Terry Pratchett

by Craig Cabell

  Life is far less commonplace than we admit. Human beings always make the observation that if you wrote real events as fiction you wouldn’t be believed, and there is so much truth in that. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously wrote in ‘A Case of Identity’ (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes): ‘“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes… “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent… if we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations… it would make all fiction… most stale and unprofitable.”’

  ‘Everybody should be allowed to blow up their own pub,’ Pratchett says. Indeed the irreverent humour of the author, along with his cutting-edge originality, has given the fantasy genre a new start. He really did blow up his own pub – the fantasy genre as we knew it – and started afresh. Although Douglas Adams’ work carved a whole new niche in the science fiction genre, one can see the influence of Pratchett in great fantasies since the beginning of the Discworld series, from JK Rowling to Jasper Fforde. Indeed, Pratchett says of Fforde: ‘[He is] ingenious – I’ll watch Jasper Fforde nervously.’ One could say that the endorsement is kindly, but when reviewers suddenly compare Fforde to Douglas Adams as well, one can see the thick blanket of humour that Pratchett and Adams draped over the whole science fiction/fantasy bandwagon influencing and encouraging a whole new generation of writers and artists from the early 1980s to at least the end of the millennium.

  ‘Urban vampires were once more heavily forecast for the week ahead, with scattered wizards moving in from Wednesday and a high chance of Daphne Farquitt novels near the end of the week.’

  Jasper Fforde (One of Our Thursdays is Missing)

  The whimsical, irreverent style in Fforde’s work is evocative of classic Adams and Pratchett. This isn’t a criticism of Fforde, it’s a compliment, as both Adams and Pratchett reminded aspiring writers that it was OK to take chances in creative writing, to dare to be different and, most of all, to break down the establishment of genre fiction, which both Pratchett and Fforde have really made their own territory today.

  Let us now analyse this great awakening as far as Pratchett was concerned. Was The Colour of Magic an overnight success? No, it wasn’t. It couldn’t be, the print run was too low for one thing.

  The Colour of Magic was published by Colin Smythe in November 1983 and has since become one of the most collectable Pratchett books you are likely to find. The print run was 4,540 copies, 506 coming from St Martin’s Press in the United States. This means that, contrary to common belief, it was not a bestseller in its original hardback.

  The first UK edition was bound in light green cloth boards with gilt lettering, making it most attractive. Alan Smith created the striking colour dustwrapper, featuring the turtle, elephants and Discworld moving through space. The original UK dustwrapper carried no price but the first issue had a price sticker of £7.95 in the UK and $11.95 in the US. The jackets were otherwise identical, but the collector should note that there is a huge difference in price nowadays: approximately £4,000 for a UK copy compared with £200 for a US counterpart.

  Just to confuse people, later issues of the UK version included US reviews on the inside flap of the jacket to cover the original blurb, which contained a mistake. Whoever had written it had called Twoflower an intergalactic tourist, which of course he was not.

  The American Science Fiction Book Club issued a copy in 1994. Collectors can tell the difference between the two US editions by the length of the book – 184 pages in the Science Fiction Book Club edition as opposed to the 206 pages of the first edition – and, of course, the words ‘Book Club Edition’ on the front inner flap of the dustwrapper. Colin Smythe imported 400 copies of this edition, selling them with a UK price sticker. Corgi published the first paperback edition in 1985, Smythe having cleared the option rights with NEL, who later regretted it.

  All of this information also shows the small moves the Discworld series made in its early days. For example, it wasn’t until the Corgi paperback that Pratchett decided to bring back Rincewind in The Light Fantastic (1986), a seamless sequel to The Colour of Magic, but one with more plot – and consequently less spontaneous imagery – than its predecessor (although Pratchett would argue that the first four novels were plotless).

  Anyone interested in collecting Terry Pratchett wants all these early editions because they are the proof – the blueprint – of the unfolding evolution of the Discworld series. If The Colour of Magic hadn’t sold well in paperback, we probably wouldn’t have had further novels in the series. But why did it sell well in paperback? Word of mouth or more copies printed? In fact, it was due to the BBC serialising the novel in six parts on their radio show Woman’s Hour. It was directly after this happened that sales took off.

  The Light Fantastic was a good commercial move. Continuing the story of Rincewind and the multicoloured chaos of the Discworld, it was a more important book than its predecessor if only because, a year after its release, Pratchett had made enough money to give up the day job and become a full-time writer. He welcomed the move with open arms, digging deeper into the fantasy world of Discworld, creating new and more outrageous characters, and amassing a legion of fans. He had now hit on the winning formula, but as we have seen, that formula had been building since his school days.

  It is worth mentioning that a joint publication by Smythe and Gollancz didn’t work, but Pratchett considered Smythe a friend so he asked him to be his agent instead. Smythe agreed and it became a sound partnership from then on.

  ‘We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: what is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?’

  Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time)

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tripping the Light Fandango

  ‘… if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. And treads on it… He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me…’

  (Rincewind in The Light Fantastic)

  The Light Fantastic slowed Rincewind down and made him take stock of who he was and what powers he truly had. There was a tenuous story too: the Discworld is on a collision course with a red star and only the secret spell somewhere in Rincewind’s head can stop the catastrophe. All hell breaks loose until Rincewind can expel the spell.

  Although we begin to understand Rincewind more in The Light Fantastic and appreciate the satirical edge of the Discworld mindset, the story is less satisfying than its predecessor. The Colour of Magic succeeded because it was pure fantasy that surged towards its final page like a branch between the shoulders of a mighty river; it was breathtaking and splendid in its visual plight. It won an audience and The Light Fantastic kept that story going. Although the format – and characters – changed thereafter, the Discworld had attracted an audience that would grow and grow from then on, but Twoflower and Rincewind grew apart in The Light Fantastic.

  Rincewind says that whatever Twoflower looked at was never the same again, and unfortunately that echoes the mania of so many tourists in the world today. The Great Pyramid in Egypt, the other tombs and temples of that great land, even the prized and well protected treasures of Tutankhamun, have depreciated because of the damage caused by the insatiable tourist over the past hundred years (even though the monuments are thousands of years old). A Native American once said: when you visit us, take nothing but memories and leave nothing but footprints. Nothing could be more apt, but nothing could be further from Twoflower’s thoughts.

  Unlike the Fellowship, who embrace the friendship of talking trees in The Lord of the Rings, Rincewind doesn’t reciprocate even when they talk to him. He clearly had heard the Goons song ‘I talk to the trees, t
hat’s why they put me away’. People were beginning to love Pratchett’s sense of humour; his back catalogue had started to sell out and he decided that a third Discworld novel would be a lucrative idea. Equal Rites would be that third novel and prove to be the first real departure for the series. About 100 proof copies were made up for writers and reviewers and suddenly the public was beginning to await the next episode in the Discworld saga. The money wasn’t yet a flood, but the books’ popularity was growing significantly.

  Rincewind, Twoflower and Luggage made Pratchett famous. They set the scene for Discworld, but soon afterwards – several books in – they were put to one side so more characters could be introduced, from witches and more wizards to city guards. But for me there was something deeply magical about the early books; let us generalise and say that Rincewind was the character who became the Raphael-interpreted Doubting Thomas of the whole fantasy genre. He broke the mould and made a multitude of fans wake up and say, that’s right, the genre shouldn’t be so stereotypical. Rincewind was the cynical Pratchett within the novel, attacking such sacred cows as Conan the Barbarian and any other stereotype that came his way. But the series had to evolve. More characters and situations were needed. Clearly Pratchett was aware that he had hit a winning formula with the Discworld series.

  Equal Rites is probably the most important book as far as giving breadth to the series is concerned. It is the first in which Granny Weatherwax appears and it concerns itself with an extension of the breaking down of fantasy clichés that was begun by The Colour of Magic. Instead of magic being passed down to the seventh son of the seventh son, we have the eighth son of the eighth son – eight being a very magical number in the series. But a calamity strikes: the eighth son happens to be a girl. At the moment of his death, the wizard Drum Billet passes on the wizard’s staff and magic to a girl by mistake; whoever heard of a girl wizard? A witch maybe, but not a wizard. And there starts the genre-breaking story of female wizard Eskarina (Esk) Smith.

  For me, Equal Rites is the very best book in the Discworld series. By this book Pratchett has homed in on the sexism of the whole fantasy genre, with witches having lesser powers than wizards and it being accepted as fact that females are only good for flying on broomsticks and throwing eye of newt into a bubbling cauldron. It was brave and ingenious and delivered different characters and places on the Discworld. The tempo was different too. It started from a fixed location and moved slowly forwards from there. With the characters not surrounded by chaos, Pratchett could delve a little more thoroughly into areas of the fantasy genre that intrigued him. He asks: what is magic? Then he explains that creating magic gives the witches and wizards nightmares and, from there, he buries himself in an interesting piece of speculation between Esk and Granny Weatherwax. They talk about the ability to perform magic, how to harness it, to control it. This is a very important part of the story and, ostensibly, the creation of the whole magical world in the Discworld series. It’s a very long conversation that lasts several pages, but starts quite simply with Granny Weatherwax asking Esk what she wants to do when she grows up (a question that crops up from time to time in Pratchett’s novels).

  Like every other child, Esk doesn’t know the answer, but unfortunately the realities of life have to be faced from the onset of one’s teenage years, and Esk is no exception to this. Does she want to grow up or does she want to become a witch? That – for Esk – is the choice, making the decision to go into the profession of a witch akin to that of going into the priesthood. Pratchett confirms this with the line: ‘… they [witches] were respected… for doing a job which logically had to be done, but people never felt quite comfortable in the same room with them.’

  Esk approaches the whole concept of being a witch – or wizard – with wide-eyed naivety and Granny Weatherwax has to deal with that, not unlike any form teacher in a modern-day secondary school when discussing students’ future careers.

  There is something very different about the first four novels in the Discworld series. They paint a huge and varied picture. They embrace a cornucopia of ideas. They only occasionally linger to build characters or to instruct in the sacred art of magic. They were a multicoloured blur that encapsulated the very best of the fantasy genre’s fun and imagination at that time. They lacked parameters, which lesser Discworld titles, such as A Hat Full of Sky, had in abundance. Some could say that Pratchett has refined his style over the years, and although this could be true for novels such as Going Postal and Making Money, I do think it has been an albatross around the neck of some other books in the series.

  All writers slow down a little, and although they may consider their later work to be their best, the fans normally go for the earlier novels, and not just for nostalgia’s sake. Some of the early ideas are ingenious and important to the overall mindset, none more telling than the long conversation Granny Weatherwax has with Esk in the first quarter of Equal Rites. The conversation explores the meaning of magic in the real world. It argues that the core of magic has its basis in worldly knowledge, e.g. to the naïve the most basic things are magical. Adults invariably do something ‘magical’ to impress children. A good example of this is the bottle of sugary pink ‘medicine’ a doctor may prescribe a child when there is little wrong with them. It reassures both parent and child without offending. Incredibly, the child feels better soon afterwards. This is not a wild analogy on my part, because in Granny Weatherwax’s conversation with Esk, she says that she saved a dying man by giving him a potion she told him was handed down to her from dwarves and had magical healing properties. In fact it was nothing of the kind, but the power of suggestion was enough to make the man recover – a rare magic indeed. So Pratchett is telling us that magic is around us in everyday life – it just needs to be used in the right way.

  Esk is a fast learner, so much so that Granny Weatherwax allows her a small piece of magic in transferring part of her mind into an eagle, to feel what it can feel and see what it can see. However, Esk pushes things too far and her whole mind is consumed in the tiniest recess of the eagle’s head and Granny has to force Esk back from the point of total absorption. This is a very interesting concept because it is something Pratchett returns to, but in a reverse way, in A Hat Full of Sky. In this instance a young witch – not unlike Esk – called Tiffany Aching leaves her body, only for it to be inhabited by a Hiver (a dangerous entity). This time it is the smallest part of Tiffany’s brain that holds the former witch while the Hiver has control.

  What I find refreshing about these ‘possessions’ is the scientific, rather than horrific, way in which they are tackled. There are no priests performing stomach-churning exorcisms, just everyday witches (sic) earning a crust to free the host.

  Although the possession of Esk’s body takes place before she becomes a wizard – and her friend is predictably cured of a stutter – there is satisfaction in the final pay-off to the novel because it dared to break down the fantasy myth that all wizards must be men. Women can be wizards too and, if the Discworld series had concluded as a trilogy, I would venture that the three books would still be incredibly important as genre-challenging (and building) stories by a man who was browned off with the repetition of cliché. To me, the first page of Equal Rites alone wins an award for daring to tread where no man – or woman – had trodden before.* Like the first two novels in the series, Equal Rites points a finger at the greats, such as the work of Robert E Howard and quite possibly Doctor Who as well, describing the Unseen University as ‘bigger inside than out’, surely a nod towards the Tardis. If we like our great novels in small packages tied with string, then perhaps Pratchett should have ceased writing the Discworld after Equal Rites, because it would have provoked more critique and would possibly have lent more greatness to the series.

  Equal Rites was also read on the radio, which helped to increase the series’ popularity.

  ‘… it is primarily a story about a world. Here it comes now. Watch closely, the special effects are quite expensive.’


  (Equal Rites)

  At the end of Equal Rites we return to the wizard who started all the problems, Drum Billet, who is reincarnated as an ant. Along with his fellow ants, he inscribes a wall of a sugar pyramid with the true secret of longevity, only to have it washed away the very next time the Unseen University floods.*

  Equal Rites is a novel about mistakes and pretence, a perfect homage to the real world of politics and sycophancy.

  Pratchett created the Unseen University as a satire on the Invisible College, which was a collection of 17th-century scientists and philosophers, such as Robert Boyle, John Evelyn, Francis Glisson, Robert Hooke, William Petty and Christopher Wren. In some of his letters, Boyle refers to ‘our invisible college’ and ‘our philosophical college’. The basic thread throughout the group’s activities was to use imagination in their experimental endeavours.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mort, Faust and Death

  ‘Godless people might get up to anything, they might turn against the fine old traditions of thrift and non-self-sacrifice that had made the kingdom what it is today…’