The Science of Discworld II

unravel the chain of causality that led to boring edge people. We want to avoid the bad effects of elves but retain the good ones. We want to play pick-and-mix with universes.
    However, despite their emphasis on prophecy, monotheist faiths have real trouble with multiple futures. Having simplified their theology down to one God, they also tend to believe that there can be only one ‘right way to heaven’. The priests tell the people what they must do, and at least while the religion is fresh the priests are fine examples. This is what gets you to heaven, they say: no adultery, no murder, no failure to give a tithe to the Church, and no undercutting the other clergy for indulgences. Then the gateway to heaven becomes ‘strait’, narrower and narrower, until only the blessed and the saints can get in without spending time in some purgatory or other.
    Other religions, notably extreme versions of Islam, promise heaven as the reward for a martyr’s death. These ideas are more closely associated with barbarian views of the future than tribal ones: paradise, like Valhalla for the Norse heroes, will be full of the hero’s rewards, from perpetually renewed women to ample food and drink and hero’s games. But they are also associated, as they were not in the more purely barbarian Norse legends, with a belief in fate, in the will of a god that nothing can avoid or deny. This is the other way for authority to force obedience: the promise of ultimate reward is a very persuasive story.
    Barbarians, for whom honour, glory, power, and love, dignity, bravery are the meaningful concepts, get plus points for denying authority and shaping events to their own desires. They have, among their gods and heroes, the mischievous unpredictable ones like Lemminkainen and Puck.
    Barbarian nursery stories, like their sagas, laud the hero. They show how luck is associated with particular attitudes, especially a pure heart that does not seek immediate or ultimate reward. There is frequently a test of this purity, from helping a poor blind cripple, who turns out to be a god in disguise, to curing or feeding a desperate animal, who comes to your aid later.
    The agents in many of these stories are supernatural – out of the order of things, magical and causeless – ‘people’, such as fairies (including fairy queens and fairy godmothers), avatars of the gods, demons, and djinni . People, especially heroes or aspiring heroes (such as Siegfried, but also Aladdin), attain control over these supernatural beings with the assistance of magic rings, named swords, spells, or merely by their own inner nobility. This changes their fortunes, and luck comes to be on their side; they win battles and bouts against long odds, they climb tall mountains, they kill immortal dragons and monsters. No tribal thinker would even dream of stories like these. For them, fortune favours the well-prepared.
    Man is forever inventive, and we have stories that counter even the most heroic tales: the Sidh, the seven-foot-tall elves of Lords and Ladies and old Irish folklore, the Devil who buys your soul and has you at his mercy even if you repent, the Grand Vizier, James Bond’s opponents.
    What is interesting in our discussion of stories here is the characters of these anti-heroes. They don’t have any. Elves are the High Folk, but they don’t have lives of their own; they are simply portrayed as being antithetic to what people, especially heroes, want to do. We don’t care about the human aspects of James Bond’s iconic enemies: they are always portrayed as being mindlessly cruel, or avid for power without responsibility and without having to overcome obstacles. They are ciphers, they don’t have creative personalities, and they don’t learn. If they did, one of them would have shot James Bond dead with a simple gun many years ago, after learning what happens to those who put their trust in laser beams and circular saws. They’d remove his watch first, too.
    Rincewind would characterise the elves as ‘edge fairies’. They don’t tell stories to themselves or, rather, they keep telling the same old story.
    It is natural to think of stories as resting on language, but the causality probably works the other way round. Gregory Bateson, in his book Mind and the Universe , devotes several chapters to human languages and how we use them to think. But his start on the subject is abeautiful mistake. He