Terry Pratchett's Discworld
See... Great A'Tuin the Turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.
In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.
Most of the Weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T'hon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
- Terry Pratchett, 'The Colour of Magic'
way back in the '80s, I was in need of a major project for my final year diploma show; big brother Ian suggested Terry Pratchett's Discworld as an idea - I wasn't aware of it at the time but quickly devoured the first few books in the series as I began work upon the model. Needless to say the finished piece had quite a wow-factor among the rest of my models for the show.
It was later borrowed by a local bookstore as a window-display piece for the visiting author's booksigning tour, an event which ended with Pratchett actually buying the model from me right there and then!
I was later honoured even further to see the model putting in an appearance in the televised version of 'The Hogfather' on SkyTV as a very unexpected Christmas Day surprise when it was first aired.
Monochrome photograph by Jack Daniels for
The Daily Telegraph
Lower colour photograph by PA Images