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A little 10 minute review of ‘A Blink of the Screen,’ with highlights:

“A Blink of the Screen” is not a masterpiece, nor a paragon of Pratchett storytelling. He was never known for his short stories:

Short stories always seem to cost me blood.

Intro to ‘Turn Tables of the Night’

But write short fiction, he did, as all of us writers do at some point in our careers. They are not what most of us are remembered for, and it’s not a form that prestigious awards prioritise. Short fiction is to the writer what the lab is to a fighting game player – a place to practice our craft, to hone it, and try new things:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/19/uh-oh-back-to-the-lab-again/

We share our stories, our new combo routes, with our peers, and place down one more tile to pave the never-ending Path to Mastery1. The more we practice, the more peers we meet – in theory. We grout our paths with plaster comprised of mutual acknowledgement, then return to our blinking screens to grind out the next step.

What you’ll find in ‘A Blink of the Screen’ is a creative writing causeway spanning the full length of Pratchett’s career: from ‘The Hades Business,’ a breakneck-paced story published when he was thirteen; an assortment of non-Discworld stories; and reprints of Discworld short stories.

Though it goes unstated, there’s another clear takeaway for the up-and-coming writer: Pratchett recycled a LOT of ideas. He did not kill darlings, but cryogenically froze them for future projects – be that a topic he wanted to revisit and give his due diligence, or extracts cut on the advice of an editor.

Down to the very roots, ‘A Blink of the Screen’ is not a record of one man’s craft, as it developed: it could be your craft, too, someday. If you keep practising, keep collaborating with fellow writers, and keep sharing what you know, you will get better, over time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint – cliché though that phrase may be.

Whether you’ll be the next household name in fantasy, however, is an entirely different matter. That’s all down to systems that we don’t directly control. Getting published is only the first hurdle, and, as I’ve learned from my tutors, if you want to publish a book, you will. It’s not a very tall hurdle – more like a stool, really.

This might be the timeline where one of my future books flies off of Waterstone’s shelves. ‘Might.’ There’s an equal chance those shelves ‘might’ go up in smoke through the friction of those flying books alone.

Even if they never do, I’ve had affirmations from my cohort, my followers, and a number of miscellaneous readers spread across multiple Discord servers. My works – some you’ve seen, some you haven’t – have been compared to a variety of writers: Oscar Wilde, David Foster Wallace, Terry Gilliam, Jorge Luis Borges, and yes, Pratchett, too. It’s a given that if one writes, one is going to be compared to those who came before. By the same token, however, being compared at all has to count for something. Right?2

In its own way, completely unintended, ‘A Blink of the Screen’ gave me a little hope for my own career as a writer. If this review’s given you the notion to buy a copy, it might do the same for you. Or, maybe not. I just like Pratchett, is all. And on that, let me segue into the highlights…

There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool In an English Queue (permalink)

You can tell this predates the neoliberal revolution, because my Right Honourable3 friend does not go nearly far enough when he proposes to legalise arbitrary violence against queue stallers. You could batter the guy in front of you at the bank, counting out his pennies; or, for a small fee, maybe you could be personally seen to through the bank’s fast-track service.

Airports do it. Everyone pays for priority boarding or fast track for peace of mind, only to meet the other priority boarders who want to give you a piece of their mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo&t=127s

What about bus queues? They may have their individual fools, but as a collective, you’ll find that sheep have more brains, pound for pound. Bus queues have no start, no end, and sprawl in three directions: into the bus station; across the stances; wherever the fuck you want.

Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting (permalink)

Christmas Eve, London, 1843. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol hasn’t even been out for a week. It’s a liminal period in Victorian Britain. With the force of a held breath, Time compresses all the Christmases that came before into one solitary Past, and presently braces for the Christmases Yet to Come, shaped by Dickens’ pen: the trees, the baubles, the roast bird dinners…

The cards.

An unwary coach on its way to London drives through a passing place that wasn’t there before. What the driver and passengers find is another London – like ours, from a distance. It’s always ‘from a distance’ in hindsight. By the time you’re IN a distance, it’s too late.
Lost souls, driven mad by flat, cardboard facades, and an overdose of microplastics the size of dinner plates, fill up the coach as it goes, until the spokes start to bend.

This is our London’s first contact with the tinsel touch of Christmas cards. Giant ones, sucked upwards through dark skies and wintry fog, like flat monoliths. Whatever threshold has been crossed, London – indeed, all of Britain – can never walk back. Neither can the giant robins and blue-ribboned kittens that’ve been let through.

This is my kind of weird fiction – I only wish there was more4. A friend of mine gave me the Oxford World Classic collection of some of Lovecraft’s stories a while back, and though I like the concept of higher entities existing outside of our reality, I like making people laugh. Making mundane objects behave in ways they shouldn’t is a great way to introduce weird elements AND be funny at the same time. It’s the stuff that Sam and Max are made of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgI4SX58d4

Theatre of Cruelty (permalink)

1000 words. Five characters. One murder mystery: Who murdered Chas Slumber, children’s entertainer? I’ve had a spot of trouble recently, trying to figure out how short stories tick, and how to make mine work. I think Theatre of Cruelty’s got an answer. See, with that many words, you’ve got no time for immersion. There’s no time to ponder the supermarket shelves – you’ve got to grab ‘n’ go from the nearest meal deal shelf.

What did Pratchett do? In a vacuum, this story tells you we’re in Ankh-Morpork, a city, and shows the police force tasked with solving the case. We get a brief breather from Colon and Nobby’s antics when Captain Vimes is outlined as a skeptic in a magical world; before you know it, we accept that some people can see Death, and Carrot’s interviewing him…

In brief: things keep moving. That suggests short stories tend to unfold, rather than infold, as I explored last time:

https://brologue.net/2025/05/04/form-is-emptiness/

Which raises a question: can you write a short story that keeps moving, yet almost entirely consists of infolding? Pratchett never wrote such a thing – the first thing I think of that fits the bill is Virginia Woolf’s “Blue and Green:”

https://biblioklept.org/2016/01/25/blue-and-green-virginia-woolf/

The Sea and Little Fishes (permalink)

You’ll not find a more startling (and, some dare say, extremely petty) exercise of headology than this. Or, as the L-space Wiki clarifies, a particular stripe of headology called ‘boffo:’

https://wiki.lspace.org/Boffo_(Concept)

There’s power in exploiting what people expect of your appearances. Ask any social engineer who’s fooled legions of office workers just by putting on a high-vis vest, and saying and asking the right things. They’ve always been an electrician – oh, and could you fob them into the lift?

As a bystander, you might watch boffo from a distance the next time the older generation starts stirring about kids gathering in public. Surely, if the party’s bigger than four, and they’ve all got backpacks on, they must be up to no good.

When someone deviates from expectations, you can feel shadows shifting. A something flits behind the daylight, just on the edge of your peripheral vision. It’s not something to worry about all the time – maybe that person’s more chatty, or restless; you’re just tired behind your eyes. Other times, it’s like your liberal, live-and-let-live friends and family decree, out of nowhere, that ‘billions must die, actually.’ Reality shatters. Everything you thought you knew about those persons must now be re-evaluated.

So, what happens when Granny Weatherwax, whose temperament sucks the freshness out of nearby apples out of sheer, overwhelming acerbity, decides to add some sugar to her attitude? She’s been asked, nicely, to be nice: Lancre’s witch trials are coming up, and she always wins.

Well.

When Granny Weatherwax turns nice, she turns eerie. Everyone is terrified of all the things she isn’t doing. She’s smiling. Wearing pink. Helping to set up stalls at the trials. And worst of all: no-one’s getting in the way of her.

The quaking, psychic apocalypse that follows would be nothing without the one character who can’t help but perpetuate it – Nanny Ogg. She, as mediator between Granny and the other witches, is what kept ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’ from leaving the printers in a fine hot ash. Nanny thinks she can keep Granny in check by showing her little achievements to one-up. Then she can’t; by the end, she’s as clueless as the other witches as to what Granny has planned.

Granny does people a ‘good’ turn, but good ain’t nice. She won’t soothe your sciatica with a painkiller, or cure it with chiropractics, but an aptly-timed backwards trip over a thick log that wasn’t behind you a second ago. If she does you any turn, it’s a Right one:

People learned to respect stormclouds, too. They refreshed the ground. You needed them. But they weren’t nice.

Respect is the hard currency by which the people of Lancre pay to receive a safe harvest, a smooth childbirth, a clean bill of health; Granny, in turn, gets the occasional crop surplus, cakes, a wheel of cheese, or whatever people can comfortably give that’s within their means.

Being nice, then, topples that currency. Being nice, and blessing someone’s cow, surely means that it’s actually milked its last, and must be sold ASAFP. Everyone knows that doing as you’re told is the last thing that Esme Weatherwax would ever do.

Especially Letice Earwig. She learns the nice way that playing headology against Granny is a gambit; a death wish, if you don’t respect her. It’s like defending Pascal’s wager by wearing copper in a thunderstorm: you’ll get a result, of a fashion, but heaven knows what else you were expecting.

A Blink of the Screen is available wherever books are sold – but dyed-in-the-wool Discworld fans may buy from either Discworld.com or the Discworld Emporium:

https://discworld.com/products/books/a-blink-of-the-screen/

https://www.discworldemporium.com/other-pratchett-works/45-a-blink-of-the-screen-paperback

  1. Sadly, the Path to Mastery always leads to the horizon, and the Earth, being round, means you never run out of horizon. A flat planet like Discworld might make it easier. Instead of going to the horizon, the path goes around in a spiral, which means at some point you have to go, ‘hey, I’ve been here before…’ ↩︎
  2. And not to over-toot my own horn or anything, but compared to my last Pratchett review… I think I’m getting better:
    https://brologue.net/2024/04/22/you-cant-handle-the-law/ ↩︎
  3. He’s called ‘Maurice Dancer.’ D’you see? D’YOU SEE??! I guess Morris dancing is a sort of queue… ↩︎
  4. Coincidentally, I recently picked up a second-hand copy of China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun for research. I hope that scratches my itch! ↩︎

TTLY… (permalink)

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This review of Terry Pratchett’s ‘A Blink of the Screen’ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. So long as you clearly credit me, this blog, and provide a clear URL for people to follow, you may use this work as you like.