Beforelife's Terry Pratchett inspirations(?)
I read a lot of genre fiction. But my all-time favourite author was and remains Terry Pratchett. I used to have a whole blog where I reviewed almost every book he wrote. I have two entire Terry Pratchett shelves at home. I’m always excited when I’m able to read a book that evokes Pratchett’s vibe, which is intelligent, dry, humorous and thoughtful.
But a few pages into Randal Graham’s Beforelife, I started getting odd vibes. This wasn’t just inspired by Terry Pratchett… he seemed to be taking bits and pieces whole cloth. Not just parts of characters and story beats, but jokes, writing style and even terminology that are central to the Pratchett ouvre.
Pratchett has written over forty books, and obviously it’s inevitable that some jokes or ideas might percolate through into other comic fantasy-style books. But the sheer volume of them overwhelmed me in this book - it may or may not be on purpose, but I think I’m convinced it can’t be coincidental.
I’ve never been struck this way reading any other book. I needed to get this down on digital paper to see if I was really crazy, or if there was a wholesale gleaning of intellectual feats… and if there was, what does that even mean?
Note: The following post has heavy spoilers for Beforelife.
In general: The footnotes. Pratchett’s use of footnotes for humorous asides is one of the trademark aspects of his writing, to the point where a book of short fiction published by him was called “Once More* with Footnotes”. I have seen other books use this approach, but not many.
p2 - "While Ian had no way of knowing this, the 487th edition of Khuufru's Eternal Almanac ranks the word "whoops" as the fourth most common final utterance of English-speaking humans, hot on the heels of “I’ll bet it’s harmless”, “What happens if I pull this?” and “These oysters seem a bit off.”
Interesting Times: “Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, "What happens if I do this?”
This is not the only time Pratchett makes this joke, but I couldn’t find the other instances.
p4 - “If mediocrity were an Olympic sport, Ian would finish right in the middle of the pack.”
Feet of Clay: If there were to be a world competition for losers, a Nobbs would come firs—last.
He makes a similar joke specifically quoting the Olympics, in Johnny and the Bomb.
p24 - “All right then. No petitions, no Chalice. Do we at least have the Oil of Service, with which to anoint the-”
Guards! Guards!: "Are the Wheels of Torment duly spun?" said the Supreme Grand Master.
The Elucidated Brethren shuffled around their circle.
Brother Watchtower?" said the Supreme Grand Master.
"Not my job to spin the Wheels of Torment," muttered Brother Watchtower. "'s Brother Plasterer's job, spinning the Wheels of Torment."
"No it bloody well isn't, it's my job to oil the Axles of the Universal Lemon," said Brother Plasterer hotly. "You always say it's my job."
This entire sequence mirrors very closely the secret society’s bumbling attempts at ritual in Guards! Guards! It’s a lot more than this quote, but I figured I’d just post a sample line and move on.
p35 - “One of those - blast it, what’s the word? Clan somethingorother. Tip of my tongue. Means secretive.”
“Clandestine?” hazarded Ian.
Guards! Guards!: “It's to do with being in wossname. Cognito.”
Malapropism is a deep vein of comedy that Pratchett mines again and again (the “tip of my tongue” is used a lot in Eric), but this particular combination of getting just the first part of the word right, followed by “something-ish”, struck me as singular.
p50 - “Whatcha call that thing she kicked me in?”
”An SUV”, supplied Kari.
Guards! Guards!: I remember what we hang them up by," said Carrot.
"Oh," said Nobby weakly. "Where?"
"We hang them up by the town hall," said Carrot.
Again - same sort of joke (mistaking a place for a body part), unusual structure.
p50 - “I saw it too,” said Thirsty Vern, “he looked all mysterious like, you know, kinda, thingy, umm, eldritch. Had an eldritch air about him. Spooky, like.”
Soul Music: "I knew it didn't belong here," said Glod. "Didn't I say it didn't belong here? I said it didn't belong here. I said it was eldritch."
"I thought that meant oblong," said Asphalt.
Eldritch as an adjective is obviously not owned by Pratchett, but calling it out as a word worth discussing is. It’s usually used to describe Rincewind’s Luggage (hence the confusion with “oblong”).
p61 - “It’s not that assassins fail to value human life. Quite the contrary: valuing human life is their bread and butter.”
Pyramids: “No, we do it for the money.
“And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money.”
The Assassin’s Guild is a central organization in Ankh-Morpork, and this “cleanliness” of valuing human life financially is repeated a few times.
p66 - “…he was just an archetypal image, an anthropomorphic personification of a vestigial fear of death buried deep in the primate mind.”
Hogfather: “what's this Anthropomorphic Personification, then?”
“Anthropomorphic personification” is, again, not owned by Pratchett, but is an incredibly unusual phrase which is repeated and discussed multiple times. Hogfather is almost entirely based around it. If you Google the phrase, most of the results are Pratchett.
p84 - “The remarkable bit, though, was that he’d done it all with the air of a man who was doing Roth and Doyle a favour. He seemed to believe that the assembled financiers were all Good Sorts who’d just bumped into inconvenient rules and, being busy folks who probably had a lot on their minds, had accidentally stumbled out of bounds. They’d want to be told about their mistakes. And now that Ian had cleared things up, he had no doubt that everyone involved - including Roth, Doyle, and Temple - would eagerly pull together and set things right.
The bizarre thing was that they had.
Jingo: “It was a kind of magic. He told people they were good chaps, and they knew they weren't good chaps, but the way he told it made them believe it for a while. Here was someone who thought you were a noble and worthy person, and somehow it would be unthinkable to disappoint them.”
Ian’s ability to convince people to do the right thing because they were good people, even if they weren’t, immediately brought Captain Carrot to mind, as it’s one of the most essential parts of his character.
p106 - Attentive readers will have noticed that Cyril did not go squawk. He said it. Quite distinctly.
Moving Pictures: “It wasn't that the dog had gone "woof!," although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe never went "woof!," they had complicated barks like "whuuugh!" and "hwhoouf!" No, it was that it hadn't in fact barked at all. It had said "woof."“
This one is interesting because Cyril the parrot has zero impact on the plot other than this joke, and it’s never explained, whereas it’s a key part of Gaspode’s story. The parallels are otherwise almost too spot-on.
p112 - Hmm. Let P represent the probability that the City Solicitor is attempting to manipulate matters to his advantage. Let Tau represent likelihood that there is an actual danger of an exodus from the City. Let Zeta equal the subset of probabilities that…
Pyramids: “Let period = x. cudcudcud Let t = time. Let initial period…”
A secret mathematician hiding in the guise of a harmless being (an assistant in Isaac’s case, a camel in You Bastard’s case) with algebraic assignments in their internal monologue, is an oddly specific resonance.
p118 - “More concerned with profits than with prophets?” said the Solicitor, smiling wryly.
Feet of Clay: “Religion is all very well, but what do prophets know about profits, eh?”
Just a throwaway joke in both cases, but the exact same one.
p168 - This meant - as far as Isaac could tell - that the book had two distinct ages: the book had existed for twenty years, but also only for four weeks.
The Last Continent: “'O’course, when I say thirty thousand years,' said the kangaroo, 'I mean it depends on how you look at it. Even them hand paintings on the top've
been there five thousand years, see. And those faint ones ... Oh, yes,
got to be pretty old, tens of thousands of years, except - '
'Except what?'
'They weren't here last week, mate.'"
Yet again - this sort of plot-based quantum combination is not impossible for both authors to come up with independently, but… really?
p196 - The upshot of all of this is that no one has tried to overthrow Abe’s government in the last two thousand years. No one wants to. After all: Detroit works. It’s a precarious, teetering balance of billions of self-interested players trying to eke out some advantage over each other, but somehow, against all expectation, the latticework of the city still hangs together - supported, it would seem, by the strength of its ruler’s will and an army of civil servants ably headed by the City Solicitor.
Sourcery: “When he had been a little boy he had seen a showman who could keep a dozen plates spinning in the air. If the man had been capable of working the same trick with a hundred of them, Lord Vetinari considered, he would just about begin to be ready for training in the art of ruling Ankh-Morpork, a city once described as resembling an overturned termite heap without the charm.”
Abe definitely seems like a Vetinari-lite. Both of them make themselves indispensable by making sure that a world without them would be much worse than a world with them in it. The quote above is far from the only place that Pratchett makes this clear.
p231 - A hubcap rolled past. This always happens.
Soul Music: “Then the oil from the coach lamps ignites and there is a second explosion, out of which rolls — because there are certain conventions, even in tragedy — a burning wheel.”
Graham even makes this exact joke again near the end of the book.
p240 - In fact, in a thousand different dimensions, a thousand different things happened as a result of choices Ian Brown made now. In one dimension he just stood there, feeling stymied, until the Goons arrested all and sundry and wrote the event off as just another day in Detroit’s mental health service. In another, he dove toward Napoleon Number Three, sadly misjudged the distance, and managed to put the prat in pratfall, ultimately allowing Bonaparte to escape and embark on a widely publicized spree of creative stabbings.
Jingo: “As he hurried forward he had, just for a second, the strange sensation that he was two people. And this was because, for the merest fraction of a second, he was two people. They were both called Samuel Vimes.
To history, choices are merely directions. The Trousers of Time opened up and Vimes began to hurtle down one leg of them.
And, somewhere else, the Vimes who made a different choice began to drop into a different future.”
Although this is throwaway in Beforelife and plot-critical in Jingo, it’s yet again evocative.
p246 - The thing that people desire most - including those who live in Detroit - is the cozy, comforting sense that tomorrow will look the same as today.
Feet of Clay: “People believe they want justice and wise government but, in fact, what they really want is an assurance that tomorrow will be very much like today."
This one just can’t possibly be a coincidence… can it?
p335 - “Your monitor is still flashing,” said the City Solicitor. He would have hissed it, but it didn’t have enough esses.
The Light Fantastic: “It should be impossible to hiss a sentence with no sibilants in it, but the voice made a very good attempt.”
Not much to say here.
p416 - It was at this point that a stray particle of inspiration hurtled across the cosmos and connected with the speech control centre in Zeus’s brain, since he was the tallest.
Wyrd Sisters: “Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time.”
As far as I can tell, this idea of “inspiration particles” was wholly invented by Pratchett, and Graham uses it as if it’s an obvious thing that everyone should know about.
p421 - To be fair, humans obsess about this too. But in the face of this, as it were, they still managed to invent the digital watch, classical music, video games, and gin martinis.”
This one isn’t a Pratchett swipe, it’s Douglas Adams. For someone writing a book in the 21st century, why would they even talk about digital watches, unless they’d read it in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
Do I have a point with this? I’m not sure. But I couldn’t stop finding these similarities. Is this bad? Should I complain? Does it matter? Does anyone else care?
Or am I tripping the light fantastic?