Monstrous Regiment

an interruption

I’m spending some extra time on the third installment of “My Stem Cell Summer,” but this little aside does have some relevant bits. See below.

These trolls are wood and not stone, and honestly they look more like goblins to me, but what do I know? Photo by Jennifer Reall.

Thomas Dambo is blowing up across North Carolina right now. My wife & I went to High Point at lunch time on a Friday, and there were over a dozen people in four or five unrelated groups gathered around Little Sally the troll, taking pictures and selfies. My wife was then inspired to drive to Asheville to see the traveling exhibit, which will be gone by the time Mythic Con rolls around, but three hours in the car each way for an easy one-hour walk did not appeal to me, not even with a side trip to Rocky’s Hot Chicken. I’ll have to be satisfied with her photos.

The monks on the Walk for Peace I mentioned last week stopped in High Point to give a speech.

One of the monks was hit by a car in Texas and had to have his leg amputated. This will become not just tragic but relevant to regenerative medicine below.

Good luck to them on the rest of their journey.

That simple earnestness is one way to get attention focused on an issue. The rest of today will be about the opposite tactic.

Well, I have no doubt that the Pentagon wanted to acquire the software prototype

and spread tyranny across the free world, but . . .

-Dirk Gently, “Episode 1”

(which is not the pilot . . . bloody BBC)

Scuppernong Books here in Greensboro has a Substack where they post two-minute reviews, such as this one for Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment, which inspired me to read the book.

My Two-Hour Review

That’s just how long it took me to write it. You’ll be done much quicker.

The monsters in question include a coffee-addicted vampire, an Igor (more on that later), and an extra-craggy stone troll called Carborundum. Also the cross-dressing protagonist Polly Perks, labeled Private “Parts” by their jerk-alicious training officer Corporal Strappi. Being a barmaid by profession, Polly is certainly the dirtiest fighter among them, and probably she is the best strategist as well.

My brother did not have this one. Pretty sure I would have remembered this cover. Image from here.

Where previous iterations of the concept like the Creature Commandos were just ways of spicing up the old war comics,

Rain, Rain, Come This Way

this is a full-on anti-war book, in the same satiric tradition as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22¹. Absurdity is the order of the day. The country of Borogravia is a theocratic duchy, under the control of the mad godling Nuggan, whose ever-expanding list of abominations includes chocolate, horizontal telecommunications as opposed to vertical ones (prayers), accordion players, and women wearing pants.

That last one I recognized from my own upbringing in rural Kentucky.

Anyway, having declared war on each and every one of its neighbors in turn, Borogravia is now at war with all of them at once. Plus they have picked a fight with the money-loving superpower city-state of Ankh-Morpork, which is Pratchett’s cultural and geopolitical stand-in for the USA, by disrupting their clack-punk equivalent of the Internet.

He makes the point multiple times that the members of the Monstrous Regiment, and soldiers in general, are not fighting for religion or policy. They are fighting because they don’t want themselves and their closest comrades to die. I mentioned Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe in a previous post

The Spoils of Publishing

and, coincidentally, he has just launched a Substack of the same name.

TRIBE with Sebastian Junger

I think Terry Pratchett would have been fantastic at newspaper strip comics. That’s the rhythm. Joke, joke, joke, BIGGER JOKE, footnote². There are so many jokes that I find it exhausting to read for very long. I need substantial breaks in between. However, I really like the way he weaves in technical stuff, like the space travel sequences in The Last Hero or this explanation of image compression from Monstrous Regiment, which is not just intuitive but accurate.

So I wondered if it would be possible to indicate a required shade on one column and, on the other side, to indicate how far along that rank that shade would persist.

-Lt. Blouse, p210

His books are so full of those little nuggets of infotainment alongside the jokes that his fans have set up annotations pages to explain them.

On Igors

Monstrous Regiment was my first encounter with the Igors, an extended family of transplant surgeons from the mountainous, Transylvania-like country of Uberwald. In war-torn Borogravia, they are mostly concerned with amputees, which reminded me of the microsurgeon I met last summer at Wake, Vijay Gorantla, MD, who is doing hand and eyeball transplants on monkeys. He is mentioned here at 12:33 in Frank Marini’s talk on extreme microscopy, in the context of rendering tissue transparent so that visible light can penetrate it to useful depths.

There are multiple versions of the technique, called optical clearing, which have been under development off and on since roughly 1914. This is extremely useful but also extremely weird, so while Marini was willing to show me and my kid some samples in person this summer, he would not let us take pictures. The People in Jars trope is already ubiquitous in science fiction, and no sensible person wants to contribute to its further fixation (double pun score!³).

There are over 40 books in the Discworld series, so many that when I made this joke about the latest D&D movie last spring

And yet . . . the sequel will be EVEN BETTER!!!! Called Dungeons & Dragons: Feet of Clay, it will be about a sex-addicted flesh golem, who alienates his loved ones through his constant philandering. Sophia Lillis (my favorite) reprises her role as Doric the tiefling druid, and the obvious “chasing tail” joke will be right there on the edge, the entire time, and never drop — because they’re just that classy.

Why Do Druids Always Have Red Hair?

I didn’t realize that Terry Pratchett had already published a book with that same title, thirty years ago.

Feet of Clay is the nineteenth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and a parody of detective novels. It was published in 1996. The story follows the members of The Watch, as they attempt to solve murders apparently committed by a golem, as well as the unusual poisoning of the Patrician.

I read the first one, The Color of Magic, sometime in my twenties. I think I started the second one, The Light Fantastic, but while I found the world-building clever I didn’t much like Rincewind, the cowardly wizard with the 99% Dodge score. I disengaged from the series at that point, and only encountered it by accident after that, as when the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company did a live radio play adaptation of Guards! Guards! at DragonCon. I listened politely when people tried to evangelize me about The Discworld, but that was it. The Last Hero and Monstrous Regiment may change my mind.

I’ve written my own series of short stories about Pyrite, the goblin illusionist who serves as our narrative guide to the magical city-state of Chimeria. One of those I’ve published here, in serial form.

The Lizard Thing, part 1

I think some more are on the way. To be clear, this is not me trying to be Terry Pratchett. I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. But I do feel like there’s some small overlap on the creative Venn diagram.

As always, thanks for reading!

1. Today I Learned, from Wikipedia:

In contrast to the typical glamorizing approach of most war titles, the EC Comics titles Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales (produced in the early 1950s) depicted the horrors of war realistically and in great detail, exposing what editor Harvey Kurtzman saw as the truth about war without idealizing it. (The mid-1960s black-and-white comics magazine Blazing Combat, produced by Warren Publishing, was similarly devoted to authentically drawn and researched combat stories with a self-professed anti-war slant.)

2. Example: a passage followed by its footnote.

The pigeon thought: 000000000. But had it been more capable of coherent thought, and knew something about how birds of prey catch pigeons,* it might have wondered why it was being gripped so . . . kindly. It was being held, not squeezed. As it was, all it could think was: 000000000!

* And allowing for the fact that all pigeons who know how birds of prey catch pigeons are dead, and therefore capable of slightly less thought than a living pigeon.

It seems that perhaps Terry Pratchett (a registered trademark) did not like pigeons much.

3. in the genetics sense AND in the formaldehyde sense.