![]() Gods come into existence and gain and lose power based on belief, rather like stocks on a stock market, which makes them unusually beholden to mortals ( Small Gods explores this dynamic). Belief is a powerful force on Discworld.Science, in the hands of intelligent but reactionary species like the dwarves, becomes a force of order, but in the hands of progressive species (mainly humans like steam engine inventor Dick Simnel, and the genius Leonardo da Quirm, but also allied goblins, some trolls and dwarves) it is an imperfectly governed chaotic evolutionary force. ![]() In the hands of the History Monks, it is an imperfectly governed chaotic evolutionary force. Time, in the hands of the Auditors of Reality, is a force of villainous order.Magic, unleashed in raw form as in Sourcery is a source of chaos (wielded by a villain seeking absolute order), but in the hands of Ponder Stibbons, a disciplined and conscientious wizard, it is an imperfectly governed chaotic evolutionary force.On Discworld, there are at least four such elemental processes: magic, time, science, and mortal belief. So order, chaos, and transformation are complicated.Īny elemental process has both orderly and chaotic regimes. On Discworld, the intentions of sentient beings interact with non-sentient elemental world processes. Even chaos is not chaotic enough to be a first-class citizen of the Discworld multiverse. So that’s an interesting trope subversion. On Discworld, luck and surprise are the most powerful forces arrayed against order, subsuming even chaos and the other horsemen. His life is far from chaotic, and his attitude is that of a resignation to fate (Fate, personified, is a separate god on Discworld, but Rincewind is resigned to his peculiar fate, as a puppet of The Lady).Ĭhaos proper is a lesser divinity, the retired fifth of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, alongside Death, Famine, Pestilence, and War. But you cannot just naively identify luck with chaos. Rincewind, for instance, is predictably unlucky and lucky thanks in part to The Lady. The Lady probably also ought to be identified with the fifth basic element (surprise, alongside earth, fire, water, air). In the novels, the Lady Luck (one of the gods) and Rincewind (a slouchy wizard) form a slouching-with-god pair, but the world itself has a larger governing order-chaos-transformer triad. It has magic, wizards, witches, dragons, dungeon dimensions, a police procedural sub-world (Watch), and an industrial revolution sub-world. This lovely map, which I’ve been using to guide my reading for the last year (14 down so far), gets at the scope and complexity of the world. Since it is at once a subversive parody of worlding tropes, and reliant on them to power the world coherently, it simultaneously validates and challenges our intuitions about worlding, including elements of Ian’s pithy core definitions. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a fascinating example world that sheds some light on these questions. If a world-process is defined by an order-chaos-transformer triad, is the god-mortal-slouching (or god-mortal-walking) triad isomorphic to it? The generator of it? A subset of it? A fractal embodiment of it? Governed by it but distinct? There’s actually a serious question buried in there, which I’ll formulate as follows: Since I’ve been jokingly referring to Ribbonfarm and its surrounding web zone as the “Ribbonfarm Blogamatic Universe” (RBU), Ian’s characterization immediately provokes the question: am I Captain Marvel or Nick Fury in the RBU? I hope I’m not Hawkeye. In the MCU, Nick Fury walks with many gods, and Captain Marvel appears to be the most powerful of the lot, which is why Fury sends a prayer-pager call out to her as his last act in Infinity War. Presumably she’ll play a key role in defeating Thanos in Endgame. This voluntary desire to surf chaos, metabolize it into new order, and then do it all over again, is sometimes called “walking with god.” Maybe it’s more like slouching with god around here. She’s more like a god than even Thanos or Thor, so the usual wisecracking smart-assery would have struck a false note.Ī line in Ian’s Worlding Raga episode last week, What is a World, leaped out at me in relation to this: It strikes a slightly quieter note than the typical Marvel Cinematic Universe romp, and it occurred to me that that’s because the character is arguably the most powerful in the MCU, like Superman in the DC universe. Last week, my wife and I watched the new Captain Marvel movie. This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Worlding Raga
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