Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn't bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces. This is the gulf of the universe, the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule, a few lost comets and...
... But a circle of blackness shifts slightly, the eye reconsiders perspective and what was apparently the awesome distance of interstellar wossname becomes a world under darkness, its stars the lights of the will charitable be called civilization.
For, as the world tumbles lazily, it is revealed as the Diskworld - flat, circular, and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the giant A'tuin, the only turtle ever to feature on Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, a turtle ten thousand miles long, dusted with the frost of dead comets, meteor-pocked, albedo-eyed. No one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum. Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that. Its already happening. Like shrines of gods. The energy streaming up from their paracosmic peaks may, in chapters to come, illuminate many mysteries: Why tortoises hate philosophy, why to much religion is bad for goats, and what is it handmaidens actually do? It will certainly show what out ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today. People have often speculated about this. Would they approve of modern society? They ask. Would they marvel at the present-day achievements? And of course this misses the fundamental point. What out ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is:
"Why is it so dark in here?"
