The Annotated Pratchett File, V7a

The Annotated Pratchett File v7a.5

alt.fan.pratchett, alt.books.pratchett

Preface to v7a.5

This is not the new release of the Annotated Pratchett File.

This is a development version, a work in progress, an unfinished business.

Since 1996 I have kept everybody waiting for a new release of the APF (version 9.0, internal codename: the Pointless Albatross release). Real life kept interfering, and year after year passed without anything happening.

I did do large amounts of work behind the scenes, but there was never enough time to take things all the way, to fully research and edit the raw material, to wrap everything up into something releasable. Worse, it didn’t look as if this situation was going to change. The time had come for me to face reality, and either give up entirely, or else make some radical changes to the way I had been approaching the job of editing and releasing the APF. I decided to change, and you are now looking at the results.

The first major change is that I have abandoned the concept of releasing only complete updates to the Annotated Pratchett File, in which all of the annotation sections for all of the books are fully updated. From now on, the APF will be updated incrementally: book-by-book, section-by-section, and sometimes even annotation-by-annotation. There will, eventually, be a version 9.0, a proper “stable release”, but until that happens the intermediate stages on the 7a.5 “development branch” will be available for public viewing.

The second major change is that I have abandoned the concept of doing the entire core researching/editing job by myself without outside help. From now on, I will share that job with Mike Kew, a.k.a. Miq—a name that should be familiar and welcome to all alt.books.pratchett and alt.fan.pratchett readers. Mike and I will be able to work in parallel on different stages of the editing process, and as a result progress can be made even if one of us is occupied with other commitments.

What has changed in version 7a.5? The single most important change is that we have added 204 new annotations (well over 1500 lines of text), finally bringing Feet of Clay and Hogfather into the domain of annotated books.

The rest of the Annotated Pratchett File has stayed mostly the same, except for the occasional rewritten section (such as this Preface). This also implies that some of the unchanged bits have now become outdated, because they still refer to the situation of the previous 7a.0 release. That is one of the disadvantages of going public with a development version: perfectionism has to take a back seat to pragmatism, and loose ends will dangle visibly until they get tied up.

In the same vein, the new annotations have not been proofread (yet) by my usual team of APF proofreaders, they only cover a period of e-mail submissions and afp logs from July 1996 until December 1998, and v7a.5 will only be available as ASCII text and on the L-Space Web, not in any of the other formats (PostScript, MS Word) that v7a.0 was released in.

I can only hope that finally being able to read new APF annotations for the first time in four years will be enough make up for such occasional rough edges.

Leo Breebaart

Delft, Hogswatch 2000

Introduction

[Note: This section was written for APF v7a.0, and has not yet been updated for APF v7a.5.]

You are now about to read the 7a-th edition (the 8th, really, but since this is the Discworld I’m not taking any chances...) of the Annotated Pratchett File, or APF for short.

One of the most popular pastimes on the Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.pratchett has always been discussing the many jokes, parodies and references that Terry Pratchett puts into his novels.

Since, as Terry once put it, “alt.fan.pratchett as an entity has the attention span of a butterfly on cocaine” it quickly became apparent that it would be a good idea to distil some of these discussions into something with a little more persistence and staying power than individual Usenet articles. So the Annotated Pratchett File was born, and (because I was brave/foolish enough to volunteer) I became its editor.

The structure of the file is straightforward, with the books divided into two large groups: the Discworld related books, and all the other ones. Per book, the annotations are sorted in ascending page order. For each annotation I supply two page numbers: the first number is that of the paperback (usually the UK Corgi edition), the second number that of the hardcover (usually the UK Gollancz edition). Use these numbers as a rough guide for finding an annotation in your own particular edition of the book.

Each annotation is also prefixed by either a ‘+’, denoting an annotation that is new or has been significantly updated in this version of the APF, or a ‘-‘, denoting an unchanged older annotation. This is handy for long-time readers who quickly want to scan for the new stuff.

The APF incorporates, in this edition even more than before, passages from articles that Terry himself has posted to alt.fan.pratchett. As an active contributor to the group, he often provides us with inside information on many aspects of his writing, and it would be a waste to let this first-hand knowledge just disappear into the vacuum of Usenet history.

The file ends with an editorial section, where various nuts & bolts of the APF editing process are discussed, and information is given to help you obtain the most recent version of the APF in whatever format you prefer.

One particular piece of information is so important I am putting it here rather than at the end, and that is the address to write to if you have any suggestions, questions, corrections, or new annotations—without the enthusiastic reactions and input from its readers, the APF would never have survived. So please mail all your feedback to me at and look for your contribution in the next edition. I will now leave you to the annotations, and end this introduction with a thought that is a bit of a cliché but nonetheless true: I hope you will enjoy reading the APF as much as I have enjoyed putting it together.

Editorial Comments for v7a.5

Page Numbers

Up to APF v7a.0, each annotation was identified (apart from the relevant quote) by two page numbers: one for the Gollancz hardcover, one for the Corgi paperback. Unfortunately, this system has a number of drawbacks.

One minor problem is that I have never liked the look of those double page numbers. The “247/391” strings look ugly, bloat the text, and make the annotations just that tiny bit harder to read.

A more serious problem is that having two page numbers is a maintenance headache. Double the numbers means double the chance of mistakes. And since I don’t own Terry’s books in both hardcover and paperback editions myself, I have to rely on volunteers to supply fully half of the data I need: all the page numbers for the editions of the books I don’t have.

Thankfully, so far I have had the help of volunteers who do a stellar job on this, but it does still mean that I can never just add an annotation without having to go bother someone else for the second page number. This makes annotating a two-step process, which is especially tiresome now that APF updates happen incrementally and in a more on-the-fly kind of fashion.

The most serious drawback, however, and the one that has made me reconsider the whole setup, is fairly recent, and caused by the fact that there are now so many different editions of Terry’s books available that the percentage of readers to whom either of the page numbers I supply means anything useful, is shrinking, and will only get smaller over time. Not only do we now have American editions in widespread use, but we also have reissues of the older Corgi paperbacks and Gollancz hardcovers, both with page counts that are different from the previous editions.

Finally, I think the most useful aspects of the page numbers is that they provide a ordering of the list of annotations for a given book. I strongly suspect that the actual numbers are used more often by me as editor than by the vast majority of APF readers. Had Terry written in chapters, I probably would never have used page numbers at all, but merely listed the annotations on a per-chapter basis. I don’t think that there are that many readers of the APF who habitually use the page numbers as a link back from individual annotations to the source text. Rather, it will be the other way around, and on a much more global level: “I have just read Pyramids, now I’ll go browse through the annotations for that book and see what I’ve missed”.

With all that in mind I have decided that as of v7a.5.4 of the APF I will be returning to uni-numbered annotations, based on the editions of the books I happen to have in my possession.

Other Annotations

Over the years, a number of other sites collecting Discworld annotations have appeared.

Detritus (<http://books.detritus.co.uk/pratchett/annotations/index.shtml>) collects annotations that have appeared on alt.fan.pratchett.

Bugarup University (<http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Village/4108/xxxx_explained.htm>) specifically collects annotations for The Last Continent.

Sockii’s Annotate-o-matic (<http://wibblehome.orcon.net.nz/annotate/>) is an interactive annotation page, where you can enter your own annotations directly.

Discworld Annotations

The Colour Of Magic

- [p. 7/7] “[...] He stares fixedly at the Destination.”

This line is interesting not only because it foreshadows The Light Fantastic (as in fact the entire prologue does), but also because it is about the only time the narrator really commits himself to A’Tuin’s gender without hedging his bets (as e.g. on the first page of The Light Fantastic). Note the capital ‘H’, which Death also rates in this book and loses in the later ones.

- [p. 8/8] “For example, what was A’Tuin’s actual sex?”

I have had e-mail from a herpetologist who has studied under one of the world’s experts on turtles, and he assures me that in real life determining the sex of turtles is no easy task. Unlike mammals, reptiles don’t have their naughty bits hanging out where they can be easily seen, and the only way to really tell a turtle’s gender is by comparison: male turtles are often smaller than females and have thicker tails. Since there are no other Chelys Galactica to compare A’Tuin to, the attempts of the Discworld’s Astrozoologists are probably futile to begin with.

- [p. 8/8] “[...] the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, [...]”

Puns on the ‘steady state’ theory of explaining the size, origin and future of the universe. The best-known other theory is, of course, the Big Bang theory, referred to in the preceding sentence.

- [p. 9/9] “Fire roared through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork.”

Terry has said that the name ‘Ankh-Morpork’ was inspired neither by the ankh (the Egyptian cross with the closed loop on top), nor by the Australian or New Zealand species of bird (frogmouths and small brown owls, respectively) that go by the name of ‘Morepork’.

Since I first wrote down the above annotation, there have been new developments, however. In The Streets of Ankh-Morpork and The Discworld Companion we are shown an illustration of the Ankh-Morpork coat of arms, which does feature a Morepork/owl holding an ankh. But from Terry’s remarks (see next annotation) I feel it’s safe to say that neither bird nor cross were explicitly on his mind when he first came up with the name Ankh-Morpork.

Finally, many readers have mentioned the resonance that Ankh-Morpork has with our world’s Budapest: also a large city made up of two smaller cities (Buda and Pest) separated by a river.

- [p. 9/9] “[...] two figures were watching with considerable interest.”

The two barbarians, Bravd and Weasel, are parodies of Fritz Leiber’s fantasy heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The Swords series of books in which they star are absolute classics, and have probably had about as much influence on the genre as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

The Swords stories date back as far as 1939, but nearly sixty years later they have lost none of their appeal. Both The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are, in large part, affectionate parodies of the Leiberian universe, although I hasten to add that, in sharp contrast to many later writers in the field, Leiber himself already had a great sense of humour. Fafhrd and the Mouser are not to be taken altogether serious in his original version, either.

Given all this, I can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that Terry intended Ankh-Morpork to be a direct parody of the great city of Lankhmar in which many of the Swords adventures take place. However, Terry explicitly denied this when I suggested it on alt.fan.pratchett:

“Bravd and the Weasel were indeed takeoffs of Leiber characters—there was a lot of that sort of thing in The Colour of Magic. But I didn’t— at least consciously, I suppose I must say—create Ankh-Morpork as a takeoff of Lankhmar.”

- [p. 11/11] “[...] two lesser directions, which are Turnwise and Widdershins.”

‘Widdershins’ is in fact an existing word meaning ‘counter-sunwise’, i.e. counter-clockwise in the Northern hemisphere, clockwise down South. A synonym for ‘turnwise’ is deosil, which helps explain Ankh-Morpork’s Deosil Gate as found on the The Streets of Ankh-Morpork Mappe.

Widdershins is also the name of the planet where Dom, the hero from The Dark Side of the Sun lives.

- [p. 12/12] “Why, it’s Rincewind the wizard, isn’t it?’ [...]”

The story behind Rincewind’s name goes back to 1924, when J. B. Morton took over authorship of the column ‘By The Way’ in the Daily Express, a London newspaper.

He inherited the pseudonym ‘Beachcomber’ from his predecessors on the job (the column had existed since 1917), but he was to make that name forever his own by virtue of his astonishing output and success: Morton wrote the column for over 50 years, six times a week, until 1965 when the column became a weekly feature, and continued to the last column in November 1975.