Product Description

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was "Hey, you!". For Brutha the novice is the Chosen One, and all he wants is peace, justice and brotherly love. He also wants the Inquisition to stop torturing him now, please.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4525 in Books
• Published on: 1993-05-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Discworld is an extragavanza--among much else, it has billions of gods. "They swarm as thick as herring roe," writes Terry Pratchett in Small Gods, the 13th book in the series. Where there are gods galore, there are priests, high and low, and ... there are novices. Brutha is a novice with little chance to become a priest--thinking does not come easily to him, although believing does. But it is to Brutha that the great god Om manifests, in the lowly form of a tortoise.

Book Information
In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was: "Hey, you!" For Bruntha the novice is the Chosen One. He wants peace, justice and brotherly love. He also wants the Inquisition to stop torturing him now, please...

From the Media
"Surely the best novel Terry Pratchett has ever written, and the best comedy" -- John Clute, Interzone

About the Author
Terry Pratchett was born in 1948. He started work as a journalist one day in 1965 and saw his first corpse three hours later, work experience meaning something in those days. After doing just about every job it's possible to do in provincial journalism--except of course covering Saturday afternoon football--he joined the Central Electricity Generating Board and became press officer for four nuclear power stations. He'd write a book about his experiences if he thought anyone would believe it.

All this came to an end in 1987 when it became obvious that the Discworld series was much more enjoyable than real work. Since then the books have reached double figures and have a regular place in the bestseller lists. He also writes books for younger readers. Occasionally he gets accused of literature.

Terry Pratchett lives in Wiltshire with his wife Lyn and daughter Rhianna. He says writing is the most fun anyone can have by themselves.

From the Back Cover
In the beginning was the Word.

And the Word was: "Hey, you!"

For Brutha the novice is the Chosen One. He wants peace and justice and brotherly love.

He also wants the Inquisition to stop torturing him now, please...

Customer Reviews

Deep and serious issues, with added humour
If, like me, you'd ever thought: "~Philosophy~. I bet that's interesting but I expect philosophy books are really hard work, full of unfathomable ideas and impenetrable language ..." , then you might like to start here, with Small Gods. Terry Pratchett seems to have a firm grasp of some profound stuff and expresses it in a way that anyone can understand.

There's a young novice called Brutha, in the church of the great god Om - a fierce god that usually manifests as some powerful creature such as a bull or an eagle. Brutha is a quiet, gentle lad with some pretty harsh, religious fundamentalist ideas, at the beginning of this story. The Omnian church is powerful, expansionist, rules with a rod of iron and has an on-going inquisition, so anyone who doesn't believe the dogma in precisely the way the church presents it, is tortured and killed. Then Brutha actually meets his god, in the form of a creature far less fearsome than Om's accustomed to, and Brutha is enlightened by revelation after revelation. Things are not what he'd imagined. He starts having dangerous thoughts that he'd better not utter. Where do gods come from? How do they become great gods? Can't people just be nice to each other and live in peace? That sort of thing. The seeds of sedition! Deacon Vorbis, Exquisitor - Head of the Quisition, would have to stamp on that sort of thinking. There's already rebellious rumblings from those infidels who try to convince people that the world is flat when church teaching is very explicit on that: it's most definitely a sphere!

This is not like any of the other Disc World books I've read (about 8 so far). It's not quite so funny but it's even more than usually thought-provoking. There's a dark under-current that the author carefully draws attention to whilst not dwelling on excessively. There are people being tortured and slaughtered in the name of a god that, it turns out, hardly anyone really believes in - wars are fought and people suffer. A man betrays his friends to save his father (who committed the terrible crime of nailing a horseshoe on his wall) from the inquisition. Terry Pratchett has managed to get all this horror into a very entertaining Disc World novel. I'm impressed.

I recommend this book, and if you haven't read any disc world books before, this is not a bad place to start.

Deeper than it looks. Possibly even deeper than TP intended.
Well, this one's quite a departure. A very different "feel" to the story, with much less of the normal knockabout stuff and much more of a dark tone to proceedings.

There's a sense throughout that Terry Pratchett wrote this book as a way to explain his feelings on the whole matter of belief, and the quite complex theological positions that some of the characters take up would seem to support this. Some of the writing feels - well, the nearest word would be "angry", and one or two events in the book will send a shiver of horrible recognition down your spine.

This isn't really the first Pratchett you should read, as it's rather unrepresentative of the series as a whole, but if you've read some of the others and are looking for something slightly different, then Small Gods can be highly recommended.

Unexpectedly Excellent
For years I have successfully avoided reading anything by Terry Pratchett. Perhaps because everyone else seemed to be doing just that, or perhaps just because I never heard about him from the right person.

That last point just changed - thanks you so much darling Liz - and she started me off with "Small Gods". I enjoyed it so much that I read it in stolen moments during two working midweek days, and now I curse the stupidity that made me wait this long.

This is a very clever book. Pratchett uses his mythical Discworld and its inhabitants to say far more about our world than he does theirs. This is a savage indictment of organised religion which will at the same time leave you holding your sides in pain as you try to stop laughing. It's most definitely not suitable for the Pope's Christmas stocking.

It may be a paradox, but if this world was a little bit more like Pratchett's, things would actually make more sense here than they do measured against accepted rationality.

I can't imagine there could be a better introduction to this author - an engaging and hilarious romp across another world, and a penetrating spotlight on an aspect of this one. Buy it!