Pyramids: A Discworld Novel: 7

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Teppic is one of the better characters I've come across in the Discworld. There are funny moments littered throughout and I did end up feeling sorry for him throughout this book. And that's the holy grail when writing characters isn't it, make me feel for them. Pratchett certainly does so here. Young Prince Teppic is sent far away from his desert homeland to the city of Ankh-Morpork for the best education money can buy. Which just so happens to be at the Assassins' Guild. In Dec. of 2007, Pratchett disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. On 18 Feb, 2009, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Book I: The Book of Going Forth Book II: The Book of the Dead Book III: The Book of the New Son Book IV: The Book of 101 Things A Boy Can Do Major Characters There's a lot of great ribbing for conspiracy theorists who go on and on about the dimensions of the real pyramids and the mystical importance, even going so far as to make these monuments (at least here) into time-recyclers. It's very funny and Death isn't pleased. Fortunately for Death, however, what he doesn't know won't kill him. Unlike most teenaged boys, Teppic isn't chasing girls and working at the mall. Instead he's just inherited the throne of the desert kingdom Djelibeybi—a job that's come a bit earlier than he expected (a turn of fate his recently departed father wasn't too happy about either). Though all the characters, unsurprisingly, feel British at their core. You've got the rather naïve protagonist dragged around by circumstance, who also somehow also causes revolutionary change in his society. The pragmatic, sexy girl. A wily, hidebound head priest. Swathes of one-note supporting characters, 99.5% of whom are male. Maybe reading Cranford in tandem made the biases of this book stand out more, but come on. There is only one central character who's a woman, and maybe two very minor female characters in the whole thing, and otherwise it's wall-to-wall dudes.

What stands out here is the amount of clever puns and twists on well-known stories from our world. The puns are not only used to explain phenomena on the Discworld but are even used as names of characters (like IIb which spells as "to be" and is the name of the eldest son of Ptaclusp, who is of course destined to become his father's successor - his younger brother is called IIa). The country of Djelibeybi, the meaning of which ‘translates’ as ‘Child of the [River] Djel’ (Djel i Beybi) is an obvious play on the British gummy candy ‘Jelly Baby’ and this translation plays on Herodotus's famous claim that Egypt was the ‘gift of the Nile.’ Its name may also be a pun on Djellaba which is a loose woollen cloak worn by Arabs. Djelibeybi is the Discworld's equivalent of Ancient Egypt. It is the main setting of the novel. The country is about two miles wide along the length of the Djel, serving as a buffer zone between Tsort and Ephebe. Ephebe is the Discworld equivalent of Ancient Greece and Tsort is mainly based on Persia with some aspects of Troy mixed in.

Pyramids is the seventh novel in the Discworld series. It was first published in 1989 by Victor Gollancz and won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in that year. The cover illustration is by Josh Kirby. The novel is split into four ‘Books' and is really a collection of linked novellas; not a single novel with chapters or sections like Pratchett's later works Going Postal and Making Money or one long chapterless book like most of Pratchett's other works. Evil-Smelling-Bugger, greatest camel mathematician of all time (and thus probably no longer alive, since You Bastard now holds the title?) (mentioned) This is the gulf between universes, the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule, a few lost comets and...Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that for a quantum particle (e. g. an electron), it is impossible to know with complete accuracy both where it is and how fast it is going. The act of observing it interferes with the event you want to measure (one might say that at the quantum level the observation is the event) in such a way that it is physically impossible to determine both velocity and position of the particle in question.