Category Archives: Discworld

Title: The World of Poo
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 2012 (
Publisher: Doubleday

Why in Database: This book is a kind of spin-off, an addition to 39 book of the Discworld series (some give it number 39.5), Snuff. In that book, this one was mentioned as an item within the universe, but here, we can read it. There is one element in the turtle, in the form of a turtle comparison of the main character’s behavior:

He recognized his Grand-mama, who quickly bent down to give him a kiss before he had time to flinch, or pull his head between his shoulder blades like a tortoise.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 2014
Publisher: Doubleday

Why in Database: This book is a peculiar addition to Pratchett’s fortieth book from Discworld series, (Raising Steam), it is even sometimes labeled with the number 40.5 to suggest when to read it. Unfortunately, there is no turtle content in the text form, only in the form of an illustration, on a picture of Om’s missionary you can see, that he has a turtle-shaped pendant around his neck. This is the only turtle element in the book.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: Where’s My Cow?
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Translation: Brak
Release year: 2005
Publisher: Doubleday / HarperCollins

Why in Database: This book is a kind of supplement to the 34 book in the discworld series ( Thud! ), sometimes it even gets a number 34.5, to indicate when to read it. It is a short, several pages long, richly illustrated book in which turtles appear only in the illustrative layer, in three pictures you can see a turtle. In the text layer, the turtle is not mentioned even once.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 2012
Publisher: Doubleday

Why in Database: The Blink of a Screen is, as subtitle points out, a collection of stories by Terry Pratchetts. Most are non-discworld, but a few are directly related to this series. There are three turtle mentions inside.

The first mention is made in the text “The Secret Book of the Dead”:

Our tortoise, being in the know Buried himself three years ago.

Second fragment is in form of a footnote in “Theatre of Cruelty”:

Which is flat and goes through space on the back of an enormous turtle, and why not…

Third mention is in story “The Sea and Litthe Fishes”:

They’d told her the world was round and flat, which was common sense, and went through space on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle, which didn’t have to make sense. It

Author: XYuriTT

Title: The Science of Discworld IV – Judgement Day
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen
Release year: 2013
Publisher: Ebury Press

Why in Database:This is the fourth and final volume of a four-book series. Again, these books can definitely be called popular science, with the addition of Discworld. The chapters are arranged in turns, one about the magicians from the unseen university (generally shorter) and one about science in a broad sense, in the fourth volume they are issues concerning broadly understood human beliefs. As this book balances between the real world and the disc, there are many (in both perspectives) references to turtles, (the turtle also got a cover in the form of a pendant), there are also a lot of fragments about terrestrial “World’s turtles“. The Turtles also got to the names of two chapters, the fourth (World Turtles) and the twenty-first (The Turtle Moves!).

The first quote is about the interesting difference between the globe world and the discworld:

Roundworld has no supports. It appears to think it’s a turtle, because it swims through space, tugged along by those mysterious forces. Its human inhabitants are not bothered by a sphere that swims, despite the absence of flippers.

The next fragment also explains the discworld’s approach to the sphere world:

The Discworld series takes Roundworld mythology seriously, to humorous effect; nowhere more so than in its basic geography and its magical supports – elephants and turtle.

The next five fragment are about the importance of turtles in the (our) world’s cosmological myths:

All well and good, but both universe-centred science and human-centred myth-making can hardly fail to ask a supplementary question: What keeps the elephants up? If the idea of an ordinary elephant hovering in mid-air is ludicrous, how much more so is that of a vast, extraordinarily heavy elephant doing the same? Discworld’s answer is A’Tuin, a giant space-faring turtle. The turtle’s shell provides a firm place for the elephants to stand. As a cosmology, it all hangs together pretty well … but of course a further question arises: What keeps the turtle up? It might seem that we could go on like this indefinitely, but at this point observations of nature come into play. The natural world provides a long list of exceptions to the belief that the natural place of any object is on the ground: celestial bodies, clouds, birds, insects and all water-borne creatures – fish, crocodiles, hippos, whales and, crucially, turtles.
(…)
Which leaves turtles.
Small turtles spend a lot of time on rocks, but no one in their right mind would expect a small turtle to hold up four giant world-bearing elephants. Big turtles come out onto land to lay their eggs, but that’s a mystical event and it doesn’t cast serious doubt on the theory that a turtle’s natural place is in water. Where, please notice, it does not require support. It can swim. So it stands to reason that any self-respecting giant space-faring turtle will swim through space, which implies that it needs no artificial support to avoid falling. Examining the animal more closely, a world-spanning turtle seems ideal as a support for giant elephants. It is hard to imagine what could perform the task better. In short, Discworld is, as stated earlier, the sensible way to make a world.

So it’s worth examining the similarities and differences between the creation stories of different cultures – especially when it comes to world-bearing elephants and space-faring turtles. Along with a third common world-bearing creature, the giant snake. The world turtle (cosmic turtle, divine turtle, world-bearing turtle) can be found in the myths of the Chinese, Hindus and various tribes of native North Americans, in particular the Lenape (or Delaware Indians) and the Iroquois.
Around 1680 Jasper Danckaerts, a member of a Protestant sect known as Labadists, travelled to America to found a community, and he recorded a Lenape myth of a world turtle in Journal Of A Voyage To New York In 1679-80. We paraphrase the story from a 1974 article by Jay Miller.fn2 At first, all was water. Then the Great Turtle emerged, mud on its back became the Earth, and a great tree grew. As it rose skywards, one twig became a man; then it bent to touch the Earth and another twig became a woman. All humans descended from these two. Miller adds: ‘my … conversations with the Delaware indicate that life and the Earth would have been impossible without the turtle supporting the world.’

Finally Little Toad brought up mud, which was spread on the back of Big Turtle. The mud grew until it turned into North America. Then the woman gave birth. One son, Sapling, was kind, and filled the world with all good things; the other, Flint, ruined much of his brother ’s work and created everything evil. The two fought, and eventually Flint was banished to live as a volcano on Big Turtle’s back. His anger can still sometimes be felt when the Earth shakes.
(…)
The world-bearing turtle never made it into the Egyptian pantheon, but it was common in ancient central America, among cultures such as the Olmecs. To many of these cultures, the world was both square and round, and it was also a caiman or turtle floating on a primordial sea, which represented the Earth and might or might not carry it.
(…)
In another central American culture, the Maya civilisation, thirteen creator gods constructed humanity from maize dough. The world was carried at its four cardinal points by four bacabs, elderly deities of the earth’s interior and waters, shown carrying a sky-dragon in early depictions but later believed to be drowned ancestors. Their names were Cantzicnal, Hobnil, Hosanek and Saccimi, and each ruled one of the four directions.fn3 They were closely associated with four rain gods and four wind gods. They can appear as a conch, a snail, a spider web, a bee-like suit of armour, or a turtle. In the Dresden Codex the turtle is also associated with the rain-god Chaac, which similarly has four aspects, one for each cardinal direction.
At the Puuc Maya site at Uxmal there is a building called the House of the Turtles, whose cornice is decorated with hundreds of the animals. Its function is unknown, but the Maya associated turtles with water and earth. Their shells were used in making drums, and seem to have been associated with thunder. The god Pauahutun, who like Atlas carried the world on his shoulders, is sometimes shown wearing a turtle-shell hat. The Maize God is occasionally shown emerging from a turtle’s shell. The Mayan name for the constellation Orion is Ak’Ek’ or Turtle Star.

God N is often shown wearing a net bag on his head. One of his manifestations was as a possum; another was as a turtle. An inscribed stone at Copán bears his name ‘yellow turtle’, in the form of his image together with phonetic signs for ak – meaning turtle. In his turtle aspect, God N represented the Earth, because the creation of the Earth, rising from the primordial sea, was like a turtle coming to the surface of a pool. God N also manifested himself as the four bacabs, whom the sixteenth-century Bishop of Yucatán Diego de Landa described as ‘four brothers whom [the creator] god placed, when he created the world, at the four points of it, holding up the sky so that it should not fall’.

To westerners, a turtle/elephant world is most commonly associated with Hinduism. Turtles are often confused with tortoises, as they generally are in American English. Philosopher John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 mentions an ‘Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise’. In his 1927 Why I Am Not A Christian Bertrand Russell writes of ‘the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise’, adding, ‘When they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”’ The elephant-turtle story remains in common circulation, but it is a misrepresentation of Hindu beliefs, conflating two separate mythical beings: the world-turtle and the world-elephant. In fact, Hindu mythology features three distinct species of world-bearing creature: tortoise, elephant and snake, with the snake being arguably the most important.
These creatures occur in several guises. The commonest name for the world-tortoise is Kurma or Kumaraja. According to the Shatpatha Brahmana its upper shell is the heavens, its lower shell the Earth, and its body is the atmosphere. The Bhagavata Purana calls it Akupara – unbounded. In 1838 Leveson Vernon-Harcourt published The Doctrine of the Deluge, whose purpose is clearly indicated by its subtitle: vindicating the scriptural account from the doubts which have recently been cast upon it by geological speculations. In it, he wrote of a tortoise called Chukwa that supported Mount Meru. This mountain is sacred in both Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, the centre of the universe – physical, spiritual and metaphysical – where Brahma and the demigods reside. Vernon-Harcourt attributes the story to an astronomer who described it to Bishop Heber ‘in the Vidayala school in Benares’. Since the word ‘vidyayala’ (note slight difference in spelling) means ‘school’ in Sanskrit, it is hard to give the report much credit. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable includes the entry ‘Chukwa. The tortoise at the South Pole on which the Earth is said to rest’, but there is little evidence to support this statement. However, Chukwa appears in the Ramayana as the name of a world-elephant, also known as Maha-padma or -pudma. Most likely various mythological entities were being confused and their stories combined.
Some sources say that Chukwa is the first and oldest turtle, who swims in the primordial ocean of milk and supports the Earth. Some also say that the elephant Maha-Pudma is interposed. This story apparently occurs in the Puranas, dating from the Gupta period (320-500). Whether the Hindus believed this myth, other than in a ritual sense, is debatable.
(…)
Horace Hayman Wilson’s 1840 translation of the Vishnu Purana relates that the creator god Hari (aka Vishnu and Krishna) instructed all the other gods to throw medicinal herbs into the sea of milk, and to churn the ocean to make amrit – the food of the gods. Assorted gods were told to use the mountain Mandara as a churning-stick, winding the serpent Vásuki round it like a rope. Hari himself, in the form of a tortoise, served as a pivot for the mountain as it was whirled around.

Next selected fragment is about Vishnu:

They implored Vishnu to help them ‘bear up Mandar ’s threatening weight’. Obligingly, he came up with the perfect solution:
Then Vishnu, as their need was sore,
The semblance of a tortoise wore,
And in the bed of Ocean lay
The mountain on his back to stay.

The next quote is a classic citation of the story of “turtles all the way down!“.

The turtle-and-elephant universe features early on in Stephen Hawking’s rampant bestseller A Brief History of Time. He tells us that a famous scientist, possibly Bertrand Russell, who was giving a public lecture, explaining how the Earth goes round the Sun and the Sun shares the rotation of the Galaxy. When he asked for questions, a proverbial little old lady complained that his theories were nonsense: the world was flat and rode on the back of a giant tortoise. ‘What does the tortoise stand on?’ the lecturer enquired. ‘You’re very clever, young man,’ said the old lady, ‘but it’s turtles all the way down!’

The mathematical approach to the infinite pile of turtles:

Mathematical calculations show that an infinite pile of stationary turtles can support itself in a universe in which gravity is a constant force in a fixed direction (call this ‘down’). This rather improbable structure works because the force of gravity acting on each turtle is exactly balanced by the reaction force where it stands on the turtle below, so Newton’s third law of motion – action equals reaction – is obeyed. Similarly, there is no problem with causality in the infinite temporal pile of universes: each is caused by the previous one, so every universe has a cause. But psychologically, human beings are entirely happy with infinite piles of causality, yet find an infinite pile of turtles ridiculous.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: The Science of Discworld III – Darwin’s Watch
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen
Release year: 2005
Publisher: Ebury Press

Why in Database: Third volume of a four-book series. Again, these books can definitely be called popular science, with the addition of Discworld. The chapters are arranged in turns, one about the magicians of the unseen university (generally shorter) and one about science in a broad sense, the third volume is about Darwin and the theory of evolution. As this book balances between the real world and the disc, there are many (in both perspectives) references to turtles (one is even on the cover). However, there are fewer of them than in the first volume, below we have selected a few more interesting:

The first selected quote is about how amazing the earth seems, from a certain perspective:

DISCWORLD IS REAL. It’s the way worlds should work. Admittedly, it is flat and goes through space on the backs of four elephants which stand on the shell of a giant turtle, but consider the alternatives. Consider, for example, a globular world, a mere crust upon an inferno of molten rock and iron. An accidental world, made of the wreckage of old stars, the home of life which, nevertheless, in a most unhomely fashion, is regularly scythed from its surface by ice, gas, inundation or falling rocks travelling at 20,000 miles an hour.

In the second quote, Ponder Stibbons describes the difference between traveling to the moon on disk and on earth:

`Things are different on a globe, sir. There are no broomsticks, no magic carpets, and going to the Moon is not just a case of pushing off over the edge and trying to avoid the Turtle on the way down.’

In the next fragment, we have reference (and quoted fragment) to the events described in Pyramids, another book by Pratchett:

However, he is up against a theoretical barrier, the paradoxes of the Ephebian philosopher Xeno, which are firstmentioned in Pyramids. A Roundworld philosopher with an oddly similar name, Zeno of Elea, born around 490 BC, stated four paradoxes about the relation between space, time and motion. He is Xeno’s Roundworld counteRepublic of South Africart, and his paradoxes bear a curious resemblance to the Ephebian philosopher’s. Xeno proved by logic alone that an arrow cannot hit a running man,[1] and that the tortoise is the fastest animal on the Disc.[2] He combined both in one experiment, by shooting an arrow at a tortoise that was racing against a hare. The arrow hit the hare by mistake, and the tortoise won, which proved that he was right. In Pyramids, Xeno describes the thinking behind this experiment.
”s quite simple,’ said Xeno. `Look, let’s say this olive stone is an arrow and this, and this -‘ he cast around aimlessly -‘and this stunned seagull is the tortoise, right? Now, when you fire the arrow it goes from here to the seag- the tortoise, am I right?’
`I suppose so, but-‘
`But, by this time, the seagu- the tortoise has moved on a bit, hasn’t he? Am I right?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Teppic, helplessly. Xeno gave him a look of triumph.
`So the arrow has to go a bit further, doesn’t it, to where the tortoise is now. Meanwhile the tortoise has flow- moved on, not much, I’ll grant you, but it doesn’t have to be much. Am I right? So the arrow has a bit further to go, but the point is that by the time it gets to where the tortoise is now the tortoise isn’t there. So if the tortoise keeps moving, the arrow will never hit it.
It’ll keep getting closer and closer, but it’ll never hit it. QED.’

The next quote again mentions paradoxes:

The second, Achilles and the Tortoise, is prettymuch the paradox enunciated by Xeno, but with the hare replaced by the Greek hero Achilles. Achilles runs faster than the tortoise – face it, anyone can run faster than a tortoise – but he starts a bit behind, and can never catch up because whenever he reaches the place where the tortoise was, it’s moved on a bit. Like the ambiguous puzuma, by the time you get to it, it’s not there.

Rincewind learns about the Galapagos tortoises:

`There’s going to be monster creatures on these islands we’re heading for, yes?’
`How did you know that?’ said Ponder.
`It just came to me,’ said Rincewind gloomily. `So there are monsters?’ `Oh, yes. Giants of their kind.’
`With big teeth?’
`No, not really. They’re tortoises.’
`How big?’
`About the size of an easy chair, I think.’
Rincewind looked suspicious.
`How fast?’
`I don’t know. Not very fast.’

Another fragment about Galapagos:

There were the spectacular giant tortoises that had given the islands their name. Darwin measured the circumference of one as seven feet (2m). There were iguanas, and birds – boobies, warblers, finches.

The last selected quote is about a turtle with wheels (shown on the cover), a creature developed by evolution god, a deity living in the discworld:

`That’s a giant tortoise!’ said Darwin, as it trundled past. `That at least is something – oh!’
`Yes.’
`It’s on wheels!’
`Oh, yes. He’s very keen on wheels. He thinks wheels should work.’
The tortoise turned quite professionally and rolled to a halt by a cactus, which it proceeded to eat,
daintily, until there was a hiss and it sagged sideways.
‘Oh,’ said a voice from the air. `Bad luck. Tyre bladder punctured. It’s the everlasting problem of the
strength of the integument versus the usage rate of the mucus.’

Author: XYuriTT

Title: The Science of Discworld II – The Globe
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen
Release year: 2002
Publisher: Ebury Press

Why in Database: This book is the second volume of a four-book series. Repeatingly, these books can definitely be described as popular science, with the addition of Discworld. The chapters are arranged in turns, one about the magicians from the unseen university (generally shorter) and one about science in a broad sense. In the second volume we have issues related to the development of people and their culture. We habe fewer turtle elements here than in the first volume, below we have selected five more interesting:

The first example is a description of how narration works:

On Discworld, the eighth son of an eighth son must become a wizard. There’s no escaping the power of story: the outcome is inevitable. Even if, as in Equal Rites, the eighth son of an eighth son is a girl. Great A’Tuin the turtle must swim though space with four elephants on its back and the entire Discworld on top of them, because that’s what a world-bearing turtle has to do. The narrative structure demands it.

In the next selected passage, turtles (tiny) are chosed as one of the examples of animal hatchlings that delight people.

We, as a species, don’t only specialise in storytelling. Just as with the other specialities above, our species has a few more oddities. Probably the most odd characteristic that our elvish observer would note is our obsessive regard for children. We not only care for our own children, which is entirely to be expected biologically, but for other people’s children, too; indeed for other humankind’s children (we often find foreign-looking children more attractive than our own); indeed for the children of all land vertebrate species. We coo over lambs, fawns, newly hatched turtles, even tadpoles!

The next two fragments are description of the events and a quotation from Small Gods, one of Pratchett’s books:

The Great God’s manifestation takes the form of a small tortoise. Brutha finds this hard to believe:
I’ve seen the Great God Om … and he isn’t tortoise-shaped. He comes as an eagle, or a lion, or a mighty bull. There’s a statue in the Great Temple. It’s seven cubits high. It’s got bronze on it and everything. It’s trampling infidels. You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise.

Brutha has a much simpler vision of Omnianism: it is something for individuals to live by. Vorbis shows Brutha a new instrument that he has had made: an iron turtle upon which a man or woman can be spreadeagled, with a firebox inside. The time it takes for the iron to heat up will give them plenty of time to reflect on their heresies. In a flash of prophecy, Brutha realises that its first victim will be himself. And in due course, he finds himself chained to it, and uncomfortably warm, with Vorbis watching over him, gloating. Then the Great God Om intervenes, dropped from the talons of an eagle.
One or two people, who had been watching Vorbis closely, said later that there was just time for his expression to change before two pounds of tortoise, travelling at three metres per second, hit him between the eyes. It was a revelation. And that does something to people watching. For a start, they believe with all their heart.

The last fragment is about the differences in perception of the universe, which is much more constant for the earth than for the disk, where A’Tuin’s interventions occur sometimes:

Everything ticked and tocked and turned for them like a great big machine. There were rules. Things stayed the same. The same reliable stars came up every night. Planets didn’t disappear because they’ve wandered too close to a flipper and been flicked far away from the sun.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: The Science of Discworld
Author(s): Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen
Release year: 1999
Publisher: Ebury Press

Why in Database: Science of the DiscWorld is the first (and the only one without a subtitle) volume of a four-book series. These books can definitely be called popular science, with the addition of Discworld. The chapters are arranged in turns, one about the magicians from the unseen university (generally shorter) and one about science in a broad sense, in the first volume they are about the creation of the world and life in it. As this book balances between the real world and the disc, there are (in both perspectives) references to turtles. Below are some examples (mostly longer pieces), but they are not all turtle elements in the book (we omitted the less “unique” ones).

The first fragment that comes before the main part of the book begins, one of the four quotes at the very beginning is about turtles:

There are no turtles anywhere.
Ponder Stibbons

The second fragment is an explanation why Science is different than the typical book “Science of Insert_name_of_universe”, where pseudoscientific ideas are described to explain why X and Y work in the series and so on:

We could have taken that approach. We could, for example, have pointed out that Darwin’s theory of evolution explains how lower lifeforms can evolve into higher ones, which in turn makes it entirely reasonable that a human should evolve into an orangutan (while remaining a librarian, since there is no higher life form than a librarian). We could have speculated on which DNA sequence might reliably incorporate asbestos linings into the insides of dragons. We might even have attempted to explain how you could get a turtle ten thousand miles long.
We decided not to do these things, for a good reason … um, two reasons.
The first is that it would be … er … dumb.

The next section we have chosen is about the relationship between turtles and the moon:

Creatures lower on the evolutionary ladder were certainly aware of the Moon. Take the turtle, for
instance – about as Discwordly a beast as you can get. When today’s turtles crawl up the beach to lay their
eggs and bury them in the sand, they somehow choose their timing so that when the eggs hatch, the baby
turtles can scramble towards the sea by aiming at the Moon. We know this because the lights of modern buildings confuse them. This behaviour is remarkable, and it’s not at all satisfactory to put it down to ’instinct’ and pretend that’s an answer. What is instinct? How does it work? How did it arise? A scientist wants plausible answers to such questions, not just an excuse to stop thinking about them. Presumably the baby turtles’ moonseeking tendencies, and their mothers’ uncanny sense of timing, evolved together. Turtles that just happened, by accident, to lay their eggs at just the right time for them to hatch when the Moon would be to seawards of their burial site, and whose babies just happened to head towards the bright lights, got more of the next generation back to sea than those that didn’t. All that was needed to establish these tendencies as a universal feature of turtle-hood was some way to pass them on to the next generation, which is where genes come in. Those turtles that stumbled on a workable navigational strategy, and could pass that strategy on to their offspring by way of their genes, did better than the others. And so they prospered, and outcompeted the others, so that soon the only turtles around were the ones that could navigate by the Moon.

Next fragment is again about the relationship between turtles and the moon:

The interesting thing about the terrestrial turtlish trickery is that at no stage is it necessary for the animals to be conscious that their timing is geared to the Moon’s motion, or even that the Moon exists. However, the trick won’t work unless the baby turtles notice the Moon, so we deduce that they did. But we can’t deduce the existence of some turtle astronomer who wondered about the Moon’s puzzling changes of shape.

The next fragment is quite a classic, an anecdote about “turtles all the way down“:

It now becomes impossible not to mention the turtle joke. According to Hindu legend, the Earth rides on the back of four elephants, which ride on a turtle. But what supports the turtle? In Discworld, Great A’Tuin needs no support, swimming through the universe unperturbed by any thought about what holds it up. That’s magic in action: world-carrying turtles are like that. But according to the old lady who espoused the Hindu cosmology, and was asked the same question by a learned astronomer, there is a different answer: ’It’s turtles all the way down!’ The image of an infinite pile of turtles is instantly ludicrous, and very few people find it a satisfying explanation. Indeed very few people find it a satisfying kind of explanation, if only because it doesn’t explain what supports the infinite pile of turtles. However, most of us are quite content to explain the origins of time as ’it’s always been there’. Seldom do we examine this statement closely enough to realize that what it really says is ’It’s time all the way back.’ Now replace ’time’ by ’turtle’ and ’back’ by ’down’ … Each instant of time is ’supported’, that is, a causal consequence of, the previous instant of time. Fine, but that doesn’t explain why time exists. What caused that infinite expanse of time? What holds up the whole pile?

Mention of Chelonium:

It is the same on Discworld, with its to our eyes bizarre elements such as chelonium (for making world-bearing turtles), elephantigen (ditto elephants), and narrativium – a hugely important ’element’ not just for Discworld, but for understanding our own world too.

The next two fragments are two different lists of rules that Ponder Stibbons made on the basis of his observations:

On the paper was written, in Ponder’s very neat handwriting:
THE RULES
1 Things fall apart, but centres hold.
2 Everything moves in curves.
3 You get balls.
4 Big balls tell space to bend.
5 There are no turtles anywhere.
6 … It’s so depressing.

THE RULES
1 Things fall apart, but centres hold
2 Everything moves in curves
3 You get balls
4 Big balls tell space to bend
5 There are no turtles anywhere
(after this one he’d added Except ordinary ones)
6 Life turns up everywhere it can
7 Life turns up everywhere it can’t
8 There is something like narrativium
9 There may be something called bloodimindium (see
rule 7)
10…

The last fragment we selected is about the unexpected protection that A’Tuin and elephants provide for the disc:

’Yes, but only as a result of argumentative wizardry. That’s quite different. You don’t expect rocks to drop out of the sky.’
’You don’t expect them to stay up? said Ridcully. ’In a proper universe, the turtle snaps up most of them and the elephants get the rest. Protects the world. Y’know, it seems to me that the most sensible thing any intelligent lifeform could do on that little world would be to get off it.’

Author: XYuriTT