Interesting Times - Terry Pratchett [127]
“Um,” said Rincewind. “Yes.”
It was a test, obviously. They’d given him this bent piece of wood. He had to do something with it. It was clearly very important. He’d—
Oh, no. He’d say something or do something, wouldn’t he, and then they’d say, yes, you are the Great Bloke or something, and they’d drag him off and it’d be the start of another Adventure, i.e., a period of horror and unpleasantness. Life was full of tricks like that.
Well, this time Rincewind wasn’t going to fall for it.
“I want to go home,” he said. “I want to go back home to the Library where it was nice and quiet. And I don’t know where I am. And I don’t care what you do to me, right? I’m not going to have any kind of adventure or start saving the world again and you can’t trick me into it with mysterious bits of wood.”
He gripped the stick and flung it away from him with all the force he could still muster.
They stared at him as he folded his arms.
“I’m not playing,” he said. “I’m stopping right here.”
They were still staring. And now they were grinning, too, at something behind him.
He felt himself getting quite annoyed.
“Do you understand? Are you listening?” he said. “That’s the last time the universe is going to trick Rincewi—”
About the Author
Terry Pratchett’s novels have sold more than thirty million (give or take a few million) copies worldwide. He lives in England.
www.terrypratchettbooks.com
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Praise for TERRY PRATCHETT’s
DISCWORLD
“Smart and funny.”
Denver Post
“Humorously entertaining (and subtly thought-provoking) fantasy…Pratchett’s Discworld books are filled with humor and with magic, but they’re rooted in, of all things, real life and cold, hard reason.”
Contra Costa Times
“Pratchett has created an alternate universe full of trolls, dwarfs, wizards, and other fantasy elements, and he uses that universe to reflect on our own culture with entertaining and gloriously funny results. It’s an accomplishment nothing short of magical.”
Chicago Tribune
“Terry Pratchett seems constitutionally unable to write a page without at least a twitch of the grin muscles….[But] the notions Pratchett plays with are nae so narrow or nae so silly as your ordinary British farce. Seriously.”
San Diego Union-Tribune
“If Terry Pratchett is not yet an institution, he should be.”
Fantasy & Science Fiction
“Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…. It has the energy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the inventiveness of Alice in Wonderland. It also has an intelligent wit and a truly original grim and comic grasp of the nature of things.”
A.S. Byatt
“What makes Terry Pratchett’s fantasies so entertaining is that their humor depends on the characters first, on the plot second, rather than the other way around. The story isn’t there simply to lead from one slapstick pratfall to another pun. Its humor is genuine and unforced.”
Ottawa Citizen
“Pratchett’s humor is international, satirical, devious, knowing, irreverent, unsparing, and, above all, funny.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Pratchett’s storytelling [is] a clever blend of Monty Pythonesque humor and Big Questions about morality and the workings of the universe.”
Publishers Weekly
“He is head and shoulders above the best of the rest. He is screamingly funny. He is wise. He has style.”
Daily Telegraph (London)
“Pratchett’s writing is hilarious.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The Discworld novels are a phenomenon.”
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Consistently, inventively mad…wild and wonderful.”
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
“Pratchett, for those not yet lucky enough to have discovered him, is one of England’s most highly regarded satirists. Nothing—not religion, not politics, not anything—is safe from him.”
South Bend Tribune
“A master