Yup. It's totally absurd, but something about it feels right. It helps that he writes action really well; there's a sort of terseness to his action scenes, like he's as impatient to get to the cool bits as you are.

I had high hopes for his games writing work, but he did Syndicate and Crysis 2 then quit, because writing games is hard and everything you submit gets changed and chopped up and broken



I've read everything up to and including the first thirty pages of Thief of Time and yeah, you're right. A lot of it is amazing.

I think there was a bit of a shift in Pratchett's mindset around Interesting Times, though, and the books became a lot more about the morality and justice of the systems that rule Discworld—I was reading a lot of stuff like Foucault and Ligotti at the time (because I was, and still am, a heavily pretentious idiot) and wanted Discworld to be funny jokes about fantasy tropes.

I reread a few of them every so often, and the Guards series is always fun. Even Jingo, which feels weirdly unfinished, like deadline day suddenly appeared and he needed to submit a final draft in the morning.