Pyramids: A Discworld Novel: 7

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Este libro en cuestión pertenece a la saga de las “antiguas civilizaciones” sin embargo no tiene un enlace directo con otras de las sagas ni con el siguiente libro por lo que me dispuse a ello. La premisa no era mala, típico libro de Prachett, me dije a mi misma: conociéndote seguro que te ríes por alguna tontería. Ptraci says, ‘I don't know whether you've ever seen a book. It's called The Shuttered – ‘ [ ] ‘- Palace’, said Pteppic automatically. [ ] ‘I thought a gentleman like you would know about it,’ said Ptraci nudging him. [ ] Djelibeybi is a place caught in a repeating loop of Time. The jelly-baby is the sweet of preference for one particular Time Lord, at least in his fourth iteration.

Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett - Goodreads Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett - Goodreads

Teppic is an Assassin who doesn't kill people (apart from inhuming the pyramid and the gods at the end; he doesn't kill people that are "alive" in the conventional sense.) Dramatic Sit-Down: Dios the High Priest is so nonplussed to find that Ptraci isn't actually hiding where he was sure she was after doing a dramatic "Ah-HAH!" reveal that he sits down on a chair which happened to contain a model ship for the king's tomb. The ghost of the king notes that it's the first time he's ever seen Dios do anything comical. Later on he also has to sit down on the temple steps when the entire pantheon is coming to life.Cats Are Mean: Dios insists cats must be worshipped, but Teppic can't help but feel if he has to worship cats they should be elegant-looking creatures, not the vicious, yellow-eyed little bastards who claw him the minute he gets near.

Pyramids Quotes by Terry Pratchett - Goodreads

Mix-and-Match Critters: The plight of the Sphinx, being a mix up of human, lion and eagle will give a creature one hell of an identity crisis, and a perpetual bad mood. Misplaced Sorrow: One of the surviving student assassins mourns the one who didn't make it, noting, "He still owed me money". Today all is more subtle, politically correct, greenwashed, bigoted, corporate responsible, dishonest, code of conducty, PR fine tuned, state media approved,… but if I see a headquarter of a company, bank, public buildings, seat of governments and ministries, hotels,… I imagine the environmental destruction, neocolonialism, suffering, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, exploitation,… leading to superpowerful states able to construct such useless monuments of oldfashioned thinking of nationality, patriotism, and megalomania. Strange-Syntax Speaker: Dios will do anything to avoid usage of past or future tenses, something Teppic notices early. Go, tell the Ephebians... Subverted in that it's followed by "What kept you?" as the rest of the Ephebian army marches in.Springtime for Hitler: The final exam to become a fully fledged Assassin is to find, stalk and kill ( inhume) a target, overcoming obstacles placed by the instructor. Teppic makes it to the target, but cannot bring himself to kill, so he looks the instructor in the eye and deliberately misses with his crossbow. Through a complicated ricochet, it ends up striking the target anyway. The instructor passes him, but scolds him for showing off. It turned out to be a dummy anyway. Pyramids had a lot of potential as a concept, and to his credit, sir Terry Pratchett really tried to cover as much of Egyptian history and customs as possible... and therein lies the problem. Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid. Cultural Translation: At one point a footnote states a character's point of view is being translated to give the idea of what he'd be saying, since Djelibeybi doesn't have those things.

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett | Waterstones

Anatomically Impossible Sex: It features on a tattoo that defies biological facts. (An in-story example; all we are told about the tattoo is that it defies said facts.) The line is one of Pratchett's trademark puns because the Sergeant is speaking to the young soldier named Autocue. Autocue is a British term for a teleprompter (the name of the company that manufactured it). So the lines in this section reflect that connection. Autocue is told to ‘run like the wind. Although I don't expect you'll need telling’. Then he is told to ‘ tell’ the Ephebians. He replies, ‘ Tell them what?’ to which the sergeant responds, ‘Go and tell them what kept you.’ Pratchett, as he often does, overplays the pun to make sure the reader doesn't miss it. Improvised Lightning Rod: Pteppicymon the Twenty-Eighth, last Pharaoh of Djelibeybi, climbs the malfunctioning Great Pyramid whose power has awoken several thousand deceased monarchs and allowed the gods to walk the earth. Using an Assassin throwing knife as a desperate lightning conductor, he earths the cosmic forces that have run rampant and allowed all this chaos to happen. He inhumes the full Set, as it were. Madness in the form of prestige buildings, world wonders costing the lives of tens of thousands and more, have such a fascination for humans that we may keep building them forever, no matter what a waste of time, resources, and money it is. Bloody old temples and pyramids, but the modern skyscrapers for which instead endless amounts of standard houses could be built, speak a similar language.The relationship between Dios and Teppic is a shout-out to the British comedy of government, Yes, Minister, with Dios playing the Sir Humphrey Appleby role of senior civil servant effortlessly running rings round an enthusiastic but clueless Minister. Dios even says "I am but a humble servant..." Cool Mask: The pharaoh's mask, which Dios insists the pharaoh wear. It looks gold, but as Teppic eventually discovers, it's actually just gold paint. Underneath, it's lead.

Pyramids (novel) - Wikipedia

Fractals, first named by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, are special mathematical sets of numbers that display similarity through the full range of scale — i. e., they look the same no matter how big or how small they are. Another characteristic of fractals is that they exhibit great complexity driven by simplicity — some of the most complicated and beautiful fractals can be created with an equation populated with just a handful of terms. Time is not fractal in nature (at least in Roundworld). Obfuscating Stupidity: Every camel, everywhere on the Disc. Having long ago figured out that showing off your intelligence in any significant way leads to being asked to do things (admittedly, either being a lab rat or used to sink boats, like dolphins), they're quite content to be contentious and disagreeable if it means all they have to do is walk around and eat stuff while they ponder theoretical physics. Jerkass Has a Point: Dios is entirely correct when he tears a strip off Teppic for his ignorance when he innocently shook the hand of a stone-mason - there's a taboo on touching the royal person in Djelibeybi, meaning that the part that touched the monarch has to come off. When Teppic protests, horrified, that he's not going to sanction this, no matter how humane the process (complete with anaesthetic and a sharp blade), Dios points out that if it wasn't for the man's colleagues, he'd have removed it with a chisel. Teppic reluctantly concedes and instead ensures that the man has a job around the palace afterwards. Necesitaba un libro que no perteneciese a ninguna saga ni fuese demasiado difícil de leer. Después de mucho pensarlo, me acordé de la “Piromides” de Terry Prachett. Sí, es cierto Prachett es un autor que puede leerse de tres maneras: siguiendo un orden cronológico, comenzando por el primer libro “El color de la magia- La luz Fantastica-ritos iguales…etc”; una segunda que es por la que opto yo por sagas “Brujas, magos, guardias, muerte…; y finalmente una tercera que es leer los libros en el orden que quieras porque no hay riesgo de spoiler. The Shuttered Palaceis a sex manual like Roundworld's Kamasutra and The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation, a 16th-century Arabic work by Sheikh Nefzaoui. The fact that Ptraci nudges Teppic, makes this even more obvious – a clear reference to the British lexicon of using ‘nudge, nudge’ and ‘wink, wink’ to imply sexual innuendo. The most well know example is of course Monty Python's ‘ Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink’ sketch.

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Teppic shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said. “They have a new Tyrant every five years and they do something to him first.” He hesitated. “I think they ee-lect him.” Subverted when Teppic's father meets Death, and is confused because he does not look like a giant scarab. Apparently, Death used to look like whatever people expected the personification of death to look like, until it became too tiresome and he decided to settle for the " skeleton with a scythe" look. When I think about the Discworld series I instinctively want to give them all 5 stars, they (via Sir Pratchett) provide such a huge amount of entertainment, fire such delights of imagination and offer much food for thought on any number of subjects both Big and small and yet as I run through the audio books in an attempts to stem the flowing tide of flabby bits about my middle I find myself unable to truthfully say that every entry is worthy of that ultimate rating. Pyramids is one such title, it is a fabulously funny book, loaded with memorable moments, classic Pratchett characters and his trademark dismantling of every day absurdities in our own reality via his fantastical world, in this instance religion, and yet it doesn't quite cause me to explode with enthusiasm for it as Mort or Wyrd Sisters did previously and I expect Guards! Guards! to do next. It´s never bad for craftsmen to organize in guilds or unions and if the specialization is something not as mainstream as wood and metalwork, but, let´s say, different forms of working with living material, it gives the whole idea potential for satirizing the strange bureaucracy of the political apparatus. If robbers, assassins, smugglers, prostitutes,… all have their accepted, democratic councils and can influence legislation and jurisdiction, the manifold interests and manipulations that are forming the processes in real life can be shown in a new light.