Discworld QOTD, from Monstrous Regiment
“Stopping a battle is much harder than starting it. Starting it only requires you to shout ‘Attack!’ but when you want to stop it, everyone is busy.”
Discworld QOTD, from Small Gods
“It's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave... you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time.”
Monstrous Regiment was kind of a shocking book, because throughout most of the series, Death is a friendly guy who's trying to help people move on. Monstrous Regiment is the first book that really says, "Look at how many living people lose everything when their family members die in war."
yeah, he has a lot to say in different books about the negatives of conflict (Night Watch and Interesting Times are extremely cynical about revolutions) but Monstrous Regiment really hits you with "look at the horrifying aftereffects"
though honestly a fair number of fantasy writers have been ambivalent about war, and it wouldn't surprise me if e.g. Lloyd Alexander was antiwar, based on how the battles in his books are chaotic messes with no heroism.
Capaldi's Doctor Who had a great speech about that, where he notes that in the end after the war everybody is going to do what they should have done before the war anyway - sit down and talk.
He says something about that in the preface to his rewrite of Carpet People. Paraphrasing when he wrote it originally as a teenager he thought Fantasy was about Kings and Battles and as an adult he thinking it’s more important to imagine doing without kings and avoiding battles.
Hey Micah! I was going to check a discworld book out from the library for shavuot, but I can't find your "where you should start" flowchart. Any chance you can repost that?
the Discworld feed - my thread is the pinned post, so you can always look through there bsky.app/profile/did:...
but the specific post you're looking for is here
DO YOU LIKE GOTH SHIT? Start with Mort, the first of the Death books.
DO YOU LIKE DRAGONS? Start with Guards! Guards! the first of the Watch books.
DO YOU LIKE ANTITHEISM? Start with Small Gods, a standalone skewering of organized religion.
From there, follow this guide to find your next book.
But the amazing thing about a lot of the novels: They work in any order. I started with The Truth, followed by the Moist of Lipwig Saga and then The Fifth Elefant and Nightwatch and only now Guards Guards. And it still works. Its like visiting old friends on another adventure.
