Some Notes on Terry Pratchett's Thud!

For something that began as a throw-away parodic riff on Fritz Leiber’s city of Lankhmar, Ankh-Morpork is now a remarkably richly developed fictional setting. The economic details, the texture of inter-species interaction, and the working of transportation and communication all contribute to a sense that the city could exist. Even old running jokes like the Pork Futures warehouse and the impossibly solid River Ankh (walking across it is no miracle) have a certain heft, given that Pratchett can demonstrate how they have a tangible impact on the lives of the characters.

There’s probably something interesting to be said about the way Pratchett overlays the generic conventions of the police procedural over that of the political thriller, and the tension between notions of idealism and realism that the plots and the characters must constantly negotiate. I’m certainly finding it more palatable than the fashionable, faux looked-too-long-into-the-abyss posturing of reactionary crap like 24, with its endless psuedo-realpolitik justifications for the aestheticisation of torture.

Am I the last person to figure this out; is the Patrician grooming Vimes as an eventual replacement? The little hints that Vimes is beginning to understand Vetinari’s POV are interesting.

Vimes is becoming an increasingly iconic figure in the narratives; going by many of Pratchett’s other novels, that’s not a particularly good sign for his personal health and well-being. Iconic characters tend to have very strange fates in the Discworld. On the other hand, these kinds of characters tend to to have narratives written in their own point of view, and I think Pratchett likes writing Sam Vimes’s voice too much to let that go.