User:Old Dickens

Verse

What if the stories were true? What if there really were Vampires and Werewolves and Wizards and Witches who really could turn you into a toad, or make you think they had? Suppose Nick and Nora Charles were the most powerful couple in the country...

There is a story that the world is a disc borne on the backs of four elephants which stand on the carapace of an enormous turtle. In one corner of the Multiverse (the one farthest from Reality) this, too, is true. This is where the story creates the history and a one-in-a-million chance turns up nine times out of ten and the ocean falls into space around the rim without depleting itself. On the Discworld, "what if?" must be answered, the stories lived, the myth made real.

Tales from this remote universe arrived regularly via inspiration particles intercepting the particularly receptive and talented brain of Sir Terry Pratchett, OBE. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sort, file and illuminate the elements of these chronicles in this little corner of the vast library of L-space. Just don't forget your ball of string.

Bridge

There has never, in my lifetime, which is getting to be a long time now, been a moment in history as daunting as 2017. The last such worrisome occurrences were in Germany in 1933, but that was in one country thought to have been reduced to a secondary power. Today we look around and see a Fascist demagogue leading the richest and most militarily powerful nation on earth in cooperation with another major military power even more authoritarian and an array of Fascist movements rising across Europe with even Britain looking equivocal. Even Scandinavia seems to be under attack; what can they and Canada hope to do against the odds? Australia, New Zealand and Japan might be left to the dubious protection of China. This could set up a world war between the hemispheres, and who would the good guys be then?

"Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…", said a victorious leader after the last world war. Its great failing is that it requires citizens to pay attention and think about it occasionally. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Chorus

I sometimes sit and laugh giddily at the mere existence of some Pratchett characters (Carrot Ironfoundersson, say) and the reality he created out of the absurd stereotype. This is often toward the end of the bottle of wine, but still, it suggests how he's different from other writers I have followed. There are now more than a thousand Discworld characters described here, and that's not all.

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Made a sysop for the many good contributions --Sanity 01:34, 19 August 2006 (CEST)