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Desrtopa comments on [Link] Terry Pratchett begins formal process to end his life - Less Wrong
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Really? I felt that it was a considerable step down, and noticed what I considered to be a deterioration in the quality of the series since even before he received the diagnosis (when I found out I was sad but unsurprised.)
Considering that Nation stood out from the trend I noticed in this work though, it might be that he's struggling to deal with an overworked setting rather than losing his skills, and I suggested as much when I wrote a review for a friend's livejournal community.
Nation seemed very far from his usual style to me. It surprised me that he included mysticism in a book that was supposedly set in the real world, and I thought that it was a lot darker and less funny than he usually is.
Well, it didn't surprise me that he included mysticism in a book that was supposedly set in the real world (or rather, an alternate real world with a slightly different geography and somewhat different history than ours which somehow ended up having Richard Dawkins in it anyway,) because he's written a number of non-Discworld books set in the real world and all of those have also had mystical elements in them.
I felt like he didn't try as hard to make Nation funny, but the humor, while less concentrated, felt fresher to me. It seems to me that my perception of the quality of the Discworld books started to deteriorate because Pratchett was struggling to find things to put in his new Discworld books that he hadn't already put into the older ones in some form.
Bill Watterson stopped doing Calvin and Hobbes while it was still popular because he felt he had run out of stuff to say with it, and didn't want it to become stale. Maybe if he had kept on writing it, he could have continued to turn out Calvin and Hobbes strips which would seem brilliant to people who were new to the comic, but the new strips would seem boring to the people who had already read the old ones. When I read Nation, I felt like the Discworld series had started to head in that direction, but Pratchett still had more to say through another setting.