History Literature / TheScienceOfDiscworld

* AmbiguouslyRelated: In the second and third books, the men who (badly) fill the historical roles of, respectively, Creator/WilliamShakespeare and UsefulNotes/CharlesDarwin (until the wizards fix things) are named Arthur J. Nightingale[[labelnote:*]] who still exists in the final timeline, but as an illiterate ploughman[[/labelnote]] and ''Preserved'' J. Nightingale[[labelnote:*]] short for Preserved-By-God; he was the sole survivor of a shipwreck as an infant and his adoptive parents were extremely religious[[/labelnote]]. It's not outright stated that they are members of the same Nightingale family (keep in mind that they would have lived about 300 years apart), but given the similar roles they play in the story, the implication is there.

-->'''Elf Queen:''' Do you not think I could give you something better than a potato?
-->'''Rincewind:''' [[ComicallyMissingThePoint Are we talking about sour cream topping with chives?]]

* DifferentWorldDifferentMovies: When they write that intelligence appears to be useful enough that it would probably still have arisen is some form if we hadn't appeared (the fiction parts show a number of civilisations getting a foothold on Roundworld in much earlier epochs, only to be wiped out by cataclysmic disasters) they speculate that if sentient crabs had evolved on the Earth in humans' place, three of them might be writing ''The Science of Dishworld'', about a bowl-shaped world that's carried on the backs of gigantic marine invertebrates.
** In-universe, the third book is about the wizards' attempts to ensure that Charles Darwin writes ''On The Origin Of Species'', not ''Theology Of Species''.

* {{Expy}}: Ratonasticthenes for Eratosthenes, and Antigonus for Archimedes.
* TheFairFolk: In volume 2.

* ItWillNeverCatchOn: The wizards do this a lot, first claiming that planets are no place for life, that the sea is only place for a intelligent creature, that the primates will never amount to anything, and so on.
** Also, that the "terribly dull lizards" would never catch anyone's interest, such that any accounts of Roundworld prehistory will most likely skip over their era.

* {{Retcon}}: The first book uses 'splitting the thaum' as a magical equivalent of 'splitting the atom'. In previous books, thaums were just an arbitrary measurement of magic (and with the competing Prime system) rather than the smallest possible unit of magic. (This definition of the thaum first appeared in ''Literature/LordsAndLadies'', but buried in a footnote to an essay on the nature of magic. This is the first time it's actually been explored. Thaums also continue to be used as a measurement when one is needed. It's not even clear if it's the same thaum; it would be very UU to use the same word for two distinct concepts and just trust that everyone will know which one you mean.)
** This sub-series seems to suggest that not just the Discworld itself but the entire universe in which it resides runs on magical principles rather than the laws of physics, with stars described as tiny points of light and so on, whereas earlier books implied that normal stars and planets also existed alongside Great A'Tuin and a few other oddities like planets made from the corpses of giant dragons, with things like the TheoryOfNarrativeCausality and (barely) FunctionalMagic only existing inside the Disc's self-contained BackgroundMagicField.
*** Which seemingly gets retconned again in Book IV, which mentions they have indeed observed normal planets and stars passing by the Discworld. Blame quantum.

* WelcomeToTheRealWorld

* WretchedHive: Rincewind's opinion of 16th century London - like Ankh-Morpork, but ''worse''.

* EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs: The first book originally skipped over the thunder lizards when showing the development of life on Earth. A later edition went back and added a chapter because... well, ''dinosaurs''.

* TryToFitThatOnABusinessCard: By the beginning of book 2, Rincewind has accumulated seven different titles (on the provision that he in no way act like this grants him any authority within the university whatsoever).

* NotImportantToThisEpisodeCamp: The Bursar is absent in book 2, being off with his aunt.

* MeasuringTheMarigolds: Averted in the science parts of the books.

-->This is why we can get the words of songs completely wrong and not realise it. The ''Guardian'' newspaper ran an amusing section on this habit, with examples such as 'kit-kat angel' for 'kick-ass angel' -- bit of a generation gap there, which underlines how our perceptions are biased by our expectations. Ian recalls an Annie Lennox song that really went 'a garden overgrown with trees', but always sounded like 'I'm getting overgrown with fleas'.
** Amusingly enough, ''[[SelfDemonstratingArticle he's still wrong]]''. The actual lyric is 'I'm thrown and overblown with bliss'.

* {{Mondegreen}}: Discussed in one of the science sections in the second book, when they bring up how our brains fill in the blanks in our sensory data by putting what we have seen and heard in a context.

** In Book 4, Ridcully pulls the exact same gag on Vetinari that Ponder Stibbons did to him, having the Patrician ceremonially "activate" UU's latest MagiTek device despite the fact that they'd already turned it on earlier to make sure it would actually work.

** This sub-series seems to suggest that not just the Discworld itself but the entire universe in which it resides runs on magical principles rather than the laws of of physics, with stars described as tiny points of light and so on, whereas earlier books implied that normal stars and planets also existed alongside Great A'Tuin and a few other oddities like planets made from the corpses of giant dragons, with things like the TheoryOfNarrativeCausality and (barely) FunctionalMagic only existing inside the Disc's self-contained BackgroundMagicField.

** Rincewind's discussion about all the things you can make from [[TrademarkFavoriteFood potatoes]] with the Elf Queen in book 2 apes Bubba's similar discourse on shrimp with Film/ForestGump.

** In book 3, the Dean re-enacts that scene from ''Film/DirtyHarry''. The Auditor he's against is smugly sure he's got no chocolate left... then Dead fills it full of nougat (and admits, actually, he ''wasn't'' sure he had any left).

* ShoutOut: In book 3, the Dean re-enacts that scene from ''Film/DirtyHarry''. The Auditor he's against is smugly sure he's got no chocolate left... then Dead fills it full of nougat (and admits, actually, he ''wasn't'' sure he had any left).
** The Dean's proposed mile-high limpet, as the only life form on Earth to get anything like immortality, is identical to Leviathan - the oldest living creature on Earth in the ''Literature/{{Illuminatus}}'' trilogy, with a point-for-point correspondence in the description.

* NiceJobFixingItVillain: The Wizards nearly foil their plan in "The Globe" by teaching Shakespear "The Hedgehog Song". But the Queen of Elves, under the assumption that the Wizards are ''trying'' to stop Shakespear from writing ''Theatre/AMidsummerNightsDream'', using her powers to strip the song from William's mind.