The Turtle Moves! Read Free Page A

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.