The Turtle Moves! (31 page)

I should probably mention once again at this juncture that he's written a lot of stuff besides Discworld. This book won't cover any of it. If you're looking for something about Johnny Maxwell or
Strata
or whatever, you're in the wrong book; I'm only doing Discworld. Sorry.

Okay,
one
cookbook. And yes, I know it's not all recipes.

My choice of terminology here is considered, and will seem more significant once you've read farther.

This was in response to a question at a bookstore event in Rockville, Maryland, in October 2006. Someone who admitted to not having read any of Mr. Pratchett's work but said he was sufficiently impressed by the evening's presentation that he intended to start, asked what other fantasy authors Mr. Pratchett recommended.

Being a fantasy writer myself, standing unobserved at the back of the crowd, I had this momentary wild hope that he would say , “Well, there's Lawrence Watt-Evans, of course....”

Didn't happen, alas. Instead, after some hesitation, Mr. Pratchett admitted that he no longer reads fantasy, though he then said that you can't go wrong with the classics: J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Fritz Leiber, Jr.

Thank heavens for that!

That's such a nice old saying. We'll just ignore the fact that pigs hunt truffles by smell, won't we? Sure we will. You're
all
kind, understanding, generous people. You wouldn't have bought this book if you weren't! You did buy it, right? If not, give this copy back and go get your own immediately.

Okay, maybe not a realistic example, since obviously it was
Guards! Guards!
, but you get the idea.

A word to the wise American: It's cheaper to ship from Canada than from the U.K., and most British books are available in Canada. I wish I'd picked up on that a little sooner.

If you're bright enough to look under her married name. If you aren't (and don't remember her maiden name to find the cross-reference), and just try looking under “Lady” or “Sybil,” you're screwed.

I would not put much effort into finding “Theatre of Cruelty,” if I were you. For one thing, it's on L-space at
www.Lspace.org
.

Maps, diaries, calendars, a cookbook, and so on. More about these much later.

My spelling checker keeps trying to tell me I mean “discord,” not “Discworld.” That seems appropriate, somehow.

Figuring out how to present that title was something of a challenge. The “with footnotes” part is supposed to be, well, a footnote, but when I tried treating it as one, it just looked stupid. So I went for this explanation instead.

Often in a footnote.

Yet.

Most people start with them anyway, though. I'll discuss where one
should
start in Part Six.

This is a character's name. Yes, it's ridiculous. I told you right on the first page of this book that Discworld was ridiculous. See Chapter 42,
Going Postal
, and Chapter 47,
Making Money
, for more details about Moist von Lipwig.

Well . . . seven of them will.

There's also chelonium, the stuff that star turtles like Great A'tuin are made of, and assorted others, but they're less important.

Not that there's anything
wrong
with footnotes!

Just what is Great A'tuin swimming through, anyway? You can't get much traction on hard vacuum. Ether? There's no good evidence it exists in Discworld's vicinity any more than it does here. The Disc's magical field? But that travels along with it. Interstellar hydrogen? Not enough of it.

I think we must assume that those continent-sized flippers are shoving spacetime itself. That's just the sort of thing you'd expect of the Discworld.

It's probably because of quantum.

E.g., Poul Anderson, or Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp.

E.g., C.J. Cherryh.

E.g., Barry Hughart.

And because there's an Australian beer called XXXX. See
www.xxxx.com.au/
.

It doesn't seem to show the Chalk Hills, where the Tiffany Aching stories are set, for one thing. That the map was drawn before those were written is no excuse.

A joke I hope to remember to explain later.

“Sword & Sorcery,” typified by Robert E. Howard's stories about Conan of Cimmeria or Kull of Atlantis, was the dominant form of fantasy adventure for a few years in the middle of the twentieth century. It generally involved sword-wielding “heroes” of questionable virtue battling sinister magic—evil wizards, supernatural monsters, curses on tombs, that sort of thing. It fell out of favor when J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings caught on, and most particularly when publishers realized they could make lots of money publishing cheap imitations of Tolkien, replacing the barbarian thief of sword and sorcery with the farm-boy with a destiny, and promoting the evil wizard to the status of Dark Lord.

Mostly the most sordid and foul-smelling elements. Some people have argued that Ankh-Morpork is merely a fantasy version of London, but Mr. Pratchett has denied this, saying that while it's got bits of London in it, it's got bits of
lots
of cities, and isn't based on any particular one.

Unknown
(or sometimes
Unknown Worlds
) was an American pulp magazine, published from 1939 until the wartime paper shortages killed it in 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. “Pulps” were called that because they were printed on the lowest available grade of wood-pulp paper, produced as cheaply as possible—even comic books and newspapers generally used better paper, comic books because the color printing would smear on pulp paper, newspapers because they used smaller type and had to hold up to being folded and handled more. Pulp magazines were cheap, disposable entertainment for the masses in the pre-television era, and most of what they published was forgettable crap. Modern readers often misunderstand this, since the only pulp stories anyone remembers are the exceptionally good ones, giving many people the mistaken idea that the typical pulp magazine was good fun.

The typical pulp magazine was tedious junk, on a par with the worst of present-day television, or very-low-end romance novels and TV spin-offs.
Unknown
was not typical at all, and in its brief existence it published a lot of those exceptionally good stories that people remember, mixed in with some of the tedious junk. Its particular niche was fantasy, but it aimed at a somewhat more sophisticated audience than most.

The Patrician is not named here, and is described as having several chins; later on, the Patrician will be a thin man named Havelock Vetinari. Some readers have assumed that this means this is his predecessor in
The Colour of Magic
, but the author has said otherwise in interviews. This is most probably Lord Vetinari, Mr. Pratchett says, he's just badly described.

Ankh-Morpork operates on a “One man, one vote” system. The Patrician is the one man, and has the one vote.

At this point in Discworld's development, the Agatean Empire is merely a very distant, mysterious, fabulously wealthy, dangerously advanced, and powerful civilization on the far side of the Disc. Later in the series it'll become the Discworld's analogue of Imperial China, with a slight admixture of other Asian cultures, but I don't see that here. Twoflower is an insurance salesman back home, and insurance salesmen in shorts and aloha shirts do not immediately bring ancient China to my mind. Really, in this first story he comes across as more like an American than anything else. Quite a bit more.

The iconograph doesn't have any of this stuff with lenses and chemicals that our film cameras have, nor the pixilated electronics of a digital camera; instead, it's a box containing a tiny imp who paints pictures of whatever the box is pointed at. Apparently the wizards of Ankh-Morpork found this easy to duplicate; in
The Colour of Magic
no one in Ankh-Morpork has ever seen one before, but a few volumes later they're commonplace.

The Luggage rates a chapter all to itself in Part Six, Chapter 60. It's more a character than a prop, and reappears in every Rincewind story hereafter.

Yes, Ankh-Morpork had Whore Pits at this point. They're never described in any detail, and fade out of the series rather quickly, though it's eventually mentioned in passing that certain concerned individuals have had the Whore Pits renamed the Street of Negotiable Affection. The old name does appear for one last time on the map in the front of
Night Watch
, which depicts the city's streets at least a decade before
The Colour of Magic
, so it wasn't forgotten, merely thought better of.

As I said a couple of footnotes back, he's an insurance salesman. When he tries to explain this to the fine people of Ankh-Morpork, he inadvertently introduces the concepts of arson for profit, and insurance fraud.

Oh, dear, now I've spoiled a joke, haven't I? Bad author! What was I thinking?

Well, really, it was a rather obvious one, wasn't it? But I'll try to behave myself better in the future. And if you
want
an explanation of some of the rather labored puns in
The Colour of Magic
, I'll once again direct you to check out Lspace.org on the World Wide Web.

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.

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.

Including me.

Well, the big ones, anyway, not the little swamp dragons. And we'll have more to say on this subject in
Guards! Guards!

Specifically, a jet airliner. Yes, fine, it's a dreadful pun. I didn't invent it, Mr. Pratchett did. Take it up with him.

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.

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.

At least for the moment.

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.

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.