Men At Arms: (Discworld Novel 15) (Discworld series)

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Artifact of Doom: The Gonne is not as powerful as magic, but it can be used by anyone without any effort. This really gets to the head of anyone holding it. For bonus points, it's sentient. 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. Gaspode tells Angua that other dogs don't bother him because "I got the Power". When he is eventually forced to use it against Big Fido's minions, this turns out to be The Power of Speech, something Hidden in Plain Sight all along because we always knew Gaspode can speak like a human; to dogs, this is effectively a Compelling Voice.

More power than any bow or spear—they just stored up your own muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. Roundworld's hermit crab (which can be found on islands like Bermuda) behaves similarly: it has no protective shell of its own, so it utilises the shells of dead land snails. The reason why the hermit crab is one of the sadder species in our world as well is given in Stephen Jay Gould's essay 'Nature's Odd Couples' (published in his collection The Panda's Thumb): the shells that form the crabs' natural habitat are from a species of snail that has been extinct since the 19th century. The hermit crabs on Bermuda are only surviving by recycling old fossil shells, of which there are fewer and fewer as time goes on, thus causing the hermit crab to become, slowly but surely, just as extinct as the snails.Playing into the asides about how police work can affect one’s empathetic faculties (like last week’s bit from Detritus), we’ve got a similar look at military service and how it affects those enlisted and conscripted in Colon’s aside about his drill sergeant and how he treated his soldiers through bootcamp. The riff here is giving us the common bootcamp anecdote—how it changes a person forever (which it does), how you come out the other side as a more competent, impressive person—but handing us the other possible reaction, being that you would absolutely want to beat the shit out of the person who removed your humanity for an extended period to make you a “better” soldier. Presenter: By a combination of violence and sarcasm the Piranha brothers, by February 1966, controlled London and the South East. Especially since someone in Ankh-Morpork has been getting dangerous ideas about crowns and legendary swords, and destiny—which points its crooked finger again when an ancient document reveals that Ankh-Morpork has a secret sovereign . . . and his name is Carrot.

Red Herring: It turns out Edward d'Eath, despite all the foreshadowing surrounding his unstable mind and, you know, family name, only ever killed one person during the story, and that was quite by accident. The Patrician sits in a plain chair at the foot of the steps leading up to the ancient golden throne of Ankh-Morpork, taken from the Steward's seat in The Lord of the Rings. However, at the end Carrot learns that the throne is actually just gold foil over (seriously decayed - the throne is several centuries old, after all) wood, the real gold having been stripped and sold long before. As usual on Discworld, it's belief that's important. Vimes is very outspoken in his disdain for kings and seems to be well versed in how Ankh-Morpork got rid of them. In Guards! Guards! he was surprised to hear that Ankh-Morpork ever was a kingdom. Possibly justified in that it’s possible that the events in that book (and the encouragement of his soon-to-be-wife) lead to him developing those traits.Tiger by the Tail: When Nobby starts swinging around his Epic Flail, he finds he can't safely stop. Fortunately, Carrot is big enough to safely intervene. Vimes (despite hating Assassins) admits that Dr. Cruces was probably a decent man before the Gonne took hold of his mind - or, at least, that he had good intentions. Another contains a Stealth Pun. He shows the "bust" of a past noblewoman, presumably meaning a statue of her head and shoulders, but the man who made the slides got confused. "More of her face, however, would have enabled us to be certain of the likeness..." Probably one of the most extreme ever written. There's a brief aside near the beginning of the book where Vimes and Carrot look at the disused Post Office building and its sign reading "NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOM OF NIT..." (a parody of the motto on the US Postal Service building in New York). In its place, this seems to be just a typical joke about bad mediaeval spelling on the Discworld, but a full eleven years later, Terry Pratchett wrote Going Postal, in which it's revealed that the sign is spelled like that because several letters were stolen to make up the sign of a nearby hairdresser's called Hugos (no apostrophe). Burrows, Marc (2022-01-28). "Your best ally against injustice? Terry Pratchett". New Statesman. Archived from the original on 2022-02-15 . Retrieved 2022-02-09.