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Markup View
Author: puritybrown
Jan 25th 2008
at
9:32:34 PM
Shouldn't it be DiabolusExMachina? The concept of a deus ex machina comes from Greek drama, but the actual phrase is Latin. (The Greek for "god" is "theos".) I was actually going to propose something similar and never got round to it -- I'd noticed it coming up in the Discworld books, though not so much to prevent a happy ending -- more to prevent the Disc from becoming too similar to our world. In the early books, any time some sort of technological or social development from our world looked like becoming widespread on the Disc, creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions would show up and attack. (Happened with film in ''Moving Pictures'' and rock music in ''Soul Music''. In ''Sourcery'', Dungeon Dimension creatures showed up because... um... there wouldn't have been a plot otherwise.) Later Pratchett started wheeling out the Auditors to stop Death from just doing whatever he wanted to do.
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