Talk:Book:Unseen Academicals/Annotations

Dedication:- This book is dedicated to Rob Williams, who typed most of it and had the good sense to laugh occasionally.

As various commentators have pointed out, this is perhaps evidence of Terry's Alzheimers beginning to affect his writing - Terry himself has pointed out that the most obvious evidence of the disease is that his typing skills have declined and he now finds the physical effort of typing to be beyond him. Hence the amenuensis.

Terry's wit and his ability to create a challenging and entertaining plot are certainly not in doubt - Unseen Academicals works and it can hold its own as part of the canon.

Having said that, some serious continuity errors have crept in which put this at odds with earlier books in the series. The Arch-Chancellor's Hat, for instance, making a reappearance after being destroyed in Sourcery. Ridcully's parentage and upbringing having been arbitrarily changed - from propsperous land-owning gentry brought up in the country outside A-M, (ref. Moving Pictures, Reaper Man), the Ridcully brothers have now been reduced in the social ranking to the sons of a well-off City butcher. Yet Mustrum still acts like a rumbustious country squire.

OK, it could be History Monks, but it felt wrong to come up against this stuff - the suspicion is that earlier Discworld books would have edited out basic errors like this. And with all respect to Rob Williams - as the routine manufacture of the books passes out of Terry's hands, for all the right and benign reasons (whilst still retaining his creativity) , then how much of the error-checking process, that Terry might have done himself in happier days, is going to fail? Tery himself might have paused on the Ridcully thing and reflected that something isn't quite right here. A third party less used to the Discworld has perhaps missed the error?

Ah well. Perhaps I'm ungrateful and asking too much... I should rejoice we still have Terry with us who has said that there are a few novels left in him yet! --AgProv 23:46, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I p****d and moaned about at some length on my own page. I felt that Mr Williams, however talented, was an intervention and a barrier to the direct text communication we've always known. Terry even used to type to fans on a.f.p and answer e-mail, before the volume became ridiculous. He spoke directly to the audience through the keyboard.

A second reading and more consideration show up more strengths, as usual, but the oddities remain. I say "oddities", because there may yet be a method behind them that disqualifies them from "errors". This book is deep. Weird, flawed, but deep. And weird. Change seems to be the central theme. The homily "the leopard does not change his shorts" is repeated beyond reason, and there are many examples to refute it. Nutt, Trevor, Juliet, Glenda, football, Ponder Stibbons, Ridcully, Vetinari (I may have missed some) are all changed or changing, although Margolotta probably hasn't changed for two hundred years. --Old Dickens 00:39, 16 November 2009 (UTC)