The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch

The wizards discover to their cost that its 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 its all gone wrong Victorian England has stagnated and the pace of progress would embarrass a limping snail. Unless something drastic is done, there wont 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 Nightingales 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 humanitys aid and ensure Darwin writes a very different book? And who stopped him writing it in the first place?


From the Hardcover edition.