Book: Going Postal (Discworld #33)

I watched Going Postal miniseries from Sky1 TV, in the UK. Someone kindly loaded it online, since Netflix no longer has it for streaming. It is good, as a made for TV movie. It's funny, and charming, and the acting is amusing. Miss Adora Belle Dearheart is rather hilarious.

She's much funnier in the book, however. Pratchett describes her smoking cigarettes like she had a vendetta against them, and that kissing her was like licking an ashtray. I used to be married to a smoker, and yes, that's an accurate description of kissing one. In the books she's got an Irish accent. The voice acting for the book on tape is best possible. And the writing is very best. I can see why it was made into a miniseries, right after Hogfather.

In Discworld, light is NOT the fastest thing in the universe. This is because no matter where light goes, the Dark has already got there first. This sort of logic works on Discworld. Heavy objects fall faster than light ones, too. Newton would throw a fit.

Listening to the novel being read, while polishing audiobooks, makes the work bearable. Polishing discs is machine operation. Machine operation is being the cheapest part of the machine, the part that moves things, the part that inspects. Managers do NOT understand this. Managers have people skills. Machine operators do not. We are technically the same species, but in critical aspects may as well not be. How people are DOES matter, after all. I am sad that librarians are expected to have people skills. It would have been nicer to just do the "SHHH!" thing instead.

Done. Pratchett really does the very best endings. This is part of the reason there's so little fanfiction. Most fans DON'T think they can do better. Fanfiction is always the "I could do better" folks at work. And that's usually true, and about 1% of it really IS better. 500,000 pieces of Harry Potter fanfiction. 5,000 of them really are better than JK Rowling wrote. Those have better quality writing, better character development, more plausible plotlines, more consistent magic, and more satisfying endings. JK Rowling loves to wag her finger and say: "INTERESTING! But not canon!" And with those words, she spawned a million competitors. The market is saturated with young adult fantasy novels. I shelve the books so I know. It is quite impressive.

Pratchett's work satisfies, and he must think about his endings a very long time. They are right. They fit. His story telling deserves the praise, and Going Postal is one of his best works, up there with The Hogfather and Guards!Guards!. It is a condemnation of price fixing in both telegraphs AND cellular phones, and praise of the entire mail system, referencing its primitive mail-coach and pony express routes and to the modern Victorian 4 times a day delivery (at its height 120 years ago). Great authors reference multiple times, and at her best, Rowling would pull that off. Alas, I think her last 3 books were written by ghost writers, which is why the prose has several different "hands" in it. It is painfully obvious in her last book. The only part I think she wrote herself was the bit at the cemetery in Godric's Hollow. Of course, I can't prove that. But that's how it reads.

Pratchett's work is always his own, and you can really see it clearly. Consistency in the prose, in the word choices and pacing, from early works to later. This is "a tell", in writing. I look forward to reading Making Steam when it is my turn.