Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBEwas an English author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his Discworld series of 41 novels. Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971; after the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983, he wrote two books a year on average. His 2011 Discworld novel Snuff was at the time of its release the third-fastest-selling hardback adult-readership novel since records began in the...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 April 1948
CityBeaconsfield, England
The theater troubled her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.
Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.
This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one.
This time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.
What is magic? There is the wizard's explanation... wizards talk about candles, circles, planets, stars, bananas, chants, runes and the importance of having at least four good meals every day.
A world like that, which exists only because the gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive. And sex too, of course.
There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn't rule the world. They're called Witches and Wizards.
Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?
Magic never dies. It merely fades away.
It's an old magical principle - it's even filtered down into RPG systems - that magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be 'stored' - in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course.
Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'
Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.
Magicians and scientists are, on the face of it, poles apart. Certainly, a group of people who often dress strangely, live in a world of their own, speak a specialized language and frequently make statements that appear to be in flagrant breach of common sense have nothing in common with a group of people who often dress strangely, speak a specialized language, live in ... er ...
The sun set, which is everyday magic...