GloatingSwine said:
Evidence suggests that Unseen Academicals was a blip, because I Shall Wear Midnight is bloody excellent.
Good lord, really? While I agree that UA was bad, it wasn't
that bad. Shit in comparison to the two or three books prior to it, but not downright awful. It even had a few moments that made me chuckle.
I Shall Wear Midnight, on the other hand...I just have nothing positive to say about it. Nothing at all, and that's the first time I've ever been able to say that about a Discworld book. Then again, when I say I'm a fan, I'm not kidding; I have almost all the books, all the maps, all the video games, and have racked up almost a
year of playing time on the Discworld MUD (think of an MMO without the graphics). Having read everything else the man has ever produced multiple times, I suppose I'm more attuned to his style than most, and this book makes it painfully obvious how far his mind has slipped. The stilted writing style, crappy dialogue, plot points that die as a loose end, pointless & unexplained cameos, character derailment, the huge amounts of expositionary speech, a "big reveal" with practically zero foreshadowing that turns out to make no sense at all, and the introduction of a new Marty Stu character who is given barely enough page time to set him up as Tiffany's perfect match just so the book can have the kind of sickly-sweet happy ending that PTerry has previously mocked relentlessly.
I hated it, because all those things combine to show that one of my favourite ever people, a person I consider one of the greatest authors ever, has finally lost what made him so brilliant.
