Posts about Terry Pratchett

Development

Reaper Mall

by David Alpert   •   May 31, 2003 3:13 pm

Actually, it turns out there's quite a lot to say about How Cities Work and Reaper Man. In Reaper Man, a mysterious set of snow globes appears in Ankh-Morpork, followed by metal shopping carts. A character realizes that if cities are like life forms - large, slow moving life forms - then there would evolve parasites to prey upon them, just as other long-lived life forms like trees have. The parasite would try to suck the life out of the city. If people are the city's life force, then a parasite might take the form of a mall, enticing people to leave the city with promises of great bargains and convenient shopping. The shopping carts are like worker insects in the mall hive.

In real life, as How Cities Work discusses, suburban sprawl sucks the life out of a city in just the same way, giving them open space, convience, and low prices. Before people know it something they treasure, a sense of place and of community, has been irrevocably lost. I'll post quotations once I get back home (I'm in Silicon Valley again now) with the book.

Who'd expect that a treatise on urban development and a Discworld novel would actually make the same point?

Development

Marshall and Pratchett

by David Alpert   •   May 7, 2003 3:35 pm

I started reading How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken by Alex Marshall on the plane. (I also started reading Reaper Man, but there's not much to say about that other than that Terry Pratchett is hilarious and you should read his books).