Hogfather

by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs (Adapted by)

Overview

It's the night before Hogswatch. And it's too quiet.

Superstition makes things work in the Discworld, and undermining it can have consequences. It's just not right to find Death creeping down chimneys and trying to say 'Ho Ho Ho…'

It's the last night of the year, the time is turning, and if Susan, gothic governess and Death's granddaughter (sort of), doesn't sort everything out by morning, there won't be a morning. Ever again…

Adapted by Terry Pratchett's long-time collaborator Stephen Briggs, this play text version of Pratchett's bestselling Discworld novel Hogfather wittily and faithfully reimagines the story for the stage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350244719
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	04/22/2021
Series:	Modern Plays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sir Terry Pratchett was the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. In all, he was the author of 50 bestselling books. His novels have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he was the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Worldwide sales of his books now stand at 70 million, and they have been translated into 37 languages. Sir Terry Pratchett died on 12th March 2015.

Stephen Briggs is a British writer of subsidiary works and merchandise surrounding Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy Discworld. He has co-designed many of the Discworld maps and has adapted over 20 Pratchett novels for the amateur stage. In 2004, he received an Audie Award for his audiobook recording of Monstrous Regiment.

Hometown:

Salisbury, Wiltshire, England

Date of Birth:

April 28, 1948

Place of Birth:

Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England

Education:

Four honorary degrees in literature from the universities of Portsmouth, Bristol, Bath and Warwick

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplow driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of the words. Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting, raveling nets of space-time on which a metaphorical finger can be put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began ...

Something began when the Guild of Assassins enrolled Mister Teatime, who saw things differently from other people, and one of the ways that he saw things differently from other people was in seeing other people as things (later, Lord Downey of the Guild said, "We took pity on him because he'd lost both parents at an early age. I think that, on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that").

But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood. Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it's being shed by the deserving*), and then wondered where the stories went.

And earlier still when something in the darkness of the deepest caves and gloomiest forests thought: what are they, these creatures? I will observe them ...

* That is to say, those who deserve to shed blood. Or possibly not. You never quite know with some kids.

And much, much earlierthan that, when the Discworld was formed, drifting onward through space atop four elephants on the shell of the giant turtle, Great A'Tuin.

Possibly, as it moves, it gets tangled like a blind man in a cobwebbed house in those highly specialized little space-time strands that try to breed in every history they encounter, stretching them and breaking them and tugging them into new shapes.

Or possibly not, of course. The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as "Things just happen. What the hell."

The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.

There was no doubt that whoever had shut it wanted it to stay shut. Dozens of nails secured it to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.

"And there's the sign, Ridcully," said the Dean. "You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says 'Do not, under any circumstances, open this door'?"

"Of course I've read it," said Ridcully. "Why d'yer think I want it opened?"

"Er ... why?" said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

"To see why they wanted it shut, of course."*

* This exchange contains almost all you need to know about human civilization. At least, those bits of it that are now under the sea, fenced off or still smoking.

He gestured to Modo, the University's gardener and odd-job dwarf, who was standing by with a crowbar.

"Go to it, lad."

The gardener saluted. "Right you are, sir."

Against a background of splintering timber, Ridcully went on: "It says on the plans that this was a bathroom. There's nothing frightening about a bathroom, for gods' sake. I want a bathroom. I'm fed up with sluicing down with you fellows. It's unhygienic. You can catch stuff. My father told me that. Where you get lots of people bathing together, the Verruca Gnome is running around with his little sack."

"Is that like the Tooth Fairy?" said the Dean sarcastically.

"I'm in charge here and I want a bathroom of my own," said Ridcully firmly. "And that's all there is to it, all right? I want a bathroom in time for Hogswatchnight, understand?"

And that's a problem with beginnings, of course. Sometimes, when you're dealing with occult realms that have quite a different attitude to time, you get the effect a little way before the cause.

From somewhere on the edge of hearing came a glingleglingleglingle noise, like little silver bells.

At about the same time as the Archchancellor was laying down the law, Susan Sto-Helit was sitting up in bed, reading by candlelight.

Frost patterns curled across the windows.

She enjoyed these early evenings. Once she had put the children to bed she was more or less left to herself. Mrs. Gaiter was pathetically scared of giving her any instructions even though she paid Susan's wages.

Not that the wages were important, of course. What was important was that she was being her Own Person and holding down a Real Job. And being a governess was a real job. The only tricky bit had been the embarrassment when her employer found out that she was a duchess, because in Mrs. Gaiter's book, which was a rather short book with big handwriting, the upper crust wasn't supposed to work. It was supposed to loaf around. It was all Susan could do to stop her curtseying when they met.

A flicker made her turn her head.

The candle flame was streaming out horizontally, as though in a howling wind.

She looked up. The curtains billowed away from the window, which flung itself open with a clatter.

But there was no wind.

At least, no wind in this world.

Images formed in her mind. A red ball ... The sharp smell of snow ... And then they were gone, and instead there were ...

"Teeth?" said Susan, aloud. "Teeth, again?"

She blinked. When she opened her eyes the window was, as she knew it would be, firmly shut. The curtain hung demurely. The candle flame was innocently upright. Oh, no, not again. Not after all this time. Everything had been going so well —

What People are Saying About This

Piers Anthony

Terry Pratchett is fast, funny and going places. Try him.

A. S. Byatt

Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz. Truly original. Pratchett creates a brilliant excess of delectable detail!

Interviews

Before the live bn.com chat, Terry Pratchett agreed to answer some of our questions:

Q:  Your work is praised for its outlandish humor and sharp-witted satire. What are some of the things that influence your outlook? What do you think makes effective satire?

A:  Well, I don't think my humor is outlandish. I'd say it's quite logical; it just applies logic in places where we've hitherto not employed it! Just about everything influences me, but I suppose the basic driving force is a desire to slap the world on the face and say, "Will you just shut up and be sensible for five minutes?"

I think satire succeeds best when it slides in quietly, like some magician who can remove your underwear without your knowing. I'm not certain that hatred drives good satire, despite what is often said.

Q:  If you were given a round-trip plane ticket to any destination, where would you go, and why?

A:  Oh, Australia. Probably to Alice Springs, so that I could hire a 4x4 and drive to Ayers Rock again. I don't know why, but the Red Centre always seems like home to me -- I go there a lot.

Q:  Please recommend three of your favorite books.

A:  The Specialist by Charles "Chic" Sale. It's the musings of an old-time privy builder, and for quiet, memorable humor, it can't be beaten. I think it was originally published in the U.S.

Then there's The Evolution Man by the late Roy Lewis (it's been published all over the place under various titles, like Once Upon an Ice Age and What We Did to Father -- I don't know if it is currently in print). It is probably the best, and certainly the funniest, SF book ever written. It makes you think, too.

I'll cheat with the last one and pick the entire Flashman series, by George MacDonald Fraser. They're funny, thrilling, and well researched too.

Q:  Which book would you give as a gift this year?

A:  Although it's not a recent publication, I'm planning to give a copy of Carl Sagan's Contact to someone whose interest was triggered by the movie.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
A New Discworld

Humorous fantasist Terry Pratchett returns to his beloved and bestselling Discworld, a flat land of untamed imagination where all manner of oddities and absurdities take place. Jingo, the previous novel in the series, Pratchett made full use of his dry wit to take a ludicrous look at the topic of war. Now, in his own inimitable fashion, the author turns his mighty talents to satirizing the Santa Claus myth in Hogfather, where he shows us the ridiculous extent that some will go to in order to destroy, and preserve, the season of giving.

When a bizarre race known only as the Auditors (of reality) decide they want the Hogfather -- Discworld's version of Santa Claus -- rubbed out, they approach the Assassin's Guild, who soon put one of their strangest agents on the task of killing what has always been believed to be a myth. Mr. Teatime is extremely adept at his profession, and the fact that he's completely out of his mind seems only to enhance his already formidable capabilities. Although we soon learn that the Hogfather is only an "anthropomorphic personality," he, like the Tooth Fairy and Death itself, is indeed quite real.

Death, who's still highly intrigued with humanity, decides to replace the Hogfather, doing his best to spread a little cheer. With a fake beard on his fleshless skull, he takes to the sleigh and the four giant hogs on Hogwatch night to hand out toys to all the good Discworld boys and girls. Soon his granddaughter, Susan Sto-Helit, becomes enmeshed in Death's attempt to take over this job, so different from the one he's used todoing. As a governess who's tried her very best to turn her back on the exploits of her grandpa Death, she's constantly at war with the bogeymen that creep into the children's dreams, and eventually she realizes that only she can help put the Hogfather back in his rightful position.

Hogfather, is quite possibly Pratchett's strongest Discworld novel to date, a witty and powerful blending of humor, satire, and often genuinely innovative fantasy. Death has developed over the course of the series to be one of the most whimsical of all characters, as we watch his often fumbling attempts to deal with humanity on a more personal level. Several of these scenes are both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, with Death trying to connect to children but not fully realizing that when a little girl wishes for a sword, he shouldn't hand her a four-foot-long scimitar. Ably assisted by his sidekick, Albert the pixie, Death becomes a kind of everyman hero trying to keep the spirit of the holiday season alive.

Also put to excellent use are the author's trademark footnotes, which lend a distinctive quality to the novel that's not unlike having a close friend muttering quips beneath his breath throughout the narrative. For Pratchett fans, it's never too soon for another delightful Discworld novel, and for those readers who haven't yet encountered his droll jesting and banter, you'll also have a terrific time with the diverting and scintillating Hogfather. One can take Pratchett's work as being either a pointed social satire or simply a madcap romp full of some of the most entertaining characters you're likely to stumble upon. Either way, the reader is in for a wonderfully gratifying treat.
—Tom Piccirilli, barnesandnoble.com
— Tom Piccirilli,is the author of the critically acclaimed supernatural novel Pentacle, as well as the dark suspense mysteries Shards and The Dead Past. His short fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including Hot Blood: Fear the Fever.

Consistently, inventively mad . . . wild and wonderful!
— Science Fiction Magazine

Isaac Asimov

The funniest parodist working in the field today, period.

New York Review of Science Fiction

Unadulterated fun—witty, frequently hilarious.

San Francisco Chronicle

For lighthearted escape, with a thoughtful center, you can't do better than...almost any Discworld novel.
— Washington Post Book World

Michael Dirda

Consistently, inventively mad . . . wild and wonderful!

Isaac Asimov' Magazine

Terry Pratchett is fast, funny and going places. Try him.

Piers Anthony

Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz. Truly original. Pratchett creates a brilliant excess of delectable detail!

A. S. Byatt

Consistently, inventively mad . . . wild and wonderful!

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine