I’ve had The Last Hero from Terry Pratchett sitting on my night-stand for a few weeks and finally managed to finish it last night (I actually gave up the ten page per night reading and stayed up till 3 am to finish it). The book tells the tale of Cohen the Barbarian’s quest to return fire to the Gods because he and the Silver Horde are mad at them for making them grow old. When they say return fire they mean blow up the home of the gods. But little do they know that doing so might doom the whole Discworld. So Lord Vetinari and the Wizards of the Unseen University put together a plan to stop them, but they have to get to the other side of the Discworld quickly enough. So they resort to advice from Leonard da Quirm to make a airplane that could get them there quickly enough and so they had to go under the disc setting them off on the first space flight in order to prevent the end of the world.
Rating: 5/5

Cohen the Barbarian, aka the Emperor Ghengiz Cohen, hero of 26 Discworld fables, and his Silver Horde go gentle into any good night? Never. Not even if they’re held together by various elasticized supporters and forget where they left their false teeth. The gods unpardonably let Cohen and Co. succumb to old age, and the members of the Horde Boy Willie, Caleb, Truckle and Hamish, who’s (“Whut?”) stone deaf still want drink, treasure and women, even if they admit they’ve had to ease back on the last one. Cohen gets a bard to record their one last universe-defying hobble toward immortality, and old age has rarely been so gut-splittingly yet accurately portrayed here, embellished by Paul Kidby’s wacky and wicked illustrations. The Horde’s last quest is to return the fire Cohen stole long ago from Dunmanifestin, the gods’ ultimate Good Address. Unfortunately, that will destroy the magic holding the world together, so Lord Vetinari of Ankh-Morpork “workshops” the situation (“the means by which people who don’t know anything get together to pool their ignorance”) and sends a dragon-powered vessel crewed by an inventor, a soldier, a wizard and an orangutan librarian to stop Cohen and his tottery Horde. Pratchett lets fly sly volleys at today’s civilization and skewers nearly every barbarian-fantasy clich‚ rampant in too many books and films.

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