This book was a fun find – I thought I’d read all of Pratchett’s stuff, and then I realized that there was life outside of the Discworld – surprise, surprise!
The Bromeliad Trilogy which is comprised of the three short books (Truckers, Diggers and Wings) is a story aimed at younger audiences than many of Pratchett’s books. It tells the tale of a group of nomes who were living at the end of an era. Their small group is dying out, and the younger ones are having to take care of the older ones. Food is scarce, things are dangerous, and the younger ones realize that there has to be more to life than this. Macklin, a strange young nome, wants to set out to find his way in the world, but he has too many older nomes depending on him. So… he takes them with him. They leave their home, and began an odyssey that takes them away from all they have known into new territories, into the homes and communities of new nomes with strange ideas, and leads them to… the stars. Because they had forgotten, you see, that that’s where they had come from in the first place.
A simple metaphor extends into a fable in these books; other small and earthbound thinkers will both revel in these stories as an adventure and as a parallel story of human existence. Once again Pratchett’s prose is agile enough to contain both myth and merriment, making this a journey of the imagination worth reading more than once.
