Jingo—Stage Adaptation
Going Postal—Stage Adaptation
Monstrous Regiment—Stage Adaptation
Night Watch—Stage Adaptation
Interesting Times—Stage Adaptation
APPENDIX 2
Online Resources
THESE ARE LISTED IN APPROXIMATE order of usefulness, and deliberately do not include the several interviews scattered through cyberspace, which you can find by googling interview Pratchett.
The L-Space Web: www.lspace.org/
The most extensive Discworld fan site. Lots of annotations, bibliographic data, etc.
Terry Pratchett Books.com Discworld page: www.terrypratchettbooks.com/discworld/
An official site for the series.
Colin Smythe Ltd.’s: Terry Pratchett page: www.colinsmythe.co.uk/terrypages/tpindex.htm
Mr. Pratchett’s agent provides news and information about his client.
The Turtle Moves: www.theturtlemoves.com/
This fan site first appeared while I was writing this book. Despite the coincidence of names, I have no connection with it, but it’s a good site.
Discworld on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/discworld_(world)
The entry point for a great deal of accumulated information about the series. It’s amazingly detailed on many subjects.
Sky One’s Hogfather page: www.skyone.co.uk/hogfather/
This site is primarily intended to promote the recent TV mini-series, but in the process they’ve provided lots and lots of nifty background material.
Sky One’s Colour of Magic page: www.skyoneonline.co.uk/tcom/news.htm
Promoting the upcoming adaptation.
The Discworld Convention site: www.dwcon.org/
Home to information about the not-quite-annual Discworld fan conventions.
Stephen Briggs’s website: www.cmotdibbler.com/
Some interesting (if largely tangential) information, and a source for some nifty Discworld merchandise.
The Cunning Artificer’s Discworld Emporium: http://www.artificer.co.uk/
Lots of strange and wonderful merchandise.
The Home of Discworld Stamps: www.discworldstamps.co.uk/html/home.php
More merchandise.
A Mad Fan’s Guide to Discworld Stamps: www.discworldstampfans.co.uk/
An obsessive fan’s collection of trivia on a specific subject.
Thud! The Discworld Board Game: www.thudgame.com/
All about the Roundworld version of the famous game.
About the Author
LAWRENCE WATT-EVANS published his first novel The Lure of the Basilisk at 24 and has since written more than 30 novels, more than 100 short stories, more than 150 published articles and contributed to several of BenBella Books’ Smart Pop titles. He was a 1987 nominee for the Nebula Award for short story and a 1988 He was a 1987 nominee for the Nebula Award for short story and a 1988 winner of the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo award for best short story. He has been a full-time writer and editor for more than 25 years and has also worked as an instructor of Viable Paradise on Martha’s Vineyard and at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Md.
1 Yes, his name is now a trademark. So’s Discworld, and a few other names that will come up in this book. Not a joke.
2 If you can make such a pun work, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
3 I know this firsthand. People who read my first novel said I was imitating Howard. People who didn’t read it said I was imitating Tolkien.
4 For those of you not already aware of it, and wondering what’s with the footnotes, allow me to explain. The Discworld novels are notorious for having plenty of footnotes, and even footnotes to footnotes. Footnotes are not particularly common in novels of any sort, including humorous fantasy, so this is a quirk, an oddity, a trademark—perhaps even a gimmick.
It’s also where Mr. Pratchett puts some of his best jokes. If I’m going to claim to be his peer, then doesn’t it behoove me to use lots of footnotes as well? I won’t be the first to do this, by any means; for example, John Moore included humorous footnotes referring to Mr. Pratchett’s known predilection for them in his novel Bad Prince Charlie.
Rest assured, I won’t go as overboard as Jasper Fforde does with the footnoterphone in his Thursday Next novels, but I will put good stuff in some of these footnotes. Don’t ignore them.
Oh, and if I cite a book here you’ve never heard of—for example, if you never heard of John Moore or Jasper Fforde—I probably won’t footnote it, but you might find it useful to check the bibliography at the back of the book, where I’ve listed most of the books I mention. I won’t always list all of the books in a series, or by a particular author, but there should be enough to get you started.
5 Often, even when they technically aren’t human beings.
6 My father was, though—a professor of organic chemistry. Which is one reason I’m not one. It didn’t look like a job I’d enjoy. He loved it, though; no accounting for tastes.
7 I know he’s written lots of stuff besides Discworld, but I’m not going to say anything about any of it in this book. I’m going to stick with Discworld because that’s quite enough to tackle without worrying about Johnny Maxwell or the Bromeliad or the rest.
8 That was at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in September 2000. I don’t really blame him, since I did interrupt his chat, but I do have an excuse for my rudeness—I hadn’t been able to stand in line for his signature because I was signing books at the same time. I’d assumed we’d be seated side-by-side at the same table, so I could squeeze it in then, but no, oh no, that would have been too convenient, and his line of fans wouldn’t fit in the regular autographing area anyway, so they put him in the other room where there was more space, and I dashed over there after I’d finished my own signing, but he’d just left, which is why I resorted to interrupting his conversation when I stumbled across him somewhere else later that day.
I’d like to say he growled and refused and generally acted as if I was rudely intruding, since after all I was, because then I’d have some dirt to report, but no, he just looked mildly annoyed and signed the book. Or books, it might have been two of them, though I only seem to have one of them on hand, Witches Abroad, and I can’t actually make out one word of the inscription.
So I don’t have any good anecdotes to report about Terry Pratchett yelling at me or refusing me an autograph or playing the prima donna or otherwise providing me with some juicy counter to all the stories about his generosity and kindness; no, I have to settle for, “Well, he was a trifle irritated with me once. Maybe even irked. And I can’t always read his handwriting.” Which, let’s face it, really doesn’t cut it as vicious gossip, does it? So all I have in the way of gossip and disparagement is this oversized footnote.
Drat.
9 Though, as of this writing, they’re still a couple of books behind. They’re much more thorough on the earlier books in the series than the more recent ones, too. And none of them are complete, in any case; they don’t bother to explain either the really obvious or the impossibly obscure.
10 And let’s face it, it would be dumb to waste a lot of time and effort duplicating it, because who’d believe I didn’t just steal it all? I wouldn’t believe it, so why should you?
11 Gollancz, 1996.
12 Gollancz, 2002.
13 Well, you could read all the Discworld books cover to cover, and track down all the obscure stories, obsessively taking notes and looking stuff up. But I’ve done that for you, you see. That’s why you’re paying for this book, so you don’t have to go have all that fun yourself.
14 Which I’ll do fairly often later on; it’s mostly just these introductions and most of the footnotes that are deliberately silly.
15 Or I just forget. Unlike some people, I’m merely human.
16 And thank you for buying it. Sincerely. On the other hand, if you’re reading this in the bookstore or library and haven’t bought a copy yet, get out y
our wallet and cough up the bucks, already.
17 And, success aside, in response to the fact that I love the series.
18 If you are British, which I admit is possible, you probably just haven’t been paying attention.
19 Yes, fine, it’s a cheap joke. I have no shame. In fact, Discworld novels have been translated into scads of languages and been successful in most of them.
20 I should probably mention once again at this juncture that he’s written a lot of stuff besides Discworld. This book won’t cover any of it. If you’re looking for something about Johnny Maxwell or Strata or whatever, you’re in the wrong book; I’m only doing Discworld. Sorry.
21 Okay, one cookbook. And yes, I know it’s not all recipes.
22 My choice of terminology here is considered, and will seem more significant once you’ve read farther.
23 This was in response to a question at a bookstore event in Rockville, Maryland, in October 2006. Someone who admitted to not having read any of Mr. Pratchett’s work but said he was sufficiently impressed by the evening’s presentation that he intended to start, asked what other fantasy authors Mr. Pratchett recommended.
Being a fantasy writer myself, standing unobserved at the back of the crowd, I had this momentary wild hope that he would say , “Well, there’s Lawrence Watt-Evans, of course....”
Didn’t happen, alas. Instead, after some hesitation, Mr. Pratchett admitted that he no longer reads fantasy, though he then said that you can’t go wrong with the classics: J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Fritz Leiber, Jr.
24 Thank heavens for that!
25 That’s such a nice old saying. We’ll just ignore the fact that pigs hunt truffles by smell, won’t we? Sure we will. You’re all kind, understanding, generous people. You wouldn’t have bought this book if you weren’t! You did buy it, right? If not, give this copy back and go get your own immediately.
26 Okay, maybe not a realistic example, since obviously it was Guards! Guards!, but you get the idea.
27 A word to the wise American: It’s cheaper to ship from Canada than from the U.K., and most British books are available in Canada. I wish I’d picked up on that a little sooner.
28 If you’re bright enough to look under her married name. If you aren’t (and don’t remember her maiden name to find the cross-reference), and just try looking under “Lady” or “Sybil,” you’re screwed.
29 I would not put much effort into finding “Theatre of Cruelty,” if I were you. For one thing, it’s on L-space at www.Lspace.org.
30 Maps, diaries, calendars, a cookbook, and so on. More about these much later.
31 My spelling checker keeps trying to tell me I mean “discord,” not “Discworld.” That seems appropriate, somehow.
32 Figuring out how to present that title was something of a challenge. The “with footnotes” part is supposed to be, well, a footnote, but when I tried treating it as one, it just looked stupid. So I went for this explanation instead.
33 Often in a footnote.
34 Yet.
35 Most people start with them anyway, though. I’ll discuss where one should start in Part Six.
36 This is a character’s name. Yes, it’s ridiculous. I told you right on the first page of this book that Discworld was ridiculous. See Chapter 42, Going Postal, and Chapter 47, Making Money, for more details about Moist von Lipwig.
37 Well . . . seven of them will.
38 There’s also chelonium, the stuff that star turtles like Great A’tuin are made of, and assorted others, but they’re less important.
39 Not that there’s anything wrong with footnotes!
40 Just what is Great A’tuin swimming through, anyway? You can’t get much traction on hard vacuum. Ether? There’s no good evidence it exists in Discworld’s vicinity any more than it does here. The Disc’s magical field? But that travels along with it. Interstellar hydrogen? Not enough of it.
I think we must assume that those continent-sized flippers are shoving spacetime itself. That’s just the sort of thing you’d expect of the Discworld.
It’s probably because of quantum.
41 E.g., Poul Anderson, or Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp.
42 E.g., C.J. Cherryh.
43 E.g., Barry Hughart.
44 And because there’s an Australian beer called XXXX. See www.xxxx.com.au/.
45 It doesn’t seem to show the Chalk Hills, where the Tiffany Aching stories are set, for one thing. That the map was drawn before those were written is no excuse.
46 A joke I hope to remember to explain later.
47 “Sword & Sorcery,” typified by Robert E. Howard’s stories about Conan of Cimmeria or Kull of Atlantis, was the dominant form of fantasy adventure for a few years in the middle of the twentieth century. It generally involved sword-wielding “heroes” of questionable virtue battling sinister magic—evil wizards, supernatural monsters, curses on tombs, that sort of thing. It fell out of favor when J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings caught on, and most particularly when publishers realized they could make lots of money publishing cheap imitations of Tolkien, replacing the barbarian thief of sword and sorcery with the farm-boy with a destiny, and promoting the evil wizard to the status of Dark Lord.
48 Mostly the most sordid and foul-smelling elements. Some people have argued that Ankh-Morpork is merely a fantasy version of London, but Mr. Pratchett has denied this, saying that while it’s got bits of London in it, it’s got bits of lots of cities, and isn’t based on any particular one.
49 Unknown (or sometimes Unknown Worlds) was an American pulp magazine, published from 1939 until the wartime paper shortages killed it in 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. “Pulps” were called that because they were printed on the lowest available grade of wood-pulp paper, produced as cheaply as possible—even comic books and newspapers generally used better paper, comic books because the color printing would smear on pulp paper, newspapers because they used smaller type and had to hold up to being folded and handled more. Pulp magazines were cheap, disposable entertainment for the masses in the pre-television era, and most of what they published was forgettable crap. Modern readers often misunderstand this, since the only pulp stories anyone remembers are the exceptionally good ones, giving many people the mistaken idea that the typical pulp magazine was good fun.
The typical pulp magazine was tedious junk, on a par with the worst of present-day television, or very-low-end romance novels and TV spin-offs. Unknown was not typical at all, and in its brief existence it published a lot of those exceptionally good stories that people remember, mixed in with some of the tedious junk. Its particular niche was fantasy, but it aimed at a somewhat more sophisticated audience than most.
50 The Patrician is not named here, and is described as having several chins; later on, the Patrician will be a thin man named Havelock Vetinari. Some readers have assumed that this means this is his predecessor in The Colour of Magic, but the author has said otherwise in interviews. This is most probably Lord Vetinari, Mr. Pratchett says, he’s just badly described.
Ankh-Morpork operates on a “One man, one vote” system. The Patrician is the one man, and has the one vote.
51 At this point in Discworld’s development, the Agatean Empire is merely a very distant, mysterious, fabulously wealthy, dangerously advanced, and powerful civilization on the far side of the Disc. Later in the series it’ll become the Discworld’s analogue of Imperial China, with a slight admixture of other Asian cultures, but I don’t see that here. Twoflower is an insurance salesman back home, and insurance salesmen in shorts and aloha shirts do not immediately bring ancient China to my mind. Really, in this first story he comes across as more like an American than anything else. Quite a bit more.
52 The iconograph doesn’t have any of this stuff with lenses and chemicals that our film cameras have, nor the pixilated electronics of a digital camera; instead, it’s a box containing a tiny imp who paints pictures of whatever the box is pointed at. Apparently the wizards of Ankh
-Morpork found this easy to duplicate; in The Colour of Magic no one in Ankh-Morpork has ever seen one before, but a few volumes later they’re commonplace.
53 The Luggage rates a chapter all to itself in Part Six, Chapter 60. It’s more a character than a prop, and reappears in every Rincewind story hereafter.
54 Yes, Ankh-Morpork had Whore Pits at this point. They’re never described in any detail, and fade out of the series rather quickly, though it’s eventually mentioned in passing that certain concerned individuals have had the Whore Pits renamed the Street of Negotiable Affection. The old name does appear for one last time on the map in the front of Night Watch, which depicts the city’s streets at least a decade before The Colour of Magic, so it wasn’t forgotten, merely thought better of.
55 As I said a couple of footnotes back, he’s an insurance salesman. When he tries to explain this to the fine people of Ankh-Morpork, he inadvertently introduces the concepts of arson for profit, and insurance fraud.
Oh, dear, now I’ve spoiled a joke, haven’t I? Bad author! What was I thinking?
Well, really, it was a rather obvious one, wasn’t it? But I’ll try to behave myself better in the future. And if you want an explanation of some of the rather labored puns in The Colour of Magic, I’ll once again direct you to check out Lspace.org on the World Wide Web.
The Turtle Moves! Page 23
