Book review: A Blink of the Screen

As he mentions a number of times in his notes accompanying them, short stories aren't something Terry Pratchett finds particularly easy to write, so there aren't many books of them. A Blink of the Screen collects those short stories he was commissioned to write for other collections or magazines, and even a few pieces of writing done for Discworld conventions, spanning his whole career. In fact the first story, "The Hades Business," is from a school project when he was 13.

The book's separated into Discworld stories and non-Discworld stories, the latter including one from 1986, "The High Meggas," which decades later would come back as the basis for the Long Earth series. My favourite of these has to be "Final Reward," in which a fantasy writer kills off the hero of his long-running series, only to find him on his doorstep having come to "meet his maker."

Of the Discworld stories, the longest one is probably the best, "The Sea and Little Fishes" following a terrifying day when Granny Weatherwax starts being terribly nice to everyone. But there's also a sweet Cohen the Barbarian story, "Troll Bridge," and I liked the lyrics to the Ankh-Morpork national anthem, the only national anthem to deliberately include a load of mumbling in the second verse since that's all anyone would sing anyway.