Why does Pratchett have it in for movies? Later on, he shows himself to be OK with newspapers and railroads and all those other newfangled contraptions. Let me just say it’s pretty apparent from the start how the book will end.) (OK, so sue me for giving away the ending. Needless to say - since there was an 11 th Discworld book - Victor and Ginger successfully keep the Things from doing so, but it’s a close-run thing, and, in the end, the Patrician and everyone else bans clicks forever. Behind it are the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions who are trying to use the Holy Wood magic (very distinct from Wizard magic) to enrapture enough people to enable them to break through into the real world. This innovation, though, unlike the other ones that are plot points in later Discworld books, is not inherently benign. And the click industry makes celebrities of the two central characters in the story, Victor (a self-failed wizard ) and Ginger who has always dreamed of being famous. The making of clicks takes place in an obscure location where the weather is always sunny and temperate, a place called Holy Wood. (Discworldites?)Įxcept the innovation that was introduced in Pratchett’s 10 th Discworld book, Moving Pictures, published in 1990.Īs the title suggests, the plot involves the discovery - or was it the re-discovery? - of motion pictures which, in the novel, are called the clicks (for the click-click-click sound the picture-thrower makes). The introduction of a new contraption often resulted in a crisis of some sort, but, by and large, when the novel was finished, the contraption with all its warts had become part of life for the Discworldians. In the books he did write about innovations in Discworld, Pratchett brought his usual skeptical eye to the great dreams and pitfalls of such changes to the everyday world.
Alas, he didn’t get the chance, cut down as he was at age 66 in 2015 by Alzheimer’s disease.
My suspicion is that, in some vague way, Pratchett had plans for bringing still more innovations to Discworld, as, maybe, the telephone, computers and supermarkets. These included a form of telegraph, the clacks ( The Fifth Element, 1999), the news media ( The Truth, 2000), a postal system ( Going Postal, 2004), coinage ( Making Money, 2007) and railroads ( Raising Steam, 2013).
As Terry Pratchett created his series of 41 Discworld novels, he took his world from a fairly medieval place into modernity through his introduction of a variety of civilization’s great innovative technologies.
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