Discussion Literature / Discworld

So why exactly is Shepherd's Crown taking this long to release? If Terry managed to finish writing it before his death, then surely they wouldn't wait this long to release it? And if it WASN'T finished, then isn't it going against Rhianna's "nobody writes Discworld but Terry" rule?

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To quote from Reduced to Ratburgers: "Probably thanks to dwarf bread, which exists as a weapon first and emergency food second."

This is slightly off, as canonically, Dwarf Bread has been stated to be an emergency food somewhere down around 50th at best.

From http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Dwarf_bread:

"Proper dwarf bread has to be not just baked, but forged (with gravel, of course) and dropped in rivers and dried out, and sat on and left, and looked at every day and then put away again. For preference, its use as a cat's litter box is also recommended. Dwarfs generally devour it with their eyes, because even dwarfs have trouble with devouring it any other way."

"So they want to kill my men? Well two can play at that game."

Pulled Unseen Academicals from the TVM section, per the Discworld Monthly report that the Schedule Slip has finally slipped far enough that the rights have expired. Thought about adding the Wee Free Men movie, but then decided we should probably wait until there's more info. (Likewise The Watch.)

Edited by 86.138.212.22

A request to people who've read these books: can someone update the entry for Discworld for Super Weight? It's a Just for Fun homegrown ranking at TV Tropes of measuring characters' relative power in a story, divided into nine broad categories. The entry according to the old criteria was this (and can be found on the medium subpage's discussion page):

• Discworld
  • Type -1: Twoflower, those with the lowest social status just about anywhere
  • Type 0: Rincewind, Brutha, Colon and Nobby
  • Type 1: Sam Vimes, Captain Carrot, Cohen the Barbarian, the Librarian
  • Type 2: Most competent witches and wizards, Susan Sto Helit, elves, typical vampires, zombies, werewolves and banshees, lesser anthropomorphic personifications
  • Type 3: Esmerelda Weatherwax, and presumably Nanny Ogg (as the most powerful witch in the world), most gods, the Queen of Elves, noble dragons
  • Type 4: Death, serious gods (Fate and The Lady), Sourcerers, the Creator(s); the Auditors of Reality
  • Type 5: Azrael and the other Old High Ones

You've got roaming bands of armed, aggressive, tyrannical plumbers coming to your door, saying "Use our service, or else!"

Removed:

• Death's normal scythe actually ISN'T that sharp. In fact, there's no indication that it's sharp at all, in the conventional sense. It just has to strike the target to work (and, being that it is so much realer than most things, that isn't difficult). The scythe that's sharp enough to cut the dialogue in the book is in Reaper Man. It's a perfectly ordinary scythe (although with a lowlands-style curved handle instead of the straight type used in the hill country where Death is in that part of the book) that's prepared very, VERY carefully, sharpened first with a stone, then with a steel, then with wool, cotton, satin, silk, and finally on DAYLIGHT. Death still fears it isn't sharp enough for his duel with the New Death. In the end, a perfectly ordinary scythe he's used all day in the fields becomes the sharpest blade in the universe because of Death's WRATH. It cuts through the blade of the New Death's thing-that-might-have-a-scythe-in-its-ancestry WITHOUT SLOWING DOWN.
  • Actually, in Mort, Death's original scythe blade is described as so thin it's transparent, and able to slice flame and chop sound. Later on it slices a flagstone in half after being accidentally dropped. I suspect all Death's efforts in Reaper Man were just an attempt to make an ordinary scythe come close to his original

Long live Marxism-Lennonism!

Isn't Sacharissa's last name a Stealth Pun or Punny Name in itself? Cripslock is a take on "Caps Lock," the key on a computer or typewriter that allows a person to go all caps in their text (or as said in the Internet, "SCREAMING").

Has anyone here ever read The Homeward Bounders (published 1981)? If so, has anyone else noticed how similar the Auditors of Reality are to Them? What with the triangular buildings and the groups of three. They both like to screw around with world(s), too, except that the Auditors do that 'cause they can't finish off life directly. They do that because they like gaming.

It occurs to me that since various books of the series are listed on this site under the Discworld namespace rather than Main, each book's subpages (Headscratchers, Heartwarming, Funny, Awesome, etc.) do not currently contain links back to the books themselves. Is there a way to set up an easy icon to link back, or should we just add links to make navigation easier?

"Mustrum Ridcully, Moist von Lipwig and Nanny Ogg have practically made careers of it."

This is filed under Nude Nature Dance... Does anyone know where it should go?

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On the trope of Marty Stu: The Orc from Unseen Academicals. Read the book a few times now and while I grew to almost all of the new/er characters I didn't really like the first time round, 'cept for him. He's just TOO perfect. He never really fails at anything he tries, can outwit virtually everyone etc. He's even, apparently, the sole being in the city Vetinari is unable to keep track of. I'd really like to know how and why some count him being an orc as redeeming factor. And, just saying: Some people have tried their hands at taking the infamous litmus test for him, getting a score of somewhere between 130 and 140 points...

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Is there a reason that some of the books have individual "crowning moment" pages (funny, heartwarming, and the like) while others are in aggregate pages? It seems untidy, especially when some of the book pages have only a single entry.

Removing natter:

• Uh... what exactly verse of The Hedgehog Song is "oblique"?
  • It's oblique because in the books you only ever hear the song referred to, you never see the lyrics. Those lyrics are creations of the fandom.
    • Not all of them. Some of those words ARE published in the books, in particular the refrain "The Hedgehog can never be buggered at all" but you never hear an entire intact verse, but only snatches of it overheard by another character (usually from outside and across the street, as Nanny Ogg is belting it out so loud the deaf could probably tell the lyrics by the vibrations in the soles of their feet)
    • Not sure if those actually are from the fandom itself, seeing as how we get a few lines in one of the books focusing on the Lancre Witches. I think it was Wyrd Sisters.
    • Lines from the song only appear in the books as Subverted Rhymes Every Occasion or Last Second Word Swaps, when the singer interrupts himself or the narrative simply changes focus before getting to the non-oblique part. A book will mention that there is a song with the title "The hedgehog cannot be buggered at all", and 50 pages later a drunk witch will have a snippet of dialogue like "... with a giraffe, if you stood on a stool...", and that's as close as Pratchett comes to putting the song in the book.

Why is Fetish Fuel/Discworld locked, anyway? Was there an Edit War about Carcer and Teatime being mentioned or something?

"Why was there bacon in the SOAP?!" "I MADE IT MAHSELF!"

I was wondering: excluding the famous battle cry in Wee Free Men are there any more poems/rhymes in any of the Discworld books? Any help would be much appreciated. thx

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• Remeber that one year in Discworld is 800 days thus Windle Poons who lived to 130 Discworld years on our calender lived to be almost 300 years old.
  • Mike Rosoft: I am not removing this yet, but I believe that whenever a year is mentioned in the book, it's probably an "agricultural year" of 400 days.

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There's a book where a rogue "Or up here?" appears in a margin, then about two pages later a character starts throwing their voice. Nice typographical pun, can't for the life of me remember which book. Any help?

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