The Turtle Moves! (9 page)

After that it's off to the dawn of time—after all, if you're going to live forever, you have to start at the beginning. If you just started where you were and lived to the end of time, you'd only live for
half
of forever. Eric and Rincewind get to watch the Creator create the Discworld, and find it somewhat less awe-inspiring than one might have hoped—an egg and cress sandwich is involved, and it doesn't even have mayonnaise.

Then they get to sit there and wait for life to evolve.

This is not really something for which either of them can work up much enthusiasm, and they therefore arrange to go elsewhere, courtesy of Eric's skill at demonology. Unfortunately, there's only one place
that
can take them. They go to Hell.

Hell, as it happens, has been looking for them. Astfgl, King of the Demons,
⁸⁶
was not at all pleased to have Rincewind appear instead of a demon when Eric finally got his summoning to work, and has been pursuing the pair as they collect on Eric's wishes.

Still, they escape in the end, though where to isn't revealed.

I include
Eric
in the Rincewind series because, well, it's about Rincewind. But it's atypical in that almost none of it is set at Unseen University, Rincewind doesn't really appear in the bit that is, and no other
wizards really have much to do with the plot. We do get to meet yet another Archchancellor, Ezrolith Churn, who was given the job because it had finally registered on the other senior wizards that, of late, the life expectancy of Archchancellors had really gotten distressingly low. That tended to reduce the job's appeal significantly, since a wizard doesn't become competitive for the post without a very good instinct for survival.

Took them long enough to notice.

I suppose I ought to mention that the Luggage appears, loyally (if angrily) following its master through time, space, and other, less usual dimensions.

At any rate,
Eric
is a short, lightweight book, doing very little to advance the series as a whole other than extracting Rincewind from the dire situation in which he was left at the end of
Sourcery
. It does serve to reduce Rincewind's depth as a character. . . .

That's really rather perverse, you know, but it's true. Generally, the more we see of a character, the more we learn about him, and the more depth and solidity he acquires. Rincewind, however, gets
simpler
as the series progresses. In his earlier appearances he was cowardly and lazy, sometimes clever, but also greedy, and with an odd streak of heroism that cropped up now and then. In
Eric
and his subsequent appearances, though, he's simply cowardly and lazy, with moments of cleverness—his greed has vanished, and the streak of heroism has withered away. Perhaps his stay in the Dungeon Dimensions was responsible, but it makes him a less interesting character, and I'm not the only reader to feel that the Rincewind series is the weakest of the lot.

At a bookstore signing for
Wintersmith
, in October 2006, a reader asked Mr. Pratchett whether we would be seeing more of Rincewind. His answer was that we probably would not, at least not any time soon, because Rincewind is not a terribly interesting character—he is, Mr. Pratchett said, primarily an observer, rather than someone who
does
things.

While this is fairly accurate as far as his appearances in
Eric
and all subsequent stories are concerned, prior to this it wasn't really the case. The Rincewind we saw in
The Colour of Magic
and
The Light Fantastic
wasn't so much an observer as a sidekick—he didn't
just
observe things, he also sometimes made them happen. He tried to talk sense to heroes, and sometimes pulled them out of bad situations.

From
Eric
on, though, he really doesn't do that any more. He's just along for the ride.

Fortunately, Mr. Pratchett does not focus on Rincewind all that often; in fact, we won't see him featured again until
Interesting Times
, nine full volumes later, as seen in Chapter 21. The next book in the series instead begins the series I've named “Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat,” concerned with the effects of new technologies, new magics, and other social changes on the people of the Disc's oldest, largest, and most foul-smelling city.

I
T WAS ESTABLISHED back in
Equal Rites
that in the Discworld universe, ideas are not just the immaterial concepts we're familiar with; they have actual physical existence. In that earlier volume they were described as subatomic particles sleeting through space, looking for a receptive mind.

In
Wyrd Sisters
, we saw various ideas, many of them cinematic, registering with poor Hwel, who tried to make sense of movies of the likes of Laurel and Hardy in the context of Discworld. They made his life difficult at times, but no worse.

In
Moving Pictures
, certain ideas are a little larger and more aggressive than that. One idea in particular has been carefully imprisoned and guarded by a succession of priests in a place named Holy Wood. Alas, the last priest dies, and the idea escapes and reaches Ankh-Morpork.

As the title makes obvious, the idea is movies, of course—not just a few images of the sort Hwel dreamed, but the entirety of the motion picture industry.

In response to this unleashed idea, The Alchemists' Guild develops a method of transferring images to film, and then projecting them. An alchemist named Silverfish
⁸⁷
sets out for Holy Wood to make movies, as
the light's better there—or at least, that's the excuse he tells himself.
⁸⁸
Actually, it's the Things under Holy Wood Hill luring him.

A great many people are lured to Holy Wood, from Ankh-Morpork and elsewhere, including Victor Tugelbend, a student at Unseen University, who serves as our primary viewpoint character and the eventual hero. He and his co-star, Theda Withel,
⁸⁹
who calls herself Ginger, find themselves caught up in the magic of the movies—which is not at all the same sort of magic Victor studied at Unseen University, but which is potent nonetheless—and they become the Disc's first movie stars.

Among those who have been lured from Ankh-Morpork by the movies is our old friend Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sausage-seller extraordinaire, last seen in
Guards! Guards!
He's fallen under Holy Wood's spell more completely than anyone else, and usurps control of Century of the Fruitbat Pictures from poor Silverfish.

And there's Gaspode the Wonder Dog. Holy Wood has given him the power of speech—but he's still an ugly little mutt no one can take seriously; only Victor will listen to him. (Gaspode will be back in later books. Victor, perversely, won't.)

It develops that the real danger here isn't anything inherent in the concept of motion pictures as such; rather, it's that because reality is thin on Discworld to begin with, something that blurs the line between reality and illusion the way movies do can weaken reality to the point that our old friends the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions can use it to cross over from their normal state of nonexistence into Discworld's reality.

They are, of course, stopped, by Victor and Ginger and Gaspode and the Librarian, before they do very much damage.

The idea that Discworld's a little short on reality—“The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist”—is introduced right on the first page, but it's not obvious until much later that this actually
means
anything, and isn't just a throwaway bit. Mr. Pratchett's very good at that, really—telling you something that doesn't look important but turns out to be at the heart of the whole story.

The first two Discworld novels were parodies of fantasy novels; the next several drifted away from parody and into satire. Even when
Guards! Guards!
built its plot around fantasy clichés such as dragons, long-lost royal heirs, and useless guards, it really wasn't so much mocking fantasy novels as using their trappings to satirize the real world. Lady Sybil Ramkin, for example, is a stereotype, but not one from fantasy novels; instead she's a stereotype from England's imperial past.

Moving Pictures
is a swing back toward parody—but it's not fantasy novels being parodied, it's Hollywood. Slapped-together scripts, movie stars who were nobody a few days ago, mad producers, a boom town awash in money—it's all there, but translated into Discworld terms.

One thing that strikes me as a bit off, symbolically, is using the figure of an Oscar as the guardian keeping the monsters of Holy Wood in check. It would be
nice
if the Oscars played some part in keeping the
worst excesses of Hollywood in check, but it sure doesn't look to me as if that's anything remotely like the real-world situation.

At any rate, the plot here is not especially complicated or coherent; it exists largely as an excuse to incorporate lots of mockery of Hollywood. This novel is jammed full of parodies and punning references—and not all of them Hollywood-related, either. There's a little spoof on the famous opening line of H.G. Wells's
War of the Worlds
thrown in at one point, for example. Reality leakage runs amok, and a great deal of the humor comes from recognizing just which real-world thing is being referenced, whether it's a one-line reference to
The Bride of Frankenstein
or an extended riff on
Blown Away
, the Discworld version of
Gone with the Wind
. This climaxes with an extra-dimensional Thing climbing the Tower of Art at Unseen University while carrying the Librarian—hardly a knee-slapper if looked at on its own terms, but when you realize that the Thing has taken on a larger-than-life version of Ginger's appearance from the movies, so that what you have is a fifty-foot woman climbing the world's tallest building while clutching a screaming ape in one hand....

There's a lot of that sort of thing. Frankly, while it's amusing, it's not what I prefer to see at the heart of a Discworld story. I'd rather see Mr. Pratchett focusing on humanity's foibles rather than demonstrating his cleverness with puns and parodies.

Fortunately, there are good character moments, as well. Dibbler's creative frenzies and Gaspode's observations on canine nature add a good bit to the scenes in Holy Wood. Detritus the troll's romantic efforts have their charm, as well.

Perhaps the best material, though, is what's happening to the wizards of Unseen University. After nine volumes of a constantly shifting cast, with never the same Archchancellor twice, we are now presented with what will hereinafter be the permanent faculty—Mustrum Ridcully as Archchancellor, Windle Poons as the oldest member,
⁹⁰
and several wizards known only by their titles: the Bursar, the Lecturer in Recent Runes, the Senior Wrangler, and so on.

One other character is introduced in passing who will be recurring in later stories set at the University: Ponder Stibbons. In
Moving Pictures
, he graduates with his degree in wizardry through a fortunate turn of events involving his friend Victor's absence from their final exam; he'll be back as a graduate student.

And why, then, you might ask, do I not consider this a part of the series about the wizards of Unseen University, when they appear and play a significant role, and the hero is a student at the University?

Because, for one thing, Rincewind is never mentioned.

For another, there are brief appearances by Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs of the Watch, by the Patrician, by Death, and so on, but none of them are what the story's
about
, and neither are the wizards. They're just a plot element. What the story is
about
is the line between illusion and reality, the mad world of movie-making, and Victor, Ginger, and Gaspode.

It's about a new idea upsetting the status quo (one can't really call anything so disorganized and bloody-minded “the peace”) of Ankh-Morpork, a theme that Mr. Pratchett will return to again in half a dozen volumes, as described in Chapter 20.

The next volume, though, returns to the series about Death.

T
HIS IS ONE OF THE STRANGEST of all the Discworld stories, right from the first sentence: “The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.” That sentence is a reminder of how thoroughly English Mr. Pratchett is, and must leave a great many American readers scratching their heads and wondering what on Earth a Morris dance is.
⁹¹