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Sunday, July 8th, 2007

Interesting Times

Categories: [ Books/Discworld ]

ISBN: 0552142352

© Amazon.fr

Seventeent volume in the Discworld series, Interesting Times has been published in 1994 by Terry Pratchett.

A message coming to Ankh-Morpork from the mysterious Agatean Empire requests the Great Wizzard to be sent there. He is identified as being Rincewind, who is then brought back by magic from the island where he was stranded after his last adventure (thanks to Hex, the supercomputer that can say thousands of location spells in a short period of time), and sent the same way to the Agatean Empire. He there meets a horde of seven elderly barbarian heroes led by Cohen the Barbarian (the Silver Horde), and is soon after taken by the “Red Army”, who is fomenting a revolution in Hunghung, the capital city of the Empire. The legend has it that the Red Army, led by the Great Wizard, would once again free the people from the oppressing emperor, or something like that. Rincewind manages, against his own will, to make them enter the Forbidden City, but they are immediately taken prisoner by the guards. In prison, he meets Twoflowers, and learns that the Red Army's cadres are Twoflower's children; the revolutionary movement itself is based on the book he wrote after his holidays in Ankh-Morpork and which caused him to be sent to prison. The doors of Rincewind's cell open mysteriously, he frees the other Red Army prisoners, and he is forced by Twoflower's daughter to go and try to kill the Emperor. But he is already dead, assassinated by his Grand Vizier, who wants to put the blame onto the Red Army and use the counter-revolution to get himself onto the throne. But the barbarian Horde has already taken the throne, using the fact that not many people know what the emperor looks like and that anybody could actually play his role. But the heads of the five great families who are continuously fighting for the power declare war to the Horde, and they will have to meet on the battlefield the next day, seven against seven-hundred thousands. Rincewind manages to flee the battlefield, but only to enter by accident a huge storage where seven thousand golems made of red clay await someone to use them again (there are bits of magical armour dedicated to that purpose). Rincewind puts the armour on, and leads, without really knowing what he was doing, the original Red Army to the battlefield, provoking a panic in the armies and allowing the Horde to take once again the control of the imperial throne. But Rincewind soon disappears, transported magically again by the wizards of Unseen University. But instead of arriving in Ankh-Morpork as expected, Rincewind lands in XXXX.

[ Posted on July 8th, 2007 at 17:14 | 1 comment | ]