{"id":4700,"date":"2018-09-27T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-27T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4700"},"modified":"2018-09-23T10:00:35","modified_gmt":"2018-09-23T17:00:35","slug":"mark-reads-the-science-of-discworld-chapter-7-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2018\/09\/mark-reads-the-science-of-discworld-chapter-7-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads &#8216;The Science of Discworld&#8217;: Chapter 7"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the seventh chapter of <i>The Science of Discworld II<\/i>, the wizards come up with a tentative (and very flimsy) plan to go after the elves. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read <i>Discworld<\/i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I feel like the plot for this book has a much stronger narrative than the first one, which largely involved the wizards getting stranded, making a bad decision (and then a thousand more), and trying to get their way back to the Disc. If I understand what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening here\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entirely possible that I do not\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthen the story here is about <i>repair<\/i>. The Roundworld has been corrupted, in a sense, by the elves. Somehow, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve infiltrated this world and changed the actual timeline enough that humanity has changed. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not where we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to be, and thus, the wizards have taken it upon themselves to repair what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been ruined.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>That damage, though, is pretty subtle at this point, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a strong impression of <i>how<\/i> the world has been altered. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more a feeling than anything else, though I have to be amused at the fact that the very presence of the wizards also has the possibility to change the timeline. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re openly doing magic in front of Dee. Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t <i>that<\/i> going to complicate things? Probably not, in the long run at least, though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m guessing we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll find out that the wizards influenced <i>something<\/i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But why millions of years in the past? Why would the elves travel so far back in time? Wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there be more for them to feed off of in later periods, simply because there are more people? As the Dean notes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153But there was <i>nothing<\/i> back there,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said the Dean, watching Ponder work on the circle. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even anyone you could call people, Hex says.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So, the theory that Hex has (and I hesitate to even call it a theory, because Hex is pretty much always right) is that the elves did something to humanity\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ancestors and changed humans <i>that<\/i> way. So, they went to the source, so to speak. And what we know of elves is that fear is very, very appealing to them, so\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 maybe they made humans <i>more<\/i> afraid? Or more <i>easily<\/i> afraid? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite know how that happens, but it certainly would be a pretty fucked up way of getting what they need. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one line that makes me think that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Stories were where the monsters died.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So: maybe the elves got rid of the desire or compulsion that humanity had to make up stories! Then, without those stories, the elves could reign <i>as<\/i> monsters. It would fit with the Roundworld sections, too, which have addressed the power of the narrative. Plus, we finally get our next big Shakespeare reference in the form of one of his bits of writing. I saw that as evidence that the elves <i>hadn&#8217;t<\/i> actually affected humanity just quite yet, that there was still time. Unfortunately, once the wizards leave the Librarian behind, this happens:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>And the floor vanished. And the house vanished. And the city vanished. And the Librarian landed in the swamp.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>An instantaneous change in the environment, so drastic that it <i>has<\/i> to be the ramifications of what the elves did. Meaning\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 EVERYTHING is gone. No humans, no cities, nothing. WHAT DID THEY DO?<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtu.be\/Y7BSdgqrXLE<\/p>\n<p><b>Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong>My YA contemporary debut, <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/AngerIsAGift\">ANGER IS A GIFT<\/a>, is now out in the world!\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><strong>If you&#8217;d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, <a href=\"http:\/\/eepurl.com\/ey636\">sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the seventh chapter of The Science of Discworld II, the wizards come up with a tentative (and very flimsy) plan to go after the elves. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[463,248,552],"class_list":["post-4700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-the-science-of-discworld-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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