The Turtle Moves! by Lawrence Watt-Evans Page A

begins what I call the “Gods and Philosophers” series. . . .

9
    Pyramids (1989)
    T HERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY that some Discworld books are one-shots, singletons, stand-alones, not part of any of the several sub-series. They will name Pyramids and Small Gods and The Truth as examples.
    Naaah. The Truth as examples.
    All of these alleged singletons fall into two categories, so far as I can see—they deal with either religion and philosophy (as in Pyramids and Small Gods ) or with the effects of some new technology or other significant sociological change on Ankh-Morpork (as in The Truth ). I’ve therefore labeled them as two series: “Gods and Philosophers,” and “Ankh-Morpork: Beyond the Century of the Fruitbat.”
    The former series is never set primarily in Ankh-Morpork, while the latter is almost entirely in Ankh-Morpork, and on those occasions when the city isn’t the actual setting (as in Moving Pictures ), most of the characters are natives of Ankh-Morpork.
    That’s reasonable enough; the people of Ankh-Morpork aren’t especially interested in religion and philosophy, but they’re very interested in new technologies that might make them some money.
    Pyramids is unrelated to anything that went before, except that it’s set on the Discworld—we’ve seen that happen before, with Equal Rites , when a new series was starting. Being one of the “Gods and Philosophers” series, it’ s mostly set well away from Ankh-Morpork—but not entirely.
    One oddity of Pyramids , relative to other Discworld novels, is that it’s divided into four “books”—not chapters as such, but “The Book of
Going Forth,” “The Book of the Dead,” “The Book of the New Son,” 79 and “The Book of 101 Things a Boy Can Do.” 80 These aren’t independent stories making up a larger narrative, like the four sections of The Colour of Magic , but just very long chapters.
    Our protagonist, Teppic (or Pteppic, or Teppicymon XXVIII), is the son of the god-king of the ancient river kingdom Djelibeybi. 81 When we first meet him, however, Teppic is a student in the Guild of Assassins in Ankh-Morpork, preparing for his final exam.
    Gods and Philosophers: The Series
    These stories are about the relationships of humans, their gods, and the universe at large, and don’t fit into any of the other series:
    Pyramids
Chapter 9
Small Gods
Chapter 15
The Last Hero
Chapter 33
    It could be argued that The Thief of Time (Chapter 32) and “Death and What Comes Next” (Chapter 37) should be included as well, but I classified them as part of the Death series instead. Maybe the two series are merging.
    For a discussion of the series as a whole, see Chapter 55.
    The scenes at the Assassins’ Guild, which take up much of that first book, “The Book of Going Forth,” don’t really have all that terribly much to do with the main plot, but they do give Mr. Pratchett a chance to shamelessly parody Tom Brown’s School Days . Teppic’s chum Arthur is a character swiped directly from Tom Brown , save that where the original was a devout Christian, the Discworld version is a devotee of the
Great Orm, 82 a rather less kindly deity than the Christian one. It makes the bedtime prayer scene rather more entertaining than the one in Tom Brown .
    This modern education is how Teppic manages to grow up with ideas and attitudes that are rather inappropriate for a pharaoh.
    No, I don’t mean a willingness to dispose of political obstacles with blades or poison; that’s perfectly normal for monarchs in most circumstances, though I admit it doesn’t seem the sort of thing one might expect of most current European royalty. I mean an unwillingness to throw himself wholeheartedly into a life of meaningless ritual.
    Still, when his father dies, Teppic returns to Djelibeybi to take up the role of god-king, and rather carelessly agrees