Discworld and the Disciplines by Anne Hiebert Alton

Author:Anne Hiebert Alton [Alton, Anne Hiebert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2014-05-06T21:00:00+00:00

I LIKE WHAT YOU’VE DONE WITH THE PLACE.

“Thank you,” said a dozen portraits in unison.

VERY KITSCH. YOU DON’T SEE MUCH KITSCH THESE DAYS.

“Oh dear,” said a muffled voice from somewhere within the robes.

The Dumbledore-shaped pile got up, leaving behind another identical pile that looked distinctly less capable of upright posture. The ghost of Albus Dumbledore was wearing a traffic cone on his head.

IS THAT A NEW LOOK? I HAVE SUCH A HARD TIME KEEPING UP WITH FASHION.

Such attempts presuppose that the writer thinks Terry Pratchett has a style that can be emulated and they are implicit verifications of the writer’s attribution of distinctiveness to Pratchett’s prose. They make sense in a way that writing a piece “in the style of books that are at 45-degree angles to someone’s desk” would not. Their authors are drawing on their felt perceptions of Pratchett’s writing, regardless of whether the writer succeeds (however we would measure that); at the same time, no one would be particularly surprised to discover that the piece’s author had not come to the task with a meticulously articulated list of Pratchettic features to encode. Style emulation is more akin to attempting to mirror a movement. Trying to name the muscles involved during the process does not help in the slightest. While some of the features of the imitative text match those from Pratchett’s writing in a way that is so obvious as to be probably uninteresting (having a Death figure speak in all caps might be regarded as a similarity of content rather than style, although that distinction is a vexed one), other sections suggest possibilities to investigate. “Dumbledore-shaped pile” uses a personal name as part of a compound modifier formed with the participle “shaped,” and this certainly strikes me, at least, as distinctive. Does Pratchett use personal names like this, and if so, does he do so more than English-speakers do in general? (Spoiler: Yes.)

Similarly, given a set of sentences such as those below, at least some Pratchett-readers will be able to assign rankings based on how much each sentence sounds like an attempt at Pratchesimilitude. The issue here, again, is not whether the sentences are Pratchett-like, it is the degree to which they can be felt to be such:

1. A vista of tall cliffs, facing a sere wasteland, loomed before them, blocking any direct progress to the north.

2. “Not to be intrusive or anything, but is that your newspaper?” asked Harald.

3. It was the sort of side-alley that your average cormorant would never invite to anything.

4. Several of the crates were stacked against the far wall, skewed slightly ajar as if someone had moved them hastily into place.

5. She was far more concerned with where the chair wasn’t.

6. Not being involved in the situation at all seemed like the absolute best state to be in, all things considered.

7. His hand slipped under the table and came up holding a meat cleaver honed to paper thinness.

8. It had been described as an odd shade of blue, particularly by people who keep their color terms down to what can be counted on one hand.

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