The Turtle Moves! by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

35

The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (2002) (with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen)

ONCE AGAIN, WE HAVE A DISCWORLD STORY about Rincewind interfering with the evolution of Roundworld, also known as Earth, interspersed with essays on science.

In this case, most of the faculty of Unseen University has been off playing the wizardly equivalent of paintball132 when they find themselves transported to Roundworld. They send a message in a bottle to Rincewind,133 who hadn’t come along; Rincewind, Ponder Stibbons, and the Librarian then venture through L-space to sixteenth-century England to rescue the other wizards—and Roundworld—from elves.

In the first Science of Discworld, the wizards managed to miss the entirety of human history; they studied the apes that would become humans, and looked at Earth after humanity’s departure, but completely missed the period between. Just didn’t happen to be looking.

Fortunately, Hex determined that it was possible to observe any time on Roundworld, not just the apparent present, so that intervening in the sixteenth century wasn’t particularly difficult.

The elves are the same interdimensional parasites we saw in Lords and Ladies. The inhabitants of Discworld had driven them off and established protections against them, but Roundworld was unguarded, and they found it eventually. In order to reach it, they passed through Discworld, though, and the wizards were drawn along in their wake.

Once Rincewind, Stibbons, and the Librarian arrive, simply rescuing the other wizards would be easy, but it’s agreed that the elves must be stopped, and that Roundworld, too, must be rescued.

Using Hex as their time machine and semi-omniscient guide, the wizards travel back and forth through human history, meddling as they go, until they manage to arrange things to their satisfaction and remove elves from our present lives—though not from our history.

The story alternates with chapters discussing information theory, language, human evolution, and assorted other science—though this time around the science is somewhat more speculative than in the original Science of Discworld. The authors argue that what makes humans special is that we tell stories; they then suggest that this is at the heart of science itself, when we tell ourselves a story (i.e., create a hypothesis), and then check it against the real world to see whether it’s true.

In fact, they argue that stories are the basis of civilization, of the entire human species—that it’s storytelling that has made us humans, rather than just a relatively hairless variety of ape.

And meanwhile, the wizards are conferring with John Dee, making sure William Shakespeare gets born and writes the right plays, and so on, all while discussing the nature of stories, and how they work in a world where there’s no narrativium, no actual magic.

Rincewind saves the day, and this time around, as in the first Science book, he’s far more appealing a character than he was in Interesting Times or The Last Continent. He’s still a coward and an expert on running away, but that’s not all he does.

Granny Weatherwax has a brief cameo, but it serves little purpose other than to remind us that she exists, that Discworld runs on narrativium, and that the clacks are in operation.

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