Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE - Introductions
INTRODUCTION - Why I’m Writing This
INTRODUCTION 2 - Why You Should Read This Book If You Haven’t Already Read a ...
INTRODUCTION 3 - Why Discworld Fans Should Read This Book
PART TWO - Comments
Chapter 1 - The Nature of the Series
Chapter 2 - The Disc Itself
PART THREE - The Stories
Chapter 3 - The Colour of Magic (1983)
Chapter 4 - The Light Fantastic (1986)
Chapter 5 - Equal Rites (1987)
Chapter 6 - Mort (1987)
Chapter 7 - Sourcery (1988)
7A - Wyrd Sisters (1988)
Chapter 9 - Pyramids (1989)
Chapter 10 - Guards! Guards! (1989)
Chapter 11 - Eric (1990)
Chapter 12 - Moving Pictures (1990)
Chapter 13 - Reaper Man (1991)
Chapter 14 - Witches Abroad (1991)
Chapter 15 - Small Gods (1992)
Chapter 16 - “Troll Bridge” (1992)
Chapter 17 - Lords and Ladies (1992)
Chapter 18 - “Theatre of Cruelty” (1993)
Chapter 19 - Men at Arms (1993)
Chapter 20 - Soul Music (1994)
Chapter 21 - Interesting Times (1994)
Chapter 22 - Maskerade (1995)
Chapter 23 - Feet of Clay (1996)
Chapter 24 - Hogfather (1996)
Chapter 25 - Jingo (1997)
Chapter 26 - The Last Continent (1998)
Chapter 27 - “The Sea and Little Fishes” (1998)
Chapter 28 - Carpe Jugulum (1998)
Chapter 29 - The Science of Discworld (1999) (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
Chapter 30 - The Fifth Elephant (1999)
Chapter 31 - The Truth (2000)
Chapter 32 - Thief of Time (2001)
Chapter 33 - The Last Hero (2001)
Chapter 34 - The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001)
Chapter 35 - The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002) (with Ian Stewart ...
Chapter 36 - Night Watch (2002)
Chapter 37 - “Death and What Comes Next” (2002)
Chapter 38 - The Wee Free Men (2003)
Chapter 39 - Monstrous Regiment (2003)
Chapter 40 - A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
Chapter 41 - Going Postal (2004)
Chapter 42 - “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” (2005)
Chapter 43 - The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch (2005) (with Ian ...
Chapter 44 - Thud! (2005)
Chapter 45 - Wintersmith (2006)
Chapter 46 - Making Money (2007)
Chapter 47 - Stories Yet to Come
PART FOUR - More Comments
Chapter 48 - The Discworld Phenomenon
Chapter 49 - The Nature of Pratchett’s Genius
Chapter 50 - The Foundation on Which the Stories Stand
Chapter 51 - Your Questions Answered
PART FIVE - The Series
Chapter 52 - Rincewind and Unseen University: The Virtues of Cowardice, ...
Chapter 53 - The Witches of Lancre: Telling the Story Where to Go
Chapter 54 - Death in the Family: The Very Model of a Modern Anthropomorphic Personification
Chapter 55 - Gods and Philosophers: Belief and Reason
Chapter 56 - Sir Samuel Vimes and the City Watch: Who Watches the Watchmen?
Chapter 57 - Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat
Chapter 58 - Tiffany Aching: Growing Up on the Chalk
PART SIX - Yet More Comments
Chapter 59 - The Background Characters: We’re All Mad Here
Chapter 60 - The Luggage: When Personal Furnishings Go Bad
Chapter 61 - The Villains: Elves, Auditors, and Things
Chapter 62 - Überwald: Creatures of the Night (Light)
Chapter 63 - Reality Leakage and the Physics of Magic
Chapter 64 - Pratchett’s Place in the Pantheon
Chapter 65 - The Secret of Discworld’s Success
PART SEVEN - References
Bibliography
APPENDIX 1 - Other Discworld Books
APPENDIX 2 - Online Resources
About the Author
Copyright Page
For Terry Pratchett.
Of course.
PART ONE
Introductions
INTRODUCTION
Why I’m Writing This
IT’S TOTALLY RIDICULOUS, you know. Discworld, I mean. The whole thing.
The idea of a flat world carried through space by four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic turtle is absurd to begin with, but sure, I suppose you could get away with using it in one novel. Maybe two. Three if you stretched. But dozens of best-selling novels and an assortment of spin-offs?
It’s ridiculous, I tell you!
I mean, really, how does Terry Pratchett™1 sell millions of books with such a silly premise? Most of us fantasy writers struggle to get by with our carefully thought-out worlds of quests and heroes and Dark Lords and so on, getting maybe a couple of trilogies out of a world, and he throws together this completely absurd hodge-podge and merrily turns out scores of books! Good ones, too.
Just because the Discworld books are wonderfully written and hysterically funny and humane and insightful and all that, that doesn’t mean he should be able to do this! I mean, I haven’t managed to do it—how did he?
Well, that’s the question, innit?
I decided that the only thing to do, when confronted with such an obvious absurdity, was to go through the entire series carefully, and figure out just exactly what he’s doing.
You may be asking, if I think the whole thing is ridiculous, why I would want to waste my time on such a project. Well, you did see that bit above about him selling millions of books, right? If he can do it, and I can figure out how he did it, then maybe I can do it, too!
Oh, I know, you probably think I could try finding a completely original way of writing my own series of brilliant, insightful, and funny fantasy novels, the way Mr. Pratchett did, instead of copying someone else, right? After all, who’d want a cheap imitation when the real thing’s available? But it’s not like that’s easy; I wouldn’t have the first idea where to begin.
Ideally, I’d like to find some nice, simple secret, some single ingredient that I could swipe, without everyone realizing I’d stolen it—but what would it be? A bizarre setting, perhaps? Would that be enough?
I could invent a square world instead of a disc. Or an elephant carrying four turtles—but that’s hardly got the same sort of appeal; the poor turtles would be forever slipping off, which would make for a very bumpy sort of world.
Or I could go some other route entirely, perhaps with, oh, a hexagonal world carried through space by six gigantic pterodactyls. . . .
But I know that would be dismissed as derivative. Never mind that Pratchett hasn’t got a single cosmic pterodactyl anywhere in sight, you can just bet that some troublemaker would say I used pterodactyls as a play on “Terry Dactyls,” or some such, and come up with some incredibly strained way to make “Dactyl” a pun on “Pratchett.”2
No, a bizarre setting obviously isn’t enough. All that would do is get me labeled a copycat. Critics love to say fantasy is derivative.
Oh, I suppose it’s not quite as bad as the old days, back when you couldn’t write fantasy, funny or otherwise, without being accused of imitating J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. Back then, if your hero had a sword and knew how to use it, you were obviously imitating Conan of Cimmeria, and if he didn’t, you were clearly aping Tolkien�
�s hobbits.34
Nowadays, as long as you stay away from schoolboy wizards and don’t go trying to be funny, you can write fantasy without being accused of imitating anyone.
And lots of people do just that. The shelves are full of fantasy novels about quests and heroes and magic. And then here’s Mr. Pratchett, writing fantasy novels about people.
That’s what he does, you know. He writes about people. Not great and noble heroes, who can be uncomfortable to have around for too long, nor about grand adventures, which get tiresome, but about people who act like human beings.5 That’s part of what’s kept him going so long—people don’t get tired of reading about people as quickly as they get tired of reading about stereotypes.
But that can’t be enough. Other writers do that. Shucks, I try to do that. There’s got to be more.
So I sat down to figure out what it was.
And if I was going to do all that research anyway, hey, why not write it up as a book and make a little money off it?
So that’s what I’m doing.
Of course, having decided that, I had to decide what kind of book I was going to write. I didn’t want to get all scholarly—that would take too much effort, given that I’m not actually a scholar, and besides, publishers like those best when they’re written by professors, and I’m not one.6 Besides, while they’re a high-status sort of thing to do, scholarly books generally don’t make very much money.
You know what makes money? Scandal. Exposés. So I thought about writing a vicious exposé about poor Mr. Pratchett, pointing out everything that’s wrong with the Discworld novels7—how they’re horrible sinful evil books that corrupt the youth of the world—and explaining what a rotten person he is, but alas, I can’t do that, because in fact there isn’t anything very wrong with them, other than the fact that I didn’t write them, I’ve seen no evidence that they’ve ever corrupted anyone, and Mr. Pratchett is, by all accounts, a very nice man, though he did look a bit annoyed at me once when I interrupted his conversation to get him to sign a book.8
I could lie, of course. I could just make up all sorts of terrible things—after all, I’m a professional fiction writer, I tell lies for a living—but then I might run afoul of all those nasty laws about libel. Lawyers can be so very awkward about these things. And I have an aversion to lawyers, in any case. It’s probably an allergy or something.
So a sensational tell-all book was out; I had to resign myself to not writing a bestseller.
The next possibility was to write an obsessive trivia book, giving away all the endings and explaining all the jokes and generally trying to ruin everyone’s fun.
Unfortunately, even that won’t really work, because other people have already gone to great lengths to explain most of the jokes and references, 9 and to cite the sources of various things, and it just wouldn’t be fair of me to duplicate their work. Or to steal it.10 Instead I’ll point you at the magnificent resource various obsessive Pratchett fans have assembled online at www.Lspace.org, in particular the part labeled “Annotations,” and you can go read up on all the references and jokes yourself and save me the trouble and embarrassment of stealing them, getting accused of plagiarism, and having my life ruined. (I told you I have an aversion to lawyers, right?)
Really, if you’re interested in references and sources, or puzzled by some little detail where you think you’re missing a joke, check the website’s annotations out. They’re pretty amazing. Not 100 percent complete, by any means, but very impressive all the same. That’s Lspace.org. If you’re a Discworld fan but you don’t have your own computer and Internet access, it’s definitely worth a trip to the library or borrowing someone else’s machine for a while.
It occurred to me that maybe I could take all that trivia, and use it to write quizzes instead of just listing it all, but that’s been done, too, by the esteemed and admirable David Langford, under such titles as The Unseen University Challenge11 and The Wyrdest Link.12
So with dense scholarly analysis, juicy scandal, detailed annotations, quiz books, and outright lies eliminated, what does that leave me?
A popular guide! I decided to go ahead and write a sort of reader’s guide to the whole thing, and see if I couldn’t find some way to keep you readers entertained by telling you things you could probably figure out for yourself if you read all of the Discworld books cover to cover, tracked down all the obscure stories, and so on, obsessively taking notes and looking stuff up.
It’s not likely to sell as well as an exposé, but what can you do?13
And really, getting serious for a moment,14 I won’t generally spoil the jokes or give away the endings unless it’s absolutely necessary for some point I’m making.15 That wouldn’t be fair to you, after you were kind enough to buy my book.16
Of course, in order to fill up the pages, I’ll have to present my own theories about What Mr. Pratchett Is Really Up To, and how the series develops as it goes along, and all that, and I might even get some of it right and say something entertaining along the way, but it’s all just to get the word-count up to a reasonable level, it’s not as if I actually know what I’m talking about. I just felt I had to do something in response to Discworld’s success.17
But then there’s the question of why you would want to read such a thing, because I can’t expect you to buy my book if you don’t have any reason to read it, and if you don’t buy it, I don’t make any money off it, and that would rather defeat the whole purpose.
This is really two questions, though, because there are two kinds of people out there who might be reading this: Discworld readers, and everyone else. So let me address the two groups independently.
INTRODUCTION 2
Why You Should Read This Book If You Haven’t Already Read a Bunch of Discworld Stuff, and Maybe Even If You’ve Never Heard of Discworld
WELL, FIRST OFF, if you’ve never heard of Discworld at all, odds are you aren’t British.18 This is not a problem; I’m not British, either. Americans, Australians, Canadians, and even Frenchmenl9 can appreciate Mr. Pratchett’s work. 20 and even Frenchmen19 can appreciate Mr. Pratchett’s
In Britain, though, the series is a huge success—not at the level of Harry Potter, but it’s a major hit, with every new book making the bestseller lists. Besides the novels, there are Discworld calendars, diaries, maps, CDs, animated TV series, live-action TV, plays, radio adaptations, art books, reference books, cookbooks21—there are even fake postage stamps based on it, and people who collect these stamps. It’s a phenomenon, it is.
So here’s a chance to see what all the fuss is about. You can read my book and have a pretty good idea what’s going on much more quickly than if you took the time to read all those dozens of books Mr. Pratchett wrote! You can also get some idea of where you might want to start reading, because one of the most annoying features of the series is that the best place to start, as even Mr. Pratchett himself will tell you, really isn’t at the beginning—it took a couple of books before the author really got a handle on the material.
And he still hasn’t fallen into a rut. The series keeps mutating and evolving.22 If you did try to read a Discworld novel and didn’t care for it, well, maybe looking through my commentary will give you an idea of one that might be more to your liking.
Or, hey, maybe it’ll convince you to give up entirely, for all I know.
At the very least, it may clear up some misconceptions. In fact, let me tackle a couple right now:
No, it’s not all parodies of fantasy novels by other authors. You don’t need to have read any fantasy to appreciate Discworld. Lots of Discworld fans don’t read any other fantasy; in fact, Mr. Pratchett says he doesn’t read other people’s fantasy anymore.23 He’s more likely to include references to fairy tales, movies, and real-world events than to fantasy novels.
No, it’s not just a bunch of silly jokes and cheap farce—not after the first couple of books, anyway. There’s a lot more than humor here, and what humor there is, is mostly character-based, not cheap pu
ns and pratfalls, nor mere absurdity. Don’t let the giant turtle mislead you.
No, it’s not impenetrably British. Yes, Terry Pratchett is English, and that does show sometimes, but it’s not the basis of most of the humor, or essential for understanding what’s going on. This isn’t Monty Python or Benny Hill .24
So what is it? Well, that’s why you need to read this book. . . .
INTRODUCTION 3
Why Discworld Fans Should Read This Book
DO I REALLY NEED to explain this? Really?
I do?
Okay, fine.the possibility that I’ll provide some in-Well, first, there’s the possibility that I’ll provide some insight into the stories that you hadn’t thought of, explain some gag you didn’t get, illuminate a detail you hadn’t noticed. Even if you’re a complete obsessive, I might get lucky and stumble on something you missed. It could happen. Even a blind pig finds a truffle sometimes.25
Then there’s the convenience of having all the stories described here in chronological order, so you can check half-remembered things without having to go through three dozen volumes that, if you’re like me, are scattered around wherever you last put them down. If you want to remind yourself whether Sam Vimes first met Lady Sybil in Guards! Guards! or Men at Arms,26 you can just look at the appropriate chapters here instead of flipping through the two novels—it’s almost a sort of condensed Reader’s Digest version you can use as reference. The Discworld Companion (assuming you have a copy; there’s no U.S. edition, and not everyone’s willing to spring for international postage)27 can tell you who Lady Sybil is,28 but it doesn’t mention which book she first appeared in.
And if there’s a book or story you missed, you can read my comments on it here and decide just how important finding it really is to you.29
You can feel superior if I missed something you spotted, something that I’d obviously have mentioned if I thought of it. Feeling superior to a published author is always good fun, and I’ve probably provided dozens of opportunities. It’s harmless, too—I’ll never know. And if I did, I wouldn’t mind.
The Turtle Moves! Page 1