It keeps expanding and diversifying. The first two novels followed a standard series model, featuring the same protagonists, but with the third book, Equal Rites, those protagonists were nowhere to be seen. New series-within-series kept cropping up; old series mutated, as when Susan took over from her grandfather. Short stories were added to the mix, as were illustrated volumes, and “young adult” novels, and science books.
Early on, there seemed to be a deliberate effort not to repeat details—the perpetually shifting Archchancellors, for example, or place-names that appeared once and then vanished forever. But this changed, and what comic-book fans call “continuity” started to accumulate, sometimes becoming in-jokes—minor characters would pop up in unexpected but logical places, lines of dialogue would recur, and so on.
Where Mr. Pratchett found it necessary in Lords and Ladies to include a warning that the book was a sequel and best understood if one had read Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad, by the time of Thud! it seems to be taken for granted that readers are thoroughly familiar with much of what’ s gone before. Nowadays novels even include the hooks on which future volumes will hang, as the epilogue of Going Postal sets up Making Money. It’s all growing ever more varied, but also more interconnected.
And that’s just Mr. Pratchett’s stories themselves, which are no longer the entirety of the Discworld phenomenon. There are now add-ons, lots of them, by other people, working from the base Mr. Pratchett has provided. They aren’t new stories, as such, but they’re all about Discworld. It seems as if there’s a compulsion many readers feel to make various elements of the series more real.
To start, there’s Stephen Briggs, who has been billed as the “cartographer of Discworld.” He started off by adapting Wyrd Sisters to the stage for an amateur drama troupe, the Studio Theatre Club of Oxford; that went well enough that, at Terry Pratchett’s suggestion, he started adapting other novels, and became fascinated with the series. He started compiling information and adding to it, with Mr. Pratchett’s blessing, resulting in a series of three maps (The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, The Discworld Mapp, and A Tourist Guide to Lancre), a reference book entitled The Discworld Companion (followed by a second edition and then by The New Discworld Companion, with each version differing in several respects beyond simply having material about later volumes added), a spin-off I’ve mentioned before called Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, a series of at least eight diaries based on Discworld (most recently Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008), a graphic novel of Guards! Guards!, and an assortment of merchandise such as badges, T-shirts, and scarves based on various Discworld features. (There are also graphic novel adaptations of The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Mort, but those don’t seem to have involved Mr. Briggs.) The non-book merchandise is offered on his website at www.cmotdibbler.com/.
Oh, and his series of adaptations for the stage had reached fifteen, at last count. It’s been suggested by some that Mr. Briggs may know more about Discworld than Mr. Pratchett does.
Then there are the two cover artists for the series—the late Josh Kirby, whose work adorned the British covers for almost two decades, and his successor, Paul Kidby. Mr. Kirby also provided the artwork for the original illustrated version of Eric, and his art was featured in Discworld calendars and elsewhere. For many British readers, Kirby’s art was a significant part of what gave Discworld its flavor.
Paul Kidby first came to the series through the spin-offs—his first published Discworld art was a flyer accompanying a computer game based on the books. From there he went on to produce the art for The Pratchett Portfolio, depicting several of the characters from the novels, and then provided the illustrations for The Last Hero, Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, the various diaries, Discworld Christmas cards. . . .
There’s also a fourth map, of sorts: Death’s Domain, with Paul Kidby’s depiction of Death’s home. It’s really more an illustration than a map, unlike the three Stephen Briggs did.
You know, when I started working on this book, I had the idea that I would assemble a complete set of all the available Discworld merchandise. I gave that idea up fairly quickly, as there’s just too much of it. Christmas cards? Badges? T-shirts? Computer games? Cut-out books?
And then there’s the Cunning Artificer, Bernard Pearson. He is a sculptor and artist who created the stamp designs in Going Postal—and who then went on to produce the actual stamps. Yes, if you’re interested in both philately and Discworld, you can collect the stamps of Ankh-Morpork, a truly astonishing variety of them, complete with various errors to make them more interesting to collectors.
He’ll also happily sell you sculptures of everything from the Fools’ Guild to one of Mr. Dibbler’s pies. Or a Tiffany Aching mirror frame, or an official Thieves’ Guild coat-hook.
His central website is at www.artificer.co.uk/. He’s also the creator of the pieces used to play the board game Thud, though game designer Trevor Truran devised the rules.155
And then there was Clarecraft, which created over 150 authorized models and other things, which are now collectors’ items.
For most multimedia phenomena, licensed merchandise is largely cheap junk, mass-produced somewhere in Asia and sold through toy stores. Discworld merchandise, on the other hand, tends to be lovingly produced by individual craftsmen. People get obsessed by this stuff!
And these are just the ones who are doing authorized work, and selling the results; who knows what else fans may have created? There are Discworld conventions. There are undoubtedly Discworld costumes out there; a group of fans in the Chicago area created and danced the Dark Morris, the other dance mentioned in Reaper Man that later became central to Wintersmith. There is a CD entitled From the Discworld, by a musician named Dave Greenslade, who wrote theme music for various elements of the series and provided words and a tune for “A Wizard’s Staff Has a Knob on the End,” one of the songs that gets mentioned a few times in the course of the series.
This isn’t the only extant version of “A Wizard’s Staff Has a Knob on the End”; in fact, there are at least three, written by various musically-inclined fans. Other fans have also, of course, written “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All,” and probably any other song Mr. Pratchett referred to that didn’t already exist.
Besides Thud, there are Discworld computer games, and a Discworld version of the strategy game Diplomacy. The Discworld card game Cripple Mr Onion has existed in our world since 1993.
In short, fans seem determined to make real as much of Discworld as they can, or to find ways to spend more time there.
That’s not unique, of course; there are plenty of people who do their best to recreate their favorite fantasies. Thousands of people in the world today speak Klingon or Elvish. Still, it takes a special sort of story to evoke this kind of loyalty; you’ll find people making replicas of items from Star Trek and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and other immensely popular epics, but not from just any ordinary novel.
Discworld isn’t an epic, though, it’s satire. And for the most part, the heroes aren’t kings or captains or princesses trying to save entire worlds; they’re just people trying to get by. Yes, they sometimes do save the entire world, but that’s not the point.
Or perhaps it is. After all, isn’t it a bit easier to identify with a tired copper or a grouchy old witch than with the pride of Starfleet, or the Heir of Isildur, or the Boy Who Lived? It’s not Rincewind’s job to save the world, but he does it anyway. (I was going to say “despite not having any fancy titles,” but he is the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography. And the Fretwork Teacher. Neither of which carries a great deal of implied nobility or a responsibility of world-saving, so far as I can see.)
All in all, Discworld is a rather different series from those others, and the fannish accoutrements available are rather different, as well. From The Lord of the Rings you can get swords and jewelry; from Discworld you can get an Unseen University scarf, or an official Thieves’ Guild coat-hook. From Star Trek we have an inve
nted alien language; from Discworld we have bawdy drinking songs.
They all have games based on them, but come on, game designers will base a game on anything. Anyone remember Burger Chef?
So we have wands and weapons from other fantasies, and we have household goods from Discworld. We have spaceship designs from Star Trek, and postage stamps from Discworld. There’s a different sort of emphasis there. It’s not on heroes, but on settings; not on grand adventure, but on everyday life.
How appropriate! After all, as I’ve said from the start, Discworld is about people and stories, not heroes and adventures.
So why does anyone think that’s worthy of going to the trouble to create or obtain the bits and pieces of such a world? It’s not particularly uplifting or inspiring.
But it’s comforting. It’s fun. Discworld is a world of stories, and what’s more, they’re old stories, familiar stories—nursery tales and Hollywood clichés and favorites from childhood, all put together, where we know they’ll all turn out right, because they always have.
The people of the Disc may complain that their world doesn’t make sense, that there’s no logic to it, but still, they all know the stories. They know million-to-one chances always come out—and so do we. It’s just a matter of making sure we’re in the right story.
Discworld is comfortable and funny and charming, like a good vacation, and readers want to bring back souvenirs. People come back from Star Wars or the War of the Ring with wartime souvenirs, weapons, and loot; people come back from Discworld with the sort of knickknack you’d pick up in a village gift shop. Nobody’s selling replicas of Sam Vimes’s sword or Granny’s broomstick, but the stamps Moist von Lipwig had printed up, a scarf to keep out the winter chill of the Ramtops—those fit.
People admire Aragorn and Frodo and Captain Kirk; they sympathize with Sam Vimes.
So Discworld attracts fans, like the other great fantasy phenomena, but they’re a rather different sort of fan.
Like those other creations, Mr. Pratchett’s Discworld has built up the sort of detailed reality that people enjoy visiting. It’s a world, not just a bunch of stage sets where the stories play out. It has details like stamps and coat-hooks. It wasn’t created all of a piece before the stories began, the way Middle Earth was, though; it has accumulated.
A good many of those details were undoubtedly originally included not as serious world-building, but as jokes—the name of Death’s horse, “one man, one vote,” and so on—but they’ve added up into something much more than a bunch of throwaway gags. One way to make people laugh is to extend a process or metaphor to the point of absurdity, following something out to its logical but ridiculous conclusion, and Mr. Pratchett has done that repeatedly. Discworld is awash in metaphors made literal and jokes carried too far. They’re ridiculous, yes, but they’re still logical—they fit together, they make sense, they’re satisfying.
Another source of humor is repetition, bringing things back in unexpected ways, so we’ve seen themes develop as things recur. We learn, eventually, that cackling is a serious issue for witches, not just a joke.
And then there are the characters. Character is the root of most of the very best comedy, and Mr. Pratchett is a master of character. Discworld is rich in wonderful characters, many of whom fall into two categories: those who fit their role perfectly, to the point that they understand it in ways we’ve never seen before, like Granny Weatherwax or Genghiz Cohen or Havelock Vetinari, and those who are unsuited to a role, but either learn it, or force the role to fit them, such as Rincewind, or Captain Carrot, or Magrat Garlick.
Sometimes all three of these combine, as when we learn the Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite from Lu-Tze the Sweeper in Thief of Time—the exaggerated wisdom of martial-arts masters is parodied by taking it to the extreme of banality, the platitudes mouthed by the most tedious and stereotypical of middle-class matrons. We learn more about it as it’s repeated, as more and more of her inane sayings are presented.
And we see Lu-Tze make it work, because he’s so much the martial arts master that he can find the true wisdom he needs even in these appalling clichés.
It all fits.
And it gives Discworld that reality that makes us want to return there over and over.
There’s an old saying, “It’s funny ’cause it’s true.” Well, Discworld is true because it’s funny. In assembling things we readers would laugh at, Mr. Pratchett has put together enough truth to bring his creation to life.
If there were just one or two books, I don’t think we’d see any fan merchandise to speak of, no reference books or maps or art books, even if it/they sold in huge numbers. There just wouldn’t be enough to base them on; there are no obsessive appendices or maps in the first couple of books, no grand plans outlined, nothing like that.
But there aren’t one or two books, there are more than thirty. Once there were half a dozen and the background had accumulated some depth, fans began to take note, and the spin-offs started to appear.
There have been other series in fantasy and science fiction that ran dozens of volumes, but most of them didn’t sell as well as Discworld, and perhaps more importantly, most series didn’t get better from one book to the next. It’s more common for the quality to deteriorate slightly, as the author runs out of ideas. Mr. Pratchett didn’t run out of ideas, but he did get better at writing about them.
And funny series? No others have lasted anywhere near as long.156 Usually the author’s jokes have all been run into the ground after three or four books, at most. As I said right at the beginning, in my first introduction, this whole world-on-a-turtle thing should’ve only been good for a couple of books, three at the outside. What’s kept Discworld going—well, there are two things, fear and surprise. . . . I mean, there are two things:
First, it’s not all one series. We’d have all been very sick of Rincewind after a dozen books if we never saw anyone else’s view of the Disc—or really, we’d have gotten tired of any of the others, too. If it had just remained parodies of other fantasy books, it wouldn’t have worked. The Disc itself is a parody of a fantasy world, but it’s not about the Disc, it’s about various people on the Disc, and a key word there is “various.” The multiple series keep everything fresh; they allow the author to run variations, rather than having to come up with something completely fresh each time—for example, having shown us the vampires in Carpe Jugulum, and introduced us to the Igors in Lancre and Uberwald, he can then show us vampires and Igors in Ankh-Morpork in subsequent books. Play with one idea with the witches, and then pit it against the Watch; try another on Rincewind, then throw it at the witches. You can get more mileage out of each invention, and generate new ideas in the process.
Second, Terry Pratchett is a fuckin’ genius. He just is. Very annoying of him. And he’s not your chortling, world-conquering sort of genius, either. He’s a very pleasant sort of genius, the kind you want to sit and listen to endlessly.
Very annoying.
So he gets to be a phenomenon.
And I don’t.
It’s so unfair.
49
The Nature of Pratchett’s Genius
IT SEEMS AS IF I need to have a chapter about this, but really, what do I know about what makes someone a literary genius? If I knew how it was done, I’d bloody well do it myself, wouldn’t I? And without having to write an entire book about Discworld first.
There’s a book out there called Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler.157 I haven’t read it, because I didn’t want to risk stealing anyone’s ideas, or worse, finding that an idea I’d come up with on my own had already been used so that I couldn’t use it without looking like I stole it. Besides, the book is a bit hard to find and fairly expensive. Also, it’s literary criticism, or purports to be, and I don’t like to think I’m doing literary criticism.158 I write for a living, which means I want to please editors and book-buyers, not critics. The two groups look for different things, and I don’t want to be dist
racted by the critics’ set.
Anyway, the book exists, and is a collection of essays about various aspects of Mr. Pratchett’s work, not all of them related to Discworld.159 The title is suggestive, though. Whoever came up with it thinks Mr. Pratchett is committing literature.
I’m not convinced. He might be. Mostly, though, I think he’s just really damn good at telling stories, which isn’t the same thing.
I also think people have been trying to figure out how to tell really good stories for a few thousand years now, and nobody’s really managed to determine exactly why some people are really good at it, and others . . . well, aren’t.
I’m not going to pretend I know what the difference is. All I know is that Terry Pratchett’s really damn good at it.
50
The Foundation on Which the Stories Stand
I’VE SAID SEVERAL TIMES NOW that the Discworld series is about stories, that that’s my grand theory about the whole thing. I think it’s time to explain that in a little more detail. Let me begin by quoting a bit from Chapter 2, “The Umpty-Umpth Element,” from The Science of Discworld II: The Globe: Discworld runs on magic, and magic is indissolubly linked to Narrative Causality, the power of story. A spell is a story about what a person wants to happen, and magic is what turns stories into reality. On Discworld, things happen because people expect them to.160
Discworld is a world constructed of stories. It’s not just a place where stories are set; it’s about stories.
It started out in The Colour of Magic as being about a specific sort of story: fantasy adventures. Discworld was constructed out of all the clichés and exaggerations of existing stories—the absurdly dirty and violent cities, the vicious and venal inhabitants of those cities, the indomitable barbarian heroes, the impossible geography, the gods and monsters and magic, the dreams and dragons. In most fantasy stories, the characters take all that for granted, and fit right in, but in The Colour of Magic we were presented with all this familiar material as seen by two people who did not take it for granted and fit in. For Twoflower the tourist, it was all new and exciting, and while Rincewind did generally take it for granted, as a wizard with no magic and a cowardly hero, he didn’t fit in very well. These two let us see the absurdity of the whole thing, and laugh at it.
The Turtle Moves! Page 16