Sid is under pressure to marry a nice Indian girl and raise a family. Sid’s East Indian mother yearns to have grandchildren. Her dreams are about to come true, but not in the way she could’ve ever imagined.
When Sid comes out as a woman, a 14 year old boy named Ralph literally shows up at her door announcing that Sid is his dad. Ralph is surprised to discover that his father is now a woman, but thinks having a transgender dad is pretty cool.
But Ralph hasn’t told his mother and step dad that he’s tracked down his biological father. And then there is Sid’s boyfriend Daniel, who has yet to tell his family of his relationship with Sid. Daniel is nowhere near ready to accept Ralph as a step son and complicate his life further.
Sid’s coming out has a snowball effect that forces everyone out of the closet and become real. What happens when gender, generations and cultures collide to create a truly modern family?
You know the joke in Men at Arms about the billiard balls? They’re made of “elephantless ivory” by the alchemists, but they have a nasty habit of exploding when used.
This was an actually real-world thing.
Owing to the high price of ivory (and, y’know, the over-hunting of elephants to the brink of extinction), in 1869 a billiards supply manufacturer offered $10,000 to whoever could make a synthetic ball that met the same specifications as ivory. A guy named John Wesley Hyatt came up with a nitrocellulose ball – nitrocellulose being both the basis of celluloid film and certain kinds of rocket fuel. Hyatt’s balls were extremely flammable, and even hitting them together too hard could cause a small explosion that sounded like a gunshot.
(Yes, in hindsight, that sentence was hilarious.)
So Discworld’s exploding alchemical billiard balls had a Roundworld equivalent, albeit not as dramatic. God damn it, Pterry.
Tsarina Jissa's Tumblr 