Thief of Time (2001)
Thief of Time is a 2001 english fantasy fiction book written by Terry Pratchett.
On the Discworld, time is too valuable to leave lying around, so the Monks of History store it, move it, and dole it out where it is needed. Their finest operative is Lu-Tze, an unassuming sweeper with centuries of practice, now saddled with a gifted young apprentice named Lobsang Ludd. Elsewhere, a brilliant clockmaker accepts a commission to build a perfectly accurate clock, the sort of instrument that would pin time down completely and end it. Death and his granddaughter take an interest too. Pratchett winds Zen parody, the Four Horsemen, and the nature of the present moment into one clockwork plot.
Quick answers
What is Thief of Time about?
On the Discworld, time is too valuable to leave lying around, so the Monks of History store it, move it, and dole it out where it is needed. Their finest operative is Lu-Tze, an unassuming sweeper with centuries of practice, now saddled with a gifted young apprentice named Lobsang Ludd. Elsewhere, a brilliant clockmaker accepts a commission to build a perfectly accurate clock, the sort of instrument that would pin time down completely and end it. Death and his granddaughter take an interest too. Pratchett winds Zen parody, the Four Horsemen, and the nature of the present moment into one clockwork plot.
When was Thief of Time published?
Thief of Time was published in 2001.
Who made Thief of Time?
Thief of Time was written by Terry Pratchett.
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Thief of Time in our writing
- Companion guide: Discworld: The Complete Guide to Terry Pratchett's Flat Planet
A few thoughts on Thief of Time
For the same play with stolen and stopped time, try Braid, a game whose puzzles bend the present much as the History Monks do. Groundhog Day mines the comedy and the ache of a day that refuses to move on. And The Good Place turns cosmic bureaucracy and the question of what makes us human into sharp, warm comedy, close kin to Pratchett's anthropomorphic Death.
Stories that loop, rewind or fracture time itself
Thief of Time treats time as something that can be hoarded, spliced and nearly stopped by a device built too perfectly. Braid, Groundhog Day and Doraemon build entire plots around bending or looping a single timeline, while The Good Place plays the same trick on the afterlife instead of a single day. Assassin's Creed II and Tezuka's Phoenix both let one life reach back through centuries of someone else's.
Engineers whose perfect machine breaks reality
The clockmaker in Thief of Time wants one mechanism precise enough to pin the world in place forever, and nearly ends everything by getting it right. Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and BioShock each follow a brilliant engineer whose flawless creation, be it a test chamber, a physics gun or an underwater city, stops being safe the instant it works exactly as designed.