Discworld Re-Read: The Last Hero

The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett (2001) 176 p.

As the century turned, and the Discworld was riding the height of its popularity (Pratchett was Britain’s best-selling author before Rowling took the crown), there was a cottage industry of supplementary works published: Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, The Science of Discworld, The Streets of Ankh-Morpork. Among this number were a couple of narrative features that were not, at the time, considered part of the main series, but have subsequently been brought into the fold. Hence, while my memory indicates that Discworld #27 should be Night Watch (in my opinion, probably Pratchett’s magnum opus) it is instead The Last Hero.

The Last Hero is an over-sized book shaped like a graphic novel, but isn’t quite one; there’s a lot of Kidby illustrations, but it’s still a text-based story, though of course the illustrations mean the book is more of a novella than a proper Discworld novel. This is amplified by the fact that the story is quite an odd one, a bit of a throwback (as Rincewind/Cohen the Barbarian stories often are) to the early days of the series when Pratchett was having fun experimenting with fantasy tropes. The story is basically that Cohen and his coterie of geriatric barbarian warriors are angry at the notion of time, ageing and death – and by the way, “what if Conan was an old man” is a joke that has well and truly run its course by now – and have therefore decided to take out their revenge on the gods: returning (the Discworld equivalent of) Prometheus’ fire to their home at (the Olympus-equivalent) Cori Celesti, “with interest.” The wizards of Unseen University catch wind of this plan and warn the government of Ankh-Morpork that setting off explosives on the mountain of the gods would trigger a magical effect that would obliterate the entire Discworld, and so the full forces of the state are arrayed to stop them. This ends up involving a slingshot space travel manoeuvre, in a prototype vehicle designed by Leonard of Quirm and staffed by Rincewind the Wiz(z)ard and Captain Carrot of the City Watch, to reach Cori Celesti ahead of the Cohen’s barbarian horde and prevent the catastrophe.

A Discworld book which features regular illustrations and is the size and shape of a graphic novel is unusual enough; add in such an outlandish plot (these are generally not Pratchett’s best) and it begins to feel like a forgettable lark, which is more or less how I remember it being published and marketed at the time. Has Captain Carrot, of the City Watch arc, actually gone to space and set foot on the moon? Sorry, I don’t think he has. The entire thing feels like it’s not really canon, like a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. That’s fine – it’s a perfectly amusing sideshow that I flicked through across a weekend – but that’s all it is.

Next up is another retcon kicking the Night Watch can down the road: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is apparently no longer a separate YA novel that happens to be set on the Discworld, but one of the main sequence. I read it but barely remember it, so we’ll see!