The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

if you haven’t. 5 Dickens recognized this: in
David Copperfield
Mr Micawber remarks ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’
    There’s no symmetry between having money and not having it – but the discussion had gone off the rails because everyone had assumed that there was, so that ‘having money’ was the opposite of ‘having no money’. If you must find an opposite, then ‘having money’ is opposite to ‘being in debt’. In that case, ‘rich’ is like ‘knurd’. In any event, making the comparison between money, love, and air lowered the debating temperature considerably. Air isn’t important if you’ve got it, only if you haven’t; the same goes for money.
    Vacuum is an interesting privative. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could sell vacuum-on-a-stick. Vacuum in the right place is
valuable
.
    Many people on Earth sell
cold
-on-a-stick.
    Discworld does a marvellous job of revealing the woolly thinking behind our assumptions about absence, because in Discworld privatives really do exist. The dark/light joke in Discworld is silly enough that everyone gets the point – we hope. Other Discworld uses of privatives, however, are more subtle. The most dramatic, of course, is Death, many people’s favourite Discworld character, who SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS . Death is a seven-foot-tall skeleton, with tiny points of light in his eye sockets. He carries a scythe with a blade so thin that it’s transparent, and he has a flying horse called Binky. When Death appears to Olerve, king of Sto Lat, in
Mort
, it takes the king a few moments to catch up on current events:
    ‘Who the hell are you?’ said the king. ‘What are you doing here?
    Eh? Guards! I deman–’
    The insistent message from his eyes finally battered through to his brain. Mort 6 was impressed. King Olerve had held on to his throne for many years and, even when dead, knew how to behave.
    ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.’
    Y OUR MAJESTY , said Death, bowing, FEW DO .
    The king looked around. It was quiet and dim in this shadow world, but outside there seemed to be a lot of excitement.
    ‘That’s me down there, is it?’
    I’ M AFRAID SO, SIRE .
    ‘Clean job. Crossbow, was it?’
    Our earthly fears about death have led to some of our strangest reifications. Inventing the concept ‘death’ is giving a name to a process – dying – as if it’s a ‘thing’. Then, of course, we endow the thing with a whole suite of properties, whose care is known only to the priests. That thing turns up in many guises. It may appear as the ‘soul’, a thing that must leave the body when it turns it from a live body into a dead one. It is curious that the strongest believers in the soul tend to be people who denigrate material things; yet they then turn their own philosophy on its head by insisting that when an evident
process
– life – comes to an end, there has to be a
thing
that continues. No. When a process stops, it’s no longer ‘there’. When you stop beating an egg, there isn’t some pseudo-material essence-of-eggbeater that passes on to something else. You just aren’t turning the handle any more.
    Another ‘thing’ that arises from the assumption that death exists is whatever must be instituted in the egg/embryo/foetus in order to turn it into a proper human being, who can die when required. Note that in human myth and Discworld reality it is the soulless ones, vampires and their ilk, who cannot die. Long before ancient Egypt and the death-god Anubis, priests have made capital out of this verbal confusion. On Discworld, it’s entirely proper to have ‘unreal’ things, like Dark, or like the Tooth Fairy in
Hogfather
, which play their part in the plot. 7 But it’s a very strange idea indeed on planet Earth.
    Yet it may be part of some process that makes us human beings. As Death points out in
Hogfather
, humans seem to need to project a kind of interior decoration on to the universe, so that they spend much of the time in a world of their own making. We seem – at least, at the moment – to need these things. Concepts like gods, truth 8 and soul appear to exist only in so far as humans consider them to do so (although elephants are known to get uneasy and puzzled upon finding elephant bones in the wild – whether this is because of some dim concept of