Pratchett watch books8/5/2023 ![]() “Somewhere in a distant second hand dimension,” announces the title card at the beginning of “The Watch,” a Pratchett-based television series - not strictly speaking an adaptation - premiering Sunday on BBC America. Unlike the magisterial Middle-earth of “Lord of the Rings,” and its many imitators, everything here is a little shopworn, in various stages of decay and improvised repair - the characters as much as the world they inhabit. The setting for 41 novels, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, a flat Earth balanced on four elephants standing on the back of a turtle, where physics are powered by magic and collective imagination, goes the comic route. But the best “Star Trek” movie is still “Galaxy Quest,” which has no problem sending up sci-fi tropes while remaining exciting and touching. (The series works better with “Flash Gordon” as its lodestar than “The Golden Bough.”) “Star Trek” had this, centered around the worn-in double act of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, with its alchemical mix of overacting and underacting. Rebels/Republic and of parents and offspring (and offspring’s offspring) looking at one another from opposite sides of the Force. This is why the best contemporary “Star Wars” for my money is “Lego Star Wars,” and not the live-action franchise spending heaps of money to tell remarkably similar, not especially moving stories of Empire vs. Not all works of sci-fi and fantasy follow this path, of course some writers, and some audiences, are inclined to take things dead seriously, and while this can be fine - “The War of the Worlds” is not a laugh riot - it can also lead to suffocating self-importance and a lack of fun. Ironic distance and satire come with the territory. ![]() ![]() ![]() Given that all imaginative fiction is imagined by humans from Earth - any that you will get to read or watch, anyway - it is always really about the world we live in. Fantasy and science fiction are perfect vehicles for humor, and better with it than without. ![]()
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