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

I have not smoked for nearly seventeen years now, having a stent in my left anterior descending artery which will not put up with it. I begin to wonder, however, if just not dying is worth it. I have taken up the study of cigars (more than the actual smoking thereof: it's cheaper). Is there any more dichotomous force than tobacco, praised in centuries of poetry and prose, abhorred in science and law? Some of the illegal alkaloids may be similarly attractive to the brain but they're less readily available, lack the centuries of song and story and their negative effects are more quickly apparent.

I haven't been able to determine if The Author used to smoke, but tobacco is very popular among Wizards, Watchmen, Witches and Discworld Humans in general. No Discworld character is mentioned as dying from it. Snuff centers on the tobacco trade, but tobacco is never denigrated, only the contraband hidden in it.

Chorus

I sometimes sit and laugh giddily at the mere existence of some Pratchett characters (Carrot Ironfoundersson, say) and the reality he creates 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 twelve hundred 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)