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

Discworld’s a little short on reality—“The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist”—is introduced right on the first page, but it’s not obvious until much later that this actually means anything, and isn’t just a throwaway bit. Mr. Pratchett’s very good at that, really—telling you something that doesn’t look important but turns out to be at the heart of the whole story.
    The first two Discworld novels were parodies of fantasy novels; the next several drifted away from parody and into satire. Even when Guards! Guards! built its plot around fantasy clichés such as dragons, long-lost royal heirs, and useless guards, it really wasn’t so much mocking fantasy novels as using their trappings to satirize the real world. Lady Sybil Ramkin, for example, is a stereotype, but not one from fantasy novels; instead she’s a stereotype from England’s imperial past.
    Moving Pictures is a swing back toward parody—but it’s not fantasy novels being parodied, it’s Hollywood. Slapped-together scripts, movie stars who were nobody a few days ago, mad producers, a boom town awash in money—it’s all there, but translated into Discworld terms.
    One thing that strikes me as a bit off, symbolically, is using the figure of an Oscar as the guardian keeping the monsters of Holy Wood in check. It would be nice if the Oscars played some part in keeping the
worst excesses of Hollywood in check, but it sure doesn’t look to me as if that’s anything remotely like the real-world situation.
    At any rate, the plot here is not especially complicated or coherent; it exists largely as an excuse to incorporate lots of mockery of Hollywood. This novel is jammed full of parodies and punning references—and not all of them Hollywood-related, either. There’s a little spoof on the famous opening line of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds thrown in at one point, for example. Reality leakage runs amok, and a great deal of the humor comes from recognizing just which real-world thing is being referenced, whether it’s a one-line reference to The Bride of Frankenstein or an extended riff on Blown Away , the Discworld version of Gone with the Wind . This climaxes with an extra-dimensional Thing climbing the Tower of Art at Unseen University while carrying the Librarian—hardly a knee-slapper if looked at on its own terms, but when you realize that the Thing has taken on a larger-than-life version of Ginger’s appearance from the movies, so that what you have is a fifty-foot woman climbing the world’s tallest building while clutching a screaming ape in one hand....
    There’s a lot of that sort of thing. Frankly, while it’s amusing, it’s not what I prefer to see at the heart of a Discworld story. I’d rather see Mr. Pratchett focusing on humanity’s foibles rather than demonstrating his cleverness with puns and parodies.
    Fortunately, there are good character moments, as well. Dibbler’s creative frenzies and Gaspode’s observations on canine nature add a good bit to the scenes in Holy Wood. Detritus the troll’s romantic efforts have their charm, as well.
    Perhaps the best material, though, is what’s happening to the wizards of Unseen University. After nine volumes of a constantly shifting cast, with never the same Archchancellor twice, we are now presented with what will hereinafter be the permanent faculty—Mustrum Ridcully as Archchancellor, Windle Poons as the oldest member, 90 and several wizards known only by their titles: the Bursar, the Lecturer in Recent Runes, the Senior Wrangler, and so on.
    One other character is introduced in passing who will be recurring in later stories set at the University: Ponder Stibbons. In Moving Pictures , he graduates with his degree in wizardry through a fortunate turn of events involving his friend Victor’s absence