And I’m hoping it works as a catchy book title, too.
Anyway, Small Gods is mildly unusual in that Ankh-Morpork and the wizards of Unseen University play almost no role whatsoever in the story; they’re barely mentioned, other than as a place Brutha might want to flee to. Pyramids included an extended depiction of Teppic’s training as an assassin in Ankh-Morpork, even Witches Abroad had several passing references to wizards and the Big Wahooni, but in Small Gods there’s almost nothing—basically just Om’s suggestion of taking refuge in Ankh-Morpork, and the Librarian’s brief appearance from L-space.
But there’s plenty to say here about human nature, religious belief, ways of thinking, and the like. If the Discworld series as a whole is about stories, Small Gods is about stories used to oppress and destroy, stories that cannot be questioned.
Pretty heavy stuff for a bunch of funny fantasy.
Which may be why we don’t see any more of the Gods and Philosophers series until Thief of Time, more than a dozen volumes later—if then; Thief of Time is one of those hard-to-classify ones, as described in Chapter 32.
Instead, there’s a brief interruption in the form of a short story, and then it’s back to Lancre and the three witches.
16
“Troll Bridge” (1992)
YES, THERE ARE SHORT STORIES about Discworld. The earliest is “Troll Bridge,” written in 1992 for After the King, an anthology of stories paying tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Obviously, if it’s set on the Disc it’s not set in Middle Earth; in his introduction, Mr. Pratchett explains that he didn’t want to trespass in Prof. Tolkien’s world, and instead tried to reflect something of the feel of The Lord of the Rings—great things passing out of the world and leaving it poorer in some ways, even though it’s safer and saner.
He had an obvious character to star in such a story: Cohen the Barbarian. Who I’ve arbitrarily decided isn’t the hero of a series, largely because he’s a secondary character in all his appearances up through Interesting Times and never has a full-length novel to himself, but who is the protagonist of this story, and arguably of The Last Hero, though the latter is really more of an ensemble piece where Cohen could equally well be considered the villain.
At any rate, in “Troll Bridge” Cohen is looking under bridges for a troll to slay, and finally finds one, but matters do not proceed as expected.
The story does exactly what Mr. Pratchett says he set out to do—to show a world that’s changing, that no longer has a place for warriors even though some of the old heroes are still around. It doesn’t really add much of anything to the Discworld as a whole, and it doesn’t add to any of the sub-series except perhaps “Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat,” but it’s a good little story all the same.
And like all Discworld stories, it’s about stories—Cohen and the troll swap stories of the old days, and find common ground in their shared stories. They know the story they want to play out, and the roles the story expects of them, but in the end they don’t follow it. The time for that story is past.
They don’t make ’em like that anymore.
We’ll see Cohen again in Chapter 20, but for now it’s back to Lancre.
17
Lords and Ladies (1992)
THIS IS THE FIRST DISCWORLD NOVEL to start with an acknowledgment that it’s a sequel to previous stories and may not stand on its own. The Author’s Note at the front says, “I can’t ignore the history of what has gone before,” specifically the events of Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad. This story begins, once the preliminaries are out of the way, with the return of Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick to the kingdom of Lancre, after their wanderings in foreign parts.
They aren’t the only ones returning, unfortunately. It seems that beings generally referred to by euphemisms, because to use their true name is to summon them—the Gentry, the Lords and Ladies, the Fair Folk—are trying to get back through an opening barred to them long ago by a ring of meteoric iron. The barrier is wearing thin, and the elves are able to influence events, and lure people to open the door for them.
This gets tangled up with the preparations for a royal wedding—Magrat is to marry King Verence II—but Granny and Nanny do their best to prevent disaster, and partially succeed.
Matters are further complicated by the arrival of certain wedding guests, including Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University; the Librarian; the Bursar (whose nerves have now cracked completely); young Ponder Stibbons, who now holds the title Reader in Invisible Writings; and Giamo Casanunda, the womanizing dwarf who took an interest in Nanny Ogg in Witches Abroad. We learn that Ridcully and Mistress Weatherwax have some unexpected history, and the coincidence of Unseen University having had an Archchancellor named Weatherwax is finally addressed.
There’s more about Morris dancing—quite a bit more, actually. There’s more about high-energy magic, more about quantum universes, and the first appearance of a Discworld unicorn.
One tidbit, trivial but amusing, is that in one of the Bursar’s fits of madness, he says, “Millennium hand and shrimp.” This phrase will be seen again.
And at the heart of the story are the elves, who are not at all the benevolent creatures of Tolkien or his many imitators, but more like the terrifying creatures of old folklore. Not the cleaned-up nursery version the Victorians wrote about, not even the stronger but still sanitized version Shakespeare gave us, but the real old stories about baby-snatching monsters under the hill, all glamour, illusion, and cold-hearted whim.
Not that Mr. Pratchett ignores the Shakespearean approach; his Queen and King are not totally unrelated to Titania and Oberon, and there are at least two direct references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s not even counting the fact that the elves get loose on a Midsummer Eve.
Story and belief—the elves lure their prey with stories created by editing what’s remembered, and defeat their foes by manipulating their beliefs. They’re parasites using stories to control their hosts.
And as always, the witches stand up for the right of people to run their own lives—or at least, to mostly run their own lives, since of course it’s different when it’s witches doing the meddling.
Other than establishing elves as villains, and providing firm connections between the witches and the wizards (and on the witches’ home ground, unlike the earlier meeting in Equal Rites), this novel does not really represent any real change in Discworld as a whole. It’s a fine, funny story, with some good scary moments, but it doesn’t really stand out from the crowd, so I find myself without much to say about it.
That’s the last we’ll see of the witches of Lancre as the stars of a book until Carpe Jugulum, nine volumes later; for now it’s back to Ankh-Morpork for another look at the resurgent Night Watch under the command of Samuel Vimes.
18
“Theatre of Cruelty” (1993)
THE SECOND DISCWORLD SHORT STORY, originally written for a bookstore giveaway, was published after Men at Arms, but from internal evidence is very clearly set between Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms, so I’m inserting it here, one place out of publication order.
The story opens with Sgt. Colon and Nobby investigating a suspicious death. They report to Captain Vimes, and tell him they’ve sent Corporal Carrot to find a witness.
Carrot being Carrot, he finds the one witness there is to every death on the Disc, and the investigation proceeds from there.
How it is that Carrot can see Death, when Carrot is neither a wizard nor a cat nor otherwise psychically advantaged, is not explained; perhaps heirs to thrones get special privileges, or perhaps he has the same sort of knack for seeing what’s really there that witches do.
“Theatre of Cruelty” is quite short, and although it has some good funny bits, its real impact as a story depends on being familiar with Punch and Judy, which many people these days are not. Its major contributions to the Discworld canon are to provide another example of Carrot’s curiously simple way of thinking, to esta
blish the existence of gnomes, and to provide a sort of origin for Punch and Judy shows. It can be read online, on Lspace.org, if you’re really interested, but if you can’t find it or can’t be bothered, I don’t think you’re really missing much.
19
Men at Arms (1993)
THE ANKH-MORPORK NIGHT WATCH, under the command of Captain Samuel Vimes (at least for the moment), is back.
It hasn’t been long since the end of Guards! Guards!, and matters are much as we left them, except that Captain Vimes is about to be wed to Lady Sybil Ramkin, and intends to retire to a life of leisure after the wedding. At least, he thinks that’s his intention, but clearly he’s not entirely in agreement with himself about the idea.
The question of who will succeed him as Captain is not settled, and is of some concern to Corporal Carrot and the other Watchmen, though not really very urgent—until dead bodies start turning up, bodies with holes through them not like the wounds left by any traditional weapons. It seems that an invention of Leonard da Quirm’s, a weapon called the gonne, has been stolen, and is being used—or perhaps is using the thief. The gonne is clearly not simply a gun of the sort we find in our world, but something with a will of its own.
I’m sure the author’s intent was that this would be a metaphor for the temptations of lethal power, but nonetheless, in the story the gonne does have its own thoughts and desires. Its exact mechanism is apparently not quite like a real gun’s, either. It uses six-shot clips rather than single cartridges, and seems to have a hair-trigger trigger and remarkable range and accuracy for a device that’s the first of its kind.
This doesn’t appear to be a case of reality leakage, of ideas bleeding through from our world, but simply of Leonard of Quirm being a creative genius, and producing something like a gun, but adapted to the Disc. The result is a weapon that literally wants to be used, and which, despite being the first of its kind, is as lethal as the guns it took our world a couple of centuries to develop.
Discworld, after all, has a very strong magical field and a shortage of reality.
The Patrician, Lord Vetinari—and now we learn that his first name is Havelock, as Lady Sybil addresses him by it—warns Vimes not to involve himself in investigating the mysterious deaths, knowing full well that such a warning will simply make Vimes more determined to find the truth. As indeed it does.
The Patrician has miscalculated matters slightly, but nonetheless, Vimes and company do find and destroy the gonne and dispose of the murderer, and all ends well—in fact, very well—for the Watch, as Carrot finds himself in a position to more or less blackmail the Patrician, and dictates terms that merge the Night Watch with the Day Watch and restore the result to its full establishment, rather than leaving it the pitiful, useless remnant it had been. Actual detectives will be trained. Carrot is promoted to Captain, and rather than being retired, Sir Samuel Vimes is to be the Commander of this enlarged Watch.
That’s the core of the plot, but really, the more important and entertaining elements of the story are elsewhere. The man who steals the gonne intends to restore the monarchy in Ankh-Morpork and has identified Carrot as the rightful heir to the throne, which he definitely is, and part of the book’s point is the realization that, contrary to literally thousands of years of storytelling, such a restoration would be a bad thing. This king is not interested in returning; he knows he does more good for the city as a Watchman than he would sitting on its golden throne.
Carrot has, in fact, learned how the city actually works in the gap between Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms. He still knows the ancient laws by heart, and uses them when it’s appropriate, but he’s come to understand the Patrician’s system of balancing Guilds and power blocs against one another, the function of the Thieves’ Guild in keeping crime under control, the rather broad local definition of “suicide,” and so on.
And he’s taken to heart Vimes’s total distrust of arbitrary authority, and Vimes’s hatred of class distinctions.
Samuel Vimes, it turns out, is very determinedly anti-monarchist. He doesn’t like the Patrician much, either, but at least Vetinari doesn’t claim any sort of divine right, or put on all the pomp a king would. Early in the book, Vimes describes to Carrot how the old kings were overthrown, how someone got fed up at the atrocities committed by the last king, Lorenzo the Kind, and led a rebellion. This rebel leader was Commander of the Guard, a man called Old Stoneface.
Toward the end of the book, the Patrician mentions that the Commander of the Guard at the time of Lorenzo’s overthrow was a man named Vimes, and Carrot confirms that the present-day Vimes is his descendant. In short, anti-monarchism is a very old Vimes family tradition.
This, of course, contradicts Guards! Guards!, where the kings have been gone for millennia and Vimes was virtually unaware they’d ever existed, but hey, it makes a better story, and Discworld is all about stories.
And this story is the heart of the Watch series, really. Vimes believes that life ought to be fair and sensible, that everyone deserves a decent life, and the fact that this is clearly not the case has him perpetually awash in anger and despair. Anger is his driving force.
Carrot believes that life ought to be fair and sensible, that everyone deserves a decent life, and that if everyone would just try, then this could be made to happen, at least briefly and locally.
That’s the core; the plots of the various stories in the series are elaborations on that.
Men at Arms introduces or continues a great many other elements. The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is described in passing—still nominally functioning, after a fashion, but not well. We’ll eventually see that addressed98 in Going Postal (see Chapter 41). Leonard of Quirm, first mentioned in Wyrd Sisters, is properly introduced; it seems that his mysterious disappearance came about when the Patrician locked him away where he wouldn’t be quite so dangerous.
Bloody Stupid Johnson, the Discworld’s worst landscape architect and designer,99 is described, and several of his creations mentioned.
Gaspode the Wonder Dog, who lost his ability to talk at the end of Moving Pictures, has regained it by sleeping too close to Unseen University and its intense magical field; he’s back, and essential to the plot.
Mrs. Cake and her undead lodgers appear briefly; she still has a problem keeping her precognition in check.
Foul Ole Ron is introduced, mumbling to himself, saying things like “Millennium hand and shrimp”—a phrase that the Bursar of Unseen University said in Lords and Ladies. Having two different befuddled characters say it does leave one wondering whether it might actually mean something.
More likely, though, Mr. Pratchett just liked it and wanted to use it again, and Foul Ole Ron was handier than the Bursar of Unseen University. He does this, taking some bit of business and moving it from one character to another, as he’s had Rincewind and Mort both looking for logic that isn’t there (and will later assign this to Ponder Stibbons), and he’s taken the literal-mindedness of the Zoons and transferred it to the dwarfs. Now “millennium hand and shrimp” has leapt from the Bursar to a new and permanent home in Foul Ole Ron.
An ongoing subplot that will continue throughout all future books set in Ankh-Morpork is the Patrician’s decision to integrate all the city’s various populations, and to use the Watch as a tool for this purpose. At the start of the book, Vimes has been ordered to recruit a dwarf and a troll, so that those species will be represented in law enforcement and become full participants in Ankh-Morpork’s community, rather than considering themselves oppressed minorities in a human city.
The detail that dwarfs and trolls hate each other complicates this, but that hardly deters Lord Vetinari. There are several references to the long-ago Battle of Koom Valley, where armies of dwarfs and trolls managed to ambush each other; we’ll hear more about that in books to come, especially Thud!, as described in Chapter 44.
Accordingly, in line with the Patrician’s edict, Vimes has enlisted a dwarf named Cuddy, and the troll Detritus, previously seen w
orking as a bouncer—well, a splatter—at the Mended Drum in Guards! Guards!, and as a bodyguard and gofer100 in Moving Pictures.
And then there’s Angua, also recruited in response to the Patrician’s demand for inclusion, and there’s a running gag in which people say, “But she’s a w—” and never finish the word, so that the unsuspecting first-time reader thinks the word is “woman.”
Actually, of course, it’s “werewolf.”101 Lord Vetinari wanted the undead represented, and a werewolf is considered to be close enough.
Angua and Detritus are a permanent addition to the cast of the Watch novels, and will be back many times, along with Vimes, Carrot, Sgt. Colon, Nobby Nobbs, and the rest. The trend of recruiting new varieties of watchmen will also continue in Feet of Clay, as described in Chapter 23, and in Thud!, as we’ll see in Chapter 44, but first there’s a multi-volume interruption, beginning with a return to the Death series.
20
Soul Music (1994)
DEATH HAS ABANDONED HIS JOB AGAIN—this time because he’s remembering something he doesn’t want to. He wants to be able to forget, but as an anthropomorphic personification, that ability has been denied him.
So he goes off to join the Klatchian Foreign Legion under the name “Beau Nidle,”102 and his granddaughter Susan of Sto Helit inherits his duties during his absence.
We haven’t met Susan before, though her parents, Mort and Ysabell, were prominently featured in Mort. She’s sixteen, attending a school for sensible young women of good family, and is at least temporarily unaware of her curious ancestry, until the Death of Rats shows up, demanding her attention.
She has vague early-childhood memories of her grandfather, but had never really grasped what they meant, partly because her parents actively discouraged her from doing so. They expected her to live in the normal human world—well, as normal as Discworld gets, anyway—and thought her peculiar background could only make things difficult, so they encouraged her to have as little to do with the mystical as possible.
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