Title: The Last Continent
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1998
Publisher: Doubleday
Why in Database: Another discworld book with many turtle references. The first three are related to A’Tuin:
Against the stars a turtle passes, carrying four elephants on its shell.
Both turtle and elephants are bigger than people might expect, but out between the stars the difference between huge and tiny is, comparatively speaking, very small.
But this turtle and these elephants are, by turtle and elephant standards, big. They carry the Discworld, with its vast lands, cloudscapes, and oceans.
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.
“There’s not a single star I recognize,” said the Senior Wrangler.
Ridcully waved his hands in the air. “They change a bit all the time,” he said. “The Turtle swims through space and—”
“Not this fast!” said the Dean.
“I think it’s what we call the Small Boring Group of Faint Stars. It’s about the right shape,” said Ponder. “And I know what you’re going to say, sir, you’re going to say, ‘But they’re just a blob in the sky, not a patch on the blobs we used to get,’ sir, but, you see, that’s what they might have looked like when Great A’Tuin was much closer to them, thousands of years ago. In other words, sir,” Ponder drew a deep breath, in dread of everything that was to come, “I think we’ve traveled backwards in time. For thousands of years.”
And that was the other side of the odd thing about wizards. While they were quite capable of spending half an hour arguing that it could not possibly be Tuesday, they’d take the outrageous in their pointy-shoed stride. The Senior Wrangler even looked relieved.
The fourth and last reference is one of the allusions to the world of the sphere, i.e. the earth, that occurs from time to time:
Rincewind lay back. Even the flies were merely annoying. Things began to sizzle in the bushes. Snowy went and drank from the tiny pool with a noise like an inefficient suction pump trying to deal with an unlucky turtle.
It was, nevertheless, very peaceful.
Author: XYuriTT
