SPOILERS Men at Arms Discussion **Spoilers**

[=Tamar]

Today I realized: Detritus has a subtle sense of humor that shows up earlier than when Vimes notices it. Vimes only sees it when Detritus, having conscripted Coalface into the Watch, says that "Carrot says there's some good buried somewhere in everyone," and says his job is "Engineer in charge of deep mining operations." He says that his ability to joke is due to the cooling helmet that Cuddy made for him. Earlier, when Detritus and Cuddy are digging upward from the cool tunnels into the UU library, the Librarian hears Detritus singing "Dlog, glod, dlog, glod" and then when he switches to "Gold, gold, gold gold" Cuddy shouts "Now you're singing the chorus!"

It seems that Detritus is being thick. But earlier, when he was sworn in, we learned that Detritus has an excellent memory even when not in a cool place; he recited the oath perfectly after hearing it once, despite the potential distraction of people around him talking about other things. It is unlikely that he would have gotten the song wrong.
I think Detritus is gently teasing Cuddy during the long digging out.
We see more of Detritus's sense of humor in Jingo.

 

[raisindot]

Minor spoiler alerts

Interesting. It may also be that his singing "dlog, dlog, dlog" reflects the trolls' "backward looking" view of linear time, where they believe the past is the future and vice versa..

Detritus also has some good humorous lines in Feet of Clay, particularly in the scenes when he's confronting the troll he's trying to convince to "rebake" Dorfl. By The Fifth Elephant, his "fickness" is just about totally gone, and he easily matches wits with Vimes in their scenes together.

 

[=Tamar]

The continual wearing of the cooling helmet may be having a long-term cumulative effect. However, in The Fifth Elephant, he's also in Uberwald in winter. The cold weather would help to increase Detritus's effective intelligence, and with the addition of the cooling helmet he's probably even brighter than he would have been ordinarily.

 

[hadas7]

This was my latest Discworld audiobook listen, so I’ll pitch in before I forget details.

I read this book years ago and it was very low on my favorite list. Consequently, it took me forever to re-read it. I enjoyed it more on re-read (it’s also great to listen to audiobooks—the experience is a little different and I generally love both Briggs’ and Planer’s performances.) Like others, I enjoyed the friendship between Cuddy and Detrius. Big Fido’s final fate was hilarious. However, I could never get interested in the main plot with the gonne. Murder mysteries were never my favorite plots in any book though.

When I first read this book I wasn’t that fond of Angua. However, I liked her much better in subsequent books and now I’m not sure why I first felt this way. I love her friendship with Cheery in other books and I was thrilled to see her in a cameo in the Going Postal movie.

One thing that kind of puzzles me and doesn’t feel quite right is Detrius’ temporary graduation into a super genius inside the freezer. If he was this way in cold temperatures, how would he ever be considered slow by other trolls? Or if they were smarter than he is, how smart would THEY have to be in the mountains? And if they’re all such geniuses, how come they never won the wars with the dwarfs, or at least created a highly advanced scientific civilization up in the mountains? It was a fun scene but it doesn’t quite work when you zoom out into the larger picture. But maybe someone can give me a bit of a brain cooling by explaining it.

 

[Tonyblack]

The brain cooling is, I think, a reference to silicone chips in computers that work far more efficiently when cold. It's the reason your computer has a fan. Of course this doesn't bear too much investigation as, as you point out, smarter trolls with silicone brains, should be smarter that Detritus when their brains are cold. It's like in Star Trek - some technology, while sounding like a great idea, falls to pieces when you start to apply logic.

 

[raisindot]

One thing that kind of puzzles me and doesn’t feel quite right is Detrius’ temporary graduation into a super genius inside the freezer. If he was this way in cold temperatures, how would he ever be considered slow by other trolls? Or if they were smarter than he is, how smart would THEY have to be in the mountains? And if they’re all such geniuses, how come they never won the wars with the dwarfs, or at least created a highly advanced scientific civilization up in the mountains? It was a fun scene but it doesn’t quite work when you zoom out into the larger picture. But maybe someone can give me a bit of a brain cooling by explaining it.

Maybe being in the Pork Futures Warehouse was the first time Detritus had ever experienced truly cold temperatures and the genius intelligence it imparts? Or maybe his own physigeology makes him "thicker" in the relatively warmer temperatures of Ankh Morpork than other trolls, thus he is "looked down upon" by other trolls? in Men at Arms Pterry wanted to show that Detritus had much more potential than the stereotypical "stupid troll" and that scene demonstrated this. Often the first time a character is introduced in a DW novel it's a wireframe of what it eventually becomes. The Sam Vimes of Guards Guards (and most of Men at Arms) is the pupa stage of what he eventually becomes. Same with Carrot and Angua. They all develop into far more complex (although not always more likeable) characters over time.

 

[RathDarkblade]

...or maybe Pterry just wrote it because it was funny, and awesome.

And all the rest of it is our thinking up hypotheses after the fact...

 

[=Tamar]

Poor Terry. He went to the trouble of a very subtle joke and none of us got it. As I posted earlier in this thread (in January), Detritus actually has a subtle sense of humor. In Soul Music, Terry also created the jazz drummer, Cliff, who has an equally subtle sense of humor. Nobody ever gets his jokes because they think he's being stupid when he's actually being ironic. (He knows perfectly well what the word "livery" means, but when he puns on it, the others just ignore him. When he lowers his sights and makes a simple pun on "club", they again assume he's being stupid.) Now think of Internet trolls - Terry was writing subtle trolls who make subtle jokes that nobody else understands.

We know that there are different kinds of trolls on Discworld. They are of different types of stone, ranging from Beryl and Chrysoprase through Detritus's granite (a very dense stone) down to Chalk and even Clay (and influenced by the magical morphic fields, in Ankh-Morpork some of them take on city earth forms - young Brick, for instance). So it makes sense that some would react differently to the same temperatures. I think one of the footnotes says that trolls are quite bright in the mountains; it's only when they come down to the plains that they are affected by the heat and slow down. We learn in Thud! that some trolls are much more intelligent than Detritus. The average mountain troll is just as intelligent as the average human being. (See "Troll Bridge" for an example.)

Trolls have a history, an almost unique concept of time (there's some other group that also count the years down instead of up), and a degree of philosophy - old trolls will just sit and think until they stop moving at all and become mountains. (Hence, the Trollbone Mountain range.) They actually do have a civilization. It's just that their idea of a proper civilization is not the same as a human's idea! They don't need much in the way of shelter - their bodies are just fine as long as nobody is trying to carve them into a fireplace. They only need sunscreen if they want to be active during the day, a human cultural thing. They eat rocks, so they have no need of cooking, and they avoid fire because it slows them down. Their communication system is very physical, so human verbal language doesn't necessarily come easily to them. They do have differences of opinion with dwarfs and druids, and that's why they carry clubs, in self-defence.

 

[raisindot]

...or maybe Pterry just wrote it because it was funny, and awesome.

And all the rest of it is our thinking up hypotheses after the fact...

Well, that's just crazy talk. What's next, foil hats?

 

[hadas7]

Thanks for all the explanations/hypotheses/tinfoil theories everyone. I would say that most of these make sense in some way or another. Tamar's explanation about different rock and mineral types makes a lot of sense to explain differences in Troll intelligence inside AM itself (like the incongruently ultra-intelligent mafia boss Chrysoprase). But a random joke explains it just as well.

Pratchett's world is incredibly complex and there's certainly quite a bit of contradiction resulting from random jokes that he probably couldn't resist proving inconsistent in the long run. This especially affects earlier books when his vision of DW was still consolidating. But in the context of Discworld it all somehow DOES work in a way that would not in other fantasy worlds, maybe because its richness and complexity includes so much that is exotic and bizarre, so you feel that there's an explanation for anything not quite in step with other elements of DW ANYWAY, it's just that we don't really know it yet. But I certainly am not one to take it all too seriously. (People who analyze EVERY little detail of anything to bits, including what are clearly jokes, drive me nuts! Thankfully not in the DW fandom, but other fandoms like Harry Potter are plagued by this. Sometimes the author just threw a detail for the sake of a detail, and that's perfectly ok. And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. ). It's just when a detail is too big to ignore that you sometimes have to take note of it.

 

[=Tamar]

Yes. At first Terry was just writing stories and didn't expect people to put them together. He did pretty well at amalgamating things, after he decided to bother with it. As it happens, the first six or seven books each have some potential or actual world-altering thing happen that can eliminate apparent contradictions - the Change Spell at the beginning of The Light Fantastic, for instance, and the various random alterations that Esk did when she was innocently making things happen that shouldn't have been possible, with her wizard's staff. Mort has a major world change, and Soul Music could have a few other changes involved that are simply not mentioned. Granny's time-working in Wyrd Sisters helped explain away a minor detail about Cohen, and so on. Then Thief of Time takes care of most other issues, and the others can mostly be handwaved with alternate world/alternate pasts. There are still a few single-book issues that I wish had been a little more closely edited, but considering that Sir Terry was inventing the overall jigsaw puzzle out of almost random bits, I'd say he did remarkably well.

 

[RathDarkblade]

Mort has a major world change, and Soul Music could have a few other changes involved that are simply not mentioned. Granny's time-working in Wyrd Sisters helped explain away a minor detail about Cohen, and so on.

They do? Aw, sod it - I don't remember what happened! Can you please remind me? Pretty please?

I do remember that at the end of Mort,

Spoiler

Death gives Mort a little more life etc. so that he can unite Sto Lat and Sto Helit.

Is that what you mean? I don't know if that should count, seeing as we don't know what would happen otherwise (other than

Spoiler

Sto Lat and Sto Helit remaining independent of each other). What would happen if they did? We don't know much about the two cities - not as much as we do about Ankh-Morpork, anyway - so I'm not sure whether we should care if they stay independent.

 

[=Tamar]

Mort has a major world change, and Soul Music could have a few other changes involved that are simply not mentioned. Granny's time-working in Wyrd Sisters helped explain away a minor detail about Cohen, and so on.

They do? Aw, sod it - I don't remember what happened! Can you please remind me? Pretty please?
I do remember that at the end of Mort,

Spoiler

Death gives Mort a little more life etc. so that he can unite Sto Lat and Sto Helit.

Is that what you mean?

That wasn't what I was referring to.

Spoiler

Death gives Mort the entire alternate timeline universe in a small shining ball, which Mort drops and then catches. So Mort is in an entirely different universe, the one in which he and the others lived. But the previous one goes on its own way, inside what looks from the outside like a pocket universe. If anything goes wrong with Mort's new universe, the other one may expand and take over again.

I don't know if that should count, seeing as we don't know what would happen otherwise (other than

Spoiler

Sto Lat and Sto Helit remaining independent of each other). What would happen if they did? We don't know much about the two cities - not as much as we do about Ankh-Morpork, anyway - so I'm not sure whether we should care if they stay independent.

I think we are told what would happen otherwise.

Spoiler

The murderous Duke was unexpectedly good as an administrator after he conquered the others (or possibly just had all the difficult negotiators assassinated). The endless little wars between tiny kingdoms and duchies are ended and they are built into a strong, powerful duchy, ushering in an era of peace. To equal that, Mort had to go around and talk to people a lot, which Susan in her adolescent ignorance thought wasn't impressive. For a young guy in his twenties, it was extremely impressive, especially since one of the tiny countries he had to weld into a strong unified hegemony was Queen Keli's.

Then in Soul Music

Spoiler

Death arranged for some changes, one of which was that Buddy and the rest of the Band survived. We aren't told how much else had to be altered to let that happen. People have a lot of "false memories" of a concert that officially never happened, and I'm fairly sure that Mr Clete was still eliminated (because there's that bit about the remains being found in the gorge).

+++ Redo from Start +++, eh?

 

[RathDarkblade]

OK... yes, I remember now. That's funny... I always thought that in Mort,

Spoiler

if things go wrong, the universe-in-a-ball was not going to expand and take over again.

After all, Death tells him that

Spoiler

it is a seed of reality, and one day it would sprout and grow again

(though not in those exact words). I thought that Death was foreseeing some time in the distant future; it's quite possible that he was, and that it had nothing to do with Mort and Ysabell. But your conclusion makes more sense.

So,

Spoiler

what does Granny's time-stirring in Wyrd Sisters have anything to do with Cohen?

I don't think he's even mentioned in WS.

 

[=Tamar]

Oh, that's on the Discworld Timeline on L-space.org -

Spoiler

They couldn't figure out Cohen's age, until it was suggested that he had been in the deep woods of Lancre, unknown to anyone else, during Granny's "advance 15 years" spellcasting. So when he came out of the woods, none the wiser (he doesn't care much about calendars), he was still 86 or so, but it was 15 years later for everyone else outside Lancre. It isn't written in specifically, but it helps make the timeline work with his stated age in different stories.

 

[NathanLovesDiscworld]

I finished reading Men at Arms today and it brought home just why I love Discworld so much. There are moments, such as when Angua tells Gaspode to shut up in Carrot's room and Carrot initially believes she is addressing him (at least that's how I read it, perhaps he just misheard her) that made me laughing out loud in public places and in contrast Cuddy's death genuinely saddened me. I also detected strong elements of racism (or should that be speciesism?), mostly directed against trolls, that lent the narrative a more serious tone and held up a mirror to real world events. Such a combination, bound together by masterful writing, can only result in a book that I enjoyed reading.

 

[Tonyblack]

I agree - the satire in these books will be relevant for hundreds of years to come. Human nature doesn't seem to evolve at a very fast rate.

 

[raisindot]

I agree.

What's interesting about the racism/speciesism in the DW books are the contrast between "rival" speciesim vs. pure racism.

For example, historically trolls hated dwarfs because in their mining activities dwarfs often "mined" rocks that turned out to be dormant trolls. Dwarfs hated trolls because trolls lay claim the mountains that dwarfs wanted to mine. Their wars were rooted in genuine distrust rooted in economic and territorial animosity.

Racism among many humans in the Discworld is simply racism. Any sapient species that isn't human is inferior and undesirable simply because it isn't human. There's no economic competition creating animosity--dwarfs, trolls, goblins, golems and gnolls don't take away jobs from humans in Ankh-Morpork; they create jobs (and whole industries) that never existed and that humans either wouldn't want to do or are incapable of doing.

 

[=Tamar]

...or don't want to do because the pay scale is so low that a human would starve.

 

[Mixa]

I finished reading Men at Arms today and it brought home just why I love Discworld so much. There are moments, such as when Angua tells Gaspode to shut up in Carrot's room and Carrot initially believes she is addressing him (at least that's how I read it, perhaps he just misheard her) that made me laughing out loud in public places and in contrast Cuddy's death genuinely saddened me. I also detected strong elements of racism (or should that be speciesism?), mostly directed against trolls, that lent the narrative a more serious tone and held up a mirror to real world events. Such a combination, bound together by masterful writing, can only result in a book that I enjoyed reading.

I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, Nathan! The Watch is one of my favourite series and the characters development is AMAZING. Go on and don’t waste a single minute… read “Feet of Clay”

Mx