BOOK: Unseen Academicals

It is slightly puzzling how someone might review this book poorly, unless they're so detached from life they don't know any war veterans. In modern times, war veterans are everywhere in English speaking countries. Wounds in modern war are even worse than during Korea or Vietnam, and modern technology and medicine means that war wounded don't have to lie in bed after they close up. They are out and about, and I suspect we'll see proper working exoskeletons in under 10 years time, so the paraplegics can walk again.

Unseen Academicals is about a war veteran, though this isn't immediately apparent as the story begins, instead confusing him with a particularly reviled race on the Discworld. It is about how war veterans are treated and distrusted and overall not regarded well enough, not respected for both their sacrifice to keep us safe as for their restraint upon returning home to a world that may need more chlorine in its gene pool.

It is also about how Academics are disconnected from the world outside their ivory tower of publically funded communism, examples of which I found in a university owned set of perfect, maintained, visitor bungalows in Livermore which existed to serve visiting Doctors of science coming to Livermore Labs, home of the Hydrogen Bomb, which is an upgraded Atom Bomb which can flash fry a big city rather than a small one. Livermore Labs and Sandia (Los Alamos) Labs are both cited, like Oxford, as examples of letting blowhards talk themselves into an easy job of pretension and laziness by being so obscure nobody can fire them. Geologists used to do the same thing as USGS but eventually the complaints from pregnant coed field lab assistants convinced then Democratic President Clinton to fire them all. And he did, too. This impacted me by making my career worthless a year before I graduated. I have never forgiven him, but it was their own faults for being such randy, useless bastards. I don't forgive them either. They had it coming. Those same bastards are running global warming research scams and seducing braless hippy chicks at dinner party fundraisers today, while their exes continue to collect alimony or child support and the professors keep a low profile and work off the books as much as possible. Absolute Bastards, but at least they're not the worst sort of bastards. They don't generally kill their girlfriends. Ahem.

They story also contains bits on the start of fashion models and the fashion institution out of a medieval culture that is evolving out of the functional armor stage and into the showy pretty stuff, and why footballers seem to attract fashion models because they're both so very dumb.

Still, the war veteran plot is the key one and how many authors today write about that? Respect to Terry Pratchett, once more. I kinda wish that he'd franchise the Unseen University to diploma mills with actual classrooms, with the stated intention of doing exactly what modern colleges do, namely waste state and Federal money and poorly educate and impoverish the youth who attend them. It would be honest and hilarious.

Book: Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is a fantastic author. He's an expert story teller, and I envy his ability, his use of language and nearly constant wry humor. His writing partner in a couple books Neil Gaiman describes Terry Pratchett as a man of enduring fury, carefully bottled rage. Not the "funny old elf" casual observers think he is. He writes about very serious subjects. He writes about corruption, racism, madness, slavery, treachery, incompetence, evil, philosophy, justice and injustice. Its beautiful writing, deceptively humorous because all that rage drives it. A Terry Pratchett novel wins awards. And it deserves to. He's a great writer because he's been at it for decades and tries very hard to craft his very best. Not "good enough" but best. Imagine if Charles Dickens had been paid for quality rather than by the word so he said more in fewer words, carefully chosen? That is what Pratchett is like.

I envy his ability as a writer, but I know that he worked very hard at this. It wasn't talent that makes him a great writer. It was decades of hard work. To be a great writer, like a great guitarist, is practice, practice, practice. I really appreciate his efforts which is why I'm a fan. He makes me wonder if I can turn my anger and outrage at how things are, into humor the way he did. Because Terry Pratchett is slowly dying and in a year or two or three there won't be anymore books. And that will be terrible because he's become exquisitely good at it by this point.

The novel Snuff is about slavery, racism, and butchery of thinking people that smell terrible. It makes you ashamed of any racist thoughts you have had. Because Racism is as easy as it is wrong. All political parties commit this sin, and its human nature to divide people into Us and Them. Lots of experiments prove this. You can't stop it, either. I think this is one of the reasons that Communism always fails. "They weren't doing their share. We suffered, and they were lazing around. Why should We be the only ones to work? Maybe we should stop working too?" In the post 9/11 world those are easy thoughts to have, despite how shameful they are. Perhaps in a world without terrorism we could have proper social justice, but eliminating terrorism requires action by the police forces from the countries of origin to stop them, and arrest the seditious murderers recruiting them, who are mostly holy clerics of Islam running charity schools.

 

Snuff is about those police, and the trouble of convincing people to reject their racism and act to stop things, from your own side of responsibility. Snuff is also about tobacco, the kind that comes in little boxes and is sniffed up your nose and gives you cancer eventually. Tobacco plantations used to be tended by slaves here in the USA, after they stopped exporting debtors from England, in the days before it was banned. The English banned slavery before we did, because they didn't have any plantations in England and instead bought things grown on them, removing themselves from the morality of the cotton clothing they adored made from the labor of slaves here. Did you smell hypocrisy when you learned that? Yes, I do too. Slavery was never legal in California, btw. Pratchett pokes at the hypocrisy of the tobacco buyers pretending to be superior for buying the efforts of slaves, in exactly the same way that buyers of smart phones in the USA pretend to be superior despite the efforts of Chinese slaves. If you don't make it yourself, how do you know it isn't made by slaves? Ahem. Just a point to consider before you plant that smug look on your face.

 

I strongly recommend this book, both for humor and quality of writing as well as the moral message is provides. There's a lot of important truths in Snuff and I'm really going to miss Sir Terry when he dies. He's one of the good people, no matter how angry he really is.