The Discworld Almanak The Year of the Prawn

Title: The Discworld Almanak The Year of the Prawn
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Bernard Pearson
Release year: 2004
Publisher: Doubleday

Why in Database: One of the books from the Discworld, there are many mentions of turtles, especially references to A’Tuin. There are also some turtles on the pictures.

Most unusually, this year will see the Great Turtle twice execute a full roll, a coincidence that has not occurred since the Great Comet of the Year of the Quick Sloth.
In times past, these events were a source of great awe and mystery to our rude forefathers, but they are now understood as a perfectly ordinary, nay, even inevitable and desirable con- dition of living in a world that ultimately rests upon the back of an enormous turtle.
One can speculate, as wizards have done, that there are worlds as spherical as the moon, although a little intuition will tell us that no intelligent life could survive long on them (because, for example, walking for any length of time in a straight line would bring you back to where you started, a circumstance likely to cause madness in all who experience it). But, more severely, without a turtle to snap them out of the sky, such a world would be prey to every mischievous comet or random rock.

On May 25 the comet Snape 32 would strike the rimward regions of Howandaland, and on August 7 the large rock named The Late Mrs Edith Barnfather, after the aunt of the discoverer, would land in the sea off Quirm; however, we can be assured that Great ATuin will account for both, with a simple roll in the case of Snape 32 and quite a complex three- dimensional roll-and-twist in the case of Edith Barnfather.

DO NOT BE AFEARED
(‘aveared’ being ar worse than being afraid!)
FOR THE TURTLE WILL PREVAIL

We expect on August 3 to witness a Turtle Eclipse of the Sun as one of the mighty flippers, beating the aether with extra force in order to begin the roll, briefly rises above the Rim, and people who tend towards vertigo or seasickness would be well advised to stay indoors at night time, particularly on August 6 when the stars will be moving quite strongly.

A rain of tortoises, which could occasion a broken pate or two, will beset those in Skund but there is good eating on them, so all is equal.

The Krullians have never fallen victim to the perennial heresy that the world is globular and it makes no kind of sense, because they’ve even mapped large parts of the Turtle’s head. When you’ve measured the albedo of an eye thirty miles across, it’s hard to be persuaded that it doesn’t exist.

FORTUNATELY WE MOVE WITH THE TIMES BECAUSE, OWING TO THE TURTLE’S PROGRESS, WE DO, IN FACT, MOVE WITH THE TIMES. STARS APPEAR AHEAD AND FALL BEHIND, AND THUS NEW CONSTELLATIONS CAN BE DEVISED. OF COURSE, SOME ARE SUCH THAT THEY ARE READILY ‘PAINTED’ ON TO THE CHANGING SKY, AND SO WE ARE NEVER WITHOUT THE STRAIGHT LINE, THE SMALL BORING GROUP OF FAINT STARS,

The Seventh House
THE HOUSE OF THE STAR
31 THE FAINT STAR MAJOR
32 THE FAINT STAR MINOR
33 THE LITTLE TURTLE
34 THE FLAGON
35 KET’S KNIFE

33 THE LITTLE TURTLE Of the Seventh House.
Large but not too bright, being one star above two more, and then three. When viewed over still water, its reflection gives it its name, although you have to want to see the turtle, if you see what we mean. A useful constellation.

57 FORWARD
Of the Twelfth House.
This star, it has been determined, occupies that point in space to which the Turtle is heading, although it is in fact not a star at all but a tiny point of darkness against a wash of glowing gas. No doubt its nature will be revealed in due course. Those born under this star are always looking forward to tomorrow.
58 AFT
Of the Twelfth House.
A large red star, visited by the Turtle in recent astronomical history, where we were fortunate to witness the birth of a number of new sky turtles whose eggs had incubated in the warm glow as on a beach. Those born under this star are beginning to make their mark as historians and others of that sort who hanker after the past.

THE PITCHER and THE LITTLE TURTLE MEET UP AND ALIGN WITH THE STARFISH and OBJOCK

THE PLOUGH HANDLE ORJOCK, THE LITTLE TURTLE and THE BRIGHT CABBAGE, which is unusual even in a half-year ending.

*NOTE: It is of some scientific conjecture that this may be due to an increase and subsequent decrease in magical activity within the Moon. There may well be a correlation between this tidal ebb and flow of magical strength and some as yet undiscovered natural phenomenon (the heartbeat of Great A’Tuin itself has been put forward by some scholars). Ed.

Ephebian mythology tells us that the cabbage sprang from the fallen tears of a king who was about to be killed by one of the Gods for making water amongst His holy grove of turnips. As the King’s tears fell, the god felt compassion and turned him into a tortoise. He was eaten by an eagle five minutes later, but it’s the thought that counts.

Author: XYuriTT

The Watch

Title: The Watch
Year: 2021
Actors: Sam Adewunmi, Matt Berry, Anna Chancellor, Marama Corlett, Richard Dormer, James Fleet, Adam Hugill, Ralph Ineson, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Paul Kaye, Joni Ayton-Kent, Ruth Madeley
Genre: Comedy, Criminal, Drama, Fantasy
Country: UK, USA
Viewing method: Whole series

Why in Database: An eight-episode series, loosely based on the works of Terry Pratchett, you could expect to see A’Tuin, but nothing like that. The turtles are in the form of paper cutouts, which is probably supposed to be an Easter Egg referring to A’tuin. A scene with them can be seen in episode seven – Nowhere in the Multiverse.

Author: XYuriTT

A Street Cat Named Bob

Title: A Street Cat Named Bob
Year: 2016
Director: Roger Spottiswoode
Actors: Luke Treadaway, Bob the Cat, Ruta Gedmintas, Joanne Froggatt, Anthony Head, Darren Evans, Tony Jayawardena, Adam Riches, Llewella Gideon, Lorraine Ashbourne, Akbar Kurtha, John Henshaw, Beth Goddard, Ivana Basic
Genre: Biographical, Drama, Family
Country: UK

Why in Database: Turtles appears in this film in the form of two visual references to the Discworld and A`Tuin. The first is a mural that is visible at some point in the background, we also have it described in note about murals. At the end of the movie, The Compleat Discworld Atlas can also be seen in the bookstore.

Author: XYuriTT

The Wyrdest Link

Title: The Wyrdest Link
Author(s): David Langford
Release year: 2002
Publisher: Victor Gollancz

Why in Database: Book related to the Discworld series, continuation of The Unseen University Challenge.
We found turtle mentions in six questions, we quote them below, in the order “Name of the category”, “question” and “answer” – in the book itself, the answers are in a different part of the book than the questions, they are not adjacent.

Guild of Apothecaries
9. Chelonium, elephantigen and narrativium – believed by wizards to be necessary for what?
9. The building of proper worlds, like Discworld, seemed quite impossible without these necessary elements. (The Science of Discworld)

Guild of Engravers II
5. 13 Midden Lane, Pseudopolis, Sto Plains, The Discworld, On top of Great A’tuin, The Univers, Space. nr. More Space.
5. Eric – young Eric’s address, supposedly scrawled on the half-title page of a book originally called Faust.

Priests’, Sacerdotes’ and Occult Intermediaries’ Guild
2. Of which incarnated god was it frequently said, generally by his own supposed worshippers, ‘There’s good eating on one of those’?
2. Om of Omnia, while inadvertently manifesting as a tortoise through most of Small Gods.

Guild of Gamblers
6. ‘There was only one way to get to the Citadel now.’
6. Om’s plan, while still incarnated as a tortoise, to be carried by an eagle to the climactic scene of Small Gods.

Guild of Lawyers
6. To what does Ponder Stibbons’s Rule Three – ‘You get balls’ – apply?
6. Roundworld Project astrophysics in The Science of Discworld. There, large quantities of matter somehow collect into balls rather than more natural shapes like turtles. It is a mystery

Unseen University – The Last Order, or The Other Order
12. What is or was Psephophorus terrypratchetti?
12. A turtle. To be precise: a species of leatherback turtle, forty million years extinct, whose bones were found in New Zealand in 1995. Its discoverer Richard Köhler named it after a favourite author called, um, wossname, hang on there, it’s on the tip of my tongue …

Author: XYuriTT

The Discworld Mapp

Original title: The Discworld Mapp
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs, Stephen Player
Release year: 1995
Publisher: Corgi

Why in Database: Book related to the Discworld series, with one turtle reference in the text, and a huge image A’Tuina on the map itself and on the main cover and the cover of the text booklet.

Even so, I’m not sure that everythingon the Discworld would quite pass muster on Earth, but since the Earth has not travelled on the back of a turtle for at least a thousand years there are bound to be some loopholes big enough to drive na elephant through.

Author: XYuriTT

The Streets of Ankh-Morpork

Title: The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
Author(s): Stephen Briggs, Terry Pratchett, Stephen Player
Release year: 1993
Publisher: Corgi

Why in Database: Book related to the Discworld series, with no mention of turtles in the text, only two pictures show a turtle which can be counted as A’Tuin. The first picture is in the booklet part, the second is a piece of the map of the title location. The book itself is primarily a map, the attached piece of text is rather pamphlet-like, not a book.

Author: XYuriTT

Death’s Domain

Title: Death’s Domain
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs, Paul Kidby
Release year: 1999
Publisher: Corgi

Why in Database: Book related to the Discworld series. One line mentions A’Tuin. The book itself is primarily a map of the Title’s location, the attached piece of text is rather pamphlet-like not a regular book.

The Death of the Discworld is a traditionalist, which is appropriate for an anthropomorphic personification whose shop floor is a flat world carried on the back of an enormous turtle.

Author: XYuriTT

The turtle moves! Discworld’s story (unauthorized)

Title: The turtle moves! Discworld’s story (unauthorized)
Author(s): Lawrence Watt-Evans
Release year: 2008
Publisher: BenBella Books

Why in Database: A book about the Discworld series. We found a lot of various turtle mentions in it, in total we found as many as 26 turtle fragments and we quote them all in our note:

The idea of a flat world carried through space by four elephants standing on the back of a gigantic turtle is absurd to begin with, but sure, I suppose you could get away with using it in one novel. Maybe two. Three if you stretched. But dozens of best-selling novels and an assortment of spin-offs?

I could invent a square world instead of a disc. Or an elephant car- tying four turtles—but that’s hardly got the same sort of appeal; the poor turtles would be forever slipping off, which would make for a very bumpy sort of world.

There’s a lot more than humor here, and what humor there is, is mostly character-based, not cheap puns and pratfalls, nor mere absurdity. Don’t let the giant turtle mislead you.

There’s no continuing plot, no planned end. The only obvious unifying feature is that all the stories take place on Discworld,*’ a gigantic rotating disc carried on the backs of four elephants, who are in turn standing on the back of a cosmic turtle named Great Atuin as she (or perhaps he) swims through space.

Well, it’s not about the elephants or the turtle. This has been the cause of some confusion among would-be readers. In all the stories to date, the elephants and turtle have never yet had a line of dialogue, or intervened in human affairs. In several stories, they’re never mentioned at all, even in passing.

* There’s also chelonium, the stuff that star turtles like Great Atuin are made of, and assorted others, but they’re less important.

OUR FIRST LOOK AT DISCWORLD came in 1983, with he publication of The Colour of Magic. The book opened with a prologue describing the Disc, introducing us to the cosmic tortoise Great Atuin, and the four giant elephants who stand upon Atuin’s back: Berilia, Tubul, Great T’phon, and Jerakeen.

He’s good at that sort of thing, and that’s on display right from the start, what with the awe-inspiring descriptions of the turtle and the elephants who, one has a suspicion, were really intended in the original myths to be metaphysical concepts, or perhaps metaphors of some sort, rather than literal ani- mals with meteor scars and hydrogen frost. One doesn’t expect to see words like “meteor” and “hydrogen” in a description of a giant turtle with a world on its back.

Another Hindu myth says that the world rests on the back of a gi- gantic tortoise. (Actually, that idea appears in several cultures, whereas the elephants are specifically from Hindu myth.) Mr. Pratchett has re- solved the apparent contradiction by suggesting that both are true—the elephants are standing on the tortoise, while the world rests upon their backs.

Here in this first two-page prologue, he manages to jam in not only a description of Great Atuin and its burden, but a brief account of the space program the kingdom of Krull has created to study the nature of their world.

Really, it cant have the same physics we do, or it wouldn’t be possible—a flat disc several thousand miles in diameter would not be stable, could not retain a breathable atmosphere, and wouldn’t gener- ally have gravity pointing the right direction. And we won’t even think about the turtle or the elephants.

“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.”

He is, in fact, a one-eyed tortoise, and his once-mighty lightnings are reduced to sparks that can barely singe a heretic’s hair.

Ephebe is a col- lection of all the stories told about ancient Athens, cranked up to the ab- surd—elected tyrants, labyrinths, philosophers arguing about tortoises, and leaping naked from the bath shouting “Eureka!”

Small Gods is also the source of my title. One doctrine of the Omnian church is that they live on a globe, and this talk of a disc-shaped world supported by elephants atop a gigantic turtle is nonsense—heretical, blasphemous nonsense that can get you executed.
The Omnians who dare to rebel against the church hierarchy take part of their inspiration from stories about people who have seen the edge of the world that the church says doesn’t exist; they believe that the Disc does rest on Great Atuin’s back, as described by travelers and in an Ephebian book entitled De Chelonian Mobile—‘The Turtle Moves.”

And the rebels, like Galileo, may pay lip service to the Omnian faith in public, but among themselves they remind one another, “The Turtle moves!” As John Morley said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” The truth will out in time. When the stories people live by become too far distanced from reality, they break down. Regardless of what anyone may teach, regardless of what anyone may want, the Disc does rest atop four elephants, who are standing on Great Atuin’s back.
And the Turtle moves!
If you think about it, it doesn’t really matter to your ordinary Omnian in the street that the Turtle moves, but it’s a short, catchy phrase that sums up the extent of the church’s lies. It works.

We’ve met a god of evolution, we’ve seen discussions of how natural selection has operated in producing the current faculty of Unseen University and the Disc’s remarkable crop of barbarian heroes, and we’ve had comments on the evolutionary value of tortoises learning to fly, on the survival value of stupidity in vampires, on the reproductive strategies of the phoenix, and on any number of similar subjects.

118 Necessary for the creation of cosmic turtles,

Legend has it there was once a fifth,!”’ but it slipped off Great Atuin’s shell, orbited around, and smacked fatally into the Disc in what later became Uberwald.

There’s no parodic or satirical twist, just the story as it is. If not for the appearance of Mrs. Ogg and Mistress Weatherwax, and the fact that we’ve seen the Nac Mac Feegle before, this wouldn’t need to be a Discworld story at all—there’s no mention at all of Ankh-Morpork or any of the other familiar lands, noth- ing involving cosmic turtles or gigantic elephants, no trolls or dwarfs. This could have been set in Sussex, or Terry Pratchett’s adopted home county of Wiltshire, with only the most trivial of changes.

As I said right at the beginning, in my first introduction, this whole world-on-a-turtle thing should’ve only been good for a couple of books, three at the outside.

Other popular deities include Offler the Crocodile-Headed God, the ichor-drip- ping Lovecraftian monstrosity Bel-Shamharoth, the sea-god Dagon, the wine-god Bibulous, Bast, Nuggan, Anoia, and of course Om, who spent virtually all of Small Gods in the shape of a small tortoise.

Likewise, in Small Gods, the Omnian church is an oppressive, imperialist, totalitarian force—but Om himself is trapped in the form of a small tortoise, unheard by even his own priests, until Brutha saves him.

All the theoretical musings of the ancient Greeks are consid- ered by the Ephebians, but do not remain mere theorizing; instead, ar- rows and tortoises and bathtubs are brought out to test each hypothesis, but somehow fail to resolve many of the arguments.

In Small Gods, the rebels in Omnia take “The Turtle moves!” as their rallying cry. Now, we know they’re right, Great Atuin does indeed move, but does it really matter? How does the Turtle’s existence and movement affect anyone?

Its not important that the Disc is atop a cosmic turtle; what’s important is that the Church says it isn’t.

Author: XYuriTT

Terry Pratchett: Back in Black

Title: Terry Pratchett: Back in Black
Year: 2017
Director: Charlie Russell
Cast: Paul Kaye, Andrew Ryan, Stephen Briggs, Neil Gaiman, Eric Idle, Paul Kidby, Val McDermid, Bernard Pearson, Rhianna Pratchett, Terry Pratchett, Tony Robinson, Colin Smythe, Rob Wilkins, Mark Lawson, Tom Paulin, Alan Titchmarsh
Genre: Documentary
Country: UK

Why in Database: Documentary with fictionalized elements, about author of the Discworld, Terry Pratchett. Of course, there is a lot of turtle elements in it, e.g. the turtle on the cover of the book The Color of Magic, other images of A’Tuin, real live turtles in one of the fragments, turtle on the cover Small Gods and a few others.

Author: XYuriTT

The Whole Hog: Making Terry Pratchett’s ‘Hogfather’

Title: The Whole Hog: Making Terry Pratchett’s ‘Hogfather’
Year: 2006
Director: Paula Nightingale
Cast: Mark Arden, Terry Pratchett, Vadim Jean, Ian Richardson, David Jason, Marc Warren, Michelle Dockery, Marnix Van Den Broeke, Oliver Money, Nigel Planer, Richard Woolfe, Tony Robinson
Genre: Documentary
Country: UK

Why in Database: Documentary about the production of Hogfather. We found turtle elements in two places, one is the cover of “The Gods Trilogy” (collective edition, includes Pyramids, Small Gods and Hogfather) showing a turtle (Om), the other is an image of A’Tuin.

Author: XYuriTT