I should have known Pratchett's Hall of Faces in the Fools' Guild was based on something real.
https://wiki.lspace.org/Hall_of_Faces
(There's a lot of money to be made in repackaging Britain to be sold to Americans as "high fantasy", btw.)
>There's a lot of money to be made in repackaging Britain to be sold to Americans as "high fantasy", btw.
or at least, there is if you're as good at it as Terry Pratchett was.
I think he liked doing that, there are so many examples of things that seem made up, but then you find they aren't. Making perfume from whale vomit, for example.
Liked? That was his thing. Every single book was a piss-take of something from the real world.
He often took real occupations and set them in his fantasy world to satirize them.
His humour was to take something from our world, put it in discworld, and then point out how ridiculous it all was.
What always amazed me was the diverseness of it. Whether he was taking the mickey out of hollywood, newspapers, rock music, somophore, stamp collecting, he seemed to have an eclectic knowledge about so much.
But not savagely, it was with the gentle fondness that underlies the best humour of friends ribbing each other.
One of the important features of satire is that you kind of need to really, deeply, fundamentally get the thing you’re satirising. Which makes it even more insane how he managed to satirise so many different topics.
He also developed an appreciation and love for the things satired; you can see it in the development of characters over time, many started out as a one-dimensional parody and grew to be actual characters with depths, while still remaining true to the original parody.
I learned a lot of history, politics and folklore reading Pratchett’s books. If he mentioned something specific I generally found it was real or at least echoed something real.
His knowledge, wisdom and love of humanity was something special.
There are random computing references stuffed into Discworld too.
Granny Weatherwax lives around a mountain range called the Ramtops, after RAMTOP on the ZX Spectrum.
The Clacks optical telegraph network can contain routing instructions in its messages, and its operators basically have a hacker culture. They also have a group called "the smoking GNU," with GNU being a set of instructions for the message routing.
The wizards have a computer named Hex, which is powered by ants that move data around, so it has a label that says "Anthill Inside."
I meant specifically the ones where it's so obscure that you only find out it was real later. But yeah he was amazing at satire across the board.
My favourite are the wee free men.
They’re not pixies, but pictsies. Their accent is a bit Scottish. They seem to have blue colored skin, but actually those are tattoos and they believe they’re currently in the afterlife (and must have been really nice persons in their previous actual life because they’re convinced they’re currently in heaven)
I always found that a bit lame and over the top.
The I learned that in northern england there once lived a keltic clan called the Picts. They were covered in blue tattoos and the kelts famously believed they lived in the afterlife and life was so good they were convinced they lived in heaven.
Er, not really in 'Northern England', the Picts lived in what is now Scotland.
My favourite aspects of the pictsies ('Nac Mac Feegle') was their fear of writing, given its association with lawyers.
I don't know the name of the phenomenon, but in fiction if you take stuff from real life especially peoples names it makes for unbelievable fiction.
Tiffany Effect
Even more appropriate as the main character of The Wee Free Men is called Tiffany Aching.
Ah, precious hamburgers
> There's a lot of money to be made in repackaging Britain to be sold to Americans as "high fantasy", btw.
Witcher is repackaging motifs from old Slavic legends with modern twists.
1987 to 1993 isn't a ton of time. It's possible he actually did come up with it himself, and it happened to mirror reality.
The 1946 version of the collection was just someone's hobby.
No, the 1946 version of the collection became a recognized registry decades before 1987. From the link in the article, the April 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated:
> As secretary of the European division of the [International Circus Clown Club] Bult keeps a file of faces so that clowns can avoid copying each other. Each clown's make-up is his professional, jealously guarded property.
Just this one half-paragraph seems like enough to define the Hall of Faces.