I reached my goal of getting through Book 5 of the Rincewind series in Discworld, so I should be ready for its offshoot, The Science of Discworld, when my copy arrives at my local library. I must admit that after five books, I’ve found Rincewind rather tiresome and Pratchett’s over-the-top style has moved to the starting-to-grate-on-me category. Reading Book 4 (Interesting Times) had some clever sequences especially towards the end when the story comes together at the end, but reading it in 2021, it feels like Pratchett’s un-PC humorous caricature of the Far East feels strongly culturally misappropriated. But at least the game of the gods remains interesting.
Things do not get better in Book 5, The Lost Continent. The culturally misappropriate action moves to the equivalent of Australia. There is a god, a tinkerer of evolution, but he seems less than interesting with Pratchett’s lampooning style of writing. Rincewind is a drag in this book. And to get the inside jokes, it helps if you know culturally inappropriate tropes about Australians, some “bush” lingo, “Waltzing Matilda”, and a minor reference to “Crocodile Dundee”. I don’t know what it says about me and the age I grew up in, but I happen to know such things. If one of my students today was reading The Lost Continent, they wouldn’t get half the references.
Given that biological evolution is a theme running throughout the book, there are also science references aplenty. These are somewhat more interesting, although Pratchett’s biology inside jokes are not as good as his physics ones. (There’s not much directly related to chemistry, which says something about the inaccessibility of my subject area. Humph!) One interesting idea in the book is when a group of wizards find themselves stranded on an island where the flora and fauna evolve at high speed to anticipate the needs or desires of the motley crew who find themselves stuck on the island. One gets a picture of what one might observe if adaptive ecology sped up, but played to the whims of its human visitors. There’s likely an old Star Trek episode that addresses similar questions.
In contrast to the wackiness of Pratchett’s fiction, I also happen to be working my way through Anticipatory Systems, a heavy theory-laden book by Robert Rosen. When one expands the notion of causality beyond the Cartesian, perhaps harking back to Aristotle’s Final Cause, things gets interesting. The scientist-brain in me is working on the problem theoretically and conceptually, but it’s hard to picture how this works in the abstract when confronted with mathematical relationships that I find difficult to grasp. In that sense, Pratchett’s ridiculous imagery is slightly helpful in getting me to put the hard theory into a wacky representation that might be easier to imagine.
Naturally, the physical categories of time and space come into the equation. In The Lost Continent, there’s an interesting relation between the two which might take the reader a while to figure out. It’s thought-provoking but not explored in great depth. I’d say the same for the evolutionary ideas except with hardly any depth. Following Rincewind’s story arc and the flitting in and out of time by a ghostly kangaroo (who drives Rincewind crazy) is tedious, but there is another wizard of interest – a minor character who nevertheless has ideas about science in an age of magic – Ponder Stibbons.
Stibbons showed up in Book 4 where the equivalent of a supercomputer A.I. (named Hex!) that he helped build teleported Rincewind to the other side of Discworld, but a glitch in the calculations botched the return journey. Hence, Rincewind gets stuck in a different time and place on the lost continent. Early in Book 5, Ponder Stibbons is pondering the hypothesis of “invisible writings”, that “all books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book every written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence. Future books exist in potentia… but the primitive techniques used hitherto, based on ancient spells like Weezencake’s Unreliable Algorithm, had meant that it took years to put together even the ghost of a page of an unwritten book.” Yes, Pratchett still has some clever turns of phrase in this book.
But there’s more. Ponder’s playing around with Hex leads him to discover that “many things are not impossible until they have been tried. Like a busy government which only passes expensive laws prohibiting some new and interesting thing when people have actually found a way of doing it… When something is tried, Ponder found, it often does turn out to be impossible very quickly, but it takes a little while for this to really be the case* – in effect, for the overworked laws of causality to hurry to the scene and pretend it had been impossible all along.” Pratchett’s * references the footnote: “In the case of cold fusion, this was longer than usual.” As a bonus, Ponder’s tinkering had led to the invisible book titled “How to Dynamically Mange People for Dynamic Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a Short Time Dynamically”. As an academic, who also works on high-performance computing clusters, I find this very funny and very ironic at the same time. Hex, as an evolved A.I. starts to garner the interest of wizards, even the old fusty ones who would say “In my day we used to do our own thinking”, but are now happy to let Hex do the thinking for them – for good or ill, or both at the same time.
When Ponder Stibbons meets the god of evolution, he gets excited at the prospect of getting involved as an apprentice creator – who now has the idea of creating organisms that are both “resourceful and adaptable”. The scientist in Ponder wants to get into the dirt and go beyond theory to practical applications. The magic of science is a bigger lure than being a wizard. There’s a punchline to this story thread, but I won’t reveal it. Perhaps it’s the ingrained scientist in me that tired of the wacky anarchic structure of Discworld. Biological evolution here on Planet Earth is more wondrous and interesting than a human-like “god” can dream up. Perhaps that’s a point that Pratchett is making, but if so, it gets lost in all the other wacky things coming one after another without much of a breather. There’s something to be said about taking a little more time to be still and to ponder.
P.S. Links to my blog posts of Book 1 and Book 3 in the series. The first was probably the best of the lot, as the novel was, well… novel.
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