated by her family, but actively suppressed and forbidden from practising it. She of course runs away from home, only to find people who do appreciate her and to find out she’s capable of more than not just her family, but she herself thought she was capable of. That’s the daydream of almost every misunderstood teenager at one point or another.

Menolly is the youngest daughter of the masterfisher Yanus, Sea Holder of Half-Circle Seahold, who is a dour, rigidly conservative man and who rules his hold and family in the same manner. In this he does not differ much from most of his subjects, all focused on the hard task of fishing in Pern’s oceans. Menolly is different, encouraged in her musical talents by the Hold’s resident harper, Petiron, as she works as his assistant in teaching the children of the Hold proper music and songs. Petiron was an old man and over the years Menolly took over more and more of his tasks, but after his death is forbidden by her father to practise her music anymore, especially not where the new harper can hear her.

One of the ways in which Menolly instead flees her miserable existence at the Hold is to undertake all the long, dreary foraging tasks that take her outside for most of the day, away from her family, none of whom are all that sympathetic to her plight. On one of those outings she discovers a group of fire-lizards flying over a cove, where a steep cliff leads down to a sandy beach. These are the creatures that the original Pern colonists genetically engineered to create dragons from, but of course the Pernese don’t know this yet. For Menolly, they’re magical enough on their own.

Meanwhile at home her situation worses and after an illness caused by an infection when she cut herself gutting fish, she decides to run away early one morning. Unfortunately that’s the day that Thread is due to fall. Thread is the reason the dragons were created in the first place, alien spores drifting in from one of Pern’s neighbour planets when its orbits are close enough. Caught out in the open during Threadfall is a good way to get killed. For Menolly there’s no other option than to head to the cave in the cove where the firelizards are living. She arrives there at the same point as the queen’s eggs are hatching and she frantically tries to feed the newly hatched fire-lizards to stop them from flying out into Threadfall. She manages to save nine of them, all of whom imprint and bond with her…

In the wider world meanwhile, the harpers from Harper Hall are busily searching for the mysterious apprentice Petiron was raving about, not realising “he” is a girl. Things come to a head when Menolly is out during a second Threadfall and is rescued by a dragonrider and taken to one of the dragonriders’ Weyrs, at Benden. There she finally realises there is a future for her outside the seahold and that there are other options open to her than either living miserably at home or all alone in a fire-lizard cave…

So yeah, this really is a story in which everything is set up to drive home how special Menolly is. The people who oppress her are all dull, miserable, loathsome if not actively evil, while all the cool people — dragonriders, masterbards, fire-lizards — all recognise her talents immediately. In the hands of a lesser writer, even a J. K. Rowling, this would’ve been tedious, but McCaffrey is good enough to overcome this. This is nowhere near as good a novel as the original two Dragonriders ones, but I would’ve eaten this up when I was twelve.

Dragonquest
Anne McCaffrey
303 pages
published in 1968

Rereading Dragonflight/Dragonquest I realised something: Anne McCaffrey’s influence on modern fantasy is highly underrated. The Dragonriders of Pern after all was a bestselling series long before a Robert Jordan, J. K. Rowling or Stephenie Meyer had even started writing, functioning as a gateway drug into fantasy and science fiction for a lot of young teenagers the way e.g. the Potter books do now. Yet she is rarely mentioned when we’re talking about the evolution of fantasy, with the potted histories of the genre usually starting with Tolkien, lightly touching on an Eddings or Brooks before getting to the fantasy boom of the nineties and beyond with Jordan, Goodkind, Rowling, Martin et all. Is it just because when the Pern books were first published fantasy was still science fiction’s poor cousin and they were therefore sold as sf?

Certainly the streamlining of genre history often has the side effect of erasing all the awkward, not quite fitting parts of it, in favour of a more teleological approach and too often these awkward fits are female pioneers like McCaffrey. More so than Tolkien she helped shape what modern epic fantasy looks like. The loner, young adult hero or heroine, in telepathic contact with his or her dragon, saviour of the world though looking extremely unlikely to be so at first, all taking place in a largely medivaloid world, that’s all McCaffrey. But there are differences with modern fantasy as well: her dragons were made by science, not magic.

What’s more, her world did not stay medievaloid for long. I didn’t remember it happening so soon, but already here, in the second book in the series, the Pernese start exploring their planet and heritage, rediscovering some of the technology and science their ancestors had to abandon because of Threadfall. This is also a common trope in epic fantasy, but McCaffrey goes further: her characters do not just rediscover, they also research and discover.

Unlike the first book in the series, Dragonquest from the start was written as a single novel, rather than a fixup of shorter stories, but is still somewhat episodic in nature. Most of the plot is driven by the conflict between the old timers, the dragon riders brought back by Lessa in the previous novel, who can’t get used to a more democratic minded Pern where dragon riders no longer get the automatic respect and deference they are used to.

If there’s one flaw McCaffrey had, it was inventing believable villains for her stories, with the more obnoxious old timers never quite convincing and almost completely ineffectual. She just never could really concieve of why anybody would want to harm her heroes…

McCaffrey’s writing is like a warm bath, comfortable and easy to slip into. She was never the greatest stylist in science fiction, but is still a cut above the workman like prose of e.g. an Asimov or Clarke. She’s the sort of writer you do want to read at twelve.

Faust Eric
Terry Pratchett
155 pages
published in 1990

Eric is a bit of an odd duck in the Discworld, out of place amongst the increasing sophistication of the last couple of novels coming before it, almost a throwback to the very first few books. It’s a lot shorter, a lot less serious and a lot more written for comedic effect than its immediate predecessors were. All of which can be explained by the simple fact that it was first published as an illustrated book, written around a series of Josh Kirby illustrations, which was later adapted into standard Discworld paperback format, losing most of its charm in the process.

A word about Josh Kirby is needed at this place. Kirby was of course the cover artist for all the Discworld novels up until his death, Thief of Time being his last novel. His work was incredibly caricatural in nature, with very exaggerated figures and bright colours, not really to everybody’s tastes. Some might have found it a bit childish even, but I always liked it. To me his covers were Discworld, especially the early novels when it wasn’t all taken that seriously yet even by Pratchett himself. Therefore it made perfect sense to do an illustrated Discworld story with his drawings, just like his replacement as cover artist, Paul Kidby, would do with The Last Hero.

Without Kirby’s illustrations, what’s left is a slight but still fun story, a clever parody of the story of Faust. It all starts when a young wannabe demonologist, Eric, tries to summon a demon from the foulest regions of hell, but through one of those million to one chances that crop up nine times out of ten, he gets Rincewind. It’s unclear who’s more shocked to find this out, him or Rincewind. But certainly no one is more shocked than Rincewind when it turns out he is indeed bound by the summoning just as a real demon would’ve been…

So he has no choice but to try and grant Eric his three wishes: mastery foa ll the kingdoms of the Earth, to meet the most beautiful woman who ever lived and to live forever. In proper Discworld fashion, none of these three wishes turn out like you’d expect, but what remains unanswered is just where Rincewind is getting the power to even attempt them. It’s all a trick of course, with Rincewind and Eric no more than pawns in a power struggle in hell, as more traditional minded demon aristocrats attempt to overthrown their current overlord, who is slightly too impressed with modern human management theories.

Eric‘s portrayal of hell reminded me a lot of Terry Pratchett’s earlier collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, particularly in how hell’s old fashioned evil doing is no match to modern, impersonal human invented evil. As a story it’s not up to the standard set by the preceding few Discworld novel, in feel it’s more in line with the earliest ones.

Guards! Guards!
Terry Pratchett
317 pages
published in 1989

For me Guards! Guards! is the last novel you can describe as an early Discworld novel. From here on all the major subseries have appeared: Rincewind, Death, the Witches and now the Night Watch/Sam Vimes novels. It’s the first novel in which Ankh-Morpork becomes more than generic, somewhat over the top fantasy city, with the first extended cameo for the Patrician and the first insights in how he rules the city. Over time Ankh-Morpork and the Night Watch would come to dominate the Discworld series of course; every novel in the main series since The Fifth Elephant either set in Ankh-Morpolk or featuring the Watch or both, but of course we didn’t know that at the time. Back then it was just Pratchett taking the mickey out of yet another set of fantasy cliches.

In Guards! Guards!‘s case, he did that by importing another set of cliches, that of the hardboiled police procedural. Sam Vimes is a hero straight out of an Ian Rankin novel: the grizzled, older, cynical detective staying in the Night Watch because he has no other place to go. He remained in his post even as the watch has degenerated into a farce and he has become a captain of only three men: Fred Colon, a fat sergeant, Nobby Nobbs, a weassely corporal and a new dwarf recruit called Carrot Ironfoundersson.

Well, I say dwarf recruit, but turns out, to his own shock, that Carrot was adopted, which might be why he’s over six feet tall; somewhat on the big side for a dwarf. Culturally though, if not physically Carrot is dwarvish to the core: honest, loyal, law abiding and extremely literal. He’s actually naive enough to want to enforce the law, which awakes something in Vimes he thought was long dead.

Meanwhile there’s a conspiracy afoot. This is not new; conspiracies are always afoot in Ankh-Morpork, whether occult or otherwise, but this is a different kind of conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy of the petty, the spiteful, the narrow minded little people unsatisfied with their lot in life, jealous of others. Their plan is simple: summon a dragon to threaten the city, so that the true king of Ankh-Morpork may return and chase the patrician, Havelock Vetinari, from his throne.

The Night Watch is of course caught in the middle and are in fact the first to run into the dragon. Investigating its appearance Sam Vimes makes the acquaintance of Sybil Ramkin, dragon breeder and high nob. The meeting between the two is not so much love as mutual fascination at first sight. Vimes quickly realises what a powerful ally she is.

What’s interesting about Guards! Guards! is the number of strong characters in it. Not just Sam Vimes, but Sybil, the Patrician and corporal Carrot are all very strong in their own way. Carrot’s strenght is the simplest, a good humoured force of nature, while Vetinari and Vimes both are much more devious and cynical, with the former more willing to accept the consequences of his cynicism, while the latter has an inner core of decentness that is its own strength. Sybil finally has that jolly hockeystick strength of the old (English) aristocracy, that ability to keep a cool head in a crisis.

There’s more of Pratchett’s evolving humanitarianism on display here as well, which would become a persistent theme with the Vimes novels. It’s not so much here that Pratchett objects to autocratic rulers — Vetinari certainly isn’t a democrat — as that he objects to unthinking veneration and rulers who just want to rule with no thought to the country they rule. Vetinari is intensly concerned about Ankh-Morpork, while the shadowy master behind the conspiracy is willing to let it be destroyed if it means power. It’s something we saw in Wyrd Sisters as well.

It’s of course an inherently conservative worldview, though it has its attractions to more liberal minded people as well, that idea of the benevolent, enlightened despot. This is what, more so than the presences of trolls and dwarves and dragons that makes the Discworld a fantasy novel, this idea that this could work.

Pyramids
Terry Pratchett
380 pages
published in 1989

A reader asks:

I’ve uh, never read any Pratchett before and have been wanting to tackle the Discworld novels for sometime but I’ve been intimidated by the reading order issue. It actually doesn’t help matters any that this is one of the most frequently asked questions, it all seems so confusing. Where to begin?

A good question. With a series that has almost forty novels, quite a few spinoff books and theatre, movie and television adaptations, the Discworld can look daunting to get into. Yet it’s not as bad as it looks. There are a couple of natural starting points: The Colour of Magic of course, but that’s not very representative for the rest of the series. A better starting point might be Guards! Guards! as that is the novel in which the whole Sam Vines/Night Watch/Ankh Morpork sub series was set up that has dominated the Discworld ever since. But of course since we’re discussing this question in a review of Pyramids, I’m going to make a case for it as the best starting point for getting into the Discworld.

the problem with the earliest Discworld books, especially the first two, is that they’re not as good as the later entries in the series, so they give you a wrong impression of it. Pyramids on the other hand is as good as any other Discworld book. What’s more it stands alone, you don’t need to have read any other book first, or after to get the whole story. Finally, more so than some, it’s drenched in Pratchett’s ideas about humanity, his philosophy so to speak. A good litmus test than for whether you’d approve of it or reject it.

The story starts with Teppic, heir to the ancient kingdom of Djelibeybi and student assassin in Ankh Morpork, that being the education suitable to the Discworld aristocracy. When he gets the news that his father the king has died, he returns to Djelibeybi to become the new king. But his time in Ankh-Morpork has changed him, modernised him and coming back he runs smack dab in the unchanging force of tradition you get in a ten-thousand year old kingdom, as personified in the head priest Dios. When this tradition meant sacrificing his father’s favourite handmaiden, Ptraci, at his funeral, Teppic revolts, to no avail..

Meanwhile one of his first deeds as king is to build a pyramid for his father, ten times as big as any pyramid ever seen in the country. But, while the pyramids can be seen flaring off time at night, the knowledge of why they do this or why it’s dangerous to build them too big has been lost. Soon the pyramid begins to warp time and space and the whole country revolves itself ninety degrees in spacetime, in the process making real everything the Djelibeybis believed in as the gods come to visit. And because the kingdom was the only thing that stood between Tsort and Ephebe, which would’ve otherwise be neighbours: its disappearance meant war… It’s up to Teppic and Ptraci to stop the war, sort out the kingdom and solve the riddle of the pyramids.

The theme that runs through Pyramids is that of sloppy, emotional individual people having to battle throuhg, in this case, hidebound tradition. The main villain of the story, Dios, genuinely cares about Djelibeybi as a kingdom, but not really about its people, whereas Teppic for the most part doesn’t care about the kingdom or his role in it until he meets Ptraci when it’s her personal plight that moves him. It’s the sort of thing Pratchett writes about a lot, of systemic unhumanity coming up against illogical, sloppy humanity and losing. It can be a bit smug at times, but here it’s done perfectly, also because Dios is not just a one dimensional villain and you can feel some sympathy for him.

All of which makes Pyramids the ideal discworld starting point: a good, standalone story that doesn’t rely on too much continuity and showcases all of Pratchett’s good sides.

Wyrd Sisters
Terry Pratchett
331 pages
published in 1988

The wind howled. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills.

The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said, in for more ordinary tones: ‘Well, I can do next Tuesday’.

The opening paragraphs of Wyrd Sisters are a good indication of the rest of the book. This is MacBeth: Discworld style and the witches do not intend to stick to the script. That’s because Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg are sensible witches and while the third member of the coven is a bit wet — as in, she actually believes in such things like covens — Magrat Garlick still has a steel core of good Lancrian common sense. They know better than to meddle in affairs (well, mostly) or dance with demons, never mind doing it skyclad. Yet when the king is murdered, his baby heir disappears and the usurper duke turns out not be just a bit evil, but actually uncaring about the land, they’re dragged into meddling against their own will.

This then is the first proper Witches novel, introducing Nanny Ogg and Margrat Garlick as well as a better worked out Granny Weatherwax than the one we’ve met in Equal Rites. As characters they conform to the old witches stereotype of the maiden (Magrat), the mother (Nanny Ogg) and the other one (’nuff said). Nanny Ogg in particular fills her role well, being earthy and salty and in good humour msot of the time, which you can usually tell by which couplet she has gotten to in the hedgehog song. Magrat on the other hand is the sort of witch who believes in crystals and such, while Granny Weatherwax is not just bossy compared to other people, she’s bossy compared to other witches… They’re some of Pratchett’s best creations.

They’re also representative of his philosophy. They’re stubborn, hardheaded, sometimes obnoxious, emotional, not very friendly, but when push comes to shove they’re on the right side. The duke meanwhile isn’t evil as much as he’s uncaring. He has killed the previous king because he wanted the power of being the ruler, not because he cared for the country he would rule. Whereas the previous king might’ve burned down houses and exercises his droit seigneur (a large dog), he did it in a personal way, rather than just because they were in the way. It’s the sort of evil we’ll encounter a lot more of in the Discworld series and had already seen in Sourcery.

Another Pratchett theme we’d see more is that of the power of speech and how it can change the world as it changes people’s perspectives, here worked out for the first time. The witches are traditionally feared but respected and much of that is due to how they represent themselves. People see the pointy hats and they think witches. So when they speak, people listen. But as the duke finds out, that authority can be challenged by a whisper campaign, by pointing out that these are just a bunch of foolish old women, that they are responsible for evil things, that they’re not very nice. In the end, the struggle between the duke and the witches comes down to who can offer the better narrative.

At this point in the series Pratchett has clearly found his stride and it shows. The writing sparkles, the plot’s tight and it’s all a bit better than earlier novels in the series.

Sourcery
Terry Pratchett
285 pages
published in 1988

Sourcery is the fifth Discworld novel and the first one after the initial two novels to star Rincewind again. Over time fan opinion has switched to thinking the Rincewind novels are the weakest in the series, but I’ve always liked them myself and I think Sourcery holds up as well as any of the other early novels. It’s the first novel in which there’s a real villain, the first time we get to see what makes a real villain in Pratchett’s eyes.

On a surface level there are some similarities to Equal Rites: again there’s a powerful, untrained magic user coming to Ankh Morpork to shake up the Unseen University, but this time he’s not so benign. Coin is not the eight son of an eight son, but the eight son of a wizard. And when a wizard has an eight son, that son doesn’t become a wizard himself, but a sourcerer, a source of magic. The magic he yields is not the tame, nice magic which is the only kind of magic the Discworld has known for ians, but wild magic, the magic from the dawn of times. Not perhaps the kind of magic you’d want a ten year old boy to have, even if his dead father has possessed his wizard staff to give him counsel.

Needless to say, Rincewind finds himself in the middle of events, even though he does his best not to be. His survival instinct, like those of most of the lower lifeforms at the Unseen Univeristy is good enough that he manages to flee the university just before the sourcerer arrives, taking the Luggage as well as the Librarian to the Mended Drum. Unfortunately, that’s where Conina finds him. Conina, unwilling barbarian heroine due to her father, Cohen the Barbarian, but who’d rather be a hairdresser, has stolen the Archchancellor’s Hat at its own request, to keep it out of hands of the Sourcerer. Now Rincewind is the one wizard who can get it to safety.

If there is any safety to be found on the Disc. With the coming of sourcery, the wizards, who had been more or less peacefully been united in the Unseen University and its complex hierarchy, quickly rediscover the old wizard truth that the natural number of wizards is one. They start building towers and magic wars and the Apocralypse are threatening. And only Rincewind and Conina, as well as wannabe barbarian hero Nijgel the Destroyer, son of Harebut the Provision Merchant, stand against it. Oh dear…

What I’ve said before and will say again about Terry Pratchett is that the real strength in his writing is his humanitarian philosophy, his love of sloppy, sentimental, illogical, emotional humanity, that forms the heart of the Discworld series. His worldview infuses the entire series and it’s hear that for the first time it is made clear, though it would only be spelled out later: the worst evil in the world is seeing people not as people, but as things. Here it’s sourcery that shapes the world according to its whims in search of a supposed magic utopia, without taking any notice of the cost in human life or anybody else’s opinions. It doesn’t want to hurt people, it just doesn’t see them.

Opposed are Pratchett’s all too human heroes and villains, petty, dumb, squabbling, cowardly. They do the right thing because they can do no else, they may be thieves or murderers or worse, but they’re never indifferent. Sourcery is the first Discworld novel in which this basic contradiction is made clear and therefore important in the evolution of the series.