The Turtle Moves! (21 page)

Beyond that—I don't know. As of October 2006, Mr. Pratchett said he didn't, either, though he had a few ideas forming. The story goes on.

S
O THAT'S THE SERIES TO DATE. It started out as clever but fairly simple parodies of fantasy novels, but grew and changed, gradually shifting from parody to satire, and gradually turning its focus from fantasy to the real world, growing darker in the process. It's still changing—Moist von Lipwig has become a series, for example.

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 invented 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.