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I know that lots of sites are doing April Fools gags today, but I would rather talk about Terry Pratchett’s wonderful creation Discworld which overall is funnier than most of the pranks going on. In all it comes to about 40 books these days, with hopefully at least a few more waiting to make it into our hands. From the first story The Color Of Magic to the most recent release Raising Steam, they are every one of them poking fun at all aspects of small mindedness, bureaucracy, prejudice, and superstition. There are a large number of wonderful recurring characters that you will find yourself relating to, often because they make up the limited number of sane people (and sane not-people) to be found in a given tale. They tend to come in groups, like the City Watch, the Witches, Ahnk-Morpork, the Wizards, and Death (yes, Death is both an individual and a group; see Soul Music, or perhaps The Death Of Rats).

The Discworld universe is in a steampunk/fantasy branch of the Multiverse, where wizards and engineers have an equal hand in creating the future, and humans share the land with a full range of other races, including Golems, Vampires, Dwarves, and Igors (the last very handy if you are suddenly in need of transplanted organs and limbs). Figuring out which order you should read the books in can be difficult, I recommend using the group approach. Go to the Novels chart on Wikipedia to find the earliest story instance of each group. Read each one of them, and I feel confident one of them will become an instant favorite, even if you don’t particularly care for the others. Then read through all of the novels in that group; by the time you finish that set, you will have met enough of the characters and picked up enough of the background for the other groups that you will know which one you want to read next. You can also read them in story-line chronological order for each group, either method will do nicely.

Sooner or later you will have read everything he has written about Discworld, but do not despair! He has written other stuff, including an excellent collaboration with Neil Gaiman. And there are four Discworld TV miniseries released on DVD, 15 stage plays have been published, two feature length animations have been created, a number of fan productions from around the world have been released into the wild, and a ton of radio plays of the stories have been recorded by the BBC and others for you to enjoy as well. There are several projects in production, including a 13 episode TV series about The Watch, a miniseries of Unseen Academicals, and the fan production of Troll Bridge. Once upon a time Sam Raimi was going to do a feature film from The Wee Free Men for Sony, but that fell through. All is not lost though, because Rhianna Pratchett announced she was going to pick up the project instead.

Written by award winning author Lois McMaster Bujold, Miles Vorkosigan is one of the best characters in space opera, and the universe she created for him to inhabit is a real treat to visit. The background starts with a planet cut off from the rest of the human inhabited planets due to a disastrous nuclear war, then reunited within the lifetime of the protagonist’s grandfather. After hundreds of years of isolation, it is difficult for most of the population to understand the changes this means for society. Starting with the fact that contact with outside worlds brings with it major medical advances to a population who has spent dozens of generations practicing infanticide as their only way to avoid major mutation and extinction. Miles earliest memory is being lifted from his crib as his grandfather tries to murder him as a mutant (he isn’t, but the old man does not comprehend what made him as he is; he only knows anything different must be killed if humanity on his planet is to survive). The gun his parent held to the back of his grandfather’s head was the only reason he made it to his first birthday, let alone beyond.

There is some debate about the correct order to read the books, but I vote for going for the author listed chronological order, rather than the published order. The Vorkosiverse will make a lot more sense that way, starting at the point his parents met (and more than most universes, you NEED to understand how we got to this point if you are going to understand where we go from here, and why). This is quite a complex collection of societies covering a major percentage of the galaxy, and like Asimov before her, Bujold does not clutter up her universe with non-human intelligent species. There is only us people driving all these situations, each group fighting for their own interests and desires.

And as with any excellent series of stories, the protagonist throws a monkey wrench into the proceedings that no one in that world sees coming, and changes everything in ways no one ever expected. My own personal connection into this universe is the fact that Miles is a frail, breakable, and damaged physical specimen who can never win a battle by strength of arms. So his only option is to use wit, intelligence, heart, and desire to force his enemy to defeat themselves. There are already a goodly number of novels and a double handful of short stories embedded in this universe; I can’t wait to get more!

BTW, did I mention the author won some awards? She has won six Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards. In fact, only Robert A. Heinlein has won as many Hugo Awards for Best Novel, although a few other authors have won 5.

In the fall of 1965 I received the latest copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the mail, and found inside it a story by Roger Zelazny, an author I had never heard of before. The story was . . . And Call Me Conrad, renamed to This Immortal when it came out in book form the following year, and it blew me away. I must not have been the only one, since it won a Hugo for Best Novel at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention (Zelazny won a total of 6 Hugo’s and 3 Nebula’s in his career) which it shared with Frank Herbert’s Dune. Earth was devastated by a nuclear war, and only a few million humans survived when the aliens invaded the planet, taking it over. Among the people fighting for Earth’s freedom was the god Pan, or perhaps just a long-lived mutant with mortal children. That was only the first of many masterpieces, which included Lord of Light, Isle of the Dead, Today We Choose Faces, Doorways in the Sand, Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming, and so many more. Besides all the other awards he won, I should probably mention that A Rose for Ecclesiastes was included in Visions of Mars: First Library on Mars, a DVD on board the Phoenix Mars Lander in 2008.

But if he had a single body of work that stood out above the rest, it had to be The Chronicles of Amber. In this multiverse there are only two true worlds: Amber, and the Courts of Chaos. All the myriad worlds between them, including our own version of Earth, are but shadows reflecting combinations of aspects of those two. The royal families of those two realms hold the power to walk the shadows, find the world that holds closest to their heart’s desire, and use the peoples and technologies/magics of that parallel timeline in the ongoing war for supremacy over all existence. Even with the amazing scope of the reality posited for the premise behind the location of the story, at its core this is still all about the relationships between all the people and gods involved with the struggle, and how they change and evolve over time. You should grab all 10 volumes of the original series (from your library or from your bookseller doesn’t matter, as long as you get them) and read them from beginning to end. I suspect you will decide it was time well spent once you do, and if you want more there are some additional works available.

Just two years after Orson Welles terrified America by presenting a modified version of H.G. Wells classic War Of The Worlds as if it was a documentary, the two ended up together in a studio in San Antonio, Texas, for an interview session. Since I couldn’t sit in for it, or even knew it had happened until quite recently, you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn it existed. Listening to it made me grin from ear to ear, so I just had to share this with you. Thanks to the amazing folks at TOR for making me aware of this, in the article they put together in honor of H.G.s birthday.

I want to mention a new book by a new author, Shattered Dreams, book one in the Luna’s Children series, by Melissa Kay Clarke. I admit I sometimes read romantic/action/adventure fantasy (particularly ones with a Steampunk sensibility, or Dragons and other supernatural creatures), and I quite enjoyed this one. In the interest of Full Disclosure I have to admit that in part this was because I got to be one of the Beta Readers and give my feedback, and then see what changed because of the input. But I genuinely enjoyed the story, liked several of the characters, and found the concepts behind the culture quite intriguing. I am looking forward to checking out the next book in the series, because this is off to quite a promising start.

Shattered Dreams by Melissa Kay Clarke
Shattered Dreams by Melissa Kay Clarke

I read an insane amount of books, and I have decided I need to start blogging about them here. Not in an every-week kind of way, but just when I am reading something I really like and want to share. I have posted about a bunch of favorite authors, and mentioned favorite books that got turned into movies or TV shows, and book-centric conventions and awards. But I don’t think I have usually talked about the books themselves. This is something I intend to correct, as there are a lot of excellent works out there.