Feeding My Ignorance

Just yesterday I wrote about how I like to visit different "worlds" when I am reading. Last night I got to the end of the story of one of those worlds. Knowing that it was his last novel, getting to the end of Sir Terry Pratchett's "The Shepherd's Crown" was always going to be tinged with disappointment - not in the story itself, but because we will never know what happens next to the many characters that we have met through the Discworld series.

...

It was unlike other series in that the focus wasn't on the story of a person, or a group of people - the focus was very much on the "land" itself - Discworld was at the centre of the books - populated by a huge array of characters - many of whom cropped up in several books - but none (with the possible exception of Death Himself) was ubiquitous and central to every story.

The result was that you are left thinking "I wonder whatever happened to ...." - and like real life there were so many unfinished tales - you just knew that the "ending" of many books was merely the start of another chapter - which, of course, will now never be written.

Its rather apt that in recent years Sir Terry had collaborated with Stephen Baxter on the Long Earth series - stories about parallel worlds. Now, Discworld is going to develop in the imaginations of millions of readers and we will - effectively - have the "Long Discworld" as each different version takes the ideas and develops them.

Of course the Discworld novels themselves work on a number of different levels - so not every reader will go away from a book with the same story in their head. So even before anyone has extrapolated from the "end" point there are already many, many different "understandings" of what Discworld is - what Discworld means - and what Discworld will become. Just like our memories of our "real" lives - each reader will retain a selection of "moments" from the books - and - no doubt - will have created for themselves a few "moments" that didn't really happen in any of the books!!

No one who has spent time with Sam Vimes, Lord Vetinari, Angua, Moist von Lipwig, the Igors, the Nac Mac Feegle and all of the other inhabitants of Discworld could fail to let their imaginations go just a bit further than the books themselves. The wonderful inventiveness and the sharp-witted commentary on our troubles, our history and our hang-ups are triggers for flights of fancy that could end up anywhere.

There is so much that could be said - I'll finish with a couple of quotes (there are far too many to include them all):

"That just goes to show that you never know, although what it is we never know I suspect we'll never know."

“In fact he was incurably insane and hallucinated more or less continuously, but by a remarkable stroke of lateral thinking his fellow wizards had reasoned that, in that case, the whole business could be sorted out if only they could find a formula that caused him to hallucinate that he was completely sane - This is a very common hallucination, shared by most people.”