So perhaps it’s not surprising—though it’s undoubtedly frustrating for American fans who haven’t bought The Science of Discworld through Amazon.co.uk or the like—that it’s in a supposed science book that much is revealed about the nature of Discworld. It’s here that such vital elements as chelonium,117 deitium,118 and narrativium119 are explained, as the wizards try to figure out how a universe can operate without them .120 It’s here that the law “As above, so below” is presented, explaining why there are so many links between Roundworld and Discworld—the reality leakage is inherent in the system.
The basic story here is that Ponder Stibbons, the faculty member of Unseen University who’s too bright for his own good, has devised a thaumic reactor—that is to say, a magical device that breaks down the elementary particles of magic to produce energy. He’s built it in the university’s squash court.
He’s also misjudged a few things, and in an attempt to bleed off excess magic, he and the other wizards (with the aid of Hex121) create a universe. Like many magical things, it’s much larger on the inside than on the outside, so that even though its exterior is only a foot in diameter, the interior is our own full-sized universe.
The wizards find this new universe fascinating in its complete lack of magic, and watch it develop over a few billion years of its internal time—which is conveniently only a matter of days for Unseen University. With the aid of Hex and the omniscope, they’re able to study it closely, and even to project themselves into it.
Poor Rincewind is named Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography122 and sent in as their scout, but he doesn’t have it all to himself; eventually most of the familiar faces on the faculty take a look around. They find it baffling that a reality lacking in basic elements like narrativium can develop life, and equally baffling that once that life exists, it doesn’t immediately produce wizard-level intelligence. They watch various promising species, hoping they’ll evolve into something that can hold interesting conversations, and are repeatedly disappointed as trilobites and dinosaurs and assorted mammals all fail to oblige them.
No one happens to be watching when certain apes finally get the hang of this “intelligence” thing.
I won’t give away the ending, but there is one, and a pretty satisfactory one at that. The thaumic reactor is eventually shut down, and the universe tucked safely away on a shelf.
And Rincewind, who was so unsatisfying as the protagonist of The Last Continent, is a much better character here than he has been in some time, displaying intelligence and compassion as well as his usual cowardice. It works.
All in all, it’s a shame that the book has no American edition. It was a bestseller in Britain, and deservedly so. Where most of the other spin-offs unavailable on the western shores of the Atlantic—such as the Discworld (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary, or the Mapp Death’s Domain—are merely entertaining trivia, the science volumes are real Discworld stories, quite possibly novel-length even without the science chapters.
Not to mention having lots of good popular science.
At the end, though, we leave Rincewind in his place at Unseen University, with Roundworld’s universe on its shelf, until The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, which we’ll consider in Chapter 35.
For now, though, it’s time to see what Samuel Vimes and the Watch are up to.
30
The Fifth Elephant (1999)
BY THIS POINT IN THE WATCH SERIES, Samuel Vimes and company have Ankh-Morpork fairly well sorted out,123 but Mr. Pratchett clearly isn’t done with the character. There’s obviously more to be said about Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch.
The only reasonable thing to do, then, is to send Vimes somewhere else. Accordingly, Lord Vetinari appoints him ambassador to Uberwald, to represent the city at the coronation of the Low King.
Up to this point, we haven’t been told much about the dwarfs’ system of government; now we learn that they have an elected Low King, who is crowned on the Scone of Stone124—a sixteen-pound chunk of dwarf bread dating back some fifteen hundred years—in their largest city, which is underneath Uberwald. Ankh-Morpork is eager to get trading concessions from the Low King, so the Patrician wants a good showing at the coronation.
One would hardly think that sending a notorious anti-monarchist cop would be an appropriate representative in such circumstances, but Lord Vetinari has a complex mind, and there are complications that he thinks Vimes can simplify.
The casual reader might wonder what the politics of dwarfs and werewolves have to do with elephants. Well, first off, the title almost certainly originated simply as a pun on The Fifth Element—the Bruce Willis SF movie was in theaters right about the time this novel was starting to gestate.125 Secondly, the Disc rests upon the backs of four elephants. Legend has it there was once a fifth,126 but it slipped off Great A’tuin’s shell, orbited around, and smacked fatally into the Disc in what later became Uberwald. The impact was responsible for much of the mountainous terrain in the area, and the elephant’s buried remains have provided the dwarfs with gigantic fat mines.
Those trade concessions Lord Vetinari is hoping for are for some of that fat.
Since this is a Vimes story, there are crimes to be solved and criminals to be apprehended, and class issues to be dealt with. Vimes is sent to Uberwald not as Commander of the City Watch, but as Duke of Ankh-Morpork.127
He hates that.
Someone has robbed a museum in Ankh-Morpork, and a tradesman has been murdered, but Sir Samuel must leave that to others as he sets out for Uberwald with his wife and a few selected escorts.
That leaves Carrot Ironfoundersson in charge of the Watch—but then he, for reasons of his own, also leaves the city, bound for Uberwald.
That leaves Fred Colon as Acting Captain. Yes, Fred Colon.
This is, of course, a disaster, though that’s incidental to the main story. It does make for some very entertaining scenes, some of them curiously reminiscent of The Caine Mutiny.
Our primary narrative, though, follows Vimes to the Uberwald town of Bonk, where he unravels a conspiracy between a clan of werewolves and certain disgruntled dwarfs. We learn a great deal more about Angua’s family, about dwarf society, and about Igor—and Igor, and Igor, and all their clan. Vampires make only a rather small (though significant) appearance; perhaps Mr. Pratchett wanted to avoid repeating too much from Carpe Jugulum.
Gaspode the talking dog has a role, as do several other familiar characters—the Librarian doesn’t appear, which is unusual, though he’s mentioned once in passing, but Death has a few scenes, and pretty much all the established Watchmen appear.
In the course of the novel, Lady Sybil informs Vimes that she’s pregnant, which isn’t significant here but obviously will be in the future.
And we get our first look at the clacks.
These are signal towers, using semaphore arms by day, lights and shutters by night, to send coded messages from one tower to the next, faster than a horse can gallop. This is obviously well within the technological capabilities of the people of Discworld, even without magic, but it just wasn’t anything anyone had a real reason to build until now, when it finally occurred to someone that it would be useful to know what various commodities are selling for in Ankh-Morpork before sending a shipload of goods there.
This parallels our own world, where semaphores have been possible for a couple of thousand years, but hardly ever got built except for a few military signaling systems and traffic control on railroads.
We’ll see more of the clacks in later books, including the very next one, which does not star any of our established heroes, despite being set in Ankh-Morpork. Oh, plenty of familiar faces appear, but the protagonist is new, and at least so far, only featured this once, in The Truth.
Samuel Vimes won’t have the lead again until Night Watch (see Chapter 36).
31
The Truth (2000)
THE CENTURY OF THE FRUITBAT has been a time of great change in Ankh-Morpork, and t
hose changes include the arrival of lots of dwarfs looking for ways to make money. One bunch of them has built a printing press, complete with moveable type. bunch of them has built a printing press, complete with moveable type
It was established in Maskerade that moveable type isn’t allowed in Ankh-Morpork—the wizards of Unseen University forbade it because they were afraid that type used to print anything remotely magical might pick up some of the magic, which could have unfortunate effects when the type was re-used for something else.
In the waning years of the Century of the Fruitbat, though, Archchancellor Ridcully decides that this restriction has outlived its usefulness, and that the value of moveable type in dealing with the growing flood of paperwork required in a modern university outweighs any dangers. Lord Vetinari reaches a similar conclusion. The dwarfs are allowed to retain their machine.
And one William de Worde, a gentlemen of limited means who has heretofore made his living by sending newsletters to half a dozen wealthy foreign clients who wish to be kept abreast of developments in Ankh-Morpork, happens upon the dwarfs on his way to the engraver, and finds himself becoming one of their first customers. At the urging of the dwarfs, who want more business for their press, he keeps increasing the size, frequency, and circulation of his newsletter, transforming it from a private letter into the Ankh-Morpork Times.
Meanwhile, yet another plot to depose Lord Vetinari is under way. In previous volumes, the defeats of such conspiracies have always been stories about Sam Vimes and the Watch, and indeed, Commander Vimes does investigate this one, but only in the background. Our viewpoint instead follows de Worde as he invents both the newspaper and the occupation “investigative reporter,” and uncovers the details of the scheme.
It’s interesting to see the Watch from the outside, and to get a new angle on Lord Vetinari. The actual story is mostly familiar material—powerful families unhappy with the city’s modernization under Vetinari, hired thugs, complicated schemes, dwarfs, trolls, and a vampire or two. The story doesn’t break much new ground, but revisits such favorites as Foul Ole Ron, Gaspode the talking dog, and Mr. Slant the zombie lawyer. We see the Black Ribboners, the vampire temperance movement, in action, and the Ankh-Morpork equivalents of photography and PDAs.
There are a few relatively subtle publishing in-jokes—for example, all the dwarf printers except Gunilla Goodmountain are named for typefaces, though with modified spellings (e.g. Boddony for Bodoni)—and a good bit of commentary about the nature of the newspaper business that reminds the reader that Mr. Pratchett has considerable first-hand experience in journalism.
All in all, it’s a satisfactory Discworld novel, but not one that seems especially important or innovative in anything but its choice of protagonist—and even there, although most of the stories have featured recurring characters like Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax, or Sam Vimes, we’ve had one-off heroes before, in such books as Small Gods or Pyramids, and of course Victor in Moving Pictures, the previous novel about new technology changing Ankh-Morpork. William de Worde fits fairly comfortably into that company. He reappears in a minor role in Monstrous Regiment, but is not the hero of any other stories, as yet.
The next book in the series is rather drastically different; where The Truth was content with comfortable settings and plot elements, Thief of Time is not—but that’s the next chapter.
32
Thief of Time (2001)
THIS NOVEL is one of the more difficult to fit into a sub-series; it could be considered part of the “Gods and Philosophers” set, but since Death and his granddaughter Susan have major roles, I decided to class it as a Death novel. 128
Thief of Time129 introduces us once again to the History Monks of Oi Dong, who live high up in the central mountains of the Disc, where the magical field is strong. We encountered them briefly back in Small Gods, you may recall. The Order of Wen the Eternally Surprised manages the flow of time on Discworld and, we learn in the course of the novel, had to reconstruct their world’s history once, when it was broken.
This is, as Mr. Pratchett has admitted131 in interviews, a handy device for explaining away any discrepancies that might crop up among the various books and stories in the series. The histories of Ephebe and Omnia are particularly damaged, which explains why their timelines often don’t match the rest of the Disc, sometimes being off by several centuries. Some bits were used several times in patching things up, as well, which explains why certain events appear to have happened in more than one era.
The History Monks have a rather troublesome apprentice by the name of Lobsang Ludd, who is assigned to the sweeper Lu-Tze for training. Lu-Tze is not exactly the standard issue sweeper, of course.
This all provides Mr. Pratchett with an opportunity to mock Eastern mysticism and martial arts—not so much the real things, perhaps, as the way they’re presented in western fiction, especially the products of Hollywood. There are references to the old TV series Kung Fu, the James Bond movies, and a variety of other such entertainments.
Meanwhile, the Auditors of Reality, previously seen in Reaper Man and Hogfather, are once again trying to put an end to messy, illogical humanity, this time by convincing Jeremy Clockson, a brilliant young clockmaker in Ankh-Morpork, to build a device that will stop time.
Naturally, that attracts the attention of the History Monks, since Time is their major interest, and also of Death, since endings are his concern. The History Monks send Lu-Tze and his apprentice to deal with the matter, while Death calls upon his granddaughter, Susan Sto Helit, now working as a schoolteacher, to try to prevent the success of the Auditors’ scheme.
Susan, it seems, is one of those wonderfully intimidating schoolteachers who actually teaches her students, rather than bullying or babysitting them. This suits her well, and she resents being dragged off to deal with incarnations, anthropomorphic personifications, apocalypses, and the like. But she does go.
No explanation is given, by the way, of why Susan is a schoolteacher and not the reigning Duchess of Sto Helit. Her ancestry seems to have been quietly forgotten—or perhaps the title she inherited no longer carries any actual power, after the fashion of present-day European nobility.
Death himself does not try to stop the clockmaker, but instead prepares to ride out at the end of time with his fellow Horsemen, as he is expected to.
Naturally, it does all work out in the end, though not quite the way one might expect. The Auditors learn a good bit about being human, Nanny Ogg plays a small but important part, an Igor gets to help build an infernal device, Jeremy Clockson and Lobsang Ludd find their place, the Five Horsemen ride out, and everything is more or less put right.
Yes, five Horsemen. The identity and nature of the fifth is a significant plot element that I really shouldn’t reveal here. I will mention, though, that I don’t think I’m just imagining the parallels between the Horsemen and the Beatles; I’m pretty sure they’re deliberate.
All in all, Thief of Time is a very satisfactory entry in the series, even though it lacks any mention of the Patrician, Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, the Librarian, or the wizards of Unseen University. The recurring cast has now gotten so large that it really isn’t practical to fit anywhere near all of them in every volume, and even the favorites need a rest sometimes.
Lots of regulars will be appearing in the next book, though.
33
The Last Hero (2001)
THIS IS A LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED volume that’s labeled “A Discworld Fable,” featuring lots of spiffy art by Paul Kidby. It’s also a story of Cohen the Barbarian, last seen in
Interesting Times, where we left him as ruler of the Agatean Empire. It seems he’s become discontented with the emperor business, and is leading the remaining members of the Silver Horde on a final adventure, one that they have no intention of surviving. Specifically, he’s planning to reverse the action of the very first of Discworld’s heroes, Mazda, who stole fire from the gods. Cohen intends to return fire to the gods, in the form of a fifty
-pound keg of the most powerful explosive he can find.
The Agateans aren’t sure this is a good idea, and have informed the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who investigates the matter and is told that, while this isn’t going to do anything irreparable to the gods, it will temporarily collapse the Disc’s magical field, thereby destroying all life on Discworld.
This is, understandably, seen as a bad thing, and an expedition is launched to intercept the Horde.
We therefore have two storylines to follow: Cohen’s progress toward the home of the gods, and the expedition’s creation and progress to that same destination. They do eventually merge, of course.
Rincewind is included, naturally; he’s pretty much always there if Cohen’s involved, and is about as close to being the protagonist as any character herein. We also get Leonard of Quirm, Lord Vetinari, the faculty of Unseen University, Captain Carrot, and the Librarian, in a tale about the nature of heroes and their legends that manages to include some magnificent scenery along the way.
I have a suspicion that to some extent this story was designed to include whatever Mr. Kidby felt like depicting. It provides us with entirely unnecessary but enjoyable extras such as a pictorial guide to thirty-seven varieties of swamp dragon, and diagrams of several of da Quirm’s creations, annotated in his own rather elegant hand. While not a full-length novel, it’s really quite a satisfactory package for any Discworld fan. And it does wrap up Cohen’s saga.
I am informed, by the way, that the paperback edition includes additional illustrations that were not ready in time for the hardcover. Alas, I haven’t seen the paperback edition and can say no more about that.
The Turtle Moves! Page 12
