Terry Pratchett Could Save the World (21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society) [1 ed.] 9781032445656, 9781032445670, 9781003372813, 1032445653

Citation preview

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Terry Pratchett Could Save the World

This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans. Rebecca Ann Bach is a professor of English, specializing in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

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Twenty-​First Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society

Twenty-​ First Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society is home to cutting-​edge research into transitions in British culture and society as seen through literary texts, including novels, plays, poetry and life writing. Exploring key works from the canon as well as lesser-​known or historically marginalised voices, the books in this series tackle topics such as race, migration, gender, class and Brexit, looking at how major texts respond to and anticipate these contemporary issues. The series offers an insight into the multicultural landscape of Britain today and the ways in which it has transformed over the centuries. Terry Pratchett Could Save the World Rebecca Ann Bach Rewriting the North Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Devolution Chloe Ashbridge For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​dge.com/​ Twe​nty-​First-​Cent​ury-​Persp​ecti​ves-​on-​Brit​ish-​Lit​erat​ure-​and-​Soci​ety/​ book-​ser​ies/​21BLS

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Terry Pratchett Could Save the World Rebecca Ann Bach

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First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Rebecca Ann Bach The right of Rebecca Ann Bach to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Bach, Rebecca Ann, author. Title: Terry Pratchett could save the world / Rebecca Ann Bach. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Twenty-first century perspectives on British literature and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022055103 (print) | LCCN 2022055104 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032445656 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032445670 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003372813 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pratchett, Terry–Criticism and interpretation. | Pratchett, Terry–Influence. Classification: LCC PR6066.R34 Z55 2023 (print) | LCC PR6066.R34 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914–dc23/eng/20221116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055103 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055104 ISBN: 9781032445656 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032445670 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003372813 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003372813 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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In Memory of Sheldon Bach 1925–​2021 who taught me how to love and how to pay attention

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Terry Pratchett—​Fantasy, Science Fiction, the Human, and the Earth

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1 Men at Arms: Terry Pratchett Takes on Gun Control

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2 Going Postal: The Internet Arrives

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3 The Truth: Journalism, Fake News, and Community

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4 Feet of Clay: Work and Workers

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Coda: Terry Pratchett—​“Creaturely Life” and the Earth 121 Bibliography Index

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Preface

In the more than five years that I have been working on this book, scholarship on Terry Pratchett’s books has blossomed. This book joins with scholars from many fields in its enormous appreciation of Pratchett’s work, and I hope that it will be useful for future scholars. I also hope that it may be read by some of Pratchett’s many, many fans. He is simply too good a writer not to be talked about and written about as long as humans are alive to love books. I have been lucky enough to have taught two of Pratchett’s novels at UAB for almost ten years. One thing that gets in the way of that teaching somewhat is that there are no standard editions of Pratchett’s books. As the careers of writers go, it is way too early for scholarly editions to have been made, but I do think and hope that this is in future for Pratchett’s novels. The textual situation now is a bit of a mess, although not, of course, for fans. Indeed, it is a mess because Pratchett has so many fans. Mass market editions get published and republished, and the pagination is wildly different in different editions. For years I’ve come to classes with carefully constructed lesson plans referring to passages on certain pages only to find that my students have entirely different words on those pages. Because Pratchett didn’t divide his adult novels into chapters, we can’t even find where we are together by locating the passages in relation to where they are in a chapter. I have resorted to making syllabi with sentences and phrases on it, indicating where the assigned reading for that day stops. As I do in my classrooms, in my scholarship, I always read closely. I do this because language is the delight, and Pratchett is utterly delightful. The page references throughout this book are accurate to the editions I cite, but, alas, they may not be to the books you have and love. Look around, as my students have had to. After all, as his fans know, there’s nothing wrong with reading Pratchett’s words over and over.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the support UAB has given me over the years it took me to write this book. In particular, my Fall 2021 sabbatical, provided by the College of Arts and Sciences, enabled me to write many of the chapters. The unfailing support of my English department and its chair, Alison Chapman, sustained me during all this work. I could not have been luckier than to work as a professor at such a generous university. This book owes so much to the people at Routledge and their associates who supported it and produced it. I’m very grateful that my editor, Jennifer Abbott, showed such interest in the project and had it reviewed by international scholars; their perspectives enriched the book immensely. Anita Bhatt guided me through the production of the book. Shiny Radjan from Newgen helped me through the copyediting process, which caught many errors. Louise Peterken has been the final shepherd of the book. Her attention to detail has improved the book in every way. As Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia taught me long ago, making a book is a “collaborative process” that involves a lot of labor. Without all the labor of the people who helped me make this book, it would be much poorer. I want to thank all the students in 301: Reading, Writing, and Research for Literature who have read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lords and Ladies and, in later classes, Macbeth and Wyrd Sisters with me. I owe particular thanks to Mandy Riggs, Jessica Robbins, Heather Esplain, Jake Sims, Zach Aplin, Rachel Houghton, and Emily Schuman for their enthusiasm and ideas. As always, I owe a great debt to all my students who have thought with me over the years. After I stumbled into reading Pratchett because Hogfather was for sale at an airport bookstore, I could not stop reading him and touting him to friends. My friends and colleagues Danny Siegel and Alison also became fans. Danny has read all of these chapters and has helped me enormously, although, of course, any errors are all mine. I also need to thank Danny for introducing me to the Tiffany Aching novels. I run into Pratchett fans all the time. In the throes of the pandemic, when I was feeling a little discouraged as a scholar, I was invited to give a paper at the London Shakespeare Seminar by Gillian Woods, a professor

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Acknowledgments  xi at Birkbeck, University of London. When Gill introduced me, she said that I was writing a book on Pratchett that she couldn’t wait to read. That comment kept me going for months during this difficult time. I could not be more grateful for the support of my friends during the last three years as I was completing this work. Thanks, as always, to Alison, Deborah Feingold, Natasha Korda, Elizabeth Oliver, Danny, and Nancy Sokolove. Elizabeth’s son, Simon Oliver, is a great Pratchett fan, and I’m thankful for conversations with him. I’m also grateful for many conversations about Pratchett with Beth McGowan. As my dedication acknowledges, as I was writing this book, my family lost my beloved father, Sheldon Bach. This is a loss for many, many other people in the world. We are still grieving. I thank my friends, and my extended New York and Chicago family for their support as we said goodbye to him: Steve and Carolyn Ellman, Delia and Eugene Mahon, Lynne Rubin, Annie and Warren Weissberg, Susan Shulson, and my mom’s cousins in Chicago. My mom—​Shelly’s wife Phyllis Beren—​my beloved kid, Jay, my brother, Matthew, and my husband, Joseph Wood, gave me so much support through this time. Jay also read most of the book for me even when they were so busy working and helping to care for my dad. I am grateful also for the support of my stepson Dylan Wood; and I am grateful to the wonderful people who helped us to care for my dad at his and my mom’s home: Louise Alexander and Grace Edwards. I owe everything to Joseph, my husband, who unfailingly supports my creativity and my daily life, as well as showing me the whole world.

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Introduction Terry Pratchett—​Fantasy, Science Fiction, the Human, and the Earth

Terry Pratchett fell in love with writing through reading science fiction (SF).1 But for the most part, he chose to write humorous fantasy novels, and his primary fantasy world, the Discworld, brought him both fame and fortune. This book is about Pratchett and some of his novels, primarily four Discworld novels: Men at Arms, Going Postal, The Truth, and Feet of Clay. Going Postal and The Truth have been grouped under the rubric “The Industrial Revolution Collection.”2 These books and Men at Arms address what happens when novel technologies are introduced into the mash-​ up Medieval-​ Victorian Discworld. Feet of Clay is a book about golems, themselves mash-​ups of technology and magic, who inhabit Pratchett’s satirically oriented Discworld along with humans, other animals, and a large variety of creatures from folklore and prior fantasy texts.3 In this book, I’ll contend that attending to these four novels and more of Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. Of course, the idea that any books might save the world is a fantasy, as are other utopian ideas. But it is an interesting and important fantasy. As Pratchett shows in his novels, all significant goals that humans can have, such as peace, love, and justice, are fantasies, but it is our belief in those goals that is significant. Pratchett has said, “the fantasy of justice is more interesting than the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic.” And he goes on to say that the making of “peace” in the book he is discussing “is astonishing.”4 However, I will argue that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology, the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology, and the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms, as well as the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now (2022). There is an active, complex, global conversation among literary and cultural critics about ways in which SF can offer us pathways into a better future, particularly in relation to environmentalism. Often these arguments contend that apocalyptic visions of an Earth destroyed for human life by what Pratchett calls the “march of weapons technology” DOI: 10.4324/9781003372813-1

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2 Introduction or unbridled consumerism will turn humans toward environmentalism.5 This is the inverse of prior (and maybe current) arguments that humans will inevitably “use up” the Earth and then live successfully on other planets.6 The environmentalist conversation is partially due to SF’s historical appeal for scientists, including one of the most significant theorists of nonhuman animal studies, Donna Haraway.7 That conversation is also active because of SF’s long-​touted relation to reality and its orientation to the future, both utopian and apocalyptic. But, as a corollary to this book’s major claims about Pratchett, I will argue that it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy over SF, as well as his devotions to humor and folklore, that give his Discworld novels their particular power and possibilities in relation to the fantastic tasks of saving humans and the Earth that humans share with other life.8 Indeed, I will be arguing that three of SF’s commitments are what may make, especially early, SF less powerful in relation to saving the Earth than Pratchett’s fantasy novels: SF’s historical faith in human reason, its futurology, and its relationship to reality (as its early promoters and practitioners defined it). Haraway’s and Bruno Latour’s theories, psychoanalytic and feminist theory, as well as Walter Benjamin’s messianic theory subtend this book, and as I will show, Pratchett’s novels believe with Benjamin that justice and the Earth are best served by veneration of “the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren”; Pratchett’s novels commit to our task of remembering the past in its wholeness. As Benjamin says, “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”9 I will argue that Pratchett shares these Benjaminian beliefs. The ideas of progress, futurology, and technological mastery that pervade some SF, and, historically, many defenses of SF over fantasy, are exactly what make Pratchett’s choice of fantasy, rather than SF, so potentially powerful in relation to saving the Earth. Pace some of these early SF defenses, fantasy and SF are not in actuality distinct genres; many texts have conventions that have been ascribed to both. In addition, neither type of text is distinct from other types of literature in any complete way. Some of the most significant texts that could be categorized in these genres clearly nod to the conventions of all of these types, including Ursula le Guin’s works and the most recent three-​time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin’s novels. As one of the most important early SF writers, Robert Heinlein wrote, long ago, in a book defining SF, “categories tend to overlap, or stories turn out to overlap the categories.”10 More recent conversations about genre also show that genre is not an account of literary texts’ essential identity (since literary texts are, by definition, multidimensional), but rather an ongoing construction of definitions of texts in their various historical milieus: readership, publication, distribution, criticism, etc. However, this does not mean that the construction of genres lacks reality effects. Marketing, sales, academic attention, and literary awards have been affected by how people have constructed these genres. No one has to defend Michael Chabon’s status

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Introduction  3 as a serious novelist, but critics cite Chabon’s and Harold Bloom’s praise of le Guin to defend her reputation as a serious author. This ongoing construction, used to denigrate fantasy writing as well as satirical humor, has had reality effects that hurt Pratchett personally; he resented not being seen as a writer of significant fiction.11 And I will argue not only that his resentment was righteous, but also that the relative neglect of his serious significance hurts our stutter-​steps toward peace and justice. In 2001 Pratchett won the Carnegie Medal for children’s and young adult books for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. In his acceptance speech he expressed his long-​standing distress about his books not being seen as serious because they were humorous fantasy novels. His speech began with the apt claim that fantasy is much more than wizards and dragons. He then declared that “fantasy needs no defence now. As a genre it has become quite respectable in recent years. At least, it can demonstrably make lots and lots and lots of money, which passes for respectable these days.”12 Pratchett was less interested in money than some other celebrity authors, and his books are also deeply critical of the late modern link between money and respectability, so this claim seems to be tongue in cheek. That insincerity may indicate how much the critical neglect of his chosen genre meant to him. I will be arguing that the relative neglect of fantasy by critics is costly, as well, to humans in general. The distinction between SF and fantasy literature is elusive and often specious, and it is less and less important to the community of authors and fans of what is now frequently called speculative fiction. Jeannette Ng, a writer of historical fantasy, won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2019, one of the Hugo Awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. In her acceptance speech that year, she called Campbell, one of the foundational SF editors in America a fascist, which he was, and in response, the Society renamed the award the Astounding award. Although there was some nasty pushback to Ng’s speech, her winning of the award and the renaming of the award point to the trend toward erasing any institutional distinction between the genres.13 However, as Ng’s commentary also indicates, the history of that distinction is significant, and it deserves discussion in relation to what I am contending is fantasy’s significance for justice and the environment. As SF historians have recounted, when SF emerged as a genre, it faced the problems many twentieth-​century genres have faced in relation to the critical world. In particular, its associations with science and pulp fiction differentiated it in critical circles from “serious literature.”14 In response, some of its twentieth-​century defenders made a case for its seriousness by differentiating the genre from fantasy fiction.15 For example, in the first issue of Science Fiction Studies, Stanislaw Lem claimed that “In SF there can be no inexplicable marvels, no transcendences, no devils or demons—​and the pattern of occurrences must be verisimilar.” For Lem, this adherence to some reality makes SF superior to fantasy: he

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4 Introduction calls SF “something more than just fairy-​ tale fiction.”16 Lem’s initial claim was echoed throughout the twentieth century. Writing in Science Fiction Studies 24 years later, an outraged Frederik Pohl wrote, “[a]‌bove all, science fiction is not, is positively not, fantasy.” Although he admits to liking fantasy, he sees the two genres as distinct because “SF is a literature of ideas” and “science fiction has played an important role in futurology.” Pohl celebrates SF’s contributions to the space program and the affinity scientists have for the form, and he says that apocalyptic SF has contributed to environmentalism. Even though the distinction between the genres is no longer actively defended, Pohl’s claim for SF was taken up enthusiastically in the twentieth century. For Pohl and others, fantasy fiction was a lighter, less mature, and less relevant genre in relation to real-​ world goals. Perhaps the most influential early writer about SF, Darko Suvin categorizes SF as work for adults: “SF thus shares with the dominant literature of our civilization a mature approach analogous to that of modern science and philosophy.” Suvin differentiates it categorically from what he says are “noncognitive estrangings such as fantasy.”17 In a book of essays about how he had to hide his interest in SF in order to be considered a real academic, the Tolkien expert and editor of Oxford collections of fantasy stories and SF stories Tom Shippey echoes Suvin, saying that Suvin identifies the “basic building-​ block of science fiction well”: “a discrete piece of information recognisable as not-​true, but also as not-​unlike-​true, not-​flatly-​(and in the current state of knowledge)-​impossible.”18 Clearly Shippey must not have shared Pohl’s deep distress that, in the 1990s, “the Science Fiction Writers of America . . . changed its name to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.”19 But Shippey sees SF as distinctive and great because it is full of things that are not impossible, making a strong case for the quasi-​realistic effects of SF. As these authors and critics define it, reality is allied with reason, cognition, and limitless scientific and technological progress.20 Collectively, they seem sure that this version of reality will ensure a better future, a future not necessarily on Earth. For them, unlike fantasy, SF is at once a realistic genre and a future-​oriented genre. It is the futurity aspect of science fiction that makes Heinlein believe that it the “superior” fictional form.21 Suvin claims that SF is both not naturalist fiction but “differs from other ‘fantastic’ genres” in that what happens within it is “not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author’s epoch” (Metamorphoses viii). Perhaps paradoxically, Suvin also touts SF’s fundamental belief in the possibility of the ideal. He says, SF has always been wedded to the hope of finding in the unknown ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary). At all events, the possibility of other strange, covariant coordinate systems and semantic fields is assumed. (5)

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Introduction  5 Significantly, the ideal that Suvin and SF authors explore is unearthly; the possibility Suvin envisions comes from an alien environment. For the most part, even when these authors or critics have environmental goals in mind, what they see is the inevitability of a hyper-​technological future that will need another kind of intelligence or another planet to achieve. For example, Isaac Asimov claims that since SF is the only fiction really dealing with scientific technological change, it is much more important than books such as Brave New World and 1984. For him, there is no need to ward off, criticize, or analyze political misery on Earth. He says, “We cannot forever face the future only as the present’s object lesson; we must look at it as the future, something as valid as the present.”22 The future is the key. Asimov believed that SF could help the US, or maybe even the world, defeat racism because it was the genre that thought of people on the planet as a whole, viewed the planet as if from outer space.23 Thus, what early SF often embraced and promoted is both the “realism” of unrelenting technological progress and the ideal of salvation from outside the Earth. In contrast, I will argue that as Anna Tsing says, “progress stories have blinded us.”24 What may only be seen now is that the fundamentally Cartesian world these authors believed in is actually unscientific. It is opposed, as Latour says, to “the world as it is known to science and experienced by living creatures.”25 Latour suggests that “[t]‌o consider the planet as a Globe means that you imagine yourself in some sort of godlike position.”26 He also says that in “front of a globe, everybody feels like Atlas, as powerful as a god. Global vision prompts hegemonic abuse, facilitating unchecked maneuvers towards power or knowledge. The globe makes the megalomanic.”27 This position in front of the globe is the one imagined by some of the early SF authors who believed that science would save humanity. However, scientifically, humans are not the measure of all things, and they cannot live without all of the nonhuman animals that support them and live on and within them. Although there are certainly individual scientists who hold these early SF views, much actual biological science is not aligned with the philosophical position that only people matter. More recent science has shown that the Earth was made habitable by all of the life forms that preceded human life, that our oxygen-​rich atmosphere is actually “the product of other life forms.”28 In addition, unfortunately, Asimov’s belief that the idea of the planet as a whole would cure racism has been definitively proven untrue. Globalism and global communications technology have failed to defeat racism or save the Earth. Quite to the contrary, unrelenting technical progress (especially the idea that any technological development is both inevitable and good), a view from outside the Earth, and a belief that human life will continue on other planets, have perhaps fundamentally contributed to the endangerment of human life on Earth. As much as he loved SF, in contrast to these early SF premises, Pratchett’s novels are deeply respectful of the Earth, the past, and the quotidian. Therefore, they are more in line with what Latour calls “the

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6 Introduction world as . . . experienced by living creatures.” Some nonhuman animals have memory and future perspective, but, at least as scientists only partially understand other animals’ intelligence, it seems impossible that they share our visions of apocalypse, the premise of some SF, and the necessary force behind what Suvin sees as “ideal.”29 Instead, other creatures live in their own quotidian earthly reality, focused on their present (a focus that, if self-​help, new age, and mental fitness precepts are any guide, many American humans are hoping to achieve). Heinlein says that “observation” in order to “make plans for the future . . . is the scientific method itself and is the activity which most greatly distinguishes man from other animals. To be able to grasp and embrace the future is to be human.”30 I am arguing that we are currently (2022) past the time to believe in the efficacy of distinguishing ourselves categorically from other animals, a very unscientific proposition. If embracing the future over the quotidian is what makes us human, that embrace is also what has contributed to our potential demise as a species, as well as the potential demise of our fellow creatures and all life on Earth. As Latour says, “we have to be materialist and rational, but we have to shift those qualities onto the right grounds,” the grounds of the Earth and all of its life.31 Like Suvin, Heinlein sees SF as “mature” in contrast to narrowly focused unscientific fiction.32 What these authors see as a more “mature” approach to the world is, perhaps, what may limit SF’s ability to contend with two fundamental realities: that the Earth is what we share, and that if we are to preserve life on Earth, we will need to contribute to human health and the health of other animals.33 The ideal that we will find—​in other intelligences and technologies-​-​ things, events, or ideas that will perfect humans is itself a fable, not a possibility, and perhaps not even something to hope for even though it was the ideal that Suvin imagined. Pratchett’s books collectively show that the hope for the perfectibility of the human or the post-​human is a misunderstanding of the reality of people, who are far from perfectible, and who are also most interesting in their individual imperfections. In addition, some SF’s focus on the future is not only problematic in that it denies the significance of the everyday, but in that such a focus neglects or despises the lessons of the past or even the past in total. Heinlein makes his rejection of the past clear: “We have the dead past, the dying moment and the ever-​emerging, always living, future . . . All our lives we are more deeply concerned with what we are going to do then with what we are now doing or have done.” Heinlein says that the scientific method involves “observing the past in order to make plans for the future.”34 The scientific method has brought us the wonders of vaccines and many other deeply helpful things, but the history of the scientific method is also important. Unfortunately, the scientific method was founded in tandem with the Cartesian, and then Enlightenment, dismissal of classical, medieval, and Renaissance knowledges. Modern science has brought us the most marvelous life-​saving technologies. However, as I have shown in

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Introduction  7 my earlier work, some of the ideas associated with its rise—​the dismissal of past knowledge, the beliefs in human perfectibility and technological progress at any cost, and the denial of death—​have also contributed to the most serious problems for humans and other animals.35 The mash-​up Medieval-​Victorian Discworld offers Pratchett and his readers a chance to reexamine these ideas, to reclaim some of the lessons of the past, and to dwell on the reality of people instead of envisioning peoples’ perfectibility. Pratchett loved science as well as SF, but his novels disavow Enlightenment ideas about the primacy of reason and intellect. Pratchett wished that humans would act reasonably toward other people and other animals. He said in that Carnegie Medal speech, “I’m just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we’ve tried everything else.”36 His wish for reasonable, caring thinking and behavior, though, is not aligned with the Cartesian idea that humans are not animals, not bodies with emotions. Rather than focusing on this Cartesian chimera, his novels display an astonishing awareness of human realities: the realities of the human mind, the realities of human sociality among and with nonhumans, and the reality of mortality. This awareness is always accompanied by a deep respect for the past and present of all people and of the natural world that people are part of. A dip into Pratchett’s children’s literature can help to illustrate these points.37 Even Pratchett’s non-​ Discworld, SF-​ oriented, Johnny Maxwell children’s books embody this awareness.38 The first Johnny Maxwell book, Only You Can Save Mankind, meditates on the relationship between reality and video games to examine technological progress and critique the human tendency to deny the reality of death. Johnny Maxwell’s friend Wobbler has written a video game called Journey to Alpha Centauri. His joke game is a piece of the book’s prismatic fictional world: Johnny’s disturbed home life, with parents on the verge of divorce, represented entirely realistically; a war situation, the first Gulf War, that Johnny and his friends watch, sometimes uncomprehendingly, on the tv; Johnny’s dream world, which Pratchett also represents realistically; and the game that Johnny is playing, called “Only You Can Save Mankind,” in which he has to make moral choices when the captain of the Scree Wees, its alien race of newt-​creatures, surrenders to him and asks him to help them get home.39 Wobbler says that the other game he has invented happens in “real time, which no one had ever heard of until computers.” Since Wobbler has learned that it would take 3,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri, “[h]‌e has written” the game “so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they’d be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, ‘Welcome to Alpha Centauri, now go home’ ” (36). Like a French New Wave auteur, Wobbler explores real time in a medium based in unreality, a media unreality that has deeply affected the world these children live in. The games Johnny and Wobbler play, primitive SF first-​person shooters,

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8 Introduction take their players into “space” to shoot at aliens. (The novel points out that these aliens ride in spaceships designed by humans.) Wobbler thinks it’s funny to set his game in a represented more realistic space void and, also, in real human time, and it is. It is also funny to suggest that the unimaginably long time it would take to get to a star system 4.37 light years from the sun might result in a missive to return home. Perhaps, the novel suggests, space travel will get humans nothing. In addition, the shooter games these kids love may have sinister effects that their makers could not have anticipated. Pratchett loved video games, and his beloved daughter is a game designer. Like many people, Wobbler often lives in the video-​gaming world, not in Blackbury where these boys live. The novel treats Wobbler’s game obsession lovingly, showing that his own home reality makes that obsession a necessity. It’s also deeply respectful of the technological prowess he has gained on his own, not learned in school. In addition, the novel takes seriously the effects of the games these boys play. Toward the end of the book, Johnny says, “[t]‌he important thing is to remember it’s not a game. None of it. Even the games” (205). Although he sounds like he’s speaking for Pratchett, the novel isn’t didactic, and it doesn’t offer a simple-​minded attack on shooter games. Instead, it is canny, as well as funny, about how the media that Johnny consumes and the games he plays interact with reality. Early in the book Johnny sees the war on tv. In a bit of free indirect discourse, the narrator says, “[t]here was a film on the news showing some missiles streaking over some city. It was quite good” (21). Readers see the aesthetic sense that Johnny has developed watching the world on screen. He judges the film good because of its realism, but the reader knows that, rather than seeing filmic realism, Johnny is seeing real bombing with real effects. Johnny isn’t alone in his confusion about reality. Wobbler says to their group of friends, “ ‘Nah. It’s not like real fighting,’ . . . ‘It’s just TV fighting’ ” (47). This seems to validate the point the Scree Wee commander makes about people later in the novel: humans “think all of life is a game,” a human problem that Johnny eventually understands (78). But Wobbler also says later that he’s seen a man on tv “saying that the bomb aimers were so good because they all grew up playing computer games” (136).40 The kids slowly learn to distinguish what they enjoy from what is destructive, a lesson people as whole need to learn. Through seeing people die, both in life and in their dreams, the kids learn that their ideas about death and killing, some of them founded in screens, are unrealistic; they transcend the tendency of humans not to seriously understand reality. As Johnny’s friend Kirsty says, “[w]hen it’s real, it’s not easy. Because people die and it’s really over” (204).41 Johnny’s reply to her, “Yes, I know. Over and over,” is a piece of the shamanic wisdom he acquires over the course of the book, which may very well also be the wisdom of the other animals on our Earth: death happens over and over. This is true, as true as the fact that death means that a particular life is over. Faced with the knowledge that the Gulf war

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Introduction  9 is real (real knowledge in the world as well as in the novel) and that many people, including him and Kirsty, have been mass-​killing aliens who want to surrender (real knowledge only in the novel), Johnny means both things by “over and over.” This book, like the Discworld novels, is under no illusion that people will stop killing one another or that anyone will live forever.42 The novel’s respect for the reality of death is accompanied by its respect for the past. While set in the twentieth century, Only You Can Save Mankind also shows that medieval ideas about prisoners of war were respectful toward (only) some people in a way that mass killing, enabled by modern weapons technology, is distinctly not. Johnny has an encyclopedia which his sad, well-​meaning father has bought because it’s full of color pictures. Johnny consults it to try to understand his own responsibility toward the alien who has surrendered to him. Pratchett’s own sad joke about the state of publishing in 1992 means that the encyclopedia doesn’t have a lot of explanation about the Geneva Conventions, but Johnny is amazed by what he finds. The narrator, in more free indirect discourse, says that the encyclopedia makers “had shoved in all these pictures of parrots and stuff because they were the Natural Wonders of the World, when what was really strange was that human beings had come up with an idea like [the Geneva Conventions]. It was like finding a tiny bit of the Middle Ages in the middle of all the missiles and things” (68). Because of a school assignment, Johnny knows about battle customs in the Middle Ages, including freeing prisoners. This observation of Johnny’s places a series of human rights achievements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of Medieval history. It suggests that this comparatively ancient history might have value and might even put into question the idea of wholesale progress in an area such as human rights. In addition, Johnny’s reference to “missiles and things” speaks to the complications that technological development introduces into any idea that people have become more humane or thoughtful over time in relation to other peoples’ lives or suffering. The massive human and environmental tragedies of WWI and WWII caused by weapons development may tip the scales in favor of the earlier world, even with its less developed ideologies of freedom, an earlier world that freed prisoners but could not even conceive of killing by humans on the scale sanctioned by much later governments. As well as respecting the past and questioning “progress,” the book is invested in the significance of the everyday, the tiny human struggles that are actually life for most of humanity, what Heinlein characterizes as the insignificant “what we are now doing”: things like caring for a house, and getting food on the table that people would like to eat.43 After he has eaten his cereal, while he is riding a bus heading to “The Neil Armstrong Mall,” Johnny starts to realize that humans have constructed a distorted battle-​ oriented alien world (as well as a distorted food world): “No one would bother to put plastic aliens inside the plastic cereal if they

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10 Introduction were just, you know, doing everyday things” rather than holding ray guns. “Holding the Cosmiczippo RayTM hedge clippers! Getting on the MegadeathTM bus! Hanging out at the Star Thruster Mall!” “You never got the sort [of alien] that just wanted to do something ordinary like borrow the lawn mower” (43–​4). Johnny knows that getting on the bus, clipping the hedges, and hanging out at the mall with his friends is his life, and now he also realizes that other beings, if they existed, would also have to conduct their “ordinary” lives. The reality layers are so remarkable in this moment, since readers have seen that the Gulf War is an ordinary thing for Johnny, a piece of reality that is not alien at all, and Johnny is on the way to a mall named for a human who was thrust into outer space to walk on the moon. The novel makes this point about the ordinary again when Kirsty almost shoots the tea lady on the alien spacecraft since Kirsty sees all aliens as, definitionally, having to be “slavering” with “claws,” not “sending out for . . . a coffee and a jam doughnut.” By this time in the novel, Johnny is primed to shrug and reply, “things are just like they are,” that is, that it is just as likely that aliens might also want a snack in the afternoon (166). The alien commander says, “I believe I upset you some time ago by suggesting that humans are bloodthirsty and dangerous” (95). But if this had upset Johnny earlier in the book, he knows now that this is also the reality of his world, not of some projected alien world. Although this is an SF children’s novel, it is deeply invested in the primacy of the quotidian. Why, the novel asks, would even alien newt-​creatures not have to order or make some food? Why would they not have to do the chores that most humans have to do? And doesn’t the brutal war people are fighting in the Gulf indicate that some of the people “on our side” are as bloodthirsty and dangerous as some of the people “we” are fighting against? The everyday details of the world are the world, as Johnny has come to see. Only You Can Save Mankind also insists on the realities of the human mind: the relatively small space cognition occupies in it, and the significance of different states of consciousness in it. The narrator says that Johnny “wondered why people made such a fuss about dreams. Dream Boat. Dream River. Dream a Little Dream. But when you got right down to it, dreams were often horrible, and they felt real” (65). Johnny also says, “You think about doing things in dreams, but we’re always wrong about dreams. When people talk about dreams they mean daydreams. That’s where you’re Superman or whatever. That’s where you win everything. In dreams everything is weird” (175).44 I would argue that Johnny’s insights into the ways humans disregard the realities of dreams help the novel to complicate any naïve understanding of the mind, including the idea that minds are occupied only with reasonable ideas. Johnny suggests that humans want to deny their noncognitive selves, to romanticize a realm of the mind that disturbs the cognitive, which itself is a minor realm since we spend the majority of our time in the noncognitive realms in our minds. In addition, his reference to “Superman” implies that adult

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Introduction  11 and children live pieces of their mental life in omnipotence, in the mental state in which they believe they can “win everything.” As D. W. Winnicott suggests, adults never lose that piece of the mind; it just diminishes in power with growth, hopefully. In fact, we can see some of the more fascist-​inclined SF as a manifestation of this immature omnipotence, so it is both funny and sad that early SF promoters characterize fantasy as immature and their SF as mature. Johnny asks his friend Bigmac about the reality of dreams, and when Bigmac denies that reality Johnny says “desperately,” “They’ve got to be something. Otherwise you couldn’t have them, right?” (113). One of the marks of Johnny’s maturation in the novel is his growing conviction about the reality of alternate states of consciousness. Later, in a shared dream with Kirsty, when she denies the significance of their experience because they are dreaming, he says “[s]‌o what? Doesn’t make things unimportant” (128). Yo-​less, a voice of compassion and knowledge in the crew of kids Johnny hangs out with, tells him about how shamans “who lived partly in a dream world and partly in the real world . . . used to be very important” (136–​7). Again, along with validating dreams, the novel is insisting that some kinds of ancient wisdom may be more important than what modernity has discounted in favor of its fantasies that we live in the realm of ideas and that dreams don’t matter.45 The novel is very sophisticated in its psychoanalytic insights. As Haraway suggests, Freud’s insight into the unconscious “undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the [primacy of] reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence.”46 Haraway acutely understands how what I have called “human grandiosity” is allied with a faith in “reason,” which Freud and some of his contemporaries came to understand was ill-​founded. Although psychoanalytic insights into the mind have been discounted by contemporary American psychiatry in favor of medication and the pharmaceutical industry, they remain the most accurate descriptions of how minds operate, confirmed, mostly without acknowledgment, by neuroscience.47 Pratchett was enamored throughout his life with the writings of G. K. Chesterton, a contemporary of Freud. In the Carnegie Medal speech Pratchett says that Chesterton famously defended fairy stories against those who said they told children that there were monsters; children already know that there are monsters, he said, and fairy stories teach them that monsters can be killed. We now know that the monsters may not simply have scales and sleep under a mountain. They may be in our own heads.48 This latter point about the mind, that Pratchett attributes to what “we now know,” is a fundamental Freudian insight, which along with attention to dreams is important in Only You Can Save Mankind. Freud classified some of the monsters in our heads as “transference” effects, the unconscious compulsions that drive behavior. Johnny’s maturity is also

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12 Introduction measured in the novel by his growing awareness of transference. When, in their last shared dream, Kirsty dreams into being an alien whom she recognizes, a creature with a mouth full of sharp teeth, Johnny thinks, “[h]‌er dream . . . No wonder she always fights” (197). This is a lovely description of how transference works in the world. Kirsty feels under attack, and so she creates attackers around her, believes that everyone is out to attack her. Johnny tells her that even though Yo-​less “thinks dreams . . . are a way of dealing with real life,” he believes the opposite, that real life is a way of dealing with dreams (204). In psychoanalytic terms this is the real insight, that people carry with them their dreams founded in early fantasy and trauma, an insight that does not come only from psychoanalytic theory, but from living attentively with people, and, for analysts, from treating people. The novel almost makes fun of the idea that all thinking is reasonable or that reasonable intellectual thought is what is most interesting. In addition to dipping repeatedly into Johnny’s dreams and depending on the fantastic/​SF idea that Kirsty and Johnny can share dreams, Johnny experiences multiple mental spaces; he gets sick, and he gets really hungry, and the novel lets us experience his sick head and his hungry head. These head spaces, like dreams, are alternate states of consciousness. Pratchett attends carefully to these states of mind, creating them accurately and attributing them to the state of Johnny’s body. Clearly, for him, these head spaces matter, along with reasonable thought; this also indicates the essential flaw in Cartesian thought. Throughout the novel, Pratchett is especially interested in what is real, not ideal, about humans, the daily realities of both internal and social human life. These other states of consciousness are large pieces of the reality of people on the Earth. One of the signs of health for Johnny at the very end of the book is his ability to treasure the “time stolen between dreaming and waking,” the hypnopompic state. In this reference to another alternate state of mind, we see Pratchett valuing the entire human mind/​body, not treasuring only reason and the mind. The unique, modern humanity that Heinlein touts, separated from the other animals, is closely associated with the denial of death and the search for immortality through technology. The second Johnny Maxwell book, which Pratchett especially loved, Johnny and the Dead, is all about accepting the reality of death. Almost paradoxically, despite its premise that Johnny can see and communicate with dead people, this SF children’s novel is a battle-​cry against the denial of death, a denial that is both a feature of post-​Enlightenment Western life and of some SF and futurology that promise that robots or other technology will enable the mind to live forever.49 The novel’s discussion of death begins when a couple of the dead people buried in the cemetery that Johnny often crosses start to appear next to their graves and talk to him. Unlike his friends who want, in a very modern way, to relegate the dead to horror stories, Johnny isn’t scared. About going back to the cemetery, he says to his hesitant

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Introduction  13 friends, “[t]‌here’s just dead people here! That doesn’t make it scary, does it? Dead people are people who were living once” (33). He instinctively wants to reassign death to a status it once held in Western society and still holds in many other places on Earth—​a feature of ordinary life and an acknowledged inevitability for people. Even when all the buried people appear to Johnny next to their graves, and he is momentarily scared, he thinks, “[w]hy should I be frightened? These are just . . . post-​life citizens. A few years ago they were mowing lawns and putting up Christmas decorations and being grandparents and things” (36). In an echo of the way Only You Can Save Mankind reassesses the concept of aliens, this second Johnny Maxwell book reassesses the concepts of death and the dead. Dead people are as ordinary as the living, and just like the living, what is important about them is the ordinary ways they conducted their lives. Johnny is trying to reassure his friends here, but just as significantly, his (and the novel’s) reassignment of the dead from the world of horror movies to the world people actually live in is a radical move. It’s one thing to introduce the ideas that aliens (creatures of our imagination) might have ordinary lives, and that some SF or video game bloodthirsty, dangerous aliens are just projections of human bloodthirstiness. It’s quite another to challenge wholescale the relegation of death to the margins, a relegation that is one of the premises of the modern world. And the book’s treatment of death and the dead is a wholescale challenge, aimed not only at ideas about the absence of the dead in the living world, but also at ideas about the relative significance of famous and ordinary dead people. At first, trying to foil a corporate plan to demolish the cemetery to build on the site, Johnny and his friends search old papers for references to people buried there who might have been famous. He reasons that people in the town could be persuaded to preserve a celebrity’s grave. Since no one “really famous” is buried there, Johnny has to abandon that effort; but only seemingly, because the novel explodes his early belief that worldly fame is what matters. The novel rejects separating celebrities from ordinary people in two ways. First, it asserts that fame within a community is as important as wider fame: When Johnny asks his wise, if slightly demented, granddad if a local entertainer Antonio Vicenti was famous, his grandad says, “[a]‌ll the kids knew him.” Disappointed, Johnny responds, “[s]o he wasn’t really famous. Not like really famous.” But his granddad says, again, “[a]ll the kids knew him” (52). This reiteration puts into question the premise behind Johnny’s disappointment. The novel implies that Vicenti’s importance to the town’s children may be just as significant as any wider fame. Second, the novel asserts that all the men who died in WWI are equally significant: Johnny visits a local nursing home just after the death of a man named Tommy Atkins. This man enlisted with his Blackbury friends in a WWI Pals battalion. None of the other boys in the battalion survived the war. Johnny finds out that this man’s name, “Tommy Atkins,” was the generic name for a British soldier, still sometimes called Tommies.

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14 Introduction This Tommy earned medals in the war, and Johnny finds out that the medals, like the man’s name, had no particular significance. But the man and the medals turn out to be significant regardless. Johnny concludes that “[g]etting medals for being there was right, too. Sometimes being there was all you could do” (112). This bit of learning for Johnny and the novel’s readers is the other way the book refuses a timeless idea, the idea behind the historicism that Benjamin criticizes, that only heroes and outsize villains matter to history. In its deliberately minor way, Johnny and the Dead is teaching Benjamin’s version of historical materialism—​ an attention to the wholeness of history instead of to whom Benjamin calls “the victors.”50 Yo-​less tries to cheer Johnny up when he is focusing on the dead, saying, “[i]‌t’s just history. It has nothing to do with . . . well, with now” (73). Johnny ends up trying to persuade the town that this shibboleth of modernity is completely wrong. This is one place in the trilogy where Yo-​ less is wrong, despite knowing much more from books than Johnny, and Johnny, despite his inattentiveness in school, is right in his attentiveness to wholeness. At the council meeting discussing the plan to build over the cemetery, Johnny speaks the truth he has come to: It doesn’t matter that no one here is really famous. They were famous here. They lived and got on with things and died. They were people. It’s wrong to think that the past is something that’s just gone. It’s still there. It’s just that you’ve gone past. If you drive through a town, it’s still in the rearview mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn’t roll up behind you. Things aren’t over just because they’re past. Do you see that? (135–​6) Sometimes it appears that hardly anyone sees that, which is why Pratchett needs to teach it again and again. Although Johnny learns this lesson in the book, it is a lesson that some American people have been taught to not learn and some are determined politically not to learn.51 As Benjamin says, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably,” and this disappearance is always in the service of conquerors, dictators, and ruling classes.52 In contrast to the efforts of the contemporary American Republican party (2022), Johnny and the Dead is trying to “brush history against the grain,” as Benjamin advises.53 Johnny asks the council meeting to preserve the cemetery because, he says, [w]‌e need [the people buried there] to tell us who we are. They built this city. They did all the crazy human things that turn a lot of buildings into a place for people. It’s wrong to throw all that away. (137)

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Introduction  15 Johnny’s effort fails because, even in his children’s books, Pratchett is wedded to representing the reality of people’s stubborn faith in progress, here represented in the town’s ruling class’s determination to satisfy the corporation’s financial interests. But the book succeeds in exposing why exactly Benjamin’s historical materialism matters. Because, as Pratchett says, there is nothing wrong with a happy ending, the cemetery is saved due to the corporation overreaching and being caught trying to illegally bulldoze the site.54 The heroic denouement to that plot is fun for kids (and adults) but not as significant as what the novel shows about death and the dead. Johnny and the Dead is a children’s SF novel, but unlike Pratchett’s Discworld books, it takes place on Earth. Akin to the ways that those fantasy novels, especially those that take place in the Ramtops countryside, deeply value the land and nonhuman animals, Johnny and the Dead deeply values nonhuman life on Earth. It is an antidevelopment book, although it clearly has nothing against buildings.55 The novel points out that because the cemetery has been largely abandoned by humans it has bushes, plants, poplar and other trees, drifts of leaves, foxes, and birds, including crows and owls. Once Johnny draws local attention to it, and to the corporate plans to bulldoze it, birdwatchers show up who “think they’ve seen a rare Scandinavian thrush” (165). Pratchett populates Blackbury not only with people who ignore the cemetery but also with (possibly some of the same) people who attend to its nonhuman life elements once Johnny brings the place to their attention: “Johnny hung around for hours, with the birdwatchers and the people from the Blackbury Wildlife Trust, who’d found a fox’s den behind William Sticker’s memorial” (171). Largely neglected by humans, the cemetery has become a wild space, affording habitat and food for life driven out by development. Pointedly, the book notes that the only park in Blackbury is very far away, and only has grass (44). Human planning has made a monoculture park, fit mostly for humans alone (as well as insects and other tiny animals). In addition, historically in the novel, the Neil Armstrong Mall displaced the town’s allotments, spaces allotted to town folks to grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Where the Mall now stands there used to be “[v]‌egetables and dogs and children all over the place” (139). This book pointedly suggests that replacing the allotments with a mall named for an astronaut was an anti-​conservation move to the detriment of the town.56 Pratchett understood that real magic and real alterity is in the other animals and the Earth, not only in the human mind. He said once, “my mail sometimes make[s]‌me feel that I’m on a different planet, which I am to some extent, but I pride myself on having a strong attachment to this one” (251). His attachment to the Earth is evident in Johnny and the Dead, and it was fundamental to his life and all of his work. In the obituary his daughter wrote for him, she describes his version of magic:

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16 Introduction So he would wrap me up and take me out of bed in the middle of the night to show me the glow-​worms in the hedge or Halley’s Comet blazing across a star-​filled sky. For him, his daughter seeing these marvels of nature was much more important than sleeping, which I could do any time. He didn’t teach me magic, he showed me it.57 Attention to what can be seen on the Earth and from the Earth was fundamental to his life and work. When he said once that “magic on the Discworld lies . . . mostly in the nature of the environment” (244), he was, perhaps, referring mainly to the deep pockets of magic in his fictional world that pervade the Ramtops and lie around the Unseen University in Ankh-​Morpork. Lying outside the University is what has made Gaspode, a recurring dog character in the books, talk. However, Pratchett may also have been nodding to what he clearly understood about life on Earth. Opening the word “magic” to what is on and in the Earth is vital for what we call conservation. As much as Pratchett was fascinated by other writers’ visions of other planets, it appears to have been essential to his craft to create a world in which magical power resides in the land. Magic and the magical were what the early SF giants wanted to banish from their texts. Lem, Suvin, and Heinlein saw magic as a sign of immaturity. They, along with Asimov, thought that only SF could truly deal with the challenges of modern life. Heinlein was dismayed by American anti-​intellectualism and anti-​science positions in the face of technological “advance.” As I write this book, anti-​science politics are contributing to a destructive viral epidemic that scientists have given us the means to stop, and they are also hindering political attempts to respond to climate change. Heinlein attributes these kinds of destructive political positions to the complexity of life in the modern technocratic world. He says, “it is always hard to face up to a complex world, try to figure out what makes it tick, try to cope with it, survive and triumph over it.”58 Heinlein is responding here to the conditions of what Latour calls “the modern collective,” in which “time enmeshes, at an ever greater level of intimacy and on an ever greater scale, humans and [mostly technological] nonhumans with each other.”59 This human enmeshment with objects and corporations, which has only increased since Heinlein described it in the 1960s, can be bewildering. Very few humans know exactly what makes the things we interact with “tick.” But this does not mean that we are without power in the face of this enmeshment. Shirley Strum and Latour, comparing baboon society to human society, explain that in “the human case” [s]‌ocial interactions become more complicated but not more complex. Much of the skill necessary to achieve society in the other, baboon-​like, option now resides in the creation of symbolic and material bonds. The result is the actors, rather than appearing to

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Introduction  17 create society, now appear to be inserted into a material society that overpowers them.60 If we are careful observers, like Strum, we can see that baboons are making the society they live in through their interactions with one another. But this has been less easily seen in the case of humans; the multilayered and intricate interactions some humans have with technologies and human and nonhuman animals can make those humans feel overpowered by their worlds. The massively complicated world Heinlein was facing in the twentieth century, which has become even more complicated, especially as communications technology has metastasized, makes humans feel as if they have no control over their lives. In Heinlein’s analysis, the complexity of this life is why humans reject reason and science and resort to fantasy. To cope with this complexity, Heinlein prescribes triumphing over the world through science, perhaps establishing “life” on other planets. But, as Latour’s actor-​actant framework shows, there is no possibility of “triumph[ing] over” our technocratic world. We belong to our collective, and we are constantly making and remaking it along with all nonhuman things (made by humans), and all nonhuman life, all of which are constantly making and remaking us. This has always been the human condition since what defines us as humans is our extensive tool-​making. Latour suggests that “to conceive of humanity and technology as polar opposites is, in effect, to wish away humanity: we are sociotechnical animals, and each human interaction is sociotechnical.”61 As Pratchett says in The Truth, “Without things, people are just bright [nonhuman] animals” (352). Paradoxically, the Cold War language of “survival” and “triumph” is an abandonment of human power to help remake the world. In the same way that Strum and Latour show that what looks like simplicity and a lack of society in baboons is only appearance, they and Pratchett show that the overwhelming character of the complication is also appearance, not scientific reality—​humans make our worlds in consort with others. As Latour says, it is imperative to “[t]‌hink of technology as congealed labor.”62 Humans make and conceive of many of the things we interact with. All those humans must be kept in mind, and human power to make change, to heal the world, must also be kept in mind. This mental adjustment toward the reality of our world rather than its appearance, along with a view from the Earth, not from space, is what Pratchett can lead us to. Heinlein sees the scientific method as the most truly human of all human activities, the one that sets us above animals: the exercise of the scientific method and the sober consideration of the consequences thereof. This is an era when the scientific method, its meaning and use is indispensable to the mature

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18 Introduction man—​we either use it, or we and our free democratic culture will go under.63 While wisely urging a “sober consideration” of science, Heinlein’s Cold War rhetoric takes both the scale of our enmeshment with technology and our separation from other animals for granted. But to take those things for granted is to remove from humans any power to change how we interact with the other animals and objects that make us and our worlds. Rosi Braidotti asks us to “respect the bond of mutual dependence between bodies and technological others, while avoiding the contempt of the flesh and the transhumanist fantasy of escape from the finite materiality of the enfleshed self.”64 This respect is what Pratchett’s novels offer, as well as acknowledging the reality of our finite materiality. Pratchett can help us to understand, rather than attempt to triumph over, our deeply flawed humanity. Like Strum, Pratchett had a deep respect for apes, our closest biological relatives. One of the recurring characters in the Discworld novels is an orangutan, the librarian in Ankh-​ Morpork’s Unseen University (a university for wizards). The immense magical field generated by the books in that library transformed the human librarian into an orangutan, and he has no interest in turning back into a human. About the Librarian, and the Orangutan–Human Dictionary on which he is working, Pratchett says, “[s]‌ince he was also, once, a human being, he feels himself in a position to advance the understanding between the two species. This may be a problem since one of the species consists of mankind, but he is persevering.”65 Unlike Strum, an anthropologist who has spent her career studying baboons, Pratchett first invented the orangutan Librarian and then began to study orangutans. This study of orangutans, which led Pratchett to financially support efforts to help orangutans to live in the face of human development, is one kind of science that Pratchett’s fantasy novels wholeheartedly support.66 He was also a fan of geography and meteorology, at least that is what the narrator of Feet of Clay says: “They don’t look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down . . . and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity” (4). The footnote to “real science” here explains it as “the sort you can use to give something three extra legs and then blow it up.” Rather than allying science with unbridled technological development, Pratchett embraces Latour’s version of scientific truth, the truth of our fundamental engagement with the Earth and its life instead of our impossible triumph over it. In 2020, five years after Pratchett’s early death, a Hugo Award was given to Neil Gaiman for the television show based on the 1990 novel Good Omens, a collaboration between Pratchett and Gaiman. Gaiman thanked everyone for giving the award to his collaborator, saying that Pratchett was his most important collaborator still. He noted that Pratchett had thought that he would never win a Hugo because that award

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Introduction  19 would never be given to “anything funny.” Humor and folklore are as significant in Pratchett’s novels as fantasy. In his address to the British Folklore society, he explains his attachment to folklore: “So for years my regular reading of folklore went hand in hand with a taste for science fiction and fantasy and, I have to say, outlived them.”67 One way to think about folklore is as the past’s evolving common sense in story, rhyme, riddles, jokes, and song. Pratchett was deeply aware of this and wanted to make his readers aware. He found folklore to be a perpetual fountain for his imagination. Benjamin says that “refined and spiritual things,” art and literature, for example, cannot exist without the material basics of life; but in the class struggle for the basics for all people, those things manifest in the “courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” of the fighters.68 This list is close to the values Pratchett’s novels suggest are most significant. In Going Postal, the primary villain, Mr. Gilt, says, “No, these days [the gods] restrict themselves to things like grace, patience, fortitude, and inner strength. Things you can’t see. Things that have no value” (320). Gilt’s words point us directly to what should be valued. In the address to the British Folklore Society, Pratchett says that he “tended toward folklore rather than mythology, because gods seemed rather dull and stupid and in any case mythology just seemed to be the folklore of the winners.”69 Like Benjamin, Pratchett is always suspicious of the “victors” in the class struggle. He knows that their cultural monuments are in a large part due to the labor of the people, what Benjamin calls “the anonymous toil” of the contemporaries of the “great minds and talents” who conceived those monuments.70 Pratchett consistently uses his humor to illuminate the lives and concerns of regular folk and to make fun of the pretentions and perfidy of the victors. For him, as for Benjamin, humor is essential, a way to parody the dull and stupid human gods instead of telling their stories and celebrating their monuments. Farah Mendlesohn’s description of his literature as loving is entirely accurate.71 It is a literature of love and, despite the cynicism that passes for intellectualism so often, as the Beatles said, “love is what we need.” It is, in truth, the only thing that will save the world, but as Pratchett shows, it must be extended to other creatures and the Earth as well as to other humans. And it must be extended to the dead as well as to the living. In the chapters that follow, I will show in detail how four of Pratchett’s adult Discworld novels take these values into discussions of some of the world’s most pressing problems. In Chapter 1, “Men at Arms: Terry Pratchett Takes on Gun Control,” I show how Pratchett uses the advent of the first gun into his mash-​ up Discworld to address some of the specious arguments made by the NRA and to offer better ways to think about human engagement with weaponry. Although Pratchett was British through and through, he clearly attended to world issues and to America. Unfortunately, America is central in the development and dissemination of weapons technology, and it is also home to the most mass shootings in the world. In Men at Arms, Pratchett refutes the foundational premises

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20 Introduction of the argument that guns don’t kill people, people do. Introducing a relatively advanced gun, an accurate rifle, into the Discworld enables Pratchett to contend with quite a lot of our world’s arguments about the technology. The undivided, hybrid, character of the Discworld—​in which objects have life and life is often recognized as consisting in associations among people, objects, and nonhuman animals—​enables even more. The gun in the book becomes what Latour calls a “quasi-​object.” Thus, Pratchett can show us what science studies theorists, like Alfred Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway, as well as Latour, have been trying to teach us: that the imagined divisions between humans, nonhuman animals, and objects in our own world do not account fully for what technology does. The gun introduced into a Discworld that had previously had only human (or animal) powered weaponry, such as crossbows and siege weapons, shows what more lively technology can accomplish. The gun’s novelty in that world also defamiliarizes the effects of modern rifles on human bodies and everything else about how guns operate in the world. Thus, the book takes seriously what most discussions of guns and gun control forget, that the history of the technology matters. In the book, Pratchett also refuses to divide the human world into bad actors and good people. Although this Manichean view should be ludicrous, it tends to dominate discussions of guns and many other pressing human problems. Pratchett offers us the emotional reality of people with guns, in contrast to the ways in which guns have been discussed for way too long. In Chapter 2, “Going Postal: The Internet Arrives,” I discuss that 2004 novel as a sophisticated meditation on communications technologies and technological change. Going Postal explores two competing technologies in the Discworld: the mail and the clacks, a semaphore system that vastly exceeds the reach of the earlier technology. Pratchett is concerned with the labor aspect of the two technologies and their costs to human bodies/​ minds. Just as both communication technologies shift how people think and operate, there is human cost to both. The new owner of the clacks, Reacher Gilt, has instituted policies for running it that systematically destroy its community-​making properties, and he has been systematically eliminating even the most minor threats to his power. The novel deeply criticizes making communications technologies monopolies. The novel is also sensitive about the allure of the new technology. Pratchett’s depiction of technology in terms of magic makes clear the realities of humans in concert with technologies, including humans’ fantastic understanding of them, and the dangers associated with those fantasies. Although the novel explores how the nature of the clacks technology changes humans, it focuses its critique on the anti-​connective, anti-​workers character of Gilt’s system. Setting the novel in the Discworld which has no electricity and no computing, and representing how, in that kind of a past, communications technologies invite monopolies and profiteering allows Pratchett to illustrate how an unrelenting “pursuit of profit” threatens everything. This

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Introduction  21 novel of Pratchett’s is a weapon against that what John Berger calls that “sole logic.” As well as showing how these communications technologies can be perverted, Going Postal offers a vision of connective technologies run apart from the profit motive. Pratchett’s love of craftsmanship is central in this novel. The novel refers us to the handwork behind all technology, no matter how advanced and seemingly magical. The book is deeply respectful of workers and tools, including language, the tool of writers. However, in a very sophisticated critique, the novel explores dangers fundamental to all human communication: the power of words to harm, and the way that anger pollutes communications, and it also makes readers deeply aware of the power of language to change the world positively. In the novel The Truth (2000), the subject of Chapter 3, “The Truth: Journalism, Fake News, and Community,” Pratchett takes on his early career: journalism. Printing with moveable type has arrived in the Discworld, prompting the start of a newspaper and, quickly following, the advent of a tabloid full of fake news. Simultaneous to the arrival of dwarfs with a printing press and moveable type, two violent criminals arrive in Ankh-​Morpork, summoned by aristocrats who hope to unseat the city’s ruler, Vetinari and replace him with their puppet. The novel uses the introduction of printing and that conspiracy to discuss investigative journalism, tabloids, and prejudice and discrimination in the Discworld as well as in our own. It is interested both in the benefits of journalism and in its limitations. In this novel, Pratchett shows how moveable type transforms the news for people, making it seem as if the news is irreproachable and magically nonhuman. This seeming magic helps to explain how fake news can be easily accepted. Thus, the novel exposes how what seems like magic is an effect of technology and how that semblance is due to human fallibility. The novel is also interested in printing as a craft. In its depictions of craftsmanship, the book does not distinguish between design and making; it refuses that distinction which often today entails value and class distinctions. Thus, The Truth embroiders on the discussion of craftsmanship initiated in Going Postal. Also, in its associated conspiracy plot, the novel shows that the distinction between the aristocrats and violent criminals they employ is specious, although it seems so apparent to the aristocrats. In addition, as the novel explores technologies of writing and printing in relation to their conspiracy, readers see a developing philosophical discussion of the concept of truth. The idea of truth is examined in the book in relation to newspapers, to the police, to criminality, to prejudice, and to class and class relations. The Truth shows a technological revolution leading to a revolution in news delivery that raises many of the issues that dog American and British life today (2022). As well as showing why humans are so susceptible to fake news, the book shows how very significant local journalism is if we are to maintain connective ties that enable peaceful relations among people. In fact, it shows how essential local quotidian news about ordinary people

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22 Introduction is; it also shows the tricky relations among the government, the police, and the press, the power of journalism as well as its deep limitations. The novel is equally instructive about how notions of criminality are entwined in class and prejudice. It doesn’t offer easy answers about either truth or lies but it does enable readers to think beyond the headlines. In Chapter 4, “Feet of Clay: Work and Workers,” I show how Pratchett uses a creature from early Jewish folklore, the golem, to explore questions of labor and the conditions of workers. The golems in the novel are exploited and want rest even though they have been created to work endlessly, but exploitive employers refuse to respect them. I argue that those employers are mirrors for some mega-​rich men who refuse to support their own workers today. However, the novel is careful not to idealize or romanticize its common workers in ways that remove them from human fallibility. Thus, it resists the mistake of some classic SF, which assigns perfection and perfectibility to one group of people or aliens, to the intelligentsia, or even to robots. Pratchett shows that to assign perfection to common people is as severe a mistake about people in general as assigning it to another group. The novel does not romanticize the poor, the rich, or the police, but it does argue for the lives of everyone, including golems. The novel also explores the resistance strategies of relatively powerless people in relation to their jobs, and it raises for consideration the way people treat other animals, a related concern. In addition, in the book, Pratchett discusses the value of ordinary people and criticizes the system supporting the aristocracy. In this book, the conspiracy against Vetinari enables Pratchett to explore the human desire for kingship and aristocracy and the bankruptcy of those institutions. This book takes another close look at the fallibility of humans, especially in our deep, unconscious as well as conscious, desires to be led, and the fundamental contradictions in the human desire for masters. The novel also shows that it matters that people will distort history in the name of romanticism. That distortion gets in the way of their possibilities for freedom. The Discworld’s golems in this book also help Pratchett explore how freedom is related to voice. In this case, the novel connects two ideas: giving voice to the voiceless and destroying the system of aristocracy in which one group of people lords it over another. The novel argues that all its workers, even the livestock, deserve dignity and respect. None of them are money, and more of them are people than even the people in Ankh-​Morpork have acknowledged. The novel also makes the point that abuse of other animals coexists with and can be a predictor of abuse of people, that people who labor are often treated as badly as other animals who labor, even when, and perhaps partly because, they are more powerful than the bosses who abuse them. In the book’s coda, I discuss Pratchett’s commitment to the Earth and its nonhuman animals as seen in Wyrd Sisters and some of the Tiffany Aching novels. I argue that in these texts and his other work, Pratchett shows his understanding of humans’ “unique responsibility” for the Earth and its creatures. “Unique responsibility” is a term from Clive Hamilton’s book

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Introduction  23 Defiant Earth. I use Hamilton’s terms in the coda to show how Pratchett provides what Hamilton calls for: a critique of the omnipotent desires of humans and of human neglect of the natural world. In the witch novels the coda concentrates on, especially in The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, Pratchett rewrites heroism as the devotion his witches have toward care instead of neglect: care for the land, its creatures, and people in their most vulnerable states. These novels and Wyrd Sisters also respect other animals’ minds and perspectives, and in these Ramtops books, Pratchett reminds readers that humans are limited, not omnipotent, that we are prey as well as predators. In these novels and other books, Pratchett takes a fully non-​innocent look at all creatures, including at how most animals, human and nonhuman, hunt and eat other animals. In addition, these books and their witches expose readers to geological time, the time of the Earth, which implies that humans are not more significant than the Earth and the other animals that live with them on the Earth.

Notes 1 Marc Burrows 18–​19. Also, see Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs 424. 2 This is the term used by the authorized Pratchett merchandise site that sells the group of books: The Discworld Emporium. 3 Pratchett says, “in Ankh-​Morpork [the Discworld’s major metropolis] you have what is apparently a Renaissance city, but with elements of early Victorian England, and the medieval world is still hanging on” (quoted in Matthew Hills 218). 4 Terry Pratchett. Carnegie Medal Acceptance speech 129. 5 In an interview by David Thorpe, Dan Bloom, who coined the term “climate fiction” or “cli-​fi,” calls the genre the “cousin” of SF. For a comprehensive survey of literature’s engagement with environmental issues, see Ursula K. Heise. 6 For a discussion of these kinds of fantasies, see Daniel Irrgang. One example is Jeff Bezos’s idea that the colonization of other plants will provide energy to fuel human expansion on Earth. Bezos attributes this idea to SF: “It’s always the science-​fiction guys,” Bezos later said, according to Davenport. “They think of everything first, and then the builders come along and make it happen.” Marina Koren. 7 Donna Haraway has been interested in SF throughout her career. See her open letter to Bruno Latour: “Carrier Bags for Critical Zones.” 8 I do not think that it is accidental that some of the most important writers in this realm of fiction who are deeply invested in racial and gender justice write fiction that heavily incorporates elements of fantasy and SF, particularly Ursula Le Guin and N. K. Jemison, the winner of three Hugo awards for her Broken Earth trilogy. Haraway is also very invested in these writers’ works. 9 Walter Benjamin. Theses on the Philosophy of History 260, 254. 10 Robert A. Heinlein 9. Heinlein and Asimov, whose views I discuss below, were early giants in the field. Their views on women and race, and Asimov’s personal behavior have been seriously criticized recently. 11 Marc Burrows 196–​210.

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24 Introduction 2 Pratchett. A Slip of the Keyboard 130. 1 13 Jeannette Ng. On Campbell’s offensive views on race and the problems that early SF giants had with women’s equality, see Alec Nevala-​Lee, especially 12–​13, 90–​1, 134, 166, 347, 360–​1, 364, and 367–​8. 14 See T. A. Shippey. Also, see Alec Nevala-​Lee. 15 The vigorous defenses of SF have been very effective. SF is currently well-​ regarded and well-​represented in the academy. The genre has flowered and is no longer dominated by white men, although a small segment of its very active fanbase is allied with the gamergate “community.” SF’s practitioners and critics have largely rejected the early defenses that sought to differentiate it categorically from fantasy. Arguably though, Fantasy fiction has suffered in the academy from the early defenses. 16 Stanislaw Lem 28, 31. 17 Darko Suvin. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 3. Significantly, in 2000, Suvin revoked his “blanket rejection of fantastic fiction,” although in that essay he is still relatively scornful of most fantasy fiction “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion” 211. Pratchett appears in note 5 of this essay. What Suvin seems to be looking for is exactly what Pratchett does. 18 One of the most eloquent essays in Shippey’s book about SF is an extended piece on Ursula le Guin’s Earthsea novels, fantasy novels. Le Guin was a highly esteemed SF writer as well as a fantasy novelist. 19 Frederick Pohl 11. 20 The now-​disgraced Campbell, according to Shippey, distinguished between scientist and engineer, in favor of the latter; in matters of complete novelty, he argues, the scientist can be handicapped by attachment to system, theory, and explanation, while the engineer is useful under any circumstances, preserved by careless pragmatism. (92n.1) Many of the early giants of SF, including Heinlein and Asimov, wrote for Campbell’s magazine and were influenced by his ideas. 21 Robert A. Heinlein. “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues” 10. 22 Isaac Asimov. “Social Science Fiction.” Turning Points 29–​61, 36. 23 Asimov “Social Science Fiction” 60. 24 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing viii; see also 21–​2. 25 Bruno Latour. “What is Given” 233. 26 Bruno Latour. “On a Possible Triangulation of Some Present Political Positions” 219. 27 Bruno Latour. “Sarah Sze as the Sculptor of Critical Zones” 158. 28 Timothy M. Lenton and Sebastien Dutreuil 178. 29 For a complex scientific assessment of nonhuman animal intelligence, see Frans de Waal. In “The Orangutans Are Dying,” Pratchett says, “Orangutans are like us. They are intelligent. They use their imagination. They think and solve complex problems. They have personalities. They know how to lie” (239). Apocalyptic fiction does not have to be dystopian, although that kind of vision is still prominent in a lot of SF. See Cory Doctorow. 30 Heinlein. “Science Fiction.” Turning Points 10. 31 Latour. Down to Earth 65. 32 Heinlein. “Science Fiction.” Turning Points 25.

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Introduction  25 33 See Bruno Latour’s extended essay Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. 34 Heinlein. “Science Fiction.” Turning Points 10. 35 See Rebecca Ann Bach 22–​6. 36 Pratchett. A Slip of the Keyboard 132. 37 Although this book will focus mainly on Pratchett’s books for adults, his children’s books are equally interesting. Pratchett said this in his Carnegie Medal Acceptance Speech 132. 38 One way to read the Johnny Maxwell books is as the David Copperfield of Pratchett’s corpus. Pratchett gives Johnny his own ability to attend to everything. In Johnny and the Dead the narrator says about him, “Johnny just opened his eyes in the morning and the whole universe hit him in the face” (1–​2). 39 On this point, see Lykke Guanio-​Uluru. Quotations from Only You Can Save Mankind are from the 1992 HarperTrophy edition. See the Bibliography for details. 40 On the war in the book, see also Andrew M. Butler. Also see Cherith Baldry 47. 41 In the first Tiffany Aching book, the other amazing children’s series Pratchett wrote, A Hat Full of Sky, Granny Weatherwax explains magic to Tiffany, saying, “but the start and the finish, the start and the finish, is helpin’ people when life is on the edge. Even people you don’t like. Stars is easy, people is hard” (197). Throughout Pratchett’s novels, the realities of death and birth are part of the magic of the world. 42 Donna Haraway’s concept of “non-​ innocence” seems relevant here. She uses that term to talk about the ways Animal Rights theory can go wrong by denying the reality of inequality in the world. Donna Haraway. “Conversations with Donna Haraway” (152). Pratchett here and throughout his work is a thoroughly non-​innocent author. See also Latour’s discussion of innocence in relation to the past: Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (102). 43 Some humans live entirely divorced from such human struggles even though someone feeding them is essential to their lives. These humans include some very wealthy men and women dependent on slaves or servants and some men thoroughly dependent on women to do the daily maintenance of their bodies. A commonality among those groups is the men. In relation to the origins of SF this had the unfortunate effect of some blindness toward these things. 44 Pratchett puts this same insight into Tiffany Aching’s mind in The Wee Free Men: “It doesn’t have to make sense, or be nice. It’s a dream, not a daydream. People who say things like ‘May all your dreams come true’ should try living in one for five minutes” (180). 45 I am using the word “modernity” to mean a set of ideas rather than a period of time. See Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. 46 Donna Haraway. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 47 See, for example, the essays collected in Sheldon Bach. 48 A Slip of the Keyboard 131. 49 See, for example, Ray Kurzweil. 50 Benjamin. “Theses” 256. 51 Examples of this are endless. See the intense political fight over the 1619 project.

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26 Introduction 2 Benjamin. “Theses” 255. 5 53 “Theses” 257. 54 On happy endings, see the Carnegie Medal acceptance speech in A Slip of the Keyboard: But sometimes I’m even capable of weirder, more ridiculous ideas [than the idea that rats can talk], such the possibility of a happy ending. Sometimes, when I’m really, really wacky and on a fresh dose of zany, I’m just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo Sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we’ve tried everything else. (131–​2) 5 See also Nurul Fateha. 5 56 On environmentalism in the novel, see also Michelle de Villiers. 57 Rhianna Pratchett. 58 Turning Points 26. 59 Pandora’s Hope 200. 60 S. S. Strum and Bruno Latour 795–​6. 61 Pandora’s Hope 1999, 214. 62 Pandora’s Hope 1999, 189. 63 Turning Points 25. 64 Rosi Braidotti 90–​1. 65 Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs 277. 66 See Pratchett’s 2000 essay “The Orangutans Are Dying.” 67 Pratchett “Imaginary Worlds: Real Stories” 165. 68 Theses on the Philosophy of History 254. 69 “Imaginary Worlds: Real Stories” 162. 70 Theses on the Philosophy of History 256. 71 Farah Mendlesohn 90, 91. See also Jacqueline Simpson’s obituary for him, “In Memoriam: Sir Terry Pratchett OBE.” Simpson says that Pratchett’s anger at injustice was always tempered with “warm affection for the goodness in humanity” (234).

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1  Men at Arms Terry Pratchett Takes on Gun Control

The debate about gun control in America is active, long-​standing, and seemingly intractable. Even the voices of articulate, sad, wounded children have made little difference in how guns are produced, sold, and registered in America.1 As with many vicious public health problems, the problem of gun violence is massively overdetermined, but one significant determinant is what Dennis A. Henigan variously describes as “bumper-​sticker arguments” or myths, prominent among them the idea that “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People.” Toward the end of an eloquent and carefully argued book with that title, in which Henigan describes and contests those myths, he says, “Innocent people died that day at Virginia Tech [April 16, 2007] because our nation has allowed myths to replace reason and evidence in making gun policy. Innocent people die every day for the same reason.”2 Henigan is certainly correct that some NRA arguments are based not on reason or evidence but on passionately ascribed to myths; but unfortunately it is unlikely that providing, as Henigan does, more reason and evidence will cause people to disbelieve the arguments themselves; indeed, as I will show, Henigan himself appears to believe in the most prominent among them, the one in his book’s title, or at least in the belief system that underpins it—​the division of the world into objects, people, and nonhuman animals. The argument that guns don’t kill people, people kill people depends on this division—​ manifested in the idea that guns are inert objects used by active people.3 Henigan’s rephrasing, “Guns don’t kill people. They enable people to kill people,” demonstrates his belief in that division (28). In this chapter, I will suggest that, because it does not subscribe to this division, Terry Pratchett’s 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms might illustrate novel ways of thinking about guns and gun control.

Divided and Undivided Worlds The division of the world into objects, people, and nonhuman animals is not a fact about the world but an idea with a history and a relatively recent origin. That division is a feature of what Latour calls the Modern Constitution, a way of viewing the world that isolates human beings as the DOI: 10.4324/9781003372813-2

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28  Men at Arms “ones who construct society and freely determine their own destiny,” who see “technology as nothing but pure instrumental mastery.”4 Descartes was a principal theorist of this Constitution. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour explains that this Constitution has become dominant at least in Europe and America, but that it is not definitive. Associated with the division of the world into people and objects is the game played between reason and myth, a game that also has a history and clearly defined rules. It may be that we can envision a way out of the impasse between gun advocates and gun control advocates by entering another history that does not share those rules, a history created by Pratchett in the Discworld. Henigan and all of the other important advocates for gun control understand the rules of the reason versus myth game and operate within them, and so does the NRA. All the players understand that there is science and there are myths: false ideas, passionately ascribed to. They also all abide by the associated rule that there are people and there are objects, like guns. Evidence and facts should control and rule over false ideas, and people should control and rule over objects. Both Henigan and the NRA also fundamentally believe that people can control guns which are objects with no life of their own. However, for most of human life, people have not trusted that reason will conquer myth, and that mistrust is exceptionally well-​ founded. Henigan believes that if he simply replaces the myths about guns with enough scientific facts, people will overwhelmingly force gun control measures to become law, and, as a corollary, he also knows that when people propagate those myths, they are liars and hypocrites. Perhaps more surprisingly, the NRA also must think that science will rule over feelings because they spend a lot of money and effort trying to stop science and education.5 The NRA is playing a numbers game here. Born under the Modern Constitution, not to be confused with the American Constitution, the NRA has clearly been worried that enough scientific research might sway people away from what Henigan calls their myths. However, the NRA also perhaps sees something that most gun control advocates, wedded to Modern Constitution ideas, do not, that for some gun owners, guns do not feel like inert objects. Men at Arms explores how guns feel to people in a world with very little affinity with the divisions that many moderns subscribe to. Pratchett’s Discworld has no developed experimental science. Instead, it has an Alchemist’s Guild and some magic. Pratchett himself, however, was a big believer in science and followed the history of science as well as the history of folklore. He was a devoted autodidact. Speaking of his early education, he said, But the real history—​the history that everyone should know—​the beginnings of the earth, the dance of the continents, the journeys of mankind, the developments of science—​these took little space on the curriculum, but thankfully were in abundance in the library.6

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Men at Arms  29 In Men at Arms, he applies his capacious mind to the problem of guns in the world. Both Pratchett and Latour are great believers in what they see as real science, a science that refuses the hard divisions of the Modern Constitution.7 Men at Arms was published six years prior to the theoretical arguments about guns as technology that Latour makes in Pandora’s Hope. Presciently, the novel both anticipates those arguments and brings them to life. Most folks in Men at Arms, no matter their species—​human, dwarf, troll, werewolf, gargoyle, or dog—​do not see their world as divided into natural living things, and objects. In addition, many things we might classify as objects have life in the Discworld. The temporality of the Discworld is a mash-​up, but it is definitely not what we have called modernity. The Discworld has little of the technology that helps to define our world. As Latour explains, what makes us modern is the scale of our culture—​how many people we are and how deeply enmeshed we are with the made things in our world, its technology.8 In his words, “the adjective modern does not describe an increased distance between society and technology or their alienation, but a deepened intimacy, a more intricate mesh, between the two” (P 196). In a world described by the adjective “modern,” objects are not seen to have life, but people are completely embedded in myriad technologies. As in our global world, not everyone in the Discworld lives in the same temporality, with the same technologies and the same ideas, but, unlike in our world, Pratchett’s completely lacks this “intricate mesh.” The Discworld has no cars, airplanes, telephones, or computers, and its cameras have imps inside them drawing the pictures. The Discworld also has had no guns. When a new technology like the gun appears in that world, most of its residents understand it as “something that happens not only in the world but to the world.”9 The gun’s introduction into the Discworld in Men at Arms lets Pratchett describe the new world that is created in the advent of a weapon that enables shooting “further, faster” and “more accurately than anyone else with any other kind of weapon” (173). However, what happens with the gun in the Discworld’s mixed temporality bears on our own. As Pratchett says, fantasy is “a way of looking at the here and now, not the there and then” (Slip 101). The gun transforms Ankh-​Morpork, the Discworld’s central city-​state, and the transformations it effects can cause those of us who have lived with the presence of guns in the world for all of our lives to see the world with guns anew. The gun, or as his Discworld folks spell it, the gonne, is only one of the technologies that Pratchett introduces into Discworld over the course of his novels, but it is arguably among the most significant.10 Unlike some other technologies that interest Pratchett, the gun comes to Discworld in a relatively advanced form. There is only one gun in that world, but, crucially, it is not a misfiring early-​eighteenth-​century musket; it is a high-​powered rifle, taking a clip with six bullets, and capable of firing accurately at long-​range.11 Introducing this kind of relatively

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30  Men at Arms advanced gun into the world enables Pratchett to contend with quite a lot of our world’s arguments about the technology. The undivided, hybrid, character of the Discworld—​in which objects have life and life is often recognized as consisting in associations among people, objects, and nonhuman animals—​enables even more. Pratchett can show us what science studies theorists, like Alfred Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, and Haraway, as well as Latour, have been trying to teach us: that the imagined divisions between humans, nonhuman animals, and objects in our own world do not account fully for what technology does.

The Novelty of the Gun Part of the fun of Men at Arms comes from watching characters get their heads around the gun. The Discworld’s humans and nonhumans already live in a world familiar with weapons. His world has wars, and Ankh-​Morpork has a rudimentary police force—​consisting of watchmen (armed mainly with truncheons). Its Guild structure includes an Assassins’ Guild. Weapons aside from guns abound in Discworld. One example of this abundance appears in this book, when the watchmen visit Ankh-​ Morpork’s armory, stocked with weapons won off its enemies, including crossbows; longbows; double-​headed battle-​axes; morning stars (spiked balls on staffs); some large-​scale siege bows, designed to “smash through doorways”; war hammers; polearms, including a glaive; and even a primitive machine, “a Klatchian fire engine,” designed to shoot fire. But there are no guns in this abundance.12 Pratchett’s readers may not know what a glaive is (a pole with a blade on its end), but at least in a general sense, we all know what guns are. Our different experiences with assorted types of guns, our different degrees of knowledge about how they work, and our different degrees of knowledge or beliefs about what they are meant to do, set us apart from, and make us vastly more knowledgeable about guns than everyone in the novel—​this is part of its fun. At the beginning of the novel, three men know that there is a gun: the gun’s inventor, Leonard da Quirm (the Discworld’s Da Vinci); Ankh-​Morpork’s Patrician-​ruler, Lord Vetinari; and the Master of the Assassins’ Guild, Dr. Cruces. Leonard has invented and crafted it; prior to the action of the novel, he gave it to Vetinari, who ordered it to be destroyed by Cruces, who, instead, has kept it in a locked case in a locked museum in his Guild. Nonetheless, these three men, and everyone else in the Discworld, are in a relatively ignorant position to us in relation to this novel technology. Pratchett creates humor from the novelty of the one and only gun in the Discworld, stolen from that case by a mad assassin; and that novelty functions heuristically as well, displacing what is obvious for us into the realm of astonishing oddity. Pratchett was quite interested in this kind of an effect. In his nonfiction pieces, he refers to this effect repeatedly, attributing it to G. K. Chesterton, who, he says, “summed up fantasy as the art of taking that which is humdrum and everyday (and therefore

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Men at Arms  31 unseen) and picking it up and showing it to us from an unfamiliar direction, so that we see it anew, with fresh eyes” (Slip 81–​2).13 In another essay, Pratchett asserts that “Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light.” He says, “I try to do that on Discworld” (Slip 100–​1). The gun’s novelty is a part of that effort, and our response to the humor that novelty provides could be an example of what Pratchett praises his fans for. He says, “They know when to take the joke seriously and let it become more than a joke” (Slip 68). The gun’s novelty makes for humor, and it also might help us to understand the world with guns anew. In Men at Arms, the gun’s first victim is a dwarf. This particular dwarf—​Bjorn Hammerhock—​has a weapon-​making workshop in Ankh-​ Morpork, on Rime Street; and unfortunately for him, Hammerhock has been given the gun to repair; in the process of repairing it, a bullet from the gun kills him. The conversation he has with Death, a speaking character in the Discworld, emphasizes the gun’s novelty and its difference from the kinds of weapons Hammerhock (and the Discworld) understands. (Death always speaks in all-​caps): “That damn thing killed me!” YES. “That’s the first time anything like that has ever happened to me.” TO ANYONE. BUT NOT, I SUSPECT, THE LAST TIME. (76) With the ability to see all, Death knows, as we readers do, that once guns are unleashed they will kill and kill. This is the first, but definitely not “THE LAST TIME” someone will die by being shot. We know that handling a gun can accidently cause death. However, Hammerhock, an expert on Discworld weaponry is astonished. Nothing that he has ever made or repaired acts like a gun that goes off accidentally to deadly effect. We get to enjoy the joke in Hammerhock’s outrage that he is dead when he has never been killed before, and we also see, perhaps for the first time, one aspect of the gun’s novelty: its propensity to cause accidental death makes it radically unlike other weapons. Henigan says, perhaps intending some humor himself, that “There is no denying that the relative complexity of guns makes their users more susceptible to accidents than users of knives” (33). Pratchett’s Discworld setting takes this argument further. We find out that the combination of explosive power and mechanics makes a technology that is more susceptible to accidents than crossbows or any other weapon that Hammerhock, a dwarf “noted for his skill with mechanisms,” has ever encountered (172).14 Setting this accidental killing in a weapon-​making workshop underlines the distinction not just between guns and knives, but between this gun and all the other destructive weapons in a world with many of them. In addition, Hammerhock’s outraged response to his death acknowledges the gun as its own actant in the world: “that damned thing killed me!”

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32  Men at Arms Also trying to understand what they are seeing with the gun and its effects on the world, other Discworld characters have no choice but to describe it in terms of what they know. To a dwarf watchman named Cuddy, Leonard’s sketch of the gun “looks a bit like a crossbow without the bow” (134). Holding the actual object, Hammerhock comments on how “interesting” it is that it combines familiar mechanical devices and “the chemicals in the tubes,” which is what he calls the explosive propellent in the cartridges (75). Hammerhock can describe this as a novel combination, but he has no idea what that combination means or enables. Before it kills him, he thinks it might be a version of a clown’s “slap-​stick” since the assassin (Edward d’Eath) who has brought it in for repair is dressed as a clown. The next puzzled observer of the gun is a gargoyle named Cornice-​ overlooking-​ Broadway who has seen a man shooting it, and who tries to explain the gun to Sam Vimes, the Night Watch’s captain and the novel’s protagonist. Like the other puzzled observers, Cornice is struck by its shape and explosiveness. He calls it an “ire-​erkhtick” (firework-​stick). (Gargoyles can’t make any sounds that require the mouth to close, as they are made of stone and have open mouths with sieves inside them.) Vimes, who has his difficulties with all kinds of translation, can’t understand what he’s saying, and Cornice tries to explain: “Ire-​erk. Oo oh? Ang! Ock! Arks! Ocketks! Ang!” (Firework. You know? Bang! Pock! Sparks! Rockets! Bang!—​my translation). From Cornice’s irritated description, Vimes gets the idea: “Oh, fireworks,” to which comment, Cornice replies, “Egg. Aks ot I ed” (Yes. That’s what I said) (155). Vimes is still puzzled, however. When he asks Cornice if it was “like a rocket stick,” Cornice calls him an idiot (“ih-​ee-​ot”), and then Vimes translates Cornice’s reply as “You point it and it goes bang” (156). What we get in these scenes of confused translation and perception is a description of something that we already know as a whole object, but that these characters describe in terms of its shape and its auditory, projectile, and thermal properties. None of those properties is mysterious to us in the way that the gun with these properties is mysterious to the characters, but the description of the gun as a mysterious object in terms of its properties works to defamiliarize something common to us—​we witness the characters wondering what it would mean for a stick to go bang; we, and they, think about what other types of things go bang. Now, we can also think about what relationships there might be between a gun and fire, between a gun and a rocket, between a gun and a stick. The last speculation might be more familiar to us, since most of us have seen people hit other people with guns in films, but the others might be less familiar.15 The novel’s continual defamiliarization of the gun and its properties is one way in which it makes its readers think about the gun as a character. The center of the novel cuts back and forth among three simultaneous episodes that invoke the mystery surrounding the gun’s identity.16 In the episode including the gargoyle-​speech translation, Vimes wakes

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Men at Arms  33 up from a nap on his office table and looks at the notes he has scribbled which include “Smell of fireworks. Lump of lead,” only to be shot at from a rooftop several hundred yards away (148). Limited by his own (and the Discworld’s) knowledge of weaponry, he thinks someone must be firing at him with “a catapult,” and he rationalizes the distance which the “lump of metal” (the bullet) has travelled by thinking that the catapult could be “Troll-​sized,” that is, enormous (149). Searching the rooftops area from which the shot has been fired, his foot bumps up against the spent clip, another thing he can’t identify, which also becomes a puzzle to solve. In a simultaneous episode, Carrot (a human watchman raised by dwarves), has been showing the city and its guilds to a new watchman Angua (a werewolf). In the Beggars’ Guild, they find the body of a beggar girl, shot by the same person shooting at Vimes. Carrot also finds “a metal slug” embedded in the floor that he realizes has shattered a window and a mirror as well as having blown off most of the girl’s head (161). After he digs the slug out of the floor, he smells it and says, “Fireworks” (164). Meanwhile, in another simultaneous episode, two other watchmen, Cuddy (a dwarf) and Detritus (a troll), are patrolling and see the shooter running away. When Vimes comes back to the office, he sits down with coffee and looks at the “thing he’d picked up from the roof top”; he sees the clip as something that looks like “Pan pipes” and that reeks of “fireworks” (170); he also looks at a report from Cuddy, to which is attached something Cuddy has found, Leonard’s sketch of the gun on the side of his instructions for making “No. 1 powder . . . . vsed in fireworks” (171). Trying to put all these clues together, Vimes thinks, “Supposing there was a weapon. Supposing there was something about it that was different, strange, terrifying” (172). Initially rejecting the idea, he finally begins to figure out what the gun is and what it does. At the same time, Cuddy and Detritus corner the gunman. Given what we, and now Vimes, understand about guns, their conversation is ominous: “Did he have any weapons?,” Cuddy says. And after Detritus replies, “Just a stick, One stick.,” Cuddy replies, “Only . . . . I smell fireworks.” He is suddenly reminded that “There had been the smell of fireworks in Hammerhock’s workshop” (175). Inevitably, in the next Cuddy and Detritus scene, a “distant figure raise[s]‌what look[s] like a stick, holding it like a crossbow” and starts shooting at them, narrowly missing killing Cuddy and marking Detritus’s stone troll body with five shots that penetrate his breast-​plate armor (177). These intertwined episodes, increasing the narrative tension, underscore both the gun’s novelty and, significantly, its stink. All of the characters involved recognize the weapon’s smell, even when they don’t know what the gun looks like or how it functions, because it smells of something they do know: fireworks—​ something relatively harmless, something that many people like to look at, that thrill with their display of light and sound. Leonard has (inadvertently) turned the No. 1 powder used in fireworks into a very efficient killing machine, something new and

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34  Men at Arms extremely dangerous. Its unfamiliarity makes it slightly more dangerous in a world in which the only weapons the watchmen have are truncheons, a relatively useless crossbow, wielded ineptly by Vimes, and a sword, drawn by Cuddy when he smells the gun and doesn’t know exactly what he’s smelling (175). It is perhaps not accidental, and it is certainly evocative, that Pratchett associates the sad relative innocence of a world with fireworks and no guns with the smell of the new thing coming—​a device that uses the projectile power of No. 1 powder designed for fireworks to launch bullets designed to kill people. What initially smells like something associated with fun begins to reek of death and destruction. We recognize the gun in the novel because we know what it is. The Discworld misrecognizes it because it smells like a firework.17 A firework can be dangerous to the handler when it is mishandled, but when handled by people who know what they are doing, it is just a sound and light show.18 The novel, thus, reemphasizes that a gun is potentially very dangerous when it is handled at all. Much later in the book, when Angua, with the ultrasensitive nose of a werewolf, is looking for Carrot, the narrator, using free indirect discourse speaks from her mind, “And there was the smell of the gonne, as vivid as a wound” (347). Even when the gun has lost its novelty, it retains its stink of bodily destruction.

The Destructive Power of the Gonne In the scene where Cuddy smells the gun, the smell reminds him of how Mr. Hammerhock’s dead body looked when he first saw it: “Mr. Hammerhock ended up with a big hole in his chest” (175). Here and elsewhere in the novel, Pratchett drives home the destructive power of the new technology by emphasizing the holes it makes in human and dwarf bodies. Not only is the gun unfamiliar in the Discworld, but its effects on the body are new and terrifying. After the gun kills Hammerhock, and Edward dumps the corpse, Cuddy, Detritus, and Angua find him in the Ankh river. Detritus says the body looks like Hammerhock, but Cuddy avers that it doesn’t look “exactly like him” since Hammerhock “didn’t have such a great big hole where his chest should be” (85). Cuddy’s concrete dwarfish description provides another way for Pratchett to stress how differently destructive the gun is. The hole in Hammerhock’s dwarf body and the novelty of that kind of gaping wound upsets everyone in the Night Watch, no matter their species. Drinking in the only bar where watchmen are truly welcome, Angua and Colon, a human watchman, discuss their find: “ ‘What I want to know is,’ said Angua, ‘what put that hole in him?’ ‘Never see anything like that,’ said Colon” (90). The wound is a puzzle and an appalling oddity. The normally less flappable Carrot is moved to anger in the bar when he talks about the murder: “And then he’s in the river with a great big hole in his chest!” (92). Vimes finds what happened to Hammerhock’s body so upsetting that on his way to break the news to Hammerhock’s wife, he stops to report

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Men at Arms  35 the crime to Vetinari. Vimes says, “He’s been . . . . shot with something, some kind of siege weapon or something, and dumped in the river.” Questioned, Vimes says, “I’ve never seen anything like it . . . . there was just a great big hole” (86). What Vimes doesn’t know is that Vetinari already knows about the gun being stolen from the Assassins’ Guild. In an effort to egg Vimes on in his search for the weapon, Vetinari uses reverse psychology and orders him off the case, telling Vimes that he and his watchmen will be replaced by Captain Quirke of the Day Watch, a nasty fool, and that Quirke will investigate the crime if an investigation is called for.19 Pratchett gives us Vimes’s infuriated, sarcastic mental response: “If one is necessary. If people don’t end up with half their chest gone by accident. Meterorite strike perhaps” (87). Like Colon, Vimes sees the hole in Hammerhock’s body and can’t conceive of what did such huge horrific damage. He speculates that it could have been a massive weapon of war: “a siege weapon,” and then he sarcastically thinks that the only way such a wound could happen accidentally would be that the dwarf was struck by a large object from the sky. The kicker is that Hammerhock was indeed killed by what we would consider to be an accident, an accident contingent on the gun’s design. Vimes’s reactions to the scale of the injury may also kick us into imagining exactly how horrific the bodily damage inflicted accidentally by a gun can be. Of course, any reader who has been in active combat, or seen an explicit action movie, has seen this damage, but it is less likely that a reader has seen that damage through the eyes of folks who’ve never seen it and can’t understand it. The novel offers readers this alarming perspective. The somewhat more deliberate shootings in the novel have equally traumatic bodily effects. Cruces targets Queen Molly of the Beggars’ Guild, but he kills the beggar girl instead; she was in the Queen’s dressing room trying on the Queen’s clothes, pitifully pretending that she could wear clothes that she officially couldn’t. When Angua and Carrot find the girl’s body, the narrator says, “Angua knelt beside the body. It was very clearly a body now. It certainly wasn’t a person. A person normally had more head on their shoulders” (160). The gun has blown off most of the girl’s head. Carrot is once again shaken out of his more usual equanimity. He has seen a lot of horror in his short career in the Watch, but this death affects him to his bodily core. The narrator notes that while Carrot is explaining the structure of the Beggars’ Guild to a puzzled Angua (Angua is new to both Ankh-​Morpork and the Watch), he’s “breathing heavily” (160). He can’t control his body’s autonomic response to the girl with half her head blown off. Cruces goes on to try to shoot Vetinari and anyone in the way of that target. Seated when he is being targeted, Vetinari suddenly stands up and gets shot in the thigh. Trying to protect him with his body, Carrot gets shot through the shoulder. In the shooting, Detritus’s stone body is also chipped, and Vimes gets hit by a stone that a bullet dislodges. This time the bodily damage is more widespread but equally upsetting and, more importantly, astonishing to those who don’t know

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36  Men at Arms what a gun is and what it can do. When the Chancellor of the Unseen University sees Vetinari’s wound, he says, “Hell’s bells! What did that to his leg?” (337). By the time Pratchett wrote Men at Arms, Vetinari had been a character in four other Discworld books. An entirely self-​controlled man, Vetinari has total command of the city he rules and no illusions. But even he is shaken by the gun’s destructive power. Stunned by the wound he says, “I appear . . . . to be losing a lot of blood” (M 328). Vetinari is not normally a hesitant speaker, but the gun has taken his speaking breath just as it took Carrot’s breath. The novel then offers us a scene through Vetinari’s “light-​headed” and “rather muzzily” point of view (M 341). Vetinari in any kind of vulnerable position is a new phenomenon in the Discworld, and Men at Arms implies what readers of the next City Watch novels will see: that the gun has permanently physically hobbled a man who was once preternaturally light on his feet (370).20 In the novel Night Watch which visits an earlier world before Vetinari takes power, he is described as “catlike” in his grace and capacity to be entirely still (NW 195). This physical grace has been permanently destroyed by the power of the gun to wound deeply.

Hybrid Issues Vetinari’s transformation in the novel from a man who moves like a cat to a man who’ll need a cane to move easily is one aspect of the novel’s most significant lesson about a world with guns: that a gun is not an object in a world divided between subjects from objects, but is, instead, what Latour calls a quasi-​object.21 A gun in the Discworld (and in ours) transforms the person holding it, and those affected by it, and is itself transformed in its action. As Latour says, You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you.22 Perhaps because his readers don’t live in the Discworld and tend to see the world as divided into people and objects, Pratchett teaches this lesson repeatedly in the novel in many different situations. The gun transforms not only the appearance or function of peoples’ bodies, as it has transformed Vetinari’s; it changes their minds. The first person to hold it is the man who has stolen it from the case, Edward d’Eath, an aptly named postgraduate student at the Assassins’ Guild who has a monomania about killing the Patrician and making Ankh-​Morpork back into a kingdom. (It last had a king several hundred years before.) Assassins in the Discworld only kill at close quarters for money, but this mad student steals the gun in order to kill Vetinari and falls in love with it:

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Men at Arms  37 Edward picked it up, cradled it for a while, and found it seemed to fit his arm and shoulder very snugly. You’re mine. And that, more or less, was the end of Edward d’Eath. Something continued for a while, but what it was, and how it thought, wasn’t entirely human. (63) Edward is already a deeply troubled man, distraught about his family’s dwindling aristocratic fortunes and obsessed with royalty and the peerage, but the novel makes it abundantly clear that without the gun, he is just that, a deeply troubled man who in a different universe might have been an innocent obsessive.23 With the gun, he’s something else, what Latour might call “a gun-​citizen.”24 The gun, too, has transformed from an inert object of interest in a locked case into a piece of a killing-​ machine-​human, a “gun-​citizen.” The italicized sentence “You’re mine” in the scene where Edward picks up the gun indicates just how much the novel is stressing that, as Michel Serres says to Latour, “Relations spawn objects, beings and acts, not vice versa.”25 Both Edward and the gun are reborn in this scene. The sad disempowered Edward relates to the gun, cradling it as a baby, and as a part of himself. This relationship between the gun and Edward makes Edward something else, not “entirely human.” It also gives the gun with Edward a voice. The inner voice that says “Your’re mine” in the scene is entirely ambiguous. Is Edward thinking that the gun is his? Is the gun thinking that Edward is his? Both are true. And from this point on in the novel, the gun participates in voice. After Cruces kills Edward and takes the gun, he’s worried that Vimes might thwart his plan to kill Vetinari. The narrator says, “The gonne lay on the table.” Cruces says, “What shall I do about Vimes?” A voice replies, “Kill him” (144). Once again, this is neither clearly the gun’s voice nor Cruces’s voice. It is the hybrid voice of Cruces-​with-​a-​gun; another man-​machine-​killer has been born. Although he doesn’t know yet who the killer is, Carrot is right when he says about Cruces, “There’s still a murderer out there somewhere. Or something worse” (271). A murderer is a human with murderous intentions or a human who has killed another human. Cruces-​with-​a-​gun is, like Edward-​with-​a-​gun was, “something worse.” This high-​powered rifle exceeds his murderous intentions. It kills the beggar girl when he was intending to kill Queen Molly, a mistake he couldn’t have made closer to his target. It wounds Detritus, Carrot, and Vimes in his pursuit of only Vetinari. Although the novel stresses this gun-​person hybridity, it is perhaps not entirely right to say that the Discworld is a place in which subject and object are understood to be active in relation to one another, in which both are what Latour calls “actants” in a world of relations. Like our own world, the Discworld is a world with different temporalities, a world

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38  Men at Arms in which some people understand all of it participants—​human, nonhuman, object—​as actants crucially related to one another, and in which some other people are less aware of that Latourian truth. Cruces struggles with his Cartesian divided-​world sensibilities after he has shot at Vimes: The gonne lay on the table. There was a bluish sheen to the metal. Or, perhaps, not so much a sheen as a glisten. And, of course, that was only the oil. You had to believe it was only the oil. It was clearly a thing of metal. It couldn’t possibly be alive. And yet . . . . And yet . . . . (274) Men at Arms locates that conflict between a Cartesian sensibility and what I will call a related-​world sensibility in issues apart from the gun, as well as in the essence of what it means to have a gun in the world. One of those issues emerges because of Hammerhock’s death. Vimes and Carrot are searching Hammerhock’s workshop for clues when Vimes finds out from Carrot (raised as a dwarf) that Hammerhock’s tools will be melted down now that he’s dead. When Vimes suggests that another dwarf could use them, Carrot reacts with disgust: “ ‘What, use another dwarf’s actual tools?’ . . . . ‘Oh, no, that’s not . . . . right. I mean, they’re . . . . part of him. I mean . . . . someone else using them, after he’s used them all these years, I mean . . . . urrgh’ ” (120). Vimes has trouble seeing the tools in the workshop as actants, alive in relation to a particular dwarf. Likewise, he can’t fully understand why the dwarves will be burying Hammerhock with an intricately decorated war ax. As the narrator notes about Vimes, “this was an area in which he did not feel comfortable” (119). This, however, is Carrot’s world; he, and all the biological or adopted dwarves in the Discworld know that tools are alive in relation to dwarves. This makes them treat tools in particular reverential ways when the dwarf who works with them dies. When Carrot sees the slug embedded in the floor in the Beggars’ Guild, the narrator says, “His eyes never left the speck of metal. It was almost as if he expected it to do something” (161). Carrot lives with the dwarfish knowledge that objects have lives, that as Michel Callon and Latour say, “There is no thinkable social life without the participation—​in all the meanings of the word—​of nonhumans, and especially machines and artifacts.”26 Despite living in the Discworld with many others who have this knowledge, Vimes has yet to learn this lesson, although in the course of the novel, the gun will teach it to him, as well. Another cultural conflict that pits the related world against the faulty knowledge displayed by Vimes involves the second corpse discovered by the Watch. After leaving the workshop, Vimes and Carrot find the body of a clown named Beano in the river. He has been accidentally killed by Edward. Edward needed Beano’s prosthetic red nose so that he could dress up like Beano and get out of the Fools’ Guild with the gun he had stolen. (He escapes through a hole in the wall between the Assassins’ Guild and the Fools’ Guild.) When Vimes and Carrot find Beano’s body,

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Men at Arms  39 his face is painted with clown makeup, but he doesn’t have his prosthetic nose. Following Carrot’s instructions, Colon and Nobby, both human Watchmen, go to the Fools’ Guild to investigate the death, and a miserable clown named Boffo tries to give them information about the murderer quietly: “ ‘You find his nose,’ [Boffo] hissed. ‘You just find his nose. His poor nose!’ ” This completely puzzles Colon and Nobby since they saw the corpse, and it had a human nose. Colon goes back and asks Boffo, “Did you mean his false nose?” Boffo is frustrated: “His real one! Now bugger off!” (141). In this cultural conflict, Boffo and all the clowns know that a clown’s real face is his performance face. Fools in the Discworld are in a constant state of performance. Beano’s red nose is a quasi-​object—​with it on, he is Beano. Without it, he doesn’t have his real nose. As hard as it is for these human watchmen to understand, this is so viscerally significant to Boffo that, later in the novel, he feels disgusted when asked about a clown wearing another clown’s makeup: “I don’t have to listen to this sort of dirty talk, miss,” he says to Angua (267). Boffo’s reaction helps Carrot understand what happened to Beano. As Carrot explains to Angua, “A clown and his make-​up are the same thing. Without his make-​up a clown doesn’t exist. A clown wouldn’t wear another clown’s face in the same way a dwarf wouldn’t use another dwarf’s tools” (269). Edward, being a human assassin, didn’t hesitate to wear Beano’s makeup and his nose. When the watchmen find Edward’s corpse in an antique sewer tunnel, the narrator describes the cool atmosphere of the tunnel: “It would almost be pleasant were it not for the sad, hunched corpse of someone that looked for all the world like Beano the clown” (235). Indeed, Edward looks like Beano for all the world, all kinds of watchmen and all clowns would agree about who he looks like because he’s wearing Beano’s makeup and his real (prosthetic) nose. Only clowns, though, would see Beano without that nose as missing his real nose. Even though many of the human watchmen can’t quite understand the way clowns and dwarves think, they live in a world which manifests its hybridity in multiple ways. On Discworld, stone gargoyles as well as trolls move, speak, and have minds, but, unlike gargoyles, who are very attached to the places they live in, trolls interact fully in the world. In addition, because the Discworld has magic, it has Gaspode, the talking dog who figures in this book as well as others. In this book, Gaspode introduces Angua and us to an underworld of dogs in Ankh-​Morpork and into how dogs actually think and speak to one another. In addition, Gaspode and Angua introduce us to a wolf understanding, rather than a dog or human understanding, of what a pack is (330); and the narrator explains the hybrid human–​ nonhuman identity of dogs: “Men made dogs, they took wolves and gave them human things—​unnecessary intelligence, names, a desire to belong, and a twitching inferiority complex. All dogs dream wolf dreams” (331). Of course, this is a human imaginative view of dogs, and not necessarily accurate about dog minds. But it

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40  Men at Arms exposes what dogs do have—​minds—​and, therefore, it refuses Cartesian ideas about nonhuman animals.27 In a related set-​piece in Men at Arms, Cuddy and Detritus make friends. Cuddy is the first biological dwarf watchman, and Detritus is the first troll watchman. They hate each other in their initial meetings, but as they become friends, Cuddy realizes that Detritus is only stupid because he lives in the surface world where the air is too warm for his troll brain to work optimally. Cuddy works all of one night to make him a “special clockwork thinking helmet” with “cooling fins” (314). Remade his intelligent self by means of the helmet, Detritus is delighted with his “new” mind. A particularly poignant moment in the book comes after Cruces and the gun have killed Cuddy, and Detritus removes “his homemade cooling helmet and [sits] staring at it, turning it over and over in his hands” (338). Who is Detritus really? He is more himself in the aboveground Discworld with his head in an “object” made by Cuddy. He’s another example of how Pratchett and the Discworld understand the social relationships between objects and people. These aspects of the Discworld are intimately related to Men at Arms’ project in relation to the gun. Like the dwarves’ understanding of tools and the clowns’ views of makeup, they show readers ways of understanding the world as what Latour variously calls a “collective” and an “assemblage,” a place of interaction among humans, nonhumans, and objects in which “action is a property of the whole association, not only of those actants called human,” what I have been calling a related world.28 In the Discworld, as in ours, objects, nonhumans, and humans are folded into one another, change one another, contain one another. However, in the Discworld, this folding process is more visible. In ours, many of the processes by which the folding happens are obscured because of the massive scale of our cultures. In a world of our scale, “the relative ordering of presence and absence is redistributed—​we hourly encounter hundreds, even thousands, of absent makers who are remote in time and space yet simultaneously active and present.”29 The objects that we relate to and with, like our cellphones, are made by many human workers out of parts made or mined by other human workers from around the world. Their labor is folded into our technology, and into us, but because of the scale of our world, that labor is largely invisible. We are also made into ourselves by our relationships with objects such as cellphones. Likewise, we become ourselves, as Haraway shows, with other species.30 The multiplicity of other creatures that we live with, and around, that we eat, and that live in our bodies, shape us and the world that we share, although, again, the vast scale of our world and our scientific-​technological advances can render that shaping largely invisible as well. The Discworld makes this related collective visible when Gaspode exposes it, when Cuddy changes Detritus, and when the gun enters that world. Like Cuddy’s cooling helmet for Detritus, the gun enters Discworld with its maker exposed. Perhaps to explore this technology in its fullness, Pratchett has Vetinari visit that maker, Leonard da Quirm, and offers

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Men at Arms  41 us their discussion of the production of the gonne and why it was not destroyed. Leonard apologizes as soon as he knows Vetinari has come to talk about the gun, and he apologizes twice more during their conversation, more fervently each time as he increasingly realizes how much damage he’s done by making this technology. Both men understand that it is an actant in the world, that it cannot help but transform the world it has entered. Vetinari says, “I’m afraid it has . . . . escaped” (189). Instead of speaking of the gun as having been stolen by a human, accurately, he gives it agency. Once made, this new technology can’t help but be alive; it can’t help but change some humans who hold it into killing-​men-​ machines. This is why Leonard gave it to Vetinari to destroy. Leonard thinks he “should never have made it,” and Vetinari doesn’t know why he didn’t destroy it himself (190). Instead, he gave it to the assassins because he says, “They should be horrified at the idea of anyone having that sort of power” (189). Leonard’s thoughts about why he didn’t destroy it himself show exactly how much, he with his genius understanding knows about the liveliness of this technology. He says, “I suppose I should have dismantled it, but . . . . It seemed . . . . I don’t know . . . . sacrilege, I suppose, to dismantle it. It’d be like dismantling a person” (191). This comparison of a gun to a person is an acute realization of the gun’s potential for activity. Leonard is a genius and can invent all sorts of technologies, but once the technology escapes his kindly control, it’s endlessly reproducible, and it will easily fall into the grasp of people, who, as Vetinari knows “never think” about what it means to have the sort of power it enables (192). Vetinari keeps Leonard locked up in a gigantic workshop because he’s capable of inventing anything, but Vetinari knows that other people don’t have minds like Leonard’s, “one of those unfortunate individuals whose fate it was to be fascinated by the world, the taste, shape, and movement of it” (188). Leonard is also entirely idealistic. He has been working on a flying machine, and when Vetinari asks him why he dreams about flying, he says, “Oh yes. Then men would be truly free. From the air, there are no boundaries. There could be no more war, because the sky is endless. How happy we would be if we could but fly” (192). Leonard’s idealism is both beautiful and pathetic. For him, the boundless sky means no more war. In our world, as Pratchett implies, the boundless sky has become, among other things, one more theater from which to kill other people using guns and bombs. Like all technology, the gun carries its maker or makers within it. Unfortunately for Hammerhock, the beggar girl, and the other people affected by it in the novel, what it carries of Leonard is not his deeply innocent idiosyncratic worldview, but his interest in shape and movement, his delight in its mechanism, and his imaginative combinatory ability; this is what has enabled him to make such a technologically advanced weapon. He says, “the rifling technique requires considerable finesse” (191–​2). A less innocent man feels the rifle, with its great range and

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42  Men at Arms accuracy, in a very different way. The book demonstrates the effect of that advanced technology with Edward, with Cruces, and most significantly, with Vimes. Before holding the gun in his hands, Cruces is used to and enjoys his power in the world. He is the Master of the Assassins. But with the gun in his hands, he can kill people from the top of a tower. He thinks, it was like being a god. It was amazing how sounds were so audible up here. It was like being a god . . . . This was power. The power he had below, the power to say: do this, do that . . . . that was just something human, but this . . . . this was like being a god. (312) As much as Cruces had not wanted to believe in the gun’s life, together with it on the tower, he is more than a human (in his mind). He treats the gun with affection, as if it responds to his touch: “He lay down, stroked the gonne, and waited” (313). Vimes, a watchman rather than an assassin, feels the same way. Again, in free indirect discourse, we hear how he understands the gun: No wonder no one had destroyed it. You couldn’t destroy something as perfect as this. It called out to something deep in the soul. Hold it in your hand, and you had power. More power than any bow or spear—​they just stored up your own muscles’ power, when you thought about it. But the gonne gave you power from outside. (358) Vimes’s realization is crucial. It is the actual power in the rifle itself, its own identity as an actant, that makes it so compelling, and that transforms its holder. What Leonard has put into the gun is its own power, and in a human’s hands the gun recreates the human as a powerful human-​with-​ gun. In a companion to Discworld, Pratchett says, Hammerhock was “killed by the march of weapons technology.”31 The novel directly takes on the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument and shows how fundamentally mistaken its division of the world is. Cruces’s Cartesian conflict is occasioned by his distress at having killed the beggar girl rather than Queen Molly of the Beggars. The gun appears to speak to him about the “accidental” shooting: That was not my fault. That was your fault. I am merely the gonne. Gonnes don’t kill people. People kill people. “You killed Hammerhock! The boy [Edward] said you fired yourself! And he’d repaired you!” You expect gratitude? He would have made another gonne. “Was that a reason to kill him?” Certainly. You have no understanding.

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Men at Arms  43 Was the voice in his head or in the gonne? He couldn’t be certain. Edward had said there was a voice . . . . it said that everything you wanted, it could give you. (274–​5) Pratchett appears to give the “guns don’t kill people” argument to the gun itself who uses it as an excuse. But the novel destabilizes even that. Does the argument belong to the gun or to Cruces’s mind? Cruces can’t tell, and neither can we. The gun is an actant; Cruces is an actant; and Cruces-​with-​the gun is the most powerful actant of all. Edward-​with-​the gun easily becomes a mindless murderer. Cruces-​with-​the gun struggles to separate himself but becomes the same thing—​a killing machine. And the novel pushes the point by offering its readers a fight over the gun between Cruces and Vimes during which Vimes hears the same voice and feels the gun’s activity. Some samples of that activity in the scene include “The gonne sped away”; “the gonne fired again”; “The trigger tugged at his finger” (352–​3). Although he is a lawman, Vimes-​with-​the gun is as dangerous as the others. He tries to tell Carrot that truth, and Carrot doesn’t believe him, but we know how close Vimes was to shooting down everyone in his way (362). It could not be clearer in this novel that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” makes no sense. Guns have activity in the world in themselves, and when they are in the world, people-​with-​ gun hybrids have increased power, desire, and motivation to kill. Men at Arms shows us how aware Pratchett was of the debate in America at the time he was writing the book in the early 1990s. Not only does he contend in the novel with the “guns don’t kill people” argument, he also has Vimes say to Carrot about Hammerhock’s war axe, “Not your actual Saturday night special, eh?” (119). The novel appeared in 1993, soon after intense pressure by gun control advocates succeeded in banning the parts for cheap guns called Saturday night specials from being imported to the USA. Interviewed in 2001, Pratchett said that he always liked his most recent novel best although he had “a long-​term affection for Men at Arms.”32 Perhaps he understood how relevant the novel was and would remain. The “guns don’t kill people” idea is still at the center of thinking about guns in America. For example, in the May 21, 2018 New Yorker, Charles Bethea describes the actor Lou Ferrigno’s appearance at the annual conference of the NRA. Ferrigno says: You’ve got to remember, before the Constitution was written this country was being run by a bunch of English rebels. So John Adams and those people came and wrote the Constitution and included the Second Amendment. My opinion is that guns don’t walk around killing people.33 Ferrigno’s logical links seem shaky, but his argument indicates how desperately we need Pratchett’s novel today.

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44  Men at Arms If we continue to think of guns and people as belonging to different universes, one of objects and one of humans, we will miss the fact that people carrying guns are hybrids; they are people-​with-​guns rather than people who walk around carrying guns that are inactive.34 This hybrid—​ people-​with-​guns—​is, by definition, more powerful than people without guns, and the love for the hybrid condition may be perversely related to the self-​perceived powerlessness of the person-​part of the hybrid. As the novel shows, once a person in it holds a gun, that person knows how much additional power it affords their new hybrid condition and, therefore, potentially, how relatively powerless the person was before this condition. This seeming paradox—​the self-​perceived powerlessness of some gun owners—​helps to explain what can seem ludicrous to gun control advocates: the continual insistence among extreme gun rights advocates that they are under attack. Many may actually feel that their only power to defend themselves is under attack. Others, less concerned about their own personal power, may not feel as attacked. A better, more accurate formulation would be that some people-​gun hybrids are a huge problem and some are not. This is not the same as believing that guns are inert objects and that the only problem is people who have mental illnesses. Everyone has fear, and we are probably all susceptible to the increased power we can feel when cradling a gun remakes us into gun-​citizens. How we solve the gun problem in America may have more to do with how we modify that hybrid condition and how we stop people from feeling powerless. A friend’s son, aged 12, was with her at a demonstration during which a gun rights advocate yelled at them, “you’re scared of us.” The boy responded to her, “of course we’re scared of you, you have the guns.” What we can hear in his response is a fundamental logic of gun control advocates: guns are dangerous; people with guns are dangerous. Let’s control access to guns and get rid of the most dangerous guns. What we can hear in her yell was more complicated: outrage at the fear she was seeing and also desire. The yeller knew she was not about to shoot the boy. She was also probably happy that she could scare anyone given how afraid she may have been feeling. The boy was full of fear that people with guns would shoot him or other people; the yelling woman was full of fear that she was powerless, incredulous that her desire to defend herself could cause someone to be afraid of her. Gun owners who want there to be no control over guns (a small but, unfortunately, very powerful percentage of gun owners) are afraid primarily because they know just how dangerous guns are. They are afraid not because they don’t know how dangerous people-​with-​guns are but exactly because they do know this. They project their knowledge of their own power to kill on everyone around them and are terrified that they will be killed by the weapon that can turn them into a killing hybrid. They “know” that they, themselves, use, or can use, a gun to kill. This explains the easy slippage between arguments for gun control and arguments that any effort to control anything related to gun

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Men at Arms  45 sales or ownership will mean that no one will be allowed to have a gun. Henigan describes this slippage as how “gun control debates often have a ‘ships passing in the night’ quality” (43). For example, gun control advocates ask for universal background checks to ensure that convicted felons cannot buy guns, and these gun advocates immediately say that everyone’s house will be searched, and all guns will be confiscated. Henigan says that the NRA argument opposing any form of gun control is supported by “talking about how important gun possession is for self-​ defense and to preserve our basic liberties” (44). Quoting an NRA official who has “no doubt whatsoever” that gun control advocates want to take all guns away from private citizens, Henigan describes this as a “change the subject” tactic (44). Pratchett’s insight explains that this is not really, or only, a tactic. The belief that they are about to be killed by the weapons that have empowered them, that have made them people-​ with-​guns, that those guns are their only power, is what supports their argument. It is an argument partly founded in terror rather than (or in addition to) hypocrisy.35 The current executive vice president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre’s diction is instructive here. He says, “Self-​defense works—​criminals fear armed citizens. Self-​defense, the most basic of all human reactions, is triggered by the threat or fear of harm. The survival instinct is not exclusive to law-​abiding people, it is just as basic to criminals.”36 Of course, the survival instinct is a basic instinct of most animals, human or nonhuman. Ignoring this commonality among all creatures, LaPierre rightly understands that fear is basic to humans, and he also understands that it is not only actual harm that triggers that response, but the perceived threat of harm. This argument is the fundamental principle upon which LaPierre bases his arguments against licensing of guns, waiting periods for purchase of guns, and laws regulating the sale and ownership of assault weapons. Perhaps LaPierre is simply a shill for the gun manufacturers, but I sense from his book, and from his increasingly hysterical public appearances, that he is genuinely afraid. I am arguing, as is Pratchett, that LaPierre’s essential argument is true to his own experience of only feeling any power against the existential threat that is other people-​ with-​guns when he is carrying a gun, when he is a person-​with-​a-​gun. Although the NRA’s campaign to abolish actual research on how guns are related to violence may be based in the profit motives of manufacturers, it is also perhaps stimulated by the belief that such research is a fraud perpetuated by those who, because they themselves have guns, want to kill empowered gun owners.37 The NRA commonly argues that if one takes guns away from law-​abiding citizens, one is leaving criminals as the only armed people, but Pratchett’s novel suggests that this is only partially true. If people holding guns and feeling in any way disempowered know power with a gun, are they criminals? The novel suggests that they are just people. In the first City Watch book, Guards! Guards!, Vetinari offers Vimes some advice:

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46  Men at Arms I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people . . . . You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.38 The gun in Men at Arms teaches Vimes this fundamental lesson again. More significantly, what Pratchett’s novel and Latour’s theory show about gun control is that it is a mistake to think of any gun as equivalent to any other gun, as bad a mistake as it would be to think of all people as identical to one another. We all have fear, but we are all also unique, and there are many kinds of guns, and gun technology changes over time. Hammerhock was not killed by a gun but by the march of weapons technology. Although we all have the propensity to be bad, each person-​with-​gun hybrid is specific to that person and that individual gun. When Pratchett chose to introduce a gun into the gun-​free Discworld, he chose a long-​range rifle that uses clips with six bullets. It is the capacity of that rifle to shoot from a distance, to fire six shots quickly, and to fire bullets that penetrate walls and cause extensive bodily damage that makes the weapon such a shock to the hapless folks in Discworld. Very likely, Pratchett chose that kind of weapon because of some shooting events that happened in his lifetime, perhaps specifically an event like the Tower mass shooting in Texas in 1966 and maybe also the famous assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, all carried out with rifles. Vetenari is shot from Ankh-​Morpork’s Unseen University’s Tower of Art, a tower that “dominate[s]‌half the city” (308). Prior to that shooting, when Vimes has recognized the gun, he fears that it will be used in that manner: “Vimes’s imagination peopled the towers with men holding gonnes. The Patrician would be an easy target” (178). In 1791, when the Second Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted, there were no rifles with clips that could accurately and quickly shoot people from a distant tower. That amendment was not about guns but about the technology called guns that existed at the time. Pratchett understood that technologies have histories, and that advances in technology frequently outpace humans’ ability to use technology in a sensible manner. A lover of science, history, and folklore as well as science fiction and fantasy, he was also well aware of the discrepancy between what people can imagine and make and what they are capable of handling. About the internet and advanced computers, he said, Science fiction certainly predicted the age of computers . . . . But what took us by surprise was that the people using the computers were not, in fact, shiny new people, but the same dumb old human beings that there have always been. They didn’t—​much—​want to use the technology to get educated. They wanted to look at porn, play games, steal things, and chat. We’re not doing it right. We get handed all this new technology and we’re just not up to scratch.39

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Men at Arms  47 What he shows in the novel is that the same idea applies to weaponry. Advances in gun technology do not mean that humans get smarter about how to be when they become people-​with-​guns. Instead, those hybrids do more damage because they are capable of doing more damage, hardly an intelligent move for our species. Pratchett’s assessment of humans and human history is depressing but is also accurate. As Jacques Ellul says, reflecting on the escalation of weapons-​of-​war technology in his time, if I prepare for war with ever more powerful weapons, it is because I am convinced that the other is wicked, and this very conviction brings to light my own wickedness, for I judge the other only by myself and my own feelings.40 Rather than believing that humans are the infinitely perfectible thinking-​ machines that Descartes and the Enlightenment imagined, living in a world in which objects have no life and bodies are insignificant, Pratchett can help us to take into account the terrified feeling animals that we are, and the hybrids we become with our technology, when we contemplate how to prevent ourselves from shooting one another and ourselves.41

Notes 1 Some things have changed since I first wrote this chapter. It is now possible for the Sandy Hook families to sue Remington. There is also a powerful and growing group of grassroots campaigns for change that have achieved new gun control legislation in a number of states. See Mimi Schwartz. 2 Dennis A. Henigan. 3 Another example of how gun control advocates share the fundamental belief in this division of the world are the epigraphs to ­chapter 3 of Robert J. Spitzer’s classic book The Politics of Gun Control: Guns don’t kill people-​people do. -​-​NRA Slogan Guns don’t die—​people do. -​-​Pete Shields (2nd edition, 43) Spitzer has since published six more editions of the book. In the current 8th edition, these epigraphs do not appear. The book now begins with descriptions of the most horrific mass shootings from 2007 to 2017. Pete Shields (Nelson T. Shields), who died in 1993, founded the advocacy group Handgun Control, which successfully advocated for outlawing armor-​piercing bullets and imports of parts for Saturday Night Specials in 1986. 4 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern 30, 66. 5 See Henigan 119. 6 Slip 215. 7 On real science, see Strum, S. S. and Bruno Latour. “Redefining the Social Link: From Baboons to Humans” 795–​ 6 and Latour, “What is Given in Experience.”

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48  Men at Arms 8 Bruno Latour. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies 196–​7. 9 Bruno Latour, “What is Given in Experience,” 230. 10 Pratchett explores movies this way in Moving Pictures, communication technologies in Going Postal, newspapers in The Truth, and the telegraph in The Fifth Elephant. See Janet Brennan Croft who sees these and other books as focusing on “various technological advances which have social ramifications all over Discworld” “The Golempunk Manifesto: Ownership of the Means of Production in Pratchett’s Discworld” in Presentations of the 2010 Upstate Steampunk Extravaganza and Meetup 4. The faux-​archaic spelling of the gun may have multiple significances. Spelling in the Discworld is by no means standardized, although some characters spell “worse” than others. The nonstandardized spelling may be part of how Pratchett denotes his world as medieval or Renaissance. Also, the Discworld’s spelling helps to distance the “gonne” from being easily understood as our gun, thus may be a piece of how the novel defamiliarizes it. In addition, “gonne” sounds like gone, what the gun can do to a person—​make him or her gone. 11 Cruces shoots the beggar girl inside the Beggars’ Guild building from the roof of an opera house more than 200 yards away, and the bullet travels through the window glass, a person’s head, and lands “an inch into an oak floor” (162). The novel explicitly contrasts that kind of range with the possible range of a crossbow fired by a human: when he is shot at, Vimes tries to return fire with a crossbow he fires “at an indistinct shape on the opera house roof opposite as if the bow could possibly carry across that range” (150). Later he thinks, “Whoever had shot those lead balls at him had been very accurate across several hundred yards, and had got off six shots faster than anyone could fire an arrow” (173). 12 Men 248, 250. 13 Chesterton’s argument about fantasy as a genre is related to Brecht’s idea about how Chinese theater operates to remove “everyday things” “from the realm of the self-​evident.” (Bertolt Brecht 131). In a later essay, Pratchett repeats the point with slightly different phrasing: the role of fantasy as defined by G.K. Chesterton is to take what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it to the audience from a different direction, so that they look at it once again with new eyes. (Slip 267) See also his comment in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion, “something old and commonplace presented in a new way so that you’re almost seeing it for the first time. That’s what fantasy should be” (421). 14 There is another weapon accident in the novel. Sergeant Colon is glumly instructing his new nonhuman recruits—​Angua, Cuddy, and Detritus—​in archery, when, in response to his exhausted and fed-​up comment, “There was a spang noise. Cuddy’s crossbow had gone off in his hand. The bolt wiffled past Corporal Nobb’s ear and landed in the river where it stuck” (83). This is sort of an accident and sort of an infuriated, purposeful, response. 15 As in one of those films, later in the novel, Cruces holds the gun “grimly in both hands, trying to hit Vimes with the barrel or the butt” (350). Earlier, after trying to shoot Colon, Cruces hits Colon “very hard,” perhaps with the gun, as he is escaping (336).

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Men at Arms  49 16 Pratchett did not understand the need for chapters in his books for adults. This view of narrative in the novel enables episodic structure like this. In a 2001 interview by Gavin J. Grant, Pratchett said, “Life doesn’t happen in chapters—​ at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn’t write in chapters . . . . I’m blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.” 17 A version of this mistake is still possible and upsetting for a similar reason in our world. 18 The novel also suggests that fireworks can be a substitute for violence. When Vimes smells fireworks in Hammerhock’s workshop after the death, Carrot says, “Could be from the forge . . . . Anyway, trolls and dwarfs have been letting fireworks off all over the city” (118). Dwarves and trolls in this new multispecies settlement dislike one another and appear to be using the fireworks as dominance displays. 19 Pratchett and Briggs describe Quirke as follows: Not actually a bad man in the classic sense, but only because he doesn’t have the imagination. He deals more in that sort of generalized low-​ grade unpleasantness which slightly tarnishes the soul of all who come in contact with it. (Turtle 305) 20 In Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion . . . . So Far, Vetinari’s entry includes “He has walked with a stick since the events of Men at Arms” (388). 21 See We Have Never Been 55 for one definition of quasi-​object. 22 Pandora’s 179. 23 The novel says just that: “And there it might have ended. In fact it did end there, in millions of universes. Edward d’Eath grew older and obsession turned into a sort of bookish insanity” (15). 24 Pandora’s 179. 25 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour 107. 26 Michel Callon and Bruno Latour 359. 27 On dogs and their minds and their relationships with humans, see Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. 28 P 183. Latour defines a collective as “an exchange of human and nonhuman properties inside a corporate body” (Pandora’s 193). 29 P 189. 30 See Donna J. Haraway. When Species Meet. 31 T 181. 32 Gavin J. Grant. 33 Charles Bethea. 34 Perhaps no one who has been issued a gun in the American military can think this way. When he entered the infantry in WWII, my father was given an M1 Garand 30 caliber rifle and ordered to keep it with him at all times, next to his body, waking and asleep. The army taught him to assemble and disassemble the rifle in the dark and to handle it as if it were his girlfriend’s body—​to stroke it and learn it as if it were his intimate partner and/​or his penis. The Rifleman’s Creed, written by Marine Brigadier General William H. Rupertus during that war, and memorized by Marines, includes the following: My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless . . . . My rifle is human, even as I, because

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50  Men at Arms it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. (www.marine​pare​nts.com/​mari​neco​rps/​mc-​rifle.asp) My father, who was an infantryman, did not learn this creed, although he was taught its lessons about his gun. His rifle’s accessories included a bayonet. This may account for his being taught that the gun was like his penis. He also told me that his gun had a number and so did he, and he was called by his serial number as well as by his name. 35 Henigan gives a list of “articles of faith” that correspond to this terror, including “that the safety of every person and family depends on the ability of individuals to defend themselves with firearms.” He calls these the NRA’s “eternal truths” (83). 36 Wayne R. LaPierre 23. 37 See Henigan 161–​2 for how the gun industry plays on fear in consumers. 38 Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards! 391. 39 Slip 198. 40 Jacques Ellul 58. 41 On this Cartesian fantasy, see Bruno Latour, “What is Given in Experience”: “Against the artificial conundrums of the mind-​body problem, which are themselves the consequence of the bifurcation of nature, Whitehead reveals that if we humans are organisms, a completely different cosmology is implied” (231). See also Latour’s Pandora’s: “Descartes was asking for absolute certainty from a brain-​in-​a-​vat, a certainty that was not needed when the brain (or the mind)) was firmly attached to its body and the body thoroughly involved in its normal ecology” (4).

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2  Going Postal The Internet Arrives

Eleven years after Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett published Going Postal, a very funny serious meditation on communications technologies and technological change. With its punning nod to mass shootings by enraged former postal workers, its title seems to relate the novel to Men.1 Going Postal introduces a dynamic new central character into Pratchett’s Discworld, Moist von Lipwig. In exchange for hanging Lipwig for his crimes as a conman, Vetinari has given Lipwig the job of reviving the city’s Postal Service. The novel’s plot concerns two Discworld communications technologies: the Postal Service, which at the beginning of the novel doesn’t function at all, and a wireless system called the “clacks,” a type of semaphore which sends coded messages by means of light signals controlled by people opening and closing shutters.2 Pratchett couldn’t have been thinking of Facebook (Meta) or Twitter when he wrote Going Postal since both platforms opened to the public two years later, in 2006, but he was certainly thinking about the fast-​paced advent of communications technologies in his world, perhaps of email. The semaphore system that he imagines as rivaling the Post Office is a version of late-​eighteenth-​century signaling systems that predate the telegraph. Like the clacks, those systems used towers, and the one developed in England by George Murray employed opening and closing shutters like the clacks. The technological shift between communication by mail and communication by the evolving clacks system is at the heart of the novel. As I will argue, it is also a way for the novel to ruminate on the most significant technological shifts in our time, shifts in telecommunications enabled by the internet. As well as treating the Discworld’s technological shift, the novel shows both of its communications technologies evolving: it depicts the origin of long-​distance mail service and stamps as we know them, as well as the very rapidly developing clacks system. The novel’s second prologue describes the death of a clacks linesman, John Dearheart, while he is trying to put up a new clacks tower which “send[s]‌messages up to four times faster” (4).3 The clacks system’s relative scale, speed, and coverage makes it an attractive business, and the business’s great financial prospects make it a target for corporate greed, represented in the novel DOI: 10.4324/9781003372813-3

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52  Going Postal by a board of oligarchs and the man who controls them, aptly named Reacher Gilt.4 Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has made billions on communications technologies, seems to share Gilt’s interest in profit, although not his actively murderous tendencies. Pratchett was clearly not thinking about Zuckerberg when he wrote the novel, but, just as clearly, he was thinking about people like him who have harnessed the power of communication to make their fortunes and who speak about that pursuit in the language of public service. The transition between the Postal Service and the clacks in the novel has a lot in common with an earlier communications technology transition as well as with the more recent transitions. The electric telegraph, developed in the mid-​ nineteenth century, was a much more effective communications technology for people than semaphore systems. The telegraph became a dominant technology in nineteenth-​century America and England, and like the clacks in the novel, in both countries the telegraph was developed by multiple private companies but eventually became monopolized. In America that monopoly was named Western Union, the company that with the advent of later more complex technologies had to break up and become what is now a money transfer operation. Unlike in America, Britain took over the British Electric Telegraph Company and made it part of the Post Office, a fate that almost happens in the novel to the clacks. A financier who has essentially stolen the clacks system through complex financial maneuvers, Gilt is responsible for making and keeping the clacks a monopoly called the Grand Trunk. In the novel, we find out that Dearheart’s death was a murder orchestrated by Gilt. The Grand Trunk very actively discourages competition, even resorting to murders like Dearheart’s. The second prologue hints at one of the novel’s primary concerns: the bodily cost of technological innovation when its course in the world is dictated only by the profit motive instead of by other human needs: needs for work, health, social connection, and community integrity. As John Berger says, [h]‌as not the world always been pitiless? Today’s pitilessness is perhaps more unremitting, pervasive and continuous. It spares neither the planet itself, nor anyone living on it anywhere. . . . deriving from the sole logic of the pursuit of profit (as cold as the freezer), it threatens to make obsolete all other sets of belief, along with their traditions of facing the cruelty of life with dignity and some flashes of hope.5 Setting the novel in the Discworld which has no electricity and no computing, and representing how, in that kind of a past, communications technologies invite monopolies and profiteering allows Pratchett to illustrate Berger’s insights: the past offers lessons for the present, and an unrelenting “pursuit of profit” threatens everything. This novel of Pratchett’s is a weapon against that “sole logic.”

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Going Postal  53 Although the novel’s name points to the centrality of the Postal Service in its plot, it is just as interested in the clacks systems’ implications for human needs. Significantly, however, the novel doesn’t critique the new technology in itself. Instead, it concentrates its rancor on the financier who has stolen the clacks in service of his own enrichment. Unlike Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, who ran Twitter, men who founded their communications platforms, Gilt wasn’t involved in developing the clacks. The new profit-​driven clacks has distorted the dreams and hard work that originally made the clacks system. John Dearheart’s father, Robert, was one of the engineers who designed the system before it was stolen by Gilt and his Board of Directors, all of whom Gilt is also defrauding. At the time of John’s death, he was trying to start his own new clacks company to redeem his dad and restore the original values of the company that he had founded, especially respect for work and workers in community. The new policies Gilt has instituted for running the clacks systematically destroy its community-​making properties, and Gilt has been systematically eliminating even the most minor threats to his power. In the new clacks system, “chatter between operators . . . [is] strictly forbidden” (103). That is just one of the ways Gilt’s company, at his direction, has revised the clacks system in an anti-​connective way. Although the novel explores how the nature of the clacks technology changes humans, it focuses its critique on the anti-​connective, anti-​workers character of Gilt’s system. Before his death from early-​ onset Alzheimer’s in 2016, Pratchett was thinking hard about technological innovation, particularly about computers and the internet. What worried him was not the technology itself, which he found miraculous, but its misuse by people. In an essay on the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he says, “[w]‌e get handed all this new technology and we’re just not up to scratch. And that’s just as well, because the dream as sold is pretty suspect, too.”6 What Pratchett finds suspicious about the dream internet, sold by companies like Google, includes its domination by “American English,” the corporate profit motive, trolling, and plagiarism. He is equally suspicious of how humans can mishandle technology and destroy other humans. In relation to the ape-​men in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he compares internet users to “electronic ape-​men”: “We’ve been throwing lots of bones into the air and they’ve been dropping all over the place, often where we can’t see them until too late, and too often on other people. The tide is rising—​ literally this time.”7 The cost to community—​“other people”—​and the Earth’s health is what concerned Pratchett, and Going Postal’s treatment of communications technologies manifests especially that first concern. Just as Pratchett’s own relationship with technology was complex, Going Postal’s treatment of its two technologies and the technological shift between them is sophisticated and fascinating. The novel explores how technologies and humans are inseparable. Going Postal also reveals the collective human work behind even the most advanced technologies, despite the fantasy that what is accomplished by that work is

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54  Going Postal overwhelming complexity that transcends what is humanly possible. The novel insists on the significance of human work and workers while also exploring that prevalent twentieth-​and twenty-​ first-​ century fantasy. Pratchett is entirely “non-​innocent,” in Haraway’s sense, about the inherent dangers of new technologies, and he is also “non-​innocent” about his own medium, language; he knows, and shows, that language, as well as technology, is always inherently dangerous, both capable of aiding killing and injury, as well as liberation and love. Although he sets his Discworld in a time before modern technologies, he neither idealizes an older world before those technologies nor humans themselves; but he clearly hates the further distortions of human life and community that come when language and new technologies meet corporate greed, the unrestrained profit motive. Both the Postal Service and the clacks systems have language at their center, and despite their inherent dangers, both systems in the novel have been good for humans, but both are in serious trouble due to corporate greed in the person of Gilt. Pratchett’s concerns about how humans interact with technologies have this insight in common with Latour, another critic of a greed-​based society that neglects all the nonhuman actors in the world, including the Earth. Like Haraway and Latour, and like Pratchett, the novel believes in technological/​scientific innovation. However, like Latour as well, and despite its setting on the Discworld, the novel seems to be asking technological innovators to attend to their innovations’ places on the Earth and to the collective interests of people, the Earth, and things.

Two Technologies As Chapter 1 on Men at Arms shows, if Latour is one of our prime theorists of the porous boundaries between people and technologies, Pratchett may be one of the most significant novelists making that truth visible. Both writers are deeply attentive to the individuality of technologies as well as the materiality of relations between people and technologies. In Going Postal both the clacks and the mail transform people, but the technologies act differently on people precisely because they are different as technologies; likewise, people transform the technologies they use. Latour says that “there is a social history of things and a ‘thingy’ history of humans,” suggesting that just as technologies are social actors, people shift in their interactions with technologies.8 Going Postal materializes this claim about both technologies, but it makes the point in a perhaps more fundamental way when it deals with the transformative power of mail, pushing the point into focus by giving letters magical properties. The accumulated letters in the nonfunctional Post Office speak to Lipwig, and they have spoken to other characters, even brought about the death of men brought in to run the Service prior to Lipwig. In an altered state of mind brought on by exploring the floors of the Post Office filled with undelivered mail, Lipwig says about the letters, “They talk! [. . .] It’s as

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Going Postal  55 though they want to be . . . read” (125). The letters continually pressure people to deliver them. The two insane men who have remained on staff and greet Lipwig when he first gets to the Post Office, Stanley and Mr. Groat, have developed careful rituals to keep the letters at bay. As the letters speak to people in the novel, the fantasy points to the ways that letters and the mail embody their makers, act as social connecters, change lives, make people different from who they were before they wrote or before they read. Since paper and pen are such old communications technologies to us, they can seem nontechnological, without the transformative power of more recent communication technologies, such as radio, television, cell phones, and the internet.9 Rejecting this mundane understanding of the mail, Pratchett defamiliarizes paper and pen to us, exposing them as the technological change-​agents they are. When the letters talk to Lipwig, they reveal their writers: “the words rambled on, the characters curving and slanting awkwardly under the pen of a reluctant writer” (125). The reluctant “characters” embody the awkward reluctant writer; their shapes mimic and express his hand on the pen. When Lipwig actually delivers one piece of old mail, the letter prompts the reunion and marriage of old lovers whose lives had veered away from one another due to the nondelivery of the letter in the past. The novel dwells on this new/​old relationship enabled by the mail, arguably not just because of the romance in the story, but as a part of how the novel illustrates how technologies actually interact with humans and other animals in making the world. Pratchett is also interested in the Post Office, I think, because it is such a labor-​intensive technology, which differentiates it from the clacks. Latour’s advice, to “think of technology as congealed labor,” appears to be a guiding principle of the novel.10 Unlike many people, Going Postal often focuses on the labor of makers and users. Pratchett is always concerned with the labor aspect of technologies and their costs to human bodies/​minds. In the Discworld, just as both communication technologies shift how people think and operate, there is always human cost to both. In this way, the novel connects the mail and clacks as technologies and acknowledges the risk in technological engagement. Before and during the action of the novel, postal workers got maimed in the course of their work (because it is the Discworld, not only by dogs and people, but also by “trolls with sticks” and dragons; and, also, because it is the Discworld, a new sorting machine introduced into the service almost warped the entire universe) (150–​5). Thus, the novel implies that innovation in technology can be even Earth-​threatening. Likewise, in the early history of the clacks, even before Gilt started firing workers and running the ones he didn’t like into the ground, people died repairing the towers when “the wind won” as they were foolheartedly trying to fix shutters by hand (232). The clacks is more inherently costly for its workers than the postal service—​at least without its magical sorting machine—​because the work is carried out at great heights; also, like the internet, the clacks is particularly world-​shifting for its loner workers. It attracts loners because of the

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56  Going Postal conditions of the work: clacks are transmitted from isolated towers way up in the sky, and the workers in the towers have specialized skills. The narrator says of the people working in the Uberwald clacks tower, “they said the rattle of the clacks got into your head and your thoughts beat time with it” (102). The locution “they said” suggests that it is common knowledge that the clacks affects its workers’ minds. The novel is entirely ambivalent about the hypnotic effects of the clacks, but not about their power, which it invokes repeatedly. In the second prologue, another hypnotic effect is attributed to common knowledge: work up there too long without a hat on, they said, and the tower you were on got taller, and the nearest tower got closer, and maybe you thought you could jump from one to another, or ride on the invisible messages sleeting between the towers, or perhaps you thought that you were a message. (3) There is something about how the clacks transmits communications that denies the limits of the human body, which differentiates it from the mail service, although part of the appeal of the clacks as a technology for its users is how it transcends the challenges to the mail posed by weather and other impediments to human walking.11 Thus, the clacks and the mail service share as much as they differ. What they share is how they as communications technologies alter the lives of their workers and their users. However, the clacks’ resemblance to the internet gives it specific bodily and social effects. Paul Graves-​Brown says, humans have always lived in a hyper-​reality defined not just by their bodies but by the things they have woven around themselves. What is perhaps distinct about the technical culture of the twentieth century, especially of the last fifty years, is the progressive use of a fundamentally social product, technology, as a means to neutralize, distance and deny one’s social existence, a process in which the producers of technology have been knowingly complicit because privatized experience promotes consumption which in turn boosts profit.12 Graves-​Brown is talking about cars as well as about the internet, and he is attributing an unbridled capitalist design to a tendency in twentieth-​ century technology, the tendency to physically isolate people from other people. Although Pratchett’s novel is equally critical of the profit motive, it is less condemnatory of the technology itself, but he attributes to it the same body/​mind effects. The clacks leads its workers to deny the reality of their bodies and their limits as people; they may believe they are messages, and so they disregard the physical distance between towers. It alters perception as well as thought. Kids, according to the narrator, are enamored of the technology “because, up on the towers, you might

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Going Postal  57 believe you could see to the rim of the world” (103). Misperception, as well as denial of bodily limits, is, however, costly. Misperception about bodies is an important feature in eating disorders, which Facebook’s (Meta’s) own internal research has shown are encouraged by Instagram, a media and image-​sharing service that Zuckerberg’s company bought in order to increase its monopoly over communications. What Pratchett also stresses is that how technologies can encourage a denial of bodily realities is nothing new. The narrator compares the way clacksmen think they can fly to the perhaps mythical idea that long-​distance sailors used to fantasize that they were on land and jump to their deaths in the sea (3). As much it may use the clacks to comment on the internet’s costs as a technology, the novel also uses the clacks to comment on its joys. The novel and Lipwig become spokespeople for what I believe was Pratchett’s own love for the imagination and work it took to bring people the internet, even when people can be too stupid to understand how to use it to become more reasonable, forgiving, and kind. But if Pratchett understands people’s limitations and the fun they can have when it comes to using computers, Pratchett and the novel are equally enamored with human invention.13 Looking out on the clacks towers in the city, Lipwig thinks of its originators, “they’d imagined a different world, and bent metal around it And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this . . . thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight” (330). There are other moments in the novel when the clacks inspires such lyrical thought about the connective possibilities of this communications technology. The narrator explains that kids love sending code “[b]‌ecause . . . under your fingers flowed the names of faraway places you’d never see but, on the tower, were somehow connected to” (103). What these lyrical moments in the novel point to is how the clacks, and by association, the internet, have the inherent good of conveying language across space and connecting people from distant locations who may have lacked communities where they live.14 In addition, Lipwig’s thoughts point to how deeply world-​shifting a technology the clacks system is—​ it changes the Discworld into a “different world.” The clacks has radically transformed Ankh-​Morpork’s physical character. In a bit of free indirect discourse, the novel enters the head of Vetinari as he looks out his window: “His office once had a wonderful view of the city and, technically, it still did, although now the roofline was a forest of clacks towers, winking and twinkling in the sunlight” (68). If the view of the city was once “wonderful,” Vetinari looks out now on the clacks’s shuttered and unshuttered windows sparkling in the sun. Whereas a view of the roofs once delighted him, presumably because of the view’s scope and its differentiated character, that view is now less differentiated but more alive with light. The towers have replaced the city roofs with another unnatural wonder, but still a wonder. The adverb “technically” in Vetinari’s mind is remarkable, bringing to mind both the advanced technical aspect of the new view and Vetinari’s

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58  Going Postal ambivalent response to the city’s new aesthetics: no longer roofs, but reflections of the sun. Much later in the novel, Lipwig responds to the same spectacle: “Silent at this distance, winking their signals above the rising mists, outlining their constellations against the evening, the towers were more magical than magic, more bewitching than witchcraft” (329). This thought seems crucial, as it points to the ways that magic and technology are linked as phenomena and ideas, especially in the Discworld, but not only in that world. About his own personal interest in electronics, Pratchett says, “[e]‌lectronics always fascinated me, I suppose because it’s a kind of magic.”15 I don’t think Pratchett is alone in his likening technology that is outside of most people’s full understanding to a force that is only imaginary.16 Remarkably, however, it is through his depiction of one in terms of the other that the realities of humans in concert with technologies, including humans’ fantastic understanding of them, and the dangers associated with those fantasies, can be made clearer. The novel is ambivalent about the effects of the clacks as a new world-​ shifting technology, and it shows the technological shift in a complex manner. In addition to changing how the city looks, that shift is both a move toward speed, reach, and convenience, and a move toward replacing humans with machinery. Perhaps these tendencies are always linked, but the link is often suppressed now, made invisible in the celebration of speed, reach, and convenience. The link is visible in the novel, and the novel also makes visible the fact that the technological shift moves communication possibilities further away from poorer people. The technological shift appears inevitable and complete in the Discworld, as it does to many people in America, particularly, even though it is not complete, and its present forms are certainly not inevitable. The clacks has transformed the communications world in Ankh-​Morpork so thoroughly that a former postal worker says, “it’s all about the clacks these days, isn’t it” and calls the Post Office and mail “an old fossil” (140). But the transformation has left a lot of people behind, just not the very rich. Gilt’s Grand Trunk is a monopoly for large-​scale communication by clacks, but individual wealthy people can rent small towers “and if you were really rich, a trained operator as well.” Lipwig’s thoughts continue, “[a]‌nd you paid. [He] had no grasp of, or interest in, technology, but as he understood it, the price was something like an arm or a leg or both” (115–​16). This could be a reference to the Grand Trunk’s murderous designs for competitors, but it is certainly one of the moments in the novel where we see that because of its advanced technological character, the clacks is a technology that may not even be minimally accessible to those below a certain income level. Later in the novel, Lipwig tells a reporter, Miss Cripslock, “a clacks is so expensive . . . that the average man in the street can just about afford it in a time of crisis.” He also says its messages are “as warm and human as a thrown knife” (179). This figurative language is characteristic of Lipwig’s salesmanship. In this case, he is trying to sell the Post Office’s necessity to Cripslock, but his figurative

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Going Postal  59 language is based in factual differences between the technologies involved in the shift, including the way that clacks providers charge by the word, as telegraph providers did when this was a dominant technology. This cost makes the clacks very unlike the internet, but its relative expense in relation to the mail service increases its resemblance to the internet and cell service since more advanced communication technologies are often accessible only relative to wealth.

Work and Workers The clacks has replaced a lot of human labor even before Gilt’s trimming of the workforce. This becomes ever more visible in the novel as Lipwig works to revive the postal system. He says to Cripslock, “I need postmen, counter clerks, sorters—​I need lots of people. The mail will move. I need people to help me move it” (179). Since the messages on the clacks system move by light signals that can be operated by one or two people, the clacks system employs far fewer people than the Postal Service. The huge contrast between the labor needs of the Post Office and Gilt’s trimmed-​ down clacks appears in two machine metaphors in the novel. Lipwig sees the past of the Post Office as a scene “alive with people.” He says, “[i]‌t was a machine made of people” (121). Later in the novel, at a dinner with Adora Belle Dearheart, Robert’s daughter and John’s sister, she warns him that the “Grand Trunk Company kills people . . . The company has been running it as a machine for making money” (242). “Machine” is the vehicle of a metaphor in both cases, but the tenor of Lipwig’s metaphorical Post Office machine is the many workers engaged in “a hundred purposeful activities” (121), whereas the tenor of Dearheart’s metaphorical machine is the increased profit Gilt is making from understaffed and increasingly dangerous clacks towers. Lipwig is thinking about the work of a group of people engaged in a collective effort. Dearheart is warning about the elimination of workers in a boss’s search for higher and higher profits. As historians of technology have shown, machines have been designed and utilized to replace skilled workers with cheaper labor, but they have also been designed by workers to change the conditions of work in favor of less alienation and more social value.17 Dearheart and the book see the clacks as having started with socially valuable goals in mind and having been transformed into the worst, most dangerous kind of machine. A number of the characteristics of Pratchett’s magical Discworld stress the point that technology is “congealed labor”: including the guild system he designed for Ankh-​Morpork, which seems partially designed to either remind or teach readers that work used to be done by collectives of people; and the imps inside such new Discworld technologies as cameras and organizers, which take the work of technologies in our world and make them done by life forms in concert with things. In Going Postal, the labor aspect of the technologies in question and of the technological shift

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60  Going Postal is, arguably, the novel’s primary concern. This may be the reason that the novel spends so much time on the building of the machine that will perforate the lines between stamps on a sheet. Lipwig has the idea, but not the skill, to make this machine. But the novel spends much more time explaining the skill and the labor of the makers than it does explaining how he came up with the idea. Thus idea-​generation, which has arguably become over-​valorized in modernity, is depicted as less valuable. In this episode in the novel, the idea aspect becomes invisible or looks relatively simple, whereas the production of the machine and its makers is elaborated. The novel tells us that making that machine took three hours of intense work: Foremen were sent for. Serious men in overalls turned things on lathes, other men soldered things together, tried them out, changed this, reamed that, then dismantled a small hand press and built it in a different way. . . . the serious men fiddled, measured things, rebuilt things, tinkered, lowered things, raised things, and, eventually . . . tried out the converted press officially . . . It felt to Moist that everyone was holding their breath so hard that the windows were bending inwards. (173–​4) When Lipwig tears a stamp from the newly perforated sheet of stamps, the narrator tells us, “The windows buckled outwards. People breathed again. There wasn’t a cheer. These weren’t men to cheer and whoop at a job well done. Instead, they lit their pipes and nodded to one another” (174). This loving, detailed description of the making of the perforating machine stresses the significance of the laborers. They, the ones who fashion this machine with their hands and their tools, are the “serious men,” the men of importance. Their labor with their hands is described at length, as is their investment in their labor, their held breaths. The repetition of the word “things” in Lipwig’s thinking points to how Lipwig, an idea-​man, rather than a laborer, cannot understand the machine parts the men are working with, does not know their specialized names and functions, and the description makes it clear that the “serious men” understand much more than he does. In the narrator’s terms, they are the educated ones, the makers, not he who thought up the idea. Likewise, Miss Dearheart describes the engineers who helped to build the original clacks system as “serious men with slide rules” (243). The detail of the tool that these men use is significant, I’d argue, because it is another place where the book emphasizes that even the most advanced technology is made by peoples’ hands. The men making the perforating machine are “serious men” wearing overalls and using lathes. They are not engineers, but, in Dearheart’s description, engineers also hold and use their tools, slide rules. In America (2022), a slide rule is an obsolete hand tool, one that has been completely replaced by advanced computing. Nonetheless,

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Going Postal  61 the novel’s insistence on the tool refers us to the handwork behind all technology, no matter how advanced and seemingly magical. The book is deeply respectful of workers and tools. Lipwig thinks about the men in the printshop, “recognizing in them all the things he knew he lacked, like steadfastness, solidarity, and honesty.” The novel continually stresses that it is the workers, especially those who use their hands in the service of their work, who are significant. Thus, the novel is engaged in the same task that Elaine Scarry attributes to Karl Marx, “not just pointing to the human authors again and again, but carrying their portraits forward. . . . so that the sentient origins of the made world stay visible.”18 Like Marx, Pratchett makes us keep these “sentient origins” in mind, makes them visible and significant to us. When Lipwig thinks about the money he had stolen in his earlier life which will now go to rescuing the Post Office, he stumbles: He’d worked hard for that mon—​well, the banks and merchants had worked hard—​well, somewhere down the line someone had worked hard for that money, and now a third of it had been . . . well stolen, that was the only word for it. (287) Behind the financial maneuvers that look like work is the hard work of the laborers. After Gilt’s hired assassin burns down most of the Post Office during an attempt to murder Lipwig, the narrator, in another piece of free indirect discourse, says, “[i]‌n the bit [of the building] that was still standing, shored up and tarpaulined, the Post Office—​that is, the people who were the Post Office—​worked through the night” (305). Here, the novel points to the idea that a named institution, the Post Office, is only shorthand for the actual unnamed workers and work that sustains it and makes what it provides possible. This fact is always invisible as well as visible in our world, made visible by Marx and Scarry, and then made visible again by Latour and historians of science and technology, and here made visible by Pratchett. Their continued intellectual and artistic labor of bringing this physical labor into visibility is itself a sign of how necessary all of that labor is. The relative invisibility of workers is probably one of late modernity’s most significant characteristics, perhaps especially in America.19 In the Discworld, the transformation from the mail system to the clacks system and the disruption caused by Reacher Gilt’s greed makes the workers more visible and alerts readers to their significance. Going Postal drives home the point about the primacy of workers in a variety of ways. It is central to the contrast between the original clacks system (the old Trunk) and the profit-​driven, worker-​destroying system that has replaced it (The Grand Trunk). One of the older engineers, Mr. Pony (perhaps a nod to the Pony Express) has stayed on with Gilt’s new company to keep things running. He’s intensely frustrated by

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62  Going Postal how the company is now run shoddily, particularly with how none of the people who know how the clacks works have anything to do with the company’s management. He thinks, “[t]‌hey never took an interest. It was just money. They didn’t know how anything worked” (323, the novel’s emphasis). Behind this comment is an idea that only people who actually run the technology can care for it properly. In the novel, the unrestrained profit motive is empty of human value in that it drives those people, the ones who know how things work, from the clacks company. The company has jettisoned way too many of those workers. The narrator describes a threat to the entire clacks system, called the Woodpecker, a coded message that makes the towers rock: it was like an illness that could only attack the weak and sick. It wouldn’t have attacked the old Trunk, because the old Trunk was too full of tower captains who’d shut down instantly and strip the offending message out of the drum, secure in the knowledge that their actions would be judged by superiors who knew how a tower worked and would have done the same thing themselves. It would work against the new Trunk because there weren’t enough of those captains now. (344) Here the novel’s narrator sounds just like Mr. Pony, but that narrator is factually describing the danger the new system is in. The novel is stressing how significant workers are and also how significant understanding the actual machinery is. What looks like a successful, extremely profitable new company is equivalent to “the weak and sick.” The company’s vulnerability is precisely what has made it so profitable—​its undermanned, ill-​used, workforce. When Lipwig’s scheme to expose Gilt and the board’s crimes works, Pratchett also spends time writing about the work that clerks do to document those crimes. The narrator compares their labor to “warfare” and respectfully depicts their tools: chalk and abacuses (389). These financial warriors take their time. The narrator says, “[t]‌hey didn’t hurry. Peel away the lies, and the truth would emerge, naked and ashamed and with nowhere else to hide” (399). Gilt’s crimes involve disrespecting work and workers, and his shame is exposed by means of work and workers. Mr. Pony also seems to channel Pratchett’s ideas about craft’s role in work. In italics, the novel stresses what he “want[s]‌to say,” but can’t, to the board of directors of the Grand Trunk: Craftsmen. D’you know what that means? . . . men with some pride, who get fed up and leave when they’re told to do skimpy work in a rush . . . you don’t care . . . you think a man who’s done a seven-​year

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Going Postal  63 apprenticeship is the same as some twerp who can’t be trusted to hold a hammer by the right end. (296) If Going Postal asks us to remember that handwork subtends everything that is made, all technology, it is equally interested in what it upholds as the right sort of handwork, work which corresponds with the Victorian thinker William Morris’s definition of “handicraft”: things “made with the pleasure of working soundly and without haste at making goods that we could be proud of.”20 Just as Morris stresses the “making” when he writes about consumer goods, Pratchett’s Mr. Pony stresses the craftsmen whom he defines in the same way Morris defines things made well. His craftsmen are people who do careful, unrushed work they are proud of. Pratchett’s own deep respect for craftsmanship shows up in detail in another of his Discworld books, Night Watch. In that novel, Sam Vimes has been blindfolded and taken to the place where the Monks of History work. Later, he finds that place by feeling Ankh-​Morpork’s cobblestones through his thin-​soled boots. Many of those cobblestones feel loose or reduced to rubble by cart wheels, until he comes to “a stretch of quite modern flagstones, well dressed and fitted.” Vimes thinks, “[i]‌t could trick you if you didn’t know you were in . . . yeah, Masons’ Road, and there were masons here and they looked after the surface” (236). As in Going Postal, in Night Watch, work is not separated from workers. The masons’ work, the well-​fitted flagstones, speak to Vimes’s feet, telling his feet that the people who made them care about how the flagstones function, about their interactions with human animal feet and nonhuman animal hooves. Likewise, in Going Postal the printer’s craftsmen refit a machine to make it function differently. They are attentive to their tools and to their task, and like Night Watch’s masons, they are proud of their work. Setting the Discworld in its Renaissance/​Victorian mash-​up time lets Pratchett continually underline the presence of workers in the things they have made and the work that they do, and the setting also lets him indulge his delightful joy in material craft and respect for technical ability.

Two Conmen, Maybe Three, At Least One with a Conscience Paradoxically, the novel does this through the lens of a technically inept conman, Lipwig, who went by the name of Alfred Spangler before he got caught by Vetinari. The novel’s name, “Going Postal” like so many Pratchett names, is a multi-​referential pun, and one of its significant referents is to the fate of its protagonist, Lipwig, forced to become the postmaster. In its bildungsroman plot, the novel follows Lipwig’s personal growth from an entirely self-​centered conman to what he becomes, a community-​serving worker. The novel focuses partly on Lipwig’s consciousness, desires, and trajectory toward a social conscience, symbolized by and related to the redemption of both the community-​oriented Postal

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64  Going Postal Service and the transformed clacks that he will hope to return to the Dearhearts. We see the intimate relations between Lipwig’s personal growth and the redemption of the clacks in the conversations that help him to change his mind about his former “career.” In the course of the novel, Lipwig learns both about being a worker in the legitimate economy, something he initially despises, and being a public figure. Cripslock, curious about his past, tells him “There’s all sorts of problems with the clacks right now. There’s been a big stink about the people they’ve been sacking and how the ones that’re left are being worked to death” (181). Cripslock recognizes Lipwig as an imposter in the legitimate world and also sees that his ambitions to revive and expand the postal service challenge the clacks as it has been transformed by Gilt. To redeem the clacks, Lipwig needs to learn about its deformation. While trying to get coaches to run mail to other cities, he finds out from the brothers who own the coach service that the workers still running the clacks towers are driven crazy by their working conditions: “We seen lads come down from them towers with their eyes spinning and their hands shaking and no idea what day it is” (232). They also tell him a story about an undermanned tower where two men died, the first trying to fix a stuck shutter in a windstorm, and the other trying to save him as he is being strangled by his safety rope (234). These stories immediately evoke disgust with Gilt’s staff-​cutting, and the novel works by having us watch Lipwig, who for a time easily ignores bad consequences for other people, slowly transform into a man who can’t tolerate those consequences. Another conversation seals his desire to pursue justice. In a bar, on his first date with Adora Belle Dearheart, Lipwig learns the history of Gilt’s takeover of the clacks. He finds out that the technology was the “vision” of Adora Belle and John’s father, built by him and “a group of other engineers,” “proud of what they did” (243–​4). Although Lipwig initially responds cynically to this story of hard work undermined by Gilt, it launches him toward the redemption project. The contrast between Lipwig and Gilt is central to the novel, as are their similarities. Through the contrast, Pratchett can explore two fundamental truths about recent communications technologies, the ways that they have developed to make individual men the richest men in the world, and the challenges they pose because of their relations to language. In his life before the Post Office, Lipwig was a successful but relatively minor conman. He stole for his own personal enrichment rather than pursuing worldly power. For him, money had “only ever been a way of keeping score” in a game he was playing with himself, but which had serious consequences for others (271). In this character, Pratchett seems to be embodying Johnny’s claim in Only You Can Save Mankind that “[t]‌he important thing is to remember is it’s not a game. None of it. Even the games” (205). Trying to concoct a dishonest answer to Mr. Groat’s question, “what did you used to do?”, Lipwig thinks, “Rob. Trick. Forge, Embezzle” (36). However, he excuses his crimes to himself

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Going Postal  65 as without human cost: “never—​and this was important—​using any kind of violence. Never” (36). In addition to his innate aversions to weapons, he had a semblance of a moral conscience, which Pratchett hilariously illustrates by having him think, “[f]ooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting” (18). When Vetinari’s hangman is reading a list of Lipwig’s crimes, he feels unfairly judged as “he’d never so much as tapped someone on the head,” but the novel begins to critique him with his own additional thoughts: “apart from all those repossessions, bankruptcies, and sudden insolvencies, what had he actually done that was bad as such” (10). This unrepentant list is one of the ways in which Pratchett describes the human cost of Lipwig’s cons. These crimes are hardly victimless, and his hangman says, “A lot of people want to see you dead” (10). Much later in the novel, he finds out that Adora Belle was victimized by one of these cons when she was fired from a bank for missing four of his forged cash drafts, and he’s deeply ashamed (310). Pratchett loves a conman, but he can’t help pointing out the cost to other humans of a man who enjoys taking other people’s money and things. However, Lipwig’s relative honesty about his crimes, his discomfort with violence, and his placement of his crimes within the compass of most people’s cupidity place him low on the scale of criminality in a book which aims at bigger criminals, the ones who have perverted the new communications technology. The novel is sophisticated in its treatment of its antihero. It points to his greed and self-​interest, but it also affords him the capacity to learn, and forgives him his evil tendencies, even as it simultaneously shows their human costs. Lipwig is the bildungsroman focus of the novel, but Pratchett’s main satirical target is his corporate equivalent, the aptly named financier Reacher Gilt, the penthouse on the financial-​criminal skyscraper, and the one who owns the New Grand Trunk clacks company. Lipwig meets him for the first time and can see instantly that whereas he does the “three-​ card trick,” Gilt does it “using whole banks.” He thinks, “[i]‌f Moist von Lipwig had been a career killer, it would have been like meeting a man who’d devised a way to destroy civilizations” (252). The ultimate contrast between the two men frames the book, and it is very significant to the book’s purpose that Lipwig doesn’t pervert the communications technology that he runs, whereas Gilt is guilty of destroying its operation. Both of the technologies serve the public, but Gilt only serves himself. In the novel’s first chapter, Lipwig accepts Vetinari’s offer to become his “angel” by exchanging his execution for the job of reviving the Post Office. In the novel’s epilogue, Gilt dies rather than take the public service job that Vetinari offers. If Lipwig was an unrepentant pickpocket among strangers, Gilt aims to impoverish his own corporate colleagues, and to run the largest communication company in Discworld with no regard for its functions or its workers. He is also a murderer who contracts out his crimes. And whereas Lipwig ultimately finds himself enmeshed in a community to the extent that he runs into a fire to save the postal workers

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66  Going Postal he previously despised and also a cat, Reacher Gilt is always dedicated to being“—​all by himself” (71). Miss Dearheart tells Lipwig, “When Reacher Gilt talks about freedom he means his, not anyone else’s” (244). Even the Igor who takes care of his house, thinks about Gilt, “[a]t least the monsters” in Uberwald, where he comes from, “have the decency to look like ones” (304). Igor comes from a land of feral banshees and unrepentant werewolves and vampires.21 Gilt’s human monstrosity inheres in his contempt for all other humans, his unrelenting pursuit of wealth, and his manipulation of language. It is also expressed in his belief that “things like grace, patience, fortitude, and inner strength . . . have no value” (320). After Lipwig starts to exchange his alliance to himself alone for an alliance with community, with Gilt in mind, he thinks about why he has given up his profit from his years of conning people: “the world as sure as hell didn’t need another Dark Lord, not with Gilt doing it so well. Gilt didn’t need a tower with ten thousand trolls camped outside. He just needed a ledger and a sharp mind” (287). This Tolkien reference shows how close to Pratchett’s heart, and how serious, the contrast between Lipwig and Gilt is. But Pratchett is also deeply interested in what makes Lipwig and Gilt the same, their ease with language, their abilities to convince the people around them that they have their interests at heart. As much as Pratchett loves what can be done with words, he is mightily aware of the damage language can do, especially in the mouths and at the hands of those who want to rule the world. This awareness may be why the book displays the lack of conscience of its major criminal, Gilt, through the emerging consciousness of its minor conman. After Lipwig listens to an idea of launching the Woodpecker at the Grand Trunk, he dreams about, and through (since this is a dream) the mental gymnastics of a man in an undermanned, dangerous tower: “no one listened to you. Headquarters had even started an employee of the Month scheme to show how much they cared. That was how much they didn’t care” (344). Pratchett places this dream, and this reference to corporate HR-​speak, well after Lipwig begins to understand that his life alone and only for himself is a travesty. He has learned this through listening to people (and a golem). Gilt, who can’t learn, never really listens, except instrumentally, for his own personal gain. However, he is adept at HR-​speak and all of the other ways that language related to public service and human service can be used to mask unrestrained profit-​driven desire. Zuckerberg is only an example, but his continual invocation of “community” in an extended interview with Kara Swisher (2018) is a great example of this use of language in the face of the 2021 Wall Street Journal exposés of Facebook’s actual practices.22 As Lipwig says, Gilt is a “master” at using language for his own profit (307). When Mr. Pony says that the Grand Trunk company has sacked

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Going Postal  67 the craftsmen they need, Gilt says, “[w]‌e didn’t sack them, we ‘let them go.” One of the board members, bank owners, but minor villains in relation to Gilt, hesitates a bit before rewording this corporation speech: “[w]e . . . downsized” (295). Not only the hesitancy, but also the words differentiate the men on the scale of villainy. “Let them go” shifts the agency from the company to the workers, as if the workers were aching to leave their jobs: and “we” permitted them to go. “Downsized” takes the workers out of the picture, as if they were just part of a thing that can be shrunken, but the word at least acknowledges the agency of the corporation that is firing people: “we” made the company smaller. Most egregiously, Gilt has gotten a newspaper to quote him as saying, “[s]afety is our foremost consideration” (308). This claim comes from his mouth after readers have heard many stories of undermanned towers causing men and children’s avoidable deaths.23 Through Gilt, the novel shows that one rich man’s control of a vital communications technology can be disastrous. In conversations with the media, Zuckerberg used to call Facebook a utility, until he, or his lawyers, realized that that label implied the possibility that his platform should be regulated and potentially operated by the government. Going Postal’s Postal Service, like the one in Britain that is owned by the UK government, and like the one in the USA, which is continually under attack from supporters of unrestrained capitalism, is a public entity. The clacks, since it was developed privately by financially naïve engineers, has now passed from the control of these public-​spirited engineers into the hands of a profiteer. When Lipwig rescues it from Gilt, Vetinari tries to take it over for the city, but Lipwig wants to give it back to the Dearhearts; he says, “[i]‌t belongs to the Dearhearts and the other people who built it” (382). Vetinari concedes for the moment, but later, Lipwig thinks about how big and how essential this novel communications technology has become: “Maybe it was something so big that no one could run it at a profit. Maybe it was the like the Post Office, maybe the profit turned up spread around the whole of society” (384). Through Going Postal’s conman-​contest, the novel shows that essential communications technologies are too big and potentially dangerous to be privately owned.24 In conversation with Latour, Serres suggests that in “literary works one sometimes finds perfect intuitions of scientific instruments that come later. It sometimes happens that the artist—​musician, painter, poet—​ sees a scientific truth before it is born.”25 I am arguing that the novel’s assertions about communications technologies are scientific truths, what people now might call social-​ scientific truths, proven over and over through peoples’ cross-​cultural experience over time. This Pratchett novel predates the explosion of Facebook and the introductions and explosions of Twitter and Instagram (acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012), but it both intuits the future of communications technologies and reveals significant truths about them.

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68  Going Postal

The Power of Words and Angry Words As well as revealing the guilt of Gilt governing any communications system, in a very sophisticated critique, the novel explores dangers fundamental to all human communication: the power of words to harm and the way that anger pollutes communications. These dangers have been increased by the scale and speed of recent communications technology. Because any communications technology transmits language (and sometimes images), it will inevitably contribute to poisoning the world as well as to healing the world. Despite the denial of this truth by those who peddle communications technologies, this is true of all communications technologies, including books. A wizard who works in the library at Ankh-​ Morpork’s Unseen University, Professor Pelc, whom Lipwig consults about the talking letters, tells him, “Words are important. And when there is a critical mass of them, they change the nature of the universe” (187). Since the novel largely shows readers the world through the eyes of a conman, it offers readers a cautionary view of this power, caution that is more important than ever in 2022, when Instagram and Twitter have become so ubiquitous. Even though he didn’t understand why the letters in the Post Office were talking, Lipwig’s history as a conman means he knows all about how words can distort reality (although he deeply underestimated his own poison while he was using it). As an active conman, he loved that power. In his public contest with Gilt to deliver a message to Genua, a faraway country—​the Post Office vs. the clacks—​he raises the stakes verbally, and thinks, “[t]‌his was where his soul lived: dancing on an avalanche, making the world up as he went along, reaching into people’s ears and changing their minds” (356). The novel lets readers enjoy his bravado, his guts, but it continues to stress an essential idea, that anyone with skill and access to transmitted language can penetrate many people’s minds, change those minds in any way they want. The avalanche metaphor accurately describes the danger Lipwig was in as a criminal, and it also accurately describes the massive gamble he’s making in his contest with Gilt. In addition, that metaphor in another reminder in the novel of the potentially disastrous power that comes with the ability to change peoples’ minds. In the book, a small group of anarchist engineers, mostly fired from the Grand Trunk, call themselves the Smoking Gnu. They’re determined to destroy the Grand Trunk by sending the Woodpecker from tower to tower. Lipwig allies himself with these men in his effort to destroy Gilt, but he then realizes that destroying the clacks is not the way to help the Dearhearts. Eventually, he helps both the anarchists and the Dearhearts by sending the truth of Gilt’s murderous exploits over the entire clacks system. Thus, he uses the newer communications technology to transmit truth rather than to twist minds, but even in this case, the novel reiterates its point about poison. In an effort to persuade the anarchists that he can

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Going Postal  69 destroy Gilt with words, Lipwig says, “I said this is about words, and how you can twist them, and how you can spin them in people’s heads so that they think the way you want them to” (365). Readers including me may love watching Lipwig disseminate truth and combat evil using the power of language, but the novel never lets readers forget that that same power inherent in communications technologies can be, and often is, used to pervert peace and justice. Through his minor conman antihero, who turns into a hero who rescues a cat from a burning building, Pratchett exposes a massive problem with the way Facebook and Twitter have functioned and are presently (2022) functioning. Lipwig understands a fundamental emotional truth that enhanced his personal pleasure as a conman. The narrator says, “he had found mere mechanical [card] tricks a bit dull, a bit beneath him. There were other ways to mislead, to distract, to anger. Anger was always good. Angry people made mistakes” (353). This insight about anger appears in the book in the guise of Lipwig’s plan to make Gilt fumble. It is also a truth relevant to how the internet has misfired. That combination of truths—​that communication can twist minds and that invoking anger will lead people astray—​is at the heart of what is most problematic about these communication platforms. Anger is particularly invoked when there is no space in a communication for complex thinking or tenderness. When Lipwig is explaining the difference between a clacks message and a letter to Cripslock, he gives an example of what the average man can afford to send: “GRANDADS DEAD FUNERAL TUES.” This is the message that he calls “as warm and human as a thrown knife.” It seems as if Pratchett was imagining a telegraph message here, a message on a technology where people paid for each character they used. Although Twitter doesn’t require users to pay by the character, its character limit, upped in 2017 from 140 to 280 characters, shares the knife-​like potential of Lipwig’s imaginary clacks message. In a humorous essay about her Twitter addiction, Caitlin Flanagan writes about the “sharp rebukes” that the platform’s character limit encouraged her to tweet.26 Despite what Kara Swisher says about Jack Dorsey’s good heart, the injurious anger that the platform appears to encourage has escaped his control. In addition, Twitter faced a takeover in 2020 from a private investment firm, Elliot Management, which Swisher calls “cutthroat.”27 For a time, Dorsey remained the CEO, and Twitter remains a home for trolls and “twitter mobs,” who savage their targets along with fine people transmitting truths, but we can only imagine what could happen if a profiteer like the fictional Gilt got ahold of the platform. This nightmare may have happened now that Elon Musk has taken over. It’s very unlikely that Elliot’s CEO, Paul Singer, is as cutthroat as Reacher Gilt, and Mark Zuckerberg is nowhere near as bad as Gilt, although the man and the character share a verbalized passion for freedom (76).28 However, the scale at which these communications platforms carry mind-​twisting language and their ultimate concern with profit can

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70  Going Postal be just as dangerous in the world today as Reacher is in Ankh-​Morpork. As Pratchett shows in Men at Arms, the history and development of technologies is immensely consequential in relation to their potential to harm. The scale and speed of the clacks in Ankh-​Morpork has made it seem essential, just as Instagram and, perhaps, Twitter have come to be seen as essential. Mr. Groat says, Truth is, sir, no one wants us anymore. It’s all the clacks now, the damn clacks, clack, clack, clack. Everyone’s got a clacks tower now, sir. That’s the fashion. Fast as the speed of light, they say. Ha! It’s got no soul, sir, no heart. (43) Since it is revived in the novel, Groat is wrong about the demise of the Post Office, but his comment points to the appeal of speed. The clacks’ speed and its associations with light make it seem magical in the novel. Likewise, the speed and technological complexity of social media make platforms appear magical in ways that fool people into seeing them as unlimitable. The Facebook Files reporting has shown that extensive internal reviews caught many horrors promoted by the platform: very rich or important people have violated limits on violence-​inducing speech without any penalties; Facebook has been used for human trafficking and other criminal endeavors, and little has been done to eliminate these problems; false information on vaccination and “information” designed to promote eating disorders has spread rampantly. Some of the lack of serious response to those horrors has come from the pursuit of profits regardless of harm, particularly if that harm is happening to foreigners or people who can’t respond publicly, some from Zuckerberg’s misguided ideas about human perfectibility, and free exchange of ideas and his relatively complete control of the company, but an important contributor to that lack of response is the idea that somehow the technology is beyond human control: that its scale, its complexity, and its algorithms transcend what is humanly possible to control. This is a very dangerous fantasy, and like the idea that humans are perfectible, it masks the reality that decisions are being made in these companies because of finances. Certainly, it would take a lot of costly human labor, as well as decisions to cut profitable endeavors, to fully address these serious issues, but addressing them is really possible.29 What Pratchett helps to make visible in Going Postal is that human labor is always the significant issue, and that if a company is aimed at the profit of the few, it may be time for control by people who can say “damn the cost,” especially when the “cost” is paying lots of people to work to make these platforms truly serve the community. After Lipwig succeeds in substituting his long message about Gilt’s crimes through the clacks network for the one that was supposed to be sent, one of the Smoking Gnu men, Sane Alex, says, “That was evil.

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Going Postal  71 What sort of person could dream up something like that?” (367). Lipwig, replies, “[m]‌e,” but, in truth, it was Pratchett who dreamed up that plan. Like the two conmen in Going Postal, Pratchett, using a much earlier communications technology, a book, was a man using words to change peoples’ minds. Professor Pelc asks Lipwig, “[a]re you of a literary persuasion,” and he replies, “[n]ot as such,” but Pratchett makes Lipwig into a writer by the end of the book (186). Fittingly, what Lipwig does as a writer is compose that message, which comes through as “delivered by the dead,” the tower workers killed by the Grand Trunk’s profiteering. Lipwig is a little ashamed to be pretending to speak for the men who have died on the clacks towers (376). The Gnu’s Mad Al, trying to get him to instead agree to send the Woodpecker to destroy the whole Grand Trunk, has insisted that this is their only chance against Gilt, and says that “[o]ne man has died for every three towers standing” (365). But Lipwig and Pratchett are truly honoring the dead in Going Postal. In the novel, Pratchett has written fiction in the spirit of Benjamin’s historical materialism. He has looked back at an earlier technological shift to see what it can tell us about our world and the choices we can make. As Adora Belle Dearheart explains to Lipwig, golems think the universe, “has no start or finish. We just keep going round and round, but we don’t have to make the same decisions every time” (249). As I will discuss in Chapter 4, the golems are so right. The technological shift of the current era has brought about what Benjamin calls “a moment of danger,” and this novel can help humans to make different decisions about what to do about it.30

Notes 1 Marc Burrows says that Pratchett thought his young adult novel Johnny and the Dead was his masterpiece 121, 147. 2 The clacks is a version of the telegraph first made by Claude Chappe and his family in eighteenth-​century France. 3 The shipwreck opening which precedes that prologue, entitled “The Nine-​ Thousand-​ Year Prologue,” is one of the many instances in Pratchett’s Discworld novels in which we see his agreement with Michel Serres that “Time is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier—​here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected” (58). Another such moment in Going Postal occurs when Lipwig decides he is “standing in the here and now but seeing in the here and then” (120). 4 Pratchett’s penchant for naming characters for who they are puts him in the company of satirists throughout the ages, including one of my favorites, Ben Jonson (1572–​1637). 5 John Berger “prophet of a pitiless world.” 6 Terry Pratchett. “2001: The Vision and the Reality” 198. 7 “2001: The Vision and the Reality” 199. 8 Bruno Latour. Pandora’s Hope 18. 9 Of course, this is not a new point. See the essential work of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. Eisenstein says, “The more rapidly new inventions proliferate,

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72  Going Postal the less conspicuous earlier ones tend to become” (20). Also see Jonathan Goldberg. 10 Latour. Pandora’s 189. 11 See page 27 for Pratchett’s send up of this postal service promise. The Discworld’s challenges to mail delivery include dragons and “Huje green things with teeth.” 12 Paul Graves-​Brown 164. 13 Pratchett was an early computer user (like my father, Sheldon Bach, was). See Marc Burrows 114–​15. 14 Because we are humans, there is always Twitter hell as well as Twitter-​ enhancing love. For an example of the latter, Jeannette Ng uses tweets to try to make the SF fandom more loving. 15 Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs. Turtle Recall 429. 16 A television ad for a Google Pixel 6 phone refers to this when it uses the basketball legend Magic Johnson to characterize its “magic eraser” feature as “magic.” 17 See Donald Mackenzie, especially 502. See also Hilary Wainwright and Dave Elliot 231–​65. 18 Elaine Scarry 272. 19 The COVID 2021–​2022 disruption of America’s supply chain is a reminder of the hidden labor problem. 20 William Morris 81. Tolkien was heavily influenced by Morris. See Marie-​ Noelle Biemer. She says that Tolkien and Morris “had the same outlook on beauty and aesthetics in their creation” (56). See also Anne Amison. 21 In the Discworld not only do some vampires and some werewolves repent their murderous desires, but Pratchett also gives some of those repentant “monsters” fully fledged characterizations. 22 Kara Swisher “Facebook.” 23 This variety of appalling speech is so common these days as to become unremarkable, although it is luckily still being reported. 24 Being Pratchett, he also implies that this idea of the clacks as essential is also questionable: “Moist kept thinking of all the bad things that could happen without the semaphore. Oh, they used to happen before the semaphore, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing at all” (339). 25 Michel Serres with Bruno Latour 99. 26 Caitlin Flanagan. 27 Kara Swisher “Brace.” 28 One thing that differentiates these men from Gilt is that Gilt actively orders murder. Pratchett, however, is clearly on the side of Mr. Pump, the golem in the book, who is assigned to make sure the Lipwig does not renege on his deal with Vetinari, until Lipwig allies himself with good. Mr. Pump says to Lipwig, You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened the Death Of Many. (100) It is not unlikely that these men might be guilty of similar crimes. 9 See, for example, Gilad Edelman. 2 30 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” 255.

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3  The Truth Journalism, Fake News, and Community

Terry Pratchett’s 2000 novel The Truth is another novel introducing a new technology into the Discworld, this time the printing press. Although printing with moveable type was achievable in Ankh-​Morpork before the time the novel depicts, it had been outlawed for one of the reasons addressed in Going Postal: the inherent dangers associated with words. Two of the city’s important interest groups and its Patrician used to agree about the danger of printing but had differing views of that danger: “Lord Vetinari was said not to like it because too many words only upset people. And the wizards and the priests didn’t like it because words were important” (47). At least at the start of the novel, the Guild of Engravers is also deeply against printing with moveable type as it appears to threaten their business model. Vetinari’s worry about the printing press has been tempered by the globalization of the Discworld and the advent of the clacks. Dwarfs bring the first printing press into the city, and Vetinari is attuned especially to the economic benefits the dwarfs have brought to Ankh-​Morpork, so that when the dwarf-​run press succeeds, he is less inclined than the wizards and the priests to object. However, his point about people’s access to easily distributed words is central to the book’s main interest: the development of journalism, including the advent of a tabloid full of fake news. Pratchett was a journalist for many years, and his love for journalists and the world of journalism pervades the book. But, as always, he is realistic about the limits of people and of the things he loves, in this case, packaging the news in newspapers; and his adherence to reality means that the novel can address both the way that fake news in the internet world is helping to destroy things and the limits of newspapers in themselves, as well as showing how essential this challenged news-​form is. He is also, as always, interested in the advanced technology. In this novel, he shows how the technology transforms the news for people, making it seem as if the news is irreproachable and magically nonhuman. This seeming magic helps to explain how fake news can be easily accepted. Thus, the novel exposes how what seems like magic is an effect of technology and how that semblance is due to more human fallibility. DOI: 10.4324/9781003372813-4

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74  The Truth Pratchett sets the advent of journalism in Ankh-​ Morpork as contemporaneous to a plot by the very rich aristocrats in the city to unseat Vetinari. This contemporaneity enables the novel to explore two other issues central to the world now (2022), which have also been central historically: the inordinate power and privilege of aristocracies, and their associated prejudices against groups of others who might threaten that power and privilege. The novel shows that ethnic prejudice is not confined to the ruling class, but that the ruling class can use its established power to actualize all their prejudices in the world, or at least to attempt to actualize them. William de Worde, the novel’s main character, is the scion of one of Ankh-​Morpork’s primary ruling families. His father, Lord de Worde, is the architect of the plan against Vetinari, a plan motivated by prejudice. Lord de Worde has moved out of the city to avoid the dwarfs, trolls, and other people welcomed by Vetinari. De Worde and the other powerful rich men in the city believe that the multiethnic character of the city that Vetinari is encouraging “will undoubtedly ruin” it (85). As a young man, William rejected his family’s power and prejudices and became a scribe. He lives in a boarding house, writes letters for illiterate humans and dwarfs, and sends a monthly engraved newsletter to a handful of notable subscribers around the Discworld. The printing press being brought by the dwarfs to the city literally hits him over the head as he is bringing his newsletter inked onto a wooden block to the engraver (15). This accident eventually leads William into investigative journalism and a journalistic partnership with the granddaughter of that engraver, Sacharissa Cripslock, who interviews Lipwig for their newspaper in Going Postal. In The Truth, William and his father come to a battle over the plan against Vetinari and over his father’s prejudice. Their battle involves the murderous criminals that the rich aristocrats employ in the conspiracy against Vetinari, Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip. The novel shows that the distinction between these aristocrats and the criminals is specious, although it seems so apparent to the aristocrats. In addition, as the novel explores technologies of writing and printing in relation to their conspiracy, readers see a developing philosophical discussion of the concept of truth. The idea of truth is examined in the book in relation to newspapers, to the police, to criminality, to prejudice, and to class and class relations. The Truth shows a technological revolution leading to a revolution in news delivery that raises many of the issues that dog American and British life today (2022). It also does this by means of dogs: Vetinari’s geriatric dog, Wuffles, who tries to foil the plot, and the talking dog Gaspode who helps William get the story of the conspiracy. As I have punned on a colloquial use of “dog,” Pratchett uses many of the phrases associated with journalism in his day and phrases associated with type in a (more) humorous way, in this case the idea that “man bites dog” is news. For example, when the press hits William, the dwarfs pursue the rolling cart carrying the press with the cry, “Stop the press!” (12). The novel doesn’t necessarily advise readers to stop the press, either traditional journalism

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The Truth  75 or today’s new feeds and cable news. In fact, it shows how essential local quotidian news about ordinary people is; but it also shows the dangers of fake news, the tricky relations among the government, the police, and the press, and the power of journalism as well as its deep limitations. The novel is equally instructive about how notions of criminality are entwined in class and prejudice. It doesn’t offer easy answers about either truth or lies but it does enable readers to think beyond the headlines.

The Technological Shift and Its Implications The Truth is just as interested as Going Postal in the ways in which writing technologies can feel magical and what that might mean for people. The novel demonstrates the massive effects the shift to the printing press has on the world, and it also illuminates the mental and material effects of all of the writing technologies it depicts: handwriting, engraving, and printing. The primary tools that William and Sacharissa employ as journalists are notebooks, pens, and pencils. Toward the end of the book, once Ankh-​ Morpork’s citizens have gotten used to journalism and journalists, some citizens see William taking notes on a traffic accident and immediately start supplying information. The narrator says, “William risked a glance at his pencil. It was a kind of magic wand” (433). The pencil and the notebook make the scene of the accident into a story; in concert with William, they act on the witnesses, compel them to produce the story’s information, as if by magic. In Latour’s terms, those tools are “actants,” alive in the fictional world, like William is alive.1 When William was a scribe getting his newsletter out to some notable subscribers, he already understood that copying text increased the power of his pen in a way that seemed magical. After the accident with the printing press, the dwarf in charge, Gunilla Goodmountain, hands him the broken wooden block he had been bringing to Sacharissa’s grandfather. Trying to explain to Goodmountain what the wood block was before it was broken, William says, “[y]‌ou know? Engraving? A . . . a sort of very nearly magical way of getting lots of copies of writing?” (16). In response, Goodmountain takes Williams’ original written copy and has his helpers set type from it and then print copies. He also shows William his advertisement for the printing press, which they call a “Word Smithy.” When William points out that a word in the ad—​“hiterto”—​is missing an “h,” Goodmountain has the type for the ad reset to include the “h” and shows the new ad to William, explaining, “[t]his is a very nearly magical way of getting lots of copies quickly” (19). In this interaction and in William’s glance at his pencil, Pratchett shows that all writing technologies have what can appear to be magical powers, but that increasingly sophisticated technologies are actants that work different kinds of magic in the world: the pencil makes events into stories; engraving expands the reach of a pen, enabling copies to be made; printing adds speed to the process because moveable type can be manipulated and changes made more easily and quickly.

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76  The Truth Moveable type is an actant that astronomically increases what appears like magical power. The type adds scale and speed into the process, and, at the same time, it seemingly removes a human element. About the dwarfs’ advertisement, William says, “you must have a really steady hand to get the letters so neat” (18). One aspect of the hand appears to be improved upon by type. When he thinks that the printed ad has been engraved, it looks more perfect to him, as if the maker has a better hand than a previous maker. But when he finds out about the moveable type, he doesn’t see the craftsmanship in the finished product; it appears to him as if the maker has disappeared. He thinks differently about the newsletter copies that the dwarfs have given him than he did about the copies that Mr. Cripslock used to make for him: Of course, he could always have asked Mr. Cripslock to do more copies as well, but it had never seemed right. After the old boy had spent all day chipping out the words, asking him to sully his craftsmanship by making dozens of duplicates seemed disrespectful. But you didn’t have to respect lumps of metal and machines. Machines weren’t alive. (21) The engraved block that Cripslock made seems like art to William; it has what Benjamin calls “aura”;2 William feels as if he owes some deference to Cripslock’s artistry and to the time that he has spent making the block. He doesn’t feel that way about the text produced using pieces of type, even though the type has also been made by hand, so he has no difficulty with the multiplicity, the scale of production, that the press enables, at least as he first thinks about it. Crucially, though, the novel insistently shows that William is wrong about the absence of the craftsman, of the hand. What the printing press has added to the Discworld is speed and scale in relation to information. It has not actually removed the hands behind the page. The novel refers often to the craftsmanship involved in the printing, especially to the making of the printing machine. When William mistakes the printing press for an engraving press, he is told by Goodmountain, “[t]‌his one’s a bit different. . . . We’ve . . . modified it” (17). The dwarfs behind the press are supreme makers and designers. Sacharissa watches them and concludes, “the dwarfs designed as they went along” (210): It looked to Sacharissa that the only tools a dwarf needed were his ax and some means of making fire. That’d eventually get him a forge, and with that he could make simple tools, and with those he could make complex tools, and with complex tools, a dwarf could more or less make anything. (210)

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The Truth  77 This relationship to blacksmithing, a primary dwarf craft, is why the dwarfs have called the press a “Word Smithy.” When they buy a new press after the old one has been destroyed, they immediately begin redesigning it “substantially” (417). In these depictions of craftsmanship, there’s no distinction between design and making; the novel is refusing that distinction which often today entails a value distinction, and an associated class distinction. Thus, The Truth embroiders on the discussion of craftsmanship in Going Postal. When Pratchett has the dwarfs call the press their smithy, he is emphasizing the craftsmanship that is invisible to William, but that is important to recall. He is also making a significant point about all technology. As technology increases in sophistication, the craftsmanship and the many people who make it only appear to disappear. In the Discworld, magic is a significant trope because it captures the way that, without continual reminders, the mind has trouble keeping the material facts of life in awareness. Pratchett shows this human tendency by constructing William’s mentality. To William, watching the dwarfs make and remake the press makes it seem “organic,” as if it has a life of its own (46). Looking at the box of type (that the dwarfs have also made), he doesn’t see their craft. Instead, he sees the pieces of the type as having potential monstrous life: these dull gray blocks looked threatening. He could understand why they worried people. Put us together in the right way, they seemed to say, and we could be anything you want. We could even be something you don’t want. We can spell anything. We can certainly spell trouble. (47) Moveable type did change the world, as Elizabeth L. Eisenstein has magisterially demonstrated. Type did metaphorically spell trouble, just as it can be used to spell the word “trouble”—​one of Pratchett’s jokes. And, as the novel keeps pointing out, it is the increased speed and scale of printing enabled by moveable type that makes it spell more trouble, especially when it falls into the hands of those making tabloid news and spreading it widely; but, equally, it is the illusion, the magical quality of increasingly sophisticated communications technology, that makes it seem as if it is speaking for itself, not that it is always a made thing, and therefore controllable by the designers. This false magical quality has been used by technology companies to excuse their actual refusal to limit their technologies in the service of their profits. Pratchett also shows readers from the beginning of the book that the printed page may always contain mistakes since all makers and operators of technology are fallible, even, in this book, the dwarf craftsmen. Pratchett may be extending this lesson about humans to dwarfs as a way of showing that even the finest, seemingly superhuman designers and makers make

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78  The Truth mistakes. However, the fallible human mind, because it sees the page as magical, has difficulty seeing the mistakes. Along with minor spelling errors like “hiterto,” which does not matter much to almost anyone in Ankh-​Morpork, the dwarfs miss-​set type in more consequential ways. The first newspaper that William brings to the dwarfs to print contains a story about a pub fight in which “5 or 6 people” got hurt (57). Reading a bit of the paper aloud to his clerk, Drumknott, Vetinari says, “I see fifty-​ six people were hurt in a tavern brawl.” Drumknott is skeptical about the number, and Vetinari replies, “it must be true . . . it’s in the paper” (88). It seems unlikely that Vetinari seriously believes this; he appears to be making his own joke about what others might believe (and they will). He was the one objecting to printing because of how it might work on peoples’ minds, how it might worry them. In response to the paper’s advent, he asks Drumknott to set up meetings with the guilds of Town Criers and Engravers whom he knows will react violently when they see the printed paper. His psychological acumen in this case is characteristic. In his joke that “it must be true,” Vetinari anticipates what William will see at the breakfast table at his lodging house where the dominant lodger is reading the paper aloud. When William tries to correct the number of people hurt in the brawl to “five or six,” his fellow lodgers dismiss him on that grounds that the paper must be correct (90). Although he lacks Vetinari’s psychological sophistication, William shouldn’t be surprised that the paper has the effect it does on his fellow lodgers. He himself has succumbed to it, thinking about his own n ­ ewsletter: “once it was in type,” he thinks, “all the letters so neat and regular . . . it looked more real” (57–​8). The printing press has the effect of appearing to remove fallible human agency from the printed news. Later in the novel, the narrator tells readers that all the people at the lodging house breakfast table see the “man who bought he paper” as “its priest, replaying its contents to the appreciative masses.” William has to restrain himself “while over his head every item [is] presented with the care and veneration of a blessed relic” (122). The god-​associated character of his printed paper will be challenged in the book by the tabloid paper that practically arises simultaneously and which itself starts to be seen as immortally accurate, but the lodgers’ fallacious interpretation introduces the point Pratchett is making about the technology. The appearance of the printed paper stops thought and analysis; somehow words in print seem to arise from a place of perfection, completely alien to the everyday imperfections of people, and, therefore, unassailable. This is why the novel needs to continue to show even the dwarfs making typesetting mistakes. In depicting the printing press’s transformative effects, the novel both anticipates and explicates some of what today’s world contends with in our communications revolution. In the Discworld, the printing press transforms the speed by which news comes to people. Where once William had to wait while the engraver used hand tools to engrave the

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The Truth  79 image of the news, now as soon as William and Sacharissa collect the news, Goodmountain can set the type and print the news. The press also transforms the scale by which the news can be disseminated and consumed. Instead of an engraved one-​page newsletter that slowly reaches about five notable figures around the Discworld, the news can occupy many pages and can reach anyone who can pay a minimal amount. In the course of the novel, the price of The Ankh-​Morpork Times goes from twenty pence to ten pence to five pence, and the tabloid Inquirer sells for tuppence. The Times gets bought by all kinds of people, in Drumknott’s words, “people coming off the night shifts, market people, and so on” (87). The city’s literacy rate is low, but the paper is read aloud, so that it transforms the effects of one town crier into myriad home criers while simultaneously supplying more news to cry. In addition, the paper magically canonizes the news, seemingly transforming the everyday world of fools and bozos, whom we all are and live among, into a world in which the news is seemingly conveyed by irreproachable better-​than humans. The speed, the scale, and the canonization problem are all problems relevant to our communications revolution. News or “news” on the internet travels too fast to be corrected when it needs to be, fake news multiplies like a cancer, and it can multiply in an unquestioned way, as Pratchett illustrates with his boarding house crew.

Fake News Furious that, in concert with Goodmountain’s printing press, William’s newspaper is taking business from them, the Engravers’ Guild almost immediately launches a tabloid paper to compete with and potentially bury The Ankh-​Morpork Times. The tabloid press, particularly the British tabloid press, is a clear historical precedent for the vicious internet-​based and cable fake news that is inhibiting every effort people today (2022) are making to stave off COVID, climate change, and prejudice. In The Truth, Pratchett lampoons the tabloid press, and his lampoon exposes truths about fake news that are essential to understand as people fight against its dominance. The novel connects fake news to fake food and to fiction, exposing how desirable it is to people.3 The Truth also adds to the conversation about fake news on the internet by exploring its inevitability. This inevitability, which may seem obvious, counteracts the naïve fantasy, floated particularly by Mark Zuckerberg, that somehow “communication” is pure. Zuckerberg’s faith that human reason will lead to reasonable conversation on platforms is itself a part of the fantasy of human exceptionalism that Pratchett’s novel refuses. Pratchett refuses modern embarrassment, and hence denial, in the face of facts about humans: our delight in outrageous stories, our foundational unreason, and some people’s stupidity. What he does not do is project those facts about all humans on a group of others. The novel shows that most people are attracted to silly stories, even if they don’t believe them,

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80  The Truth and most people have trouble distinguishing the facts and establishing the truth. Pratchett also shows that people can even be persuaded that their own reality accords with fake news. These facts about people are what makes tabloids and fake news so dangerous. The Engravers’s fake newspaper, The Inquirer, is so immediately persuasive to people that if the paper publishes a story about a monster in a local lake “five readers would turn up swearing that they’d seen it, too” (377). Pratchett introduces the paper in the novel when William initially mistakes it for his own paper. He makes this mistake even after seeing the headline: “WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO COBRA.” He wonders, “[s]‌urely Sacharissa hadn’t got out another edition by herself, had she?” (188). His initial mistake tellingly points to how easily the Discworld will accept The Inquirer as a paper of record, and how easily so many people today across the world will swallow fake news. Although he doesn’t use it, Pratchett literalizes the metaphorical reach of the word “swallow,” which as early as 1513 meant, along with eating and drinking, “To take in eagerly, ‘devour’ (with one’s ears or mind)” (OED “swallow,” v. 4c.). William does not eagerly eat up the outlandish stories in the rival paper, but even he can be fooled. Much later in the novel, readers find out that a recurring Discworld character, the sausage and meat-​pie vendor Mr. Dibbler, has authored all the fake news in The Inquirer. Mr. Dibbler’s sausages are famously disgusting, but he stays in the sausage business because of his creative discourse about his “food.” He has been selling rat innards, sawdust, and other nonedibles as the “[f]inest pork” for many years (101). The novel depicts most of the Ankh-​ Morpork populace eagerly swallowing the stories Dibbler crafts. In William’s boarding house, “[i]‌t was generally agreed that the news in the Inquirer was more interesting” (230). At least one of the rich men in the conspiracy enjoys the Inquirer’s stories, and it becomes instantly more successful than the Times. The nasty engraver who runs The Inquirer, Mr. Carney, thinks, “[t]he odd thing was . . . that those things” Dibbler “wrote were like the wretched sausages he sold—​you knew them for what they were, but nevertheless you kept on going to the end, and coming up for more” (377). Even one of William’s developing staff, Mr. O’Biscuit, a former wizarding student, has been convinced by a story of a rain of dogs which the Inquirer creatively developed from one puppy falling out a window (425–​6). Reassuring the conspirators that William’s investigative journalism won’t challenge their plots, the zombie lawyer, Mr. Slant, says, “nobody takes it seriously. The Inquirer outsells it two to one already, after just one day” (234). Because the Inquirer recycles stories based in prejudice and fantasy, it is wildly popular, especially in relation to reality. The tabloid validates peoples’ prejudices, and peoples’ prejudices make them suspicious of what is real. As William finds that out at the dinner table: “[r]‌ains of insects and so on . . . fully confirmed everyone’s view of distant lands” (230). By sending a query to the King of Lancre, William

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The Truth  81 goes to the expense of investigating the Inquirer’s story of the woman in Lancre (in the Ramtops) giving birth to a cobra; but what he finds out, aside from the truth that she didn’t, is that no one at the breakfast table believes the correction that he prints because most of them are sure that people that far away are not really people. The King of Lancre’s denial becomes confirmation that the story is true. It is not only xenophobia and prejudice that encourage people to believe the Inquirer’s fake news. Pratchett shows that reality can violate dearly held ideas about propriety and beliefs about institutions such as the police and the government. William’s landlady is happy to believe a story with the headline ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND, but she finds the reality that the husband in question ran away with another woman unseemly at the breakfast table. Likewise, the reality of the plot against Vetinari makes less sense to people at the boarding house than a confirmed idea that politicians are dastardly, or an idea that anyone in police custody is guilty, or even just dislike of Vetinari and his policies. In addition, Pratchett is comfortable with truths about intelligence that make many moderns uncomfortable but that also account for how difficult it has become to counteract fake news when it becomes widespread. Covering a fire, William runs into a man who says, “I reckon this is another case of mysterious spontaneous combustion, just like you reported yesterday.” The Times did report a fire, but it is the Inquirer that labelled the fire mysterious, despite the fact that it resulted from a stupid man lighting a cigar as he was soaking his feet in turpentine. The man who disbelieves the facts about the fire doesn’t want to hear about the facts and is sure that someone, “they,” is covering up the real spontaneous combustion mystery. He says, “[i]‌t’s amazing the way they treat us as if we’re stupid.” William can only agree, with the deadpan comment, “[y]es, it’s a puzzle to me, too” (261). Neither he nor the novel is puzzled by the way stupid people (and smart people) can be fooled into believing anything that confirms what they would like to believe. In addition, the novel is equally clear that intelligence is not confined to a particular class or educational level. When the Engravers try to cut off his newspaper’s supply of paper, William must make a deal with Harry King, a man who made a fortune taking away human waste, especially urine. About their interaction, the narrator says, “William felt the distinct unease of a well-​educated man who has to confront the fact that the illiterate man watching him could probably outthink him three times over” (207). Also, William’s investigation is hampered by his own confirmed belief that dogs can’t talk. The novel makes this point earlier when it describes some of the other boys at William’s exclusive public school as people “who would one day be at least the deputy-​leaders of the land” but who had to learn “how to hold a pen without crushing it” (28). Stupidity is not confined to one class or status group or level of educational achievement, and neither is intelligence, or the effects of confirmation bias. If people are going to transcend the dangers of fake news, what Pratchett shows in The Truth must be fully acknowledged.

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82  The Truth

Different Kinds of News It is equally important to understand that people need all the kinds of news that the true Ankh-​Morpork journalists are printing. Pratchett’s detailed portrayal of journalism, based in his own small-​town journalistic past, is relevant to another aspect of the communications revolution currently occurring: the demise of local newspapers. Unrestrained twenty-​first-​century capitalism has affected how news is consumed all over America. The monopolistic takeover of newspapers in America by the Gannett corporation and by the hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, has destroyed much of what Pratchett depicts developing in the novel: both local investigative journalism and, especially, news about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. In a 2021 Atlantic story about Gannett killing a Burlington, Iowa newspaper, The Hawk Eye, Elaine Godfrey depicts a paper that could easily be a non-​fantasy Ankh-​Morpork Times, a paper with a small, scrambling, dedicated staff that did investigative reporting when called for, but mostly reported local news and let people locate things like tag-​sales.4 Godfrey says that “even The Hawk Eye’s most passionate detractors would still cut out the articles about their granddaughter’s softball team and stick them on the fridge.” One of the things that William learns about running a newspaper is how passionately people want to see their names and the names of their friends and family in the paper. Sacharissa and Goodmountain, people more in touch with other people than William has been since he rejected his family, understand this immediately. They haven’t grown up in William’s very rich bubble. Their understanding of ordinary people is what keeps the paper alive even when William is only really interested in his major investigative coup about the conspiracy against Vetinari. Pratchett portrays the “small” stuff that goes in the paper throughout the novel, and the significance of that stuff is underlined in a fight Sacharissa and William have over why people don’t seem very interested in his exposure of the conspiracy. Sacharissa has been given a report by her neighbor of the annual meeting of the Ankh-​Morpork Caged Birds Society. She finds the report utterly boring, but she wants William to understand what he cannot because of his birth status: that the people arguing about “Best of Breed” rules about parrots are “basically living little lives that are controlled by other people” (289). Although the novel insists that William’s investigation is vital for saving the well-​being of everyone in the city, especially dwarfs and ethnic others, it also insists that the interests of all ordinary people are significant and should be served by the newspaper. As always in his fiction, Pratchett is deeply interested in the lives of ordinary people.5 William eventually starts to understand that ordinary people have interests far from the political world. Caught in a hailstorm later in the novel, William is writing about the size of the hailstones and reminds himself to check his comparison to golf balls later.

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The Truth  83 The narrator says, “[p]‌art of him was beginning to understand that his readers might have a very relaxed attitude about the guilt of politicians, but were red-​hot on things like the size of weather” (392). These days, the size of hailstones may well be related to global climate issues, caused by the large scale of some countries’ populations, but massively exacerbated by the greed of the people who control “small” peoples’ lives. This political truth, however, doesn’t make William’s dedication to political issues more significant than Sacharissa’s neighbors’ interests. The novel makes this point clear. If William wants to make a newspaper that will sell and will also serve people, he needs to learn that a newspaper must be significant to the interests the people in the community. People’s interests are significant in themselves, and they are what connects people in localities to their neighbors. Crucially, as the novel intimates, these connections are what will sustain the world. Godfrey argues that under Gannett’s control of The Hawk Eye, people in her town miss out on local news and, as a result, “[d]‌isinformation becomes the norm, as people start to get their facts mostly from social media”; but what is equally important is the loss of “the more quotidian stories.” She gives the example of “the tractor games during the Denmark Heritage Days.” This is exactly what The Truth is showing creatively, except in the Discworld what people care about are things like a “report from the Ankh-​Morpork Recovering Accordion Players Society” (226). The Times also prints stories that The Hawk Eye might have covered, such as “Sacharissa’s report of the Flowers and Cookery meeting” (95) or “the Ankh-​Morpork Floral Arranging Society” (429). Godfrey points out that stories like this are essential, that her local paper used to be “a repository of community knowledge,” where people could see what actually happened in their lives in the newspaper: when local people were born and died and what they did with their daily lives, where they used to shop or meet. She also shows that the Facebook groups that have “replaced” the paper are full of rumors and speculation of the sort that Pratchett has the Inquirer publish. As Vimes thinks in Feet of Clay, “That’s rumor for you. If we could modulate it with the truth, how useful it could be” (87). These Facebook groups do not actually connect people to each other; instead, they promote fear and dislike. Although Pratchett sets his novel in the Discworld’s big city, The Truth is a story about the rise of the kind of local journalism that Godfrey is lamenting. Its story of the rise of that kind of journalism and the simultaneous rise of the tabloid Inquirer is a refutation of the claims about “community” that Zuckerberg makes in defense of Facebook. It can also, and simultaneously, be an argument to demonopolize newspapers in America, to support local press. Readers can see in the book that the world the Ankh-​Morpork Times is helping to create is in the interests of everyday people, and that the world The Inquirer makes encourages prejudice and dangerous unreality. Once again, with his eye on the everyday, Pratchett

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84  The Truth seems to anticipate how divisive social media has become and to show how it can be combated.

The Press and the Police, and the Limits of Both Pratchett is equally interested in the necessity of investigative journalism: the need for what was classically termed the fourth estate. In The Truth, William’s investigative journalism saves the city from a conspiracy that would have installed invidious rule by a puppet king, controlled by the evil-​minded aristocracy. William’s ability to write down and print what people say checks the power of institutions and interest groups in the city, significantly including the police. As Vimes points out, “[h]‌e’s got a pen and a printing press and everyone acts like he’s suddenly a major player” (320); and he is. The novel is very attentive to the relative force and character of the city’s primary players: the Patrician, the ruling class, the guilds, and the police. Although William would never use a weapon, Vimes and other citizens think about William’s writing functioning as a gun or a crossbow. In an interview scenario engineered by William, Vimes asks him how he got Sergeant Detritus to cooperate and concludes, “[a]ha, [you] pulled a pen on him” (142). Later, after William has published his first story about the Vetinari case, Vimes tells him to put away his notebook. The narrator says, “The notebook was the cheapest kind, made of paper recycled so many times you could use it as a towel, but once again someone was glaring at it as if it were a weapon” (171). After William has successfully defended his press from the Engraver’s Guild (now calling themselves the Guild of Engravers and Printers) and their evil lawyer, Mr. Slant, by threatening to print a story about their illegal takeover attempt, Vimes asks William, “[a] re you going to print everything you hear? . . . Do you intend to run around my city like some loose . . . loose siege weapon” (172). The aristocratic conspirators are also worried about the newspaper (234). The tools of investigative journalism—​pen, notebook, and printing press—​ gain power in Ankh-​Morpork, to the point that they seem threatening to the police and to the ruling class behind Vetinari’s removal from power, two groups actively opposed to one another. Through this portrayal, Pratchett shows how deeply necessary the newspaper is to the political and institutional health of the city.6 In this novel, the police and the newspaper work together, if uneasily, but the novel is always clear about the necessity of the paper in relation to the police. The excesses of America’s heavily militarized police and the endemic racism in some police forces have become serious issues in America and England. The Truth speaks to the issue of police force and to racism in the police, especially in the context of Pratchett’s Night Watch series of novels, to which The Truth is related. That series includes Men at Arms (Chapter 1) and Feet of Clay (Chapter 4). Collectively, the series explores the rise of an active, relatively ethical police force in

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The Truth  85 Ankh-​Morpork, from a moribund Watch that coexisted with a heavily armed, torturing secret police force. The Watch that readers see operating in Men at Arms, Going Postal, and The Truth is a basically social justice–​ oriented force under Vimes’s command. Vimes refers to its past in The Truth when he says to William, “[t]‌his is an official truncheon of office, Mr. de Worde. If it was a club with a nail in it, this’d be a different sort of city” (282). Vimes’s own mild and eroding racism is referenced in this novel as are his struggles with his own power and authority, also seen in Men at Arms. What The Truth adds to this depiction is a crucial call for journalistic surveillance of the police. Pratchett is also entirely realistic about the need for policing, and he shows this in the way that he demonstrates the limits of journalistic power at the same time as he is demonstrating that crucial power. Unlike Vimes, the novel’s violent criminals, Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, don’t acknowledge or respect the power of the press. Both William and Sacharissa almost die at their hands, and the ways that Pratchett depicts their threatened lives point to the need for police that some critiques may miss. In the first threat scene, the more vicious killer, Pin, shows William his weapons and asks him, “[y]‌ou know that stuff about the pen being mightier than the sword? . . . ‘Want to try?’ ” (269). In the second, as Sacharissa is being kidnapped by Pin and Tulip, she tries to assert the power of the press to forestall them, saying, “If you come near me, I’ll—​I’ll write it down!” (347). Sacharissa gets kidnapped, regardless, and William doesn’t want to fight a losing battle with his pen against Pin’s “range of cutlery.” Pratchett creates an enjoyable scenario involving Goodmountain using typesetting to communicate with William about Pin’s threat, and Goodmountain and Otto Chriek save William, but it is the Watch that scares the criminals; and Otto, the paper’s vampire photographer, temporarily loses his head to Pin’s sword. Likewise, the threat of publication has no effect on the kidnappers; it is Wuffles, Vetinari’s dog, and Sacharissa’s knee in Tulip’s balls when he is distracted by the dog that save Sacharissa; and the struggle causes a fire that destroys Goodmountain’s press. In the moment prior to that fire, William threatens the criminals with the Watch. He knows that if the press is needed to control the Watch, the Watch is needed to defend people like him from killers. The Watch and the press can’t pull together, as Vetinari points out at the end of the book, when he says that “[p]‌ulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny” (425); but the Watch without the press is not so good either. As William develops into an investigative journalist and Vimes learns to tolerate the press, readers learn this with them. In pursuit of the story about Vetinari, William evades the investigating watchmen and heads toward the scene of the crime. The narrator says, The Watch probably wouldn’t like him going in there, but William felt in his bones that you couldn’t run a city on the basis of what the Watch liked. The Watch would probably like it if everyone spent

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86  The Truth their time indoors, with their hands on the table where people could see them. (149) This joke contains two significant truths. If the city is to run to ordinary people’s benefit, it must respect people’s freedom. People must get to go about their business unobserved by the Watch, and, in some cases, journalists should get to investigate along with the police. In addition, the novel shows that journalists, at least good investigative journalists, and police officers, at least good police officers, have a lot in common. They both tell stories, and they use some of the same technology. Although Vimes carries a truncheon and William carries a pen, both men use notebooks. After the fire, Vimes comes to see the destroyed newsroom and its crew. He starts asking questions and notices William has “taken his notebook out of his pocket.” In return, he pulls out his own truncheon. As their conversation evolves, he puts the truncheon down and asks William to put his notebook away, saying, “[t]‌hat way, it’s just me and you. No . . . clash of symbols” (279). But if he carries a different symbol as a policeman, he and the journalist use the same tool: Vimes answers William’s next implicit query by pulling his own notebook out and reading the facts he’s collected. In a scene much earlier in the novel, when Vimes wants William to share his story before it is published, he tells him, “I am the commander of the Watch, lad” (143). William replies, “Yes, sir. And I’m not. I think that’s my point, really, although I’ll work on it some more” (144). William isn’t as sure as Pratchett about this because journalism is in its infancy at this point in the book. Both characters in this scene use their notebooks as well. The novel is showing that the journalist and the watchmen share tools, and methods, and goals; they are the same as well as essentially different. They both put stories together, and if they’re good at what they do, they both observe the world very closely. Vimes is impressed that William noticed the crossbow bolt in the floor at the crime scene. They both know the layout of the city and its shops and businesses very well. But they know things in a slightly different way. Vimes knows the details of people’s lives that don’t need publication. Although this novel lovingly celebrates journalism, it does so with a keen eye both on the ways it should be limited and its inherent limits. Journalists, the book shows, shouldn’t necessarily expose people or pander to people’s desire to shape the world in relation to their prejudices; thus it should operate very differently than the social media world and its newsfeeds. Journalism is also always only somewhat related to the truth. It is a human invention, dependent on human technology, and, because it is human, it is inherently flawed. The book exposes its flaws and tendencies in some detail, so that while it nods allusively to celebratory stories of journalism such as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men, it refuses to exalt either its journalists or journalism. In

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The Truth  87 the novel, William gets the real story of Pin and Tulip’s attack on Vetinari from Wuffles, who acts out what he saw and did, and whose dramatized story, including biting legs, is translated by Gaspode. Gaspode calls himself Deep Bone when talking to William, an allusion to Deep Throat, the source in All the President’s Men.7 Despite repeated exposures to Gaspode, alone and hidden, and also in the company of the band of homeless and mentally and physically challenged men he lives with, William never understands that it is the dog talking to him. William lives in the Discworld where more bizarre things than a talking dog happen frequently, but Gaspode, disguised as Trixiebell, fools him completely. As Gaspode says, sarcastically, after he fools a different human, “a couple of thumbs and they’re lords of bloody creation” (307). The book underlines William’s inability to see what is real when he thinks about how the talking dog story is as silly as the story that the “long-​lost heir to Ankh-​Morpork’s throne” is alive and living in the city (167). (He is, and he is Carrot.) Pratchett doesn’t let his readers forget that even his beloved journalism is a product of deeply flawed humans and that its naturalized conventions are just that: conventions, not reflections of truth. Commenting on the Ankh-​Morpork newspaper as it has developed in the book into its British and American twentieth-​ century form, Vetinari says, “It amazes me how the news you have so neatly fits the space available. . . . And every day something happens that is important enough to be at the top of the first page, too” (421). These facts about how the newspaper appears are, as Vetinari suggests, deeply questionable. What is in the newspaper may be less or more than what might be news; and the top of the first page is always constructed as important, but it may or may not be. William’s trouble thinking of headlines is another way that The Truth comments on the limits of the newspaper: “he wasn’t good at getting the huge complexities of the world into fewer than half a dozen words” (349). Headlines indicate the limits of journalism, but the novel also attributes the problem to the press itself. One of the last comments in the book is a bit of free indirect discourse that explains the character of the printing press. Along with its being “hungry” for news, William thinks, it “chop[s]‌the complexities of the world into little stories” (435). That problem is not confined to headlines. No story can fully account for what is true about the world; events and people are more complex than a news story can tell. Journalism may be necessary and beneficial, but it cannot be comprehensive, not only because it is trying to document complexities in small stories but also because it is written by a person or people, who are fallible and who are also not the only perceiving creatures on the Earth. As Berger says, “Our customary visible order is not the only one: it coexists with other orders,” the experiences of other animals. Berger thinks that “[s]‌tories of fairies, sprites, ogres were a human attempt to come to terms with this coexistence.” He also says that dogs, “with their running legs, sharp noses and developed memory for sounds, are the natural frontier

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88  The Truth experts of” these other orders.8 Pratchett has Gaspode and Wuffles demonstrate this in the book as they tell William the true story of the crime against Vetinari and identify the criminals by how they smell (258, 336). With all of their resources, both Vimes and William have been trying to figure out what happened in Vetinari’s office, but the real expert is a witness they cannot understand, a geriatric dog, sheltered from the vicious criminals by a group of homeless men. The dog, though, knows exactly who is guilty, and can smell them out no matter how much they have disguised themselves.

Prejudice In The Truth, Pratchett offers a wholesale critique of prejudice, which has risen in the social media world, including prejudice against that crew of homeless men—​Arnold Sideways, Foul Ron, the Duck Man, Coffin Henry, and Altogether Andrews—​who live with Gaspode. The book is also immensely sophisticated about the ways in which almost everyone walks around, or rolls like Andrew, with ingrained limited ideas about other people and nonhumans, even if some people are determined to be free of those prejudices.9 Therefore, as well as demonstrating the ignorance, viciousness, and ill effects of prejudice, the novel offers a kind of loving grace to many people in question, including William, although the novel’s grace is especially limited in relation to the wealthy aristocratic conspirators and Mr. Pin. In their case, what the novel is also showing is that contemporary assumptions about criminality are massively flawed: there is much less difference between the rich conspirators and the thugs they employ than many people might assume, maybe even no difference except the money. Worried that William may be heading into serious trouble when he goes to confront his father about the conspiracy he has led, Gaspode tells Sacharissa, “Lord de Worde used to get his butler to put down poisoned meat for the street dogs” (389). The Truth comments often about the ways humans mistreat other humans as well as dogs. It also frequently makes the journalism point that “there was always a lot of human interest in a story about [nonhuman] animals,” thus suggesting, in addition, that humans appear at times to be more interested in other animals than they are in other humans (289). Gaspode’s critique of Lord de Worde works on two levels in relation to this insight about humans. In offering information about de Worde’s cruelty, a dog is complaining about evil treatment of other dogs. I think the novel does this to demonstrate how humans should care about the evil treatment of other humans. In addition, however, the malice Lord de Worde demonstrates against dogs does demonize him to humans like me, demonstrating the tendency the novel exposes. Gaspode, a dog, is clear about who is the actual criminal in the act he describes. De Worde is doubly criminal in that he displaces his evil onto another person, a tendency his son despises. Both of the novel’s journalists offer windows

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The Truth  89 into prejudice, but they see it differently because they come from such different class backgrounds. De Worde’s son William acts in the novel as a kind of local informant on the aristocrats. He has also been complicatedly shaped by the prejudices he grew up steeped in. In contrast, Sacharissa, a child of the lower middle class, grew up with its ideas about respectability but without as much inherent prejudice as William’s family since her life did not afford her much of their prejudice. Because of her less privileged standpoint, she can understand William’s family’s beliefs as well as the truth about them, and she can also understand other people, sometimes better than he can. The Ankh-​ Morpork Times employs the homeless crew to hawk newspapers. The crew is invisible to many in the city, but not to Sacharissa. In the fight with William, she tells him, [l]‌isten what is true to a lot of people is that they need the money for the rent by the end of the week. Look at Mr. Ron and his friends. What’s the truth mean to them? They live under a bridge! (289) Sacharissa meets William in the novel when she comes to yell at him for taking work away from her family, specifically her grandfather, the engraver. She knows exactly what it means to not have enough money to eat, and she can easily imagine the world these men live in. Pratchett makes these men crucial to the novel’s plot, which is another way of showing that prejudiced assumptions that the homeless are disposable and should be invisible are stupid. Running from the newsroom with two sacks full of dogs that they’ve kidnapped in an attempt to get rid of Wuffles, Pin orders Tulip to throw the sacks in the river. Arnold, Henry, and the Duck Man rescue both sacks of dogs, warm the dogs by their fire, and worry over their health—​the Duck Man won’t let Henry give them “mouth-​to-​mouth respiritoriation” because he is concerned about the dogs’ health since Henry coughs continually (297–​8). In the novel’s dog moral calculus, the homeless men easily outrank William’s father, who, as well as poisoning dogs by proxy, sees people who disagree with him as “insane, or dangerous, or possibly even not really people” (393). In the fantasy Discworld, dwarfs, trolls, gnomes, vampires, Igors, zombies, bogeymen, tooth fairies, werewolves, and gargoyles, among others, count as people. Like many ethnic groups in our world, even though they count as people, they also face prejudice. In the Discworld, as in ours, there is also significant prejudice toward the poor and the working class. The aristocratic conspiracy against Vetinari wants to reestablish a city where the fantasy people, especially the dwarfs, are not welcome and the poorer people are unseen service workers, a city like the one in the past, ruled by a ruthless dictator; in this case, they want to establish a city ruled by a puppet king, ruthlessly controlled by them. William tells Sacharissa that his father and friends “grew up in

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90  The Truth a world where, if you were enough trouble, they could have you . . . disappeared” (387). Places like this still exist in the twenty-​first century, and some wealthy and powerful people have dreams of reestablishing this kind of world in more places. This is the world that the aristocrats want restored to them and which they want to impose on the city, the object of their conspiracy against Vetinari. The aristocrats have “families going back a thousand years” but they do not have any “honor,” according to Willliam, who knows (394). The novel inveighs against mythical ideas of an English past which brush over the criminal history of families like the de Wordes. The same sort of mythical ideas brush over the criminal history of people and families in America. The novel’s exposure of the aristocrat’s conspiracy is part of Pratchett’s significant Benjaminian attempt to reclaim the wholeness of the past.10 Fighting with his father, William says that their family values are “money, land, and titles,” and he points out that the family has deliberately chosen to marry to increase and preserve these things, a comment that his father brushes off (397). Lord de Worde is careless about the lives of many other people, but he prefers to banish his son since he has de Worde blood. When he summons men to help in this effort, William describes these men as men, “who knew how to evict, distrain, and set man-​traps” (398). The landlord past of William’s family included throwing tenants out of their homes, seizing their property to pay off a debt, and trapping poachers. Pratchett refers here to actual British Medieval and Renaissance social systems in which common land, where less-​privileged people used to be able to hunt for food, was taken by rich men, some of whom also engineered debt situations to seize land and property from people. Nominally in those systems, the rich were supposed to care for their tenants.11 This does not seem to be the case in the more realistic fantasy Discworld, which exposes the viciousness of many of the rich, a viciousness that every day’s news confirms. Even Pin understands this viciousness, characterizing the conspirators who have just told him that they do not like the pluralistic society Vetinari is encouraging as “concerned citizens”; Pin thinks to himself, “[w]‌herever they were, they all spoke the same language, where ‘traditional values’ meant ‘hang someone” (85). This attitude, the novel shows, is characteristic of the city’s aristocrats; they appear to have clean hands, but they are the true criminals. They are also the most prejudiced people in the novel. The Truth shows that their prejudice stems from their privilege. They are immensely sure of their own power and righteousness, and they wall themselves off from anyone who could challenge their ideas, including paying no attention to the people they see as their servants, and to their actual servants. In the discussion with Pin and Tulip about the pluralistic Watch that Vimes has, sometimes reluctantly, built, the rich men are concerned about Tulip’s obvious drug use. The narrator says, “[s]everal of the chairs wondered, not if they were doing the right thing, since that was indisputable, but whether

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The Truth  91 they were doing it with the right people” (83). As William explains to Sacharissa later, the training these men had from birth prevents them from wondering about their own actions: “[t]hey are brought up to give orders, they know they’re on the right side because if they are on it then it must be the right side, by definition” (387). They see their world as divided into their cohort of massively wealthy entitled people and other people whom they largely define as criminals. Justice is theirs to dispense and theirs to define. In a note, Pratchett says, “William’s class understood that justice was like coal or potatoes. You ordered it when you needed it” (141n.). De Worde has moved out of the city which “William’s family and everyone they knew” mentally mapped as “divided into parts where you found upstanding citizens, and other parts where you found criminals” (141). They see Vimes’s Watch as “a regrettably necessary subset of the criminal classes, a section of the population informally defined by Lord de Worde as anyone with less than a thousand dollars a year” (141). William explains to Sacharissa that this mental map his privileged family and their friends have constructed is the opposite of reality: “[y]‌ou think places like the Shades are bad? Then you don’t know what goes on in Park Lane!” (387). The Shades is a dangerous Ankh-​Morpork neighborhood where a person walking on the street at night might be attacked, but Park Lane is a place where an attack on the entire city can be planned and implemented, as it has been in the novel, which if successful would probably mean that groups of people would be customarily rounded up and tortured or disappeared.12 In his own privileged mind, William underestimates what Sacharissa knows and understands, but he is an accurate informant on the perfidy of his people. In a conversation with Carrot about what has been happening in the city since Vetinari has been displaced, Vimes asks what Mr. Scrope, the aristocrats’ pick for a puppet leader, has been saying publicly. When Carrot tells him about Scrope’s “political” messaging, and says, “[a]pparently he wants a return to the values and traditions that made the city great,” Vimes, who lived in that former regime, replies, “aghast,” “Does he know what those values and traditions were?” (321). Vimes, and Pratchett, are well aware that traditional values can be code for immensely repressive systems. The novel gives us no access to Scrope’s mind or intentions, but it suggests that people can support an authoritarian regime without knowing what they are really supporting. A refusal to know is an important part of power. As The Truth depicts prejudice throughout Ankh-​Morpork and other regions of the Discworld, it is especially informative about how prejudice is coded.13 On his way to confront his father, William reflects on a childhood spent listening to, “well, viciousness mostly, now that he thought about it, the opinions of Mr. Windling dressed up in more expensive words” (393). The Truth suggests here that this kind of code can swallowed by children and is only, perhaps, penetrable later in life. The vocabulary William’s family uses, including “traditional values” sounds clean and seems to denote education and morality but it is only code for

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92  The Truth seamy behavior and opinions. Mr. Windling also speaks in racist code, just of a slightly less exclusive sort. During the novel, William listens to him speaking in coded language such as “[t]‌he city is getting rather crowded, though . . . Still, at least zombies are human. No offense meant, of course.” This comment, full of code, is a response to the dwarf who lives in the lodging house saying, “I suppose it takes all sorts” (123). William reflects on “no offense meant” as a code giving a speaker the freedom to offend freely. Windling’s attitude about dwarfs is not uncommon in the city and resembles anti-​immigrant attitudes in the US and elsewhere. The newspaper receives a letter to the editor which falsely attributes a spate of robberies to dwarfs and says that dwarfs are taking jobs away from humans (133). Windling also uses the code phrases “ordinary people,” “outsiders,” and “too many people” to talk about humans versus dwarfs (251–​2). The dwarfs who run the press are used to the prejudice that is in the city’s air. Thus, the novel suggests that prejudice can be pervasive, coded, and may also have to be tolerated by its targets if they are to survive in a city. In addition, The Truth shows that the people who both want to and can afford to wall themselves off from ethnic others can be exceptionally prejudiced and can act on their prejudice. Also, other people in the novel live in a miasma that includes prejudice, but do not necessarily adhere to its “principles.” William’s characterization indicates that even the scion of an exceptionally prejudiced aristocratic family can break away from the racist system, at least to a large extent. People at William’s breakfast table can be fair-​minded too. When Windling floats a fantasy of a past in which “the gates were shut, not open to all and sundry. And people could leave their doors unlocked,” other people at the breakfast table point out that the city was much poorer in the past, and that the dwarfs have brought economic prosperity (252). Their landlady is xenophobic but not prejudiced about ethnic others. She shares Sacharissa’s concerns about respectability, but Sacharissa herself is relatively free of prejudice. As in America and England and other places on the Earth, there is always the possibility of systemic racism in Ankh-​Morpork and other regions of the Discworld, and there is also always the possibility that people can be loving to others. Since Otto Chriek is a vampire, he confronts racism from the dwarfs as well as from humans. Having more recently come from Uberwald, the original home of dwarfs, vampires, and werewolves, among others, vampires are loathed by many people in Ankh-​Morpork, dwarfs among them; in Uberwald, vampires eat dwarfs and other people. Although Otto has sworn off eating people-​ flesh, many express their fear and hatred of him, and of vampires generally in the novel, including Vimes and Goodmountain. In Otto’s position as a member of possibly the least favorite ethnic group, he can see more about how prejudice works than most of the other characters. This is a point Pratchett makes creatively, which connects him to antiracist thinkers over time, from Frantz Fanon

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The Truth  93 to Ta-​Nehisi Coates.14 Otto knows that, as much as he denies it, William retains some of the prejudiced ideas his father tried to instill. Otto goes to save William from his father because he cares for him; as he says about William, “he was not brought up nice but he tries to be a nice person” (389). In the fight with Lord de Worde and his men, Otto is an easy match for all of them, even just fighting with his fists, but as William has said earlier, they are without honor. One of the men tries to club him, and William’s father uses a sword against Otto’s fists. Even though he could kill the lot of these thugs, and even though Lord de Worde calls him an “it,” Otto holds back at William’s request, kissing de Worde instead of killing him. Otto says to William’s father, “Ve have people like you back home . . . Zey are the ones that tell the mob vot to do . . . Always zere are damn people like you!” (400). The mob has already killed one of Otto’s friends, even though that friend showed them the black ribbon that proved that he had sworn off hurting people (369). The picture of prejudice Pratchett paints in The Truth is attentive to both the complexity of prejudice and of people. It is also clear about possible relationships between prejudice and class. What the novel shows about this relationship is often obfuscated in the real world and in representation. Prejudice has often been represented as more prevalent in the working classes. The Truth shows prejudice evenly distributed across classes. It also shows that it can be more easily weaponized by the wealthy in many ways. The aristocrats can engineer political change to protect their power and to attack ethnic others. They can also present their prejudice to many people as the truth in order to set mobs on people. This is easily seen in America today (2022) in Fox News programming. Pratchett knows that people in mobs lose their minds, morals, and boundaries. The narrator calls a mob “the invisible beast” (138). This is ancient knowledge although it appears to still surprise some. The novel adds to this knowledge by explaining that often the rich and powerful are the ones who “tell the mob” what to do; thus their prejudice is more dangerous. This would be real news for the audiences of Fox News who are continually treated to news about mobs of black people as if these mobs are the biggest danger to the country, when the prejudices their programming encourages cause real danger to democracy.

The Truth After the fire, William, by listening to the recorder (Disorganizer) that he takes off Mr. Pin’s body, finds out that his father has directed the conspiracy against Vetinari and the city. Pin had known that he couldn’t trust the rich men who hired him, and he had started recording conversations with their lawyer for his own protection. (Their fundamental untrustworthiness is another indication that they lack honor.) William has the imp inside the Disorganizer play back what Pin had recorded, and he recognizes his father’s favorite doctrine, “a lie can run around the world

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94  The Truth before the truth has got its boots on” (375). Readers hear this doctrine again and again in the book. As well as reminding William of his father, it links William and his father. William has long been convinced by the way his newsletter subscribers believed silly tales that his father is right, and he uses the doctrine himself (133, 143). But whereas this idea about truth motivates William to pursue and disseminate truth, Lord de Worde delights in the power of lies and the gullibility of people (386). That gullibility ensures that the de Worde family will retain and increase their power and wealth. The novel itself takes a more complex position on truth than either William or his father. Because the novel examines truth in relation to fallible journalism made by fallible humans, it cannot present human truth as a viable, attainable goal, but it also doesn’t see the idea of truth as a laughable chimera. In addition to showing that even real journalism can never reach truth entirely, the novel shows that truth is beyond people’s capacity altogether. This is a significant insight that could serve to humble humans who deeply need humility.15 One way that the novel conveys this message is through what some may see as a blasphemous joke. The Discworld is a pagan world with many amusing gods and goddesses, including Errata, the goddess of misunderstandings, and Anoia, the goddess of things that get stuck in drawers, but there is a specific Christian reference in this novel. It appears when Sacharissa has a creative idea for the second edition of the newspaper. She “shyly” shows Willliam the design she made for the paper’s masthead. In an allusion to the masthead of the London Times which has both an engraved picture of a lion and a unicorn and the motto of the British Royal family, Dieu et mon Droit (God and my right), the masthead that Sacharissa has designed has engraved flourishes and a moto: “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YE FREE.” William responds to the design by mistaking the grapes that Sacharissa has engraved for cherries and asking, “What’s the quote from? It’s very meaningful without, er meaning anything very much.” Sacharissa says that she thinks “it’s just a quote” (117). It is actually a quotation from the King James Bible, John 8.32, which may be meaningless apart from its context. Pratchett might have given Sacharissa this choice of quotation because it works well to make his humorous and significant point about typos as well as related points about truth. Even dwarfs, who romanticize less than humans, make mistakes. Just as the dwarfs have set “fifty-​six” mistakenly when the copy said, “five or six,” they miss-​set the type in the quotation on the masthead of the issue which first reports on Vetinari’s arrest. The dwarfs print “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YE FRET” (171). Additionally, the newspaper carrying the news about the police looking for Wuffles has the miss-​set masthead quotation “THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YE FRED” (225). And, when the printing press is burning in the fire that that traps Tulip with Pin, the narrator says, “[f]‌or a moment the words themselves floated on the melting metal, innocent words like ‘the’ and ‘Truth’ and ‘shall make ye fere,’ and then they were lost” (354).

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The Truth  95 “Fred” is an obvious joke in that it can’t be or become the truth about you unless you are named Fred. If “fere” is to be read as its homonym, “fear,” then the other two printing mistakes “fret” and “fear” are reasonable emotional reactions to the truth, at least to the actual truth of the criminal conspiracy which is both worryingly confusing for the Watch and for William and terrifying due to the criminality of the perpetrators. However, they are not reactions to any higher truth, and “Truth” is not an innocent word on the level of the article “the.” However, as well as telling some kind of untruth or truth about the novel’s events, the typos do speak to a larger truth, which is that making mistakes is the condition of all people. Even dwarfs, relatively precise people who can engineer and build almost everything, will make mistakes. There is no perfection among people. Perhaps this is why Pratchett, not Sacharissa, has chosen this quotation from John. In its biblical context, the truth being referred to is not human truth, it is the truth of God. In a couple of places, the novel appears to address this kind of metaphysical truth. Otto is experimenting with a photographic technique that uses dark light produced by land eels from Uberwald. The eels and the dark light they produce are very dangerous, and if they do reveal a kind of truth, it is distinctly not innocent. Goodmountain and the other dwarfs react with fury to Otto messing around with land eels. A picture of William taken with their dark light shows his father in the background even though he was not present when the picture was taken. Having his picture taken with the dark light causes Pin to see and feel the people he has ruthlessly killed following him everywhere. Otto explains the action of this technique, saying, “[d]‌ark light reveals zer truth to the dark eyes of zer mind,” explaining further that “[p]hilosophically, the truth can be vot is metaphorically there” (287). Earlier in the book, Otto explains that the eels can take pictures of the future as well as of the past (216). This is a metaphysical, superhuman truth, seeing what is real in people’s minds that they cannot see and seeing the future. The novel represents another metaphysical truth when Tulip, who has been killed by Pin, speaks with Death, who explains the significance of the ordinary people he has killed by showing him their lives. The narrator comments that “[l]ies did not survive long out here,” that is, after death (360). It is only in realms not accessible to people that the truth can be found. In contrast, people alive on Earth are utterly confused by and about actual truth, even the truth of events, and journalism will never completely reach it. These are truths that the novel teaches. People often uncritically believe what they read, as William finds out as journalism develops: “if it was in the paper, it was news. If it was news it went in the paper, and if it was in the paper it was news. And it was the truth” (125). William already knew that cops have trouble recognizing the truth. He tells Otto that he can potentially fool Detritus with the truth: “He’s a policeman. The truth usually confuses them. They don’t often hear it” (138). As Vimes responds when Angua says there is a goddess of truth,

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96  The Truth “can’t have many followers, then” (176). Pratchett gives the proprietor of the Inquirer, Mr. Carney, the cynical argument about freedom that may be a logic behind the work of today’s many providers of fake news. When caught, Dibbler defends his creative fake news to William and Sacharissa, saying, “[t]‌hat way people can make up their own minds.” “That’s what Mr. Carney says. People should be allowed to choose, he said” (316). This could be seen as a justification for the peddling of untruths to the public by such real people as Tucker Carlson, or perhaps I am being generous in believing such people are able to sleep at night without justifying their deeds. Although Pratchett loves real journalism, he also knows that it is a format for temporary truth, if that. After listening to his father on the Disorganizer and hearing Sacharissa’s story about what she saw when the kidnappers found her in William’s father’s house, William pieces together an account of what happened when Pin and Tulip enacted the plot to replace Vetinari. He feverishly dictates the story to Goodmountain, who sets the story and runs off a copy for William and Sacharissa to look at. This prompts a conversation about truth: “Are you sure of all this, William?” she said.

“Yes.” “I mean, some bits—​are you sure it’s all true?” “I’m sure it’s all journalism,” said William. “And what is that supposed to mean?” “It means it’s true enough for now.”

(384)

This reminder that journalism is a creative art, not making fiction unless it is fake news, but making stories, and that journalism does not last long is significant enough that Pratchett repeats it. At the very end of the novel, Sacharissa responds to her own romantic story about William by saying, “Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow” (434). Newspapers have a go at the truth, but they often need to correct their stories, and their stories are always partial because there is not enough time to make complete stories when the paper must be published daily. In the first conversation where this idea comes up, Sacharissa calls “newspaper stuff . . . words that last for a day. Maybe a week,” and she also says, “[w]‌hat did you expect? These aren’t books, they’re . . . words that come and go” (365). It is accidental, but also telling, that in my copy of The Truth there is a typo in a significant description. The word printed is “gone” and it seems as if the word should be “got.”16 Books, it appears, are not necessarily better records of the truth than newspapers even if they are more substantial and less likely, in the twenty-​first century, to end up as toilet paper or wrapping paper.17

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The Truth  97 What The Truth says about the perpetuity of newspapers and their accuracy, like what the novel says about the necessity of local news, is relevant on many levels to the related communications situation people in the US and England are in today (2022). What has replaced local news in newspapers, newsfeeds on the internet, act against local connections. Fake news has proliferated in ways that make tabloids seem almost quaint. The newer technology lets stupid and hateful language linger in ways that hurt all kinds of people, not just celebrities, but also very young people who have no understanding that what they say online will haunt them forever. The internet is not the newspaper, but it has become a platform on which newspapers are posted and with which newspapers must continually interact. But the internet has failed already as an archive of newspapers and of knowledge, despite the efforts of such people as Adrienne LaFrance, Jill Lepore, and Jonathan Zittrain, what the internet has produced are “actual holes in human knowledge.”18 Newspaper stories, which used to be archived in libraries, are lost forever due to eroding links. The Truth thinks creatively about the origin of journalism. It also fights against fake news while simultaneously explaining its appeal. As Pratchett shows, humans are easily fooled, malicious, stupid, and at the same time individual lives and their stories are infinitely valuable. Acknowledgment of these truths would go a long way to helping humans live together in peace.

Notes 1 Latour defines actant in many places. For a cogent definition, see Michel Callon and Bruno Latour 356. 2 See “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 223. 3 See Michael Pollan on fake food, particularly Food Rules: An Eaters Manual. This book appears in many versions. The most beautiful and compelling is illustrated by Maira Kalman. 4 Elaine Godfrey. “What We Lost When Gannet Came to Town.” All subsequent quotations from Godfrey are from this article. Godfrey explains that the takeover was not due to the Hawk Eye’s financial difficulties. Another article published by The Atlantic about the hedge fund Alden Global Capital makes the same point. Taken together, the articles make suspect the assumption that local newspapers are dying because they are not financially feasible. Instead, it seems as if monopoly capitalism is destroying the local news business. Going Postal makes this seem almost predictable. See McKay Coppins. 5 This novel explicitly states this interest. When Death meets Mr. Tulip, who has killed many people, he shows him the lives of those people. Death says that what he is showing is “JUST LIVES. NOT ALL MASTERPIECES, OBVIOUSLY, OFTEN RATHER NAIF IN THEIR USE OF EMOTION AND ACTION, BUT NEVERTHELESS FULL OF INTEREST AND SURPRISE AND EACH IN ITS OWN WAY, A WORK OF SOME GENIUS” (360–​1). 6 This is both still true and deeply threatened in 2021. See Coppins. Coppins sounds as if he is summarizing this aspect of the novel: “Take away the

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98  The Truth newsroom packed with meddling reporters, and the city loses a crucial layer of accountability.” 7 On the Watergate allusions in the book, see Rayment 23–​44. Rayment also discusses the way the novel satirizes tabloids. 8 John Berger. Why Look at Animals? 10. 9 On the critique of prejudice throughout the City Watch novels, see Edward James. Also, see Mel Gibson. 10 There is a very funny moment earlier in the novel that also contributes to this effort of Pratchett’s. The crew are discussing whether they should take the job of hawking the papers. The Duck Man says, “We could live like kings on a dollar a day, Arnold.” Arnold says, “What, you mean someone’d chop our heads off?” Then, he says, “Someone’d climb up inside the privy with a read-​ hot poker and—​” Finally, he tries, “Someone’d drown us in a butt of wine?” The Duck Man points out, “No, that’s dying like kings, Arnold” (67). This moment in which the novel refuses to romanticize monarchy can be usefully compared to the moment in Only You Can Save Mankind in which Johnny deromanticizes dreams (see the Introduction). 11 Pratchett refers to this expectation in Feet of Clay (145). 12 We see this prior world in action in the Pratchett novel Night Watch. 13 For an introduction to the idea of racial “code words,” see Michael Omi and Howard Winant. 14 See Frantz Fanon and Ta-​Nehisi Coates. The most recent pithy statement of this proof that I have read is Danzy Senna’s saying, “to be black in America is to hold a PhD in whiteness whether you want to or not.” 15 It would be especially helpful if the major technologists in this world, especially the ones who are building spacecraft—​Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson—​would find some humility. Humility is deeply related to acceptance of death just as human grandiosity is deeply related to denial of death. See Richard Powers interviewed by Ezra Klein on this issue and the relation between it and preserving the planet. 16 273. There is also an amusing typo in my copy of Feet of Clay. On page 188 the head of the Butcher’s Guild, whose last name is Sock, is called “Sick.” That book is especially badly edited. On page 271 “prisoners” is printed when the word should be “poisoners.” 17 This was not the condition of books in the English Renaissance. Books were sold as loose quires of paper. See Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass. See also the great poem by Ben Jonson “Inviting a Friend to Supper.” 18 Jonathan Zittrain. This problem is especially serious for scholarship. Unfortunately, doing work on contemporary literature, especially, forces me to use links instead of books and articles which appear in print as well as online. All scholars now need to be more conscious that their work, instead of contributing to knowledge, may disappear due to the internet.

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4  Feet of Clay Work and Workers

Feet of Clay (1996) is structured like a police procedural and includes a murder mystery and another conspiracy against Vetinari that Vimes must expose. Policing is important in the book, but I will argue in this chapter that the novel is primarily interested in work and the rights and predicaments of workers, as well as in how people are devalued by their desire to be ruled.1 The book’s title is a phrase derived from the biblical Book of Daniel where it refers to the weakness in a worshipped king. “Feet of clay” has come to mean weakness in anyone admired. In the book, it also refers to golems who are made of clay, like Adam who was made by God from the dust of the Earth, at least in the second creation story in Genesis. The likeness between golems and people is central in this book. Golems are creatures with a complicated Talmudic and Midrashic history, including the ideas that they are shaped from clay, that they’re massive, that they can’t speak, and that they may be prior forms of Adam, or other humans who have not reached their full potential.2 In the seventeenth century, the idea that golems might have words attached to their foreheads which govern their behavior entered the tradition.3 In Feet of Clay golems are powered by words inserted in their foreheads by their makers; they can’t speak, but they can write words on a slate; and their primary function is to work. Because they are clay, and not flesh, they can work endlessly. Their primary identity as workers and their voicelessness become crucial in this novel. Made in ancient times by humans, the Discworld’s golems have been instructed by their words never to harm a human. Even though they protect and work tirelessly for humans, they are demonized in Ankh-​ Morpork. Thus, the novel critiques prejudice like The Truth does. Feet of Clay explores their demonization, but it focuses on their work conditions, especially under exploitive employers. These employers share with many other people a profound inability to see their golems as people. In a central scene in the book, one of those employers, Mr. Catterail, orders Vimes into his low-​wage textile factory to arrest a golem named Dorfl for smashing up the factory’s engine, a treadmill worked by other golems. Vimes looks out at Catterail’s oppressed underpaid human workers and treadmill golems and understands, finally, that golems’ position as DOI: 10.4324/9781003372813-5

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100  Feet of Clay workers requires them to be considered as people. In the scene, after Catterail has complained bitterly about the golem’s actions, Vimes says, “mildly,” that a “lot of people use oxen in their treadmill,” rather than golems. Catterail doesn’t understand what Vimes is saying: “What’s that got to do with it?,” he says, “Anyway, cattle can’t keep going twenty-​four hours a day” (301). He can’t understand golems or cattle as anything but machinery toward his own profit. Catterail’s reply that oxen can’t work endlessly shows that nonhuman animals are also workers whose boundaries must be respected. Catterail’s disrespect for oxen, assessing them only as lesser machinery is a red flag indicating the actual worth of livestock, another of the novel’s concerns. One major policing problem in the book derives from the fact that the golems in Ankh-​Morpork are sick of their working conditions and want rest and freedom. Paradoxically, their desire to be free leads them to create a king. In their quest not to be abused, the golems create a king golem themselves, a perfect clay model with a crown, who, tellingly, looks “like a human, or at least like humans wished they could look” (305). The conspiracy plot is linked to the golems’ creation because another exploitative employer, Mr. Carry, has employed that golem in his candle factory, which is making candles laced with arsenic, candles that are being used in the plot by city aristocrats and bosses to slowly poison Vetinari. Like their position as workers, the golems’ perfect creation of another golem links them to humans and human creation. He is both their child and their king, in whom they have invested all their dreams. Their dreams are human dreams, and Pratchett shows that their quest to have a child or a king to fulfill their dreams is quintessentially human as well as well as fatally flawed. Not only are the golems’ dreams impossible, they are also deeply destructive to their creation. The golem made by golems goes mad and becomes a killer, just as humans sometimes become killers even when they are also supposed to obey the words that are in all golems’ heads: THOU SHALT NOT KILL! The police procedural structure of the novel begins with the murders of two old men who have helped the golems make their child/​king: Mr. Hopkinson, a historian and baker of dwarf bread, and Father Tubelcek, a priest. Vimes’s pursuit of their murderer helps Pratchett to make another significant point related in the novel to work: that all peoples’ lives matter, not just the lives of aristocrats and kings. The issues addressed in Feet of Clay are vitally important in our world. Once again, the Discworld is not exactly contemporary England or America, but it is flawed in ways that significantly reflect, and let us reflect on, situations there and in other parts of the world. The issue of work and workers remains vital to equity and peace today, in that workers in places akin to Catterail’s nasty factory make goods consumed by people in England and America; and their poor pay and working conditions remain far from consideration by many people.4 Work is at the center of most current injustice, as it has been at the center of injustice and fights for justice throughout history. Some exorbitantly wealthy

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Feet of Clay  101 Americans, such as Jeff Bezos, the Koch brothers, and the Walton family, who control large segments of the economy, are fighting unions just as earlier members of the ruling class did; and they continue to outsource work across the world in a desire for higher profits. Pratchett’s novel encourages us to think about how bankrupt that desire can be. In addition, the chattel slave system, a labor system which linked the world globally as early as the seventeenth century, still affects the race situation in America. As Yvonne Holden says about the historical links between slave labor in the Americas and burgeoning appetites, “in Europe, once the appetite for sugar and chocolate and coffee and cheap textiles and all these things started flooding the market, and people [could] finally buy into this larger system of capitalism and consumption”; it was the free, enforced labor of slaves that supported this consumption.5 Thus work and workers remain at the heart of inequity today. In their status as not actual humans, but creatures made of clay, the Discworld’s golems are a fascinating mirror for consideration of workers and working conditions. They are also connected to the Earth, like people and other animals, who will become clay. Although there are many employers today (2022) who care about their workers, many significant large workplaces continue to value gigantic profits over people. The golem situations in the book display the sick logic behind this valuation. In Feet of Clay, as I will show, they also raise for consideration the way people treat other animals and other people, related concerns. In addition, the novel, like the other novels examined in this book, takes a close look at the fallibility of humans, especially in our deep, unconscious, as well as conscious, desire to be led. The novel explores the fundamental contradictions in the human desire for masters. The Discworld’s golems in this book also help Pratchett explore how freedom is related to voice. These are more reasons why close attention to Terry Pratchett might help to save the world.

What Are People Worth? Perhaps the Discworld golems have “THOU SHALT NOT KILL” in their heads because it is one of the commandments in the Torah for the Jewish people. Ancient morals declare that all people’s lives are precious, no matter their class, status, race, or gender.6 This is constantly forgotten in the Discworld as it is all over the Earth by humans. In many ways, Feet of Clay shows how vicious this forgetting is. As a policeman, one of Vimes’s jobs is keeping all people, regardless of their status or moral condition, from being killed by other people (127). However, he also knows how a system based on profit alone has an alternative, dastardly logic. When he finds out that Vetinari is being slowly poisoned, he summons a racehorse doctor to care for him. Nobody understands this choice, and when Colon questions him, he explains that “[h]‌orse doctors have to get results.” In free indirect discourse, the narrator elaborates, explaining that human doctors are not liable for their patients’ deaths, “because

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102  Feet of Clay human beings are not, technically, worth anything. A good racehorse, on the other hand, may be worth twenty thousand dollars” (71). In litigious America, it may not be true that lives don’t have monetary value, but it is certainly true that there is a relative value system on human lives, and that, often, other kinds of life, like racehorses, and even things like property, are valued more highly monetarily than a human’s life.7 The novel reiterates the point about the relative valuation of human life in relation to the old men who have been murdered. Vimes thinks, “[n]o one would care if the Watch didn’t care. Two old men, murdered on the same day. Nothing stolen” (127). If the murders had included robbery, the stolen things would have value; as is, the old men can be considered worthless. But for the Watch as Vimes has reorganized it, this is just as much a murder case as any murder of a toff. Vetinari’s slow poisoning becomes a murder case for the police when the arsenic-​laden candles that are poisoning him kill Flora, the grandmother of Vetinari’s housemaid Mildred Easy, and Mildred’s little brother. These deaths are significant in the novel, and in themselves, because they make Vimes and Pratchett’s point about the preciousness of all people’s lives and, also, emphasize how villainous people are who don’t get that point. When Carrot and Angua come to arrest the candlemaker, Carry, he begins to panic after Carrot says, “the candles killed two other people”; but when Carry finds out that they were “[a]‌n old lady and a baby in Cockbill Street,” his response is a disparaging, “[w]ere they important?” (310). This is the man who originally bought the child/​king golem from the other golems, despite his knowledge that priests have outlawed making new golems, and who excused his purchase with a homonymic adage, “what do prophets know about profits” (3). He, like others, assesses value on the basis of social or economic status. The novel’s ultimate villain is a vampire whose job as a herald means that he assesses peoples’ value by their lineage and records that value in stud books and coats of arms; he is called Dragon King of Arms. When Vimes goes to arrest him, he charges him with “complicity in the murders of Mrs. Flora Easy and the child William Easy.” Dragon replies, “I am afraid those names mean nothing to me” (329). Vimes’s reply, “They probably don’t,” is loaded with his contempt for a man who values no one who is not in the peerage. The novel, though, is especially important because it shows that it is not only the villainous who have trouble understanding or remembering that other peoples’ lives, regardless of who they are, are as significant as their own; many other not villainous people share this trouble. (This may be why the commandment not to kill is so prominent in the Bible and why the Torah is simultaneously so full of stories of people forgetting that commandment.) One of the ways the novel makes this point is in a conversation between Vimes and Carrot: “People are dead, Captain! Mrs. Easy’s dead!” “Who sir?”

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Feet of Clay  103 “You’ve never heard of her?” “Can’t say that I have, sir. What did she used to do?” “Do? Nothing I suppose. She just brought up nine kids in a couple of rooms you couldn’t stretch out in and she sewed shirts for tuppence an hour, every hour the bloody gods sent, and all she did was work and keep herself to herself and she is dead, Captain. And so’s her grandson. Aged fourteen months. Because her granddaughter took them some grub from the palace! A bit of treat for them! And d’you know what? Mildred thought I was going to arrest her for theft! At the damn funeral, for god’s sake!” “It’s murder now.” (219–​20) Although, in itself, this conversation makes the point about the value of ordinary people, in the context of the Watch series of novels, including Men at Arms, the conversation is particularly weighty. Carrot loves people despite their faults, and he knows most people in Ankh-​Morpork. He is also the actual heir to Ankh-​Morpork’s throne but is totally uninterested in ruling over others. Almost impossibly, he has immense charisma, but no desire for power. Although he was raised by a dwarf and can instruct Vimes about how dwarves think, in this conversation, readers see that Carrot has come to adopt a bit of human nonsense in relation to peoples’ value. Vimes, a much more flawed person than Carrot, needs to tell him that Mrs. Easy’s life is significant not because of her employment situation in the world—​the value system referred to in Carrot’s question, “What did she used to do?” Vimes is the one who understands that she mattered, and her death matters, no matter what. Significantly, the novel also makes the point here that the ends of candles that the housemaid Mildred brought home as a workers’ illegal perk do not matter at all in relation to her grandmother’s life and poorly paid, or unpaid, copious work raising children in tight, uncomfortable spaces. Vimes’s own life has taught him the lesson about all lives mattering, and he can teach it to Carrot, who catches on quick, and who in turn can teach him what he has trouble with: that golems, dwarves, zombies, and others are people too. Brought up as a poor commoner, Vimes knows that many people work very hard and are devalued, perhaps especially women, who, as he says, can be conceived of as doing “nothing,” even though they are doing everything. The lesson about Mrs. Easy’s work is a feminist lesson. As Judith Shulevitz says, “[f]‌eminist economics has taught us that the domestic sphere” has “floated above the sordid dominion of the dollar only because it relied on the free labor” of women.8 “Sordid dominion” appears to be sarcasm aimed at those who may idealize the realm of the domestic but refuse to pay highly, or at all, for work in it. Shulevitz reminds us of one of the most important insights of feminism, which, sadly, keeps being thought, expressed, and then, even when considered, forgotten: that caring work, traditionally mostly the work of women, is vital to the world, literally keeping the human world

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104  Feet of Clay alive, and should be highly valued, but is often devalued. This insight is all important and is also apparently extremely hard for many people to hang on to. Pratchett, though, is not forgetful and, through Vimes, makes readers aware of the significance of “those who” clean “the mud off” other peoples’ boots (6). Vimes’s early life and his experience jumping class through marriage make him very sensitive to workers who care for him and his house. He finds it difficult to be excluded from these workers’ lives. Pratchett reminds us of these workers’ functions by describing them through the narrator’s account of what Vimes sees when he goes into the lighted kitchen of the huge house he has married into, drawn there by “conversation and laughter”: he sees his butler “with the old man who stoked the boiler, and the head gardener, and the boy who cleaned the spoons and lit the fires” (6–​7). Within this novel named partly for unpaid, tireless workers, Vimes’s look at these people—​who keep his house warm, his gardens under control and productive, and his spoons clean so that he can eat without getting sick—​is a reminder that, as Shulevitz says, if someone is not working in these ways, “our bodies” and “our houses . . . . spiral toward disorder and decay.”9 When Adam Smith published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in 1779, he classifies the work of “menial servants” as “unproductive” in that, unlike the labor of manufacturers, their services disappear rather than adding value to goods or currency. “Menial” once had the obsolete neutral meaning “relating to the household, domestic” (OED “menial” A.1.). When Smith used the word, it did not yet have the solely “disparaging implication” it was to take on in the nineteenth century, and Smith is careful to say that servants’ work is significant and “deserves its reward” as much as manufacturers’ work; he also links servants’ unproductive work to the unproductive work of churchmen, lawyers, and writers.10 But since the eighteenth century, as the bulk of household maintenance work in England and America has devolved on women, it has been removed almost entirely from the marketplace, as Shulevitz notes, and when in the marketplace, it is severely devalued. In Vimes’s lesson for Carrot and his insight into his household, Pratchett’s mash-​up Medieval-​Victorian Discworld offers an alternative vision of the worth of people who care for other people. However, the novel is careful not to idealize or romanticize its common workers in ways that remove them from human fallibility. Thus, it, once again, resists the mistake of some classic SF, which assigns perfection and perfectibility to one group of people or aliens, to the intelligentsia, or even to robots. To assign perfection to common people is as severe a mistake about people in general as assigning it to another group. As Vimes says, “[t]‌ he common people?” “They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or

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Feet of Clay  105 power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I’ve got to be on their side.” (331–​2) Earlier in the novel, thinking about the old men who have been murdered, he reflects on how people often romanticize the dead: “People would probably say they had lived blameless lives.” And he also thinks about how ridiculous that romanticization is, but that leads his mind to the idea that blameless or not, “[y]‌ou had to be on the side of underdogs because they weren’t overdogs” (127). He has also told Carrot, “just because someone’s a member of an ethnic minority doesn’t mean they’re not a nasty small-​minded little jerk” (273). Vimes is speaking for the novel here, which argues throughout that no people are worth more or are essentially purer than other people, but as importantly, that no people are worth less than other people.11 The novel does not romanticize the poor, the rich, or the police, but it does argue for the lives of everyone, including golems.

What Are Golems Worth? When Vimes explains to Carrot that all Mrs. Easy did “was work and keep herself to herself,” it seems that he is unconsciously echoing what Carrot has just told him about how people are attacking and murdering golems. Dorfl has falsely confessed to murdering the old men, which “inspires” myriad human crimes against any golem they see. Carrot says, “It’s as if people were . . . . just waiting for the opportunity. It’s odd sir. All [golems] do is work and keep themselves to themselves and don’t offer any harm to anyone” (218). Raised by dwarves, Carrot can’t understand why so many humans and other people including Angua hate Golems. To him, the way humans interact with golems is often brutal and is also completely inconsistent. And it is. Employers in the book desire golems because they work without rest. Even the priests of Ankh-​Morpork accept them because, as Carrot says earlier, “they’re so useful. Some are walled up or in treadmills or at the bottom of shafts. Doing messy tasks, you know in places where it’s dangerous to go. They do all the really mucky jobs” (147). Golems should be exceptionally valuable, and since they haven’t been made since ancient times, they cost a lot, but they are also hated and treated poorly. Golems work incredibly hard for people and, on the one hand, employers treat them like machines but, on the other hand, they abuse them as if they were people. The head of the Butcher’s Guild, Mr. Sock, who owns the slaughterhouse that employs Dorfl, objects to Angua asking for him using an honorific, repeating her “Mr. Dorfl” with sarcastic italics: “Mr. Dorfl?” (109). Sock orders Dorfl around without any honorific, and his behavior when Angua is there indicates that he is accustomed to scolding and threatening him (111). Sock also curses at him, calling him “Dorfl, you damn stupid lump!” (117). At the same

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106  Feet of Clay moment, he wants to refuse Dorfl’s request for a night off because “[t]‌he bacon slicer never asks for time off” (117). This is deeply logically inconsistent behavior (also deeply human), since threats, curses, and scolding have never made a bacon slicer or any other machine work better or worse, even though many people, including myself, occasionally address them as if they were animated. After Dorfl is attacked by a mob, Sock calls him “that” and won’t take him back. However, when Carrot offers to buy Dorfl in order to free him, Sock says, “[i]t was worth $530 when I bought it, but of course it’s got additional skills now” (253). This is patently outrageous since Sock was trying to rid himself completely of Dorfl for nothing. Dorfl, himself, has just given the mob this self-​valuation when they are trying to hammer him to death. He won’t hurt the men attacking him, even though he could easily kill them; but, in an effort to save his life, he holds a slate up on which he has “written: I AM WORTH 530 DOLLARS.” One of the men says, in reply, “[m]‌oney? . . . . That’s all you things think about!” which is a sick joke on all kinds of levels, one of which is that if Dorfl were a thing, he couldn’t think (250). Carrot says to the man “[m]oney is all you can think about when all you have is a price,” but the novel is showing something else about people as well. Money is generally all that people who employ the golems think about. From the beginning of the book, readers see that golems don’t care much about money. When they sell their child/​king to Carry, who like most of the businessmen in the book strikes a hard and nasty bargain, the golems give the money they have gotten from him to a beggar (3). People are the ones who often only think about money. Employers buy golems and work them relentlessly to make as much profit as possible, and they take golems’ relentless work for granted.12 As Catterail’s factory indicates, those same people will do this to other people in their relentless pursuit of profit. Vimes looks at the “worried” faces of the poor workers in Catterail’s factory and does not respond well to Catterail’s defensive comment, “[p]eople are jolly glad to get the work!” (301). These people don’t seem glad at all. In addition, regular people who don’t employ golems randomly hate them. Vimes thinks, momentarily, about why regular people are so scared of golems even when golems will never harm them: “[g]‌iven how we use them, maybe we’re scared because we know we deserve it” (141). This insight is probably more persuasive than the reasons other people give for their animus. One hammer-​bearing mob participant kicks Dorfl when he is crouched on the ground and says to Carrot, “you can’t trust ‘em’ ” (251). This is when he is obviously trusting the golem not to destroy him in response since the golem outweighs and outpowers him. The untrustworthy nature and stupidity of golems is common “knowledge” in Ankh-​ Morpork. Talking with Dragon King of Arms, Carry says, “Trust dumb golems not to do something prop-​,” and Dragon, who despises Carry as well as other humans, interrupts him, saying, “[e]veryone knows you can’t trust golems” (242). Another mob has gone after Dorfl with hammers and

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Feet of Clay  107 crowbars, but one of their members accuses him of the attack, calling him “[v]icious bugger” and saying, “you know what they’re like,” but that guy in the mob gives himself away when he explains, “[e]veryone knows they’re not allowed to fight back!” (292–​3). The novel is showing us not that you can’t trust golems, but that you can trust some people to kick people when they’re down and that you can trust mobs to act viciously and attack defenseless people. Given how people treat other people, it is hardly surprising that people treat golems as badly as they do. Since it’s clear from Pratchett’s novels Lords and Ladies and Wyrd Sisters that he has read Shakespeare closely, he must have known that Shakespeare teaches the same lesson about mobs in Julius Caesar. Evidently, it is a lesson that must be taught over and over to silly people who can’t seem to remember it and, so, often form mobs or let themselves be used by those who organize mobs. All the common knowledge about golems is shown to be false in the novel. As relentless workers, they are worth an enormous amount to employers and even to the city as a whole since by doing the “mucky jobs,” they are likely contributing to the common good. But the common knowledge about them is as extensive as it is wrong. Even the homeless crew, who appear only once in this novel, parrot the common hatred. One of them says, “I hate bloody golems, takin’ our jobs,” despite the fact that the crew isn’t interested in work (166). Colon tells Carrot, “You can’t trust golems, my dad used to say . . . . Turn on you soon as look at you, he said” (135). Vimes is as susceptible to this body of lies as the homeless crew and the rest of the city. Just as Vimes can teach Carrot about the worth of ordinary people, Carrot can teach Vimes the facts about golems. He says to Vimes, “I’ve checked up all the records I can find and I don’t think a golem has ever attacked anyone. Or committed any kind of crime.” Before he can stop himself, Vimes says, “[o]‌h, come on . . . . Everyone knows” (139). It will take Vimes the rest of the novel to get to where Carrot is on the actuality of the ancient golems in the book. But what he will get to is what the book is teaching about golems and work. When he tells Vetinari at the end of the book that he is going to hire Dorfl, the Patrician asks him “[w]hat will you use the golem for?” and he replies, “Not use, sir. Employ. I thought he might be useful for to keep the peace, sir” (344). Golems are useful almost everywhere, but Vimes comes to the truths that they must be treated as employees and treated better than many employers in Ankh-​Morpork treat their human employees and other people, who also deeply deserve better treatment.

Resistance and Solidarity at Work Unlike many of the golems created by writers since ancient times, the golems Pratchett creates are like people but are more perfect than people.13 Discworld golems don’t harm people even when people harm them, turning the other cheek much more effectively than the vast majority of

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108  Feet of Clay people; and their instinct is to actively save human life. We see in many of Pratchett’s novels that golems fight fires instinctively. In Feet of Clay Pratchett’s golems also feel each other’s feelings, forming a community that has more solidarity than many human communities, and a solidarity not founded on hatred of others. They won’t betray one another. They also have individuality: Dorfl is a budding intellectual with a love of nonhuman animals, and Zhlob, the prior golem at Carry’s candle factory, was plodding rather than efficient, as his punning name indicates (156). These golems think, feel, and create. Their feelings include complicated affects such as shame, grief, sorrow, and sadness. When they find out that their child/​king is guilty of the murders, they make the decision that Dorfl will sacrifice himself by drawing lots rather than by intimidation or fiat. This latter act of the collectivity of golems is immoral on one level, in that they are shielding a criminal, but it is an action based on love. They appear to be more capable of true, other-​serving love than many people in the world. Being made of Earth, it seems as if they might be less eager to destroy the Earth than many people are, but Pratchett, unlike some SF practitioners from the past and their earthly imitators, such as today’s space-​seeking billionaires, is not offering them as a robotic alternative to humans, but rather as a mirror of human tendencies. As Vimes understands in this book, golems and humans are alike. In an exchange that gets repeated in other Discworld novels, when Vetinari says about Dorfl, “he’s just made of clay, Vimes,” Vimes replies, “Aren’t we all, sir?” (344).14 The golems Pratchett creates in the novel have two fallibilities, both human: they screw up at work sometimes, and they want a king. For golems, both of these fallibilities are work-​related. The novel has immense sympathy for the first fallibility and little at all for the second, although it demonstrates a deep psychoanalytic understanding of the human tendency to give up freedom for being dominated. The golems’ first fallibility is defined as a fallibility by employers: it’s their tendency at times to continue to make things, to work to the point where the working is difficult to manage. This is a bit of accurate common knowledge about golems; it is what Preble Skink, the lumber merchant, refers to when he says, “[t]‌hey’re always doing dumb things” (184). Vimes tells this truth about golems to Carrot: “You hear lots of stories about them doing stupid things like making a thousand teapots or digging a hole five miles deep.”15 Carrot explains to Vimes that rather than being a crime, what the golems are doing when they overdo is just “ordinary rebellion”: “You know . . . . someone shouts at it ‘Go make teapots,’ so it does . . . . No one wants them to think, so they get their own back by not thinking” (140). This is difficult for Vimes to understand even though he practices the same kind of what James C. Scott calls “everyday resistance” with his own boss. When Vetinari dismisses him from the office abruptly one day, Vimes shuts “the door behind him, a little harder than necessary” (122). In their conversation about Dorfl, Vimes obstinately, but over-​politely,

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Feet of Clay  109 refuses an order, repeating the honoric “sir” as a mark of respect—​and simultaneous implicit critique of authoritarian control—​that enables him to tenaciously get his way. Even though Vimes can’t see that he practices the same kinds of strategies as the golems do, the book is quite dedicated to showing the righteousness and significance of, in Scott’s words, “the ordinary weapons of relatively powerless groups,” including, “dissimulation, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance” in their efforts “to defend” their “interests.”16 When Vimes encounters this kind of pilfering in his own plod toward the truth of the poisoning, he finally gets this point entirely about the resistance strategies of relatively powerless people in relation to their jobs. He and Mildred Easy have the following conversation about her taking food home from Vetinari’s palace where she is a maid: “Everyone does it!” “Yes, I know.” ... “Everyone takes a few things,” said Mildred Easy. “It’s not like stealing.” It is, thought Vimes treacherously, But I don’t give a damn.

(206)

Later, Vimes finally figures out that the arsenic hasn’t been implanted in food, but it is in the candles Vetinari burns for light in his room; speaking to Carrot, he calls the candle ends Mildred has brought home, “a servant’s little bonus too” (272). Questioning Mildred again, among the other domestic Palace servants, he tells her, “as kindly as possible,” “everyone takes small things from the place where they work. . . . No one thinks of it as stealing. It’s like . . . . rights” (281). What the novel is showing here, and in the case of the golems’ strategic overwork, is that inequities between workers and bosses and abuse of workers are responded to through these kinds of resistance. Although Vimes’s policeman self knows that Mildred is technically stealing, his sympathy as a former commoner tells him she has a right to take a bit of what she could never buy herself. The golems, deeply abused by their bosses, lie to them and overwork, acting out their resistance to abuse. Carrot gets this, and Vimes will figure it out, too. In this Discworld novel, and in others, golems stand for a system of morality that people in the novel (and in today’s world) give lip service to but often do not act in relation to, containing ideas such as “love your neighbor as yourself.” In Going Postal, Vetinari says, “Golems are highly moral creatures by nature” (24–​5). Their resistance to abuse in Feet of Clay is a way for Pratchett to highlight both the abusive choices of their employers and the ways in which those employers and other rich people in Ankh-​Morpork violate ancient human values, the fair treatment of workers, the valuing of people over profits. Scott’s book Weapons of the Weak analyzes the reactions peasant farmers in a region of Thailand had

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110  Feet of Clay to new farming practices and machinery that widened economic gaps in a way that challenged previous community values. In the final chapter of his book, Scott connects the resistance strategies these poor farmers practiced to similar responses to “development,” from the Levellers in the English Revolution to weavers and threshers in England responding to the introduction of machines that replaced workers. Scott says, “the defense and elaboration of a social contract that has been abrogated by capitalist development is perhaps the most constant ideological theme of the peasant and the early capitalist worker” (347). In Feet of Clay, readers learn that the economic situation of the Discworld has changed because Vetinari has allowed dwarves and trolls into the city (190). There is greater wealth now, but it isn’t shared throughout the city, and greedy employers may even have become greedier. Ankh-​Morpork has a highly competitive proto-​ capitalist economy that coexists with its mash-​ up Medieval-​Victorian social structure. Pratchett is not writing any kind of exact political or economic allegory; instead, he is launching his critique at the heart of the problem—​ pointing to the fact that ancient understandings of morality are abrogated when people value profits over people, and especially where this kind of valuation is celebrated or approved rather than condemned, since people have always behaved immorally. Because Dorfl is powered by the words in his head, when he finds Tubelcek, the priest, killed by the child/​king golem, he tries to revive him by putting words into him, into his mouth. The words he chooses are commandments, written in an ancient language. Constable Visit-​The-​Infidel-​With-​Explanatory-​Pamphlets, whom Vimes can barely stand to listen to, says about the commandments, [t]‌hese are some of the rules that their god allegedly gave to the first people after he baked them out of clay, sir. Rules like “thou shalt labor fruitfully all the days of your life,” sir and “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Thou shalt be humble.” That sort of thing. (107) Mildred and the other servants pilfer in reaction to the deep inequalities in the system they labor in. The inequalities in this system and the shift toward larger inequality in Ankh-​Morpork are visible in the scene where Vimes questions Mildred about the candle ends she has pilfered. Everyone in the scene, including Vimes, knows that richer people get to burn better-​quality candles for light, and poorer folks use what Vimes calls “damn’ near pork dripping” (283). Mildred’s grandma Flora and her little brother died because Mildred took the ends of the better candles, poisoned by Carry in his factory, which as Vimes says, has undercut his competitors “these days” (283). Carry is a winner in this increasing inequality. Pursuing profit obsessively, Carry has employed the child/​king golem who works so tirelessly and efficiently that Carry has fired all of his other workers and installed what Carrot recognizes as “a producing line.

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Feet of Clay  111 It’s a way of making thousands of things that are all the same” (307). In Carry’s workshop, the Fordist world has invaded. As Carrot sees it, the new technological idea is interesting, and it is, but the vicious owner in this case also makes it deeply exploitative. In the novel, this new world is represented by the vicious employers like Carry and Sock who are also among the guild leaders conspiring to replace Vetinari after the poisoning takes effect. As the discussion among them in a room of the palace called “the Rats Chamber” indicates, there is no solidarity among those leaders (187). In this case, Pratchett is using the human conception of rats, rather than the actuality of rats, who live in highly social ways. Vimes thinks of the conspirators as “a bunch of thugs” (331). They rudely insult one another, laugh scornfully at each other, interrupt each other; and despite their lack of care for one another, they are united in despising the idea of a democratic vote (187–​97, 191). This is in contrast to the solidarity among the palace servants seen in the questioning of Mildred. When Vimes asks her what else she has taken home to her family, she looks “at the suddenly blank expressions on the faces of the other servants” (281). On the evidence, all of them resist inequality, and none will accuse her of anything. This is like the solidarity of the golems who support one another completely. Scott calls this phenomenon “resistant mutuality.” He says, “[o]‌ne central question to ask about any subordinate class is the extent to which it can, by internal sanctions, prevent the dog-​eat-​dog competition among themselves that can only serve the interests of appropriating classes.”17 Both of these subordinate classes in the novel share a morality that forbids them to betray one another. This morality exists in Ankh-​Morpork, but it is challenged by greedy folks. At the ultracompetitive meeting of the city’s rulers and guild leaders, it is the lowest among them, Queen Molly of the Beggar’s Guild, who speaks for the city, raising the idea that Vimes who is a “servant of the city” may object to their plans. She laughs at Dr. Downey’s claim that “we represent the city,” and he, in turn, ignores her when she says, “ ‘[s]o this is the new way of things, is it?’ . . . . ‘Lot of ordinary man sit around a table and talk and suddenly the world’s a different place? The sheep turn round and charge the shepherd?’ ” (196–​7). Molly, who has survived the gun in Men at Arms is looking at a bunch of greedy people who deny ancient morality. She speaks in biblical and folkloric language. She knows that rather than representing the city, these people represent no one except their individual selves. In turn, she sends a warning to Vimes through Foul Ron and Gaspode (236). The novel implies that the conspirators deserve to be betrayed by the lowest among them whom they scorn.

Kings, Aristocracy, and Voice Those people are planning to replace Vetinari with a king. The other, real, fallibility of the golems in this novel is their own desire to have a

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112  Feet of Clay king whom they believe will free them from their abuse by exploitative people like the conspirators. What the golems want, Dorfl tells Carrot, is “RESPITE” (227). “Respite” is an old word with obsolete meanings related to “respect or regard” as well as currently alive meanings of “a rest” or a “break” (OED n. II 6, I 2a.). It seems as if Dorfl may mean both rest and respect from the ways readers see people like Sock, Catterail, and Carry treat golems without respect. Although the golems and the conspirators have wildly different goals, they share a desire for a king. Trying to reason his way to a solution to the old men’s murders, Vimes thinks about the golems, “[t]‌hey’d put part of their own selves into a new golem.” His next thought is, “[d]amn hulking things. Aping their betters!” (238). At this point in the novel, Vimes hasn’t solved the murder cases, and it is very unlikely that he would think that the conspirators were better than the golems if he knew anything true about golems or the conspiracy; but he’s right when he connects the golems’ desire to make a king to the human desire to have kings. When Carrot sees the child/​king golem, he murmurs, “[t]hey did make themselves a golem. The poor devils. They thought a king would make them free” (305). The critique of monarchy in the novel is clearly made when it depicts both the conspirators’ and the golems’ desire for a king as both futile and dangerous. The conspirators settle on Nobby Nobs for a king, thinking they can control him, but Nobby isn’t only immensely unsuitable to rule; he also has no desire to be even a figurehead. The golems’ child/​king is actively dangerous, as Nobby would be were he given any power. The child/​king has murdered the two old men because they helped to make him, and he knows that he shouldn’t exist, that “the world is a bit too much” for him, as Carrot says (227). Although he kills the old men, threatens to kill Colon, and defends himself violently, the child/​king smiles when Dorfl kills him to prevent him from killing Carrot (320). Even the child/​king doesn’t want to be king. The novel despises the idea of kingship, of people giving up their freedom to subject themselves to an unelected ruler because of his birth. At the same time, the novel understands and explores how fundamental the human desire for kings remains even when the institution is outdated in a country. As Dorfl says after he can talk and is free, “You Say To People Throw Off Your Chains’ And They Make New Chains For Themselves” (349). The last king of Ankh-​Morpork, Lorenzo, was a vicious tyrant, although nobody but Vimes seems to remember that fact. Even Nobby is thrilled to be playing Lorenzo in the tricentennial recreation of the Battle of Ankh-​Morpork by a group of historical reenactors. These Discworld reenactors are depicted like some of today’s American Confederate reenactors and Confederate sympathizers, people who built and maintain memorials that spread lies about the American Civil War.18 Like Nobby, many of them believe the lies they are peddling. Vimes, a descendent of the man who killed Lorenzo to free Ankh-​Morpork from his horrific rule, tells himself, “[i]‌t didn’t matter what a bunch of deranged romantics

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Feet of Clay  113 thought. Facts were facts” (81). But the novel shows that it does matter that people will distort history in the name of romanticism. That distortion gets in the way of their possibilities for freedom. The history of the Battle of Ankh-​Morpork that the novel references is deeply complicated. Vimes remembers the truth of it: that his ancestor was brutal, but that he got rid of an institution that deeply oppressed most people (84–​5). The novel here makes the case for telling and understanding the truth of history. In Clint Smith’s book about how Civil War stories are lied about, a Monticello guide David Thorson says, “history is kind of about what you need to know. . . . . but nostalgia is what you want to hear.”19 This is exactly the point that Feet of Clay is making about the desire Ankh-​ Morporkians have to romanticize King Lorenzo and the institution of monarchy. The novel also shows how and why people are so keen to give their freedom up to kings. It is not just that they prefer to misunderstand history, it is that there is a psychological need (and repulsion) for an all-​ powerful leader. Vimes has observed this, but he sees it as a primal mystery. Responding to his observations, he thinks, “[i]‌t was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: Kings. What a good idea” (77). He knows that there is some psychological compulsion for kings, but it looks like a “blank spot” to him. Talking to Dragon King of Arms, Vimes describes his own thought process on the way to understanding the conspiracy: “then I started thinking: who wants a king? Well nearly everyone. It’s built in” (331). Vimes can get this far, to the built-​in part, but Pratchett gives Carrot vision into the infantile logic underlying the desire for kings. Carrot says, “[t]he big trouble . . . . is that everyone wants someone else to read their minds for them and then make the world work properly. Even golems, perhaps” (227). This is a truth about the desire for kings, that it stems from the fact that babies are born in a state of complete dependence. They need someone to read their minds and make the world work properly. Their condition of total domination must be transcended if they are to grow and live. However, as D. W. Winnicott says, “Unfortunately the fear of domination does not lead groups of people to avoid being dominated; on the contrary, it draws them towards a specific or chosen domination.”20 It is not only in groups that people desire domination. All people regress, and, in a state of regression, they can easily be in the condition that Carrot describes. One of the novel’s denouements involves Dorfl in a condition of freedom, with a voice, and with a plan for other golems to free themselves from perpetual work without respite (349–​50). Dorfl in this condition is crucial to Vimes’s arrest of Dragon King of Arms. When Dragon says that Vimes’s evidence against him is useless because he’s the only one who has seen Dragon’s physical admission of guilt, Dorfl says “I Did” (336). He has moved from a person without a voice to a witness. In this case, the novel connects two ideas: giving voice to the voiceless

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114  Feet of Clay and destroying the system of aristocracy in which one group of people lords it over another: Dragon and the conspirators’ system. This is a crucial task in the novel’s moral universe. Dragon is furious that Dorfl has been given a voice; he says, “[t]‌hat’s blasphemy.” Vimes replies, “[t]hat’s what people say when the voiceless speak” (336). Vimes can’t get rid of Dragon by himself because Dragon is himself a city institution, but he can rid the city of the documents Dragon keeps that are the official records of the Ankh-​Morpork aristocracy, the books of heraldry and records of the peerage. Those books record the deeds of and words about the inherited rulers of the city. In the newly wealthy city, they are being augmented with records of the new rulers. Vimes thinks about this: “These days they seemed to be bringing out a new edition” of the peerage “every week” (83). He has never been impressed by the peerage or their records. When he picks up a copy of the aptly named “Twurp’s Peerage,” the narrator, in free indirect discourse, says that the book is, “as he personally thought of it, the guide to the criminal classes. You wouldn’t find slum-​dwellers in these pages, but you would find their landlords” (83). Ankh-​Morpork’s slumlords are well-​represented, and they are the ones who have had the loudest voices. Vimes sees those records as a materialization of, in Benjamin’s words, “the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (VII). Vimes calls them, to himself, “the stockbooks of the city. People stood on them to look down,” a lovely funny material image (338). After the fight with Dragon, the book implies that Vimes sets fire to these records: “the lineages, the books of heraldic minutiae, the Who’s Whom of the centuries” (Vimes’s thoughts 338). This is a crime that the patrician addresses. In a later conversation, Vetinari says about the fire, “[t]‌he provenances of many splendid old families went up in smoke.” When he says to Vimes that those manuscripts are “[w]ithout price,” Vimes replies, “certainly worthless, sir” (340). This joke on the literal meaning of an idiom is itself a way of giving voice to the voiceless. If the books spoke only of the rich and powerful, and loudly proclaimed that they were the only ones with worth, Vimes is assessing them from the perspective of those they have trampled, the voiceless people they look down upon, people like Flora and William Easy. This is characteristic of how Vimes, and Pratchett in this case, sees the project of those who seek justice. In relation to Dorfl before he is given a voice, Carrot says to Angua, “Commander Vimes said someone has to speak for the people with no voices” (314). For much of the book, Vimes does not understand golems as part of those people, but he gets there, and he is the one who orders Dorfl reconstructed, after the child/​king kills him, “with a voice” (322).

The Animals and Work Feet of Clay is interested in justice for all kinds of voiceless workers, whether or not they are human or humanoid like golems and werewolves.

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Feet of Clay  115 The anthropologist Anna Tsing writes about “how subsistence hunters recognize living beings” as people, “protagonists of stories,” and how “expectations of progress block this insight: talking animals are for children and primitives. Their voices silent, we imagine well-​being without them.”21 Pratchett never falls into this trap; what he does instead is write about giving voice to things and nonhuman animals, and he does this for adults and for children, whom he highly valued. This novel, which focuses so intently on work and workers, connects two very powerful nonhuman workers: Dorfl and Angua, a werewolf who works for Vimes as a policewoman. Both of these workers complicate any idea that humans are exceptional or superior. Dragon King of Arms’ plot to make Nobby king of Ankh-​Morpork comes about partly because Dragon knows that the rightful king, Carrot, is in love with Angua, and Dragon is disgusted by the idea that the royal line will be polluted by werewolf blood. In that sick preoccupation, the novel again critiques the idea of aristocracy, linking the concept of exceptional humans to the desires of an evil vampire. (Although Vimes’s prejudice at this point is focused on vampires, he will be forced to reconsider that prejudice in later books such as The Truth.) Angua doesn’t like golems at all through much of the novel because, although they rank below her on the scale of life and the undead, they are not subject to the same discrimination as werewolves are; at least this is what she thinks. But if they’re treated differently, they share something significant—​they have powers that a human does not. Angua’s more acute senses make her invaluable to the police force. The narrator says that in the minutes after she transforms back into a human, “smells were still incredibly strong, and her ears could hear sounds way outside the stunted human range” (58). The narrator points out that “nasal vision meant seeing through time as well as space” (56). This immensely powerful sense is vital to solving crimes. In addition, as a wolf, she can save her colleague Cheri in the candle factory when all the humans are unable to jump high enough (323). Dorfl will also be a more valuable policeman than his cohorts, as he points out when he asks to be paid more because he doesn’t sleep and can work round the clock (349). Both of these invaluable workers face prejudice. One is part-​nonhuman animal, and one is made of clay. The novel argues that these workers and all the other workers in the novel, even the livestock, deserve dignity and respect. None of them are money, and more of them are people than even the people in Ankh-​Morpork have acknowledged. When he has a voice, Dorfl has a plan to free his fellow golems: Working for the police, he’ll save enough money to buy his friend Klutz’s freedom, and together they’ll work to free more golems. Before he can free any other golems, however, he moves to free the nonhuman animals he has worked among and killed and dressed in Sock’s slaughterhouse. He cares about them, their freedom and well-​being, and they trust him. The first-​time readers see Dorfl in the novel, he has been feeding the slaughterhouse’s yudasgoat, who lies down beside him to “chew” his “cud” (113). That

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116  Feet of Clay goat, whose job is to lead the other animals to slaughter, is comfortable with Dorfl. Likewise, in the scene where Dorfl sets the cattle, pigs, chickens, and sheep at Sock’s free, the narrator says about the cattle, “[h]‌undreds of dark eyes watched Dorfl curiously as it walked between the fences. They were always quiet when the golem was around” (287). Here again, the novel speaks to Dorfl’s relationship with the livestock he works among and on. The goat trusts him and likes him enough to lie down beside him, and the often-​worried cattle become quiet near him. Perhaps they can sense the regard that will lead him to slice off the locks to their pens and set them free to walk into the city. He lets the yudasgoat free to lead them out, and it does, “apparently deciding that the distant odor of the cabbage fields beyond the city wall was much preferable to the smells immediately around it” (287–​8). In this scene, the reactions of different people categorize them in relation to how they understand the nonhuman animals. Sock says, “that’s money walking out of the gate” (288). This places him with Catterail who sees his golem and his other workers as money incarnated. When the people who work at the slaughterhouse see Dorfl going toward the pens with a cleaver, they think he is going to kill all the animals. They see the livestock as meat (and the golem as a meat-​producing machine). Dorfl and the narrator are the only ones who see them as creatures who may have their own desires, apart from the lives and destinies made for them by the enterprise. Like Dorfl, the novel is attentive to the minds of the livestock: they watch Dorfl with curiosity. His actions in that scene and at other cattle yards, poultry shops, and butcher shops, as described by “men in blood-​stained aprons,” challenge the Cartesian line that has purported to separate humans from other animals on the basis that bodies are machines (293). Dressed in apparel indicating that they work in the butcher shops around Sock’s slaughterhouse, those men tell Vimes, Carrot, and Angua that Dorfl has liberated livestock and gone on to literally redress their wrongs, although they do not see his actions in those terms. He has decorated a sausage maker with parsley, onion, and oatmeal and put him into the sausage machine, but he hasn’t made him into sausage. He has stuffed the poultry man with sage and onion and shoved an apple up the pork butcher’s ass (293–​ 4). Dorfl symbolically punishes the men who live by butchering other animals, but he refuses to imitate them by butchering the men. His symbolic punishments show that all animals, including humans, have bodies and that their bodies are integral to their identities. Dorfl cracks an egg on Sock’s head rather than slaughtering him (288). Then he proceeds to treat other people in the shops in the way that they treat the nonhuman animals they sell. Having watched people treat other animals as if their bodies were just of use and their pain irrelevant, Dorfl demonstrates that attitude toward them, although stopping short of doing it to their dead bodies. The novel invites readers to see Dorfl’s parody of the butchers as funny, as Vimes and Angua do. In the way that it evokes the physical pain

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Feet of Clay  117 and humiliation of his victims, the novel also invites a reading of what is done to other animals as vicious, defamiliarizing the ways people “dress” other animals to eat them. The novel is repeatedly attentive to the bodies, minds, and feelings of the livestock it depicts, and it also points to the commonalities between people and other animals in relation to bodies, minds, and feelings. The freeing of livestock by Dorfl creates chaos in the streets around the cattle yards and shops. The narrator describes a street as “full of animals, milling around uncertainly,” and explains, “[w]‌hen animals are in a state of uncertainty they get nervous” (290). The anxiety of livestock confined in small spaces, rather than living on open terrain, is referred to repeatedly. When Angua and Cheery first go to interrogate Dorfl, the narrator describes the “sounds of the city” that penetrate the cattle yard, including the “occasional bleat of a worried sheep” (111). Wee Mad Arthur, a gnome who helps Colon escape from Carry’s candle factory, tells him that “Cattle penned up is always a bit nervous.” Arthur is talking to Colon who has been tied up and locked in a room by Carry, and Colon says, “I know how they feel” (245). The novel spends time on humans’ worries, and it also spends time on the anxieties of the other animals—​they are the same in their emotional reactions to novelty and disconcerting situations. A minor plot in the novel concerns Colon and his wife’s plan to retire to the country and farm. He knows absolutely nothing about farm animals, and what he finds out in the melee of people and animals on the street is that the animals he was planning to keep on his farm are real and have the same emotions that he has. When he’s too disgusted and cowardly to jump into the filthy water underneath Carry’s shop in order to save his life, the narrator comments, “Colon’s body, which in many respects was considerably more intelligent than the mind it had to carry around, took over” (245). He is saved by his unconscious bodily reactions, which he shares with the other animals, and which, in this case, are more useful than his mind. His buddy Nobby, who also has no real idea about other animals, ends up in a doorway with the yudasgoat, sharing his cigarette end and saying to the goat “you and me both” (304). The novel makes a similar point about the similarities among mortals when it describes the men trying to recapture the animals Dorfl has freed: “Gangs of men were trying to round them up. Since they were tired and working at cross-​purposes, and the animals were hungry and bewildered, all that was happening was that the streets were getting a lot muddier” (304). Both the men and the other animals are subject to their bodies’ conditions, and in this case, the mortals are now all subject to what bodies excrete when they are terrified. This is an obvious point, perhaps, but one often obfuscated because of the human tendency to see people as exceptional. The novel makes a joke about this tendency when it tells a little story about a rat aiming to go to “a grain store it knew was up ahead.” The rat has the misfortune to run into his death at the hands of Mad Arthur and, therefore, into the Death

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118  Feet of Clay of Rats, who, like Death, walks around the Discworld collecting the dead of his kind. The narrator says, “[t]‌he soul of the rat—​for anything so similar in so many ways to human beings certainly has a soul—​watched gloomily as the figure [Arthur] took its recent habitation by the tail and towed it away” (210). The novel refuses the Cartesian idea that the mind separates people from other animals, and it also refuses the idea that only humans have souls. (Again, the novel is probably giving less credit to actual rats than it might.) The novel also refuses to assess humans as exceptional on the level of desire for freedom. Dorfl tells Vimes, “I Smashed The Treadmill But The Golems Repaired It. Why? And I Let The Animals Go But They Just Milled Around Stupidly. Some Of Them Even Went Back To The Slaughter Pens. Why?” Vimes answers this query with a quip that connects the golems and animals to people, human animals: “Welcome to the world” (349). Many in the world are afraid of freedom. It is the humans, though, who often mistreat and enslave other humans and, in Discworld, the two other groups. The centrality of other animals in the novel is underlined when, toward the end of the novel, not only does Dorfl free the livestock he has worked among, but Vimes takes the heraldic animals out of the fire he has started at Dragon’s Royal College of Heralds and brings them home with him (339). They will live with the dragons that Vimes’ wife Sybil cares for. Other animals may be so central in this novel because of how deeply they are connected to work, as they were for so long in the premodern world. Angua explains the yudasgoat’s work at the slaughterhouse to Cheery: “I suppose you could call him an employee” (115). Cheery’s ignorance about the yudasgoat can be linked with her ignorance about Angua, a person she grows to love who is also a werewolf, a member of an ethnic group she hates because a werewolf killed her cousin in the past. Cheery will have to learn to see Angua as more than a stereotype, as a valued coworker and a friend. Just as Colon has been ignorant about cattle and sheep before he is forced to confront them in person, before Sybil makes him go to the College of Heralds, Sam Vines has never seen the elderly assortment of pelicans, hippos, hedgehogs, gryphons, and more who work as models for the heralds. As in the world before engines, in the Discworld, most power comes from the work of nonhuman animals: these assorted mythic and “real” animals that symbolize the power of rich families, oxen that customarily power treadmills, horses that transport people. Pratchett brings our imaginations back to a world powered by other animals. The novel also makes the point that abuse of other animals coexists with and can be a predictor of abuse of people, that people who labor are often treated as badly as other animals who labor, even when, and perhaps partly because, they are more powerful than the bosses who abuse them.22 In the coda that follows, I will write more about Pratchett’s attention to voiceless animals and about what he suggests may help us to save the world.

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Feet of Clay  119

Notes 1 See Nickianne Moody, “Death and Work,” for a fascinating discussion of how work figures in Pratchett’s Death sequence, Mort, Soul Music, Reaper Man, and Hogfather. Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd edition. Old Earth Books, 2004, 153–​70. 2 See Byron Sherwin. The Golem Legend: Origins and Implications. University Press of America, 1985, 3–​14. 3 Sherwin 17. 4 See Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s edited collection Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. A number of pieces in that collection discuss this problem in reference to the destruction of the land of the workers who are producing the goods enjoyed by the wealthy. Latour and Weibel say, “[m]‌oderns have always behaved like absentee landlords” (15). 5 Clint Smith 74. 6 Using the work of Philippe Rospabé, David Graeber makes the case that many cultures in the world have understood or understand the irreplaceability of any human life. Graeber says that in those cultures, “no one . . . . would ever be foolish enough to suggest that any amount of money could possibly be the ‘equivalent’ to the value of someone’s father, sister, or child” (134). 7 This logic is explored and mildly challenged in the 2021 movie Worth. It is also the logic behind the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia (USA) on February 23, 2020 by white men who said they thought he had been breaking into houses. 8 Judith Schulevitz 23. 9 Schulevitz 23. 10 On the changes in the usage of “menial,” see the OED (“menial” 3.). Adam Smith 400–​1. 11 This important point is made by Hayao Miyazaki, another massively significant contemporary artist deeply interested in the past; see Ligaya Mishan. In a 1994 interview cited in this article, Miyazaki says, “no matter what class people are born into, idiots are still idiots and good people are still good.” 12 See page 183 where a timber merchant’s golem has sawn its head off in shame that the child/​king has killed the old men, and Preble Skink, his employer, says about the golem’s all-​night work “[w]‌hat else would it do.” 13 Golems have appeared in modernity in many literary forms, including as protective figures and physically powerful fools. Golems also feature in theory. See Cathy S. Gelbin, and Gad Yair and Michaela Soyer. Golems appear in the Simpsons, in the X-​Files, in Michael Chabon’s novel Kavalier and Clay, in Helene Wecker’s books The Golem and the Jinni and its sequel Hidden Palace: A Novel of the Golem and the Jinni. Emily Strand offers a history of robots related to golems that could suggest that Pratchett’s golems may be related to Asimov’s I, Robot. Strand discusses a trend of “classic science-​ fiction stories which present the trope of the deeply underestimated created servant encountering an empathetic woman who befriends and advocates for the servant-​creature, urging it toward self-​actualization and liberation” (189). Janet Brennan Croft suggests that Going Postal’s Adora Belle Dearheart, who runs the Golem Trust, can be seen as following this trend (Strand 195n.8). See also Janet Brennan Croft. “The Golempunk Manifesto: Ownership of

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120  Feet of Clay the Means of Production in Pratchett’s Discworld” Presentations of the 2010 Upstate Steampunk Extravaganza and Meetup and her extended discussion in the 2020 version of that article. Pratchett might also have been thinking of Elie Wiesel’s The Golem: The Story of a Legend. Wiesel’s golem “lives only for others” and “devotes his every breath, his every thought, every inch of his being to a single sacred purpose: to protect the life, the security and the future of the community” (12). He turns the other cheek (34). See Alida Allison for a commentary on this work and a look at two other children’s books that feature a golem. 14 See Going Postal where Vetinari asks Moist, “Why should Mr. Pump be any different just because he is made of clay? Ultimately, so are we all” (24). 15 See also Colon’s story about a golem in Quirm (137). 16 James C. Scott 29. 17 Scott 350, 35n.17. 18 See Clint Smith. 19 Smith 41. 20 D. W. Winnicott 125. 21 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 155. In the note to this claim, Tsing cites Ursula Le Guin’s Buffalo Girls and Other Animal Presences. 22 Pratchett won an award from PETA in 2011 for his offer of an award to find the people responsible for killing 31 swans in Somerset. On that occasion, he was reported to have said that people who wantonly kill other animals are usually a danger to people.

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Coda Terry Pratchett—​“Creaturely Life” and the Earth

In the Afterword to Pratchett’s final book, The Shepherd’s Crown, his assistant Rob Wilkins explains that as Pratchett was dying of posterior cortical atrophy, he “measured” things “by the cost in writing time. If demands for his presence took him away from writing, it had to be really worthwhile, such as feeding the chickens or attending to his tortoises” (275). As his priorities as he was dying suggest, Pratchett’s attention to and love for nonhuman animals (other creatures) pervade his work, particularly the Discworld novels set in the Ramtops chalk uplands, a magical twist on rural areas akin to the ones he grew up in and lived in as an adult.1 As seen in Feet of Clay, even his city novels reflect that attention and love. In the Unseen University, the Wizarding college in Ankh-​ Morpork, famously the Librarian is a formerly human wizard, who in the second Discworld novel was transformed into an orangutan and decided to retain his ape-​shape.2 Pratchett knew very little about orangutans when he decided on this joke but, as he explains in the 1994 short film for TV Jungle Quest, he ended up as a patron for the Orangutan Foundation and eventually went to Borneo to see orangutans outside a zoo and to talk with Biruté Mary Galdikas, often called the Jane Goodall of Orangutans. Jungle Quest is worth watching for many reasons, including its pleas for conservation of the rainforests in Borneo, the habitat of orangutans; its many close looks at orangutans; and, particularly, for what it shows of Pratchett, who, in the case of orangutans, was as interested in reality as he was in fantasy, as always. As Feet of Clay also shows, Pratchett was a thoroughly non-​innocent lover of nonhuman animals.3 This non-​innocent love of other creatures surfaces repeatedly in the Tiffany Aching novels and the witch novels. It is accompanied by what Clive Hamilton might call “a helpful start” toward “learning to live in solidarity with the Earth,” along with a “sensibility of human folly and vulnerability.”4 In Defiant Earth, the philosopher and politician Hamilton describes his search for an ethics of care for the Earth. He says that the “predilection for care or neglect goes beyond morality, it expresses an orientation toward the natural world, to be in sympathy with it or negate it” (151). He is “calling for a different kind of orientation to the Earth, one in which we understand deeply our extraordinary power and unique DOI: 10.4324/9781003372813-6

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122 Coda responsibility” (152). Pratchett always shows his understanding of our unique responsibility for the Earth and its creatures. Hamilton looks to literature as well as to philosophy for that orientation, suggesting that “the wanton neglect of the natural world is a sublime [utterly arrogant] expression of our freedom (whose exemplars can be found in real life but not yet in literature)” (151). Perhaps Hamilton does not know about Pratchett’s work, but I would argue that as well as displaying the orientation toward the Earth that Hamilton is calling for, Pratchett’s books have at least one exemplar of the “wanton neglect of the natural world” as an expression of sublime freedom, the Duchess in Wyrd Sisters. In addition, I will be arguing in this coda that Pratchett does not share what I consider the only flaw in Hamilton’s diagnosis of human failings and potential in the face of the Anthropocene: his neglect of the gendered aspect of that failing. Perhaps I can understand why Hamilton neglects to discuss the gendered aspect of the Anthropocene: the fact that the “Great Acceleration” of damage to the Earth which has caused a permanent change in the Earth System can be mostly attributed to the political and economic decisions of men (2–​3). As Hamilton describes it, the pursuit of freedom without responsibility is a characteristic of modern people generally, but it’s hard to see how one can deny that, historically, people with the power to make the most significant choices about fossil fuel usage and nuclear strikes have overwhelmingly been men. Most ordinary people in America and England use fossil fuels constantly, but the governmental and institutional choices that enable that usage and preclude alternatives are disproportionately the choices of men. In addition, it has been true, even throughout history, that many women have been less concerned with unbridled freedom and more concerned with care and duty toward others. That this system has been unfair to women in many ways, and that there have always been caring, dutiful men and self-​serving, neglectful women does not change the facts on the ground about gender in relation to the Anthropocene, which Hamilton may think is insignificant. One thing that makes Pratchett so remarkable is his constant eye on the facts on the ground, which include the facts around gender. Pratchett did not write female characters in stereotypical ways, as only the caretakers of the world, or male characters in stereotypical ways, as people who only pursue their personal freedom, but he also did not pretend that women do not have bodies that bear children and have not had a larger role in supporting what Hamilton calls the “forces of care”: “self-​ restraint, respect for the natural world, love of one’s children, and the desire for civilization to flourish”; whereas men have had a larger role in “the forces of neglect—​power-​hunger, greed, growth fetishism, hedonism, and psychological weaknesses” (Hamilton 124). Perhaps carelessly, Hamilton uses the word “man” when he describes people. He says, “For me, man is Shakespeare’s man, both glorious and tragic, for whom benevolence is what is at stake and the aspiration to omnipotence is the most dangerous temptation” (126). Pratchett also loved Shakespeare, and he attends to

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Coda  123 both men and women. In Shakespeare’s plays, as I have shown elsewhere, we see a close, accurate, and loving connection to other creatures that stems from Shakespeare living in a world in which birds, beasts, and fish were at the center of the world with people.5 Shakespeare does heavily critique the human desire for omnipotence, but he could hardly have imagined how destructive to all life that desire could get once people were able to make fossil-​fuel-​burning engines and nuclear bombs and could be encouraged to consume endlessly and to neglect other animals to the extent that they could factory farm. Living in this world, Pratchett attends to that desire for omnipotence in this late modern form. He also pays tribute to the caring of women, especially in the Witch novels and Tiffany Aching books. Wyrd Sisters is one of the two witch novels he wrote that rewrites Shakespeare plays, in this case Macbeth. In Prachett’s version, his Lady Macbeth who inspires his Macbeth to kill his king and thus disrupt the natural order of things is a Duchess who gets her comeuppance at the hands of the Ramtops Lancre forest and the creatures in it (260–​1). This is a satisfactory fantasy end for a woman so disrespectful toward the Earth. She and her husband, Duke Felmet, hate Lancre, the rural kingdom that they killed to attain; her husband grows to especially hate the forests, hoping to burn them down and salt the Earth so that nothing can grow (138). Their greed and power-​hunger make them enemies of the Earth, literary exemplars of glorified disrespect. Pratchett pointedly makes them disregard the power of the land itself, of the trees that are rooted in it, and the creatures who live on and in it. In particular, the Duchess exults in her disdain for the land and its creatures, absolutely ignorant of their power until they overwhelm her. Toward the end of the novel, Pratchett has the forest close in on her, including its lowliest creatures, “even the rabbits” (261). Pratchett’s inclusion of small prey animals in the forces of the forest that destroy the Duchess is a distinct nod toward the significance of all creatures, not just the lions and eagles that so many humans have seen as exalted and like their own “exalted” selves. In contrast to the Duke and Duchess, the witches in Wyrd Sisters are exemplars of care and deeply connected to other animals, even the lesser prey animals, like rabbits, chicken, sheep, and goats. Granny Weatherwax is the senior witch in the novel, and she ages throughout the Ramtops books and dies in The Shepherd’s Crown. Granny lives apart from other humans but surrounded by other creatures.6 Just as Pratchett attended to his chickens and tortoises while he was dying, she regularly cares for the creatures with whom she lives. Wyrd Sisters shows that Granny has the power to summon demons and even to move Lancre 15 years forward, but she uses that kind of power exceedingly reluctantly, choosing instead mainly to attend to the needs of her goats. Leaving for a meeting with the other two witches in the book, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, Granny first does what is necessary for her household: she milks and feeds the goats (48). The novel foregrounds the priority she gives to these members of her household. Readers find out that she has missed what should have

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124 Coda been a previous coven meeting because she was “up all night with a sick goat” (51). As she is dressing to rescue Nanny who has been captured by the Duke and Duchess, the narrator says that Granny puts on “her witch’s cloak, which served as a blanket for sick goats when not otherwise employed” (107). It’s not that Pratchett doesn’t give Granny the typical fantasy powers and dress of a witch; rather, he is most concerned to show that those powers and dress are not what she values, her goats and tending to their needs are. She also keeps bees and tends to their needs. All the central witches in the Ramtops novels are involved in taking care of humans in times of need, especially at birth and toward death; but the most important witches in these novels are also responsible for other animals. In addition, Pratchett gives Granny Weatherwax the power to feel other animals’ minds and to borrow their consciousnesses. Pratchett’s focus on these powers and how they work could easily be seen as a pointed attack on the Cartesian foolishness of denying animals’ minds.7 In Wyrd Sisters, the land itself rebels against the rule of the Duck and Duchess and their hatred of its ecological essence. Granny and the other witches can feel the land’s fury, but they don’t immediately understand the origin of what they feel. Once Granny starts to figure this out, in order to clarify what she senses, she explores. After doing some borrowing of other animals’ minds and summoning a demon with the help of Nanny and Magrat, Granny contemplates what the mind of Lance could be. She muses: “Animals had minds. People had minds, although human minds were vague foggy things. Even insects had minds, little pointy bits of light in the darkness of non-​mind” (78). This piece of Granny’s awareness offers readers a complete rethink of the priorities of post-​Cartesian thought about mind. Even scientific research today that is deeply concerned with other animals tends to assume that people have complex minds and to measure the “possibility” of other animals’ minds in relation to human abilities. In contrast, Granny thinks about other animals’ minds first in this thought, and then compares peoples’ minds to them, categorizing the peoples’ minds as relatively less sharp and somewhat occluded. Describing an earlier search for the mind of the land, the narrator tells us that Granny could feel the tiny minds of chrysalises down under the frozen leaf mold. She could sense the earthworms, which had migrated below the frost line. She could even sense a few people, who were the hardest of all—​human minds were thinking so many thoughts all at the same time that they were nearly impossible to locate; it was like trying to nail fog to the wall. (63)

Since Granny thinks that humans are thinking “many thoughts,” it could seem as if she is assessing their minds as complex. However, Pratchett

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Coda  125 obviates this potential complexity in the simile he gives her. Humans don’t really think complexly; their thinking is like “fog.”8 In contrast to what she knows about people, Granny perceives mice’s “small, fast minds,” and the mind of a “hunting owl” as “a sudden dagger of alertness as it glid[es] over the rooftops” (63). If human minds are like fog, they are potentially not as fast and sharp as other minds. In what may be a very accurate assessment of both kinds of animals’ intelligence, in A Hat Full of Sky, Granny explains to Tiffany Aching that in her opinion, sheep are “as stupid and wayward and ungrateful as humans” (255). Even sheep’s relative foolishness does not make their brains lesser than human brains; it just makes them like humans. In addition to her knowledge about the minds of people and other animals, Granny uses her power to perceive and borrow other animals’ minds gently and respectfully. Their minds are valuable to her since they can perceive things humans cannot, and she never takes the power they offer her for granted. She always leaves gifts of gratitude when she is done borrowing. This respect for other animals’ powers extends to other talented witches such as Tiffany Aching. Thinking about her earlier encounter with the Queen of the Fairies (in The Wee Free Men), Tiffany remembers that when she had defeated that Queen, she saw the world more clearly: She’d seen it clearer than a hawk sees, heard it better than a dog hears, felt its age beneath her feet, felt the hills still living. And she remembered thinking that no one could do this for long and still be human. (Hat Full 137). In this reminiscence, Pratchett nods again to the facts about perception: that hawks can see better than people, and dogs can hear better than people, and that humans cannot perceive the realities of the Earth, which may contribute to why humans have so much trouble respecting those realities. These lessons pervade the Ramtops novels. For example, in Wyrd Sisters, nonhuman animals have their own minds and their own perspectives that the narrator clues us into. Early in that novel, Magrat brings a tortoise to a coven meeting. She desperately wants a familiar, something the other witches find amusing, and the tortoise she brings shares their capacity for humor. When Nanny and Granny mistake the tortoise for a rock, and Granny says that, unlike Magrat’s earlier familiars, at least a rock will “last,” the narrator comments, the “rock extended a head and gave her a look of mild amusement” (51). Nanny and Granny’s mistake is funny from the tortoise’s perspective as it is from ours. It’s more than unlikely that tortoises in our world understand English and share our sense of humor. Equally, however, it is very likely that tortoises have sophisticated minds and sociality that we may

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126 Coda not be aware of. Pratchett makes readers think about nonhuman animal minds and perspectives. Perturbed by his interactions with the Duke and Duchess, Verence, the professional Fool who will become Magrat’s husband, stares moodily into a small lake; the narrator says that a “couple of trout stared back at him” (89). Humans may carry their preoccupations and foolishness through the world, but they are not the only ones observing the world, and their often unalert and inattentive views are sometimes countered in the novel by the views of the other animals around them. When Granny is leaving to meet Nanny and Magrat, readers see her mounting her defective broomstick from the perspective of “a hunting badger who, hearing the thumping of running feet, poke[s]‌its head out from the bushes.” The badger sees “Granny hurtling down the path with the broomstick held stiff-​armed beside her.” She eventually manages to “vault clumsily onto it before it trundle[s] into the night sky as gracefully as a duck with one wing missing” (49). Even with her magical technology, the narrator informs us that Granny on a broomstick can only resemble a maimed bird. Unlike her, the badger is equipped for its life, attentive to sound, and able to see her clumsy attempt to fly. A badger is a skilled predator but can also be prey, so it needs to attend to the sound of another animal running. In the pre-​Cartesian world, the premodern world, people, who are predators, were much more able to see themselves and other people as also prey.9 In the Ramtops books, Pratchett reminds us of the truths of that perspective, truths that late modernity has so fiercely tried to deny. If the Duchess in Wyrd Sisters is an exemplar of someone who glories in the careless modern perspective which disrespects the Earth, when the forest and its many creatures close in on her, the narrator says that she is “like a rabbit that has just seen a stoat” (243). In that moment in the novel, an apex predator of modernity has become the prey that all humans truly are, subject to death like every other creature on Earth, and smaller and less physically powerful and adept than many other creatures. One of the ways that Pratchett encourages awareness of that truth in these novels is to make one class of their antagonists elves, who in the Discworld are creatures of the cold and hunters of humans.10 In these novels, humans who are not witches can be charmed by elves, but other animals who live closer to reality can sense how dangerous elves really are. In The Shepard’s Crown, when the Queen of the elves and her troops invade Tiffany Aching’s land, the narrator says, “[a]‌nimals noticed them too. At the very moment the Queen stepped onto the Chalk, the hares on the downs had turned and frozen, while the owls out hunting had soared higher, sensing the unwelcome presence of another predator” (102). Some animals, like owls and badgers, are natural predators. Humans can be predators, but they are also naturally prey, even if moderns tend to forget this and to romanticize not just their own lives but also the lives of other creatures. In Wyrd Sisters, the narrator shoots down this romanticization, describing the

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Coda  127 mass of creatures who gather outside Granny’s cottage as animals “who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or being killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk” (80). The faulty imagination that lets humans forget these basic facts of life and romanticize other creatures as “folk” might seem harmless, but, unfortunately, it has helped to enable a forgetfulness of the reality of the human condition among the other animals. Pratchett wants us to keep that reality in mind, and not only in the Ramtops novels. In Going Postal, we get a glimpse of that truth in free indirect discourse: out in the bustling cavern [of the Post Office], white feathers began to fall from the roof. They may have been from an angel, but were more likely to be coming from the pigeon that a hawk was just disemboweling on a beam. Still, they were feathers. It’s all about style. (389) Everything in Lipwig’s earlier conman life was about style. He can still view the world that way, but by this point in the novel, he knows that it was this view of the world that enabled his own predation on other people. Pratchett’s novels point us to the essential reality of predation and prey without romanticization; this is part of their non-​innocence. Going Postal refuses in this moment to view the feathers only as anything other than the result of bloody natural relations. His novels are also entirely aware of where the responsibility lies in the world we share with other animals, the responsibility humans have for people in need and for other animals. The novels link those responsibilities, as, arguably, in a fair kind world they should be linked. One mantra the Tiffany Aching novels repeat is in the words of Tiffany’s Granny Aching, a witch in everything but the name: “Speak up for those who don’t have voices” (Wee Free Men 29). This is the “duty” Tiffany takes over from her grandmother who has died two years before the events in the first of the novels, but who remains an important figure throughout them. Granny Aching was a legendary shepherdess who spoke very little but always for those who could not defend themselves. In A Hat Full of Sky, Tiffany remembers her grandmother enraged at a man who beat his “overloaded” donkey. Granny was such a powerful member of the community that news spread that, in response to his abuse of the donkey, she had struck him in the face. Tiffany thinks about the aftermath of that incident: for a while, at least, people were a little more gentle with their animals. For months after that moment with the peddler, carters and drovers and farmers all across the downs would hesitate before raising a whip or a stick, and think: Suppose Granny Aching is watching? (106)

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128 Coda Although Granny Aching is primarily concerned with her sheep, she acts as the conscience for all the people who use cows, horses, and oxen across the chalklands. She tells Tiffany, “We are as gods to the beasts o’the field, my jiggit. We order the time o’their birth and the time o’their death. Between times, we ha’ a duty” (Wee Free 51–​2). This is a Pratchett-​typical non-​innocent understanding of the world: humans live eating and drinking and wearing other animals and what they make, but to do that without care for those other animals is an abject denial of responsibility. Thus, factory farming is an abject denial of responsibility. Granny’s mantra rings through the novels and is embroidered upon and reiterated by Tiffany herself and by other witches. In A Hat Full of Sky, Granny Aching invokes that wisdom to save Tiffany from the force that tried to possess her: the hiver. She tells Tiffany, forcefully, “Milk the goats now, Tiffany! Now, Tiffany, d’you hear! The trusting creatures look to you! They wait for you! Tiffany milks the goats. Do it, Tiffany!” (241). This is a duty that Tiffany understands even when damaged. These witches see their duties as extending directly from nonhuman to human animals, and the novels see their fulfillment of those duties as superhuman. In the novels’ moral universe, humans ideally should care for themselves, but when they cannot, in times of birth, death, or disability, the witches care for them. As Tiffany grows into her role as the Chalk’s witch, her father complains that she is doing too much for other people. She explains to her father, Well, Dad, you know how Granny Aching always used to say, “Feed them as is hungry, clothe them as is naked, and speak up for them as has no voices”? Well, I reckon there is room in there for “Grasp for them as can’t bend, reach for them as can’t stretch, wipe for them as can’t twist,” don’t you? (I Shall Wear 36) When Tiffany explains that she is doing what other people cannot do, her father is proud of her and calls what she is doing “a man’s job.” She thinks, without telling him, that “he was unlikely to see a man doing the job that she did” (36–​7). Pratchett writes the conversation in a way that recasts traditional heroism. Rather than discounting this kind of work as below men and fit mostly for people seen as relatively worthless, Tiffany’s father, perhaps because he is Granny Aching’s son, now understands that what Tiffany has been doing for the people of the Chalk is hero’s work, which is what he means by “a man’s job.” However, Pratchett has Tiffany correct this sexist misinterpretation in her head: the work she is doing is heroic and, also, beyond the abilities and proclivities of many men (and women). The conversation implies that if men don’t do this work, it is because they are less capable and less heroic, not because the work is lowly.

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Coda  129 Pratchett gives his primary spokesperson, the crusty, sometimes mean, and sometimes foolish Granny Weatherwax, a long diatribe aimed at Tiffany that specifies what magic really is: the ability to care for people regardless of their idiocy. I’m arguing that the list that defines magic in their conversation is as specific as it is to counter the more customary, but ultimately fruitless, beliefs that magic and superpower are, or should be, aligned with power and violence. That list appears in Granny’s explanation to Tiffany about why she decided to have Tiffany’s magical education supervised by Miss Level, a witch who gets little respect from the community. Granny says that in the face of that disrespect, Miss Level does not return it: Instead, “She cares about ’em. Even the stupid, mean, drooling ones. The mothers with the runny babies and no sense, the feckless and the silly and the fools who treat her like some kind of servant.” This first list in the conversation makes it clear that Miss Level does not judge any people, even the kind of people who are often made fun of in all kinds of representations, like television shows. Then the definitive list appears. Granny continues, Now that’s what I call magic—​seein’ all that, dealin’ with all that, and still goin’ on. It’s sittin’ up all night with some poor old man who’s leavin’ the world, taking away such pain as you can, comfortin’ their terror, seein’ ’em safely on their way . . . and then cleanin’ ’em up, layin’ ’em out, making ’em neat for the funeral, and helpin’ the weeping widow strip the bed and wash the sheets—​which is, let me tell you, no errand for the fainthearted—​and stayin’ up the next night to watch over the coffin before the funeral, and then going home and sitting down for five minutes before some shouting angry man comes bangin’ on your door ’cuz his wife’s havin’ difficulty givin’ birth to their first child and the midwife’s at her wit’s end and then getting up and fetching your bag and going out again . . . That is the root and heart and soul and center of witchcraft, that is. The soul and center! (253–​4) I think that this list is worth quoting in full because it is so very different from usual views of what is heroic. In these novels we see witches as exemplars of care for creatures, all of them, human and otherwise, and, also, as exemplars of care for the Earth. The novels and their witches see geological time, the time of the Earth, which implies that humans are not more significant than the Earth and its other animals. They remind us that all creatures die and that the Earth is made up of dead life. There is a beautiful moment in Wyrd Sisters when Granny looks out the window of Nanny Ogg’s washhouse. The narrator describes the view as “a dusty spiderweb’s graveyard of faded butterfly wings and last summer’s bluebottles.” The narrator goes on to say, “A faint glow beyond the frosted panes suggested that, against all reason, a new day would soon dawn” (76). Here, dust, the detritus of

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130 Coda every living and nonliving thing on Earth, is the qualifier for the natural world’s dance of life and death, the spider building a web which will catch butterflies and other flies until they all become dust, as we will. I do not think Pratchett meant this, but that dance must go on “against” the reign of reason that interrupted human humility, humility which is what could save us and the Earth. Tiffany grows into geologic wisdom. On the way to her formal training as a witch with Mistress Level, she thinks that she needs to follow Granny Aching’s caring path: in the eye of her mind [Tiffany had] walked in those deep prehistoric seas when the Chalk had been formed, in a million-​year rain made of the shells of tiny creatures. She trod a land made of life, and breathed it in, and listened to it, and thought its thoughts for it. (Hat Full of 59) The witches of the Chalk, Granny and Tiffany Aching, live aware of geological time and its creaturely essence. This awareness is essential. They also recast ideas about progress and the future. Toward the end of A Hat Full of Sky, the narrator describes the beginning of the shepherds’ year when the new lambs are born this way: “that was when, in warm nests of straw shielded from the wind by hurdles and barriers of cut furze, the future happened” (Hat Full 356). In this book, I have been suggesting that it is only when we collectively can imagine the future as the continuation of all life on Earth, even sheep’s lives, that we can help to rescue the Earth. This is Pratchett’s message to us.

Notes 1 In an interview attached to the 2004 paperback of A Hat Full of Sky, Pratchett talks about growing up and living on the English chalk country (370). 2 See the footnote on page 175 of Wyrd Sisters for more on the history of the librarian. 3 See the discussion of Donna Haraway’s concept of non-​innocence in the Introduction, note 44. 4 Clive Hamilton 38, 161. 5 See Bach, Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature. See also Berger. Why Look at Other Animals. 6 The customary word for living this way is “alone,” sometimes a human adjectival misnomer for people who do not live with other people but who live with other creatures. 7 In I Shall Wear Midnight, the penultimate Tiffany Aching book, Pratchett takes a direct shot at the stupidity of Descartes’s premise. Miss Smith says, “We think that the head is important, that the brain sits like a monarch on the throne of the body. But the body is powerful too, and the brain cannot survive without it” (206). 8 In the Tiffany Aching books, this assessment of peoples’ ability to think clearly is embroidered. In Wee Free Men, the Queen of the pictsies, their kelda

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Coda  131 says, “what people mean to do and what is done are two different things” (110). She also explains the difference between how people customarily think and reality: “First Sight is when you can see what’s really there, not what your heid tells you ought to be there . . . Second sight is dull sight, it’s seeing only what you expect to see” (112). 9 For a discussion of this dynamic in the Renaissance, see Bach. Birds and Other Creatures, 104–​14. 10 For a wonderful discussion about how the elves function in Wee Free Men and The Shepard’s Crown, see Bongiovanni.

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134 Bibliography Grazia, Margreta de and Peter Stallybrass. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 3, 1993, pp. 255–​83. Guanio-​Uluru, Lykke. “War, Games, and the Ethics of Fiction.” Game Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 2016. Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. Polity, 2017. Haraway, Donna. “Carrier Bags for Critical Zones.” Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. MIT Press, 2020, pp. 440–​5. —​—​—​. “Conversations with Donna Haraway.” Donna Haraway: Live Theory, edited by Joseph Schneider. London: Continuum, 2005, pp. 114–​56. —​—​—​. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. —​—​—​. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Heinlein, Robert A. “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues.” Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction, edited by Damon Night. Harper & Row, 1977, pp. 3–​28. Heise, Ursula K. “Science Fiction and the Scales of the Anthropocene.” ELH, vol. 86, no. 2, 2019, pp. 275–​304. Henigan, Dennis A. “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”: And Other Myths about Guns and Gun Control. Beacon, 2016. Hills, Matthew. “Mapping Fantasy’s Narrative Spaces.” Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by. Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd edition. Old Earth Books, 2004, pp. 217–​37. Irrgang, Daniel. “Transhumanist Eschatology.” Critical Zones, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. MIT Press, 2020, pp. 288–​91. James, Edward. “The City Watch.” Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd edition. Old Earth Books, 2004, pp. 193–​216. Jeannette, Ng. https://​whate​v er.sca​lzi.com/​2 019/​08/​20/​jeanne​tte-​ng-​john-​w-​ campb​ell-​and-​what-​sho​uld-​be-​said-​by-​whom-​and-​when/​; https://​boi​ngbo​ing. net/​2019/​08/​20/​nee​ded-​say​ing.html; https://​med​ium.com/​@net​tlef​i sh/​john-​w-​ campb​ell-​for-​whom-​this-​award-​was-​named-​was-​a-​fasc​ist-​f6933​23d3​293 Klein, Ezra. “Ezra Klein interviews Richard Powers.” www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​ 09/​28/​podca​sts/​tra​nscr​ipt-​ezra-​klein-​int​ervi​ews-​rich​ard-​pow​ers.html?searc​ hRes​ultP​osit​ion=​1 Koren, Marina. “Jeff Bezos Knows Who Paid for Him to Go to Space.” www. thea​tlan​tic.com/​scie​nce/​arch​ive/​2021/​07/​jeff-​bezos-​blue-​ori​gin-​suc​cess​ful-​fli​ ght/​619​484/​ Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking, 2005. LaPierre, Wayne R. Guns, Crime, and Freedom. Regnery Publishing, 1994. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter. Polity, 2008. —​—​—​. “On a Possible Triangulation of Some Present Political Positions” Critical Inquiry, vol. 44, 2018, pp. 213–​26. —​—​—​. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press, 1999.

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Bibliography  135 —​—​—​. “Sarah Sze as the Sculptor of Critical Zones.” Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Latour and Peter Weibel. ZKM/​ MIT Press, 2020, pp. 158–​59. —​—​—​. We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 1993. —​—​—​. “What Is Given in Experience?” Boundary 2, vol. 32, no. 1, 2005, pp. 223–​37. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel, eds. Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. ZKM/​MIT Press, 2020. Lem, Stanislaw. “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1973, pp. 26–​33. Lenton, Timothy M. and Sebastien Dutreuil. “Distinguishing Gaia from the Earth System(s).” Critical Zones, pp. 176–​79. Mackenzie, Donald. “Marx and the Machine.” Technology and Culture, vol. 25, no. 3, 1984, pp. 473–​502. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Mishan, Ligaya. “Hayao Miyazaki Prepares to Cast One Last Spell.” New York Times, November 23, 2021. www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​11/​23/​t-​magaz​ine/​ hayao-​miyaz​aki-​stu​dio-​ghi​bli.html Moody, Nickianne. “Death and Work.” Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature, edited by Andrew M. Butler, Edward James, and Farah Mendlesohn, 2nd edition. Old Earth Books, 2004, pp. 153–​70. Morris, William. “The Lesser Arts.” 1882. Useful Work v. Useless Toil. Penguin, 1993, pp. 56–​87. Nevala-​Lee, Alec. Astounding. HarperCollins, 2018.Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. Routledge, 1986. Pohl, Frederik. “The Study of Science Fiction: A Modest Proposal.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995, pp. 11–​16. Pollan, Michael. Food Rules: An Eaters Manual, illustrated by Maira Kalman. Penguin 2011. Powers, Richard. Interviewed by Ezra Klein. New York Times, September 28, 2021. www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​09/​28/​opin​ion/​ezra-​klein-​podc​ast-​rich​ard-​pow​ ers.html?sho​wTra​nscr​ipt=​1 Pratchett, Rhianna. The Guardian, December 27, 2015. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ books/​2015/​dec/​27/​terry-​pratch​ett-​rem​embe​red-​by-​rhia​nna-​pratch​ett-​daugh​ ter-​obitu​ary-​2015 Pratchett, Terry. A Hat Full of Sky. Harper, 2004. —​—​—​. A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction. Doubleday, 2014. —​—​—​. “Carnegie Medal Acceptance speech.” A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction. Doubleday, 2014, pp. 128–​32. —​—​—​. Feet of Clay. 1996. Harper, 2007. —​—​—​. Going Postal. 2004. Harper, 2008. —​—​—​. Guards, Guards. 1989. Harper, 1990. —​—​—​. “Imaginary Worlds: Real Stories.” Folklore, vol. 111, no. 2, pp. 159–​68. —​—​—​. I Shall Wear Midnight. HarperTeen, 2010. —​—​—​. Johnny and the Dead. HarperCollins, 2006. —​—​—​. Men at Arms. Harper, 2008. —​—​—​. Night Watch. HarperTorch, 2002. —​—​—​. Only You can Save Mankind. HarperTrophy, 2004.

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136 Bibliography —​ —​ —​ . “The Orangutans Are Dying.” A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction. Doubleday, 2014, pp. 237–​41. —​—​—​. The Truth. Harper, 2014. —​—​—​. “2001: The Vision and the Reality.” A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction. Doubleday, 2014, p. 198. —​—​—​. We Free Men. HarperCollins, 2003. —​—​—​. Wyrd Sisters. HarperTorch, 2001. Pratchett, Terry and Stephen Briggs. Turtle Recall: The Discworld Companion. . . . . So Far. Harper Collins, 2012. Rayment, Andrew. Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity: Pratchett, Pullman, Miéville and Stories of the Eye. Rodopi, 2014. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 1985. Schwartz, Mimi. “Things Have Changed Since Sandy Hook.” May 21, 2018. www.nyti​ m es.com/​ 2 018/​ 0 5/​ 2 1/​ o pin​ i on/​ s andy- ​ h ook- ​ s anta- ​ f e- ​ g un- ​ c ont​ rol.html Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: The Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1985. Senna, Danzy. “White Progressives in Pursuit of Racial Virtue.” The Atlantic, September 2021, 90–​3. www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​magaz​ine/​arch​ive/​2021/​09/​mar​ tin-​learn​ing-​in-​pub​lic-​diang​elo-​nice-​rac​ism/​619​497/​ Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. University of Michigan Press, 1995. Sherwin, Byron. The Golem Legend: Origins and Implications. University Press of America, 1985. Shippey, T. A. Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2016. Shulevitz, Judith. The Sabbath World. Random House, 2010. Simpson, Jacqueline. “In Memoriam: Sir Terry Pratchett OBE.” Folklore, vol. 126, no. 2, 2015, pp. 232–​4. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.. Gryphon, 2021. Smith, Clint. How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. Little Brown, 2021. Spitzer, Robert J. The Politics of Gun Control: Guns Don’t Kill People-​People Do, 2nd edition. Chatam House, 1998. —​—​—​. The Politics of Gun Control, 8th edition. Routledge, 2021. Strand, Emily. “Dobby the Robot: The Science Fiction in Harry Potter.” Mythlore, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, pp. 177–​200. Strum, S. S. and Bruno Latour. “Redefining the Social Link: From Baboons to Humans.” Social Science Information, vol. 26, no. 4, 1987, pp. 783–​802. Suvin, Darko. “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion.” Extrapolation, vol. 41, no. 3, 2000, pp. 209–​47. —​—​—​. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Yale University Press, 1979. Swisher, Kara. “Brace Yourself for What’s Coming at Twitter.” New York Times, March 4, 2020. www.nyti​mes.com/​2020/​03/​04/​opin​ion/​jack-​dor​sey-​twit​ter-​ ell​iot-​sin​ger.html?searc​hRes​ultP​osit​ion=​5 —​—​—​. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Recode, Decode. Vox, July 18, 2018. www.vox.com/​2018/​7/​18/​17575​158/​mark-​zuc​kerb​erg-​faceb​ook-​interv​ iew-​full-​tra​nscr​ipt-​kara-​swis​her

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Bibliography  137 Thorpe, David. “Interview: Dan Bloom on Clifi and Imagining the Cities of the Future.” www.smar​tcit​iesd​ive.com/​ex/​sust​aina​blec​itie​scol​lect​ive/​interv​iew-​ dan-​bloom-​clifi-​and-​imagin​ing-​cit​ies-​fut​ure/​1037​731/​ Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015. Villiers, Michelle de. “Carrying Death Away: Social Responsibility, the Environment and Comedy in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny and the Dead.” English Academy Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 2014, pp. 77–​86. Waal, Frans de. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are. Norton, 2017. Wainwright, Hilary and Dave Elliot. The Lucas Plan: A New Trade Unionism in the Making? Allison and Busby, 1982. Webb, Caroline. Fantasy and the Real World in British Children’s Literature: The Power of Story. Routledge, 2015. Wiesel, Elie. The Golem: The Story of a Legend, translated by Anne Borchardt. Summit Books, 1983. Winnicott, D. W. The Child and the Family. Tavistock, 1957. Yair, Gad and Michaela Soyer. The Golem in German Social Theory. Lexington Books, 2008. Zittrain, Jonathan. “The Internet Is Rotting.” The Atlantic, June 30, 2021. www. thea​tlan​tic.com/​tec​hnol​ogy/​arch​ive/​2021/​06/​the-​inter​net-​is-​a-​col​lect​ive-​halluc​ inat​ion/​619​320/​

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to information in the notes at the end of each chapter. accidental death (in Men at Arms) 31, 35, 46 Aching (Granny Aching, character) 127–​8, 130 Aching, Tiffany 127–​8, 129, 130 Alden Global Capital 82 aliens 7, 8, 9–​10, 12, 13, 22 Allison, Alida 120n13 Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, The (Pratchett) 3 America: anti-​science politics 16; communication technology 21, 52, 58; divided world thinking 28; fossil fuels 122; guns 19, 27, 28, 43, 44, 45, 46; historical perspectives 14, 90, 112; labor matters 61, 100–​1, 104; news media 21, 82, 83, 93; policing 84; psychiatry 11; racism 84, 92, 93, 98n14; science fiction 3, 4 Amison, Anne 72n20 anger 21, 68, 69, 70 Angua (character) 33, 34, 35, 39, 105, 115, 118 animals see nonhuman animals Ankh-​Morpork, Battle of 112–​13 Ankh-​Morpork Times, The 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89, 94 Arbery, Ahmaud 119n7 aristocrats 21, 74, 84, 88–​91, 92, 93, 100, 118 Asimov, Isaac 5, 16, 23n10, 24n20, 119n13 authors 61, 62; see also writing tools and technologies Bach, Rebecca Ann 25n35, 130n5, 131n9

Bach, Sheldon 25n47, 72n13 Baldry, Cherith 25n40 Beano the Clown (character) 38–​9 Benjamin, Walter 2, 14, 15, 19, 71, 76, 90, 114 Berger, John 21, 52, 87, 130n5 Bethea, Charles 49n33 Bezos, Jeff 23n6, 98n15, 101 biblical references 94, 95, 99, 102 Biemer, Marie-​Noelle 72n20 Bloom, Dan 23n5 Bloom, Harold 3 Bongiongvanni, Livia 131n10 Braidotti, Rosi 18 Branson, Richard 98n15 Brecht, Bertolt 48n13 Briggs, Stephen 23n1, 26n65, 48n13, 49n19, 72n15 Britain: aristocratic families 90; communications technology 51, 52, 97; fossil fuels 122; historical perspectives 90; labor matters 100, 104, 110; police 84; Post Office 52, 67; racism 84, 92; Tommies 13 British Folklore Society, Pratchett’s address to 19 Burrows, Marc 23n1, 23n11, 71n1, 72n13 Butler, Andrew M. 25n40, 119n1 cable fake news 79 Callon, Michel 38, 97n1 Campbell, John W. 3, 24n20 Carnegie Medal for children’s and young adult books, Pratchett’s acceptance speech 3, 7, 11, 26n54

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Index  139 Carrot (character): Ankh-​Morpork’s throne 87; Feet of Clay 102–​3, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110–​11, 112, 113, 115; Men at Arms 33, 34, 35, 36, 38–​9, 43; The Truth 87, 91 Cartesian thought: human minds 12, 50n41, 118, 124; on nonhuman animals 7, 40, 116, 118, 124; objects 38, 42; and science 5, 6 celebrity 13–​14 cellphones 40 Chabon, Michael 2–​3, 119n13 Chappe, Claude 71n2 Chesterton, G. K. 11, 30–​1, 48n13 Chriek, Otto (character) 85, 92–​3, 95 clacks: accessibility for the poor 58–​9; corporate greed/​profit motive 51–​2, 53, 54, 59, 67; labor aspects 55–​7, 59, 61–​3, 64, 66–​7; language, power of 54, 68, 70; Lipwig’s redemption of 64, 66, 67, 68–​9, 70; originators of 53, 64; and the printing press 73; technological shift 20, 51; transformative power 20, 54, 55–​8 climate fiction (cli fi) 23n5 clowns/​fools 38–​9, 126 Coates, Ta-​Nehisi 92 communications technologies: accessibility (and wealth) 58–​9; America 21, 52, 58; books 71; community-​making properties, destruction of 20, 53; cost to human bodies/​minds 20, 52, 55–​7; globalization 5, 73; labor aspect 20, 21, 53–​4, 55–​7, 59–​63, 64, 66–​7; language, power of 21, 54, 66–​7, 68–​71; modern life’s complexity 17; plot outline (Going Postal) 51–​2; transformative power of 54–​8 computers 46, 57; see also internet consumerism 2, 56, 63, 100, 101, 123 Coppins, McKay 97n4, 97n6 corporate greed see profit motive craftsmanship 21, 60–​1, 62–​3, 76–​7 criminality 21, 22, 64–​5, 70, 74, 75, 84, 88, 89, 90–​1 Croft, Janet Brennan 119–​120n13 Cruces (character) 30, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 48n11, 48n15 Cuddy (character) 32, 33, 34, 40 dark light 95 death: accidental death (in Men at Arms) 31, 35, 46; and children

(Johnny Maxwell books) 7, 8–​9, 10, 12–​15; guns, destructive capacity of (in Men at Arms) 20, 29–​30, 34–​6, 42, 44–​5, 46; nature 127, 129–​30; nonhuman animals 115–​16, 117–​18, 127, 128; truth after death 95; and the value of life 13–​14, 101–​2, 103, 106; witches’ care of the dying 124, 128; see also murder Death (character) 31, 95, 97n5, 118 d’Eath, Edward (character) 32, 34, 36–​7, 38, 39, 42, 43 defamiliarization 30–​1, 32, 48n10, 55, 117 Descartes, René 28, 47, 50n41, 130n7 Detritus (character) 33, 34, 35, 40, 84, 95 De Worde, Lord 74, 88, 90, 91, 93 De Worde, William (character): and aristocratic prejudice 74, 89, 90–​1, 92–​3; and fake news 80–​1, 96; local interest stories 82–​3; newspaper limitations 87, 88; and truth 78, 93–​4, 95, 96; Vetinari story 74, 84, 86–​7, 88, 93–​4, 96; and the Watch 85–​6; writing tools 75, 76, 77, 78–​9, 84, 86 Doctorow, Cory 24n29 Dofl: anti-​golem prejudice 105–​7; freedom and voice 112, 113–​14, 115, 118; and the golem child/​king 105, 108, 112; and humans 106, 116; and nonhuman animals 108, 115–​16, 117, 118 dogs 39–​40, 55, 74, 80, 81, 85, 87–​8, 89, 125; see also Gaspode (character) Dorsey, Jack 53, 69 dreams: in Only You Can Save Mankind 10, 11, 12 Duchess (character) 122, 123, 124, 126 Dutreuil, Sebastien 24n28 dwarves: Bjorn Hammerhock (character) 31, 32, 33, 34–​5, 38, 42, 46; Cuddy (character) 32, 33, 34, 40; ethnic prejudice 49n18, 74, 89, 92; fallibility of 77–​8, 94, 95; printing technologies 21, 73, 74, 75, 76–​7; tools 38, 39 Earth: and genre (Science Fiction vs. fantasy) 1–​2, 4, 5, 6; golems’ 99, 101, 108; humility, need for 130; nonhuman perspectives 8,

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140 Index 87–​8, 125–​6; scientific truth 18; and technology 1, 5, 17, 54, 55; “Unique responsibility” (Hamilton) 22–​3, 121–​2; wanton neglect (Duchess in Wyrd Sisters) 122, 123, 126; witches in Wyrd Sisters 123–​5, 129; see also nature Edelman, Gilad 72n29 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 71–​2n9, 77 Elliot, Dave 72n17 Elliot Management 69 Ellul, Jacques 47 elves 81, 126 ethnic prejudice: against golems 99, 105, 106–​7, 115; against vampires 92–​3, 115; against werewolves 115, 118; aristocrats 74, 89, 92, 93; coding of 91–​2; dwarf-​troll animosity 49n18; racism and the police 84; racism’s defeat by science fiction 5; valorizing ethnic minorities 105; and xenophobia 80, 81, 92 everyday lives see ordinary lives Facebook 51, 52, 57, 66, 67, 69, 70, 83 fake news 21, 70, 73, 75, 79–​81, 96, 97 fallibility: desire to be led 99, 101, 108, 111–​12, 113; dwarves 77–​8, 94, 95; golems 108; human perfectability in Science Fiction 6, 7, 22, 104; human stupidity and computers 46–​7, 57, 70; newspapers and journalism 73, 78, 87, 94; romanticization of disadvantages people 105 fame/​celebrity 13–​14 Fanon, Frantz 98n14 fantasy genre 1–​5, 11, 30–​1 farming 109–​10, 117; see also meat production Fateha, Nurul 26n55 feminist economics 103–​4 Ferrigno, Lou 43 Flanagan, Caitlin 69 folklore 1, 2, 19, 22, 28, 127 fools/​clowns 38–​9, 126 Fordism 111 fossil fuels 122, 123 freedom: communications technology 69; desire to be led 108, 111–​12, 113; fake news 96; fear of 118; and historical truth 113; surveillance 86; and voice 22, 101, 113–​14, 115;

wanton neglect of the natural world 122 Freud, Sigmund 11 Gaiman, Neil 18–​19 Galdikas, Biruté Mary 121 Gannett Corporation 82, 83 gargoyles 32, 39, 89 Gaspode (character) 16, 39, 40, 74, 87, 88, 111 Gelbin, Cathy S. 119n13 gender 23n8, 103–​4, 122, 123, 128 genre (fantasy and science fiction) 1–​6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 22 Gibson, Mel 98n9 Gilt, Reacher (character): clacks system 20, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 61, 64; Dearheart’s murder 52; HR-​speak 66–​7; and Lipwig 61, 62, 64–​6, 67, 68–​9, 70–​1; on value 19 Godfrey, Elaine 82, 83 Goldberg, Jonathan 72n9 golems: child/​king 100, 102, 106, 108, 110, 111–​12, 114; feelings 108; and human beings 99, 100, 105, 106–​7, 107–​8, 112, 115; Mr Pump 72n28; and nonhuman animals 108, 115–​16, 117, 118; Talmudic and Midrashic history 99; on the universe 71; voice 22, 99, 108–​9, 113–​14, 115, 118; and work 22, 99–​100, 101, 105–​6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113 Good Omens (Pratchett and Gaiman) 18–​19 Graeber, David 119n6 Granny Aching (character) 127–​8, 130 Granny Weatherwax (character) 123–​5, 126, 129 Grant, Gavin J. 49n16 49n32 Graves-​Brown, Paul 56 Grazia, Margreta de 98n17 greed see profit motive Guanio-​Uluru, Lykke 25n39 Guards! Guards! (Pratchett) 45–​6 guns: defamiliarization/​novelty 20, 30–​4; destructive capacity 20, 29–​30, 34–​6, 42, 44–​5, 46; gun control debate (America) 19, 20, 27, 28, 43–​5, 46; hybridity issues 20, 36–​47; Rifleman’s Creed 49–​50n34 Hamilton, Clive 22–​3, 121–​2 Hammerhock, Bjorn (character) 31, 32, 33, 34–​5, 38, 42, 46

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Index  141 happy endings 15 Haraway, Donna 2, 11, 20, 23n8, 25n42, 30, 40, 49n27, 54, 130n3 Hat Full of Sky, A (Pratchett) 23, 25n41, 125, 127, 128, 130 Hawk Eye, The (newspaper) 82, 83 Heinlein, Robert 2, 4, 6, 9, 16, 17–​18, 24n20 Heise, Ursula K. 23n5 Henigan, Dennis A. 27, 28, 31, 45, 50n37 heraldic animals 118 Hills, Matthew 23n3 history see past knowledge Holden, Yvonne 101 horses 101–​2 Hugo Awards 2, 3, 18–​19 human beings: and baboon society 16–​17; bloodthirstiness 10, 13; and communication technology, boundaries with 53, 54–​7; denial of death 7, 12; desire to be led 99, 101, 108, 111–​12, 113; fallibility and the printed word 73, 78, 87, 94; fantasy and science fiction genres 1–​2, 5, 6, 7, 22, 104; and golems 99, 100, 105, 106–​7, 107–​8, 112, 115; minds of 7, 10–​12, 79, 124–​5; mob violence 93, 105, 106–​7; and objects (division and hybridity) 20, 27–​8, 29, 36–​47; prejudice as a human trait 88; as prey animals 126; procreation, desire for 100; responsibility to nonhuman animals 22–​3, 121–​2, 127–​8; and the scientific method 7, 17–​18; separation from nonhuman animals 5, 6, 7, 12, 18, 20, 29, 39–​40; stupidity and computers 46–​7, 53, 57, 70; tiny daily struggles 9–​10; valuable qualities of 19; value of human life 100, 101–​5, 114 hybridity: clowns/​clown noses 38–​9; the division between guns and people 20, 27, 28, 30, 36–​8, 41–​3, 45–​6, 47; dwarves/​tools 38; and the gun control debate 27, 43–​5; nonhuman animals 39–​40; technology 17, 40 Inquirer (Ankh-​Morpork’s tabloid newspaper) 73, 77, 78, 79–​81, 83 internet 51, 53, 56, 57, 59, 69, 73, 79, 97; see also Facebook; social media; Twitter

investigative journalism 21, 74, 80–​1, 82, 84, 85–​8 I, Robot (Asimov) 119n13 Irrgang, Daniel 23n6 I Shall Wear Midnight (Pratchett) 128–​9, 130n7 James, Edward 98n9, 119n1 Jemisin, N. K. 2, 23n8 Johnny and the Dead (Pratchett) 12–​15 Johnny Maxwell books (Pratchett) see Johnny and the Dead (Pratchett); Only You Can Save Mankind (Pratchett) John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer 3 Jonson, Ben 71n4, 98n17 journalism: fake news 21, 70, 73, 75, 79–​81, 96, 97; investigative 21, 74, 80–​1, 82, 84, 85–​8; limitations of 73, 75, 86–​8; local news 21, 75, 82–​3, 97; prejudice 21, 88–​9; temporary truth 96; tools 75, 84, 86 Jungle Quest 121 Kalman, Maira 97n3 kings: golem child/​king 100, 102, 106, 108, 110, 111–​12, 114; restoration in Ankh-​Morpork 36, 84, 89–​90; see also monarchy Klein, Ezra 98n15 Koch brothers 101 Koren, Marina 23n6 Kurzweil, Ray 25n49 labor: communications technology 20, 21, 53–​4, 55–​7, 59–​63, 64, 66–​7; contemporary society 61, 100–​1, 104; craftsmanship 21, 60–​1, 62–​3, 76–​7; cultural monuments 19; farming 109–​10; Fordism 110–​11; and gender 103–​4, 128; and golems 22, 99–​100, 101, 105–​6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113; human-​object hybridity 40; nonhuman animals 100, 115, 118; slavery 101; technology as congealed labor (Latour) 17, 55, 59 LaFrance, Adrienne 97 language, power of (in Going Postal) 21, 54, 66–​7, 68–​71, 73 LaPierre, Wayne R. 45 Latour, Bruno: baboon study 16–​17; and the Earth 2, 5–​6, 18, 25n33;

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142 Index on the human mind 50n41; on innocence 25n42; on labor 17, 55, 61, 119n4; on modernity 25n45, 27–​8, 29; object-​person hybridity 36, 38, 40, 46, 48n9; and technology 16, 17, 18, 27–​8, 29, 30, 54; and writing tools (in The Truth) 75 Le Guin, Ursula 2–​3, 23n8, 24n18, 120n21 Lem, Stanislaw 3–​4, 16 Lenton, Timothy M. 24n28 Lepore, Jill 97 Lipwig, Moist von (character): on the clacks 57, 58, 69; conman 63, 68, 69, 127; and Gilt 61, 62, 64–​6, 67, 68–​9, 70–​1; honoring the dead 71; on the perforating machine 60; personal growth 63–​6, 67; and talking letters 54, 55, 68; on words 68, 69; on work and workers 59, 60, 61 livestock 100, 115–​17, 118, 128 local news 21, 75, 82–​3, 97 Lords and Ladies (Pratchett) 107 Lorenzo (king) 112, 113 Mackenzie, Donald 72n17 magic: as caring 25n41, 129–​30; and communications technology (in Going postal) 20, 58, 59; in Johnny and the Dead 15; letters in Going Postal 54–​5, 68; library, in Ankh-​ Morpork’s Unseen University 18, 121; and nature 15–​16, 126; news media 21, 70, 73, 75–​6, 77–​8; science fiction 16; social media 70; talking dog (Gaspode) 16, 39 Marx, Karl 61 Maxwell, Johnny (character) 7, 8–​11, 12–​13, 14, 15 meat production 115–​16, 117, 123, 128 Mendlesohn, Farah 19, 26n71, 119n1 Mishan, Ligaya 119n11 Miyazaki, Hayao 119n11 mob violence 93, 105, 106–​7 modern collective (Latour) 16, 17, 40 Modern Constitution (Latour) 27–​8, 29 monarchy 98n10, 112, 113; see also kings Moody, Nickianne 119n1 morality 7, 65, 89, 91, 101, 109–​11, 114, 128

Morris, William 63 mortality 129 moveable type 21, 73, 75, 76, 77 murder: by the golems’ child/​king (in Feet of Clay) 100, 102, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114; dark light, revelations by 95; of Dearheart 52; Duchess (in Wyrd Sisters) 123; Grand Trunk Co’s profiteering (in Going Postal) 55, 59, 64, 71; mass shootings (America) 19, 27, 46; mob violence 93, 105, 106; plots against Vetinari 74, 85, 99, 100, 101, 102, 109, 110; shootings (in Men at Arms) 33, 34–​6, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43 Murray, George 51 Musk, Elon 69, 98n15 National Rifle Association (NRA) 19, 27, 28, 43, 45 nature: geography and meteorology 18; and magic 15–​16, 126; orangutans 18, 121; romanticization of 126–​7; in Shakespeare’s plays 123; see also Earth Nevala-​Lee, Alec 24n13 newspapers: in America 82; Ankh-​ Morpork Times 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89, 94; archives 97; fake news 21, 73, 79–​81, 96, 97; Inquirer 73, 77, 78, 79–​81, 83; and the institutional health of the city 84–​5; limitations 73, 78, 86–​8; local news (in The Truth) 21, 75, 82–​3, 97; misprints and typos 75, 78, 94–​5; moveable type 21, 73, 75, 76, 77; press/​police relationship 84–​6; readership 73, 79; and truth 21, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79–​81, 93–​7 Ng, Jeannette 3, 72n14 Night Watch (Pratchett) 36, 63, 98n12 nonhuman animals: anti-​ developmentalism (in Johnny and the Dead) 15; dogs 39–​40, 55, 74, 80, 81, 85, 87–​8, 89, 125; and golems 115–​16, 117, 118; heraldic animals 118; horses 101–​2; human responsibilities towards 22–​3, 121–​2, 127–​8; livestock 100, 115–​17, 118, 128; nature in Shakespeare’s plays 123; orangutans 18, 121; romanticization 126–​7;

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Index  143 and the scientific method 17; separation from human beings 5, 6, 7, 12, 18, 20, 29, 39–​40; shamanic wisdom 8; souls of 118; thoughts and feelings 117, 124–​6; witches’ care 123–​4, 125, 127–​8, 129–​30 objects: Detritus’s cooling helmet 40; golems as 105–​6; Latour’s Modern Constitution 27–​8, 29; talking letters 54–​5, 68; see also guns; tools Omi, Michael 98n13 Only You Can Save Mankind (Pratchett) 7–​12, 64 orangutans 18, 121 ordinary lives: aliens in Only You Can Save Mankind 9–​10, 13; common workers 104, 109–​10, 111; cultural monuments 19; dead people (in Johnny and the Dead) 13–​14; everyday resistance 108–​9, 110; local news 21, 82–​3; significance and value of 14, 100, 103 oxen 100 past knowledge: ancient (shamanic) wisdom 11; Discworld’s Medieval-​Victorian setting 7, 20, 52; folklore 19; historical materialism (Benjamin) 14, 15, 71; Pratchett’s respect for 2, 5, 7, 9; romanticization 22, 113; science 7; Science Fiction 2, 5–​6 people see human beings Pin, Mr. (character) 74, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96 Pohl, Frederik 4 Pollan, Michael 97n3 postal service: and the appeal of speed 70; labor aspects 55, 59, 60, 61; language, power of 54, 68; and Lipwig’s personal growth 63–​4; public ownership 67; technological shift 51; transformative power 54–​5, 56, 68 Post Office (UK) 52, 67 Powers, Richard 98n15 Pratchett, Rhianna 26n57 predators and prey 23, 123, 126–​7 prejudice 21, 22, 74, 79, 80–​1, 86, 88–​93; see also ethnic prejudice printing technology 21, 73, 74, 75–​9 profit motive: and ancient morality 110; and Berger’s “sole logic” 20–​1, 52; and the dream internet

53; ethics of private ownership (communications technology) 67, 69–​70, 77; exploitation of golems (in Feet of Clay) 22, 99–​100, 101, 106, 109; false magical quality of technology 77; Grand Trunk 51–​2, 53, 54, 59, 61, 62, 67, 71; gun control 45; HR-​speak 66–​7; and the monetary value of humans 101–​2; nonhuman animals 100, 101–​2, 115–​16; outsourced/​foreign labor 101 progress see technology psychoanalysis 11–​12 quasi-​objects (in Discworld) 20, 36–​7, 39 racism see ethnic prejudice rats 117–​18 Rayment, Andrew 98n7 robots 12, 22, 104, 108, 119n13 romanticization 22, 104–​5, 113, 126–​7 Rospabé, Philippe 119n6 Rupertus, William H. (General) 49–​50n34 Scarry, Elaine 61 Schwartz, Mimi 47n1 science fiction 1–​6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 22 scientific methods/​truths 6–​7, 17–​18, 28, 67, 124 Scott, James C. 108, 109–​10, 111 Senna, Danzy 98n14 “serious literature” 3–​4 Serres, Michel 37, 67, 71n3 Shakespeare, William, plays of 122–​3 Shepherd’s Crown, The (Pratchett) 121, 123, 126 Sherwin, Byron 119n2, 119n3 Shields, Nelson T. “Pete” 47n3 Shippey, T. A. 4, 24n14, 24n20 Shulevitz, Judith 103, 104 Simpson, Jacqueline 26n71 Simpsons, The 119n13 Singer, Paul 69 slavery 101 Smith, Adam 104 Smith, Clint 113, 119n5, 120n18 social media 70, 83–​4, 86, 88; see also Facebook; Twitter Soyer, Michaela 119n13 space travel 2, 5, 7–​8

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144 Index Spitzer, Robert J. 47n3 Stallybrass, Peter 98n17 Stengers, Isabelle 20, 30 Strand, Emily 119n13 Strum, Shirley S. 16–​17, 18, 27n7 Suvin, Darko 4–​5, 6, 16 Swisher, Kara 66, 69 tabloid press see Inquirer (Ankh-​ Morpork’s tabloid newspaper) technology: and anti-​science politics 16; context of Discworld’s Medieval-​Victorian mash-​up 1, 29, 52, 54; death, denial of 7, 12; defining modernity 29; farming 110; and fossil fuels 123; human capacity to handle 46–​7, 53, 57, 70; human hybridity 17, 40; printing 21, 73, 74, 75–​9; science fiction 2, 4, 5, 6; scientific method 6–​7, 17–​18; and society 16, 17; see also communications technologies; guns; weapons telegraph system 52, 59, 69, 71n2 Thorpe, David 23n5 Thorson, David 113 Tiffany Aching novels (Pratchett) 22, 121, 123; see also Hat Full of Sky, A (Pratchett); I Shall Wear Midnight (Pratchett); Shepherd’s Crown, The (Pratchett); Wee Free Men, The (Pratchett) Tolkien, J. R. R. reference 66, 72n20 tools 17, 21, 38, 39, 60–​1, 62, 75, 84, 86 Torah, The 101, 102 traditional values 90, 91 transference 11–​12 trolls 33, 39, 40, 49n18, 55, 74, 89; Detritus (character) 33, 34, 35, 40, 84, 95 truth: following death 95; historical 113; newspapers, and truth 21, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79–​81, 93–​7; scientific 18, 28, 67 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 5, 115 Tulip, Mr. (character) 74, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97n5 Twitter 51, 53, 67, 68, 69, 72n14 “2001: The Vision and the Reality” (Pratchett) 53 Twurp’s Peerage 114 vampires 66, 85, 89, 92, 102, 115 Vetinari, Lord (character): allowance of dwarves and trolls into

Ankh-​Morpork 74, 89, 110; attitude to printed news 73, 78, 87; on bad eople 45–​6; deal with Lipwig 51, 63, 65, 67, 72n28; and the gonne (in Men at Arms) 30, 35–​6, 40–​1; plot against (Feet of Clay) 22, 99, 100, 101–​2, 109, 111; plot against (The Truth) 21, 74, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86–​7, 88, 89–​90, 93, 96; poison plot against (Men ar Arms) 21, 22, 35, 36, 37; on view of the clacks’s towers 57–​8 Villiers, Michelle de 26n56 Vimes, Sam (character): bad people 46; on craftsmanship 63; and everyday resistance 108–​9, 110; on fear of freedom 118; on golems 100, 106, 107, 108, 112, 114; on the gonne (in Men at Arms) 34–​5, 42, 43, 46; heraldic animals 118; his Watch, rich men’s view of 90, 91; investigation into poisoning attempt on Vetinari 99, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113; investigations (in Men at Arms) 32–​3, 34–​5, 37, 38–​9; on leadership/​kingship 91, 112, 113, 114; objects as actants 38, 42, 43; on ordinary people 104–​5, 110; on the police-​press relationship 84, 85, 86; on rumor 83; sensitivity to human value 102, 103, 104; on truth 95; and vampires 92, 115 voice: everyday resistance 108–​9, 110; and freedom 22, 101, 113–​14, 115; golems 22, 99, 108–​9, 113–​14, 115; of the gonne (in Men at Arms) 37, 42–​3; nonhuman animals 16, 39, 74, 81, 87–​8, 118, 127, 128 Waal, Frans de 24n29 Wainwright, Hilary 72n17 Walton family 101 war 7, 8–​9, 10, 13–​14, 30, 35, 41, 112–​13 Watergate allusions 86, 87 weapons: environmentalism 1–​2; everyday resistance 108–​9, 110; modern and Middle Age warfare 9; prejudice as 93; words as 52, 84, 85; see also guns Weatherwax (Granny Weatherwax, character) 123–​5, 126, 129 Wecker, Helene 119n13 Wee Free Men, The (Pratchett) 23, 25n44, 125, 127–​8, 130–​1n8

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Index  145 Weibel, Peter 119n4 werewolves 33, 34, 66, 89, 92, 115, 118 Western Union 52 Whitehead, Alfred 20, 30, 50n41 Wiesel, Elie 120n13 Wilkins, Rob 121 Winant, Howard 98n13 Winnicott, D. W. 11, 113 witches 23, 121, 122, 123–​30 women 103–​4, 122, 123, 128 work see labor World Wars (I and II) 9

writing tools and technologies 62, 75, 84, 86; see also moveable type Wyrd Sisters (Pratchett) 22, 23, 107, 123–​7, 129–​30 xenophobia 80, 81, 92; see also ethnic prejudice X-​Files 119n13 Yair, Gad 119n13 Zittrain, Jonathan 97 Zuckerberg, Mark 52, 53, 66, 67, 69, 70, 79, 83

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