Officially, Unseen Academicals is the 8th and final novel in the Rincewind subseries of the Discworld novels. Unfortunately, Rincewind isn’t in particularly much of it. A few pages? He’s a professor now… and that’s about it.

Instead, the entire story is about football.

Except apparently, football in the Discworld is played with a log wrapped in cloth or somesuch mad thing and mostly involves ridiculous amounts of violence (which, when given the nature of football in our world, is saying something).

Mostly, the story is told from the point of few of a the servants in Unseen University. Mister Nutt–an orc of sorts and deconstruction of the whole idea of an ’evil’ race–is amusing. Glenda Sugarbean–a heriditary pie maker–is amusing. The Librarian is amusing, for what little he’s in this one. And there are a handful of other interesting characters and callbacks to other novels.

Plotswise, football. That’s really all. For reasons, the wizards of Unseen University are going to play football and end up rewriting much of the sport to sound more like what we might expect.

It’s a bit overlong for what the plot is and probably would have been better as one of the shorter novels we’ve seen in the Discworld series. It’s not bad though. Still well worth the read.

And… that is that for Rincewind. Next up, resetting back to the next Discworld series: the Witches of Equal Rites