Kristin Noone - Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds

Terry Pratchetts Ethical Worlds

Terry Pratchetts Ethical Worlds

Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond

Edited by Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Je f ferson, North Carolina

Also of Interest and from McFarland

Welsh Mythology and Folklore in Popular Culture: Essays on Adaptations in Literature, Film, Television and Digital Media (edited by Audrey L. Becker and Kristin Noone, 2011)

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Noone, Kristin, editor. | Leverett, Emily Lavin, editor.

Title: Terry Pratchetts ethical worlds : essays on identity and narrative in Discworld and beyond / edited by Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett.

Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2020 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020018832 | ISBN 9781476674490 (paperback ; acid-free paper ) ISBN 9781476638034 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Pratchett, TerryCriticism and interpretation. | Pratchett, Terry. Discworld series. | Ethics in literature. | Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. | Discworld (Imaginary place)

Classification: LCC PR6066.R34 Z88 2020 | DDC 823/.914dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018832

British Library cataloguing data are available

ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-7449-0

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-3803-4

2020 Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover images 2020 Shutterstock

Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640

www.mcfarlandpub.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

Terry Pratchetts Ethical Worlds

Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin Leverett

Terry Pratchetts novels and stories have sold more than 85 million copies worldwide, and have been translated into multiple languages and multiple media: films, board games, cookbooks, pop-scholarly folklore and science texts, and more, including the recent Amazon series based on Good Omens . During his lifetime, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 and was knighted for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours, and his numerous literary awards include the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the Carnegie Medal, among others. This vast influence and appeal have led to a growing body of Pratchett studies and scholarly discussions, in particular with regard to his use of comedic fantasy to explore larger social and moral questions: truth, justice, identity, community, relationships (or lack thereof) with the past, the purpose of creativity, and the importance of compassion. Focusing specifically on Pratchetts Discworld novels, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren observes that Pratchetts fantasy disrupts the cosmos of putatively given good order for the sake of a more just order. Justice depends finally not on law but on inventiveness (Alton and Spruiell); Pratchetts work interrogates themes of inventiveness and justiceand the meaning of and interdependence ofthese ideas via intertexuality (allusions, references, pop culture and folklore), identity (British and global, located in time and partaking of the heterotemporal), adaptation (novels, films, plays, board games), and genre-crossing (young adult, fantasy, satire, science fiction). This complexity invites further study of the impact of Pratchetts contributions to fantasy, literacy, and theories such as narrative causal-ity, and in this project, our aim has been to make a gesture toward unifying some of these disparate areas of Pratchett studies and bringing them productively into conversation with each other. Terry Pratchetts works celebrate the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and creation; taking this as our thematic core, the essays collected here examine the ways in which Pratchett constructs an ethical stance that values and valorizes informed self-aware choice, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the value of play and humor in crafting a compassionate worldview, and acts of continuous self-examination and creation.

Previous Pratchett scholarship has followed three main threads: (1) examination of Pratchett within specific genres, for instance fantasy (e.g., Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James A Short History of Fantasy ); (2) commentary on Pratchett as a young adult author (the category in which he has achieved most critical attention and awards) and his contributions toward childrens literacy (as noted, for example, in famed science fiction critic John Clutes essay Coming of Age); and (3) focus on Pratchetts Discworld universe in particular, the best-developed, longest-running, and most mature sequence of the authors work (an example of this focus is Anne Hiebert Alton and William Spruiells Discworld and the Disciplines , referenced earlier). Here, we hope to weave together some of these threads of questioning: what impact, for instance, does Pratchetts early science fiction writing have on his later turn toward fantasy, in terms of genre shifts? How might an investigation of Pratchetts fondness for mythology and British folklore deepen our understanding of contemporary British identity and its complex relationship to colonialism? In what ways do themes of identity formation and exploration resonate in both the young adult novels and the novels for older readers, and to what extent do we see Pratchetts non Discworld stories reflect or extend or even critique the predominant themes within Discworld, which must be understood not as a singular phenomenon but in dialogue with the rest of his work?

To this end, the essays gathered here combine elements such as science fiction studies, the effects of collaborative writing (e.g., Pratchetts work with Neil Gaiman and Stephen Baxter), steampunk aesthetics, productive modes of ownership, intertextuality and textual references, neomedievalism and colonialism, adaptations into other media, linguistics and rhetorics, and coming of age as an act of free will. Fundamentally, we suggest that throughout Pratchetts works, moments of deliberate transformative choicein particular those which create or transform or play with the expectations of narrative, genre, and storytellingare central to his construction of ethical identity around moral self-examination, internal awareness, and often difficult yet worthwhile acts of compassion.

Opening the collection, Kristin Noones Something That Gods Are: Acts of Creation in Terry Pratchetts Early Science Fiction considers the authors early and more sf-influenced work, reading the novel Strata and the short story #ifdefDEBUG + world/enough + time to argue that Pratchetts early science fiction presents moments of creation as an ethical act necessary for a self-aware, responsible, and pleasurable life, and that these early texts might offer insight not only into prototype versions of the later Discworld but into the evolution of Pratchetts moral stance. Following on from this, Mike Perschons Conan the Nonagenarian: Beyond Hyborian Hypermasculinity with Terry Pratchetts Cohen the Barbarian returns to the 1930s pulp-fiction hero Conan the Barbarian to explore the ways in which Pratchetts Cohen the Barbarian moves from simple parody to sophisticated post-postmodern exploration of intertextuality and adaptation of the heroic ethos. Similarly, Emily Lavin Leverett interrogates the linkage of past and present in Carrot Ironfoundersson: Medieval Romance, Narrative Causality and the Ethics of Choice in Terry Pratchetts Guards! Guards! , which takes the character of Carrot Ironfoundersson as a focal point for an examination of multiple medievalisms, satire, and multi-temporality in the romance motifs of Carrots character development over multiple novels.