I listened to the audio of this trilogy on my iPod. It is a very
different style of humor from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. The
humor can almost be called quaint.
The story revolves around a group of nomes (gnomes) - whom it turns
out are highly advanced aliens who landed on Earth when we were still
Neanderthals. They got stuck on Earth without any electricity or a way
to communicate with their ship or rebuild anything technical (no
metal) and over the preceding thousands of years somewhat devolved
themselves.
Nomes are very short lived (10 years makes for an old nome) and
experience time around 10 times faster than humans. The humor in this
book mainly revolves around the idea that the nomes are so literal
that they cannot understand anything about humans (and too fast to
understand our speech). Terry Pratchett works this angle very well as
you would expect since he has such a wry wit. But their "literalness"
also annoyed me consistently throughout the whole experience: how can
they ever have become so advanced if they are so stupid? How can you
create things like spaceships without mastery over abstraction? Surely
over the thousands of years they have been here, they would have
advanced further, discovered new things or at the very least worked
out how to communicate with humans?
Having said that, the books are still very funny, filled with
Pratchett's insightful observations on humanity and some typically
heart warming relationship building.
Overall, well worth a listen or read if you get the whole trilogy
together and treat them as one book (because they really do read as
one piece in three chapters).
Mostly Fiction book review of The Bromeliad Trilogy:
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/scifi/pratchett2.htm.
The Bromeliad Trilogy on weRead: http://bit.ly/avONCm
