{"id":2146,"date":"2010-07-27T16:54:17","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T22:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.delirium.org\/?p=2146"},"modified":"2010-07-27T16:54:17","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T22:54:17","slug":"eric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/?p=2146","title":{"rendered":"Eric"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If all the Discworld books had been like <a title=\"Eric by Terry Pratchett, at Amazon\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Eric-Terry-Pratchett\/dp\/0380821214\/\" target=\"_blank\">Eric<\/a>, well, okay, probably most people that I know would still have read them. They are, after all, competently written comedic fantasy. But they wouldn&#8217;t talk about them nearly as much as they do, at the least. I mean, as a representation of the kinds of things that tend to happen in Discworld, it is a top notch book. The problem is that, even as short a distance into the series as I am, I&#8217;ve come to expect a fair amount more incisive literary and social depth, and never mind the amount I expect from all the buzz that surrounds later books in the series. By contrast to that experience\/buzz, this book was a merely[1] funny series of vignettes strung together as a parody of Faust with a horny thirteen-year old in the eponymous role and resident failure (as a wizard, too, but I more meant it with a capital F) Rincewind as the wish-granting demon. If that doesn&#8217;t make a lot of sense, well, that&#8217;s what the plot is for, yeah?<\/p>\n<p>The sad thing is, I&#8217;m totally not joking about it being funny or a really good sample of the kind of thing that happens every day on the Disc. If there&#8217;s a moral to my story, it&#8217;s this: expectations are a fickle bitch. And as for great expectations, well, they were written by Dickens, which I think tells you everything you need to know.<\/p>\n<p>[1] he says, as though that&#8217;s not a reasonably tough accomplishment on its own<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If all the Discworld books had been like Eric, well, okay, probably most people that I know would still have read them. They are, after all, competently written comedic fantasy. But they wouldn&#8217;t talk about them nearly as much as they do, at the least. I mean, as a representation of the kinds of things [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[420,106],"class_list":["post-2146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-comedy","tag-fantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/delirium.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}