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A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Stories

books

14th May 2013

"A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Stories"
By: Terry Pratchett

This is a collection of his Discworld and non-Discworld short stories. With a few exceptions I do think I prefer his longer books by a long shot and a number of his Discworld stories aren't in fact short stories but more like articles. Though one of my favourite stories in this book is one of the "articles" written for the con book for a Terry Pratchett convention and is a series of paragraphs about various diseases that only exist in Discworld and these could be described as each being an individual very short story. Out of the other Discworld stories my favourite was a longer story about the Witches and an annual competition, where Granny Weatherwax is asked to "be nice" - she is, painfully so for everyone else involved.

The other story I really liked was called "The High Meggas" and was one he had written after he sent "The Colour of Magic" into his publisher and he had been planning a series of short stories and possibly books based around the ideas in this story before "The Colour of Magic" became unexpected popular and he ended up using another idea to write "The Light Fantastic" instead. "The High Meggas" is actually science fiction and is properly in the hard science fiction category despite having no space ships as it's really about very advanced technology. On a very basic level, a way of moving between different Universes, and therefore different versions of Earth, was invented and in such a way that it allows people to move independently between the different Earths. To a certain degree it follows the idea that everything that can happen does, as it is set on a set of Earths were a meteor hit the earth in comparatively recent history and does different amounts of damage on the different Earths. It is actually really well done and would have been an interesting series of stories/books, if he had actually written them – preferably as well as the Discworld books of course :)

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