They learn better.
And so does everyone else. One of the reasons Lord Vetinari deserves to rule Ankh-Morpork is that he recognizes talent when he sees it, and once Vimes comes to his attention, that talent is rewarded. Vimes is a man who can be very useful, to the Patrician and to the city, so his rise is rapid.
But Vimes is a man who was meant to be a copper, a man who grew up in terrible poverty and has never forgotten it, a man who sees the ruling classes as his natural enemy, a man who prefers to operate largely unnoticed, so that rise is a mixed blessing.
Which is why the Watch series is one of the longest. Rincewind and company got a healthy head-start, but the Watch has closed the gap significantly.
Once a protagonist has solved the problem at the heart of a story, that story is over and done. There’s only one book about the Amazing Maurice; there’s only one book about Brutha; there’s only one book about Teppic; and in each case, it’s because at the end, the problem that forced the character into having adventures in the first place is solved. Maurice has resolved his moral dilemmas and found himself a home, Teppic has settled matters in Djelibeybi, and Brutha has been recognized as a prophet of Om and has reformed the Omnian church. Doing anything more with those characters would feel like cheating; they’re done.
To some extent, it seemed as if Rincewind was done at the end of The Last Continent; he was safely back at Unseen University, with no desire to go anywhere else. That series has only continued because Archchancellor Ridcully has no compunctions about throwing Rincewind at problems, and this sort of disruption is in keeping with the character’s history.
The witches can keep going indefinitely because they’re a reactive force—they respond to threats to Lancre, and threats keep turning up. There’s a danger that the series might get repetitive after a while, but the witches themselves are infinitely reusable.
And Sam Vimes—well, he can keep reacting to threats to the peace of Ankh-Morpork (and he does), but on a personal level he’s gone literally from the gutter to a mansion, from being ignored or despised to being internationally renowned, the second-most-powerful man in the wealthiest and most powerful city on the Disc. From a dramatic point of view, that ought to make him less interesting—but it doesn’t, because he doesn’t think he belongs in that mansion. He doesn’t like playing politics. He despises war. The methods available to him as Duke of Ankh (or Ankh-Morpork, whichever it is) are not ones he’s comfortable using. He wants to be back out on the streets—but at the same time he loves his wife and son, and has no intention of giving up the wealth he’s attained. So even though he’s ostensibly got everything he could want, he’s not done, in the way Maurice or Brutha is. He still has his internal conflicts. He still has the Beast in his heart that he struggles to contain. He still has a city to protect from itself. There are still serious issues in his life that remain unresolved.
And that brings us to the third important character in the Watch stories, after Vetinari and Vimes—Carrot Ironfoundersson. There’s one very basic issue in his life that remains unresolved, and probably always will. He’s found his place in the City Watch, he’s happy there, he loves the city and its people, he’s made his peace with his mixed human/dwarf heritage, his relationship with Angua is gradually straightening out, but there’s still the looming issue of his birthright. He is, after all, the rightful king of Ankh-Morpork—well, as much as anyone is a “rightful king.” He not only has the bloodline and the sword, but all the other attributes that would make him a beloved and just ruler, a magnificent king.
The traditional thing for the lost heir in a fantasy story to do, of course, is to claim his inheritance, slaughter any dragons, villains, or guardsmen who get in his way, and bring about a Golden Age as king.
Carrot doesn’t do that. He knows he could, but he doesn’t. Instead of butchering the guards as they charge one by one into the room in Chapter Three, he’s joined up with them, because when all’s said and done, he thinks the city is better off with the tyrant Vetinari in the palace, and Vimes and himself on the streets. He refuses even to accept command of the Watch at the end of Men at Arms because “People should do things because an officer tells them. They shouldn’t do it because Corporal Carrot says so. Just because Corporal Carrot is . . . good at being obeyed.”
He’s a stock fantasy character, but one who’s too smart, in his peculiar way, to act out his ordained role. Just as Sam Vimes refuses to be the useless nobody his role calls for, Carrot refuses to be the straightforward hero-king he was born to be.
The other Watchmen also fail to live up to their stereotypes. Fred Colon is the bumbling old fool who really ought to die of his own stupidity in Chapter Three, stabbed in the back by someone he didn’t mistrust enough, just a few weeks short of retirement.
But he doesn’t.
Nobby Nobbs is the little weasel who should either abandon his post and flee out of the story entirely, or betray his compatriots for a handful of gold and then get killed in the ensuing melee.
But he doesn’t.
These men are all stereotypes, and they even know they’re stereotypes—but they’re all just a little too human, a little too smart, a little too strong-hearted, to play out their demeaning parts in the standard fashion. The members of the Watch know the stories they’re supposed to live out, they know (except for Carrot) that they aren’t the heroes, they’re just bit players—but they all rise above what’s expected of them, even Carrot, who rises above claiming the throne because he sees that it’s better for the city if he doesn’t.
These are people who know the story they’re in, whether it’s the returning king in Guards! Guards! or the grand war for national pride in Jingo or the bitter race war in Thud!, but who insist on changing it to one they like better.
Mr. Pratchett has created something really wonderful in the Watch. I look forward to seeing more of them.
As for my title question, “Who watches the Watchmen?,” the answer turns out to be obvious.
They watch themselves. That’s why they survive.
57
Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat
RIGHT AT THE START of The Colour of Magic, we are informed that Ankh-Morpork is the oldest city on the Disc. It’s been there for thousands of years, and the current city is mostly built atop earlier versions, so that there are mazes of tunnels and basements everywhere.
Nothing unusual about that in a fantasy novel. Where in the real world we only have maybe five thousand years of history all told, fantasy worlds regularly have tens of thousands, and often amazingly little happens in all that time. It’s not particularly unusual for evil wizards to live a few centuries, for prophecies to be handed down for millennia, for royal pedigrees to matter over absurdly long times—I mean, how long did the Stewards rule Gondor before Aragorn showed up to reclaim the throne?164
In fact, fantasy worlds not only tend to have ridiculously long memories, they tend to be impossibly stagnant. Someone can get sent into magical exile for a century or two, come back, and see not much of anything changed except that everyone he knew is a lot older, or dead.
In real life, anyone who missed the twentieth century would be pretty lost.
Hell, anyone who missed the fourteenth century would be pretty lost. A Siennese nobleman who was ensorceled in 1300 and released in 1400 would have missed the Black Death and the beginnings of the Renaissance, for example, and would find that his city had gone from being a major power to little more than a village.
But we are told that Ankh-Morpork has stood there for millennia, and presumably hasn’t altered all that terribly much in most of that time, but in the course of the Discworld series, that all changes. There isn’t a full-blown industrial revolution or anything, but there are a few significant inventions, such as movies, newspapers, a sophisticated telegraph system, postage stamps, paper money, cameras, and personal organizers.
That’s a lot to absorb.
Of course, not all of it sticks; movies t
urn out to be a temporary aberration caused by extradimensional entities and fade away. The rest, though, linger on.
How the people of Ankh-Morpork and their ruler, Patrician Havelock Vetinari, deal with this sudden march of progress is the subject of Moving Pictures,165 The Truth, Going Postal, and Making Money. I include the short story “Troll Bridge” here as well, even though it isn’t set in Ankh-Morpork and has no specific sociological innovations in it, simply because it’s on the same general theme of dealing with changing times, and Cohen the Barbarian never quite got his own series.
There was no single protagonist for this series originally; Victor Tugbelbend is the star of Moving Pictures, while William de Worde brings us The Truth. However Moist von Lipwig, protagonist of Going Postal, returns in Making Money, so either he’s a separate series, or he’s taking over the series, or . . . well, for now, he’s just a part of it.
It’s not entirely clear just what’s brought on these changes, and why they all happen in such a rush. Cameras, or rather iconographs, were introduced by Twoflower in The Colour of Magic, and may have existed for centuries in the Agatean Empire, for all we know. Moveable type had been invented before, but forbidden by the wizards of Unseen University until Archchancellor Ridcully decided it might help with his paperwork. There’s no obvious reason the clacks hadn’t been built sooner, nor are we ever really told much about their initial creation—they just appear.
Of course, many of these developments are based on magic, rather than the technology we use. Iconographs don’t use photosensitive chemicals, for example; they use imps with paintbrushes.166 Commander Vimes’s Dis-Organizer doesn’t use electronics; it’s another imp. The exact methods the Alchemists’ Guild used in creating motion pictures aren’t explained in detail, but also involve imps and demons. (Clearly, these imps and demons paint very fast.)
In fact, generally speaking, most of Discworld’s “high tech” stuff is demonically based; imps serve the same roles that birds and small animals did on The Flintstones. For those of you unfamiliar with this ancient cartoon series,167 The Flintstones was set in a Stone Age that greatly resembled the American suburbs of the 1950s, except that everything was made of stones, sticks, and animal hides, and critters of various sorts were substituted for machinery. Fred Flintstone was a heavy-machinery operator at a quarry, but his “machine” was a dinosaur he rode. The phonograph in the Flintstone home had a turntable driven by a small furry animal on a drive-belt, and the “needle” was a bird’s beak, still attached to a live bird.168
Lots of cheap humor was derived from the clever substitutions of animals for machines, and the occasional snide asides these critters made—-most of them spoke, a fact that the human characters generally ignored. Mr. Pratchett isn’t above this sort of humor in the Discworld stories, except he uses imps rather than birds and beasts, and their comments are more likely to be dismayed or angry than merely snide. The imps in iconographs often provide a little extra commentary on events, as when one runs out of black paint in a particularly dark moment, and the imp in Vimes’s Dis-Organizer is a character in its own right in its pitiful frustration with its employer’s refusal to cooperate with it.
The Flintstones would sometimes rely on Rube Goldberg devices of wood, string, and hide to make up for the lack of metal and electricity, and the Disc’s people also improvise when necessary, as in Otto Chriek’s easily-shattered vial of blood that would restore him to life when his iconograph’s flash turned him to dust. It’s definitely some of the same sort of ingenuity; Mr. Pratchett just does it better.
And the purpose of this ingenuity, of course, is to allow the presence of familiar technological devices without the technology.
In some cases, the author doesn’t bother; after all, there’s no reason movable type and semaphore towers couldn’t be built with ancient technology. Gutenberg’s printing press didn’t require steam or electricity, so there’s no need for imps, either.
At any rate, in the second half of the Century of the Fruitbat (and the dawn of the Century of the Anchovy), Ankh-Morpork survived the arrival of several of these new technologies. Some of them, such as the iconograph and the Dis-Organizer, are treated as mere background details, but a few form the basis for entire novels: movies, in Moving Pictures; newspapers, in The Truth; and the clacks, or semaphore towers, along with postage stamps, in Going Postal.
The clacks actually appear before Going Postal, and both clacks and newspapers have permanent effects, as seen in Monstrous Regiment. That makes Moving Pictures the odd one out, in that movies appear and then disappear in the course of the novel, and there’s no attempt to revive the movie industry in later books, no one making the odd little film.
In Moving Pictures, people are caught up in the story of Hollywood, out of their own control, not understanding their own actions, even while they spread their own stories of Klatchian sheiks and sword-wielding heroes to eager audiences. That’s a story that has to be stopped.
In The Truth and Going Postal, though, the stories are unleashed and then tamed. William de Worde discovers the power of the press, the ability of the printed word to manipulate the masses, and does everything he can to direct that power in beneficial ways. The swindler and con artist Moist von Lipwig already knows how to use stories on a small scale to get what he wants, and when he’s given control of the Post Office, he discovers that can scale up, that it’s possible to sway not just individuals but the entire city with a good song and dance—and like de Worde, he strives to turn this power to the benefit of the entire city, rather than just himself.
De Worde does what good he can because he’s determined not to be like his father; von Lipwig does so because he’s determined to better himself, rather than his family, though admittedly he also has the bad example of Reacher Gilt to inspire him.
(Of course, we don’t yet know anything at all about von Lipwig’s family; it may also be motivating him.)
And one interesting feature of all of these isn’t in the characters of the ostensible protagonists, but in the character of Lord Havelock Vetinari. The Patrician does not try to suppress these new technologies.
Your classic fantasy tyrant would have smashed de Worde’s presses and executed de Worde when the Times started disrupting things. He would have sent troops to burn Holy Wood to the ground. He would have hanged Moist von Lipwig permanently, and either nationalized or destroyed the clacks.
Vetinari doesn’t do any of that.
It’s not that he’s incapable of it, as any mime hanging in the scorpion pit could tell you; it’s that he has the imagination to see that sometimes change is an improvement, sometimes a risk is worth taking, and sometimes suppressing something isn’t practical. A printing press isn’t a hard thing to build, really, not when you have a few dwarf artificers around; smash the Times, and you might find the Tribune appearing on the streets from somewhere deep beneath the city. The clacks change how things are done, but they do so by making people richer, and more wealth is a good thing.
Vetinari prefers to let matters play themselves out, and perhaps give them a few nudges in the right direction—or let Vimes give them a few nudges.
He does suppress some things, when he determines them to be too dangerous, to be a net loss to the city. He does keeps Leonard of Quirm sequestered. He’s happy to see the end of the gonne in Men at Arms. But when something may be a net benefit, or may be more trouble to suppress than it’s worth, Vetinari lets it exist.
Vetinari is a smart tyrant.
In a way, Vetinari is the real hero of The Truth and Going Postal and Making Money and several of the Watch stories. He wants what’s best for Ankh-Morpork, and has mastered one of the hardest parts of governing: choosing the right man for the right job, and then letting him do it. He doesn’t care whether the people he chooses like him; he doesn’t care whether anyone likes him. He cares whether they want the same things for Ankh-Morpork that he does. He gives Vimes his head because he knows that Vimes wants peace and justice, and detest
s the ruling classes—and Vetinari also wants peace and justice (within reason), and knows that the ruling classes are the biggest threat to his own position.
He lets de Worde run the Times because he prefers the honest press that de Worde is trying to provide to the propaganda that someone else might produce.
He puts von Lipwig in charge of the Post Office because he knows he needs someone smart and unorthodox if he’s ever to have a working postal service again—and at that, von Lipwig isn’t his first attempt, he’s just the one that works. And because it works, Vetinari moves Lipwig on to the Royal Bank.
Clearly, Lord Vetinari is the best thing that ever happened to Ankh-Morpork. It’s not a coincidence that the city flourishes so spectacularly under his rule, as it did not under Lord Snapcase or Lord Winder or any of the previous Patricians, nor under any of the later kings. This is a man for whom Sun Tzu’s Art of War is just stating the obvious, Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is a child’s primer, and Peter Anspach’s “Evil Overlord list”169 is his morning reminder. He’s a man who has transformed Ankh-Morpork’s story from an ongoing soap opera and political intrigue with occasional episodes of war into a science fiction saga of new inventions transforming society.
In many stories, and many aspects of real life, it’s taken for granted that change is a bad thing. In most fantasy novels, in particular, change is a bad thing—we start out with the happy little forest creatures and the cheerful peasants and the benevolent rulers all in harmony; then an evil wizard or a sarcastic dragon or a Dark Lord comes along and messes everything up, and Our Heroes spend a few hundred pages removing the disturbance and putting everything back the way it was, removing as many of the changes as possible and bringing back the Good Old Days. Even some of the Discworld novels follow that basic plot outline: Things are good, a problem arises, the problem is removed, things go back to being good.
The Turtle Moves! Page 19
