James Nicoll Reviews

2002’s Night Watch is the 29^th work in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series¹. It is the sixth Discworld novel² to focus on Ankh-Morpork’s City Watch.

Thirty years to the day after the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May, Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reluctantly leaves his pregnant wife Lady Sibyl to pursue the cheerfully homicidal psychopath, Carcer. Vimes’ intention is to arrest Carcer without losing more members of the Watch to the knife-wielding madman. Thanks to a bolt of magical lightning, both Carcer and Vimes vanish.

Slightly more than thirty years previous, two strangers suddenly appear in an Ankh-Morpork on the precipice of revolution.

Read more ➤

1992’s Only You Can Save Mankind is the first volume in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell trilogy.

The grim tyranny of Margaret Thatcher was succeeded by the slightly less onerous rule of her former lackey John Major. Not that this concerned Johnny Maxwell, who was young enough to avoid most unpleasant world news. But his youthful innocence cannot protect him from the reality that his parents are on the verge of divorce nor from the fact neither parent seems up to the task of parenting him.

At least the same technological progress that allows the British government to whimsically snuff out lives half a planet away has also allowed young Johnny the distraction of computer games.

If only his video enemies would stop trying to talk to him.

Read more ➤