Mort - Terry Pratchett [99]
Daily Telegraph (London)
“Terry Pratchett does for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for science fiction.”
Today (Great Britain)
“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.”
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“Delightful…. Logically illogical as only Terry Pratchett can write.”
Anne McCaffrey
BOOKS BY TERRY PRATCHETT
The Carpet People
The Dark Side of the Sun
Strata • Truckers
Diggers • Wings
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead • Johnny and the Bomb
The Unadulterated Cat (with Gray Jollife)
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
THE DISCWORLD® SERIES:
Going Postal • Monstrous Regiment • Night Watch
The Last Hero • The Truth • Thief of Time
The Fifth Elephant • Carpe Jugulum
The Last Continent • Jingo
Hogfather • Feet of Clay • Maskerade
Interesting Times • Soul Music • Men at Arms
Lords and Ladies • Small Gods
Witches Abroad • Reaper Man
Moving Pictures • Eric (with Josh Kirby)
Guards! Guards! • Pyramids
Wyrd Sisters • Sourcery • Mort • Equal Rites
The Light Fantastic • The Color of Magic
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic (with Graham Higgins)
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Companion (with Stephen Briggs)
The Discworld Mapp (with Stephen Briggs)
The Pratchett Portfolio (with Paul Kidby)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MORT. Copyright © 1987 by Terry Pratchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2007 ISBN: 9780061803888
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*Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that