Q: “What did you think about the soviet union” A: I never thought it was going to fall the way it did and I assumed it would remain a power as long as any other place unless it came to WW3 or something. Which of course always seemed to be a strong possibility. Failing that I thought that they’d take the rest of the world down with them. In a certain sense, they might have actually done that by “waking up” the middle east and having remnant detractors sell off all kinds of munitions. You still hear stories about old soviet warheads, especially nuclear ones, although a lot of them probably are stories. The AK-47 being the most popular assault rifle to be used by terrorists isn’t a coincidence though. Also, the consecutive weakening of Russia after the dissolution created a vacuum of US attention which allowed them to get up to the sort of mischief which apparently pissed off almost every country in the middle east. Now that Russia has been fairly firm (I’m pretty sure that the population is still shrinking with a higher death to birth ratio) it has been reasserting itself as a pissing contest opponent for anyone, particularly the united states which hasn’t been good for the stability of the world. It is true that being essentially on opposite sides of the northern hemisphere the needs and wants of Russia and the US are also opposite in many ways but frankly I feel like there’s mostly just a lot of resentment from the cold war fueling things. eh hem well anyway, I’m not a socialist myself so while on the whole it’s not like I was sad to see the dissolution it’s possible that conventional warfare died with the USSR and while that SHOULD have been a good thing, the reality is that it ended out meaning the proliferation of unconventional warfare.

Well that was a bit more than I’d intended. Yesterday I finished reading Going Postal, another Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. I found this to be one of the most amusing novels in the series so far and its tone was appreciably lighter than that of Monstrous Regiment. It was also the start of what has turned out to be a new sub-series for the franchise as the protagonist Moist von Lipvig has now been featured again in the most recent discworld book “making money”, which I’m in the middle of now. I would say that the Moist stories are structurally a bit similar to the Sam Vimes/city watch stories in that you have one man placed in a position of power by Vetinari and neither necessarily wants to be there but ends out rising to the occasion anyway. The difference is that Vimes is a cop and Moist is a criminal, their modes of operation are remarkably similar though. I do have one major qualm with the book though, it managed to conveniently rid itself of its initial premise and major difficulty through a pretty big plot twist. Only, I’d call it more of a copout. This point is easily identifiable in the book. Also, everything went just a little bit too smoothly after that. This is not uncommon in the discworld books but sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse. This however is not the worst of such offenses it just happens to have been the one I just read.

In the end I would recommend Going Postal and I’ll probably recommend Making Money unless it really spirals past the halfway point. Always a possibility. As a side note, I don’t think that Going Postal is a bad place to start yourself on the series since it’s a pretty good indicator of most of the rest of the series. In fact the archetype for most discworld books is “protagonist that’s more inclined to run than anything undertakes (typically is forced to undertake) to save some failing or otherwise doomed enterprise, hilarity ensues”. As it turns out you can turn that into almost anything since all stories are about the same anyway (they begin and they end and they never cover everything).