The Science of Discworld II: The Globe by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Ebury Press, 拢16.99, ISBN 0091882737
LIKE most other projects these days, every popular science book needs a Big Idea. The Science of Discworld II promises to be very popular 鈥� Terry Pratchett鈥檚 Discworld novels sell well over a million a year, while Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are maths and science bestsellers in their own right 鈥� so it needs a really big Big Idea.
Fortunately, it鈥檚 got one: a new theory of what makes us human. According to the Discworld trio, this is simply our ability to tell stories. Forget language (you can tell stories without it), forget art (every picture tells a story), forget Homo sapiens, in fact. We should really be called Pan narrans, the story-telling ape, because this single talent explains everything else in human culture.
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Don鈥檛 expect a straightforward exposition of this idea, though. The book鈥檚 format mirrors that of its predecessor The Science of Disc-world. Pratchett pens a story about Discworld, a realm of fantasy without science but run by wizards whose magic actually works. Stewart and Cohen then interleave some rather more down-to-earth ideas about Roundworld, known to us as the real world, where science rules and magic is just a story.
The Discworld tale involves a bunch of quarrelling wizards who deploy an all-seeing computer and a lot of confusing time travel to stop the evil elves gaining control of Roundworld, which to the wizards is just a small, magic-free zone created within Discworld for experimental purposes. After many Pratchett-type adventures and a bit of fiddling about with causality, the wizards launch their secret weapon: William Shakespeare, the ultimate storyteller. By putting A Midsummer Night鈥檚 Dream on at the Globe (or Roundworld, neat, eh?) and portraying the elves as glittery things in tights, Shakespeare destroys their credibility and ushers in the modern world. It鈥檚 more cod maths than literary history, though: as the flyleaf says, 鈥渢his book is a true account of events in the life of William Shakespeare, but only for a given value of 鈥榯rue'鈥�.
It looks good, then. Established authors, a proven formula and a family-size Big Idea. But the trouble with Big Ideas is that they can be too big. Explaining everything from chemistry to social conventions as the result of storytelling seems so all-encompassing as to mean very little. You can call the way minds use internalised objects in imaginary causal sequences 鈥渟torytelling鈥� if you like, but it鈥檚 really just a label. And even then there are problems with claiming that storytelling defines humanity. For a start, my cat can do it: she attracts attention at a window that doesn鈥檛 open, then runs to be let in at one that does, seeming to have constructed a simple story about her world. We still don鈥檛 know, either, how minds decide which bundles of perceptions qualify as characters in a narrative, or why only some sequences seem causal. You could say that it鈥檚 because they make a better story, but this would confirm how small the Big Idea really is.
Maybe this is an over-serious criticism of a satirical souffl茅 whipped up from magic, science and undergraduate humour. But I do sense a serious purpose behind it all: a poetic, sidelong and entirely laudable attempt to plumb the profundity of the human situation. If it fails in the end, it鈥檚 because an ace storyteller like Pratchett is bound to think that the defining human activity is storytelling.
With Stewart and Cohen on board, The Science of Discworld II contains a lot of solid science and maths, much of it debunking the traditional tosh in other popular science books. So if you鈥檙e interested in human origins, and like your ideas laced with farce of the Pratchett kind, you鈥檒l find it entertaining, instructive and illuminating. But only for a given value of 鈥渋lluminating鈥�.