The Carpet People   by Terry Pratchett

Book which Pratchett wrote aged 17, and then updated mid-life after he had become an established best-seller. An example of Pratchett’s usual invention of a race of people that parallels our own, but this time the fiction is ridiculous and the races are microscopic souls that live in the depths of a carpet’s pile.

I know it is deliberately ridiculous and you are not supposed to take it seriously, but I can’t help thinking of the impossibility of the situation: people so small that thousands can build a city between five carpet tufts (‘hairs’), yet large enough to travel far and wide throughout the rug; and then the different races seem to exist at different scales to each other, and it is never clear which race is bigger or stronger than another.

Essentially the book is a manufactured interval in the history of a civilisation through a period of great attrition between the races, but ultimately coming together after a large battle to create a more harmonious monolithic kingdom; faint parallels with English history come to mind, though it is in no way to be taken as a serious parable of the real world.

The resolution is both spoiled and aided by the fact that one of the races ‘remembers’ things from the future, and a select few of that race can also ‘remember’ all the alternate possible futures. The final resolution of the story only comes about because one such individual causes a one-in-a-million future to happen. It is both convenient, and very clever, and strangely unsatisfying to close a book like this.

There are some moments of true hilarity manufactured by the idiocy, mostly using the carpet as parallel. For example, the idea that using knowledge of the future to affect the present would cause the fabric of the carpet to roll up on itself!

Low re-read factor because it is ultimately not more than a pleasant waste of time. Possibly the most nonsensical book I've ever read.