The Turtle Moves!

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I
T'S TOTALLY RIDICULOUS, you know. Discworld, I mean. The whole thing.

The idea of a flat world carried through space by four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic turtle is absurd to begin with, but sure, I suppose you could get away with using it in one novel. Maybe two. Three if you stretched. But dozens of best-selling novels and an assortment of spin-offs?

It's ridiculous, I tell you!

I mean, really, how does Terry Pratchett
^™
1
sell millions of books with such a silly premise? Most of us fantasy writers struggle to get by with our carefully thought-out worlds of quests and heroes and Dark Lords and so on, getting maybe a couple of trilogies out of a world, and he throws together this completely absurd hodge-podge and merrily turns out
scores
of books! Good ones, too.

Just because the Discworld books are wonderfully written and hysterically funny and humane and insightful and all that, that doesn't mean he should be able to do this! I mean,
I
haven't managed to do it—how did he?

Well, that's the question, innit?

I decided that the only thing to do, when confronted with such an obvious absurdity, was to go through the entire series carefully, and figure out just exactly what he's doing.

You may be asking, if I think the whole thing is ridiculous, why I would want to waste my time on such a project. Well, you did see that bit above about him selling millions of books, right? If he can do it, and I can figure out how he did it, then maybe
I
can do it, too!

Oh, I know, you probably think I could try finding a completely original way of writing my own series of brilliant, insightful, and funny fantasy novels, the way Mr. Pratchett did, instead of copying someone else, right? After all, who'd want a cheap imitation when the real thing's available? But it's not like that's
easy
; I wouldn't have the first idea where to begin.

Ideally, I'd like to find some nice, simple secret, some single ingredient that I could swipe, without everyone realizing I'd stolen it—but what would it be? A bizarre setting, perhaps? Would that be enough?

I could invent a square world instead of a disc. Or an elephant carrying four turtles—but that's hardly got the same sort of appeal; the poor turtles would be forever slipping off, which would make for a very bumpy sort of world.

Or I could go some other route entirely, perhaps with, oh, a hexagonal world carried through space by six gigantic pterodactyls. . . .

But I know that would be dismissed as derivative. Never mind that Pratchett hasn't got a single cosmic pterodactyl anywhere in sight, you can just bet that some troublemaker would say I used pterodactyls as a play on “Terry Dactyls,” or some such, and come up with some incredibly strained way to make “Dactyl” a pun on “Pratchett.”
²

No, a bizarre setting obviously isn't enough. All that would do is get me labeled a copycat. Critics love to say fantasy is derivative.

Oh, I suppose it's not quite as bad as the old days, back when you couldn't write fantasy, funny or otherwise, without being accused of imitating J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. Back then, if your hero had a sword and knew how to use it, you were obviously imitating Conan of Cimmeria, and if he didn't, you were clearly aping Tolkien's hobbits.
^3
4

Nowadays, as long as you stay away from schoolboy wizards and don't go trying to be funny, you can write fantasy without being accused of imitating anyone.

And lots of people do just that. The shelves are full of fantasy novels about quests and heroes and magic. And then here's Mr. Pratchett, writing fantasy novels about
people
.

That's what he does, you know. He writes about people. Not great and noble heroes, who can be uncomfortable to have around for too long, nor about grand adventures, which get tiresome, but about people who act like human beings.
⁵
That's part of what's kept him going so long—people don't get tired of reading about people as quickly as they get tired of reading about stereotypes.

But that can't be enough. Other writers do that. Shucks,
I
try to do that. There's got to be more.

So I sat down to figure out what it was.

And if I was going to do all that research anyway, hey, why not write it up as a book and make a little money off it?

So that's what I'm doing.

Of course, having decided that, I had to decide what
kind
of book I was going to write. I didn't want to get all scholarly—that would take too much effort, given that I'm not actually a scholar, and besides, publishers like those best when they're written by professors, and I'm not one.
⁶
Besides, while they're a high-status sort of thing to do, scholarly books generally don't make very much money.

You know what makes money? Scandal. Exposés. So I thought about writing a vicious exposé about poor Mr. Pratchett, pointing out everything that's wrong with the Discworld novels
⁷
—how they're horrible sinful evil books that corrupt the youth of the world—and explaining what a rotten person he is, but alas, I can't do that, because in fact there
isn't
anything very wrong with them, other than the fact that
I
didn't write them, I've seen no evidence that they've ever corrupted anyone, and Mr. Pratchett is, by all accounts, a very nice man, though he did
look a bit annoyed at me once when I interrupted his conversation to get him to sign a book.
⁸

I could lie, of course. I could just make up all sorts of terrible things—after all, I'm a professional fiction writer, I tell lies for a living—but then I might run afoul of all those nasty laws about libel. Lawyers can be so very awkward about these things. And I have an aversion to lawyers, in any case. It's probably an allergy or something.

So a sensational tell-all book was out; I had to resign myself to not writing a bestseller.

The next possibility was to write an obsessive trivia book, giving away all the endings and explaining all the jokes and generally trying to ruin everyone's fun.

Unfortunately, even
that
won't really work, because other people have already gone to great lengths to explain most of the jokes and references,
⁹
and to cite the sources of various things, and it just wouldn't be
fair
of me to duplicate their work. Or to steal it.
¹⁰
Instead I'll point you at the magnificent resource various obsessive Pratchett fans have assembled online at
www.Lspace.org
, in particular the part labeled “Annotations,” and you can go read up on all the references and jokes yourself and save me the trouble and embarrassment of stealing them, getting accused of plagiarism, and having my life ruined. (I told you I have an aversion to lawyers, right?)