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

actually you changed from a rando person to a random person when you posted the last time and thank-you for agreeing with me
i have to say that i think a writer can't keep one style going forever their writing has got to develop and im just happy that there are so many books i would have run out of ideas years ago

how true.
yes i know the posts are different, it's because i noticed the mistake and altered it just after pressing post. I expected it to cancel the previous post but I didn't take into account that computers are simply mindless machines and don't know what you want them to do. argh!

ok well never mind now don't worry about it

I miss the humor of his earlier work. His newer stuff is deeper. Sometimes I like it sometimes I don't. I do not believe it's gone downhill just changed.

i have to agree with that although i think ive said i almost prefer the later books

I used to work for the company that published Terry's books... I agree that he has got very "formulaic" and seems to just write new stories about old characters and to develop ideas that we have already read about. But then again, he wrote some "children's" books (Truckers, Diggers, Wings, are one series) which show a different side of his creative spirit, but as several of you have said, there are lots of other good authors around!

It's true that the later books tend to be more "dark", But I don't see that as a bad thing at all. They are still full of the typical Pratchettical wit, and his brilliant way of twisting words

I have been discussing Pratchett on many different forums, and it is my experience that there are as many different oppinions on what is good or bad in his books, as there are readers
Everyone has a fav character /place that they want to hear more about, and many have a character / place that they think he has written too much about...

I once read a quote where he said something about that if he had to listen to the requests from all the fans about what should or shouldn't be in his next book, then it would contain something about Rincewind/ not something about Rincewind, take place in Ankh-Morpork / Lancre/ Fourecks/ The counterweight Continent/ another loved place from an earlier book/ somewhere completely new. We would meet some of the good old characters/ we would meet new characters etc.

In short, every fan has an opinion about how it all should* be....and very few of these opinions are the same!

Being an incarnated fan, I have trouble seeing how you can dislike any of the books, I think they are brilliant in each their way

...I'll stop jabbering now...

I loved the earlier Pratchetts, which were a kind of gleeful freewheeling romp around the ideas of fantasy fiction, with the Discworld being just an hazily sketched out concept acting as minimal backdrop to the ideas.

I do admit to enjoying the "trainspotting" quality of these early books: being able to tick off all the references to other writers and fantasy worlds, and to be able to laugh appreciatively when a concept familiar from "straight" fantasy had the pi$$ ripped out of it. (For instance, Ursula LeGuin's dragons will never be the same again after Colour of Magic; the high-camp body-fascism of Conan the Barbarian comes in for a deserved kicking, several times over; and Michael Moorcock's Black Sword, alas sans Elric, gets a remake, in the form of a fully sentient weapon with the equivalent of middle-aged angst, musing about packing it all in and starting over as a ploughshare, "whatever one of those is")

This is something that's never been fully absent from the later books. Take the scene in "Witches Abrioad" where Pratchett risks the wrath of the most terrible, pitiless, and potent entity in Fantasy (the lawyers of J.R.R. Tolkein)by having Gollum himself do a walk on, or is it a slither-on, cameo part. Then again, he does the same at the end of "Going Postal", the most recent book, with the suggestion that the Wizards of Unseen University have had their own dealings across the depths of time and space with Sauron Himself. No doubt Ridcully, knowing
he's a long long way away from any realm where Sauron has authority, was able to intone the dread exorcism "Bugger Off, it's ours!" with impunity and wrest control of the "palantir"...

I think a certain amount of fossilisation begins to set in with "Moving Pictures".

The shifting landscape of the Discworld begins to take on permanent form, which would have been finalised by whichever anal retentive drew all the maps.

Once the maps were there, there weren't many unknowns waiting to be discovered: all the new stories had to be fitted into that predeterminded framework, and this kind of kills off the spontaneity of the early books. Everything after that becomes plotted and calculated and planned: it doesn't help that a regular cast of characters is also part of the scenery now.

In all except the first book, Vetinari has been patrician of Ankh-Morpork. There is enough evidence in "Colour of Magic" to presume that the Patrician then was somebody else - the Snapcake who also appears in "Night Watch", when Vimes is thrown thirty years back down his own timeline? Incidentally, if you care about suuch things, these two facts help us to date when Rincewind was first flung into wild adventure and crazy things - he now has a thity-plus year history of stubbornly not dying.

Similarly, Ridcully first became Archchancellor in "Moving Pictures" and hasn't given it up yet. This fossilises the university: it takes some of the old "sinister" out of it and makes it newly recognisable as the in-fighting and back-biting that goes on among the tenured faculty of any higher learning institution anywhere.

As for Vimes, the reason he survives is that he's realised the city runs on predicatible rails: he's the man who can read the timetable for the various trains and is GOOD at playing chicken on the tracks. More: he knows exactly where a well-placed concrete block will derail, say, the Assassin's Guild. (Is this a good metaphor?) Of course, he has to work alongside the man who WROTE the timetable - Vetinari.