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A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pratchett completists should jump on this, but otherwise I think I'd be irritated to pay full hardcover or audio price for a collection with so much juvenilia and so many punchline stories. I mean, his drabbles and short shorts and poems are often quite good – "They don't teach you about death, your mom and dad. They give you pets," – but still. Oh, and the A.S. Byatt introduction is awful, because apparently she can be judgmental and dismissive of genre fiction while she's talking about genre fiction that she likes, but what the fuck ever, A.S. Byatt, you just keep chewing those snotty sour grapes. A few scattered thoughts:

"The Sea and Little Fishes" – A Discworld story of Granny Weatherwax, and what it's like to be very very good but not very nice. I, uh. I might have identified with this a leeeettle bit. One of the standouts.

"The Hades Business" – Apparently written at the age of 13, and my God, it doesn't show. Well, I mean, it does in the prose, and in the ideas when put to scale of his full range of work, but honestly, he was so clearly already himself at that age, it's a little eerie.

"# ifdef DEBUG "+ "world/enough" + "time" – Life and death and virtual reality. Dated, sweet, apparently adored by the masses. But it made me very uncomfortable in some subliminal gender related ways, and that feeling has only worsened with thought.

"The High Meggas" – A 1986 short story that later became The Long Earth. Dimension hopping across alternate earths with bonus survivalist and truth dilemma. It did make me want to read the novel, largely because it's such a fertile concept. Most notable for being maybe the tenth time in this collection Pratchett says something should have been/wanted to be/eventually was a novel, which is apparently his form of choice. If you couldn't tell. And knowing that . . . I honestly wish a few of his books were short stories now.

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