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Fantasy. Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML:Roundworld, aka Earth, is under siege. Are three wizards and an orangutan Librarian enough to thwart the Elvish threat? When the wizards of Unseen University first created Roundworld, they were so concerned with discovering the rules of this new universe that they overlooked its inhabitants entirely. Now, they have noticed humanity. And humanity has company. Arriving in Roundworld, the wizards find the situation is even worse than they'd expected. Under the elves' influence, humans are superstitious, fearful, and fruitlessly trying to work magic in a world ruled by logic. Ridcully, Rincewind, Ponder Stibbons, and the orangutan Librarian must travel through time to get humanity back on track and out of the dark ages. The Globe goes beyond science to explore the development of the human mind. Terry Pratchett and his acclaimed co-authors Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen combine the tale of the wizards rewriting human history with discussions of the origins and evolution of culture, language, art, and science, offering a fascinating and brilliantly original view of the world we live in.… (more)
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There are four books in the Science of Discworld series; this is the only one I’ve read. The books are written in an alternating chapter format: Sir Terry writes the short, fiction, chapters and Stewart and Cohen write the longer, nonfiction, ones. The fiction portion tells a tale of the wizards of Discworld and a misadventure while doing a team building exercise in the forest. They find themselves interacting with Roundworld, a globular world where magic doesn’t exist, but elves do. Thinking this situation is unfair to the humans, they first eliminate the elves from Roundworld. Then they discover that this was a horrible mistake, as humans need to believe in magic in order to thrive and progress- even though the magic is imaginary. They have to go through great effort to correct their meddling.
The science part of the book covers a lot of different subjects; quantum physics, evolution, psychology, religion, time, multiverses, culture, and philosophy. It’s all in terms that most will find accessible, but there is some repetition.
It’s an attempt to get lovers of fantasy to read science-y stuff and sneak some education down our throats, sort of like a grown up version of Mickey Mouse teaching kids about math or something. It works, but not terribly well. The wizard story is just barely held together; the wizards do something, and then they stop and what just happened is explained to us. By the end of the book, I remembered a lot of the science but little of the story. While Cohen and Stewart wrote the science sections, I swear I see Sir Terry’s hand in that; the footnotes are some of the funniest stuff in the book.
Final verdict? Certainly not my favorite Pratchett, but if I see the other three in the series I’ll probably read them. Just not that eagerly.
There is a bit of a story - some of which assumes that you have read a precious book (which I had not). This story appeared to consist of a couple of paragraophs interspered amound musings on the functioning of the Disc world, history of this world and some other frankly bazar theories.
As normal the wizards of the disc world are interfearing, this time it is with our world (this is apparently contained in a paperweight or something and might just have been created by them in the previous book.
The two parts of this book simply did not melt for me, I would just be getting into the story line when it would transform in to a discussion on the definition of science and who in history was a scientist, (even though the word scientist is quite a new one)bang the plot flies from my head as this topic begins to interest me. When the story continues, I have forgotten what was happening, and would like more information on the subject they were discussing.
It feels like badly written psudo science (though the science is actually disc world science not this world, I think)mixed with bady executed narrative.
I will not be seeing out any more of these
Apart from the occasional lapses into dreaded physics this 2nd book gets to grips with human "narrativium" & the development of stories within our species pretty well & is, overall, an enjoyable read.