On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Chris Turkel wrote:
>
>I tried reading several Discworld books but gave up. Its not they are
>bad writing, they are very good, its just whimsical, light hearted
>fantasies ain't my thing.
>
Hmm. I would distinguish between "having whimsy" and being "just
whimiscal & light hearted".
Starting around the fourth book - "Mort" - and with occasional
relapses of being "just whimsical", I would admit - the Discworld
books start to include greater amounts of darkness.
"Guards! Guards!" has some very dark themes indeed.
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are
the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There
are, always and only, the bad people, but *some of them are on
opposite sides.*"
[...]
[He indicates the city below:] "A great rolling sea of evil.
Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much
*deeper* in others. But people like you put together little rafts
of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite,
this will triumph in the end. Amazing!"
[...]
"Down there are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god,
ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday
badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great
sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you
might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not
because they say *yes*, but because they don't say *no*."
-- Patrician Vetinari on humanity