The Last Continent (Discworld, #22; Rincewind, #6)

by Terry Pratchett

but out between the stars the difference between huge and tiny is, comparatively speaking, very small.

People don’t live on the Disc any more than, in less hand-crafted parts of the multiverse, they live on balls. Oh, planets may be the place where their body eats its tea, but they live elsewhere, in worlds of their own which orbit very handily around the center of their heads.

It is a general test of the omnipotence of a god that they can see the fall of a tiny bird. But only one god makes notes, and a few adjustments, so that next time it can fall faster and further.

It would be terrible to think that some impatient deity might part the clouds and say, “Damn, are you lot still here?

there were no hours here. There was dawn and dusk, morning and afternoon, and presumably there was midnight and midday, but mainly there was heat. And redness. Something as artificial and human as an hour wouldn’t last five minutes here. It would be dried out and shriveled up in seconds.

Wasn’t it a basic principle never to let your employer know what it is you actually do all day?

And experiments with Hex, the University’s thinking engine, had found that, indeed, 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, the universe relied a great deal on things not being tried at all.

Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

“I don’t think it’s supposed to mean anything. I think it’s just supposed to be.”

“Pro-active, I think. It’s a word he’s using a lot.”

The wizards had no intention of being lean, but were getting as mean as anything.

Whoever had designed the skeletons of creatures had even less imagination than whoever had done the outsides. At least the outside-designer had tried a few novelties in the spots, wool and stripes department, but the bone-builder had generally just put a skull on a ribcage, shoved a pelvis in further along, stuck on some arms and legs and had the rest of the day off.

Don’t go digging things up in case they won’t let you bury them again.

it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers.

Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense. The goal is the Theory of Everything, but Ponder would settle for the Theory of Something and, late at night, when Hex appeared to be sulking, he despaired of even a Theory of Anything.

A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke.

Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber.

You can say this about Ankh-Morpork—no matter how misshapen a garment, there will always be someone somewhere it would fit.

Sometimes you had to turn facts in several directions until you found the right way to fit them into Ridcully’s head.*

whose memory could spring nasty surprises like that.

The study was a mess, even by the extremely expansive standards of wizardry.

they always make up that sort of thing,” said Ridcully. “Otherwise it’s too boring. It’s no good coming home and just saying you were shipwrecked for two years and ate winkles, is it?

“It says the continent has very few poisonous snakes . . . Oh, there’s a footnote.” His finger went down the page. “It says, ‘Most of them have been killed by the spiders.’

VERY STRANGE, he said. A PERMANENT ANTICYCLONE. AND INSIDE, A HUGE, CALM LAND, THAT NEVER SEES A STORM. AND NEVER HAS A DROP OF RAIN.

PARDON? “He said, ‘No

as soon as you find anything that offers amazing possibilities for the improvement of the human condition it’s best to put the lid back on and pretend it never happened.”

Geography should be hard to get to.

!)

And Rincewind came from a culture where, if there was nothing to say, you said something.

He’s not even heroic. He’s just in the right place at the right time.” The old man indicated that this was maybe the definition of a hero.

Creators aren’t gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It’s men that make gods. This explains a lot.

But there was something wrong with the trees. He looked down at the pretty shells on the beach. There was something wrong with them, too. Creepily, worryingly wrong. A few birds wheeled overhead, and they were wrong. They were the right shape, as far as he knew, and they seemed to be making the right noises. But they were still wrong.

“With us it’s a fully fledged gold-embossed cock-up or nothing,”

Time here is,” the kangaroo shrugged, “not the same. It was . . . glued together differently,

When this place was made there wasn’t much space and time left over to work with, see? He had to bodge them together to make them work harder. Time happens to space and space happens to time—”

“Your arrival caused a wrong note,” it ventured. “What in?” The creature waved a paw vaguely. “All this,” it said. “You could call it a bloody multidimensional knuckle of localized phase space, or maybe you could just call it the song.”

not history from now on, history that’s already happened,”

“By arriving here I changed what’s already happened?”

“It’s not just that things in the future can affect things in the past,” he said. “Things that didn’t happen but might have happened can . . . affect things that really happened. Even things that happened and shouldn’t have happened and were removed still have, oh, call ’em shadows in time, things left over which interfere with what’s going on.

“All we have to do is search this island until we find a book with a title like Practical Boat-Building for Beginners.”

some say it’s the country drying up, others say it’s a giant snake rushing through the ground,” said Scrappy. “Which is it?” “The wrong sort of question.”

time and space were all stirred up, didn’t I? You wait till you’re on your journey. There’s places where there’s several times happening at once and places where there’s hardly any time at all, and times when there’s hardly any place. You’ve got to sort it out, right?”

You have to go and do what we know you’re going to do because you’ve already done it. In fact, if you hadn’t done it already I wouldn’t be here to make sure it gets done. So you’d better do it.”

when I get to where I’m going, what am I supposed to do?” “It’ll . . . be obvious,

“I will make a start at dawn to complete this task which I have already completed,

If other creators go around leaving ruddy great empty oceans, someone’s bound to fill ’em up, right?

there was no such thing as an informal meal in Mrs. Whitlow’s world. If Mrs. Whitlow made sandwiches even just for herself she would put a sprig of parsley on the top. She placed a napkin on her lap to drink a cup of tea.

“There’s only one,” said Ponder. “That’s what he was trying to tell us.”

capable of thinking very big thoughts in very small chunks.

“One of anything doesn’t work, sir,” said Ponder. “It can’t breed.”