Ponder Stibbons, Hero-in-Waiting
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels started off as a crude sendup of the swords and sorcery genre. By Pratchett’s own admission, he’s gotten a lot better since then. While he retains the satire, his characters are now characters in their own right, rather than merely rubbished versions of someone else’s protagonist. The plots got a lot better, too, once he started taking shots at the people who make human institutions work the way they do, instead of blaming it all on the plots of unspeakable things from beyond dimension.
He still sticks largely to a system of satirizing major institutions, one per book. He’s done rock and roll, the army, the police, the diplomatic corps, the press, the postal service, international phone companies, cinema, organized religion, and others, depending on where you draw the line between a brief mention and a proper satire. He takes particular delight in savaging power structures of all kinds, and the people who lead them for personal (and deeply hypocritical) gain.
The one leader who comes out all right in all this criticism is Lord Vetinari, who sits atop the squalid city of Ankh-Morpork and somehow manages to keep it all running, despite—or rather, by using—its citizens’ casual greed, treachery, and stupidity. Vetinari is in some sense the antithesis of the egocentric leaders Pratchett so despises; although Vetinari openly claims to be a self-interested tyrant, he has so embraced the concept of enlightened self-interest that every time he winds up on top, so too does his city and a few deserving souls trying to do the right thing.
One such success story is the former captain and now ducal commander of the watch, Samuel Vimes. They are my favorite characters from the series, hands down, and both are at their best when squared off against one another. Pratchett must particularly love them, too. He dares not use the omnicompetent Vetinari as a protagonist, but Vimes has been the protagonist four or five times, more than anyone else since the original Rincewind, failed sorcerer, and Vetinari often sets the ball in motion though he is hardly present through the book. I can’t decide which I like better, nor with which one I identify more strongly.
Every time I get to the question of character identification, I sigh inwardly, because I am nothing like either Vetinari or Vimes. Of the recurring characters, I most resemble Ponder Stibbons, the wizard tied up in the sorcerous Unseen University’s equivalent of a computer science department. (To be honest, I most resemble the Senior Wrangler, also at Unseen University, a hair-splitting academic of no value whatsoever. But he isn’t a recurring character, so he doesn’t count.) To date, Stibbons hasn’t appeared much, or accomplished much, which is why I sigh.
But I have hope that my alter-ego will prove himself some day. He has slowly transformed from insignificant student, noteworthy only for sharing a room with another character, to the youngest, keenest, and therefore most generally frustrated and ignored of the UU’s staff. He is particularly ignored by the UU’s bull-headed Archdean, but he keeps trying to get the Archdean to understand the point at hand. A hapless fellow with just enough self-respect to try to try to stick to what he understands to be true in the face of an uncaring or stupidly hostile community is Pratchett’s archetype protagonist. Stibbons also stands squarely in unexplored territory. We’ve seen the magical computer science department, but we’ve never seen it used for much. Computing power is just the kind of thing the power-hungry can abuse, as long as they keep people ignorant, which is Pratchett’s favorite sort of villain. And, while computers are certainly powerful, someone who knows them is just as keenly aware of the limits of that power; Stibbons could be caught one the horns of the “garbage in, garbage out” dilemma—calculations are no more accurate or reliable than the input data—while desperately needing to use his calculating power to stave off disaster.
Stibbons has all the marks of a Discworld hero; he just hasn’t made the big time yet. I think Pratchett just needs someone to describe the slings and arrows suffered by applied mathematicians at the hands of fortune or idiot clients to make Stibbons—and by extension, me—a Discworld hero.