Small Gods
 Terry Pratchett
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1992 HarperPaperbacks NY USA
  ISBN: 0061092177
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There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see & never get worshiped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria. Consider the tortoise & the eagle. The former, a ground-hugging creature with limited, immediate horizons & the latter, while living in high places, sits for hours surveying all until it spies the wobbling tortoise.

Then the eagle leaps into flight, dives upon its prey & a minute later the tortoise sees its world swiftly dropping beneath. The tortoise gleefully surveys this new view, thinking how friendly is this eagle for this gift.

And then the eagle drops the tortoise. It is a millennia-old game between these two critters. One of these days, however, tortoises will learn to fly & then won't things change!

Not having read a Terry Pratchett before Small Gods, I know I stumbled, unsuspecting & vulnerable, upon this treasure. Like a pomegranate, Small Gods is filled with juicy twists & turns; amusing archetypal Wise Ones & Numbskull Initiates; giggles of historical rewrites & parodies of pious bovids. It is a multi-layered comedic adventure, well wrought, exuberantly worded & satisfyingly edifying, I think.


A sassy, delightfully witty take on religiosity, pomposity & self-importance. Sometimes I thought I was reading a botanical evolutionary cautionary tale; other times I was certain I had found one of the truly enlightened tomes, hidden from us Woolly Mammals until our brains matched our blades. Don't ask!

While Small Gods is a Novel of Discworld, it does stand alone. Terry Pratchett has a keeper in this one.

Also by Terry & Lyn Pratchett: The Discworld Series as well as: The Carpet People; The Dark Side of the Sun; Strata; Truckers; Diggers; Wings and more!
(05/30/99)

Rebecca