Feet of Clay Discussion **Spoilers**

[Dotsie]

Sounds like an ideal replacement for Vetinari. I wonder if he can do crosswords? Just because someone can kill, doesn't mean they will.

[poohcarrot]

Sounds like an ideal replacement for Vetinari. I wonder if he can do crosswords?

[poohcarrot]

"Egotesticle" was a brilliant word, when Angua is talking about the other watch members getting drunk, having a dead hot curry then throwing up.

[raisindot]

I'm also pretty sure there aren't (m)any people that would save the AI over the boy. For almost everyone, it would be:
1. humans
2. animals
3. plants
4. Simon Cowell

I absolutely, totally disagree. I wouldn't save Simon Cowell for many reasons, among them that he is not an intelligent lifeform.

[raisindot]

I think Dorfl answers the question about "what is life" best when he suggests, in his debate with Ridcully, that he will allow himself to be ground into dust to see if his "soul" somehow reassembles himself if one of the clergy will allow the same thing to be done to them.

A brilliant bluff.

[raisindot]

Dorfl and golems aside, what I really like about FOC is that, for me, it's the first Guards book that presents Sam Vimes as the 'genuine' copper we see in every Guards book from this point forward. In Guards! Guards! he's a comical drunk who only becomes brave at the end. In Met at Arms he's barely in the story--Carrot is the main driver. Here, all of the elements that make Vimes what he is: His hatred of the aristocracy, his affinity for the working classes, his rage, his simultaneous pride and embarrassment with his ancestry, his uneasy relationship with Vetinari, and his super street instincts--jell. It seems that by this point PTerry might have realized that in the series he either needed to build it around Carrot (who had dominated the first two books) or around Vimes. Smartly, he choose Vimes, who has so much more to work with.

I also like FOC because it really is the first book that starts to build a whole economic and cultural history around AM. You get bits of it in earlier books, but here Pterry dives into the lives of the dirt poor, the craftsmen, the aristocrats and the guild members. He's really striving for something more than a funny story here, and it works well.

It's very interesting to compare FOC to The Truth. The latter is in some ways very similar, in that it's also dealing with a plot to remove Vetinari and also examines the lives of the "people" of AM.

I also like that here PTerry sets up the Angua/Carrot situation that will be resolved in The Fifth Elephant. Notice that when Angua is thinking about leaving Carrot, she believes that Carrot will never try to get her back because of his belief that 'personal is not the same as important.' In TFE, we end up seeing how wrong she was.

[poohcarrot]

Yo J-I*b, I assume you know what all the golem names mean?

I thought you were going to start with that.

[raisindot]

Yo J-I*b, I assume you know what all the golem names mean?

I thought you were going to start with that.

Why would I know what the golem names mean? Anyway, which ones besides Dorfl were named (I forgot this already)?

[Willem]

From L-space annotations:
The names of the golems, again, are Yiddish. "Klutz" -- a clumsy clod or bungler (from German); "Bobkes" -- beans, but only metaphorically; something worthless or nonsensical (from Russian); "Shmata" -- a rag, or piece of cloth; used both literally and to describe a person of weak character (from Polish).

Also named:
Dibbuk. A dybbuk, in Jewish mythology, is a demonic spirit that possess the body of someone living
Zhlob, Yiddish for "boorish glutton"

Then there's the Golem king Meshuga, which means 'crazy'.

[poohcarrot]

Why would I know what the golem names mean? Anyway, which ones besides Dorfl were named (I forgot this already)?

[p. 95] "NOW THREE HUNDRED DAYS ALREADY. [...] WHAT WOULD I DO WITH TIME OFF?"

Ending sentences with "already" is a common mannerism among Yiddish-speaking Jews in Anglophone countries. Rhetorical questions are another mainstay of Yiddish conversational style.

If you did that on purpose J-I*b, that was incredible.

[raisindot]

If you did that on purpose J-I*b, that was incredible.

What, you think it was done by accident, maybe?

[raisindot]

*Sigh* I guess as the token Jew here, I'm supposed to be an expert on golems, is that it? Huh? Huh?

Well, lucky that I am.*

In Jewish science fiction tradition, golems were never meant to be used as "slaves." They were created solely for the purpose of kicking the asses of the various Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Slavs, Cossacks or whoever else were in charge of this week's pogrom parade. In essence, they were kind of the first superheroes and probably were partly an inspiration for Shelly's Frankenstein.

Once they had achieved their purpose (killing all the attackers) the golems were supposed to be deactivated until the next time.

They were wishful thinking for a people who were basically defenseless against a world that wanted them dead, converted, or evicted.

[poohcarrot]

So, exactly like the Red Army in Interesting Times which are also golems.

[Tonyblack]

So, exactly like the Red Army in Interesting Times which are also golems.

I don't want to get into too much of a discussion about Interesting Times as that discussion is due in August, but I wouldn't say they were golems as they have to be remote controlled by a human. They don't seem to have anything resembling life at all.

[LilMaibe]

A note here to all those from Germany and all those that can speak german (hope I didn't miss anyone else saying it ) :

Recently a new, uncut (!) audiobook of 'Hohle Köpfe' (FoC, obviously) has been published by (i think it was) Schallwelten
6 CDs, read by Rufus Beck.

Hope it's okay that I threw this in here.