I’m not quite certain what to say about this book. It’s not part of his Discworld series, in fact, not part of any series I know of. I can’t quite decide whether it’s a dig at science fiction stories or a salute to them. What I do know is that there are many jokes and many references to other books.
Ok, this is science fantasy – I reckon it’s science fantasy, I’m happy to have someone argue with me. The story is that of Dominick Sabalos who is about to come into his inheritance. What he doesn’t know is that his death was predicted by his father. Why then does he survive? His father was an undisputed expert in P Math so this should have been a certainty, but survive he does and gets a new skin colour to go with it. His black skin colour now has a tinge of green. He survives a few more attempts on his life during his journey. This book is the first book to mention Hogswatch and Small Gods so Sir Terry Pratchett must have taken these concepts across to Discworld. There are several mentions of Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics (rather modified but still identifiable). I suspect Sir Terry was having a dig at a number of authors who give their characters rather unpronouncable names when he gave the Phnobes names as they all have names made up entirely of consonants making them even harder to pronounce than normal.
There is some violence, there has to be to enable Dom to survive. It’s fairly moderate, there are no swear words or adult concepts. To quote Sir Terry from Hidden Turnings, an anthology put together by http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/. “…if you can get all the jokes, you’re old enough to read them. My mum isn’t.”
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