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 arrive 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 spent several years of my youth in a fundamentalist, Evangelical Baptist Sunday school. By fourteen I could no longer swallow the various absurdities that a fundamentalist Christian is required to accept and gave it up. Among those fundamentalist Christians, however, there was a fundamental acceptance of the Christian principles proclaimed in the New Testament:

• Judge not, lest ye be judged
• Let him who is without sin cast the first stone
• Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us
• It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God
• Love thy neighbour as thyself
• Turn the other cheek
• Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's

My Sunday school teachers and the pastor and the deacons of the church did not tell me that it was God's will that homosexuals should be killed, because there is a commandment (O.T., mind you) that "thou shalt not kill", but none prohibiting sexual practices (although there are harsh words elsewhere for the Sodomites). They certainly did not rail against providing medical care or other necessities to the less fortunate; charity was quite highly regarded. They felt that sinners should be prayed for and that it was God's prerogative to punish them, not theirs. (Another Baptist preacher was Tommy Douglas, founder of Medicare in Canada.)

Of course, there is nothing new about the hypocrites. The Inquisition, the conquistadors, witch-burning; Catholics and Protestants have had their extremely low points over two thousand years. Over the hundred years or so before my Sunday school days (those being two generations past), however, Christianity seemed to have risen above an irreducible minimum of buggers in the Roman Church and outright frauds and charlatans among the Protestants. Since then, Puritan Protestant Christianity has fallen to compete with murderous fundamentalist Islam for the world championship of anti-social hypocrisy. It is appalling to see these two tribes, so alike in villany, attacking each other with words and bombs while professing to follow the same god.

(Just re-reading Small Gods.)

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 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)