Just finished reading Feet of Clay and must say l thourghly enjoyed it.
the golems were great, cheery littlebottom and the whole dwarfs showing off their sexuality was funny, and vimes was classic.

l have just started on Thud! and l'm glad l read Feet of Clay first. Now i know who the characters are!

The Watch books may be the series where reading them in order makes them the most interesting... And which are the less stand alones, even though they all [i:732ea06414]can [/i:732ea06414]be red as stand alones.
And Feet of Clay remains my all time favourite. it was the first DW book I red in English at all - I had given Equal Rites a try in its German translation, which had been a bit sloppy.
I remember the bit where I *spoiler*

[color=white:732ea06414]
thought "Oh my god, it's going to be the book, isn't it? He stole the thing with the poisoned pages from Eco's "Name of the Rose"... Got me there.
And all the hints... The non-Latin motto... [/color:732ea06414]

Of course, the introduction of the Golems was great, although Ankh Morpork got a little too... comfortable from then on, with its indestructible fire men and all... i think that's where it started, at least. The city is loosing it's edge... More to that in the Thud-Discussion thread.

"Hoher Sinn liegt oft im kindischen Spiel." (Friedrich Schiller)

[quote:a852ea253a="shadowgirl"]Just finished reading Feet of Clay and must say l thourghly enjoyed it.
the golems were great, cheery littlebottom and the whole dwarfs showing off their sexuality was funny, and vimes was classic.

l have just started on Thud! and l'm glad l read Feet of Clay first. Now i know who the characters are![/quote:a852ea253a]Have you read Going Postal yet, because that has futher insights into golems?

Dragon's Kingdom - Stop typing "alot" when you mean "a lot"! - Disappointed

Yes, they keep popping up, but always as sidekicks, whereas they gain some depth in "Going Postal".

"Hoher Sinn liegt oft im kindischen Spiel." (Friedrich Schiller)

Yeah. I loved Anghammarad, especially the bit where he died.

"I Have Lost My Clay." YES. THAT IS STANDARD. YOU ARE DEAD. SMASHED. EXPLODED INTO A MILLION PIECES. "Then Who Is Doing The Listening?" EVERYTHING THERE WAS ABOUT YOU THAT ISN'T CLAY.

Funny thing...I had a golem character of my own before I read Feet of Clay, but he was completely different from the golems in there. And the first golem I ever saw was four inches tall and made of string. Have you noticed the variety they come in?

>> Yes, I know it's been seven months since this thread was used. Who cares?

That is a tremendous Watch book! The whole plot including the Golems, the vampire who finds it amusing to mix up geneology and Scrabble and the never ending cunningness of Vaims to solve everything make this book a breathtaking experience!

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

[quote:03dc4c60bb="Sir_Vaims"]That is a tremendous Watch book! The whole plot including the Golems, the vampire who finds it amusing to mix up geneology and Scrabble and the never ending cunningness of Vaims to solve everything make this book a breathtaking experience![/quote:03dc4c60bb]

I'm wondering, is Vaims the Bulgarian version of Vimes ? Or is it just a typo you do every time ? I know some of the names have been changed in French either because they mean something in English (like Brother Brutha) of because the english name means something confusing in French...

Damn Spider pig

It's the Bulgarian version of Vimes. Incedentally it may also be the way to pronounce Vimes if you are rediculously posh, like the art gallery curator in Thud!

Dragon's Kingdom - Stop typing "alot" when you mean "a lot"! - Disappointed

You're absolutely right! it's my mistake-i should read the books in english,but it is sometimes hard to find the book in original on the market and in result i've alaways known Vimes as Vaims which is exactly the same thing! I am very glad that the names never get changed when translated in bulgarian because i loathe it when the writer's idea of a good name is disregarded because of the fact that a name might not be understood! A name is a name-it shoul stay as it is! By that i don't mean to offend anyone.

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

Hey...how come you reply to them but not to me when I commented on another thread? :P

Just kidding!

Incidentally, anybody else note how some of the elements of Asimov's robots went into the golems? A chem, however, is more flexible than a positronic brain....

the idea of words to serve as brain is a very good one. as for me i am not a big Asimov's fan.

"Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo. And I am afraid to say that these days all I get is moo."

I'm sure Terry must have read Asimov's work, and many others, they're pretty much must reads for any science fiction fan really I think. There are certainly similarities between the struggle for golem rights and those of robots in Asimov's books.

Dragon's Kingdom - Stop typing "alot" when you mean "a lot"! - Disappointed

Eh. Fair enough. I suppose that's got some points, although except for Andrew and to a certain extent Daneel and...oh, whatsit, the second mind-reading robot... Anyway, apart from them robots don't really go for freedom very much. I was talking more in terms of mental flavor, though...the golems feel like some of the robots. Like, say, what's-his-name, the nursemaid from I, Robot. And I'm not all that fond of it either, Vaims, it has a certain samey-dead quality once you've read a good bit, but I went through the library's collection two summers ago. << >>

The golems most certainly feel like Asimov's robots. The first parody Pratchett made of Asimov's robots and Laws of Robotics was in his early Science Fiction parody, Dark Side of the Sun. The Golems of his later creations are a more subtle parody of the aforementioned. The Laws of Robotics are analogous to the basic laws of a Golem, as written in the Chem (Golem must work, golem must have a master, can't harm a human being etc.) and, more importantly, both Dorfl and Pump remind me of Daneel, when it comes to reasoning. The simpler golems, such as Arghammad, are more like most of the robots in Asimov's world.

Still, what was possibly intended to be 'just' a parody got a life of its own soon enough. Dark Side of the Sun was still 'just' parody, and as such had little in the way of depth. Feet of Clay gave the parody a life of its own, and while the golems almost certainly started out as a parody of Asimov's robots, they soon became a seperate entity. Asimov's robots don't go for freedom. Not really. Even Daneel served humanity first and foremost, as did Giskard (the first mind-reading robot ).

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty. - Rabbi Moshe ben-Maimon

When I said a struggle for robot rights, and golem rights, I was more talking of a struggle on behalf of them rather than by them - either by characters in the story or an infered underlying subtext directed at the reader, like in Pebble in the Sky, which is set after the Robot books I think, and the woman in Going Postal.

Dragon's Kingdom - Stop typing "alot" when you mean "a lot"! - Disappointed