Talk:Book:Unseen Academicals/Annotations

Dedication:- This book is dedicated to Rob Wilkins, 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 Wilkins - 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 Wilkins, 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)

Weird is right, it felt like the book was starting to wrap up the DW series whilst at the same time asking more questions than it answered. I really really hope I'm wrong with this but could TP be preparing to hand the reigns over to someone else? --Megahurts 09:10, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Continuity

• Biggest problem I noted was the creation of the new ball, why didn't they just ask Carrot? He said in Jingo that he always carried a deflated ball in his pack, and the game matches the one the wizards 'invent'. We know it's earlier too, because the Dean is mentioned, with the crystal ball viewing of the Leshp fights. Ktetch 23:01, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Now why did no one else notice this? I'd like to propose that the story precedes Jingo, but that's very difficult in the short space of Carrot's career until then. (Insertion from AgProv:- Unseen Academicals cannot precede Jingo, as Constable Haddock is a character in Unseen Academicals - he was not a Watchman at the time of Jingo, or he'd have joined a suddenly much smaller Watch in sailing for Klatch). Of course, the Dean has just left the faculty, placing Unseen Academicals most recently; another bugger for the serious student. TP has always been friendly to the fans while taunting them mercilessly. --Old Dickens 01:02, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

I think in this case there's no error: The ball created for 'football' in Unseen Academicals is clearly for what Americans call 'soccer,' while we can infer from the text of Jingo that the 'football' that Carrot had in his pack was most likely an actual 'football' instead of a soccer ball. In any case, the football presented in Unseen Academicals is somewhat ghetto in appearance, and I wouldn't be surprised if the space between Jingo and Unseen Academicals saw enough of a decline in the standards of football to actually change the composition of the ball.

Or Carrot could have just been a bit ahead of the game. Doctor Whiteface 03:41, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Remember that Carrot is a dwarf. And that they had to go to a dwarf to get a proper ball made since vulcanized rubber was a dwarfen invention. Carrot may not have even known it was something new to the city --Fhh98 04:00, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Nope, it won't wash. "...Captain Carrot was bouncing an inflated pig's bladder." (Jingo) You can only bounce an ovoid ball once and then you have to go and pick it up again. Dave Likely's game used a Rugby-shaped ball but I see no evidence of anything but soccer in the matches organised by Carrot years earlier. These involved many street boys, so the game shouldn't have been unknown. The game also appeared to be familiar to both armies in the brief war over Leshp. How do you infer otherwise from the text? --Old Dickens 18:01, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Who said anything about text. I was going on obviously faulty memory there. Fhh98 19:07, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Doctor Whiteface, above. --Old Dickens 19:25, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Page 352 (UK hardback) the foonote about master of Music writing down Macarona Unum est... makes me immediately thing of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarena_%28song%29 but I don't know the words of that if there is a better match

With regards to Ridcully's background, should I point out that in the same scene Ponder Stibbons experienced deja vu without the original vu? He may not have been the only one to do so, just the only one to acknowledge it...

I've just been thinking, who says the country estates belonged to his dad? Just says 'Family'. It could have been his (childless) uncle's, or belonged to his mother's parents. It's not so much a contradiction. Dad a butcher, mother a rich country lady who went to town, saw him, fancied him etc. not all that impossible. Ktetch 04:09, 13 February 2010 (UTC). We know about Ridcully that the explicit reason he was not at ther University to be drawn into the Sourceror's war was that he had retired from active wizardry, to look after the family estates deep in the country. This was on behalf of his mother Moving Pictures, Reaper Man. So as you say, not incompatible. --AgProv 15:20, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

And with regards to the hat, we know it was destroyed in Sourcery, but perhaps Ridcully has found it a good idea to keep alive rumours that he had recovered it after those events had eventuated, to preserve the tradition that all wizards should be united under the Hat's owner...

Isn't there an explicit reference to Mustrum not wearing the hat since he doesn't like its voice? Is it possible that the Luggage recovered the hat off-scene during the final events of Sourcery? Admittedly it's been a while since I last read it though.--Megahurts 14:58, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

That comment was made in Unseen Academicals --Fhh98 15:50, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

I know, Ridcully saying that in UA implies that the hat is still extant. --Megahurts 08:09, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Terry himself

Intervewed in The Guardian, Sat 12th Dec 2009, Terry Pratchett said about Unseen Academicals:-

Various factors made it somewhat difficult to write, and like every book I have ever written, I wished I could have given it a fortnight's worth of extra time. But the editor's whistle was about to blow, so i had to take the shot.

Flowers for Algernon reference.

On pg. 94, just before he "dies", Mr. Nutt says "Do you know, sir, that your situation here is very similar to that described by Vonmausberger in his treatise on his experiments with rats?" to a character named Algernon who is incidentally also very stupid. This seems to be a reference to the short story Flowers for Algernon

Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintainance

Ref. Robert M. Pirsig's work of popular philosophy, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintainance. I am getting one of those intuitions that with regard to Mr Nutt's quest for worth, there will be a lot of Pirsig references, homages and reprises scattered throughout Unseen Academicals, possibly hidden among all the joke philosophy and quasi-Pythonic philosophers you see on the surface. Just off to get a copy of Pirsig and refresh my memory....--AgProv 09:37, 8 July 2010 (UTC)