34
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001)
THIS WAS THE FIRST DISCWORLD NOVEL to be marketed as a “young adult” title. What this apparently means is that it has chapters and the protagonists are young. Other than that, it’s pretty much your basic Discworld story. There are dark scary bits—it’s not toned down for young readers. The vocabulary isn’t reduced, either.
It’s maybe not as funny as most of the adult ones.
At any rate, we first heard of the Amazing Maurice and his educated rodents as a throwaway gag in Reaper Man, back in 1991; now we meet them.
Maurice is a cat. It should be mentioned for our American readers that in England, “Maurice” is pronounced “Morris”—I’ve heard Mr. Pratchett say the title, and he definitely pronounces it that way.
And my English readers, if any, are now probably saying to themselves, “Well, how else would you pronounce it?” Indeed, some Americans may pronounce it after the British fashion, but more common on this side of the Atlantic is to pronounce it like the French, “Maw-REESE.”
But Mr. Pratchett is, as previously mentioned, undeniably English, so the correct pronunciation here is “Morris,” and it’s presumably a reference to Morris the Cat, the spokesbeast for Nine Lives cat food and an advertising icon of the 1970s.
The educated rodents are self-taught, for the most part. They’re a clan of rats who ate from the garbage heap behind Unseen University, where the wizards discarded leftover magic, and this thaumaturgically enhanced diet has given them roughly human-level intelligence and the ability to speak. Maurice, too, has acquired super-feline intelligence.
This newfound ability to reason has led Maurice and the rats to conclude that there’s a better life to be had than eating garbage in an alley. Maurice has recruited a young musician130 to play the role of a piper, and the lot of them have been traveling across the Disc, scamming villagers.
The Amazing Maurice: The Series
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else, so it gets to be a series all by itself. If you really insist on disagreeing with some of my other classifications, then you can call this series “one-offs,” or “singletons,” or something along those lines, and move other titles into it. If you insist on being difficult.
I don’t have a chapter about the series as a series, for reasons I hope are obvious.
It’s a simple enough ruse. The rats arrive in a new town, make themselves as visible and obnoxious as they safely can, and then the kid shows up and offers to get rid of the plague of rats for a fee. He plays his pipe, leads the rats out the town gates, gets paid, and then kid, cat, and rats all pack up and move on to the next town.
The rats have a dream of using their share of the money to buy a boat and then finding themselves a deserted island to live on, peacefully ever after.131 Maurice intends to get rich, and has perhaps been misleading the rats as to just how much money a boat costs. They’ve worked their way from Ankh-Morpork across the plains and into Uberwald, where we join them shortly before they arrive in the town of Bad Blintz.
The rats want this to be the last town they defraud; they’re developing ethics, and beginning to realize that their little scheme is dishonest. Maurice would prefer to keep going. The kid doesn’t much care.
But it all becomes moot when Bad Blintz turns out to be a very strange and unhappy town indeed, one in the midst of a famine that’s being blamed on rats, even though most of the rat tunnels underneath are deserted. . . .
Our heroes tackle the mystery, and confront the source of the trouble, and in the end, Bad Blintz becomes a very different place and the rats find a permanent new home.
Along the way, Keith and Maurice fall in with Malicia Grim, a girl who dresses in black and has an unhealthy fondness for stories—unhealthy in that she keeps expecting events to follow a proper storyline.
Which, this being a story, they often do. It being a Pratchett story, though, they often aren’t the events Malicia expects. She was raised on classic fairy tales—her grandmother and great-aunt were the Sisters Grim, famous Discworld authors of fairy tales—and the story Malicia finds herself in isn’t exactly one of those.
The rats, too, have a story they believe in, a children’s book called Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure. It’s a good bit less grim than the stories Malicia loves, and has become a symbol of hope for the rats.
And of course, their entire livelihood—the scam Maurice invented for them—is a reenactment of a famous story.
The disparity between stories and reality is an ongoing theme here. Almost all the characters have stories guiding them, but not the same stories. They strive to fit their lives into stories, or fit stories into their lives. Some of them, like Maurice and the piper, hope to exploit other people with the stories they tell, while others primarily influence themselves.
In interviews and talks, Mr. Pratchett has mentioned several times that the book that first turned him into a reader himself, and set him on the path that eventually led to the creation of Discworld, was The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. He has also pointed out how utterly absurd much of The Wind in the Willows is, even on its own terms—the characters change size as needed to suit the plot at any given moment, issues of predation are ignored, and so on. Despite this lack of logic, he and millions of other readers love the book.
I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that Mr. Bunnsy Has an Adventure owes a great deal to The Wind in the Willows—it’s an absurd, idealized story set in a world lacking in real conflict that everyone agrees is ridiculous, but people love it anyway.
Of course, Discworld itself is also absurd, but not so much idealized as exaggerated, and it’s far more consistent than The Wind in the Willows, even if the version in The Colour of Magic does have a lot of details that don’t match the current one. (It has been developing for more than twenty years, after all.)
Incidentally , none of the regular Discworld characters appear here except Death and the Death of Rats. (It would be pretty silly to tell a story like this and not mention the Grim Squeaker.) There’s no mention of the Librarian, Granny Weatherwax, the Patrician, Sam Vimes, or Archchancellor Ridcully—none of them appear, presumably because this book is aimed at younger readers who haven’t read any of the other Discworld stories. There are mentions of familiar places, such as Sto Lat, Bonk, and of course Ankh-Morpork, but virtually the entire story takes place in, around, and under Bad Blintz. It’s a self-contained story, with little room for connections or sequels; it doesn’t fit into any of the Discworld series. When I first read it, I wondered whether that would be the pattern for all the Discworld “young adult” stories—assuming there were more.
Well, there were more, and it wasn’t. So far, all the other YA Discworld stories have been about Tiffany Aching, starting with The Wee Free Men, as seen in Chapter 38.
But before we get to that, it’s back to Rincewind and books aimed at adults.
35
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002) (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)
ONCE AGAIN, WE HAVE A DISCWORLD STORY about Rincewind interfering with the evolution of Roundworld, also known as Earth, interspersed with essays on science.
In this case, most of the faculty of Unseen University has been off playing the wizardly equivalent of paintball132 when they find themselves transported to Roundworld. They send a message in a bottle to Rincewind,133 who hadn’t come along; Rincewind, Ponder Stibbons, and the Librarian then venture through L-space to sixteenth-century England to rescue the other wizards—and Roundworld—from elves.
In the first Science of Discworld, the wizards managed to miss the entirety of human history; they studied the apes that would become humans, and looked at Earth after humanity’s departure, but completely missed the period between. Just didn’t happen to be looking.
Fortunately, Hex determined that it was possible to observe any time on Roundworld, not just the apparent present, so that intervening
in the sixteenth century wasn’t particularly difficult.
The elves are the same interdimensional parasites we saw in Lords and Ladies. The inhabitants of Discworld had driven them off and established protections against them, but Roundworld was unguarded, and they found it eventually. In order to reach it, they passed through Discworld, though, and the wizards were drawn along in their wake.
Once Rincewind, Stibbons, and the Librarian arrive, simply rescuing the other wizards would be easy, but it’s agreed that the elves must be stopped, and that Roundworld, too, must be rescued.
Using Hex as their time machine and semi-omniscient guide, the wizards travel back and forth through human history, meddling as they go, until they manage to arrange things to their satisfaction and remove elves from our present lives—though not from our history.
The story alternates with chapters discussing information theory, language, human evolution, and assorted other science—though this time around the science is somewhat more speculative than in the original Science of Discworld. The authors argue that what makes humans special is that we tell stories; they then suggest that this is at the heart of science itself, when we tell ourselves a story (i.e., create a hypothesis), and then check it against the real world to see whether it’s true.
In fact, they argue that stories are the basis of civilization, of the entire human species—that it’s storytelling that has made us humans, rather than just a relatively hairless variety of ape.
And meanwhile, the wizards are conferring with John Dee, making sure William Shakespeare gets born and writes the right plays, and so on, all while discussing the nature of stories, and how they work in a world where there’s no narrativium, no actual magic.
Rincewind saves the day, and this time around, as in the first Science book, he’s far more appealing a character than he was in Interesting Times or The Last Continent. He’s still a coward and an expert on running away, but that’s not all he does.
Granny Weatherwax has a brief cameo, but it serves little purpose other than to remind us that she exists, that Discworld runs on narrativium, and that the clacks are in operation.
All in all, it’s a good story and an entertaining book, and we’ll see more of Rincewind and Roundworld in Chapter 43, but for now it’s back to Ankh-Morpork and Sam Vimes.
36
Night Watch (2002)
WHEN YOU’VE FOLLOWED A CHARACTER through a tough climb up the social ladder, from a drunk in the gutter to the well-respected Duke of Ankh,134 it starts to get tricky to find good things to do with him. One of the best tricks is to take away all those hard-won accomplishments.
So in Night Watch, as Lady Sybil nears her delivery date, His Grace Commander Sir Samuel Vimes is in pursuit of a really nasty serial killer by the name of Carcer, and has chased him onto the roof of Unseen University’s library, when a thunderstorm blows in from the Hub and a bolt of magical lightning flings Vimes and Carcer thirty years into the past.
I think it’s arguably possible that this was the same storm that powered up the glass clock in Thief of Time, though I haven’t worked out whether the chronology for that entirely fits. Whether it is or not, it certainly seems to be connected somehow to the damage that one did to the Disc’s history. Once he’s in the Ankh-Morpork of his youth, before Lord Havelock Vetinari became Patrician, before Mustrum Ridcully became Archchancellor, and before Samuel Vimes himself was much more than a raw recruit, Lu-Tze the sweeper intervenes, and gives Vimes four days to make history come out right—or be removed from it. Carcer has already caused significant damage to the history Vimes remembers, and that has to be repaired; if Vimes can’t fix it, the History Monks will have to erase it, and Vimes with it.
And he has no help, no well-organized, well-manned, well-equipped Watch, no cooperative Patrician, no money, no family—just his own wits and thirty-year-old memories.
Well, that, and a healthy supply of narrativium, which is to say, the author’s on his side. Still, it’s a lot of fun watching it all play out.
There are hints of things to come; early on, before being transported back in time, Vimes is told that Borogravia has invaded Mouldavia. We’ll see more of Borogravia’s military adventures, and Sam Vimes’s involvement in them, in Monstrous Regiment.
There are also references to what’s gone before, as The Times, William de Worde’s newspaper from The Truth, is still going.
There’s at least one odd little error, when a torturer who is described as “naked to the waist” shortly thereafter has “blood on his shirt,” when he very definitely hasn’t had a chance to put a shirt on.
And there’s a great deal of seeing how Ankh-Morpork came to be as we know it. We meet a much younger Havelock Vetinari, the legendary Rosie Palm135 and the Agony Aunts136 (often referred to but not seen until now), and so on.
Mostly, though, we watch Sam Vimes doing his job—protecting the people of Ankh-Morpork from each other, and from their own rulers.
He does, of course, survive and return to his own time, where his son, little Sam, is born. We’ll see more of them in Thud!, as described in Chapter 44.
But there are a few other stories to look at before we get there.
37
“Death and What Comes Next” (2002)
WRITTEN FOR AN ONLINE GAME called TimeHunt, this very short story is simply a conversation between Death and a dying philosopher. The philosopher is trying, by means of quantum uncertainty, to talk his way out of dying. Death replies with some of the logical results of such thinking.
A good bit of the theorizing here closely matches discussions between Ponder Stibbons and the other wizards in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.
There really isn’t much to say about it; it’s a cute bit of persiflage, and not much more than that. If you feel it necessary to read it, it’s online at Lspace.org.
38
The Wee Free Men (2003)
THE NAC MAC FEEGLE, whom we met in Carpe Jugulum, are back, and responsible for the title of this first book about Tiffany Aching.
This is the second of the nominally-for-kids Discworld novels, after The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and it’s much closer to the standard “young adult” model, in that it describes a young person starting on her path in the world. In this case, Tiffany Aching, age nine, learns that she’s the hereditary protector and designated witch of the Chalk, an area of the Disc that bears a very, very strong resemblance to the English Downs.
Tiffany’s baby brother Wentworth has begun attracting the attentions of monsters, and simultaneously Tiffany finds herself being aided, for unknown reasons, by the Nac Mac Feegle. After receiving some initial guidance from a witch, Miss Perspicacia Tick, Tiffany is left to make her own way—and when the Queen of Fairyland steals Wentworth, it’s up to Tiffany and the Feegles to rescue him.
This Queen, while clearly an elf of the usual parasitic sort, is not quite what we’ve seen in Lords and Ladies or The Science of Discworld II, but instead leans a little more toward the version presented in traditional fairy tales, or the Queen of Faerie described by T.H. White in The Once and Future King, or even the Goblin King in the movie Labyrinth.
In fact, the plot is similar to Labyrinth in its most basic outlines, though very different in its particulars.
Tiffany is a very likeable character, though the people around her mostly don’t find her very likeable. That’s because they aren’t inside her head, as we’re privileged to be. She, like other Discworld witches, has the knack of seeing what’s really there, rather than what ought to be there, and of thinking about it rationally, rather than just following rules, traditions, habits, and patterns. She’s a thoroughly grounded character, with roots deep in her ancestral home.
At the end of the book, Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax make a brief appearance, and it’s no surprise that Granny approves of Tiffany’s no-nonsense approach.
The Education of Tiffany Aching
The Education of Tiffany Aching is presented in:
The Wee Free Men Chapter 38
A Hat Full of Sky 40 Chapter
Wintersmith Chapter 45
A fourth and probably final volume, I Shall Wear Midnight, is forthcoming.
The series as a whole is discussed in Chapter 58.
In outline, this is one of the most traditional plots in any of the Discworld stories—a girl’s baby brother is stolen by the fairies, and with the help of magical allies but mostly by means of her own determination, wits, and courage, she’s able to rescue him from the Queen of the Fairies, and return home, a stronger person than when she left. There’s no parodic or satirical twist, just the story as it is. If not for the appearance of Mrs. Ogg and Mistress Weatherwax, and the fact that we’ve seen the Nac Mac Feegle before, this wouldn’t need to be a Discworld story at all—there’s no mention at all of Ankh-Morpork or any of the other familiar lands, nothing involving cosmic turtles or gigantic elephants, no trolls or dwarfs. This could have been set in Sussex, or Terry Pratchett’s adopted home county of Wiltshire, with only the most trivial of changes.
Of course, then it couldn’t have cashed in on the immense popularity of the Discworld series, and these are unquestionably the same sort of witches we’ve seen in Lancre, and the same Nac Mac Feegle we met in Carpe Jugulum, and the links do become somewhat stronger in the subsequent Tiffany Aching stories, so it’s just as well that it’s on the Disc.
And it’s a very fine story, no matter how traditional it may be. I was very pleased, after reading it, to learn that we would see more of Tiffany Aching, who returns in A Hat Full of Sky, as described in Chapter 40, and in Wintersmith, as described in Chapter 45—and we’re promised a fourth and final Tiffany Aching story, I Shall Wear Midnight, to be out in a year or two.
But first, it’ s off to the mountains of Borogravia. . . .
39
Monstrous Regiment (2003)
The Turtle Moves! Page 13