Free The Turtle Moves! by Lawrence Watt-Evans

even have mayonnaise.
    Then they get to sit there and wait for life to evolve.
    This is not really something for which either of them can work up much enthusiasm, and they therefore arrange to go elsewhere, courtesy of Eric’s skill at demonology. Unfortunately, there’s only one place that can take them. They go to Hell.
    Hell, as it happens, has been looking for them. Astfgl, King of the Demons, 86 was not at all pleased to have Rincewind appear instead of a demon when Eric finally got his summoning to work, and has been pursuing the pair as they collect on Eric’s wishes.
    Still, they escape in the end, though where to isn’t revealed.
    I include Eric in the Rincewind series because, well, it’s about Rincewind. But it’s atypical in that almost none of it is set at Unseen University, Rincewind doesn’t really appear in the bit that is, and no other
wizards really have much to do with the plot. We do get to meet yet another Archchancellor, Ezrolith Churn, who was given the job because it had finally registered on the other senior wizards that, of late, the life expectancy of Archchancellors had really gotten distressingly low. That tended to reduce the job’s appeal significantly, since a wizard doesn’t become competitive for the post without a very good instinct for survival.
    Took them long enough to notice.
    I suppose I ought to mention that the Luggage appears, loyally (if angrily) following its master through time, space, and other, less usual dimensions.
    At any rate, Eric is a short, lightweight book, doing very little to advance the series as a whole other than extracting Rincewind from the dire situation in which he was left at the end of Sourcery . It does serve to reduce Rincewind’s depth as a character. . . .
    That’s really rather perverse, you know, but it’s true. Generally, the more we see of a character, the more we learn about him, and the more depth and solidity he acquires. Rincewind, however, gets simpler as the series progresses. In his earlier appearances he was cowardly and lazy, sometimes clever, but also greedy, and with an odd streak of heroism that cropped up now and then. In Eric and his subsequent appearances, though, he’s simply cowardly and lazy, with moments of cleverness—his greed has vanished, and the streak of heroism has withered away. Perhaps his stay in the Dungeon Dimensions was responsible, but it makes him a less interesting character, and I’m not the only reader to feel that the Rincewind series is the weakest of the lot.
    At a bookstore signing for Wintersmith , in October 2006, a reader asked Mr. Pratchett whether we would be seeing more of Rincewind. His answer was that we probably would not, at least not any time soon, because Rincewind is not a terribly interesting character—he is, Mr. Pratchett said, primarily an observer, rather than someone who does things.
    While this is fairly accurate as far as his appearances in Eric and all subsequent stories are concerned, prior to this it wasn’t really the case. The Rincewind we saw in The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic wasn’t so much an observer as a sidekick—he didn’t just observe things, he also sometimes made them happen. He tried to talk sense to heroes, and sometimes pulled them out of bad situations.
    From Eric on, though, he really doesn’t do that any more. He’s just along for the ride.

    Fortunately, Mr. Pratchett does not focus on Rincewind all that often; in fact, we won’t see him featured again until Interesting Times , nine full volumes later, as seen in Chapter 21. The next book in the series instead begins the series I’ve named “Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat,” concerned with the effects of new technologies, new magics, and other social changes on the people of the Disc’s oldest, largest, and most foul-smelling city.

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    Moving Pictures (1990)
    I T WAS ESTABLISHED back