The Turtle Moves! Read Free Page B

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.