Once More With Footnotes

went and had another look at him. He'd choked to death on something. What is this?"
     
                  He held up a little leather disc.
     
                  "It's a swozzle," said the little police man. "He used it for the voices. He said ours weren't funny enough."
     
                  " 'That's the way to do it!' " said the one called Judy, and spat.
     
                  "It was stuck in his throat," said Carrot. "I suggest you run away, just as far as you can."
     
                  "We thought we could start a people's co-operative," said the leading gnome. "You know ... experimental drama, street theatre, that sort of thing."
     
                  "Technically it was assault," said Carrot. "But frankly I can't see any point in taking you in."
     
                  "We thought we'd try to brin g theatre to the people. Properly. Not hitting each other with sticks and throwing babies to crocodiles — "
     
                  "You did that for children?' said Carrot.
     
                  "He said it was a new sort of entertainment. He said it'd catch on." Carrot stood up, and flicked the sw ozzle into the rubbish. "People'll never stand for it," he said. "That's not the way to do it."
     

Introduction to The Unseen University Challenge, the first Discworld quiz book, compiled by Dave Langford and published by Victor Gollancz in 1996.
     
    Some of t he questions foxed me, I can tell you. I was slightly glad of that — I'm not sure I'd feel at ease with myself if I knew every blessed thing about Discworld.
     
    Foreign readers might need to know that Mastermind is a venerable TV quiz show which, unlike many r ecent competitors, often asks the kind of questions that prevent dumb people from winning.
     
     
     
     
     
Introduction: T he U nseen U niversity C hallenge
     
                  Someone once said that the Discworld is a world and mirror of worlds. Hang on ... that was me.
     
                  But the fact is that any fantasy world is, sooner or later, our own world. It may be in heavy disguise, but it can't escape its origins. At a basic level, even the language gives it away. However towering the distant mountains, however dwarf-haunted the local woods, a ny character wanting to eat a piece of zorkle meat between two slices of bread probably has no other word for it than sandwich. Every sentence the most exquisitely alien elf speaks will be filled with the echoes of Rome.
     
                  There's not a lot we can do about it. The builder of fresh worlds may well start out carefully avoiding Alsatian dogs and Toledo steel, but if he or she has any sense, will one day look up from the keyboard and utter the words: "What the hell?"
     
                  Somewhere around that point, the Discworld starts. Reality is very thin around it, you see. Influences leak across from other more prosaic worlds. A city Watchman in a breastplate and helmet and tight corner finds himself speaking in the tones of Harry Callaghan. A young druid pioneering a new ty p e of popular music might have, for perfectly logical and defensible reasons, a name which translates as "Bud of the Holly."
     
                  This is all traditional stuff. A storyteller helps the narrative come alive by picking the images the readers will recognize. But there are further hidden devices. Ankh-Morpork, the main city, has Lord Vetinari as its ruler; clearly the Vetinaris have a distant relationship with the Medici. But anyone who does a tiny bit of research and some lateral thinking will work out why the ci t y has also had, for quite a few books, noble families called the Selachii and the Venturis. There's a plot waiting there somewhere ...
     
                  Mind you, this sort of thing rebounds. People analyse Discworld books. Some people go through the text with the thoroug hness of Baconians, and write me triumphant letters about how the phrase "Please open the window" has clearly been taken from a Czech play last performed in 1928. Others ask about the eventual fate of characters who were created at a moment's notice solel y in order to be stunned by a falling mongoose. Some readers even ask what happened to characters after the end of the book.
     
                  This tendency probably has some kind of mysterious survival value.