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Archer’s Goon

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The accurate representation of authors was the greatest thing ever. Quentin was stereotypical but not so much so that he got annoying, and he was still very real and unique. He was one of my favorites. Happily Married: Hathaway and his wife Bess, as a deliberate contrast to the other siblings who all live alone apart from their minions, servants, or robots. The Goon marching them through the office buildings to demand an explanation from Mr. Mountjoy, causing chaos and confusion in their wake. Magical Seventh Son: Although all the siblings are magical, the seventh son is supposed to have twice the gifts of the others.

THIS IS THE BEST AND UTTERLY BRILLIANT AND MIND-BLOWINGLY UNIQUE AND I LOVE ALL THE CHARACTERS AND I ADORE IT AND IT'S PERFECT. Riddle for the Ages: What exactly are the seven siblings and where are they from? Quentin describes them as “wizards” and Awful calls Dillian an “evil enchantress” but they never refer to themselves in such terms or use the word “magic” to describe their powers. There’s a vague implication that they might be aliens, but that’s all we’re ever going to get. Ambiguously Gay: Torquil. Has a great love for theatrical outfits (eyeliner included), shopping, and disco dancers. This trope is even more true for the TV miniseries. The trouble started when Howard Sykes came home from school and found the "goon" sitting in the kitchen. He said he'd been sent by Archer. But who was Archer? It had to do with the 2,000 words that Howard's author father had failed to deliver. This six-part children’s sci-fi comedy-thriller series was based on the fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones and won the BAFTA Award for Children’s Programmes in 1993.MacGuffin: The 2000 words. They do nothing, Venturus set them up to mislead the others and to give his adoptive father tax-free income. This amazing fanart. And also this by the same artist. (Note, there's some other Diana Wynne Jones artwork in there as well. Also excellent.) Although each wizard ruled a section of the town, he or she was a prisoner in it. Each suspected that one of them held the secret behind the words, and that secret was the key to their freedom. Which one of them was it? The Sykes family become pawns in the wizards' fight to win their freedom, wrest control from one another, and fan out to rule the world. Erskine and Venturus's relationship. Erskine looks out for him! And understands him well enough to figure everything out about him when nobody else could. And Venturus is fond enough of him that he feels hurt and betrayed when the Goon turns out to be Erskine, and kind of likes him despite all this. When comparing all the rest of the siblings' attitudes towards each other, this is love indeed. One day, the Sykes family are disturbed to find the intimidating Goon (Morgan Jones) in their kitchen, demanding two thousand words of gibberish that Quentin apparently owes to Archer.

There's this concept that I for some reason really love, where people stand for, or even are, ideas or abstractions in some sense. It's a similar idea to anthropomorphism. The Greek gods are a pretty good example of this; some of them are considered actual things, like Helios who is the sun, and and some just have qualities similar to the things and are generally in charge of the things, like Apollo the sun god. In this book, this is realized through the idea of "farming". The wizard siblings "farm" various town functions, like education and infrastructure and future related things, or music and entertainment and shopping and fun related things. What they farm seems related to their personalities and powers in some ways, and you could easily imagine Torquil, for example, as the "god of arts and entertainment". My love for abstraction and structure is quite strong, and trumps realism any day, and this idea is an important reason why I love this book so much. (Some of the other books I like for a similar reason are The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, The Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis, and Enchanted by Alethea Kontis. And I'm sure there are more I've forgotten.)

Some of the fantastical elements remain unexplained by the end of the book, such as the origins of the mysterious siblings, but the story doesn’t feel incomplete without them; rather, I suspect that it would drag if Jones had included those details as well. Creative subjects, in the form of literature, music and the arts vie with science and technology, to the ultimate detriment of the latter, in philosophical terms at least. EAN: 9780688025823], [SC: 25.34], [PU: New York: Greenwillow Books, 1984. dj], WIZARDS, CHILDREN'S FANTASY, TIME PARADOXES, ALTERNATE WORLDS, HARDCOVER FIRST EDITION - AND ILLUSTRATED NO… More...

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