Nation (novel)
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| Author | Terry Pratchett |
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| Cover artist | Jonny Duddle |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Alternative history, Fantasy |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
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Publication date
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11 September 2008 |
| Pages | 416 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 231884187 |
Nation is a novel by Terry Pratchett, published in the UK on 11 September 2008. It was the first non-Discworld Pratchett novel since Johnny and the Bomb (1996). Nation is a low fantasy set in an alternative history of our world in the 1860s. The book received recognition as a Michael L. Printz Honor Book for 2009.
Pratchett took his editors by surprise by writing it before the previously scheduled Tiffany Aching conclusion. He has said "I want to write this one so much I can taste it", and that he's been ready to do it for four years. Pratchett said in February 2007, "At the moment I'm just writing. If it needs to be Discworld it will be Discworld. It could be set in this world 150 years ago while still more or less being a fantasy. The codename for it is Nation."
Written loosely in a third-person perspective, the novel is set in an alternative history of our world, shortly after Charles Darwin has published On the Origin of Species. A recent Russian influenza pandemic has just killed the British king and his next 137 heirs. Except for the opening chapter, the novel's action entirely occurs in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean (the fictionalised South Pacific Ocean) on a particular island known by its indigenous inhabitants as "the Nation".
The first chapter involves a subplot in which the Gentlemen of Last Resort, a secret society serving the Crown, urgently set out for Port Mercia in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean to seek the next man in the British line of succession: Henry Fanshaw, the unsuspecting governor of England's oceanic territories. Fanshaw's 13-year-old daughter, Ermintrude, is one of the novel's two protagonists. The other protagonist, Mau, is an aboriginal native of the Nation who is first depicted alone at neighbouring Boys' Island, where he has hand-built a canoe to complete his initiation rite from boyhood into manhood. Ermintrude, meanwhile, is leisurely travelling aboard a British schooner, the Sweet Judy, when mutineers, led by a ruthless Cox (coxswain), are subdued and set adrift at sea, returning to the plot at a later time.
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