The Last Continent

‘n’ chips where the fish is more than just a white goo lurking at the bottom of a batter casing and you can’t use the chips to shave with. There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don’t apply mustard because that would spoil the taste . It’s just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort, and seek it out. It’s as if Machiavelli had written a cookery book.
    Even so, there is no excuse for putting pineapple on pizza.
    * This is why protesters against the wearing of animal skins by humans unaccountably fail to throw their paint over Hell’s Angels.
    * It would be nice to say that this experience taught Ponder a valuable lesson and that he was a lot more considerate towards old people afterwards, and this was true for about five minutes.
    * Although of course it’s not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations.
    † The one on the first floor, with the curious gravitational anomaly.

PRAISE
THE LAST CONTINENT
    “Amusing…enjoyable…very clever…What Pratchett seems to be doing, frequently, is commenting on the essential absurdity of life. He places his characters, who behave in a very [contemporary] everyday way, in the unlikeliest situations, juxtaposing the probable and improbable to provide a view from a new, usually humorous perspective…Just about every icon from popular Australian culture is trotted out, but it’s done with such freshness and geniality that only a real stick-in-the-mud would object.”
    Washington Post Book World
    And praise for TERRY PRATCHETT’s DISCWORLD

    “Terry Pratchett is difficult to review because you want to offer up your favorite scenes and allusions…Pratchett revels in pricking pomp and assurance…He can move from farce to sadness in seconds.”
    New York Times Book Review
    “A top-notch satirist.”
    Denver Post
    “Think J.R.R Tolkien with a sharper, more satiric edge.”
    Houston Chronicle
    “Terry Pratchett seems constitutionally unable to write a page without at least a twitch of the grin muscles…[But] the notions Pratchett plays with are nae so narrow or nae so silly as your ordinary British farce. Seriously.”
    San Diego Union-Tribune
    “Pratchett has created an alternate universe full of trolls, dwarfs, wizards, and other fantasy elements, and he uses that universe to reflect on our own culture with entertaining and gloriously funny results. It’s an accomplishment nothing short of magical.”
    Chicago Tribune
    “Discworld takes the classic fantasy universe through its logical, and comic, evolution.”
    Cleveland Plain Dealer
    “Humorously entertaining (and subtly thought-provoking) fantasy…Pratchett’s Discworld books are filled with humor and with magic, but they’re rooted in, of all things, real life and cold, hard reason.”
    Contra Costa Times
    “Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…It has the energy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the inventiveness of Alice in Wonderland . It also has an intelligent wit and a truly original grim and comic grasp of the nature of things.”
    A.S. Byatt
    “Mad magic, wild adventures, hilarious characters and situations, and enchanting prose. Most writers would have been reduced to repeating themselves by now; Pratchett finds a mother lode of ore every time he returns to the vein.”
    San Francisco Chronicle
    “What makes Terry Pratchett’s fantasies so entertaining is that their humor depends on the characters first, on the plot second, rather than the other way around. The story isn’t there simply to lead from one slapstick pratfall to another pun. Its humor is genuine and unforced.”
    Ottawa Citizen
    “Pratchett’s storytelling [is] a clever blend of Monty Pythonesque humor and Big Questions about morality and the workings of the universe.”
    Publishers Weekly
    “Terry Pratchett is the Charles Dickens of our time, and if you think otherwise you haven’t been paying attention…If you haven’t discovered him yet, you’ve a great many treats in store…Pratchett never writes the same book twice…And they keep getting better.”
    New Zealand Herald
    “The Discworld novels are a phenomenon.”
    Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

B OOKS BY T ERRY P RATCHETT
    The Carpet People
    The Dark Side of the Sun
    Strata • Truckers
    Diggers • Wings
    Only You Can Save