Alternate History and Terry Pratchett. Part 3, Small Gods.

[David Flin]

Continuing his look at the AH in Terry Pratchett's works.

Comment on this article by @Thande here.

 

[Alex Richards]

Small Gods is perhaps the most infamous issue of the Timeline Question - and demonstrates a rather good example of your old 'using 100 years just because it's a round number' issue- there's a lot of issues that could have been resolved there if Pratchett had just had 30-40 years at the end of the book.

 

[Thande]

Small Gods is perhaps the most infamous issue of the Timeline Question - and demonstrates a rather good example of your old 'using 100 years just because it's a round number' issue- there's a lot of issues that could have been resolved there if Pratchett had just had 30-40 years at the end of the book.

Yeah, but in fairness "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now we are alive" are powerful arc words that this requires - it's not like "lol let's add another century in which writers can't use the Romulans".

 

[Alex Richards]

Yeah, but in fairness "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now we are alive" are powerful arc words that this requires - it's not like "lol let's add another century in which writers can't use the Romulans".

That and this is still the early days where Discworld is a broadly static setting rather than one which was experiencing it's own Industrial Revolution.

 

[Incognitia]

I was definitely surprised Brutha lived another 100 years, but you've got to embed a reasonable duration to get from Vorbis to Constable Visit* in the Ankh-Morpork Watch...

*For the uninitiated, full name Visit-the-infidel-with-explanatory-pamphlets.

 

[Jared]

*For the uninitiated, full name Visit-the-infidel-with-explanatory-pamphlets.

And his colleague, Smite-the-Unbeliever-with-Cunning-Arguments.

 

[Nick Sumner]

Nice article. I've got to read more Terry Pratchett...

 

[Charles EP M.]

One of the big guns of Pratchett's work, heard it brought up as an example of good writing of religion in fantasy - by a catholic priest and a Jewish theology writer - at a con panel last year. General rumble of appreciation in room.

(I then got into a long chat about Truckers with a panelist after)

 

[Elektronaut]

Discworld and religion is an interesting subject to discuss because Pratchett is a good writer, so it is possible to discuss it, but I don't think he's pro-religion. The article kind of implies that the 'proper' cosmic authority in Discworld are the good guys, while notably leaving out what is very obviously the most developed and recurring cosmic authority in the setting, the Auditors of Reality. They are definitely not good guys and they hate human beings, and particularly human imagination.

The Auditors of Reality could never be the good guys in Pratchett because it's impossible to imagine Pratchett unironically legitimising any authority which has their amount of power relative to everyone else.

It's been a very, very long time since I read Small Gods so I'd have to re-read it to do a specific analysis on it. But I agree with the article that it's a wider book than just being a narrow critique of religion.

 

[Hendryk]

The idea that ‘people start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure’, for example, is a recurring problem in real life and the cause of many schisms.

Now to be pedantic, not all religions are theistic to begin with. Insofar as Buddhism involves faith in something, it's in the impersonal process of Dharma, and though it doesn't take any position one way or the other on the existence of personal gods, it considers their worship rather a waste of time. So in a sense it turns that Pratchettian maxim on its head.