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Strange bedfollows, but that's my CV.
It's a real shame that Making Money came too late to be included in the Greenwood Press
book I've been
editing. I've just read this Guardian review which seems timely:
And I was thinking, Northern Rock. Which Patrick Ness mentions. Pratchett writes on "racism, sexism, journalism, death, war, the army, the Inquisition, the ambiguous nature of good and evil, and the uncomfortable power of narrative", a good list if not necessarily in the right order. In recent years Pratchett has had congruences with 9/11, 7/7 and now sub-rime mortgages. That's a long way from parodying dragon novels, I'm thinking.
I'm also thinking, Second Edition.
Brrrr.
And Jonathan Lethem has announced the contents of Library of America's second volume on Dick, which covers the 1960s and 1970s:
Martian Time-Slip
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
Now Wait For Last Year
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
No real duds there - NWFLY is perhaps not as strong, but you're talking The Penultimate Truth, The Zap Gun, A Maze of Death and We Can Build You as being on a par with it and it's a difficult choice between them. The ending of NWFLY perhaps clinches it. After that you've got Our Friends From Frolix 8, The Unteleported Man (in several versions), Counter-Clock World, Nick and the Glimmung, The Crack in Space and The Simulacra which falls apart at the end. But I think I would have gone for Clans of the Alphane Moon or Galactic Pot-Healer.
Does that leave a volume for the Divine/VALIS trilogy (which needs to include Radio Free Albemuth and/or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, according to hiow you count the trilogy)? What about the 1950s. Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint are the best novels - with Solar Lottery saying more about sf at the start of the 1950s than Dick's fiction. The Cosmic Puppets holds up, and The World Jones Made - but how about Confessions of a Crap Artist and any of the half dozen or so mainstream novels? In Milton Lumky Territory gets my vote.
It's a real shame that Making Money came too late to be included in the Greenwood Press
book I've been
editing. I've just read this Guardian review which seems timely:
- Boris Johnson's candidacy for mayor of London could have come straight from a Terry Pratchett novel: a lovable buffoon with no discernible accomplishments becomes a leading contender for just those very qualities (ie buffoonery, Liverpool-bashing - is there anything else?). Bullyingly jovial, faintly sinister and with no apparent plans for the city except to promise the exact opposite kind of tyranny as the current tyrant-incumbent, all that remains is for him to be revealed as a multi-tentacled demon to make a jolly good Discworld novel. Vote for him, it may yet happen.
And I was thinking, Northern Rock. Which Patrick Ness mentions. Pratchett writes on "racism, sexism, journalism, death, war, the army, the Inquisition, the ambiguous nature of good and evil, and the uncomfortable power of narrative", a good list if not necessarily in the right order. In recent years Pratchett has had congruences with 9/11, 7/7 and now sub-rime mortgages. That's a long way from parodying dragon novels, I'm thinking.
I'm also thinking, Second Edition.
Brrrr.
And Jonathan Lethem has announced the contents of Library of America's second volume on Dick, which covers the 1960s and 1970s:
Martian Time-Slip
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
Now Wait For Last Year
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
A Scanner Darkly
No real duds there - NWFLY is perhaps not as strong, but you're talking The Penultimate Truth, The Zap Gun, A Maze of Death and We Can Build You as being on a par with it and it's a difficult choice between them. The ending of NWFLY perhaps clinches it. After that you've got Our Friends From Frolix 8, The Unteleported Man (in several versions), Counter-Clock World, Nick and the Glimmung, The Crack in Space and The Simulacra which falls apart at the end. But I think I would have gone for Clans of the Alphane Moon or Galactic Pot-Healer.
Does that leave a volume for the Divine/VALIS trilogy (which needs to include Radio Free Albemuth and/or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, according to hiow you count the trilogy)? What about the 1950s. Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint are the best novels - with Solar Lottery saying more about sf at the start of the 1950s than Dick's fiction. The Cosmic Puppets holds up, and The World Jones Made - but how about Confessions of a Crap Artist and any of the half dozen or so mainstream novels? In Milton Lumky Territory gets my vote.
