★★★☆☆ Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett
** spoiler alert ** The content of their character
Unseen Academicals
Terry Pratchett
** spoiler alert **
The content of their character
One of the most famous and controversial quotes in US politics comes from Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. It is this:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
That, I judge, is the central thrust of Unseen Academicals, the 37th novel in Terry Pratchett‘s Discworld series. That this is the main thrust is, perhaps, not obvious, and it is certainly not obvious immediately, which is why I marked this review a spoiler.
Unseen Academicals is nominally about Unseen University, the wizard college in Ankh-Morpork, but it does not, in truth, add much to what we already know about UU. It is also, slightly more convincingly, about football. UU discovers that they are required to have a football team, and they therefore stand one up.
There is, it turns out, one employee of UU who is competent to create and train its football team. This is an underling called Nutt. We eventually learn that, despite his lowly status as a candle dribbler, Nutt is a scholar, extraordinarily good at everything he undertakes. In fact, he is an orc.
The orcs were a warrior race famous for ripping their opponents’ heads off. It is generally believed that they died out long ago. It is also generally believed that that is a good thing. Thus you see why I think the Martin Luther King quote relevant.
Unseen Academicals is, I believe, an average Discworld novel. That makes it quite a good novel in absolute terms. The evil of unjust prejudices is also a common theme in the Discworld.