Great A’Tuin, the giant star turtle, swims through space and time. On
its back stand four huge elephants with a flat world resting on them. The
seas of this world constantly pour water off its edge into the depths of
interstellar space. This is the Discworld created by Terry Practchett in
his series of hilarious science fantasies.

The discworld novels starts with a two-book sage in which we meet Rinceweed,
the disc’s most incompetent wizard, and follow him to the far edges of the
world and back again. He meets and joins up with the world’s first tourist
and his luggage, a chest made of ‘Sapient Pearwood’, which has hundreds
of feet and an extremely malicious temperament.

During these adventures Terry Pratchett constantly amazes and delights
us with hoards of fascinating and crazy characters. The disc is peopled
with trolls, dwarves, barbarian heroes and heroines, gods, and of course,
Death. One of my favourite character is the chief librarian of the library
of the Unseen University, home of wizardry on the disc. The library is an
extremely dangerous place. The librarian was changed into an Orang Utang
and now resists all attempts to change him back.

In Moving Pictures, the tenth discworld book, Terry Practchett has turned
his eyes and wit to the movie business and Hollywood with uproarious consequences.
The book starts off with a bang as the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork discover
‘octo-cellulose’, which unveils the secrets of the film industry and changes
the lives of many people from all over the disc. The alchemists take this
secret to Holy Wood Hill (away from the eyes of prying wizards) where they
are followed by thousands of starry-eyed people all hoping for a job in
‘moving pictures’.

Victor Tugelbend, a student wizard and Theda Withel (stage name: Dolores
De Syn) are lucky. They manage to become stars in films such as Cohen the
Barbarian and Blown Away. But then they discover the secrets of long dead
civilisation and are the only ones who can save the world.

If you like light-hearted irreverent parodies, the Disc-world books
are for you – I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Eric Brown studies maths, more maths, chemistry and biology at Islington
Sixth Form College, London.

IT WAS a brilliant idea to design a game about ecology, which makes
people more aware of the issues while they enjoy themselves. But, unfortunately,
there are several drawbacks to the Green Game. It’s similar to Trivial Pursuit:
you answer questions to move round the board, collecting pieces of a jigsaw
of a dodo. When your dodo is complete, you have won. Questions are divided
into categories, such as land, animal, sea or air depending on the symbol
on the square you are on. The game is intended for 15-year-olds and above
but, even if you have a degree in science, you’ll run into problems.

Most questions are ridiculously hard, many are phrased in such a muddled
way that several answers could be right and, even worse, the answers are
sometimes wrong, missing or don’t apply to the question. For example, ‘What
family do crows belong to?’ is answered ‘Corridae’, rather than ‘Corvidae’.
You might forgive one misprint but many occur. And ‘Where do fruit bats
face extinction?’ might be answered by a list of countries bordering the
Indian Ocean. A bald answer ‘Indian Ocean’ is wrong – no fruit bats live
there. Other questions veer between metric and imperial measures in their
answers which confused some.

When we played this game it took about three hours and we didn’t even
finish it. But there are positive sides to the Green Game. The board is
really well set out with sturdy pieces, and there is an excellent idea struggling
to get out. The game is good if you enjoy having a laugh at the awful English
– the questions read as though they’ve been badly translated from German
– or like to spend time arguing if the question was too hard, the answer
wrong or if it’s your fault. It would also probably work better as a team
game. We found sides formed, anyway, just to decide what the questions meant.
If you want a game that you can take seriously and doesn’t take so long,
then this is not for you. We would not spend Pounds sterling 26.99 on it.

Eric Brown is at Islington Green School, London.

Paula Vaccarey is at Stoke Newington School, London.