Back to Blog
Turtles all the way down5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |