Publisher Description
The wizards discover to their cost that it’s no easy task to change history. Roundworld is in trouble again, and this time it looks fatal. Having created it in the first place, the wizards of Unseen University feel vaguely responsible for its safety. They know the creatures that lived there escaped the impending Big Freeze by inventing the space elevator — they even intervened to rid the planet of a plague of elves, who attempted to divert humanity onto a different time track. But now it’s all gone wrong — Victorian England has stagnated and the pace of progress would embarrass a limping snail. Unless something drastic is done, there won’t be time for anyone to invent space flight, and the human race will be turned into ice-pops. Why, though, did history come adrift? Was it Sir Arthur Nightingale’s dismal book about natural selection? Or was it the devastating response by an obscure country vicar called Charles Darwin whose bestselling Theology of Species made it impossible to refute the divine design of living creatures? Can the God of Evolution come to humanity’s aid and ensure Darwin writes a very different book? And who stopped him writing it in the first place?
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“British comic actor Michael Fenton Stevens and longtime Discworld expert and narrator Stephen Briggs bring ease and glee to this third installment of Terry Pratchett’s ‘fact/fantasy fusion’ series. Glee, yes, really. Sometimes complicated ideas and information soak into the brain more easily when heard and not just read, and that is certainly the case here. When delivered by the right authors and the right voices, the theories of evolution and general relativity and a number of other real science theories transmute into absolutely mind-boggling comprehensible fun. Education mixed with entertainment—what a wonderful concept. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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AudioBile
About the Authors
Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) was an English novelist known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series. His first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971, and after publishing his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983, he wrote two books a year on average. He was the United Kingdom’s bestselling author of the 1990s and has sold more than 55 million books worldwide. In 2001 he won the Carnegie Medal for his children’s novel The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to literature in 1998 and was knighted in 2009.
Ian Stewart is an Emeritus Professor and Digital Media Fellow in the Mathematics Department at Warwick University, England, with special responsibility for public awareness of mathematics and science. He won the Royal Society’s 1995 Michael Faraday Medal for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of science. He is best known for his popular science writing on mathematical themes.
Jack Cohen is a British biologist and science fiction consultant. He has authored or coauthored many books, in recent years with Ian Stewart and Terry Pratchett.
About the Narrators
Michael Fenton Stevens is an actor and comedian, as well as a founding member of The Hee Bee Gee Bees, a pop music group. He is known for his work in television and for his voice work on BBC Radio 4.
Stephen Briggs, who also works in film, has adapted and staged fifteen Discworld plays, collaborated with Terry Pratchett on a number of related works, and performed the audio recordings of Pratchett’s books. Briggs has won five AudioFile Earphones Awards. He lives in England.