The Turtle Moves! (5 page)

And that last novella, “Close to the Edge,” parodies the Yes album covers Roger Dean was famed for in the 1970s .
⁶¹

Okay, well, perhaps not. Though honestly, it does seem to, with all those strange craft falling off the edge of the world and all, and having the same title as one of Yes's early albums.

Really, it's an assortment of more fantasy clichés, but this time without an obvious specific source—heroes doomed to be sacrificed, gods manifesting, and so on. If I had to tie it to a single author, I'd pick John Brunner, author of
The Traveler in Black
, but I suspect Mr. Pratchett would react to that with puzzlement, or maybe, since he doesn't seem to do outrage, minor annoyance.

I'm probably simply displaying my own eccentricity by picking Brunner. Perhaps L. Sprague de Camp would be a better fit, or even Lord Dunsany. The L-space annotations suggest some Jack Vance influence, and I can see that, too. It's not so much a single author as an entire style of fantasy—the witty, mildly cynical, sometimes lyrical sort that has been around since the nineteenth century, while usually being outsold by the sword-and-sorcery or magic-pony or pseudo-Tolkien stuff.
⁶²

At any rate, “Close to the Edge” concludes
The Colour of Magic
without actually ending the story. Rincewind and Twoflower are thrust through a series of further adventures, and then finally escape the last menace by replacing the crew of a spaceship and falling off the edge of the world.

One thing about setting a story on a flat world—there's a great temptation to sooner or later send someone falling off the edge. The problem with that is, where do you go from there?

Having already once saved Rincewind and Twoflower by miraculously
translating them to another plane, apparently Mr. Pratchett felt no need to do so again. The result is a rather unsatisfying ending. Yes, they escaped the people who were trying to kill them, but now the
universe
is trying to kill them.

Fortunately, the story really
didn't
end there. The three-year wait for the conclusion, though, must have seemed interminable.

You, lucky reader, can just go on to the next book—or, since you're here, the next chapter.

Before you do, though, I should perhaps mention that the British network Sky One, prompted by the success of their video adaptation of
Hogfather
, began filming their version of
The Colour of Magic
in July of 2007, starring David Jason as Rincewind. The production aired in Britain for Easter of 2008, but as of this writing has not reached the U.S.

T
HIS SECOND BOOK IN THE SERIES picks up exactly where
The Colour of Magic
left off, with Rincewind and Twoflower plummeting through space. Like
The Colour of Magic
, it's still parodying various elements of fantasy fiction.

This is where the Standard Model Discworld Novel first appears, with no chapters, just one continuous book-length narrative. Rather than mocking specific works in separate stories as
The Colour of Magic
did, it pretty much throws everything in together.

This one parodies scheming wizards, druids, New Agers, Conan the Barbarian and his ilk, red-headed warrior women, trolls, mysterious little shops, and doomsday cults, and wraps up the various loose ends from the first book, providing Twoflower and Rincewind with a reasonably happy ending, in which they avoid being devoured by unspeakable creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions.
⁶³

Twoflower gives the Luggage to Rincewind at the end, so that it will continue to appear in the series whenever Rincewind does, without the need for Twoflower's rather annoying presence.

This book also introduces the Librarian, who will go on to appear in almost every story hereafter.

In an early scene, the
Octavo
, the book containing the eight spells that supposedly created the Discworld in the first place,
⁶⁴
sends a burst of magic shooting upward, and it transforms the head Librarian of Unseen
University
⁶⁵
into an orangutan. He remains an orangutan for the rest of the series (excluding a period of illness in
The Last Continent
), and is one of the most frequently-seen characters, matched only by Death.

Another important introduction is Cohen the Barbarian. In
The Colour of Magic
, we saw one parody of Robert E. Howard's Conan in the form of Hrun the Barbarian; here we meet another, rather more original one. Genghiz Cohen (whose first name won't be mentioned until
Interesting Times
) is the barbarian hero's barbarian hero, a man whose exploits are legendary throughout the Disc, a man who can triumph over any foe, and who has been doing so for a long time—after all, it takes awhile to have all those adventures, and for word of them to get around. As the greatest, most famous barbarian hero in the history of Discworld, he's been doing it for a
really
long time.

And that's why we need a second barbarian hero, instead of just bringing back Hrun. Cohen is, when we meet him, eighty-seven years old and still adventuring, because after all, what else does he know how to do?

This is an obvious but rarely-considered consequence of heroes too tough to ever be beaten—since they don't die, and in fact
specialize
in not dying, they're going to get old. Examining such necessary but never-mentioned consequences of something is an excellent source of humor, and one that Mr. Pratchett makes extensive use of throughout the series.

In
The Light Fantastic
, we also visit Death's home for the first time and meet Ysabell, Death's adopted daughter, as well as Famine, War, and Pestilence, who happen to be visiting. Death's friends call him “Mort” here, a detail that will be quietly ignored forever after.

While I won't identify the parties involved, since I don't want to spoil
any surprises, I will say that the reason we see Death's home is that one character has died, and another is trying to rescue him anyway.

The idea of retrieving a soul from the house of Death is, of course, an ancient one, found in any number of classic myths, in any number of cultures: Gilgamesh, Orpheus, and so on. Only on Discworld, though, would the rescuer find his friend teaching Death and the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse to play something not entirely unlike bridge. Blending the mythic and the mundane is another reliable humor source that Mr. Pratchett taps frequently.

Although a mountain troll appeared briefly in
The Colour of Magic
, it's here in
The Light Fantastic
that it's first explained that trolls are made of stone, that they eat stone, that their teeth are diamonds because something that hard is needed to chew stone, and that heat is bad for their brains. They aren't
quite
like what we see strolling the streets of Ankh-Morpork a few books later—they aren't noticeably stupid at moderate temperatures, for one thing—but they're definitely getting there.

The creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions appear as well.

All in all, a good many of the lasting details of Discworld are starting to fall into place now, in a way they didn't in the first book. It's still mostly playing off other fantasy stories, commenting on the absurdities of them, but it's also developing its own personality.

So far, other than the humorous elements, it looks rather like an ordinary fantasy series. It started off as one thing—parodying specific fantasy tropes—but then started to become its own new thing in the second volume. Our heroes, who were fairly two-dimensional in the first volume, start to be fleshed out in the second. The normal progression would be for them to start to turn from parodies into real heroes in the third volume.

Mr. Pratchett didn't do that. Sneaky git.

Instead, we're at a fork. The third volume doesn't have Rincewind or Twoflower in it; they aren't even mentioned in passing. Rather, it begins the second of the eight sub-series.

So you, dear Reader, now have a choice. You can go on to Chapter 5, about the third book,
Equal Rites
, or you can instead follow the adventures of Rincewind. If you want to follow Rincewind, then skip ahead to Chapter 6 for his bit part in
Mort
, or to Chapter 7 to read about his more significant role in
Sourcery
.

Y
OU WOULD THINK, with a title like that, this book would be mocking either feminism or sexism. That may even be what Mr. Pratchett intended. It isn't, however, what he actually gives us.

It starts off looking very much as if that was what he meant to do, as we see Drum Billet, a powerful wizard, arrive in the town of Bad Ass
⁶⁶
during an appropriately theatrical thunderstorm, with the intention of passing his wizard's staff on to a child about to be born. The local smith is an eighth son, and has seven boys already. You'll recall that eight is the magically potent number in Discworld, rather than seven, so it's the eighth son of an eighth son, rather than the seventh son of a seventh son, who is marked for magic.

The child is born, the staff handed on—but the baby is a girl.

Oops. Discworld's wizards are all male. Women who take up magic are witches, with a rather different approach to the subject. This child, Eskarina
⁶⁷
Smith, seems destined to be a problem.

Now, if this were following the pattern of the first two books and parodying common or garden-variety fantasy novels, we'd have lots of funny scenes where little Esk demonstrates the truth of that old feminist
slogan, “In order to get ahead, a woman has to be twice as good as a man. Fortunately, that isn't difficult.” Male wizards would act like complete dickheads, and good old feminine common sense would win the day. That, frankly, was what I expected when I first got a look at the book.

It's not what I got.

I tell you, you can't trust Mr. Pratchett. Just when you think you have him figured out, tagged as another purveyor of easy parody, he switches modes entirely, and without being obvious about it.

What he does here is to present a straightforward account of a young woman trying to find a comfortable place for herself when she's been saddled with talents inappropriate to her station.

That's not to say it isn't funny, because it
is
funny; it just isn't the sort of broad farce the first two books were. The characters are more like people than caricatures, and the humor doesn't derive from mocking the stereotypes of fantasy fiction, nor even the stereotypes of feminist rhetoric, but from mocking the behavior of real people. Eskarina Smith isn't a superwoman, but an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent. The wizards refusing to accept her aren't exaggerations of fantasy-world wizards, but exaggerations of real-world academics, more concerned with office politics than with magic, and sexist not as a result of deliberate misogyny, but from confusion, tradition, and uncertainty.

And Esk's mentor, the witch who takes the girl under her wing . . . well, there's no easy way to sum her up, because this is where we're introduced to one of Mr. Pratchett's finest creations, one of the great characters of fantasy fiction, Granny Weatherwax.

Esmerelda Weatherwax is the local witch for the town of Bad Ass, in the kingdom of Lancre, in the Ramtop Mountains. Her formal education is sketchy, but her intelligence and understanding of human nature are formidable.

Witches weren't really mentioned in the first two books, but
Equal Rites
presents us with a great deal of detail on just how they operate on the Discworld, and sets the pattern that witches will follow throughout the rest of the series. Witches can do real magic, but are most effective when they know better than to use it; most of their power comes from seeing things as they are, rather than as how they're assumed to be. Granny Weatherwax is the ultimate expression of this—which is why we eventually learn, in later books, that she's Discworld's top witch. In
Equal Rites
, she's a highly respected practitioner of her art, but there's no indication she's
that
extraordinary.

Granny and Esk share the lead in
Equal Rites
. A third character, Simon, a young wizard of exceptional promise who arrives at the Unseen University at about the same time as Esk, is also of major importance in the story, though he doesn't appear until some way into the book.

Rincewind and Twoflower don't appear. Cohen the Barbarian is nowhere to be seen, nor is there any mention of Hrun, Bravd, or the Weasel. This is, in fact, clearly not the same series as the previous two books at all—except that it's still set on Discworld, and features more or less the same Unseen University we saw before.

A quick summary of the plot: Granny attempts to deal with Esk's wizardly abilities by training her to be a witch, but alas, Esk's magic is not witch's magic, it's wizardry. Granny recognizes the inevitable and sets out to deliver Esk to Unseen University, so that she can be trained as a wizard and learn to control her magic before she inadvertently does something truly dreadful with it. They have a few adventures along the way—not the swordfight-and-monster sort of adventures that would be there if this were another straightforward fantasy parody, but the sort of adventures a real girl might get into, such as slipping away from her
guardian and falling in with bad company. They meet Simon and other wizards, and then arrive at Unseen University, where Granny's letters asking for Esk's admission haven't even been taken seriously enough to be laughed at.