Title: Sourcery
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1988
Publisher: Victor Gollancz in association with Colin Smythe
Why in Database: Typically, in Sourcery, as in the previous four volumes of Discworld, we have several turtle elements, all of them we describes below. At the beginning we have some informaton about how discworld looks like, and of course a description of A’Tuin:
There was no analogy for the way in which Great A’Tuin the world turtle moved against the galactic night. When you are ten thousand miles long, your shell pocked with meteor craters and frosted with comet ice, there is absolutely nothing you can realistically be like except yourself.
So Great A’Tuin swam slowly through the interstellar deeps like the largest turtle there has ever been, carrying on its carapace the four huge elephants that bore on their backs the vast, glittering waterfall-fringed circle of the Discworld, which exists either because of some impossible blip on the curve of probability or because the gods enjoy a joke as much as anyone.
Later, A’Tuin is also mentioned as a possible cause of Discworld trembling:
“I’m sure I felt the building shaking, too,” said Rincewind, a shade uncertainly. Here in this quiet room, with the fire crackling in the grate, it didn’t seem quite so real.
“A passing tremor. Great A’Tuin hiccuping, um, possibly.”
In one of the footnotes (in which Pratchett’s books are rich) there is an unusual description of the Chimera:
It hath thee legges of a mermade, the hair of a tortoyse, thee teethe of a fowle, and the wings of a snake. Of course I have only my worde for it, thee beast having the breathe of a furnace and the temperament of a rubber balloon in a hurricane.
The Discworld is not all about A’Tuin, we also have here a mention of ordinary turtles, escaping from luggage:
Down below the panic on the roads the Luggage paddled slowly up one of the reed-lined drainage ditches. A little way ahead of it a moving wave of small alligators, rats and snapping turtles was pouring out of the water and scrambling frantically up the bank, propelled by some vague but absolutely accurate animal instinct.
Towards the end, a single mention of A’Tuin appears again:
He jerked to his feet again and strode to the simulacrum of the world. The image was perfect in every detail, down to a ghost of Great A’Tuin paddling slowly through the interstellar deeps a few inches above the floor.
Author: XYuriTT
