This is part of the Pratchett Project.
The blurb:
There are many who say that the art of diplomacy is an intricate and complex dance. There are others who maintain that it's merely a matter of who carries the biggest stick. The oldest and most inscrutable (not to mention heavily fortified) empire on the Discworld is in turmoil, brought about by the revolutionary treatise What I did on My Holidays. Workers are uniting, with nothing to lose but their water buffaloes; warlords are struggling for power—and what the nation wants, to avoid terrible doom for everyone, is a wizard. Rincewind is not the Disc's premier wizard—in fact, he can’t even spell 'wizard'—but no-one specified whether competence was an issue. And they do have a very big stick...
Mighty Battles! Revolution! Death! War!
Well, finally: the wizards are getting to be a bit more interesting, and a bit less murdery.
The concept of Ankh-Morpork and the surrounding continent as a kind of paradise is certainly good for a laugh, but I think I appreciate the shift from genre parody to satirical storytelling that's really evident between Eric and Interesting Times—there are seven or eight intervening books in publishing chronology, including Reaper Man (my favourite Death novel), Men At Arms and Small Gods. I won't know for sure til I read all of them but I'm tentatively putting a pin in Small Gods as the book where the series really, finally gets its feet under it. Out of all the books I've read, anyway—there are still the Witches novels on the to-be-read pile, so maybe Witches Abroad or Lords and Ladies that are also in that range between Eric and Interesting Times will supplant it.
Interesting Times expands the Discworld lore to include the Agatean Empire, kind of an analogue for China, pre-Revolution. Previously a pretty serene place, if you discount the murders and sieges every time the emperorship changes hands, the social order is upended by Twoflower's return home and his stories about his holiday to Ankh-Morpork where people can be rude to socially superior people and not get their heads chopped off. There's a fair amount of stereotypical depiction in there, and honestly, it does make the peasant Agatean revolutionaries (which a few exceptions) come across as not just carrying the idiot ball but having been hit over the head with it to the point of concussion. Very few of them get much in the way of depth.
Balanced against that, Rincewind seems to be occasionally showing signs of character beyond being an anthropomorphic pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses (thank you Douglas Adams) with the ability to leg it at speeds that would make Usain Bolt blink. Not a lot—cowardice is still his defining characteristic—but I have hopes he'll be more than a parody.
The story itself continues the tradition of ending with Rincewind being flung into more peril (or at least not immediately being sent back somewhere safe), landing in XXXX, the fabled Last Continent. I'm Australian, this should be fun to review, right?
Started: 30 October 2025
Finished: 2 November 2025
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