The Turtle Moves! (28 page)

The Omnian Church, the ancient religion of Djelibeybi, the various
would-be rulers of Ankh-Morpork who seek to depose Lord Vetinari, perhaps even rock ‘n' roll—they, too, are striving to control people and deprive them of their freedom.

There are, to be sure, some villains who don't care about freedom—Carcer and Teatime, for example, simply kill people. They, too, are treating people like things, but not things they want to control, merely things they want out of the way. Some of the nobles who employ assassins take a similar, if less extreme, attitude.

The non-human villains, though, the villains who exist as species rather than individuals, who reappear in multiple stories, are almost all parasites seeking control. The Auditors are refreshingly different in that all
they
want to do is wipe out all life in the universe.

Of course, they want to wipe out humanity because it's messy; they don't like free will, independence, or creativity either. It's just that rather than suppress freedom, they'd prefer to exterminate people entirely.

Clearly, this is an issue Mr. Pratchett feels strongly about—that people must have the right to go on living their own potty little lives however they please. That's most explicit in some of Sam Vimes's musings, but it's all through the series. Carrot doesn't claim his birthright because if he did, he would be intruding on that right—he knows that people
would
obey him, they
would
live out the story of the returning king instead of getting on with their own affairs, and he won't have it.
That
is what makes Carrot a
real
hero—that he wants people to be free, as far as they can be, even when they themselves would just as soon put him in charge.

All through the series, the villains are the people, ideas, stories, beings, creatures, or entities trying to tell people how to live their lives, and the heroes are the people who insist they choose for themselves.

That may seem obvious, but you know something? It's not. Plenty of authors are happy to write heroes who tell people what to do, “for their own good.” Plenty of authors would agree with Lily Weatherwax that
she's
the good sister, the one making the stories come out right. Plenty of authors would have wanted our side to win the wars in
Jingo
and
Monstrous Regiment
, instead of just ending them. Plenty of authors would have put Carrot on the throne of Ankh-Morpork.

This purity of motive, this ferocious belief in the value of human freedom, is one of the things that makes Terry Pratchett as enjoyable a writer as he is. Many people pay lip service to the importance of freedom; Mr. Pratchett obviously
believes
it.

S
O WE HAVE THE VILLAINS. And we have the monsters. And these two sets overlap, but they do not coincide.

Let us consider the vast land of Uberwald, home to vampires, werewolves, and other monsters. The entire place is a parody of the Hollywood conception of Transylvania, with its forests and castles and monsters and peasants.
¹⁷⁸
There's lots of good comic material there to play with.

It's also a good source of villains—like the vampires in
Carpe Jugulum
, and the werewolves in
The Fifth Elephant
. What I find interesting, though, is that so many of the monsters are
not
villains.

Igor, for example, is never a villain. At most he's a villain's servant, and even then he may well turn on his master if he feels that said master isn't going about his role properly. In
Carpe Jugulum
, it's Igor who revives the old Count; the young Count isn't following the rules—isn't following the story. Igor (any Igor
¹⁸¹
) is a great believer in tradition, which is another way of saying he wants people to play out their storybook roles. He knows where he fits in the stories, and generally he
likes
it there.

As
Carpe Jugulum
explains at some length, even the traditional vampires don't need to be villains; they exist in balance with their environment,
in a situation where everyone understands the rules and abides by them.

And the
non
-traditional vampires—well, they go in two directions. There are the villainous predators of
Carpe Jugulum
who have struggled to overcome what they saw as weaknesses, so that they can dominate their surroundings rather than fit into them comfortably, but there are also the Black Ribboners, the Reformed Vampires, and the Uberwald League of Temperance. These are vampires who have sworn off drinking blood, substituting other addictions for their natural one, in order to live among humans without getting a stake through the heart. We see several of them in the course of the stories; their official motto is “Not one drop!,” and their unofficial motto is “Don't be a sucker.”

Black Ribboners may be villains, but they're just as likely to be heroic. Most are just people, like iconographer Otto Chriek, trying to live their own lives. They appear almost pathetic in their attempts to fit in to human society—but Sam Vimes, in
Thud!
, suspects this may be an act, a way to allay suspicion, and he's probably right. (Vimes usually is.)

Most Black Ribboners seem to wind up in Ankh-Morpork, rather than Uberwald; after all, in Uberwald traditional vampires are tolerated, so why bother? In Ankh-Morpork, though, the black ribbon may be necessary to survival.

Still, they're monsters from Uberwald who have given up monstrous behavior in order to find a place in civilized society.

Some werewolves have done the same, though they don't wear black ribbons and advertise what they are; Constable Angua is the obvious example.

Vampires, werewolves, Igors—all are outwardly monsters, but Mr. Pratchett has chosen not to settle for that. They all have the option of breaking out of their traditional roles; their physical nature does not determine their destiny. This is rather a contrast to any number of Tolkien's imitators who have given us orcs or the equivalent who are evil simply because they're orcs; the possibility of a good orc is never even considered.

But it is in the Discworld stories.

And Uberwald, a land that at first glance would appear to be nightmarish, doesn't look quite so bad as a result. The apparent horrors are not really so very horrible.

Except, of course, when they are, like the werewolves in
The Fifth Elephant
.

Black Ribboners are more funny than fearsome; likewise the traditionalists like Igor and the old Count in
Carpe Jugulum
, though they retain a little more of the old menace. But the modern vampires in
Carpe Jugulum
and the murderous werewolves of
The Fifth Elephant
manage to be genuinely scary, all the same. It's all in the attitude.

There's undoubtedly a lesson in that, but I'll let you decide for yourself what it is.

A
LL THROUGH THE SERIES, right from the first volume, there have been connections between the Disc and our own world. In early volumes, these were explained as the result of reality being very thin on the Disc, so that ideas could seep through from other, more real places, but that seems to have faded somewhat as an explanation, and
The Science of Discworld
instead presented us with an explicit connection between Discworld and “Roundworld.”

The connection is indisputable, though, from Rincewind and Twoflower falling onto that other plane
¹⁷⁹
in
The Colour of Magic
, to poor Hwel dreaming a mix of Shakespeare and early twentieth-century film comedy in
Wyrd Sisters
, to movies getting loose in Holy Wood in
Moving Pictures
, rock ‘n' roll arriving on the Disc as Music With Rocks In in
Soul Music
, to the marching songs and Maledict's Vietnam flashbacks (flashsidewayses?) in
Monstrous Regiment
, and of course, to the events of the three
Science of Discworld
books.

What I find interesting about it is that the Disc started out as a collection of all the clichés and landscapes from fantasy novels, gathered together for purposes of parody, but has gradually changed, so that now it's more nearly a collection of clichés and landscapes from our world, gathered together for purposes of satire. There's no sharp break, but more and more of our reality seems to have leaked through. In
The
Colour of Magic
, Ankh-Morpork is pretty clearly medieval; by
Going Postal
, its citizens wear neckties and are more concerned with corporate finance than feudal combat.

Mr. Pratchett has said that he knows the Disc is a temporal hodge-podge, and that each element is modeled on the Roundworld era that seems most appropriate for that aspect of his creation—thus ancient, medieval, Victorian, and modern bits jostle up against each other, and Ankh-Morpork's grand nineteenth-century Opera House is next door to an Elizabethan theater, The Dysc, realism or economic logic be damned. Some things remain consistently pre-modern, so there are no internal combustion engines,
¹⁸⁰
but that doesn't mean a crashing coach can't go up in a fiery explosion if that's what narrative necessity requires. It's all in service of the stories.

It's all built of narrativium.

Other things have changed over the course of the series, as well. It's been many a volume since we got descriptions of light, slowed by the Disc's magical field, spilling slowly across the landscape—when the subject came up in
Thief of Time
, it was only as a classroom lesson, not atmospheric narrative. Modern magic no longer tends to the coruscating light-shows described in
Sourcery
; instead the magically enhanced coach in
Thud!
is smooth and silent in operation. The number eight still has magical significance, going by the chapter numbering in
Going Postal
, but it doesn't seem to have the power it did in “The Sending of Eight”—and in
Making Money
there isn't even the altered chapter numbering. The color octarine and the metal octiron don't get the attention they used to.

In fact, magic has generally gotten less obtrusive, the better to comment on our own world and history.
Sourcery
was awash in pyrotechnics; in
Monstrous Regiment
there's nary a wizard or witch to be seen.

One reason I didn't really like the Devices introduced in
Thud!
was that they seem to be a sort of replacement for magic; they appear to be relics of an ancient lost technology. I'd prefer to see real magic remain prominent. That may just be me, though.

At any rate, the nature of the Disc's society has changed over the course of the series. It could be put down to the author's tastes and interests changing, or to the meddling of the History Monks, but I have a controversial theory of my own to propose: What if narrativium is
unstable? What if the nature of Discworld has been changing as the narrativium that holds it together has decayed into different isotopes?

Could be an interesting thing for some over-ambitious student at Unseen University to investigate.

T
HERE ARE STILL OTHER MINOR SUBJECTS I could probably address, but really, I'd be getting into mere trivia—things like Willikins's background, the narrative function of cabbages, and so on. I'm not going to do that because, frankly, it would be silly.
¹⁸¹

There are larger issues to be addressed, as well—someone could probably get a pretty good doctoral thesis out of class issues in Ankh-Morpork, especially regarding Sam Vimes, for example. I'm not going to tackle that one for three reasons:

I'm an American, Mr. Pratchett is English, and the two nationalities have drastically different attitudes regarding social class, often to the point of mutual incomprehensibility,
¹⁸²
so I'm not qualified. Someone British should do it.

I'm not interested in obtaining a doctorate; hell, I'm a college dropout, never finished my bachelor's.

It'd be a whole lot of work that no one would be paying me to do.

(And a possible fourth reason is that it wouldn't be funny.)
¹⁸³

So I won't be doing anything that ambitious, and I think I've inflicted enough trivia on you fine, patient readers, so there's just one more thing I want to discuss to wrap up this book, and that's how Terry Pratchett is perceived by his readers.

Terry Pratchett is the second-most-successful living fantasy author in Britain, behind J.K. Rowling. Not everyone sees him that way, though.

There are those who argue that he doesn't really write fantasy, since it's (a) funny, and (b) satire.
¹⁸⁴
Some people have a very narrow view of fantasy, obviously; Mr. Pratchett certainly thinks he writes fantasy.

There are those who argue that he's not second to J.K. Rowling, because
she
doesn't write fantasy. Apparently she once said she didn't think of herself as writing fantasy, to which Mr. Pratchett responded, “I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?”
¹⁸⁵

Some people have strange ideas of what qualifies as “fantasy.” So just to make sure we don't have that problem here, as far as I'm concerned, anything with wizards and dragons is fantasy, and I'm not interested in arguing about it. Trolls, flying broomsticks—fantasy. So Discworld is definitely, undeniably fantasy. So's Harry Potter, whatever his creator may think.