raisindot wrote:Speciesism never fades even in contemporary AM. Look at what everyone thought about both goblins and orcs in UA until Nutt demonstrated that the leopard could change its shorts. Look at how everyone treated golems until Dorfl demonstrated their sentience in Feet of Clay.
Jeff - NP with the fact that speciesism exists on the Disc as it evidently does and not just between humans v The Rest (as surely this is an exact description of the Troll/Dwarf dynamic
), just as to degree. Trolls are probably closest to goblins/orcs in terms of being looked down on by humans but they were never slaves as such surely - mainly because they have v. little reason to come into contact with humans ordinarily outside of the city and it's Dwarves that cause them problems as they inhabit the same territories.
The city migrations of course are all covered from 1983 in Roundworld as post John Keel AM - Nightwatch is the only book that covers that period and presumably at that time A-M was not the gold-lined streets attraction that it becomes when we get to the earliest AM we know from CoM onwards when Vetinari is arguably only just in charge and the city becomes more cosmopolitan that it attracts other species - would you go to a 'promised land' that didn't want/need your 'type' when you're King of the Mountain with all the gold you can handle back home? No draw there for Dwarves at least is there?
Obviously something happens in between to make it worthwhile for the Dwarves to migrate and for Troll skills to become viable within the city's remit - my point is they go there as migrant workers not as slaves because they provide some kind of function that humans don't supply that make it worth their while to leave their natural homes?
The goblins appear not to have had this choice and part of that is perhaps connected to their ancestral past as thralls of some more competent 'Dark Lord' - don't know whether there's an analogy to Middle Earth here in that they're partly 'created' or bred but in that fantasy world the Elf/Orc division was created by a Dark Lord in that he's supposed to have mutilated and genetically degraded Elves into a travesty of their original form (and the same with Men before we get into that argument too
) to effectively breed them to 'evil' or have them as walking zombies possessed by 'evil spirits' - that's the legendarium there with grounds for why ME orcs are so hated to the point of genocide - enslavement doesn't even get a look in there because they're completely aggressive and not wanted even as slaves...
I digress hugely but to suggest that Discworld trolls and dwarves were
more than the recipients of general 'speciesism' to the point they were hunted and enslaved just isn't on the map. In John Keel's time there was 'just' no good reason for them to become economic migrants in AM - that's all, whether or not they were 'wanted' there.
Discuss
) about Terry's gradual slide as a writer - consider this viewpoint. I would put almost all of the DW books from The Truth onwards as 'sub-standard' as in not 'vintage' Terry. Of course there are exceptions (actually for me only Nightwatch and Thief of Time) depending on your own preferences but I think that Terry actually lost interest in the traditional Discworld with TT. Ironically this co-incides with the death of Josh Kirby but possibly also with Terry's father's last illness - certainly there's a ground shift in his writing at that time and significantly it's when the Lancre Witch series was downgraded to cameo status. So no, forgive me, I'm no longer a rabid reader of Terry, but I love and honour him for what he does write about with humour and courage and humanity, and in the last 10 years or so it's his non-fiction (Science) Discworld books and Nation that actually 'shine' more for me than the full on canon ones.
Will I see you at Ennistymon on the 4th Nov I wonder - even though Terry's not going to be there? Does that make you the bad fan - of course not! 
