Summary
'This is one of Pratchett's best books. Hilarious and highly recommended' The Times
The Discworld is very much like our own - if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is . . .
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'It was the usual Ankh-Morpork mob in times of crisis; half of them were here to complain, a quarter of them were here to watch the other half, and the remainder were here to rob, importune or sell hotdogs to the rest.'
Insurrection is in the air in the city of Ankh-Morpork . The Haves and Have-Nots are about to fall out all over again.
Captain Sam Vimes of the city's ramshackle Night Watch is used to this. It's enough to drive a man to drink. Well, to drink more . But this time, something is different - the Have-Nots have found the key to a dormant, lethal weapon that even they don't fully understand, and they're about to unleash a campaign of terror on the city.
Time for Captain Vimes to sober up.
Author Notes
Terry Pratchett was on born April 28, 1948 in Beaconsfield, United Kingdom. He left school at the age of 17 to work on his local paper, the Bucks Free Press. While with the Press, he took the National Council for the Training of Journalists proficiency class. He also worked for the Western Daily Press and the Bath Chronicle. He produced a series of cartoons for the monthly journal, Psychic Researcher, describing the goings-on at the government's fictional paranormal research establishment, Warlock Hall. In 1980, he was appointed publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board with responsibility for three nuclear power stations.
His first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. His first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. He became a full-time author in 1987. He wrote more than 70 books during his lifetime including The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort, Sourcery, Truckers, Diggers, Wings, Dodger, Raising Steam, Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Tales, and The Shephard's Crown. He was diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007. He was knighted for services to literature in 2009 and received the World Fantasy award for life achievement in 2010. He died on March 12, 2015 at the age of 66.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Booklist Review
This eighth novel in Pratchett's Discworld saga takes us to the city of Anhk-Morpork, with its unionized criminals. This arrangement is fine with the captain of the night watch, but then an oversize dwarf arrives, and he is determined to clean up the city in the best Wyatt Earp tradition, even if he has to fight a dragon to do it. The zaniness sometimes gets out of hand, but the novel is good, rowdy fun and can be enjoyed independently of the rest of the series, which is emerging as the most ambitious humorous science fiction project since Douglas Adams launched his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. ~--Roland Green
Library Journal Review
Here are two selections from Pratchett's "Discworld" series, which is immensely popular in his native Britain. These very engaging and funny stories mix wry humor, magic and fantasy, sorcerers, dragons, and insightful characterizations to form something approximating comic Tolkien and akin to Roger Zelazny's "Millenium Deeds" series. In both tales, curmudgeonly Samuel Vimes leads the City Watch through police endeavors in Ank-Morpork. Guards! features magicians who summon a terrifying dragon, the sly plotting of the city's governing Patrician, an orangutan librarian, and the men of the Watch, who fumble around the edges of the escapades. Feet is a darker, more gruesome story: Vimes and his squad investigate some strange and violent deaths, puzzling activity among the city's golems, and an immobilizing illness affecting the Patrician. Both of these works also explore issues such as gender and class politics, racism, and spirituality from the various viewpoints and biases of the characters. The most outstanding feature of these well-paced stories is narrator Nigel Planer, who brings terrific energy and the voices of thousands to this remarkable performance; he could read a toothpaste tube and keep listeners on the edges of their seats.DDouglas C. Lord, Hartford P.L., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Guards! Guards! Chapter One This is where the dragons went. They lie... Not dead, not asleep. Not waiting, because waiting implies expectation. Possibly the word we're looking for here is... ...dormant. And although the space they occupy isn't like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. Not a cubic inch there but is filled by a claw, a talon, a scale, the tip of a tail, so the effect is like one of those trick drawings and your eyeballs eventually realize that the space between each dragon is, in fact, another dragon. They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly and proud and arrogant. And presumably, somewhere, there's the key. In another space entirely, it was early morning in Ankh-Morpork, oldest and greatest and grubbiest of cities. A thin drizzle dripped from the gray sky and punctuated the river mist that coiled among the streets. Rats of various species went about their nocturnal occasions. Under night's damp cloak assassins assassinated, thieves thieved, hussies hustled. And so on. And drunken Captain Vimes of the Night Watch staggered slowly down the street, folded gently into the gutter outside the Watch House and lay there while, above him, strange letters made of light sizzled in the damp and changed color... The city wasa, wasa, wasa wossname. Thing. Woman. Thass what it was. Woman. Roaring, ancient, centuries old. Strung you along, let you fall in thingy, love, with her, then kicked you inna, inna, thingy. Thingy, in your mouth. Tongue. Tonsils. Teeth. That's what it, she, did. She wasa...thing, you know, lady dog. Puppy. Hen. Bitch. And then you hated her and, and just when you thought you'd got her, it, out of your, your, whatever, then she opened her great booming rotten heart to you, caught you off bal, bal, bal, thing. Ance. Yeah. Thassit. Never knew where where you stood. Lay. Only thing you were sure of, you couldn't let her go. Because, because she was yours, all you had, even in her gutters ... Damp darkness shrouded the venerable buildings of Unseen University, premier college of wizardry. The only light was a faint octarine flicker from the tiny windows of the new High Energy Magic building, where keen-edged minds were probing the very fabric of the universe, whether it liked it or not. And there was light, of course, in the Library. The Library was the greatest assemblage of magical texts anywhere in the multiverse. Thousands of volumes of occult lore weighted its shelves. It was said that, since vast amounts of magic can seriously distort the mundane world, the Library did not obey the normal rules of space and time. It was said that it went on forever. It was said that you could wander for days among the distant shelves, that there were lost tribes of research students somewhere in there, that strange things lurked in forgotten alcoves and were preyed on by other things that were even stranger. Wise students in search of more distant volumes took care to leave chalk marks on the shelves as they roamed deeper into the fusty darkness, and told friends to come looking for them if they weren't back by supper. And, because magic can only loosely be bound, the Library books themselves were more than mere pulped wood and paper. Raw magic crackled from their spines, earthing itself harmlessly in the copper rails nailed to every shelf for that very purpose. Faint traceries of blue fire crawled across the bookcases and there was a sound, a papery whispering, such as might come from a colony of roosting starlings. In the silence of the night the books talked to one another. There was also the sound of someone snoring. The light from the shelves didn't so much illuminate as highlight the darkness, but by its violet flicker a watcher might just have identified an ancient and battered desk right under the central dome. The snoring was coming from underneath it, where a piece of tattered blanket barely covered what looked like a heap of sandbags but was in fact an adult male orangutan. It was the Librarian. Not many people these days remarked upon the fact that he was an ape. The change had been brought about by a magical accident, always a possibility where so many powerful books are kept together, and he was considered to have got off lightly. After all, he was still basically the same shape. And he had been allowed to keep his job, which he was rather good at, although "allowed" is not really the right word. It was the way he could roll his upper lip back to reveal more incredibly yellow teeth than any other mouth the University Council had ever seen before that somehow made sure the matter was never really raised. But now there was another sound, the alien sound of a door creaking open. Footsteps padded across the floor and disappeared among the clustering shelves. The books rustled indignantly, and some of the larger grimoires rattled their chains. The Librarian slept on, lulled by the whispering of the rain. In the embrace of his gutter, half a mile away, Captain Vimes of the Night Watch opened his mouth and started to sing. Now a black-robed figure scurried through the midnight streets, ducking from doorway to doorway, and reached a grim and forbidding portal. No mere doorway got that grim without effort, one felt. It looked as though the architect had been called in and given specific instructions. We want something eldritch in dark oak, he'd been told. So put an unpleasant gargoyle thing over the archway, give it a slam like the footfall of a giant and make it clear to everyone, in fact, that this isn't the kind of door that goes "ding-dong" when you press the bell. Guards! Guards! . Copyright © by Terry Pratchett. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.