Feeding the Dragon: Guards! Guards! and Brexit

For a book published 31 years ago, "Guards! Guards!" by Sir Terry Pratchett has a lot to tell us about Brexit. I started reading it for light relief from the news; it didn't entirely work, but did give me a new perspective.

(Minor spoilers follow, but as noted, it's been 31 years.)

I hadn't reread GG for at least a decade, and what struck me this time is how angry it is. I don't mean that as a bad thing. Beneath all the daft puns and jokes (which are extremely funny), is a deep and righteous anger at the petty evil of humanity.

Ltoinel, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Entitlement Issues Redux

I've been thinking about entitled fans, in relation to George RR Martin and Star Wars.

Where is the next book, George?

Martin's fans have awaited his next book with growing impatience, ever since A Dance With Dragons was published seven years ago this week. With admirable bluntness, Neil Gaiman once pointed out George RR Martin is not your bitch.

(Gaiman was writing in 2009, two years before A Dance With Dragons was published. Plus ça change.)

Here is a less combative analogy, which may help make the point:

Terry Pratchett: The Letter I Should Have Written

It was announced this afternoon that Sir Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66. He was a tremendously funny and brilliant writer, and his passing is a great loss to us all. This must be devastating for his friends and family, and they have my deepest sympathy.

A Just Giving page donating to the Research Institute for the Care of Older People (RICE), a dementia charity, has been set up in his memory. I have made a donation at: https://www.justgiving.com/Terry-Pratchett

Sir Terry Pratchett.
Source: psjmprints

I was fortunate enough to meet Sir Terry once, at a book signing in Edinburgh in 1997. I naively turned up with a few friends at the advertised start time, to find a queue already stretching out the doors of Waterstone's, and continuing a long way down the pavement at the east end of Princes Street. It was early summer, sometime in May I think, and the weather was good, so we didn't mind waiting.

The advertised time was something like 2 pm to 5 pm. At about 4.30, I was still outside the shop, but the word was passed down the line that Pratchett (not yet Sir Terry at that time) was going to do the whole queue. Sometime around 5.30, nervously clutching my hardback copy of Hogfather, I reached the front of the queue for my moment with the great man.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: Review

Bilbo: "Is it over yet?"
Source: IMDB

I'm coming in a bit late on this one, but here are my thoughts on The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

One moment in this film beautifully sums up the whole: Dain, chieftain of the dwarves of the Iron Hills, sees yet another bizarre computer-generated monster appear on the horizon, and responds with an incredulous, "Oh, COME ON!"

I rather enjoyed the first two instalments in the Hobbit trilogy. The Lord of the Rings films were a towering achievement of cinema; the prequels are not in the same league, but pretty good fun on a winter evening. I am a huge fan of Tolkien's books, but I'm not a purist. I was happy to accept the Hobbit films as a new story, based on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (with its Appendices), but told by Peter Jackson as much as by JRR Tolkien. I am sad to report that Jackson has seriously dropped the ball in this episode.

(Mild spoilers below the fold, for anyone who has not read the book.)

A Song of Books and Television

A few weeks ago I became curious about how sales of A Song of Ice and Fire books compare to viewing figures for the Game of Thrones adaptation for television. I assumed the audience for a TV show with extraordinary levels of violence and nudity would far exceed that for George RR Martin's lengthy books, but this may not be entirely true.