Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

> The Auditors of Reality are particularly interesting. They are the Discworld edition of what I’ve called the Great Bureaucrat archetype elsewhere. Their ideology is something like the Wokism of Discworld, a deadening, stifling, faceless force of intersectional lifelessness.

what

Man this dude sure has a definition of “woke” that is completely alien to the roots of that term.

> I read one Pratchett novel (Thief of Time I think) in college, but I’m glad I didn’t properly get into it till my mid-forties. These are books you cannot really appreciate if you’re too young. I read through the lot around 2017-19, during the first Trump admin, when I was in my early forties.

what

Dude they are comic fantasy, yes Pratchett has Things to Say about the world in them, more and more as the series goes on, but I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen and the series was a constant delight through my college years and beyond. Yes there are things in Discworld that will zoom right by a kid and only land when you come back to it as an adult. That’s part of why they’re good books. There’s things like that in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Cycle (Book of Three, Black Cauldron, etc) that hit me like a ton of bricks when I pick up those little books forty years after I first read them as a kid and completely missed those parts. Stories can speak to multiple ages on multiple levels.

> I picked up Equal Rites soon after it came out when I was eighteen

I read Colour of Magic when I was 13 I think. It might have been a year or two later; a friend's mother had heard the Radio 4 "Woman's Hour" reading of Equal Rites and recommended them to me as she knew I liked Douglas Adams.

Adams and Pratchett had this in common - they had sufficient layers of jokes in them that they could appeal to both me in my early teens, and a friend's mother in her 40s (roughly). I missed a huge number of gags on the first read through. I like to re-read familiar books, though, and I used to get a few more each time through.

Until I read the APF there were still a bunch of historical gags or similar that I was missing by a country mile! I'm sure there are plenty more that have still gone over my head.

I honestly think that Pratchett was a better writer than Wodehouse, even though that's practically heresy for a Brit.

The Discworld books are great but yeah, they're very much at the level of say a bright 15 year old. I've been reading them since I was that age, and I always find plenty to enjoy, but I think they're really at their best for teens.

tbh you probably get more out of some of them in your mid teens, especially the ones which really aren't trying to make serious points (the first two especially) and the ones that were explicitly written as YA fiction. The sophisticated bits are references, not stuff you won't understand until you've been married and the social commentary isn't exactly hard to digest. (Or maybe it is if you wait until your 40s and conclude that the Auditors are 'woke'!)

Pratchett wrote good kids books earlier in his career too

> Wokism of Discworld

That comment also raised some eyebrows when I read it. Discworld is pretty "woke". The female dwarves are a bunch of LGBT analogues, a huge chunk of the watch series is about racism, Night Watch and Jingo are both pretty anti-populism.

That is how "woke" is used now. Any resemblance to the original use is completely lost. It is merely "things I don't like".

And it has become a convenient shibboleth: anyone using the word that way has nothing of value to say to me on any topic.

Perhaps ironically, that’s not actually what shibboleth means.

"A common or longstanding belief, custom, or catchphrase associated with a particular group, especially one with little current meaning or truth." (Wiktionary).

If you mean to restrict it to the Biblical usage of pronunciation, it generalized past that centuries ago.

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