Review: Moving Pictures

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett
eBook

My rating: 5 of 5 stars





Moving Pictures is the first in the so-called "Industrial Revolution" line of discworld novels. It was published in 1990, the same year as Eric, and is a wonderful satire on Hollywood and the film industry.
Main characters in this story are Victor Tugelbend, who devised a very intelligent system to fail exams at Unseen University "good enough" not to be thrown out, and Theda 'Ginger' Withel, who just wants to be herself, as big as possible. They are both drawn away from their day-to-day lives by a wild (and dangerous) idea - the same idea which helped the alchemists invent the 'clicks' (as in movies) and which made Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler a very successful producer (because he knows how to advertise). They all meet at Holy Wood, a hill between dunes and close to the ocean, which hides from them a civilisation long gone...
Victor and Ginger notice that something is wrong about Holy Wood (and it's not because of the talking animals that hang around there). Well, them and the wizards in Ankh-Morpork, who have a device that shows where reality is unravelling, and how much. Only they don't know what it does, and like Victor and Ginger they only figure it out at the last moment - just in time to save the discworld from the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions?

Having finished with the tenth discworld novel now, I must say that what I love and admire most about the whole series is the recurrence of characters. I've met CMOT Dibbler, and of course Detrius, before, and the next novel puts old Windle Poons right in the middle of its plot, after he's been introduced in Moving Pictures. Discworld characters are - in general - a weird and funny bunch, and it's great fun meeting them all again from time to time, as minor characters to another story.

For a conclusion on Moving Pictures I want to mention that I definitely didn't get all the movie references, and probably misunderstood a lot of them (after all, the book is 22 years old). Nevertheless, the novel made me laugh a lot, and the grand final was again grand.
I'll leave you with one of my favourite quotes from the book: "Just when you need to save the world, there's a world for you to save".


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