![]() I kind of think it was a book on finance I found lying around the house. I actually bumped into this idea-save the elephants-in a legendary lumber room of my childhood, though I can`t remember where exactly. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. It’s one of the great ancient myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. If I had a penny for every time someone asked me where I got the idea of the Discworld, I’d have-hang on a moment-£4.67.Īnyway, the answer is that it was lying around and didn’t look as though it belonged to anyone. In the paperback reprint of The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett talks about how Discworld came into being: The prologue was a magic ring, a desperate wish, an open wardrobe door. I don’t know the effect these words had on you when you first read them, but for me they were a temenos, the threshold between my chair and the faërie woods beyond the hedge, the invisible bridge from now to myth. Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven. In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight. ![]() Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination. Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part… ![]() Pratchett’s Discworld is imagined in the prologue to the first book, The Colour of Magic: ![]() At his right and left hand are Douglas Adams in sheer satiric glory, and Neil Gaiman, whose humour shades into great darkness. Among the humorous fantasy writers, Terry Pratchett has pride of place. To say that I’m a fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is an understatement. ![]()
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