By Terry Pratchett
A Stroke of the Pen is a short story collection unearthed by fans during 2022 and 2023, written under various pseudonyms in the 70s and 80s and published in newspapers. I bought it on Amazon in October 2023 after seeing it for double the price in Blackwell’s, and read it on the bus to work.
I found them charming, if a little childish. They have a lot of the elements of his later work, including the whimsical humour, the silliness, and the blend of magical realism and sci-fi, but they lack the characteristic bite, which I guess is understandable given they were the first stories he wrote, and they were meant to be serialised.
I did really like the Quest for the Keys, it had all the trappings of Ankh-Morpok, that city of which other cities are merely pale reflections, although Rincewind and the Hero were distinctly different. It even had the scene set in the Roundworld, which had remarkable similarities to that book I read ages ago about the guy who switches worlds and described cars as monsters. I wonder if the author had read the story in a newspaper?
Anyway, a nice read and one for the collection.