May 27 2015

To Be Read 1

The good news is that at present I can buy books faster than I can read them. The bad news is that at present I can buy books faster than I can read (and review) them.

Here are some new things that have appeared (somehow!) in the to-be-read pile, along with what some of my hopes, thoughts, or expectations about them.

Radiant State by Peter Higgins. The third book in the Wolfhound Century series, about which I have written a few times. I was counting the days until its release! But I’m going to finish another book or two that I currently have going before I dive in and find out what happens in the end.

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor. I had been intrigued by Lagoon a couple of times in the bookstore, but hadn’t picked it up yet. I mentioned the author to a friend; she read The Book of Phoenix, and recommended it strongly, adding that no matter what I thought going in, the book wouldn’t be quite like that. How’s that for an enticing teaser?

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. I had been intrigued by Lagoon a couple of times in the bookstore, and I have now picked it up.

The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café by Alexander McCall Smith. The fifteenth book in the The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I love these books; I always buy the new one and read it when the time is right. I haven’t yet read The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, so now I have two to look forward to.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. When I reviewed The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, I said that although that was the first book by Chiang I had read, it wouldn’t be the last. There we go.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/27/to-be-read-1/

May 24 2015

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason.

That’s how Seveneves begins, and it pulled me right in. I stayed up until 3am last night to finish this 867-page hard science fiction novel, to the point that my eyes were watering and my cat was giving me the stinkeye for keeping her awake.

There doesn’t seem to be a good way to explain just how much this book encompasses and how well it does it. There’s lots and lots and lots of orbital space mechanics, which is a very tasty subject. There’s politics (of course), and efforts to save humanity by going to space, and heroics, and an Earth that is destroyed. There’s epigenetics, and new strains of mankind, and delving into what it all means, if anything. This is a hard science fiction apocalyptic scenario in which humankind survives, but survives by changing radically.

The first third of the book deals with the destruction of the moon itself, something that is never explained but simply is. A character that reflects Neal DeGrasse Tyson to an amusing degree figures out what is going to happen as chunks of broken Moon begin falling onto Earth, and works out a timeline in which humanity must find a way to save itself before the surface of the Earth consists solely of fire and molten rock. There is a mad rush to select the best of humanity as well as its most competent, to be sent into space in vehicles that can attach to the International Space Station. Out of 7 billion people, perhaps 20,000 are expected to survive, with any luck. Spoiler alert: they don’t have much luck.

The second third concerns after the Earth is destroyed. Along with humanity in space comes politics, with all the rancor and inability to cooperate that entails. There’s also a rift between the “regular people” who were chosen to learn space mechanics in order to join with the ISS (via a lottery that each country or major metropolitan area conducts), and those who are already there because they have extensively specialized skill sets – robotics, astrophysics, epigenetics, psychology, sociology, biology, etc. In the end only seven people survive it all – seven women. There isn’t a lot of amity among these seven remaining women, who break roughly into aligned groups of 4, 2 and 1, but they work out a deal for rebuilding the human race and then do it.

This is where I’ve seen reviews complain about the gap in the story. Neal doesn’t go step-by-step (as he is so often wont to do), about how the plan these women have made is implemented. Instead he jumps right into the third section, which sees us 5000 years into the future, with the Earth finally cooling down enough for terraforming to begin, and seven differing races of humans, based on the choices each of the Seven Eves made. I can agree that the jump from we’re-all-going-die-in-space to oh-wait-we-didn’t-and-look-at-all-these-cool-things-we-built-up-there-while-breeding isn’t the smoothest, but I disagree that the third section of the book is the weakest. It’s not weak, it’s just an unexpected pivot given the first two sections.

I happen to love Neal Stephenson since I first picked up a copy of Snow Crash and was pulled willy-nilly into the world of Hiro Protagonist. His books have gotten more serious, more thorough, and more hard core since then, but I don’t mind. He writes a damned good story and makes you think while he does it. There’s plenty of good characterization and sub-plots to keep people entertained while he goes into multiple pages of technical explanations, and if you’re like me, you love the technical bits, too. It is hard science fiction, after all.

If this site gave stars, this book would have 5 of them from me. It was right up my alley in nearly all respects, and will come highly recommended by me to anyone who asks.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/24/seveneves-by-neal-stephenson/

May 16 2015

Jhereg by Steven Brust

A thirty-year-old fantasy adventure novel has aged less badly than a seventy-year-old Hollywood novel. That’s the first thing that struck me thinking back on Steven Brust’s Jhereg, and comparing it to the other book that I just recently finished. Though to be fair, I suppose I should check back in another forty years. I’ll mark my calendar. (I’ve also kinda started in on Stand on Zanzibar, which is pushing fifty, and which I am pretty sure I haven’t read in at least twenty, more likely twenty-five. It’s eerily accurate about some aspects of the early twenty-first century. It’s also a bit startling to see how much I retained from previous encounters with the book.)

Anyway. Jhereg was a lot of fun, for values of “fun” that include “lead character is an assassin by profession.” That would be Vlad Taltos, the novel’s first-person narrator and overall hero. Vlad is a mid-level mafioso, in a fantasy world that features humans, a human-like race of people called Dragaerans, various other intelligent creatures, and at least three different kinds of magic. The heart of the action in Jhereg is Vlad’s forty-second assassination commission, which turns out to be more than he had bargained for.

A jhereg, by the way, is a flying reptile with a poisonous bite, not too large to perch on a person’s shoulders, but still big enough to attack people and do grievous harm. Vlad has one as a familiar, and their banter occurs telepathically, or as Brust writes, psionically. Vlad’s world is a high-magic setting, with death often no more than an inconvenience (though it can become permanent under certain circumstances), and teleportation common enough that Vlad will undertake several in a busy day, and that his office has a designated spot for both incoming and outgoing teleportation. This not the kind of book that explores the ramifications of commonplace magic very rigorously; it’s the kind of book that takes such things as read and gets on with telling a fast-paced adventure story. It’s possible that carefully working out the implications of the setting and magical systems that Brust provides would reveal plot holes, but Brust is not a writer to let the action slow long enough for a reader to want to do that kind of poking.

When I first sat down to write up a few thoughts on Jhereg, I had been thinking that there’s not much in it that would make a reader think this is the first book in a series that is still going strong 32 years and 18 further novels later, but that isn’t quite correct. In the book’s world, each Dragaeran belongs to a House, of which there are seventeen. The Houses are named after creatures of the book’s world, some familiar, such as Dragon or Phoenix, some not, such as Jhereg or Yendi. The book itself has seventeen chapters, each preceded by an epigraph concerning one of the Houses, or perhaps the creature itself. The Houses appear to rotate possession of the Imperial throne, and Jhereg is firmly in the middle of the procession. And while there are a few scenes in the book’s prologue about young Vlad, by the time the main story starts he’s grown up and established in his profession. Equally, however, he appears to be writing the story from a vantage point of some years later. Add all of these elements together, and it’s clear that Brust was at the very least constructing a character and a setting that would give him room to tell many more stories. Jhereg is a good start.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/16/jhereg-by-steven-brust/

May 14 2015

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

I skipped a good sixty or seventy pages of this book in the hope that jumping ahead would prevent me from pronouncing the Eight Deadly Words, but in the end it didn’t.

As the copyright page tells any reader, “The novel What Makes Sammy Run? was originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1941. Copyright 1941 by Budd Schulberg.” That’s pretty much the nub of the problem. It’s a book about Hollywood in the mid- to late 1930s, and so much about published novels, movies, and commercial writing has changed since then, that it all felt terribly out of date, and uninteresting. (Schulberg later wrote the screenplay for “On the Waterfront,” among other things, so he went on to have quite a decent career.)

The title character is a complete asshole who fucks over everybody he can in his career, and who supposedly can’t speak a paragraph without swearing, but there was more actual profanity in the first half of this sentence than in all of the book that I read. The past is a foreign country, and one can only allude to their colorful language there.

Apart from not caring what happens to those people, I didn’t buy several other major elements of the book. I didn’t buy that the narrator would care what happened to Sammy either. Sure, if the first-person narrator loses interest in Sammy, then he disappears from the book and it comes to an abrupt stop, but the author’s structural needs are not a real reason for Al Manheim to follow Sammy Glick’s every move. I didn’t buy much of tough dame Kit’s motivations either. And finally, I didn’t buy that Sammy was so much a better shark than all the other predators in the Hollywood tank that everything he tried succeeded.

The things that interested me most about the book fell outside the story itself.

[Sammy] may be said to be between patterns of social responsibility. And I believe this is true not only because he happens to be a second-generation product of the slums, but because our American culture as a whole may be in a state of dislocation. We are a babel of heterogeneous moralities. We are dizzy with change. … No wonder Sammy Glick (including all the Sammy Glicks who would never allow him into their clubs) has found the moral atmosphere so suitable and the underfooting so conducive to his kind of climbing. Yes, Sammy is still running, I’m afraid, and the question still is, How do we slow him down? Perhaps the answer involves an even bigger question: How do we slow down the whole culture he threatens to run away with and that threatens to run away with us?

That’s Budd Schulberg, from an introduction to the novel he wrote some years after its initial publication. That “dislocation,” that “babel of heterogeneous moralities … dizzy with change,” were both from the early 1950s, a period now generally regarded as one of the most stable and homogeneous periods in the nation’s recent history.

In 1989, Schulberg added an afterword, in which he notes a shift in some readers’ perception of Sammy from “the quintessential antihero, the bad example, the free-enterprise system at its meanest, brass-knuckle, kick-in-the-groin dirties” to someone who could be “a positive guide to their futures onward and upward.” While Schulberg still won’t swear on the page, he does not mince words: “But the dramatic transformation of Sammy Glick from the antihero of the forties to the role-model hero for the Yuppies of the eighties is a painful reminder of the moral breakdown we are suffering without even to realize that suffering is involved. … O.K. That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with a big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.”

Budd Schulberg died in August 2009, at the age of ninety-five.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/14/what-makes-sammy-run-by-budd-schulberg/

May 09 2015

History is Weird

The second offspring of [Jewish] messianic hopes [in eighteenth century Poland] was Frankism—from the name of its founder, Jacob Frank (?–1791). Frank’s father had fled Poland to escape persecution as a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Jacob Frank himself traveled widely in Romania and Greece, where (in Salonika) he met those believers in Sabbatai who had followed their master into Islam but had remained Jews underneath. Initiated into the secret teachings of the sect, Frank proclaimed himself the messiah (Santo Señor, in the Spanish idiom of the Salonika Jews). He had a vision of Poland as the Promised Land, and upon his return there, he was greeted enthusiastically, mostly by poor folk opposing the rabbis, but also by some Jewish notables. Frank, as a new messiah, proclaimed the end of Jewish law and, as a matter of fact, of all law—”I have come to abolish all laws and religions in order to bring life to the world.” The ascent to the kingdom of freedom and wealth was to be accomplished by a descent into abomination and perversion. A Manichean tradition, so strong in the Balkans, is clearly perceivable in Frank’s teachings. Evil was to be overcome by doing evil, sin by sinning. The Frankists, like the Hasidim, practiced ecstatic dancing and singing accompanied by the clapping of hands, but also held orgiastic rituals whereby men and women undressed “to see truth in its nakedness” and copulated indiscriminately—while only the leader stood apart. Frank reinterpreted the idea of the mystic trinity in the cabala as a union of the Holy Primeval (Attika kadisha); the Holy King (Malka kadisha), who was the messiah (Frank himself); and the Primeval Mother (Matronita elyona), who was none other than Frank’s daughter, Eve. The Frankists, because of their rites, provoked horror, and in 1756 they were excluded from the Jewish community by the rabbis—their wives and daughters were declared harlots, their children bastards, and any contact with them anathema. After protracted negotiations with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, a minority of their number chose conversion to Catholicism; they were granted titles of nobility. The majority, however, submitted themselves to the Jewish elders and publicly recognized their errors, though many of them continued to contribute financially to Frank’s cause. Frank himself was baptized in Warsaw in 1759 (with the king as his godfather) and imposed upon those who followed him on that road a strictly dual religious life. In harmony with his teaching, baptism was seen as the lowest debasement necessary to bring about a new world. The faithful were advised to get some military training to prepare themselves for the battles of the final upheaval. Perhaps because of that, several brave Polish officers in the Napoleonic army came from the ranks of the Frankists—for instance, Aleksander Matuszewski, general of the artillery. The Catholic clergy soon discovered Frank’s double game and imprisoned him in the monastery of Czestochowa, where he spent twelve years. Later on, he migrated to Offenbach in Germany, where, as “Count Frank,” he was surrounded by a mounted bodyguard in fanciful uniforms and used to drive in a princely coach. The French Revolution seemed to be an accomplishment of Frank’s prophecies, and many Frankists joined the Jacobins (among them, the heir apparent and nephew of Frank, known in Vienna under the name of Frank Thomas Edler von Schönfeldt, and his brother Emmanuel), only to be beheaded on the guillotine in 1794 together with Danton. “Frankists” remained a vital part of the Polish scene, and several eminent Polish families renowned for their active part in Freemasonry and the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 were descendants of Frank’s followers. At first they preserved their identity and married only among themselves. Gradually, though, they merged completely with the upper classes.
[Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature, pp. 164–66]

Just try to match that, alt-history. Just try.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/09/history-is-weird/

May 05 2015

On Basilisk Station by David Weber

Introduction

The Honor Harrington series (the name of our heroine and main character in the series), also known as the Honorverse, is a Military Science Fiction series by author David Weber. On Basilisk Station, published in 1992, is the first book in the series, which already spans thirteen books and a few spin offs.

Setting

The honorverse occurs on our universe, in around century 41 our reckoning. A universe where humanity has dispersed thorough the stars (Both before and after finding Faster Than Light technology) and established homes in numerous planets on different star systems, and evolved into large and complex but clearly distinct political-social affiliations grouped mostly around star systems.

Characters

The series centers strongly around Honor Stephanie Alexander-Harrington, a young officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy, whom we meet as a newly raised Commander, taking command of HMS Fearless, a light cruiser on the Royal Manticoran Navy.

Weber devotes a good large portion of the book at developing the internal thought process and psychology of Honor, developing her as an almost utopic leader, the pure image of an effective leader who looks to drive everyone under her command to give the best of themselves, and a guide who will sit with her underlings as equals (as much as military rank, which she seldom uses to push people, would allow) and gently push them to share ideas and take initiative on the running of the ship. Honor rarely pulls rank and she doesn’t micromanage, but it’s obvious she expects only the best effort from her subordinates, and views anything less than heroic efforts as a lack of self integrity and a sign of the person cheating themselves and others. Genially, with one exception, the whole ship responds by rising to their best for her in a manner that is so constantly perfect that becomes emotionally draining, and shaming, to read at times.

Honor also exhibits almost perfect morality and adherence to military rules and ideals, thankfully pulling from perfection and showing just enough pragmatism in the nick of time, and using her drive for perfection and desire of recognition to make the character still believable.

The only other character that is developed to a level, if not close at least somewhat comparable, to Honor’s is Lieutenant commander Alistar McKeon, first in command to Honor on HMS Fearless, and whose internal plot arc revolves mostly around his struggle with his mostly unexplained and seemingly unmanageable resentment towards Honor, the redemption of which marks a slightly cliche if enjoyable moment in the book.

The only area in which Weber leaves me seriously craving for deeper development is around alien (to Earth) life forms in his universe.

On one hand, treecats, like Honor’s inseparable companion Nimitz, hold an interesting niche as pets who both exhibit higher than normal sentience traits and sociological insertion into human civilization than pets in real life, yet being pets I think Weber did reach a good balance having Nimitz’s presence felt, and not stepping into the more artificial “Look at this, it’s a treecat, look at the treecat, see the special animal I made” stance some writers exploit. Yet as a lover of cats, and frustrated zoologist, I must admit, I wouldn’t mind a smaller novella, or fake sociozoological analysis stint onto treecats outside of the main Honorverse story arc/setting.

Yet where I do feel the book is seriously lacking, is around the sentient alien species indigenous to Basilisk. An interestingly non (entirely) anthropomorphic species to which the author and the humans he writes pays such little regards that it almost feels like we’re dealing with normal humans with a strange name and a passing mention of a third arm.

This species is not the main plot of the book, and certainly I do not expect a full anthropological paper on them, yet the dismissive way they’re mentioned makes me feel they’re an artifact the author was not sure to include in the verse, and somehow might still regret having come up with at times. While it’s true that not every human will launch into a deep philosophical analysis and dissertation on the meaning of nonhuman sentience, it’s also true that it’s existence will have a noticeable impact into the humans on this verse and thus the narrative around them.

Story development

The story development is pretty good for a first book in a series. Weber introduces Honor to new circumstances to herself which allows the reader to take an easy hitchhike alongside the protagonist into the playing field of the story, creating an introduction to our surroundings and environment that feels natural and not at all forced. He has also mastered a good blend of story and back-story, dropping elements from Honor’s (and the setting’s) past here and there thorough the evolving arc in manners that tie to the current story we’re following and works the background information we need to form the characters and events into easy to follow segways which do not rip the reader from the occurring action.

While this could be considered a surprise reveal story, if much softer a surprise than say, Ender’s Game, for example, the development of it does not draw onto many artificial elements, cliffhangers or soap opera-ish, so that its progression feels natural and plausible.

As someone who has a cursed knack for guessing a book’s plot’s ending, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy a surprise reveal that did catch me partly off guard, but in a much amenable “Oh why didn’t I see that” manner rather than a “Oh, that can’t be” forced reveal.

One thing I do have to warn the reader about is that Weber seems to share a mentality with George R.R. Martin. His hand doesn’t waver at killing beloved or important characters, though, like Martin, never in a spiteful or dagger turning manner but just as part of a natural and realistic narrative.

All in all, “On Basilisk Station” was a thoroughly enjoyable, and enjoyed, book. It introduced me to a series, of which if I do not read the extensive whole available I’ll surely partake again, most surely more than once. It’s not a light read, and it needs you to be able to at least coexist with the military setting, but it’s not a burden to read either, it’s logical and well written, with language that lays easily in a very enjoyable middle between simple English and deep and thoughtful acts of acrobatic word-smithing (meaning, this book is not written in very plain simplistic English, but it’s not fanciful and show-offish either), and it will provide for sure several good hours of entertainment, with well timed emotional ups and downs, and an ending that will not leave you resentful of the author or the work.

Technical data

Book: On Basilisk Station
Series: Honor Harrington (Honorverse)
Author: David Weber
ISBN: 0-671-57793-X
Date: 1992
Publisher: Baen Books

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/05/on-basilisk-station-by-david-weber/

May 04 2015

The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard

Of course the house is haunted. But what does it want? Who is writing the letters that seem to deliver themselves? And what does that person (?) want? Malcolm Mays, a protagonist on the run from his past, might live to find out. Or wish he hadn’t.

The End of the Sentence is deliciously creepy.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/04/the-end-of-the-sentence-by-maria-dahvana-headley-and-kat-howard/

May 01 2015

What Work Is by Philip Levine

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but …

Full poem is here.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/01/what-work-is-by-philip-levine/

Apr 30 2015

So, Anyway by John Cleese

The back of the dust jacket of So, Anyway… by John Cleese gives the book an unofficial subtitle, “The Making of a Python,” and indeed, that is what all but one of the book’s chapters describes. There are a few flash-forwards, or asides regarding later events, but the bulk of the story concerns what happened before a collaboration with five other comedians launched him to global fame.

It’s a straightforward book, and I suspect it’s a terrific audiobook, since Cleese reads it himself. His comedic voice comes through clearly, and he permits himself the occasional zany tangent, usually returning to the main thread of the narrative with his titular phrase, “So, anyway…” Reading through, one also inevitably learns a certain amount about mid-century England, Cambridge, and the BBC. It also surprised me at how easily Cleese fell into success in fields that are now fiendishly competitive. He seems a bit surprised in retrospect as well.

The best parts of the book, in my view, were the ones in which he talks about the craft of writing comedy, how difficult it is to be funny, rather than just clever or witty. The sketches that he often co-wrote with Graham Chapman often had an internal logic and Cleese worked very hard to keep that logic consistent with itself, no matter how tenuously the sketch might be tethered to consensus reality. Ultimately, though, funny defies definition; in the end there are no rules, only laughter. A BBC censor let them end a Python sketch with the exclamation, “Bugger!” As he explained, “I would never have believed I would OK it … but when I actually saw it, it was so funny, I’m going to.”

I would like to read Cleese’s take on the Python years, and even more a behind-the-scenes account of A Fish Called Wanda. Just as an aside, I’ve noticed that general-interest non-fiction books originally published in the UK have better indexes than those first published in the US. The observation holds true for So, Anyway… as well, and I wish that however the British publishers manage to make the economics work would find its way across the Atlantic.

So, anyway … the book is detailed, it’s written very much in Cleese’s voice, and it sheds a lot of light on where he came from.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/30/so-anyway-by-john-cleese/

Apr 29 2015

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

One of the possibly apocryphal stories told about Terry Pratchett being knighted for services to literature is that he said his service was “presumably not trying to write any.” He knew better, of course, and kept right on writing literature as long as he could.

Pyramids is the seventh Discworld book, and at this point in the span of the series, he’s doing several different things quite in addition to writing books that are funnier, both line-by-line and over longer spans, than practically any other novels being written at the time (1989 for Pyramids). First of all, he’s adding settings within the overall concept of the Discworld. Pyramids is the fourth different set-up so far, with more to come. (As things turned out, Pratchett did not revisit the setting of Pyramids.) Second, he’s broadening the range of his satire. Where he had started out skewering the conventions of fantasy fiction, he’s now turning his dissecting tools onto government, history, religion and commerce. Not all at once; or at least, not always all at once. Third, he is letting the stakes of the story emerge from the characters. In Pyramids, a significant danger to much of the Disc does arise, but it’s almost as if by accident, coming from choices that characters made without any regard to larger implications. That’s a more thorough subversion of fantasy tradition than the obviously contrived danger in The Light Fantastic. Pyramids is also, unlike any of the previous novels, divided into four separately titled sections. (The third, “The Book of the New Son,” plays on Gene Wolfe’s very serious fantasy series, The Book of the New Sun.)

The land along both sides of the river Djeli is one of the Disc’s oldest existing kingdoms, with a ruling house whose known history stretches back some 7000 years. The pharaoh of Djelibeybi is a divine monarch, who causes the sun to rise every morning and set every evening. When he dies, he is laid to rest in a pyramid suitable to commemorate such an important personage. Unfortunately, the country’s waning fortunes, not to say shrinking territory, along with seven thousand years’ worth of accumulated pyramids mean that there is very little suitable land left to cultivate, and Djelibeybi is increasingly impoverished.

Teppic, heir to the throne and the godhood, is sent to the great city of Ankh-Morpork in the hope that he will learn a lucrative trade and help alleviate the kingdom’s poverty. He is also, if possible, to get an education. Both goals are served by apprenticing him to the Assassins’ Guild, whose school is both excellent and easy to get into. The trick is to get out again alive. The book opens as Teppic is preparing for his final exam, an account of which is interspersed with flashbacks that tell his tale up to that point and give some background on Djelibeybi. But no sooner has Teppic improbably passed with flying colors (and knives), than his father Teppicymon XXVII dies. Teppic inherits the throne and the godhood.

His time in Ankh-Morpork has given Teppic ideas about enlivening and modernizing the very traditional kingdom he has inherited. Ideas such as plumbing. His foil is the venerable high priest and adviser, Dios. In a pivotal arrangement, Dios convinces Teppic to build for his late father the largest pyramid in all of Djelibeybi. That drives the plot, because on the Disc pyramids have a magical property of slowing time, a property that increases, possibly exponentially, with size. The construction of the largest pyramid ever built plays havoc with time inside and then outside the kingdom. Teppic has to find ways to remedy the situation without actually knowing what is happening; further, he would like to reform the kingdom; and if he really had his druthers he wouldn’t have to be pharaoh at all. How that works out is the matter of Pyramids.

One of the best diversions along the way is the time that Teppic spends in a neighboring kingdom, one modeled on ancient Greece, complete with bibulous and querulous philosophers:

Teppic wandered along the table to where Pthagonal was sitting in unrelieved misery, and currently peering suspiciously over the crust of a pie.
Teppic looked over his shoulder.
“I think I saw something moving in there,” he said.
“Ah, said the geometrician, taking the cork out of an amphora with his teeth. …
[Pthagonal] pulled a pair of dividers from the folds of his robe and measured the pie thoughtfully. “Is it a constant, do you think? It’s a depressing concept.”
“Sorry?” said Teppic.
“The diameter divides into the circumference, you know. It ought to be three times. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But does it? No. Three point one four one and lots of other figures. There’s no end to the buggers. Do you know how pissed off that makes me?”
“I expect it makes you extremely pissed off,” said Teppic politely.
“Right. It tells me that the Creator used the wrong kind of circles. It’s not even a proper number! I mean, three point five, you could respect. Or three point three. That’d look right.” He stared morosely at the pie. (p. 269)

And then sometimes Pratchett just casually drops a major observation on unsuspecting readers:

And I’m shut in my body, thought [the ghost of Teppicymon XXVII]. Everything we believe is true? And what we believe isn’t what we think we believe.
I mean, we think we believe that the gods are wise and just and powerful, but what we really believe is that they are like our father after a long day. (p. 260)

Or:

The thing, [Teppic] told himself, is not to look up or down, but straight ahead, into the marble [of the pyramid he is climbing], parcelling the impossible height into manageable sections. Just like time, That’s how we survive infinity – we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/29/pyramids-by-terry-pratchett-2/