Surely, Granny Weatherwax’s statement that sin is treating people like things reflects the author’s own deep-seated beliefs. Throughout the entirety of the Discworld, throughout all the series contained in it, we find the idea that the worst thing you can do to people is to rob them of their freedom, rob them of choice, treat them like things. Elves, vampires, stories—they all deprive people of their freedom of choice, their free will, and are therefore things that must be stopped.
The Omnian Church, the ancient religion of Djelibeybi, the various would-be rulers of Ankh-Morpork who seek to depose Lord Vetinari, perhaps even rock ‘n’ roll—they, too, are striving to control people and deprive them of their freedom.
There are, to be sure, some villains who don’t care about freedom—Carcer and Teatime, for example, simply kill people. They, too, are treating people like things, but not things they want to control, merely things they want out of the way. Some of the nobles who employ assassins take a similar, if less extreme, attitude.
The non-human villains, though, the villains who exist as species rather than individuals, who reappear in multiple stories, are almost all parasites seeking control. The Auditors are refreshingly different in that all they want to do is wipe out all life in the universe.
Of course, they want to wipe out humanity because it’s messy; they don’t like free will, independence, or creativity either. It’s just that rather than suppress freedom, they’d prefer to exterminate people entirely.
Clearly, this is an issue Mr. Pratchett feels strongly about—that people must have the right to go on living their own potty little lives however they please. That’s most explicit in some of Sam Vimes’s musings, but it’s all through the series. Carrot doesn’t claim his birthright because if he did, he would be intruding on that right—he knows that people would obey him, they would live out the story of the returning king instead of getting on with their own affairs, and he won’t have it. That is what makes Carrot a real hero—that he wants people to be free, as far as they can be, even when they themselves would just as soon put him in charge.
All through the series, the villains are the people, ideas, stories, beings, creatures, or entities trying to tell people how to live their lives, and the heroes are the people who insist they choose for themselves.
That may seem obvious, but you know something? It’s not. Plenty of authors are happy to write heroes who tell people what to do, “for their own good.” Plenty of authors would agree with Lily Weatherwax that she’s the good sister, the one making the stories come out right. Plenty of authors would have wanted our side to win the wars in Jingo and Monstrous Regiment, instead of just ending them. Plenty of authors would have put Carrot on the throne of Ankh-Morpork.
This purity of motive, this ferocious belief in the value of human freedom, is one of the things that makes Terry Pratchett as enjoyable a writer as he is. Many people pay lip service to the importance of freedom; Mr. Pratchett obviously believes it.
62
Überwald: Creatures of the Night (Light)
SO WE HAVE THE VILLAINS. And we have the monsters. And these two sets overlap, but they do not coincide.
Let us consider the vast land of Uberwald, home to vampires, werewolves, and other monsters. The entire place is a parody of the Hollywood conception of Transylvania, with its forests and castles and monsters and peasants.178 There’s lots of good comic material there to play with.
It’s also a good source of villains—like the vampires in Carpe Jugulum, and the werewolves in The Fifth Elephant. What I find interesting, though, is that so many of the monsters are not villains.
Igor, for example, is never a villain. At most he’s a villain’s servant, and even then he may well turn on his master if he feels that said master isn’t going about his role properly. In Carpe Jugulum, it’s Igor who revives the old Count; the young Count isn’t following the rules—isn’t following the story. Igor (any Igor181) is a great believer in tradition, which is another way of saying he wants people to play out their storybook roles. He knows where he fits in the stories, and generally he likes it there.
As Carpe Jugulum explains at some length, even the traditional vampires don’t need to be villains; they exist in balance with their environment, in a situation where everyone understands the rules and abides by them.
And the non-traditional vampires—well, they go in two directions. There are the villainous predators of Carpe Jugulum who have struggled to overcome what they saw as weaknesses, so that they can dominate their surroundings rather than fit into them comfortably, but there are also the Black Ribboners, the Reformed Vampires, and the Uberwald League of Temperance. These are vampires who have sworn off drinking blood, substituting other addictions for their natural one, in order to live among humans without getting a stake through the heart. We see several of them in the course of the stories; their official motto is “Not one drop!,” and their unofficial motto is “Don’t be a sucker.”
Black Ribboners may be villains, but they’re just as likely to be heroic. Most are just people, like iconographer Otto Chriek, trying to live their own lives. They appear almost pathetic in their attempts to fit in to human society—but Sam Vimes, in Thud!, suspects this may be an act, a way to allay suspicion, and he’s probably right. (Vimes usually is.)
Most Black Ribboners seem to wind up in Ankh-Morpork, rather than Uberwald; after all, in Uberwald traditional vampires are tolerated, so why bother? In Ankh-Morpork, though, the black ribbon may be necessary to survival.
Still, they’re monsters from Uberwald who have given up monstrous behavior in order to find a place in civilized society.
Some werewolves have done the same, though they don’t wear black ribbons and advertise what they are; Constable Angua is the obvious example.
Vampires, werewolves, Igors—all are outwardly monsters, but Mr. Pratchett has chosen not to settle for that. They all have the option of breaking out of their traditional roles; their physical nature does not determine their destiny. This is rather a contrast to any number of Tolkien’s imitators who have given us orcs or the equivalent who are evil simply because they’re orcs; the possibility of a good orc is never even considered.
But it is in the Discworld stories.
And Uberwald, a land that at first glance would appear to be nightmarish, doesn’t look quite so bad as a result. The apparent horrors are not really so very horrible.
Except, of course, when they are, like the werewolves in The Fifth Elephant.
Black Ribboners are more funny than fearsome; likewise the traditionalists like Igor and the old Count in Carpe Jugulum, though they retain a little more of the old menace. But the modern vampires in Carpe Jugulum and the murderous werewolves of The Fifth Elephant manage to be genuinely scary, all the same. It’s all in the attitude.
There’s undoubtedly a lesson in that, but I’ll let you decide for yourself what it is.
63
Reality Leakage and the Physics of Magic
ALL THROUGH THE SERIES, right from the first volume, there have been connections between the Disc and our own world. In early volumes, these were explained as the result of reality being very thin on the Disc, so that ideas could seep through from other, more real places, but that seems to have faded somewhat as an explanation, and The Science of Discworld instead presented us with an explicit connection between Discworld and “Roundworld.”
The connection is indisputable, though, from Rincewind and Twoflower falling onto that other plane179 in The Colour of Magic, to poor Hwel dreaming a mix of Shakespeare and early twentieth-century film comedy in Wyrd Sisters, to movies getting loose in Holy Wood in Moving Pictures, rock ‘n’ roll arriving on the Disc as Music With Rocks In in Soul Music, to the marching songs and Maledict’s Vietnam flashbacks (flashsidewayses?) in Monstrous Regiment, and of course, to the events of the three Science of Discworld books.
What I find interesting about it is that the Disc started out as a collection of all the clichés and landscape
s from fantasy novels, gathered together for purposes of parody, but has gradually changed, so that now it’s more nearly a collection of clichés and landscapes from our world, gathered together for purposes of satire. There’s no sharp break, but more and more of our reality seems to have leaked through. In The Colour of Magic, Ankh-Morpork is pretty clearly medieval; by Going Postal, its citizens wear neckties and are more concerned with corporate finance than feudal combat.
Mr. Pratchett has said that he knows the Disc is a temporal hodge-podge, and that each element is modeled on the Roundworld era that seems most appropriate for that aspect of his creation—thus ancient, medieval, Victorian, and modern bits jostle up against each other, and Ankh-Morpork’s grand nineteenth-century Opera House is next door to an Elizabethan theater, The Dysc, realism or economic logic be damned. Some things remain consistently pre-modern, so there are no internal combustion engines,180 but that doesn’t mean a crashing coach can’t go up in a fiery explosion if that’s what narrative necessity requires. It’s all in service of the stories.
It’s all built of narrativium.
Other things have changed over the course of the series, as well. It’s been many a volume since we got descriptions of light, slowed by the Disc’s magical field, spilling slowly across the landscape—when the subject came up in Thief of Time, it was only as a classroom lesson, not atmospheric narrative. Modern magic no longer tends to the coruscating light-shows described in Sourcery; instead the magically enhanced coach in Thud! is smooth and silent in operation. The number eight still has magical significance, going by the chapter numbering in Going Postal, but it doesn’t seem to have the power it did in “The Sending of Eight”—and in Making Money there isn’t even the altered chapter numbering. The color octarine and the metal octiron don’t get the attention they used to.
In fact, magic has generally gotten less obtrusive, the better to comment on our own world and history. Sourcery was awash in pyrotechnics; in Monstrous Regiment there’s nary a wizard or witch to be seen.
One reason I didn’t really like the Devices introduced in Thud! was that they seem to be a sort of replacement for magic; they appear to be relics of an ancient lost technology. I’d prefer to see real magic remain prominent. That may just be me, though.
At any rate, the nature of the Disc’s society has changed over the course of the series. It could be put down to the author’s tastes and interests changing, or to the meddling of the History Monks, but I have a controversial theory of my own to propose: What if narrativium is unstable? What if the nature of Discworld has been changing as the narrativium that holds it together has decayed into different isotopes?
Could be an interesting thing for some over-ambitious student at Unseen University to investigate.
64
Pratchett’s Place in the Pantheon
THERE ARE STILL OTHER MINOR SUBJECTS I could probably address, but really, I’d be getting into mere trivia—things like Willikins’s background, the narrative function of cabbages, and so on. I’m not going to do that because, frankly, it would be silly.181
There are larger issues to be addressed, as well—someone could probably get a pretty good doctoral thesis out of class issues in Ankh-Morpork, especially regarding Sam Vimes, for example. I’m not going to tackle that one for three reasons:
I’m an American, Mr. Pratchett is English, and the two nationalities have drastically different attitudes regarding social class, often to the point of mutual incomprehensibility,182 so I’m not qualified. Someone British should do it.
I’m not interested in obtaining a doctorate; hell, I’m a college dropout, never finished my bachelor’s.
It’d be a whole lot of work that no one would be paying me to do.
(And a possible fourth reason is that it wouldn’t be funny.)183
So I won’t be doing anything that ambitious, and I think I’ve inflicted enough trivia on you fine, patient readers, so there’s just one more thing I want to discuss to wrap up this book, and that’s how Terry Pratchett is perceived by his readers.
Terry Pratchett is the second-most-successful living fantasy author in Britain, behind J.K. Rowling. Not everyone sees him that way, though.
There are those who argue that he doesn’t really write fantasy, since it’s (a) funny, and (b) satire.184 Some people have a very narrow view of fantasy, obviously; Mr. Pratchett certainly thinks he writes fantasy.
There are those who argue that he’s not second to J.K. Rowling, because she doesn’t write fantasy. Apparently she once said she didn’t think of herself as writing fantasy, to which Mr. Pratchett responded, “I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?”185
Some people have strange ideas of what qualifies as “fantasy.” So just to make sure we don’t have that problem here, as far as I’m concerned, anything with wizards and dragons is fantasy, and I’m not interested in arguing about it. Trolls, flying broomsticks—fantasy. So Discworld is definitely, undeniably fantasy. So’s Harry Potter, whatever his creator may think.
But neither Pratchett nor Rowling reads fantasy these days. Mr. Pratchett used to—he’s spoken highly of The Wind in the Willows, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Fritz Leiber, Jr.—but no longer keeps up with the field, in part to avoid being accused of plagiarism.
There’s this idea in many literary circles that literature is a sort of giant, very slow conversation among authors, that every book comments on earlier books that the author has read186; there’s something to this in many cases, though it’s nowhere near as universal as many English lit professors would have you believe. In some cases, it’s fairly obvious that an author was responding to what had gone before in his genre—in science fiction, for example,187 it’s clear that Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream was a comment on much of the old pulp SF he had read, and that Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero was a similar reaction. Many fans believe that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was written as a deliberate reply to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.188
But if someone doesn’t read in the genre he writes in, he can’t very well hold up his end of this “conversation,” can he?
Well, yes, he still can, after a fashion, by not limiting himself to the one genre. Or to books. The earliest Discworld books are indeed a part of the fantasy-novel conversation, responding to Leiber and McCaffrey and the Weird Tales gang, but later on it’s obvious that while Discworld is still being used to respond to other stories, they aren’t fantasy novels, but movies, fairy tales, history, Shakespeare’s plays, current events, etc.
It’s still fantasy, but it’s not necessarily what one might call category fantasy.189 It’s part of the larger conversation of all popular culture, rather than just that bunch sitting in the corner talking about Tolkien and Howard. Terry Pratchett is the guy at the party with something clever to say about everything, whether it’s music or movies or politics or whatever comes to hand, and not just his own specialty.
That may be a part of why it’s so much more popular than the average fantasy novel—it’s commenting on stuff everyone knows, not just the stuff fantasy readers are familiar with.
That doesn’t make Terry Pratchett an outsider, though. He’s been active in the science fiction/fantasy community since childhood, and he still is, attending conventions (and not just Discworld conventions), participating in the online fantasy community, and so on. He may not read much in the field anymore, but he certainly hasn’t cut his ties to it. He’s actively defended the genre in the press. Fantasy fans are proud to claim him as their own.
But there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Discworld readers who don’t consider themselves fantasy fans, and who read no fantasy except Discworld.190 His appeal is broader than that of the genre he works in—and fantasy isn’t exactly an unpopular genre.
Must be nice.
There have been efforts in
the press to start a feud between Pratchett and Rowling—after all, they’re #2 and #1 in their field, surely they must be rivals! There have also been polls asking fans to choose between Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. Journalists have accused Pratchett of swiping Ponder Stibbons’s appearance from Harry Potter, ignoring the detail that the first portrait of Stibbons appeared a year before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone saw print. They have suggested that Rowling has stolen ideas from Pratchett, or that Pratchett has stolen things from Rowling.
This is stupid.
Writing isn’t a competitive exercise, and generally speaking, names and concepts don’t belong to anyone. If Rowling and Pratchett have used similar ideas, it doesn’t mean either one stole from the other, only that they drew on the same sources in our shared culture. No one has to choose between Rowling and Pratchett; we can read them both. There’s no need for a loser; they can both win. The pantheon of modern fantasy writers isn’t monotheistic; there’s plenty of room for all the gods you want to put in it. Sit J.K. Rowling on the throne of Zeus, and Mr. Pratchett can still take the role of Apollo, while Stephen King rules Hades. There’s still room for nine more Olympians, and scores of titans, demigods, and the like. . . .
That metaphor’s getting a bit out of hand, isn’t it? Sorry.191
At any rate, to sum up—Terry Pratchett’s place in the fantasy pantheon is assured, in part because he’s not staying securely within the usual genre boundaries. His stories have a broader appeal than most fantasy because even though they’re full of wizards and dragons and trolls and witches, that’s not what they’re about.
The Turtle Moves! Page 21