Following the advice of Von Kladpoll in Doppelte Berührungsempfindung, he realises that he can perform an analysis on himself, and, adopting a Viennese accent, he does so ("Now, tell me about your mother, Mister Nutt. When Nutt, the brainy stooge to the foolish wizards of Unseen University, who works in the lowest rank of the university's servants, asks his friends to help discover his unspeakable secret, it is in mocking imitation of psychoanalysis. Pratchett vies with those inspired hunches that lead the heroes of fantasy literature to outwit the fates. She is in a hurry to save the day, but finds herself trapped by an academic bore and his unintelligible theoretical elucidation of his apparently necromantic powers.
Does she know Houseman's theory of the Universal Memory, describing how "what we call the passage of time is in fact the universe being destroyed and instantly rebuilt in the smallest instant of eventuality. When Dr Hix, head of the university's Department of Post-Mortem Communications, explains to the good-hearted but unintellectual Glenda that there is a way for the skilled magician to look into the distant past, he offers to explain the magical science behind the feat. In Pratchett, this is parodied, naturally. We know that moment in Dr Who when the Doctor hurriedly explains the pseudo-scientific logic by which some minatory alien operates (and by which it can be defeated). The Harry Potter books are dedicated to discovering the laws that govern the behaviour of Death Eaters or the exact location of Horcruxes. Novels with magic in them give over an inordinate amount of time to such explanation. Once a novelist has freed him or herself from life's physical laws, once a novel is no longer bound by what the 18th-century pioneers of the genre called "the probable", you need to know the rules by which characters operate. From Dracula to The Lord of the Rings, fantasy heroes triumph by understanding the strict laws that govern the supernatural. Fantasy fiction is pedantically attentive to the rules governing its characters' powers, and the dangers that test them.
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