enne📚 reviewed Small Gods by Pratchett, Terry
None
3 stars
It was weird to go back and reread Small Gods remembering that enjoyed it once upon a time, but not remembering a single thing about it, other than "turtle" and the idea that the turtle god's power was determined by the amount of belief it had.
Both Small Gods and Pyramids are about resisting the self-destructive nature of empty religious tradition. Pyramids is more about meaningless tradition whereas Small Gods is more about the structures around belief calcifying and replacing that belief. They're similar stories in a lot of ways, but while Pyramids was quite fun, I had a harder time caring about the characters or the plot here.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do. …
It was weird to go back and reread Small Gods remembering that enjoyed it once upon a time, but not remembering a single thing about it, other than "turtle" and the idea that the turtle god's power was determined by the amount of belief it had.
Both Small Gods and Pyramids are about resisting the self-destructive nature of empty religious tradition. Pyramids is more about meaningless tradition whereas Small Gods is more about the structures around belief calcifying and replacing that belief. They're similar stories in a lot of ways, but while Pyramids was quite fun, I had a harder time caring about the characters or the plot here.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
I think perhaps this book just doesn't work for me because I've just never been a huge fan about a story about breaking free of religious dogmatism. (It's likely this is why I enjoyed Some Desperate Glory less than a lot of other folks too.) Maybe it's that I don't find Om or the way everybody treats Brutha to be particularly funny. Maybe it's also that Vorbis, essentially the head of the inquisition, is such a comically evil character that even for a comedy book it all just feels a bit thin.
(In full honestly, I wonder if the passage of time made me conflate this book with the details of Reimena Yee's comic The God of Arepo just based on the same base idea. This isn't a review of The God of Arepo, but it's short and I'd highly recommend it! More than this book, sorry!)