Free The Turtle Moves! by Lawrence Watt-Evans Page A

in Equal Rites that in the Discworld universe, ideas are not just the immaterial concepts we’re familiar with; they have actual physical existence. In that earlier volume they were described as subatomic particles sleeting through space, looking for a receptive mind.
    In Wyrd Sisters , we saw various ideas, many of them cinematic, registering with poor Hwel, who tried to make sense of movies of the likes of Laurel and Hardy in the context of Discworld. They made his life difficult at times, but no worse.
    In Moving Pictures , certain ideas are a little larger and more aggressive than that. One idea in particular has been carefully imprisoned and guarded by a succession of priests in a place named Holy Wood. Alas, the last priest dies, and the idea escapes and reaches Ankh-Morpork.
    As the title makes obvious, the idea is movies, of course—not just a few images of the sort Hwel dreamed, but the entirety of the motion picture industry.
    In response to this unleashed idea, The Alchemists’ Guild develops a method of transferring images to film, and then projecting them. An alchemist named Silverfish 87 sets out for Holy Wood to make movies, as
the light’s better there—or at least, that’s the excuse he tells himself. 88 Actually, it’s the Things under Holy Wood Hill luring him.
    A great many people are lured to Holy Wood, from Ankh-Morpork and elsewhere, including Victor Tugelbend, a student at Unseen University, who serves as our primary viewpoint character and the eventual hero. He and his co-star, Theda Withel, 89 who calls herself Ginger, find themselves caught up in the magic of the movies—which is not at all the same sort of magic Victor studied at Unseen University, but which is potent nonetheless—and they become the Disc’s first movie stars.
    Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat
    Although some people just consider these to be one-shots, I see them as a series concerned with how the people of Ankh-Morpork and their ruler, Patrician Havelock Vetinari, are dealing with the march of progress:
    Moving Pictures
Chapter 12
“Troll Bridge”
Chapter 16
The Truth
Chapter 31
Going Postal
Chapter 41
Making Money
Chapter 46
    Two important notes: “Troll Bridge” isn’t set in Ankh-Morpork and has no specific sociological innovations in it, but I include it here simply because it’s on the same general theme of dealing with changing times, and Cohen the Barbarian hasn’t got his own series.
    Also, Moist von Lipwig, protagonist of Going Postal , returns in Making
    Money , and will probably be reappearing again in the future, so either he’s a separate series, or he’s taking over this series. I say he’s taking over this series.
    For a consideration of the series as a whole, see Chapter 57.

    Among those who have been lured from Ankh-Morpork by the movies is our old friend Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, sausage-seller extraordinaire, last seen in Guards! Guards! He’s fallen under Holy Wood’s spell more completely than anyone else, and usurps control of Century of the Fruitbat Pictures from poor Silverfish.
    And there’s Gaspode the Wonder Dog. Holy Wood has given him the power of speech—but he’s still an ugly little mutt no one can take seriously; only Victor will listen to him. (Gaspode will be back in later books. Victor, perversely, won’t.)
    It develops that the real danger here isn’t anything inherent in the concept of motion pictures as such; rather, it’s that because reality is thin on Discworld to begin with, something that blurs the line between reality and illusion the way movies do can weaken reality to the point that our old friends the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions can use it to cross over from their normal state of nonexistence into Discworld’s reality.
    They are, of course, stopped, by Victor and Ginger and Gaspode and the Librarian, before they do very much damage.
    The idea that