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26 - Wednesday, September 5, 1990 —- North Shore News

Lovers of the unorthodox will
consume Discworld cult classics

arning: North Americans are about to fall into the

clutches of a new cult. Not your garden variety,

count-your-guru’s-blessings-and-pass-the-Rolls
Royce brand of cult, mind you. This one has millions of
acolytes and is led by no less than the High Priest of the
Multiverse himself, Terry Pratchett.

And just what, you ask, is a
Terry Pratchett? Well, for a start,
he may be Britain's most popular
author.

All of his sci-fi Discworld fan-
tasies (seven so far, and counting)
have risen to the upper ranks of
the British bestseller list. Sourcery

MIKE
STEELE

book review

hit the number twe spot and The
Colour of Magic entrenched itself
there for eight months.

Wyrd Sisters (book six) won the
coveted Best Novel Award while
Pyramids ithe latest Discworld
treat} soared to the top of the
bestseller chart, decided it liked
the view and had already been
fighting vertigo {oz five weeks
when a copy recently winged its
way into my eager hands.

Here, by way of an enticement
to join the legions of warped Prat-
chett worshippers the world over,
is the introduction to Pyramids
(Corgi; 285 pp.; $4.95):

“Nothing but stars, scattered
across the blackness as though the
Creator had smashed the wind-
screen. of his car and hadn’t
bothered to step to sweep up the
pieces.

“This is the gulf between uni-
verses, the chill deeps of space
that contain nothing but the occa-
sional random molecule, a few lost
comets and...

« but a circle of blackness
shifts slightly, the eye reconsiders
perspective, and what was ap-
parently the awesome distance of
interseller wossname becomes a
world under darkness, its stars the
lights of what will charitably be
called civilization.

“For, as the world tumbles

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lazily, it is revealed as the
Discworld — flat. circular, and
carried on the back of Great
A‘tuin, the only turtle ever to
feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell
Diagram a2 turtle ten thousand
miles long, dusted with the frost of
dead comets, meteor-pocked,
albedo-eved. No one knows the
reason for all this, but it is proba-
bly quantum.

“Much that is weird could
happen on a world on the back of
a turtle like that.

It's happening already...

“|. The pyramids in the ancient
valley of the Djel are ilaring their
power into the night.

“The energy streaming up from
their paracosmic peaks may, in
chapters to come. illuminate many
mysteries: why tortoises hate phi-
losophy, why too much religion is
bad for goats, and what it is that
handmaidens actually do.

“It will certainly show what
our ancestors would be thinking if
they were alive today. People have
often speculated about this.
Would they approve of modern
society, they ask, would they
marvel at present-day achieve-
ments? And of course this misses a
fundamental point. What our
ancestors would really be thinking,
if they were alive today, is: “Why
is it so dark in here?’ "”

At the core of Pratchett's amaz-
ing success is an uncanny ability to
posit and describe a world that
defies all accepted laws of physics,
theology, common sense and
sundry highway regulations.

His novels exceed accepted tar-
iff weights for magic, seethe with
innuendo, glory in irreverence and
raise cheeky hyperbole to heights
Never Before Achieved By Any
Modern Writer (or at feast not by
one unfettered by a canvas jacket
with mandatory locking cufflinks).

His iantastic stories of bumbling
Discworld denizens manipulated
by forces clearly beyond their
control are among the funniest
{and let's not forget cheapest)

forms of entenainment any lover
of the unorthodox and oblique
will find on this or any other
planet.

But, you might wonder qvell,
you might if adults throw caution
(and sanity} to the winds and em-
brace the Multiverse According to

AN
EVENING OF

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ARE YOUR HOSTS AT A
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, WINE AND CHEESE

Pratchett, what will become of the
hapless children forced to share a
distorted reality with these
Discworld-dazed folks? What in-
deed?

As a matter of fact, the author
has given some thought to the
matter and decided, in the inter-
ests of coherent co-existence and
enhanced royalty payments, to
induct the wee ones as well.

Which brings us Gind rather
nice. bsay so myselty to the tirst
two volumes of the Nome saga:
Truckers (Doubleday: 190 pp.:
$14.95 in hardcover! and Diggers
(Doubleday; 133 pp. $14.95 in
harde over).

Beginning with Trackers, Prat
chett unfolds the tale or the
diminutive race of litde people
long thouzht to be nothing more
than the inhabitants of tairy tales
but who are, in fact, real.

Stranded on earth when their
space shuttle crashed 15,000 years
ago, and unable to communicate
with the mother shiys, the Nomes
have lived a marginal existence
ever since, faring much better in
fable than in life as succeeding
generations struggle to survive on
our world.

It was, to say the least. a shock
to po trom spacetarers to, for want
of a more delicate term, food.

eS re ete

naan