A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction

Terry Pratchett is one of the great fantasy novelists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Discworld books are hilarious, inventive, humanistic, and remarkably good for such an extended series. The worst you can say about the weaker of the 40 odd novels is that they’re just okay. This collection of short fiction is worse than just okay.

We have two decent stories. The quite good Discworld short “The Sea and the Little Fishes”, which features a witching competition, and why Granny Weatherwax always wins. “The High Meggas” is the genesis of the Pratchett/Baxter Long Earth books, about parallel dimensional travel. “The High Meggas” was written at the same time as The Colour of Magic and Discworld proved such a runaway success that the idea never really went anywhere. It’s okay, a little punchier on action compared to character.

But the rest of this collection is junk of interest only to the Pratchett completionist. We have his first published story, written when he was 13, jobbing fiction from the 70s, and a bunch of Discworld sketches, of which you’ve probably seen the jokes in print in the actual books.

My overwhelming sense is one of annoyance at the editors and publishers who took the crumbs of stories from Pratchett’s disk drives and figured that they’d make a complete book.