Pyramids: A Discworld Novel: 7

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Though all the characters, unsurprisingly, feel British at their core. You've got the rather naïve protagonist dragged around by circumstance, who also somehow also causes revolutionary change in his society. The pragmatic, sexy girl. A wily, hidebound head priest. Swathes of one-note supporting characters, 99.5% of whom are male. Maybe reading Cranford in tandem made the biases of this book stand out more, but come on. There is only one central character who's a woman, and maybe two very minor female characters in the whole thing, and otherwise it's wall-to-wall dudes. The third and final part details the supernatural adventures of Pteppic and Ptracy, while trying to save the kingdom, from all its legends and beliefs. This was the place where my patience became rather thin, and my close-to-non-existent attention span began to take a hike.

Pyramids (novel) - Wikipedia

Murphy's Bullet: Pteppic decides to fail his Assassin's Guild final exam in style and deliberately aims his crossbow away from the target. The bolt ricochets off several objects before burying itself in the target. The examiner comments that he is not a fan of these new, flashy techniques but passes him as the end result was achieved. I highly recommend them, unless you dislike Terry Pratchett, in which case I don't, for obvious reasons Shaggy Frog" Story: Copolymer (the Greatest Storyteller in the World) constantly lapses into this due to his bad memory and short attention span.

I find this one of the funniest early works, showing that Pratchett trained his muscles enough and is coming closer and closer to ingenuity and unique telling talent. From now on, each book is a total must read, except of the later ones which turn dark and are sometimes so different that it may be difficult to find traces of Pratchetts´early, lighthearted, exceptionally funny, writing in them. And I don´t mean a bit sad or something, I mean depressingly and frustratingly showing the darkest sides of humankind in pictures ineradicable out of the readers´ mind. It has been suggested that Pratchett took his inspiration for this line from Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, but this is a very ancient concept in magic and primitive religions. People bearing the same name as the deceased often change their names for fear of the dead person's ghost. James George Frazer's The Golden Bough covers this concept in detail. Unfortunately he doesn't bank on his "conservative" Head Priest Dios, who lives his life by ritual and regularity and has no time for religion despite believing that Net was the Supreme God, oh as was Hast, Fon, Set, Bin, Sot, Dhek and Ptooie, as well as a host of others. The trouble was the kingdom was a slave to ritual and to a multitude of Gods for every occasion, with many duplicates. Pun: Djelibeybi. (Helped along by the fact that it literally means "Child of the Djel".) That Americans weren't getting the pun led Pratchett to create the nearby country of Hersheba. A group of unlicensed thieves trying mugging Teppic, Chidder and a friend of theirs when they graduate. It doesn't work out well for them.

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Reasonable Authority Figure: Teppic tries to be one, but Dios keeps overriding him, and everyone else is too terrified to go against Dios' will.The Anticipator: Teppic considers inhuming Mericet, his Assassin's school examinator (managing to kill the examinator gets you an automatic pass, because it's nearly impossible), but decides against it. Mericet was in fact hiding as a gargoyle, tells Teppic where to go next (involving an obstacle course worthy of Assassin's Creed), and somehow shows up there before Teppic. All Stories Are Real Somewhere: The narrator notes that this must be the case in an infinite universe. Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Assassin's Guild school's final exam resembles the UK driving license test. You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger* (* Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.) differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients. . .” Although in the aspect of him being the high priest, he very much follows expectations in that he is not explicitly insane or power-hungry, but so pious that adherence to belief and tradition override all else.