sonder, liberosis & monachopsis

Reading my way through Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series and just finished Equal Rites (which introduces my fav Discworld character Granny Weatherwax) SO GOOD.

Worldbuilding that sounds like shitposts but eventually evolves into something beautiful

Characters being dragged kicking and screaming into character development and growth (looking at YOU, Sam Vimes)

Characters whose “selfishness” or “greediness” manifests as a need to protect the places and people they love cause they’re THEIRS

Witches

Specifically witches as magical but mostly just very helpful and smart

Good not always meaning nice

But also, genuinely good and nice characters that are still interesting (ex. Carrot, Brutha)

The lowest possible fantasy meets the lowest possible sci fi

Excessive footnotes

Stories that make you roll on the floor laughing and then kick you with feelings when you’re still down

A combination of agnosticism, profound distrust of organized religion, and genuine respect for those who truly believe and use that belief to help others

They’re about a girl, in a professional hierarchy created by women, growing into her own power, and growing as a person. At the end of each book, her good work is validated by the most powerful witches. For Tiffany’s success, she’s rewarded in an almost Mary-Sue like fashion (and I use that term in the most positive way). Granny Weatherwax bows to her. Granny Weatherwax takes off her hat to her. This lifts Tiffany’s spirits and reassures her that she’s on the right track, and it’s treated as SO IMPORTANT, and, like – how many other books do that? 

The prizes at the end of the story – Tiffany becomes a better person, she protects people, she gains the respect of her superiors (who are also women). 

Can you imagine that in another novel? The joyful moment of heartwarming, the cherry on the ice cream sundae of the adventure, the heroine’s crowning glory, is that some old women bow to her in respect. 

The books are so positive towards women, it’s unreal. Sure, the witches don’t always get along (they’re witches, they’ll always argue), and Tiffany has to deal with some petty one-up-man-ship, but it’s so fucking mature, how it’s handled. Tiffany winds up helping her enemy, Annagramma, who slowly learns to become a decent human being, and is revealed to have her own problems. She also becomes friends with the woman her childhood crush marries, even though they were initially antagonistic towards each other. It would have been SO EASY for these women to be one-note villains, the “bitches” for Tiffany to triumph over, but they’re not, and that’s fantastic. Pratchett does not go for the low-hanging fruit, and tear other women down to build Tiffany up. 

I once had the incredible privilege to speak to Terry Pratchett in person at the Edinburgh Fringe. I thanked him for the Tiffany Aching novels, which had helped me and my husband bond during our year of long distance. And I asked him how he, as a male author, was able to write such well-rounded women. 

“Well, my mother was a woman,” he said, and the audience laughed, but basically he said that his life had been filled with just as many interesting women as interesting men, and it felt natural to reflect that in his novels. 

once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up

this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?

Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”

so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”