Small Gods - Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett has written a lot of good books. When my teenage self ran out of Doctor Who novelisations, it was Pratchett's Discworld series that maintained my terrifying reading rate until I was old enough to appreciate all the pop culture and drugs references in the Doctor Who New Adventures. But of all the Discworld novels, 'Small Gods' is the one to which I keep returning. It's not exactly my favourite, as I always loved the slightly earlier Reaper Man even more because I was a very pretentious teenager. But this novel is without doubt the most solidly intellectual of the entire canon. The book takes its premise pretty directly ...

"What gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods." This is why the Church of the Great God Om is all-powerful and why Om is somewhere up a brown river. Humans want gods but they don't necessarily believe in them - it's the difference between wanting a church wedding and actually going to church. Om started out as one of the billions of small gods, hanging on to existence while trying to attract believers. One day a shepherd came along and Om helped him locate a lost sheep. Et voila, Omnianism. There's an old story that says if you whip a horse, it'll run faster but eventually, when you stop whipping it, it'll lose ...

This was my first experience reading a Terry Pratchett novel, as well as my first introduction to the 'Discworld'... and I was impressed! Small Gods has a bit of everything - it's full of imagination, philosophy, satire, and gets down right funny at times! The story centers around Brutha, a religious novice in Omnia, who is also a worshipper of the Great God Om (who is a .................turtle). The only thing is, he is the last true believer and the only person who can truly speak to Om (which is the reason for Om only being a turtle in the first place). Basically, this is Brutha's story of self and religious discovery. None of ...