The Turtle Moves! by Lawrence Watt-Evans

cat Greebo appears, along with the infamous song, “The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All.” And there are no obvious inconsistencies with any of what’s gone before.
    The effects of the still-unnamed narrativium are at the heart of everything, and a second important phenomenon that I call “reality leakage” 76 is apparent.
    The story begins with Lancre’s King Verence being assassinated by Duke Felmet and his vicious wife. A resemblance to Macbeth is obvious and intentional, though the story takes its own direction right from the start. A band of traveling players is involved; when Felmet wants to strengthen his position as king, he hires them to write and perform a
play about how a heroic duke supplants a bad king, only to have three evil witches interfere. The troupe’s playwright is a dwarf 77 by the name of Hwel.
    Narrativium is evident in the way Hwel’s play refuses to behave itself; it wants the story to be told properly , which is to say, more or less as the Macbeth Shakespeare wrote. The story knows what it ought to be.
    And reality leakage—well, it seems that in addition to writing plays suspiciously like Shakespeare’s, Hwel has these dreams that are unmistakably familiar material from the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Chaplin’s Little Tramp, even if he can’t quite capture the humor in a way the other players appreciate. He also uses bits of story that the discerning reader will recognize as originating in Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera , Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest , and the like.
    We already knew, from Rincewind’s brief venture into an alien plane 78 in The Colour of Magic , that it was possible for things to move between our world and the Disc. We saw in the account of the Seriph of Al Khali in Sourcery that there were some inexplicable similarities in certain stories and poems. Now, in Wyrd Sisters , it’s made explicit that some residents of the Discworld have somehow tuned in to our reality. They see and hear it in their dreams. The similarities are not mere coincidence, but reality leakage between the two worlds.
    This will be developed much further in later novels, but this is where it’s solidly established.
    There are other hints of things to come, as well. Hwel mentions a human raised among dwarfs—this would presumably be Carrot Ironfoundersson, whom we’ll meet in Guards! Guards! There is discussion of the nature of kings, which will also be reflected in Carrot’s eventual adventures.
    Some of Mr. Pratchett’s strengths really begin to emerge here. In previous novels, his attempts at the frightening have mostly taken the form of long falls, sharp blades, wild magic, and tentacular horrors such as the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, none of which are actually scary to the typical reader. Oh, he may have conjured a few chills in Mort , but after all, that was all about Death. In Wyrd Sisters , on the other
hand, he manages a couple of genuinely creepy scenes, notably the final fate of the Duchess.
    The depth of characterization also takes a quantum leap here. We care about these people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg and company are wonderful creations. We met Granny before, in Equal Rites , but she’s much more strongly realized here.
    This jump in quality may be why Wyrd Sisters was the first of the novels to make the transition to the screen, in six animated half-hour episodes that aired on Britain’s Channel 4 in 1996. It was a fairly faithful adaptation, and generally enjoyable, if not brilliant. The cartoon versions of Granny and Nanny don’t quite live up to their ancestral text, but I quite liked the animated Magrat. The series was released on DVD, but is no longer widely available.
    Alas, we won’t see the witches on the page again until Witches Abroad , six(!) novels later. You can skip to Chapter 14 for that. The next one chronologically instead