Twoflower has heard the stories, but he obviously hasn’t really understood them. He’s quite sure that he won’t be harmed, no matter how dangerous the place may be, because after all, he’s just a tourist, not an adventurer.
That adventurers can be people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the famous ones are the minority who didn’t die, has never occurred to him. He looks on Ankh-Morpork as a big theater putting on a show for his entertainment, and doesn’t for a minute see himself as a participant; he’s just an observer. He wants to see the tavern brawls, the barbarian heroes, the Whore Pits,54 and so on, and is completely oblivious to any possible danger in this.
And he does get to see tavern brawls, barbarian heroes, and Whore Pits. Amazingly, thanks to Rincewind, he also survives intact, though he’s responsible (quite unintentionally) for setting a large part of Ankh-Morpork ablaze.55 The two of them escape the city (and Bravd and the Weasel) and venture elsewhere.
The second section (or chapter, or novella) of The Colour of Magic, “The Sending of Eight,” gives us haunted forests and mysterious ancient crypts and destinies guided by the whims of gods—dark fantasy, in the mode of Weird Tales,56 with some distinctly Lovecraftian57 touches, but adapted to the Discworld.
We now learn that, like many fantasy characters, these characters are caught up in a game played by the gods, notably Fate and the Lady, the latter clearly being Lady Luck, though her name is never mentioned, since it’s bad luck to address her by name.
The Lady, being who she is, cheats.
While the idea of names or words one mustn’t say aloud for fear of attracting the attention of hostile supernatural powers is an old and familiar one—for example, in Lovecraft’s stories, speaking the name of Hastur the Unspeakable aloud is “a punishable blasphemy”—Mr. Pratchett carries this a step farther into absurdity in this story with the unspeakable number, the one between seven and nine. This is the Number of Bel-Shamharoth, also known as the Sender of Eight and the Soul Eater, an abominable god much like the Great Old Ones that H.P. Lovecraft originated. (Many other authors have imitated Lovecraft’s creations since then.)
Rincewind attempts to rescue Twoflower from the Temple of Bel-Shamharoth; Twoflower, the determined innocent tourist, does not make this easy.
We also see a good bit of Hrun the Barbarian, who makes his living robbing ancient temples, battling monsters, and so on, and who is clearly based on Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. We’re definitely in Weird Tales territory here, even though I don’t see much that’s specifically taken from Clark Ashton Smith—but on the other hand, there’s also the frequent mention of the sound of rolling dice. While that’s a reference to the game being played by the gods, it’s also a reference to the unfortunate spate of second-rate fantasy novels in the late seventies and early eighties that were a little too obviously based on Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games, games where dice rolls determine the outcome of every fight. Readers of the time would often say disparagingly of such obviously game-based novels, “You can hear the dice rolling.”
Well, in “The Sending of Eight,” the characters can literally hear the dice rolling, as the gods play with them.
There are other interesting tidbits here, as well. Rincewind, despite being a wizard, doesn’t much like magic, and often wishes the world operated on more sensible principles, but alas. . . .
“It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.”
In short, where people in our world dream of a world full of magic and wonder, people on the Disc dream of a world that makes sense, and doesn’t have all that magic and wonder confusing matters.
As the series progresses, several different characters will have this attitude—most of them wizards, perversely enough—though it will eventually settle most thoroughly not on Rincewind, but on one Ponder Stibbons.
As far as the development of Discworld itself goes, we encounter our first troll as just one of the various menaces Rincewind and Twoflower meet on the road; it dies rather more easily than is entirely in accord with later depictions, and is otherwise not quite what we’ll see in subsequent volumes.
Trolls and dryads appear, but no dwarfs. Elves are mentioned that don’t appear to be the sort we’ll meet in Lords and Ladies. A great many things aren’t what we’ll wind up with. There are various place-names mentioned—Chirm, B’Ituni, Re’durat, and so on—that are remarkable for their failure to reappear in later stories. Generally, throughout the series, names keep turning up over and over even if we never learn much about the places mentioned, but that’s not the case in this first volume, where any number of exotic names are thrown about, never to be seen again.
I suppose Chirm might be an alternate spelling of the city of Quirm, which does indeed appear many times, but I wouldn’t bet on that being deliberate.
Well, moving on, the third part of The Colour of Magic is “The Lure of the Wyrm.” This is largely a direct parody of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but generalizes nicely to the whole wish-fulfillment sort of setting that some fans58 disparagingly call “magic pony” fantasy, where powerful magical beasts selflessly serve the whims of their human masters for no very clear reason. In this case, the wish-fulfillment aspect becomes a bit more literal than usual.
In case you aren’t familiar with it, in “magic pony” fantasy, the protagonist is always a girl or young woman (often red-haired) who has been abused or mistreated in some fashion, but who mystically bonds with some wonderful, powerful, empathic or telepathic creature, whether horse, dragon, unicorn, wolf, or whatever, because she’s just so special, and uses this bond to elevate herself to some exalted status. Mercedes Lackey , Jennifer Roberson, and assorted others—pretty much all of them female—have written this sort of thing, with varying degrees of talent and success, but Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight is the classic in the field, in which a kitchen drudge named Lessa of Ruatha bonds with the great golden dragon Ramoth and becomes Weyrlady of Benden, leader of all the dragonriders of Pern.
In “The Lure of the Wyrm,” Liessa Wyrmbidder is the rider of the great dragon Laolith, and the Lady of Wyrmberg. I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on here. Liessa Dragonlady is not quite as likeable as Lessa of Ruatha, but the resemblance is unmistakable.
Hrun says that dragons are extinct,59 but obviously, these people are riding dragons; plainly, something strange is up.
Here, Twoflower’s invincible optimism finally finds useful application; if anyone has wishes looking for fulfillment, he does. It seems Wyrmberg is even closer to the edge of reality than the rest of Discworld, and Twoflower, like Liessa, can use that. Though not always safely or effectively.
In the end, Rincewind and Twoflower briefly fall out of their native reality entirely, into another plane60—but only briefly, before plummeting back to another part of the Disc, and into the fourth and final novella.
And that last novella, “Close to the Edge,” parodies the Yes album covers Roger Dean was famed for in the 1970s .61
Okay, well, perhaps not. Though honestly, it does seem to, with all those strange craft falling off the edge of the world and all, and having the same title as one of Yes’s early albums.
Really, it’s an assortment of more fantasy clichés, but this time without an obvious specific source—heroes doomed to be sacrificed, gods manifesting, and so on. If I had to tie it to a single author, I’d pick John Brunner, author of The Traveler in Black, but I suspect Mr. Pratchett would react to that with puzzlement, or maybe, since he doesn’t seem to do outrage, minor annoyance.
I’m probably simply displaying my own eccentricity by picking Brunner. Perhaps L. Sprague de Camp would be a better fit, or even Lord Dunsany. The L-space annotations sug
gest some Jack Vance influence, and I can see that, too. It’s not so much a single author as an entire style of fantasy—the witty, mildly cynical, sometimes lyrical sort that has been around since the nineteenth century, while usually being outsold by the sword-and-sorcery or magic-pony or pseudo-Tolkien stuff.62
At any rate, “Close to the Edge” concludes The Colour of Magic without actually ending the story. Rincewind and Twoflower are thrust through a series of further adventures, and then finally escape the last menace by replacing the crew of a spaceship and falling off the edge of the world.
One thing about setting a story on a flat world—there’s a great temptation to sooner or later send someone falling off the edge. The problem with that is, where do you go from there?
Having already once saved Rincewind and Twoflower by miraculously translating them to another plane, apparently Mr. Pratchett felt no need to do so again. The result is a rather unsatisfying ending. Yes, they escaped the people who were trying to kill them, but now the universe is trying to kill them.
Fortunately, the story really didn’t end there. The three-year wait for the conclusion, though, must have seemed interminable.
You, lucky reader, can just go on to the next book—or, since you’re here, the next chapter.
Before you do, though, I should perhaps mention that the British network Sky One, prompted by the success of their video adaptation of Hogfather, began filming their version of The Colour of Magic in July of 2007, starring David Jason as Rincewind. The production aired in Britain for Easter of 2008, but as of this writing has not reached the U.S.
4
The Light Fantastic (1986)
THIS SECOND BOOK IN THE SERIES picks up exactly where The Colour of Magic left off, with Rincewind and Twoflower plummeting through space. Like The Colour of Magic, it’s still parodying various elements of fantasy fiction.
This is where the Standard Model Discworld Novel first appears, with no chapters, just one continuous book-length narrative. Rather than mocking specific works in separate stories as The Colour of Magic did, it pretty much throws everything in together.
This one parodies scheming wizards, druids, New Agers, Conan the Barbarian and his ilk, red-headed warrior women, trolls, mysterious little shops, and doomsday cults, and wraps up the various loose ends from the first book, providing Twoflower and Rincewind with a reasonably happy ending, in which they avoid being devoured by unspeakable creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions.63
Twoflower gives the Luggage to Rincewind at the end, so that it will continue to appear in the series whenever Rincewind does, without the need for Twoflower’s rather annoying presence.
This book also introduces the Librarian, who will go on to appear in almost every story hereafter.
In an early scene, the Octavo, the book containing the eight spells that supposedly created the Discworld in the first place,64 sends a burst of magic shooting upward, and it transforms the head Librarian of Unseen University65 into an orangutan. He remains an orangutan for the rest of the series (excluding a period of illness in The Last Continent), and is one of the most frequently-seen characters, matched only by Death.
Another important introduction is Cohen the Barbarian. In The Colour of Magic, we saw one parody of Robert E. Howard’s Conan in the form of Hrun the Barbarian; here we meet another, rather more original one. Genghiz Cohen (whose first name won’t be mentioned until Interesting Times) is the barbarian hero’s barbarian hero, a man whose exploits are legendary throughout the Disc, a man who can triumph over any foe, and who has been doing so for a long time—after all, it takes awhile to have all those adventures, and for word of them to get around. As the greatest, most famous barbarian hero in the history of Discworld, he’s been doing it for a really long time.
And that’s why we need a second barbarian hero, instead of just bringing back Hrun. Cohen is, when we meet him, eighty-seven years old and still adventuring, because after all, what else does he know how to do?
This is an obvious but rarely-considered consequence of heroes too tough to ever be beaten—since they don’t die, and in fact specialize in not dying, they’re going to get old. Examining such necessary but never-mentioned consequences of something is an excellent source of humor, and one that Mr. Pratchett makes extensive use of throughout the series.
In The Light Fantastic, we also visit Death’s home for the first time and meet Ysabell, Death’s adopted daughter, as well as Famine, War, and Pestilence, who happen to be visiting. Death’s friends call him “Mort” here, a detail that will be quietly ignored forever after.
While I won’t identify the parties involved, since I don’t want to spoil any surprises, I will say that the reason we see Death’s home is that one character has died, and another is trying to rescue him anyway.
The idea of retrieving a soul from the house of Death is, of course, an ancient one, found in any number of classic myths, in any number of cultures: Gilgamesh, Orpheus, and so on. Only on Discworld, though, would the rescuer find his friend teaching Death and the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse to play something not entirely unlike bridge. Blending the mythic and the mundane is another reliable humor source that Mr. Pratchett taps frequently.
Although a mountain troll appeared briefly in The Colour of Magic, it’s here in The Light Fantastic that it’s first explained that trolls are made of stone, that they eat stone, that their teeth are diamonds because something that hard is needed to chew stone, and that heat is bad for their brains. They aren’t quite like what we see strolling the streets of Ankh-Morpork a few books later—they aren’t noticeably stupid at moderate temperatures, for one thing—but they’re definitely getting there.
The creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions appear as well.
All in all, a good many of the lasting details of Discworld are starting to fall into place now, in a way they didn’t in the first book. It’s still mostly playing off other fantasy stories, commenting on the absurdities of them, but it’s also developing its own personality.
So far, other than the humorous elements, it looks rather like an ordinary fantasy series. It started off as one thing—parodying specific fantasy tropes—but then started to become its own new thing in the second volume. Our heroes, who were fairly two-dimensional in the first volume, start to be fleshed out in the second. The normal progression would be for them to start to turn from parodies into real heroes in the third volume.
Mr. Pratchett didn’t do that. Sneaky git.
Instead, we’re at a fork. The third volume doesn’t have Rincewind or Twoflower in it; they aren’t even mentioned in passing. Rather, it begins the second of the eight sub-series.
So you, dear Reader, now have a choice. You can go on to Chapter 5, about the third book, Equal Rites, or you can instead follow the adventures of Rincewind. If you want to follow Rincewind, then skip ahead to Chapter 6 for his bit part in Mort, or to Chapter 7 to read about his more significant role in Sourcery.
5
Equal Rites (1987)
YOU WOULD THINK, with a title like that, this book would be mocking either feminism or sexism. That may even be what Mr. Pratchett intended. It isn’t, however, what he actually gives us.
It starts off looking very much as if that was what he meant to do, as we see Drum Billet, a powerful wizard, arrive in the town of Bad Ass66 during an appropriately theatrical thunderstorm, with the intention of passing his wizard’s staff on to a child about to be born. The local smith is an eighth son, and has seven boys already. You’ll recall that eight is the magically potent number in Discworld, rather than seven, so it’s the eighth son of an eighth son, rather than the seventh son of a seventh son, who is marked for magic.
The child is born, the staff handed on—but the baby is a girl.
Oops. Discworld’s wizards are all male. Women who take up magic are witches, with a rather different approach to the subject. This child, Eskarina67 Smith, seems destined to be a problem.
Now, if this were following the patter
n of the first two books and parodying common or garden-variety fantasy novels, we’d have lots of funny scenes where little Esk demonstrates the truth of that old feminist slogan, “In order to get ahead, a woman has to be twice as good as a man. Fortunately, that isn’t difficult.” Male wizards would act like complete dickheads, and good old feminine common sense would win the day. That, frankly, was what I expected when I first got a look at the book.
It’s not what I got.
I tell you, you can’t trust Mr. Pratchett. Just when you think you have him figured out, tagged as another purveyor of easy parody, he switches modes entirely, and without being obvious about it.
What he does here is to present a straightforward account of a young woman trying to find a comfortable place for herself when she’s been saddled with talents inappropriate to her station.
That’s not to say it isn’t funny, because it is funny; it just isn’t the sort of broad farce the first two books were. The characters are more like people than caricatures, and the humor doesn’t derive from mocking the stereotypes of fantasy fiction, nor even the stereotypes of feminist rhetoric, but from mocking the behavior of real people. Eskarina Smith isn’t a superwoman, but an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent. The wizards refusing to accept her aren’t exaggerations of fantasy-world wizards, but exaggerations of real-world academics, more concerned with office politics than with magic, and sexist not as a result of deliberate misogyny, but from confusion, tradition, and uncertainty.
And Esk’s mentor, the witch who takes the girl under her wing . . . well, there’s no easy way to sum her up, because this is where we’re introduced to one of Mr. Pratchett’s finest creations, one of the great characters of fantasy fiction, Granny Weatherwax.
The Turtle Moves! Page 4
