Another Guardian interview

[Who's Wee Dug]

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-bo ... CMP=twt_gu

 

[lazecraze]

Loving this interview!

 

[Mixa]

Thanks for sharing the interview Dug! I didn't know the book will be published the 11th September... Another thing to celebrate in our Catalan Day (this year we're commemorating its 300 anniversary :dance: ).

Mx

 

[Discworldpadawan]

Dose'nt Ankh morpork also celebrate 300 years in the books, - 300 years of winning, as well as losing the civil war??!!
Actually I have a good question, in the timeline of the books, what sort of a timescale are we looking at? Perhaps I need to clarify, how much time (in normal years) elapses from the Colour of magic right the way up to the present, Raising Steam? Im assuming its a relatively short amount of years, with a lot of the stories overlapping / happening at the same time as one another, all relative and the like? Would be interesting to know

 

[pip]

Theres two time leaps , one with Rincewind getting trapped in the Demon world , hence he doesn't age as much as he should, and the Witches carrying the whole on Lancre forward in time. These explain some of the crossover of characters where it mightn't have made as much sense.

 

[simmonds91]

How old is Vimes' boy now? in Snuff he was old enough to walk around and even talk, thats a good few years since Thud when the lad was getting born and of course there is also tiffany's growth as well. I feel the timeline is almost as old as The discworld novels (30 odd years), the stories overlap and whatnot of course but it's close no?

 

[=Tamar]

There's an old attempt at working out a timeline here:

http://www.lspace.org/books/timeline/dw ... intro.html

Do read the comments.
The Discworld runs mostly chronologically; about the only hiccup is Small Gods, which, if I recall correctly, was somewhere in canon said to happen both 100 and 200 years before "Discworld Present," because of the events of Thief of Time.

 

[Discworldpadawan]

Lol! Taking into consideration all the above, methinks I'll just continue to enjoy reading the books, and stay oblivious to the actual timeline Ignorance is bliss, as they say!

 

[The Mad Collector]

ah but Thief of Time explains that there is no such thing as a time-line as any inconsistency is explained by the History Monks fixing things with what time they have available so anything can happen at any time without anyone noticing

There were anomalies everywhere.
And no one had noticed.

You had to hand it to human beings. They had one of the strangest powers in the universe. Even her grandfather had remarked upon it. No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder. Trolls and dwarfs had it, too, that strange ability to look at the universe and think 'Oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?' And along with this had come an associated power, to make things normal. The world changed mightily, and within a few days humans considered it was normal. They had the most amazing ability to shut out and forget what didn't fit. They told themselves little stories to explain away the inexplicable, to make things normal.

Historians were especially good at it. If it suddenly looked as though hardly anything had happened in the fourteenth century, they'd weigh in with twenty different theories. Not one of these would be that maybe most of the time had been cut out and pasted into the nineteenth century, where the Crash had not left enough coherent time for everything that needed to happen, because it only takes a week to invent the horse collar.

The History Monks had done their job well, but their biggest ally was the human ability to think narratively. And humans had risen to the occasion. They'd say things like 'Thursday already? What happened to the week?' and 'Time seems to go a lot faster these days,' and 'It seems like only yesterday...'

 

[Who's Wee Dug]

And there is also the different leg in the trousers of time anomalies to explain the differences.