The Light Fantastic

An organisation with this name is also mentioned in the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

20

The four fundamental forces that govern our universe are gravitation, electro- magnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.

The word ‘charm’ also resonates with the concept of quarks, the elementary quantum particles that the strong nuclear force in fact acts on.

21

The bickering of the spells is cleared up somewhat by the creation passages on pp. 103/85-119/99 from Eric. It is quite clearly stated that first the Creator did an Egg and Cress (for Rincewind), then He Cleared His Throat, then He Read the Octavo (that’s the word then), which created the world and finally the primordial slime came into being because Rincewind couldn’t eat the Egg and Cress Sandwich and just dropped it on the beach. The Creator subcontracted for the firmament, so it isn’t quite clear when that came to be.

'In the beginning was the word” is of course also a biblical allusion to John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

22

Caroc = Tarot and Ching Aling = I Ching: two ways of accessing the Distilled Wisdom of the Ancients, and all that. A minor inconsistency, by the way, is that on p. 24/24 there actually is a reference to Tarot cards.

23

A reference to the Young Men’s Christian Association, YMCA. In our world the YMCA somehow became associated with the homosexual scene (I think quite a few people singing merrily along to the Village People’s disco hit ‘YMCA’ would have been very surprised to learn what the song was really about), hence the “studded collars and oiled muscles” bit.

24

It’s always important never to look back if you’re rescuing somebody from Death’s domain. The best known example of this can be found in the tragic legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus went to fetch his departed loved one, talked Hades (the Greek version of Death) into it, but had to leave without looking back. Of course he looked—and she was gone forever. A contemporary retelling of the Orpheus legend can be found in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series.

A few people have written and suggested a reference to Lot’s wife in Genesis 19:26 (who was turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back when they left Sodom and Gomorrah), but the fact that we’re talking about Death’s domain here indicates clearly to me that the Orpheus reference is the one Terry intended.

25

A houri is actually a beautiful young girl found in the Moslem paradise. ‘Sherbet’ is a cooling Oriental fruit drink (also a frozen dessert) as well as a fizzy sweet powder children eat as a sweet, and which comes in a cardboard tube with a liquorice ‘straw’ at the top. To get to the sherbet you bite off the end of the liquorice and suck through it.

26

A biriani is an Indian rice curry.

27

This is the first mention of Creosote, whom we will later meet as a fully developed character in his own right, in Sourcery.

28

The idea of a strange little shop that appears, sells the most peculiar things, and then vanishes again first appears in a short story by H. G. Wells, appropriately called The Magic Shop. A recent variation on the same theme can be found in Stephen King’s Needful Things.

When an a.f.p. reader mistakenly thought that this type of shop was invented by Fritz Leiber, Terry replied:

'Actually, magically appearing/disappearing shops were a regular feature of fantasy stories, particularly in the old Unknown magazine. They always sold the hero something he didn’t—at the time—know he needed, or played some other vital part in the plot. And I think they even turned up on the early Twilight Zones too. You’re referring to a Leiber story called Bazaar of the Bizarre or something similar, where a shop appears which seems to contain wonderful merchandise but in fact contains dangerous trash.”

The Leiber story is indeed called Bazaar of the Bizarre. It features Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and can be found in Swords Against Death.

29

In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where we find (in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter III) that Gildor Inglorion the High Elf says: “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards because they are subtle and quick to anger”. The other part she may have got from signs often seen in