The Turtle Moves! (3 page)

O
UR FIRST LOOK AT DISCWORLD came in 1983, with the publication of
The Colour of Magic
. That book opened with a prologue describing the Disc, introducing us to the cosmic tortoise Great A'tuin, and the four giant elephants who stand upon A'tuin's back: Berilia, Tubul, Great T'phon, and Jerakeen.

We'll get back to them in a moment, but first a word about prologues to fantasy novels.

I've been writing fantasy for about thirty years now, and reading it for much longer. I've taught workshops for would-be fantasy writers, and judged contests. I've seen a
lot
of fantasy, good and bad, and I long ago came to a conclusion: Fantasy prologues are pretty much always a bad idea.

Fantasy novels often have them
anyway
, of course, introducing the reader to some of the characters and establishing a lot of the background details that are too boring to waste actual story time on. I've certainly written a few of them myself. When you've just
got
to explain the prophecy your hero is going to fulfill though none of the characters are going to mention it for thirty or forty chapters, or you
really
want the reader to know where the magic sword is hidden so he can appreciate the suspense as our heroes finally get close to it, you just explain it all in a prologue. It seems so simple. Classier than footnotes,
³⁹
and preferable to stopping the action later to say, “By the way, there's this ancient story our heroes haven't heard yet . . .”

But generally, they're clunky. A good prologue is a rare thing. Mostly, not to put too fine a point on it, they suck.

And the prologue to the
Colour of Magic
. . . well, it's troublesome. One might almost suspect it of being a deliberate parody of a prologue. One
might
, if one were suspicious that way. One might suppose that Mr. Pratchett had himself noticed that fantasy-novel prologues tend to be less a good storytelling device and more a way of showing off all the spiffy world-building the author has done. Yes, one might.

Or one might remember that Mr. Pratchett was a young and inexperienced writer at the time, who might not have realized yet that prologues are usually a bad idea.

But let us move on to look at what the Prologue tells us. It introduces us to five characters by name, but they aren't the heroes of the story, nor the villains. They aren't even human. They have no dialogue, and do not participate directly in the story. They are, as you might say, in an unusually literal sense, the supporting cast.

They have cool names, though. Good fantasy names. Berilia, Tubul, Jerakeen—lovely fantasy-world names.

Great T'phon, though—is there a
Lesser
T'phon somewhere? If not, how come he gets a “Great” while the other three do not? Great A'tuin, sure, the turtle's the base on which everything stands, so putting a “Great” in there seems perfectly reasonable, but why does T'phon get one, while Jerakeen, Tubul, and Berilia do not?

Either T'phon's got a better PR guy, or there really
is
a Lesser T'phon somewhere. Or there was once—many, many volumes later we are told that there had once been a fifth elephant. Maybe that was Lesser T'phon. Maybe he was the runt of the litter, which is how he lost his footing and fell off.

Or not. Maybe “Great T'phon” just sounded cool.

But that's another thing—who named these guys? How does anyone
know
their names?

I suppose it's magic. Or the gods told someone.

At any rate, we are introduced to the Discworld in a surprisingly literal fashion, not by meeting our protagonists or our villains, but by meeting the five beings upon whose backs the entire world rests.

Typical of Mr. Pratchett, that, being cleverly literal. He's good at that sort of thing, and that's on display right from the start, what with the awe-inspiring descriptions of the turtle and the elephants who, one has a suspicion, were really intended in the original myths to be metaphysical
concepts, or perhaps metaphors of some sort, rather than literal animals with meteor scars and hydrogen frost. One doesn't expect to see words like “meteor” and “hydrogen” in a description of a giant turtle with a world on its back.

Which is rather the point. Our Mr. Pratchett is playing the science-fictional game of “What if it were real?” here. He's taken a bit of Hindu mythology and shoved it into outer space as if it were a solid, physical world in the cosmos that we now know is out there.

Hindu myth? Why, yes—the idea that the world is supported on the backs of four gigantic elephants is from Hindu mythology. Earthquakes happen when the elephants shift their weight.

Another Hindu myth says that the world rests on the back of a gigantic tortoise. (Actually, that idea appears in several cultures, whereas the elephants are specifically from Hindu myth.) Mr. Pratchett has resolved the apparent contradiction by suggesting that both are true—the elephants are standing on the tortoise, while the world rests upon their backs. He has then sent this curious construct hurtling through interstellar space as we now understand it (which I suspect was not what the authors of the Hindu scriptures had in mind), and has given some thought to what such creatures might look like after a few millennia drifting—or rather,
swimming
⁴⁰
—through hard vacuum.

Though of course he ignores details like what the elephants eat, what they breathe, and why they don't just shrug their shoulders and rid themselves of that awkward Disc, and so on. I suppose that's all just to be put down to magic. Discworld, as we're told from the first, has an intense magical field.

And it's not as if the Hindu mythmakers worried about such details, either.

One might wonder, though, why an Englishman with no particular ties to India should choose to model his fantasy world after Hindu myth.

Well, why not? Fantasy novelists have been borrowing various other mythologies for their settings for years. C.S. Lewis had happily borrowed the creatures of classical mythology for his invented land of Narnia, even while building his story around Christian themes. He had
made it a flat world, and in
The Voyage of the
Dawn Treader he sent his heroes sailing out to its edge.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth does not appear to be on a spherical planet; the western lands whither the elves go are not just the Americas. Like almost all of Tolkien's work, this was built up in emulation of a variety of European myths.

Fritz Leiber's Nehwon existed in a gigantic bubble—the inside of a sphere, rather than the outside.

Other fantasy authors have cheerfully swiped the worlds of Norse myth,
⁴¹
or Russian folklore,
⁴²
or a China that never was,
⁴³
or the settings of Irish or Finnish or Arabian myth, as well as any number of variations on medieval Europe. Mr. Pratchett simply borrowed the most amusing cosmology that he happened upon. He was writing absurd fantasy, so he wanted an absurd setting for it.

He was, in fact, letting the reader know right from the start what he intended to do all down the line—take everything that one normally found in fantasy, and push it just a little farther than usual, in order to show its fundamental absurdity.

So he presented us with a world based on a real myth, but considered both logically and cosmologically—as we go along through the series we'll get detailed explanations of how the eight seasons work, for example, even though it's never actually relevant to the story. Here in this first two-page prologue, he manages to jam in not only a description of Great A'tuin and its burden, but a brief account of the space program the kingdom of Krull has created to study the nature of their world, complete with puns on astronomical theories from
our
world—another theme that will continue throughout the series, the humorous and often punning references to commonalities between Discworld and our own less-magical planet. (These bizarre resemblances do get explained, after a fashion, in
The Science of Discworld
—see Chapter 29. And see also Chapter 62.)

This description of the Disc is all given as an explanation of how a Krullian astronomer happened to have a telescope pointed toward Ankh-Morpork, the oldest city in the world, and therefore became the first person on the Disc to see the smoke of that city's burning. That fact, that this particular person was the first to see it, turns out to have
absolutely nothing to do with the story we're about to be told; it's merely an excuse for a prologue describing the Disc.

One might, as I said, suspect the author of parody.

And in
The Colour of Magic
, once past the prologue, one would undoubtedly be right. That first book was quite plainly a parody of the genre of heroic fantasy (including science fantasy) as it existed circa 1980. As the series progressed, though, it moved away from parody, through satire, to become something else entirely.

So that opening description of Discworld set up the essentials, which do not change, but we gradually learned more and more about the structure and nature of this strange world as the series went on.

As far as geography goes, Discworld has three continents, but the inhabitants would probably say there are at least four. The largest doesn't seem to have a name; it includes the Hublands at the center of the Disc, but extends almost to the Rim. A body of water called the Circle Sea intrudes into it at one point, and the area rimwards of the Circle Sea is called Klatch, which is sometimes referred to as a separate continent; this is very roughly parallel to our world's distinguishing Europe and Asia, even though, by any sensible definition, they're obviously two sides of one continent.

The other continents are the Counterweight Continent, home to the Agatean Empire, and EcksEcksEcksEcks, or XXXX, or FourEcks, initially so called because its true name is unknown elsewhere.
⁴⁴

For reasons that don't actually hold up under close scrutiny, Mr. Pratchett set it up so that lands at the center of the Disc are colder than lands at the edge. Klatch and EcksEcksEcksEcks are mostly hot desert, while the more central lands are cold, with snowy winters. The central area is also mountainous, culminating in a central spire that acts more or less as the axis on which the Disc rotates; this miles-high spire is called Cori Celesti, and is the abode of the gods.

The rim is almost entirely covered with water, and a gigantic waterfall is perpetually spilling from all sides. We get some lovely descriptions of this now and then in the course of the stories, but no explanation of where all that water comes from and why the Disc hasn't long since run dry. It's presumably magic.

If you want a more detailed rendering of all this geography, the best thing to do is to get hold of a copy of the official Discworld Mapp, by
Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, published by Corgi in 1996 and still in print in Britain. It's not absolutely complete,
⁴⁵
but it's close. There are also some lovely depictions of what the whole thing would look like in the various art books and animated adaptations.

The Disc is orbited by a small sun and a moon; the orbital mechanics of these subsidiary bodies are nonsensical and I'm not going to waste everyone's time trying to explain them. Gravity as we understand it is clearly not the primary force at work here.

In fact, the physics of the Discworld is different from our own in several ways. There are at least two crucial elements in its make-up, narrativium and deitium, that don't exist in our universe, but those are just the beginning. Really, it
can't
have the same physics we do, or it wouldn't be possible—a flat disc several thousand miles in diameter would not be stable, could not retain a breathable atmosphere, and wouldn't generally have gravity pointing the right direction. And we won't even think about the turtle or the elephants.

Not to mention slood.
⁴⁶

Discworld has an intense magical field which affects practically everything—unlike our own world, which has
no
magic. This field distorts probability, makes wizardry and witchcraft possible, gives belief real power, allows anthropomorphic personifications to exist—no,
requires
anthropomorphic personifications to exist—and generally complicates life for the Disc's inhabitants.

Perhaps this field's strangest effects are on light. Light travels much more slowly than it does in what we consider “normal” space, and behaves more like a liquid than it has any right to. This is described in detail many times in the early volumes. Oddly, several volumes in, it seems to be deemed unworthy of further attention, and ceases to have any noticeable effect on the stories, though it's still getting the occasional mention as late as
Thief of Time
.

The spectrum on the Disc contains an eighth color in addition to the customary seven: octarine, the color of magic. That also starts out as an important feature of the setting, but becomes less significant over time.

Furthermore, reality itself is very thin on the Disc, so that things (and Things) from other dimensions and alternate realities tend to leak in on
occasion. As Mr. Pratchett put it in a recent interview, Discworld is far out at the absurd end of the bell curve, right at the edge where if it were any more absurd, it couldn't exist at all.

Many fantasy authors go to great lengths to work out the internal logistics necessary to give their invented worlds the appearance of independent existence and substantial reality; Mr. Pratchett did not go that route. In fact, he seems to have kicked over the signposts and burned the maps to
avoid
that route. Heraldic mottos are in dog Latin, while exotic names are mostly French, Latin, German, Arabic, Welsh, or bad pastiches of those languages; there's no pretense of any linguistic sense to any of it. The economy of Ankh-Morpork makes very little sense. In the course of the series, an ostensibly late-Medieval/early-Renaissance society somehow transforms into more or less a nineteenth-century setting, developing motion pictures, rock music, tabloid newspapers, an analogue of computer networks, and assorted other outrageous anachronisms along the way. This is all explained away as the Disc's magical field interacting with ideas leaking through from other realities.