Terry
Pratchett did not burst on the scene in 1963 with the publication of his
short story “The Hades Business.”
Instead, he scribbled forgotten short stories and vignettes for
almost a decade more before he discovered that he is more at home with
the novel length with the publication of The
Carpet People, in 1971, another instance of him not bursting on the
scene. Many of the short
stories Pratchett wrote between those two events, as well as several
written more recently, are collected in A
Blink of the Screen, Pratchett’s first generally available
collection of short fiction.1
The
collection opens with “The Hades Business,” which introduces the
recurring theme of death into Pratchett’s writing.
The story has something that many of those that follow it lack,
notably, the fact that it is a complete short story.
Too often, the works included in A
Blink of the Screen don’t quite manage to achieve the status of a
short story, lacking for character or plot, and instead are vignettes
built around a humourous idea. There
are a few exceptions in the first part of the collection, in which
Pratchett actually does commit short story.
This merely supports the statement that Pratchett makes in one of
his introductions that he finds writing short stories much more
difficult than writing novels. In
fact, one of the short stories that he includes in A
Blink of the Screen, “The High Meggas” from 1986, was only
recently turned into the basis for a series Pratchett has begun
publishing with co-author Stephen Baxter.
The
last portion of the collection includes a variety of short stories and
ephemera Pratchett has written about his most well-known work…The
Discworld. The stories in this section have a tendency towards being
fully realized stories set within the larger creation of Pratchett’s
fantasy world, beginning with “The Troll Bridge,” which examines
what happens when a troll living under an out-of-the-way bridge finds
himself face-to-face with the legendary Cohen the Barbarian, who really
doesn’t want to be bothered with yet another monster.
However, even as Pratchett includes stories of the Disc in this
section of the book, many of the pieces are not full stories, but again,
little vignettes or pieces made to flesh out the Discworld, taken from
the rules of the Game of Thud or the anthem of Ankh-Morpork, written for
the BBC.
In
addition to the short fiction Pratchett has included in the book, A
Blink of the Screen includes three sections of illustrations,
incorporating artwork by Josh Kirby, who has long been associated with
Pratchett’s writings. The
first section includes illustrations for books which included his non-Discworld
stories (as well as the cover for the original publication of
“Theatre of Cruelty,” while the other two contain images
associated more closely with Discworld, including a set of cigarette
cards depicting the characters from Unseen Academicals.
Fortunately, despite
Pratchett’s own apparent misgivings about some of the material in the
book, there are enough stories, both about the Disc and non-Discworld,
to make the collection of interest to general readers and not merely as
a curiosity to be found in the library of those who consider themselves
Discworld, or Pratchett, completists.
The inclusion of these illustrations adds a nice touch and seems
to indicate a certain level of Pratchettness as surely as an orang-utang
saying “ook” or a skeletal figure TALKING ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
1.
In honor of Pratchett being named Guest of Honor at Noreascon
IV, the World Science Fiction Convention in 2005, NESFA Press published Once More* with Footnotes, which included many of the stories in A
Blink of the Eye and presumably many of the articles which will
appear in A Slip of the Keyboard.
