But in the Ankh-Morpork series, things generally don’t go back, and no one really expects them to. It’s not just the big advances like newspapers or clacks, either; no one really expects the dwarfs and trolls and vampires to go back to Uberwald, or wherever they came from. Golems become a part of the city’s every day life. Things change, and people adapt to the changes.
That’s the science fiction model, rather than fantasy. In science fiction stories, something comes along—alien invaders, atomic war, time travel, teleportation, death rays, matter duplicators, flying cars, whatever—and the world changes to accommodate it, and Our Heroes are the ones trying to make sure that accommodation’s a good one. No one ever manages to put the genie back in the bottle; the aliens may be defeated, but that doesn’t bring back the Good Old Days. The world has been changed forever.
And that’s what usually happens in Ankh-Morpork. Oh, not always—Victor and his friends did manage to get the movie genie back in the bottle, so to speak, and the fad for Music With Rocks In passes—but usually. The city absorbs the changes, makes them its own, and goes on, not quite the same as before. It’s the science fiction mindset, rather than the fantasy one, despite the wizards and dragons and trolls.
I find that fascinating.
58
Tiffany Aching: Growing Up on the Chalk
THE EXACT DIFFERENCE BETWEEN children’s stories and stories for adults isn’t really very clear. Some people seem to think that all fantasy is aimed at children, since after all, sensible grown-ups don’t want to read about all that silly magic stuff; in fact, in Britain there are special editions of several of the Discworld novels with “serious” covers so that readers who are embarrassed to be seen with that childish fantasy stuff can look as if they’re reading something important and grown-up while they enjoy that childish fantasy stuff.
And it’s not as if children’s books these days are written with simpler language, or with simplified morals—modern kids aren’t very fond of being condescended to, and that sort of “good for you” children’s book, if it gets published at all, generally sells like crap.
Nor is it a lack of sex, as plenty of adult novels (including most of the Discworld books) don’t contain any significant amount of sex, nor is it a lack of violence, as children’s stories have always been chock-full of beheadings, witch-burnings, man-eating ogres, and whatnot.
Nor are children’s books necessarily shorter, as J.K. Rowling170 has demonstrated more than decisively.
One wonders, then, exactly what the difference might be between an “adult” Discworld book and a “children’s” Discworld book.
Mostly, it seems to be the age of the protagonist.
Some might argue, I suppose, that this would make Equal Rites a children’s book, since Eskarina Smith is a child, but since the actual protagonist of the book is probably Granny Weatherwax, who is anything but, I reject that argument. I know childishness when I see it. So there. Nyah-nyah.
The other key ingredient is marketing—if it’s labeled a children’s book, then it is one. Some publishers have used this very cleverly, publishing the exact same book with two different covers, one labeling it as for adults, one as for children. This has often resulted in lots of additional book sales. (See what I said above about the “serious cover” Discworld books.)
At any rate, Mr. Pratchett decided some time back to get into the children’s market, and he wrote The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, then followed it up with the Tiffany Aching series.
Maurice wasn’t really all that traditional a children’s book, since Maurice and the rats are adults, and it’s a pretty dark story. Tiffany Aching’s story, on the other hand, fits right into one of the standard children’s story niches: a girl finding her path to adulthood.
In The Wee Free Men, she realizes she’s going to be a witch, and eventually take Granny Aching’s place as the witch of the Chalk. She moves from the relative carelessness of childhood to responsibility, saving her brother from the Queen.
In A Hat Full of Sky, she learns to be a witch, and hits adolescence and peer pressure in the process.
In Wintersmith, she comes of age, facing young womanhood in her relationship with the Wintersmith.
Where Discworld stories usually involve a subversion of traditional stories, though, the Tiffany Aching stories pretty much follow the old stories as they are, without parody, and with very little satire. Saving her brother from the fairies is a classic fairy-tale plot, and if this were an adult Discworld novel I’d expect to see some twist on it—a “Ransom of Red Chief”171 story where the Queen is desperate to get rid of Wentworth, perhaps. Instead, the author plays it straight. Tiffany faces down the Queen’s magic with the magic of her grandmother’s stories in a fashion I find reminiscent of nineteenth-century authors like George MacDonald.172
These are classic coming-of-age stories, rather than satire, that just happen to be set on the Disc.
One can see how Mr. Pratchett might consider these a change of pace. One can also see why he created a new part of the Disc, the Chalk, as the setting—he presumably wanted somewhere that didn’t have the accumulated satirical baggage of Lancre or Ankh-Morpork. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was set in Uberwald, and at first glance it might seem as if Tiffany Aching could have been set in Lancre or the Sto Plains—in fact, Mr. Pratchett has mentioned that when he first started developing the story it was set in Lancre—but creating a new place avoided any concerns about continuity, any assumptions readers might have made.
Good stuff.
And that completes my list of series. But I have some more general comments about various aspects of Discworld that I’d still like to make before wrapping things up—mostly just little stuff that didn’t really fit in elsewhere, about various components of the series as a whole.
PART SIX
Yet More Comments
59
The Background Characters: We’re All Mad Here
AS I SAID BACK IN CHAPTER 48, if you’re creating a world, you need details. If you only provide the heroes and villains, the big events and important places, you don’t have a world, you have a stage set.
Terry Pratchett has very definitely created a world, not a stage set. One of the great charms of Discworld is all the eccentric little background details.
J.R.R. Tolkien created the world of Middle Earth by inventing entire languages and elaborate genealogies, and working out detailed histories and mythology. Mr. Pratchett hasn’t done any of that—Discworld’s history is riddled with inconsistencies, its human languages are all borrowed from Europe (though Dwarfish and Troll do appear to be inventions), and its mythology is an absurd hodge-podge.
What he has done, though, is to provide the sort of little details that sticks long after one has forgotten all the lists of kings and dates and explorers from history class. Your average student doesn’t remember Caligula’s real name,173 but he remembers that ol’ Bootsie174 made his horse a senator.
That sort of colorful character and telling detail helps to bring history alive—even if it’s invented history. Thus people like Bloody Stupid Johnson, Leonard of Quirm, and General Tacticus make Discworld seem more real.
They’re also funny.
They’re all exaggerations of real-world figures, of course. General Tacticus is every great general and military philosopher rolled into one, from Julius Caesar and Sun Tzu to George S. Patton and General Giap. Like all of them, and like Sergeant Jackrum in Monstrous Regiment, he’s utterly pragmatic—he doesn’t write about glory or conquest or martial spirit, but about how to win. His name is reminiscent of Tacitus, the Roman historian, but his reported actions and opinions are much more in the tradition of Sun Tzu, who said, “. . . to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
Leonard of Quirm is not just Leonardo da Vinci, but every well-meaning, easily-distracted inventor who failed to real
ize just how good human beings are at weaponizing things, and how willing we are to think the unthinkable.
Bloody Stupid Johnson is every artist, inventor, or architect who ever left people saying, “What was he thinking?” Though (this may just be me) I tend to see him as a sort of Inigo Jones gone bad.
People like these give Discworld much of its flavor. They’re also handy plot devices; if a character needs a bit of strategic advice, reading Tacticus can provide it; if the Patrician needs a mechanism for some specific purpose, Leonard can devise it; and any time the plot requires some diabolical creation that no sane person would ever have built, one of Bloody Stupid Johnson’s designs will turn up.
Notice, though, that they aren’t lead characters. Tacticus and Johnson are apparently long dead; Leonard is Vetinari’s captive and happy to remain so. None of them would work as a protagonist; Tacticus would be far too efficient to be entertaining, Johnson would be far too ineffective to survive a typical adventure, and Leonard far too scatterbrained to work his way unguided through a plot. The closest any of them comes to actually playing hero is Leonard’s role in The Last Hero, where he’s very much under Vetinari’s supervision.
Besides these three, an entire cast of lesser characters has accumulated over time, people who are entertaining and provide humorous subplots, but who don’t generally contribute much to the central storylines. Mrs. Cake, the medium verging on small, is one, as are several of her undead lodgers. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and his numerous counterparts are another recurring pleasure.
All of these, and others, are exaggerated types; they each sum up a category the real world has in abundance. Tacticus is the Great General, Johnson is the Inept Designer, Leonard the Careless Inventor; Mrs. Cake is every busybody, Dibbler every salesman. Foul Ole Ron is not just any homeless guy, he’s the quintessential street person.
They’re all slightly mad. That’s one reason they don’t play lead roles.
They’re also a stock company. When Mr. Pratchett needs a military genius he doesn’t invent a new one, he just uses Tacticus. When he needs a working invention, it’s Leonard’s; when he needs a failed one, it’s Johnson’s. They’ve become shorthand, letting the reader know what to expect. In Hogfather, if the Archchancellor’s bathroom had been designed by Leonard of Quirm, we would have expected it to be quirky but quite marvelous; because it was instead designed by Johnson, though, we know it’s going to be a disaster, and part of the fun is the anticipation of just how it’s all going to go wrong when Ridcully insists on using it anyway.
Likewise, we know that whatever Dibbler is selling is something we don’t really want.
Of course, some of the recurring characters aren’t just simple exaggerations. The Librarian, who appears in more stories than anyone but Death, isn’t any mere stereotype; he’s a real character, with his own personality . He does come with some running gags built in, though—if anyone calls him a monkey, for example, we know what to expect.
And part of Gaspode’s charm, at least for me, is that we don’t know what to expect. He’s always true to his doggy nature, but just how that will play out can be surprising.
This accumulation of supporting characters and bit players gives Discworld a great deal of apparent depth and adds a lot to the fun, but you know, if you look at it logically, they aren’t realistic at all. In the real world, people who study military strategy don’t just quote Sun Tzu, they’ll quote Caesar and Clausewitz and Napoleon. Great inventions weren’t all thought up by da Vinci or Edison; Bell and Westinghouse and Nobel and Watt and a thousand others were responsible, as well. We don’t have anyone as dominant in any field as Tacticus or Leonard or Dibbler. They’re shorthand, not realistic—but they still seem to add to Discworld’s reality.
Something funny about human perception there, I think.
At any rate, realistic or not, they add a lot of fun to Discworld. They save Mr. Pratchett the trouble of inventing dozens of new minor characters every time; he just re-uses the old ones. Which saves us, the readers, the trouble of learning a whole new cast every time, and is often funny, as well.
It’s a win-win situation.
60
The Luggage: When Personal Furnishings Go Bad
THERE’S ONE SUPPORTING CHARACTER I didn’t mention in the last chapter because I wanted to give it a chapter all its own.175 When you ask a Discworld fan to name some of his favorite characters, you may get some of the series protagonists—Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, Sam Vimes—and you may get some of the recurring supporting cast, such as Lord Vetinari or the Librarian.
But you’ll also probably get the Luggage.
How, you might wonder (if you haven’t read any Rincewind stories), does a suitcase get to be a beloved character? Obviously, this is no ordinary valise.
It is, in fact, a wooden trunk made of sapient pearwood,176 a rare and magical material found only in the Agatean Empire. It has a body, a lid, brass fittings, and hundreds of little legs. (Artists’ depictions invariably settle for mere dozens. No exact count is ever given.) It does not have a face, yet people generally have no trouble reading its expression, or being aware that it’s watching them. It cannot speak, but can generally make itself understood. It’s impossibly faithful to its owner and will follow him literally anywhere, even if that means traveling unguided through space, time, or other universes. It seems to be almost indestructible; certainly, no one has ever managed to harm it in any of its appearances. It’s been known to dispose of entire roomfuls of heavily-armed opponents without suffering any visible damage.
It holds whatever it’s convenient for its master for it to hold—gold, clean underwear, or various other things, or even nothing at all. Enemies who fall into it (or are swallowed) are never seen again, while its master or his friends can safely shelter in it when necessary.
It’s usually content to sit quietly where it’s been put, but it does have a life of its own; in Interesting Times it went off to court a mate and sire (we presume) offspring, before faithfully returning to Rincewind’s side. It follows Rincewind wherever he goes, whether that’s the beginning of time, another reality entirely, or into Hell itself—but it doesn’t like making that much of an effort; it plainly resents having to chase across the universe after its owner, and can get very cranky with anyone who gets in its way.
You wouldn’t like it when it’s cranky.
The Luggage is one of the great fantasy creations of the twentieth century. While the Rincewind stories are in many ways among the weakest of the tales told about Discworld, the Luggage consistently provides them with bright spots.
I didn’t discuss it much in earlier chapters because it’s never central to the story, it’s always just a background feature, but I really didn’t feel it would be right to finish up this book without devoting a little time to it. It’s a vicious homicidal monster that sometimes frightens even the owner it’s defending. It’s killed dozens of men, it’s entirely possible that it’s destroyed entire civilizations, it never does anything especially new or original, yet it still somehow comes across as (a) funny, and (b) almost loveable.
How the heck does Mr. Pratchett do that?
61
The Villains: Elves, Auditors, and Things
I’VE DISCUSSED THE HEROES of the Disc in moderate detail; now it’s time to consider the villains.
In the first two books there were no grand villains, just various people and monsters who wanted to kill Rincewind and Twoflower simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or had said the wrong thing, or had something the would-be killer wanted, such as money.
In several books immediately thereafter, though, the closest there were to villains were the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions. These were never all that well defined, which is hardly surprising, since they aren’t entirely real and for the most part they’re indescribably hideous. We do know they’re prone to tentacles, claws, fangs, eyestalks, and that sort of thing, but unlike some authors, when Mr. Pratchett say
s they’re indescribable, he means it.
Their motivation is fairly straightforward—they want to move to a better address, and the Disc qualifies. If this means removing the present occupants, that’s not a problem.
These were a pretty good menace, and they served as a general all-purpose danger several times, but after a while they got rather dull. We’d seen them too many times, and seen them defeated too many times, to really find them a serious threat anymore. “Oh, yes,” we said, “unspeakable eldritch horrors from beyond space and time. Ho, hum. Tentacles, ichor, loathsome abominations, yadda yadda yadda. Seen it. Wonder what’s for lunch?”
And it would seem that the author got bored with them, too, as we haven’t seen them in quite some time now. Nary a mention in recent books.
But we’ve had other recurring villains. The elves introduced in Lords and Ladies return in more or less the same form in The Wee Free Men, and in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe. The Auditors of Reality, first seen in Reaper Man, return in Hogfather, Thief of Time, and The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch. Vampires177 are only the featured villains in Carpe Jugulum, where the witches of Lancre deal with them, but they cause trouble for the Watch on occasion, as well.
Stories and ideas also show up as “villains” several times, but not the same stories and ideas, so I don’t count those as recurring villains, exactly.
There’s an interesting thing about these villains: Most of them are parasites. The elves are extradimensional parasites that prey on humans. Vampires are obviously parasites—they suck blood, for heaven’s sake! You can’t get much more parasitic than that.
The Things from the Dungeon Dimensions could be considered parasites; they want to take the human world for themselves, and they sometimes take their appearance from human minds.
The shopping-mall creatures in Reaper Man are explicitly parasites that prey on cities. The idea of movies that gets loose in Holy Wood is a parasite. The stories Lily Weatherwax uses in Witches Abroad are parasitic. The hiver in A Hat Full of Sky is a parasite. The gonne is a parasite, of sorts. It could be argued that the gods, as seen in Small Gods and Wintersmith and elsewhere, are parasites dependent on human belief. And in every case, these are not parasites that simply kill their hosts, but beings that steal human freedom.
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