Well, there’s this comic opera first performed in 1872, composed by Jacques Offenbach, called Le Roi Carotte—“King Carrot.” The title role calls for a comic tenor, and is a carrot who becomes a human being and deposes a tyrant.
The resemblance surely isn’t a coincidence.
As for other developments, the Librarian appears in Guards! Guards!, of course, and is temporarily deputized into the Watch, but even he isn’t completely consistent with other books. While he’s always objected violently (and with good reason) to being called a monkey, his reaction here is presented as involuntary and uncontrollable, when elsewhere it’s been presented as a natural reaction to an unforgivable display of rude stupidity.
On the other hand, this is also where we see the first real explanation of L-space, which became a basic recurring concept in later volumes. L-space is where libraries and the better sort of bookshop exist, you see. They aren’t in normal space at all, and they all interconnect.
The explanation is simple. Books represent knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power is energy. Energy, as Einstein told us, equals matter. Matter has mass. Mass warps space.
Therefore, anywhere enough books are gathered together, space is warped, and a connection to L-space forms. A skilled librarian—and the Librarian is very skilled—can navigate through L-space from any one library to any other, anywhere in time or space. This will prove very useful in later books.
Guards! Guards! is where a great many things really start to fall together. The whole idea of monarchy was addressed in Wyrd Sisters, but here it is again, seen from rather a different angle. The Patrician’s methods, heretofore only mentioned in passing, are examined in more detail, though Lord Vetinari’s personality has still not reached its final forbidding form. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler is introduced, as is the troll Detritus. The magical power of books is refined into the concept of L-space.
Certain details from earlier books reappear in new forms. “Inn-sewer-ants,” introduced by Twoflower back in The Colour of Magic, is back, but in the form of protection money paid to the Thieves’ Guild.
We get a look at dwarf society, and that’s a bit different. Up until now, the only dwarf who had any time on stage was Hwel, in Wyrd Sisters, and the dwarfs in Guards! Guards! aren’t much like him—but he did say that he wasn’t much like his father, or he’d have been a hundred feet underground digging rocks, so it’s pretty clear Hwel wasn’t a typical dwarf.
But back in Equal Rites, we encountered the gypsy-like Zoons, who had trouble with the concept of lying; the Zoons are never seen again, and their literal-minded honesty has now been transferred to the dwarfs.
We won’t see the Watch featured again until Men at Arms, seven volumes later, as described in Chapter 19; first it’s back to tie up some loose ends regarding Rincewind.
11
Eric (1990)
THE ACTUAL TITLE IS FAUST ERIC. This was originally an illustrated volume, with nifty pictures by Josh Kirby, and is a good deal shorter than the average Discworld novel—in fact, it was originally labeled a Discworld story, rather than the usual “a novel of Discworld.”
Unlike all the other short stories and illustrated volumes, though, it’s an essential part of the series, because this is where we learn how Rincewind escaped from the Dungeon Dimensions, where we left him at the end of Sourcery—he was summoned by an amateur demonologist named Eric Thursley.
Eric wasn’t trying for Rincewind; he wanted a proper demon who would grant him three wishes. He got Rincewind instead.
And to Rincewind’s own astonishment, Eric gets his three wishes—mastery of the kingdoms of the world, to meet the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, and to live forever.
(If these sound familiar, well, there’s a reason the title has Faust’s name crossed out and Eric’s substituted.)
Naturally, they didn’t work out as expected. They never do, do they? One wonders why anyone tries the whole “three wishes” thing; really, why not try for, oh, five wishes? Maybe that would turn out more pleasantly. Three, though, that’s always a disaster, and especially getting them from a demon. It’s just asking for it—to borrow Mr. Pratchett’s evocative phrase, it’s like standing on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor and shouting, “All gods are bastards!”
I mean, all the stories warn you that three wishes will turn out badly, and the Disc runs on stories.
As the author points out, if summoning demons was a way to get power, wizards would do it. They don’t. This should serve as a warning.
But Eric refuses to be warned, and he and Rincewind (and Eric’s parrot) get swept off to the Tezuman Empire, where Eric is indeed recognized as the master of the kingdoms of the world. Had Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough been published in Ankh-Morpork, Eric might have seen the flaw in this particular prize.
When they manage to escape that particular nasty fate, it’s off to the ancient war between Tsort and Ephebe that was described in Pyramids, the one that’s the Discworld equivalent of the Trojan War.85 Here Eric does indeed meet the woman generally acknowledged to be the most beautiful who has ever lived on the Disc. He failed to specify meeting her while she was still beautiful, however. Or meeting her not in the middle of a bloody great war.
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 se
ries 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.
12
Moving Pictures (1990)
IT 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 Silverfish87 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.
Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat
Although some people just consider these to be one-shots, I see them as a series concerned with how the people of Ankh-Morpork and their ruler, Patrician Havelock Vetinari, are dealing with the march of progress:
Moving Pictures Chapter 12
“Troll Bridge” Chapter 16
The Truth Chapter 31
Going Postal Chapter 41
Making Money Chapter 46
Two important notes: “Troll Bridge” isn’t set in Ankh-Morpork and has no specific sociological innovations in it, but I include it here simply because it’s on the same general theme of dealing with changing times, and Cohen the Barbarian hasn’t got his own series.
Also, Moist von Lipwig, protagonist of Going Postal, returns in Making
Money, and will probably be reappearing again in the future, so either he’s a separate series, or he’s taking over this series. I say he’s taking over this series.
For a consideration of the series as a whole, see Chapter 57.
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 bi
t 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.
13
Reaper Man (1991)
THIS 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
The Turtle Moves! Page 7
