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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

Please don’t let the few who have co-opted LOTR ruin it for the rest of us. It is a shame though, I wear my Palantir shirt very infrequently now.

I’m currently on book 2 of Discworld and finding it ludicrously enjoyable. Its absurdity makes it feel like an antidote to many things.

It feels more fantasy than “hardest of hard sci fi” to me though? And I think the space suit was broken so is it a good model for tech?

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The first few books are straight-up parody fantasy. The first one which even _verges_ on feeling like Discworld is the third, Equal Rites, but really you probably won’t see what he’s talking about til Wyrd Sisters and Guards, Guards if you read chronologically.

Yeah, the first two books especially were very clearly intended as "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but fantasy". They're a good read, but they're not quite what the series became

One of the marvelous things about Discworld is that although it is absurd, it is one of those logical abstractions of technology I've seen. For example he describes in an incredibly lifelike way the clacks system (basically a kind of internet) and it's many properties - the network effects of internet infrastructure, it's used in commerce, the importance of information, the "hackers" who manipulate it, etc. Discworld is almost really hard scifi sometimes.

There were real semaphore systems used for communication. Then he layered a lot of early telegraph stuff on top of that, popped some of his own invention into the mix and finally used the rest to parody internet and mobile phones. It's magnificent really.

Speaking of sci fi - have you read Strata and Dark Side? They're pastiches of Asimov and Niven and so on, but he has some really neat ideas in there as well. I particularly like his notion of vacuum tube technology taken to its limits in Strata.

If ever I needed proof of the non-existence of a benign all powerful god then the fact that someone who loved writing that kind of intricate and clever sophisticated humour would be so cruelly struck down with Alzheimers would suffice.

"A life with footnotes", the biography of him by Rob Wilkins is excellent and very moving.

The Clacks, the Disorganiser, Dwarf-discovered Devices, and L-Space are all wonderful ideas. I'm a huge fan of the City Watch series, with Thud! being my absolute favourite.

I envy those reading the series for the first time!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph

One of the major recurring themes of r/discworld is that so much of the amazing ideas in Discworld were actually real things.

To greatly oversimplify, the first 4 Discworld books are about fantasy. The ones after that are about other subjects, using the fantasy world of Discworld as a vehicle. And Pratchett really does this masterfully.

> on book 2

All the books were written over span of 30+ years and they changed over the time during this.

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