Good Omens · Book of prophecy
The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Agnes Nutter
The only book of prophecy that is never wrong, and therefore the only one that did not sell — each prediction being perfectly accurate and perfectly useless to anyone except the descendant it was meant for.
The title of the novel is the title of the book inside it, which is the kind of honesty Agnes would have approved of and the publishers of 1655 did not.
She is the worst prophet in history because she is the only accurate one. A prophecy that will certainly happen, to a particular great-great-grandchild, on a particular Tuesday, involving a particular make of videocassette, is not a mystery. It is a note. The Device family spend three centuries indexing those notes on cards, which is the correct scholarly response to a text that has no metaphor left in it.
Pratchett and Gaiman are doing the Discworld trick in a different key: take a literary furniture item — the book of last things — and ask what would happen if it worked. What happens is that the Apocalypse becomes a scheduling problem, and a witch in Lancashire, having already written the scene of her own death, brings nails and powder to the pyre so the special effects will match the page.
Anathema is offered a sequel and declines. That is the only sensible editorial decision in the story.
On the readability rating. Many individual prophecies are quoted, some of them complete. The book as a bound sequence of 1655 remains inside the Device family. No facsimile of Agnes has been published that is Agnes; the novel is a commentary that keeps stealing her best lines.
From the book
Do Notte Buye Betamacks. The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, quoted in Good Omens, 1990
In-world history
Published in 1655; unsold. Agnes is burned as a witch, taking a good part of the village with her, as advertised. The surviving copy stays in the Device family, annotated, cross-referenced, and treated as a practical manual for remaining alive. A second volume arrives at the end of the novel. Anathema Device burns it unopened.
Why it matters
A joke about every almanac in English literature, and a plot engine. Agnes sees the end of the world in 1655, writes it down, and then packs gunpowder into her petticoats so that the burning will be, as she has already noted, memorable.
Appearances
- Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990) — Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman The novel is, among other things, a reading of Agnes's book; numbered prophecies are quoted throughout
Connected volumes
- Related to The Septateuch · Discworld
Catalogue record
- Category
- Book of prophecy
- World
- Good Omens
- Imagined by
- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
- Language
- English, of a seventeenth-century and highly personal kind
- First appearance
- Good Omens (Gollancz, 1990)
- Readability
- Quoted
Sources
- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Victor Gollancz, 1990). The novel's subtitle is the book's title; prophecies are quoted by number throughout.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-01