h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This place has got quiet recently. And by recently I mean the last three years.

Are any members still about?


Geggs

Hi!
I'm not a member (yet, how do I sign up?) and a big fan of TP.

Martin
---
I know where my towel is. It says so on the towel. How about You ? http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/map/h2g2

Well, the original method of joining was posting to the 'Can I join please?' thread, but that's 5 years dead.

We really ought to do something about this page, actually. It's a bit out of date.

Hello anyway Haragai, and welcome to PA!


Geggs

Geggs me old trout!
I'da been here sooner if I'd known.
Now subscribed to the page.


~jwf~

me too

Me three.

Just finished 'Snuff', which I got for Christmas. Quite remarkable how similar young Sam's story was with the boy in 'The World of Poo'.

<BB<

Hello all three.

I've been trying to read Snuff since I got it last Christmas, but I never seem able to find the time. I'm a bad person, I know.


Geggs

You're not a bad person, merely a busy one

<BB<

Snuff is such a departure from the generally 'silly' approach
Pratchett usually takes to parodying our whirled. It deals
with the huge and ugly subject of racism and human cruelty.

And at the same time it enters into the depths of close family
values and relationships with detailed observations of those
small interactions that make us human. And it also elevates
the heroic status and manliness of Vimes well beyond the usual
sort of dedication he displays in 'lesser' issues such as burglary
and mere murder.

The use of the river trip as background cannot but help remind
the reader of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Mark Twain's Life on
the Mississippi or Apocalypse Now. Classic imagery with classic
filmic narrative and river-born adventure that reads as easily as
one of those old B&W serial adventures of men and ships on a
dangerous river journey.

Only Night Watch surpasses it for Literary excellence as a truly
complex and perfectly interlaced story arc.


~jwf~

I've just finished Snuff, and was going to comment but after JWL it's a bi like after the lord mayors show

I'm waiting until I'm back in Blighty for the month of April to get Dodger, as hardback books are prohibitively expensive in XXXX

JWF not JWL, damn my shortsightedness and a misspent youth

Egads! I just re-read what I had written about Snuff
and wonder who I might have been channeling that day.

I read that post again now and shout Yes, Hurrah, I agree,
and I couldna said that better myself. But I don't remember
ever saying it.


That said, I feel I can now add a very few words about
The Long Earth which I have finished about a week ago
and have been left feeling speechless and unfulfilled.

The most significant element that continues to keep my
skin itchy are the typical Pratchett pop cultural images
that pop up in the most incongruous and untimely places,
like non-sequiturs or anachronisms. They've always been
there, small unlikely connections between the Discworld and
our own realities which give us solace in their familiarity.

But in this book they appear like potholes in the road. For
example, a reference to someone 'walking like John Travolta'
came out of nowhere and so out of context it left me stunned.

There is no doubt some deeper meaning to all these, some
meaningful philosophical interpretation that as yet remains
a complete mystery to me.

Beyond that, the shocking 'surprise' ending left me with an
unusually pessimistic foreboding for humanity. Throughout
the entire book the only positive value to be found in life seems
to be the comfort and ecstatic joy of curling up in a furry pile
of puppies; everything else is red of claw and fang.

And the basic narrative device, the idea of an unending
multiverse of other Earths existing just a step away, was
so problematic in practical physical terms I could never
quite suppress my 'logic' and simply suspend my critical
faculties and enjoy the story. There is no 'magic'.

Why has it always been so easy to accept trolls and dwarves
and werewolves and the Assassins Guild and the Wizards of
Unseen University but now be unable to immerse myself in
the infinite possibilities of a "Long Earth"?

There is an underlying 'clinical' quality to this new vision which
leaves me fearful of a stainless steel cockroach crawling up
my arse to die.


~jwf~

I think The Long Earth was an excellent idea, but perhaps not as well executed as it might have been.

TRiG.

I don't know how much was Pratchett and how much Stephen Baxter - but looks like they deliberately ended it where they did in order to have a sequel.

<BB<

I believe it was always intended as a series of three novels, so that's quite likely.

TRiG.

Thanks guys, the notion of sequels gives me some hope.
Or at least a rationalisation of why it is left hanging.

Arthur C Clarke's Space Oddity 2001 also had one of those
long journeys that raises more questions that it answers
and an ending that left me feeling quite unresolved.

(Volume 3, "2061", has sat by my bedside unread for years,
covered in a dust of trepidatious suspicion but offering
some solace of possibilities.)


~jwf~

I have 27 more Pratchett books to read before I even get to "Snuff."

I quite enjoyed 2061: Odyssey Three, but thought the ending of 3001 was just terrible. (vaguely Pratchett-related as Stephen Baxter has co-authored books with both Clarke & Pratchett).

<BB<

>> 3001 << ?



Y'mean there's a Volume 4?
I thought I had the antidote, the final resolution in '2061'
And I've been saving it for years, like a placebo, to be
opened when needed, when the mystery of the big black
megalith sucked all the light and reason from my eyes.
'3001' ??
OMG... Noooooooo!

~jwf~

I read "3001" when it first came out. That was 15 years ago.