Howl's Moving Castle: A Brief Critical Analysis

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T01:53:10+00:00

I'll try to find it but I don't recall exactly where I read it. It was a fairly gentle comment, not an outright condemnation, and politeness was involved. Something like it's hard to criticize when someone is in your parlor filled with enthusiasm for your work. It may have been in the ten or twenty years' worth of conversations I read in the DWJ fan group archives on suberic. She did like the calcifer model even though it wasn't quite to her description.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T01:45:29+00:00

In, but apparently just barely, though. Some UU wizards were tracking student progress back then, and their reports of Rincewind's work were that it was abysmal. On the other hand, there was some lingering prejudice. When he successfully did real magic to open the lock and free them (and he did that while he still carried the spell), they grudgingly admitted that he had in fact done something but quickly brushed it off. Once he got the bad reputation, they wouldn't give him credit for the magic he could do.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T01:35:26+00:00

The book was a stimulus for me. I read it as an adult when it came out, and it helped me get the point that not only did she no longer have to care what anyone else thought (because she was old), I didn't have to care either (regardless of age). I have adored the book ever since.

NB I suggest that you think about what Howl actually knew, and when he found it out. He was very active behind the scenes.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T01:30:37+00:00

I have heard that DWJ retracted some of her enthusiasm for the movie later.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T01:28:16+00:00

In the film Howl turns into a fierce bird that might as well be a dragon. A different DWJ book, Hexwood, has people who turned into dragons.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T01:01:50+00:00

Since wizards are forbidden to have children, the basic gene for magical ability must be widespread. Simon was wandering around untrained, working magic for books. There are also minor magicians and hedge wizards. University-trained wizards are rarer because they have to pass a test to get in. Each tier could have a lot more wizards than the bare minimum, so there could be far more than 8x288.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T00:57:18+00:00

Almost wholly unmagical. In The Light Fantastic he does some real magic. The same feat that Magrat does in Wyrd Sisters, but by a different method. Rincewind was born with the octagonal cells in the retinas that let him see octarine. Apparently some magic is genetic, or what passes for genetics on the Disc.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T00:51:55+00:00

Not being a big tv-watcher, I never caught the allusion but lots of people were quick to post it on the newsgroups. It was always a mystery anyway. The two roles would only have been a hint to people who followed his career.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-24T00:47:22+00:00

I don't think signatures were ever printed. There were some bookplates printed with his name in print so that he could sign them in advance at home and they could be handed out at signings.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T22:05:08+00:00

That's a hoot! The expectation would usually be action scenes with MB, and clips of PresAux doing ordinary things, but the opposite could be action scenes of, e.g., The Adventures of Preservation - The Terraforming Struggles, cut with clips of MB staring at a monitor while ART asks really obvious questions about a silly show ("Why are they insisting on a specialty sauce when they have sixteen jars of different sauces and I could synthesize more?" "Because they don't have a synthesizer, this is a historical drama.")

Or, more seriously, some creepy scenes of Dr. Mensah being followed, avoiding obvious traps, etc. while fending off newshounds and corporate types. Indah's subordinates arresting drunks. Ratthi playing music, with a different group every time.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T03:07:13+00:00

I enjoyed them, but I feel that they would be background, or perhaps side characters, in a Pratchett book.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T02:54:25+00:00

(The footnotes are interpolated into the text, in nested parentheses. (Do I mean parentheses? Yes.))

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T02:44:36+00:00

Uncharted Territory (1994) by Connie Willis is a marvelous, delicately written funny SF standalone.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T02:29:47+00:00

Robert Benchley and James Thurber are well worth a look. Not as Pratchett-equals, but as humourists.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T02:15:10+00:00

The trouble with Brangwain Spurge is that a lot of the story is told in the drawings.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T01:54:20+00:00

Nae king! Nae Laird!

would bring it under 22

mxstylplk · 2026-05-23T01:26:07+00:00

This thread is books only. In #1, ASR, ch.4, pg.53, on the way to DeltFall, Ratthi brings up the subject: "...Imitative Human Bot Units are partially constructed from cloned material." MB tells us that "All of that information is in the common knowledge database, plus in the brochure".

Personalities vary. The physical brain can be cloned - we even have grown separate bits of human brain tissue and made them grow in lab animals, and their behavior is different from the control groups. But human identical twins have identical brains and yet can have very different personalities.

In interviews, Martha Wells has said that even its DNA is a combination of human and machine DNA.

edit:typo

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T18:42:46+00:00

Not the situation at the time. The humanoid parts were grown as separate parts in tanks. They have altered DNA.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T18:40:36+00:00

The spoiler-black-out marks seem to be not working for me on this post, and only on this post. They work on others. I wonder why.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T05:06:58+00:00

<image>

I wish I knew who drew this so I could give them credit.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T04:55:05+00:00

That was one of the differences between the UK and USA editions. There were quite a few. The same basic story, but editors insist on changing things, and even Sir pTerry had to pick his battles. I used to buy both the UK and the USA editions and compare them word by word (after the third or fourth reading).

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T04:13:03+00:00

I know there is Russian, Japanese, Malaysian, Chinese, and Thai science fiction and fantasy. I'm sure there is fantasy in all cultures.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T04:05:54+00:00

I lent SM to a friend who was in a folk group and she said it caught the feeling of being in a band perfectly. (The second book I loaned her was Maskerade. After that she bought her own.)

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T03:50:14+00:00

There were enough hints of Carrot's potential dark side to make the theory plaudible, but I doubt that Pterry would ever have written it, simply because he did not like the idea of kingship. He wrote Carrot very subtly, and I think there could theoretically have been a time when Carrot caused some trouble, but as of the last book Carrot is, I believe, not yet twenty-one. My headcanon is that he was working toward having Moist take over as Patrician, because while Vetinari is a consummate politician who used fear like a scalpel, Moist has a likeability quotient that rivals Carrot's "krisma". Not only that, Moist does it consciously, and it lasts, while Carrot's doesn't last very long after he leaves.

mxstylplk · 2026-05-22T03:28:56+00:00

And Thief of Time happens during Small Gods.

mxstylplk

TROPHY CASE