56 Weird Tales was a pulp magazine back in the first half of the twentieth century; it lasted much longer than Unknown (see footnote 48). Like Unknown, Weird Tales was not a typical pulp, and published a lot of good stories (and as well as a lot of crap). Its particular niche was fantasy, adventure, and horror, and unlike Unknown, it was perfectly willing to wallow in the lurid and sensational. It’s best remembered today as the major outlet for the work of three authors: Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Howard was the creator of Conan of Cimmeria, the prototypical barbarian hero; Lovecraft is best remembered as the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos; and Smith authored about a hundred mordant and gloriously-overwritten short stories about wizards, demons, and the like. The three of them traded ideas back and forth freely, so that Conan might occasionally find himself battling one of Cthulhu’s kin. A great deal of modern fantasy, at least that portion that’s not aping Tolkien, emulates Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith.
Weird Tales has been revived several times, and the latest incarnation is still in operation today, but the current version is not much like the original.
57 H.P. Lovecraft’s specialty was the tale of someone discovering unspeakable horrors and going mad from the knowledge of their existence. He was fond of “non-Euclidean” architecture, elder gods, long-buried vaults containing hideous secrets, evidence of civilizations older than humanity, eldritch beings from other worlds, and the like.
58 Including me.
59 Well, the big ones, anyway, not the little swamp dragons. And we’ll have more to say on this subject in Guards! Guards!
60 Specifically, a jet airliner. Yes, fine, it’s a dreadful pun. I didn’t invent it, Mr. Pratchett did. Take it up with him.
61 If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t tell me, it’ll just make me feel old. Go look through the Yes albums in a used record shop, especially Fragile, Close to the Edge, and Yessongs, if you can find them with the original album covers and inserts.
62 One of the curious features of The Colour of Magic is that it parodies most of the major fantasy sub-genres of the day while ignoring the biggest, baddest of them all—Middle Earth and its imitators. Perhaps Mr. Pratchett felt that that had already been done.
63 At least for the moment.
64 Well, it’s supposed to contain them; at this point in the story one of the spells has escaped and is residing in Rincewind’s head.
65 Unseen University is the center of wizardry on the Discworld. The name is a parody of the Invisible College, a loose federation of seventeenth-century scientists that became the Royal Society. In its earliest mentions, Unseen University had no fixed location; a few books later it’s solidly in Ankh-Morpork, on Sator Square, where it has remained ever since.
“Sator Square,” by the way, is a pun—the Sator Square is an ancient charm, a five-by-five grid of letters:
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
It reads the same in every direction, and is ambiguous Latin that might be translated as “The sower Arepo works to hold the wheels.” It dates back to at least the first century A.D.; its exact origins and significance are obscure, but it has long been thought to have magical power, so it’s an appropriate name for a plaza next to a college of wizards.
Discworld is full of this sort of moderately obscure joke. You don’t need to get the references like this to appreciate the humor and enjoy the series, but if you do get them, they’re a nice little extra.
66 Notice that the names are changing style. In the first two books, we got personal names like Hrun, Bravd, Rincewind, and Zlorf, and place-names like Agatea and Ankh-Morpork—pure fantasy names, with no reasonable etymological explanation. Oh, a few more familiar names crept in, right from the start (such as “Hugh”), but most were just collections of phonemes. Now, though, we’re getting recognizable words, though admittedly “Drum Billet” would not look particularly at home on a roster of ordinary English names.
And Bad Ass, we will eventually be told, was named for a troublesome donkey.
67 Okay, there are still some fantasy names in there.
68 The eight orders of wizardry are mentioned several times in the first few books, and are clearly considered important, but they apparently didn’t turn out to be as useful in story construction as Mr. Pratchett had expected, as they fade away. By the time Mustrum Ridcully becomes Archchancellor in Moving Pictures, there’s no mention of them at all, nor any evidence that they ever existed.
In fact, the significance of both the number eight and the color octarine also dwindles away as the series progresses. Those were elements parodying fantasy novel conventions that ceased to be relevant as the series moved away from simple parody and into other areas.
69 The fact that Death himself was called “Mort” in The Light Fantastic is conveniently ignored.
70 There’s that pun again.
71 Which was implied in “The Lure of the Wyrm” in The Colour of Magic.
72 “Oddly” because Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would not be published until six years after Sourcery. I suppose it’s possible that J.K. Rowling drew her inspiration from Mr. Pratchett’s little yarn, but somehow that seems very unlikely. I imagine it’s a case of great minds thinking alike, or some such thing. Obnoxious journalists and clueless readers have pointed out several parallels between bits of Discworld and bits of Harry Potter’s world; see Chapter 65.
73 And who else’s opinion matters here?
74 From a March 2005 interview published in Science Fiction Weekly #449.
75 “Dog-Botherer” is also a play on “God-botherer,” a term for an officiously religious person, or British military slang for a chaplain. Mr. Pratchett is never reluctant to layer his puns.
76 Because I like the sound of it. It’s not Mr. Pratchett’s preferred term, by any means.
77 This is the first time a dwarf has appeared in the series, or even been mentioned. Hwel is not really the helmeted, bearded, axe-wielding stereotype we’ll see so much later on (mostly in the Watch series). He does mention that he’s not at all a typical dwarf.
78 Last time, I hope.
79 The names of the first two books refer to actual ancient Egyptian texts, but this third appears to be a reference to Gene Wolfe’s four-volume “Book of the New Sun.”
80 Do people still buy those books of things that are supposed to keep their kids busy without involving either parental supervision or calls from the police? I wouldn’t think they’re needed much in these days of video games and cable TV. We acquired a couple when my own children were young, such as 838 Ways to Amuse a Child, but they’ve mostly sat unread on a shelf while my daughter found new and interesting ways to restrain My Little Pony with drapery cords and a few bits of string, and my son discovered just how much damage you can do to expensive furniture with nothing but a golf tee.
81 I assume most of you can’t have missed the pun, but some of our American readers may be unaware that Jelly Babies are a popular English candy, something like Gummi Bears, and despite the similar names almost completely unlike jelly beans.
82 Not Om; that’s a different god we’ll meet later.
83 Back in The Colour of Magic, Hrun said that large dragons were extinct. This is where we learn that they aren’t dead, they just aren’t on the Disc anymore—a situation that may not be permanent.
84 Referred to obliquely in Wyrd Sisters, as I mentioned earlier. If you skipped that chapter, shame on you. You don’t even have the excuse that you’re following a particular sub-series, since Guards! Guards! is the first volume in the Watch series.
85 More of that reality leakage stuff here, I suppose—at any rate, the Tsortean War very closely resembles the Trojan War as described by Homer, though with the polish knocked off in the usual Pratchett manner.
86 Colin Smythe, Mr. Pratchett’s agent, suggests that “Astfgl” may be pronounced as a very hasty “That’s difficult.” He has
not, however, confirmed with the author that this was intentional; it’s merely his personal theory, albeit an appealing one.
87 I assume this is a reference to Samuel Goldfish, who co-founded the companies that eventually became Paramount Pictures, MGM, and the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. The Goldwyn Company (which after his departure merged with Mayer to become Goldwyn-Mayer, and then with Metro to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM) took its name from Goldfish and his two partners, the Selwyn brothers, and Goldfish liked the name “Goldwyn” so much that he legally changed his own name to match the company.
Note that it clearly wasn’t difficult to choose “Goldwyn” as the more commercially viable combination of those two names. “Selfish” just wasn’t going to cut it.
88 In our own world, the American movie industry started on Long Island, in New York, but moved fairly quickly to southern California because the sunlight was more reliable there. New York has far fewer sunny days than Los Angeles even now, and a hundred years ago L.A. had much less smog.
89 Whether she’s related to one-eyed Withel, a fellow described in The Colour of Magic as the second-greatest thief in Ankh-Morpork, who Rincewind lays out cold by punching him while holding a roll of solid gold coins, is never mentioned. The name Theda, of course, is a reference to Theda Bara, the silent film star for whom the term “vamp” was first invented. “Theda” was short for “Theodosia,” her real name; it was pure coincidence that it’s an anagram of “death.”
90 Okay, Poons is not really permanent.
91 You probably think I’m going to tell you, which makes it very tempting not to, to tell you to go look it up, but I am going to be a kind and generous soul and resist that temptation.
The Morris dance is an English folk dance with a lot of complicated traditions and garbled history behind it, obscuring its actual origins. Various English villages have their own versions, each with its own traditional tune, costume, steps, and schedule, but most commonly it takes the form of several men (always men until the 1970s, anyway, when women first began to participate) dancing in two lines facing each other, outdoors in the spring. In most villages the dancers wear white, with bells strapped to their legs and beribboned hats on their heads and various belts and other trappings, and wave either sticks or large white handkerchiefs about. Additional mummery characters such as fools, hobby-horses, and half-men-half-women (called “the Betty”) may be involved—especially a Fool, complete with a pig’s bladder on a stick, which he uses to whack dancers who he thinks are slacking off.
The Morris dance is often assumed to be an ancient fertility ritual, and treated as such, but its actual history is a hopeless tangle of myths, misunderstandings, and outright lies, overlaid with Victorian nonsense. Don’t believe anything anyone (including me) tells you about its origins.
The name apparently comes from an eighteenth-century belief that the dance is Moorish in origin. It almost certainly isn’t.
There are entire books about Morris dancing, and deservedly so, as it’s an interesting phenomenon. In England it’s just something everyone knows about, and the English are often startled to discover that nobody else has any such custom—unlike many British traditions, it failed to take root in the colonies, possibly because of the distaste of many American religions for any form of dancing whatsoever.
Of course, it may be that Morris dancing is one of the reasons that Southern Baptists and the like don’t approve of dancing, as it has a definite pagan flavor to it.
At any rate, there are American Morris dancers now, just as there are American Zen Buddhists and American dashiki-makers, but they tend to be an urban phenomenon and not much like their English forebears.
It’s actually a great deal of fun for both participants and spectators, though. It’s rather too bad it isn’t more widespread here on the western side of the Atlantic.
92 And also the other dance, the opposite of the Morris, which will turn up again much later, in Wintersmith.
93 This creature’s rather complicated life-cycle obviously owes a great conceptual debt to the late, great Avram Davidson, and his award-winning story “Or All the Sea with Oysters.”
94 A descriptive phrase from the opening page of Moving Pictures. 94 And whether there’s a difference.
95 “Temps,” it should be noted, is a versatile French word that means, among other things, the weather. “Cire” is French (or Quirmish) for “to wax.”
96 We aren’t told who’s #1, but hey, #2 tries harder. (If you don’t get the reference, you’re too young to remember Avis Car Rental’s most successful ad campaign.)
97 Named for Gytha North (1951-2006), a British fantasy fan and enthusiastic singer of Mr. Pratchett’s acquaintance. Her fondness for music is probably responsible for Nanny Ogg’s penchant for breaking into bawdy song whenever she is able to get a drink or two into her, but otherwise the resemblance seems to have been rather slight.
98 Yes, of course the pun is intentional.
99 Later on we’ll learn that he designed and built lots of things besides landscaping, from organs to plumbing.
100 “Go fer this, go fer that . . .” But you knew that, right?
101 Fine, I blew another gag, and without warning you. Sorry. But it’s really pretty essential to know that Angua’s a werewolf in several later stories.
102 I am embarrassed at how long it took me to recognize that as “bone idle.” Usually I pick up puns fairly quickly, but that one went right by me for ages.
103 Welsh for “sprout of holly”—except Pratchett prefers “bud” to “sprout.” Yes, it’s real Welsh and means what he says it does.
104 Not real Welsh. Read it backward, as three words. Or two and a half, anyway. Mr. Pratchett presumably got this trick from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who set his prose piece “Quite Early One Morning” (later expanded into a play for voices, Under Milk Wood) in a town called Llareggub. 105 We’ve seen mysterious little shops before, and will again. Quite a nuisance they can be, sometimes.
105 Unlike Lords and Ladies, there’s no warning in Soul Music that it’s a sequel and can’t stand on its own, but in fact it would be very, very hard to follow some bits if one hadn’t read Mort. A look at Moving Pictures wouldn’t hurt, either.
106 A reference to the Golden Horde, of course, but silver as in “silver-haired.”
107 Unless you count BenBella Books, who are paying me to write this whole book and not telling me what to say in it, which I think is very generous of them.
108 “Überwald” is German for “beyond the forest.” “Transylvania” is Latin for “the land beyond the forest.” This is not a coincidence. Incidentally, the umlaut in the name of the Discworld country comes and goes; technically it ought to be there, according to Uberwald’s inhabitants, but the people of Ankh-Morpork often can’t be bothered with the fiddly little thing, so usually it’s omitted. I intend to follow the example of the Ankh-Morporkians and save myself the typographical hassle of including it hereafter. Its effect on pronunciation is only discussed much later, in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
109 Yes, it’s a pun on Cheers.
110 Yes, there are some.
111 The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women is the title of a book by John Knox, first published in 1558, denouncing the existence of female monarchs.
112 Note spelling. These aren’t pixies, exactly; they’re gnomes or fairies with pictish roots, meaning they speak like Scottish hooligans, are covered in blue tattoos, and have red hair.
113 Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om Oats, in full.
114 If not more.
115 This appears to come from a word meaning “a deep spring, or source.”
116 Since there’s only one phoenix at a time in mythology, either on Earth or on the Disc, there’s no firmly-established plural. If you’d prefer “phoenixes,” write your own book; I’ll go with the Greek “phoenices.”
117 Necessary for the creation of cosmic turtles.
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118 Necessary for the creation of gods.
119 Necessary for the creation of pretty much everything, from the Discworld point of view—it’s what stories are made of.
120 It’s also mentioned that the Disc’s traditional five elements are earth, air, water, fire, and surprise. Apparently Discworld, like our own world, has both the classical short list and a much larger modern table of elements.
121 You remember Hex; that’s the magical computer equivalent introduced in Soul Music, named in Interesting Times, and last seen in Hogfather.
122 The former occupant of that post was found to be missing in The Last Continent, and never did turn up. Rincewind was chosen to fill the vacancy because that would mean he was the appropriate person to explore this hostile new universe.
He wasn’t given a choice, of course.
123 Well, except for the measures introduced in passing at the end of Jingo, when the Watch was charged with relieving traffic congestion and using the resulting fines to help finance itself. This was perhaps not the best idea the Patrician ever had, and we see some of the consequences in the early scenes of The Fifth Elephant, such as the Discworld equivalent of traffic cameras and the boot.
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