Unseen Academicals
The wizards at Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University are renowned for many things_wisdom, magic, and their love of teatime_but athletics is most assuredly not on the list. And so when Lord Ventinari, the city's benevolent tyrant, strongly suggests to Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully that the university revive an erstwhile tradition and once again put forth a football team composed of faculty, students, and staff, the wizards of UU find themselves in a quandary. To begin with, they have to figure out just what it is that makes this sport_soccer with a bit of rugby thrown in_so popular with Ankh-Morporkians of all ages and social strata. Then they have to learn how to play it. Oh, and on top of that, they must win a football match without using magic. Meanwhile, Trev (a handsome street urchin and a right good kicker) falls hard for kitchen maid Juliet (beautiful, dim, and perhaps the greatest fashion model there ever was), and Juliet's best pal, UU night cook Glenda (homely, sensible, and a baker of jolly good pies) befriends the mysterious Mr. Nutt (about whom no one knows very much, including Mr. Nutt, which is worrisome...). As the big match approaches, these four lives are entangled and changed forever. Because the thing about football_the most important thing about football_is that it is never just about football.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
13mentions
13people
2010–2026years
15% recommend62% neutral23% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Since no one has mentioned it so far, I recommend the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. This year, I finished (numbers in Discworld order, annotated by the series):
9. Eric [Rincewind]
10. Moving Pictures [Independent]
12. Witches Abroad [Witches]
18. Maskerade [Witches]
19. Feet of clay [The City Watch]
23. Carpe Jugulum [Witches]
32. A Hat Full of Sky [Tiffany Aching]
37. Unseen Academicals [Wizards]
38. I Shall Wear Midnight [Tiffany Aching]
Brilliant series, highly recommended. Whenever I feel down, I re-read one of the Witches series - I spot something I never noticed before - an immediate mood-booster!
- I thought Unseen Academicals was his best book.
- > This shift coincided with a decrease in adjective TTR below a defined threshold, occurring approximately ten years before Pratchett’s formal diagnosis.
The diagnosis was announced in 2007, meaning the shift occurred in 1997. 1997 was after Jingo and before Carpe Jugulum and The Last Continent, and 2007 was after Making Money and before Unseen Academicals.
The Last Continent is the first identified in the paper as below the cutoff for adjectives which they use to identify the start of the decline.
My own feeling is that many of his strongest works were before 2000, though he had several excellent ones after (the City Watch and first two Moist von Lipwig; I know the ongoing Tiffany Aching series are good, but in terms of writing I found them not as intricate as his earlier books.) I found Snuff harder to read, and Raising Steam, sadly, very difficult. I could tell the genius was there, but my memory of the writing was that it used much longer sentences, had less intricate plotting, and far fewer puns and wordplay. It was this book that made me really feel a sense of grief for what was happening to him, and it was this one where I first felt there was an observable threshold that was crossed.
I have sometimes wondered if it would be respectful if another author was brought into assist in editing or rewriting his last two novels. I know his unpublished works were destroyed, and any writing assistance is not his own voice. Yet I feel, in a sense, seeing books with such clear decline could in itself have let his legacy down. I don't know what his own view was or would be. While I admire Sanderson' continuance of the Wheel of Time, I would not wish such a drastic change in tone for some similar effort for the last of Pratchett's works. Yet I deeply wish that his last books were, somehow, different, more representative of him that I feel they were, in that his illness (in a sense, of course!) let him down. They cause me sadness.
GNU Terry Pratchett. (My own site sends this too.)
- > without this kind of tech, there's no true gender equality
Right, and partly to forestall any appeal-to-nature responses, I'll borrow from another top-favorite author, with emphasis added:
> The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”
> The two wizards exchanged a glance. Vetinari was staring into the depths of his beer mug and they were glad that they did not know what he saw in there.
-- Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
- “Cruelty” is the default state of things. It is not a behavior we lower ourselves to, it is who we are. What we must do is rise above it.
> The Patrician took a sip of his beer. ‘I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.’
- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
- I admit there are a couple I've never read (they're sitting on the shelf next to me - Raising Steam, Unseen Academicals, Making Money). That way I'll always have another Terry Pratchett novel to read.
I felt that Carpe Jugulum was a retread of Lords & Ladies, and the formula was getting stale by that point.
If Monstrous Regiment is YA, it has to go up against Tiffany Aching, and it definitely loses there.
