A collection of quotes on L-Space, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.”
— (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!)
Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass, and on that simple equation rests the whole of L-space. It is via L-space that all books are connected (quoting the ones before them, and influencing the ones that come after). But there is no time in L-space.
Nor is there, strictly speaking, any space. Nevertheless, L-space is infinitely large and connects all libraries, everywhere and everywhen. It’s never further than the other side of the bookshelf, yet only the most senior and respected librarians know the way in.
(I’m going to need these later so I’m just teeing them all up in this thread. All praise goes to Pterry)
He was spending more nights now watching Hex trawl the invisible writings for any hints.
In theory, because of the nature of L-space, absolutely everything was available to him, but that only meant that it was more or less impossible to find whatever it was you were looking for, which is the purpose of computers.
Books bend space and time. One reason the owners of those aforesaid little rambling, poky second-hand bookshops always seem slightly unearthly is that many of them really are,
having strayed into this world after taking a wrong turning in their own bookshops in worlds where it is considered commendable business practice to wear carpet slippers all the time and open your shop only when you feel like it.
You stray into L-space at your peril.
… all books, everywhere, affect all other books.
This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.
The hypothesis behind invisible writings was laughably complicated.
All books are tenuously connected through L-space and, therefore, the content of any book ever written or yet to be written may, in the right circumstances, be deduced from a sufficiently close study of books already in existence.
Future books exist in potentia, as it were, in the same way that a sufficiently detailed study of a handful of primal ooze will eventually hint at the future existence of prawn crackers.
… a magical library, built on a very thin patch of space-time. There were books on distant shelves that hadn’t been written yet, books that never would be written. At least, not here. It had a circumference of a few hundred yards, but there was no known limit to its radius.
One book could be a library, if it was a book that made a big enough dimple in L-space. A book with a title like 100 Ways with Broccoli was unlikely to be one such, whereas The Relationship Between Capital and Labour might be, especially if it had an appendix on making explosives
🦧 Knowledge equals power… The string was important. After a while the Librarian stopped. He concentrated all his powers of librarianship.
Power equals energy… People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
Energy equals matter… He swung into an avenue of shelving that was apparently a few feet long and walked along it briskly for half an hour. Matter equals mass. And mass distorts space. It distorts it into polyfractal L-space.
So, while the Dewey system has its fine points, when you’re setting out to look something up in the multidimensional folds of L-space what you really need is a ball of string.
🦧 📗
It paid to look at any book the orang-utan gave you. He matched you up to books. Vimes supposed it was a knack, in the same way that an undertaker was very good at judging heights.
All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can’t simply be chained to the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates.
Or, in the case of the volumes on tantric sex magic for the serious connoisseur, kept under very cold water to stop them bursting into flames and scorching their severely plain covers.
The Librarian was, of course, very much in favour of reading in general, but readers in particular got on his nerves. There was something, well, sacrilegious about the way they kept taking books off the shelves and wearing out the words by reading them.
The important thing to remember about grimoires is that they are deadly in the hands of any librarian who cares about order, because he’s bound to stick them all on the same shelf.
This is not a good idea with books that tend to leak magic, because more than one or two of them together form a critical Black Mass.
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space…
Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
There are some laws, though, that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space.
The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space. The thaumic mathematics are complex, but boil down to the fact that all books, everywhere, affect all other books.
This is obvious: books inspire other books written in the future, and cite books written in the past. But the General Theory of L-Space suggests that, in that case, the contents of books as yet unwritten can be deduced from books now in existence.
**There’s a Special Theory as well, but no one bothers much with it because it’s self-evidently a load of marsh gas.