Alternate History and Terry Pratchett. Part 5: Jingo

[David Flin]

Continuing @Thande 's series on Alternate History and Terry Pratchett.

Comment Here.

 

[Incognitia]

Seeing just how badly things go for Vimes in the city is pretty chilling, as I recall.

Personally I imagined that the Vimes who stayed dumped his disorganiser sharpish and didn't have to hear all his alternate's appointments, but you never know.

 

[Alex Richards]

I feel like this is one of the purest expressions of 'AH as Horror' out there, its just embedded in comedy.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Vimes hearing a fatigued litany of everyone he knows dying is one of those bits that sticks with you (and fits the absurdity of war theme, it came this close to happening).

 

[Jared]

Jingo as a whole was one of my least favourite Discworld novels.

The whole "war is ridiculous" theme felt like Pterry was trying to wedge it into a setting where previous canon had this being the opposite of how Ankh-Morpork behaved - this is a city which wins its war by its accountants persuading their enemies to sell their weapons, not futilely raising inexperienced armies to go wandering halfway across the world. To say nothing of how Pterry had previously said that racism was not much of an issue on the Discworld because speciesism was a much bigger thing ("Black and white got on together and ganged up on green"), and suddenly you have otherwise bog-standard characters suddenly becoming racist because Klatchians were a different colour.

That said, the payoff of the Dis-organiser reciting the litany of fallen characters is one of the more memorable individual scenes in the whole series...

 

[Thande]

Jingo as a whole was one of my least favourite Discworld novels.

The whole "war is ridiculous" theme felt like Pterry was trying to wedge it into a setting where previous canon had this being the opposite of how Ankh-Morpork behaved - this is a city which wins its war by its accountants persuading their enemies to sell their weapons, not futilely raising inexperienced armies to go wandering halfway across the world. To say nothing of how Pterry had previously said that racism was not much of an issue on the Discworld because speciesism was a much bigger thing ("Black and white got on together and ganged up on green"), and suddenly you have otherwise bog-standard characters suddenly becoming racist because Klatchians were a different colour.

That said, the payoff of the Dis-organiser reciting the litany of fallen characters is one of the more memorable individual scenes in the whole series...

I agree with this point, it's just not strong enough for me to spoil my enjoyment of the whole.

Jingo! does have possibly my favourite Discworld joke ever, the 'Pavlovian response' footnote. On the other hand, it also has one of the oddest errors to have slipped through the editing process (it was fixed in the second edition) - after saying a criminal can't read or write, they then find a pad with the remnants of him writing and don't see a contradiction.

 

[AndyC]

One thing that came to mind reading the article that never struck me before was in the Dis-Organiser using the most probable extrapolation to get the appointments.

At the time, I thought that was a funny idea, but now that's closely related to the ChatGPT-style "Artificial Intelligence" text generators: they use probability (based on a huge corpus of texts online, some of which may have copyright implications, but that's to go down a different discussion) to generate likely sentences.

It's CalendarGPT.

 

[Thande]

One thing that came to mind reading the article that never struck me before was in the Dis-Organiser using the most probable extrapolation to get the appointments.

At the time, I thought that was a funny idea, but now that's closely related to the ChatGPT-style "Artificial Intelligence" text generators: they use probability (based on a huge corpus of texts online, some of which may have copyright implications, but that's to go down a different discussion) to generate likely sentences.

It's CalendarGPT.

It's not surprising considering Pratchett was often at the forefront of these things. Foul Ole Ron's catchphrase "Millennium hand and shrimp!" was spat out by an early text generator programme called Babble (which can still be accessed here: https://www.bgreco.net/babble/ ). You could kind of call it the ancestor of ChatGPT and its ilk in some ways, just being more deliberately off-the-wall and drawing on a much smaller sample!

 

[Alexander Rooksmoor]

I had known the use of 'Jingo' from the 1878 song - the potential for a war between Britain and Russia that year has been the basis for one of my short stories - but had not realised it went back as far as 1694 - if we can trust Wikipedia and was used as a substitute for 'God' or 'Jesus'. I guess we might now be talking of Joveism instead of Jingoism, if they had stuck to Shakespeare's favoured euphemism.

When I first saw Jingo, knowing Pratchett was sort of working through both fantasy and political tropes, I had assumed it was a critique of colonialism and given the small island featured, a distant satire on the Falklands War which had occurred 15 years earlier, a rather more sophisticated approach than Raymond Briggs's The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984).