The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork is the greatest city on the Discworld - a flat planet carried through space on the back of four elephants standing astride a giant turtle - and has seen fire, flood, famine and even the odd barbarian invasion during its long history, but even it is unprepared for the arrival of a much more devastating threat: tourism. Twoflower is the first visitor to the city from the distant Agatean Empire, and is happy wandering around taking "pictures of the sights" with a magic box and soaking up the authentic atmosphere. This behaviour in Ankh-Morpork would normally result in him having the lifespan of a mayfly confronted by a supernova, but luckily the wizard Rincewind has kindly volunteered to be his guide and protector in return for not having his extremities removed by the city's Patrician, who is anxious to avoid insulting a foreign power with an army in the millions.

Unfortunately, Twoflower's attempts to introduce the concept of fire insurance to the hardy and creative business-owners of Ankh-Morpork results in an enforced flight from the burning metropolis and the beginning of a long and very strange journey across the Disc, taking in dragons, spaceships and the fabled temple of Bel-Shamharoth along the way. All the while the only spell that has ever managed to lodge itself in Rincewind's mind is very keen to get itself said, which could be a very bad idea indeed... 

There is no more disheartening notion than the one which has sadly been reality for the past six years: the Discworld series is complete. There will, never again, be a new Discworld novel (or any other) published by Terry Pratchett. This state of affairs was once unthinkable: almost annually between 1983 and 2015 - and sometimes two or even three times a year - a new Pratchett book would be released and cheerfully climb to the top of the bestseller lists, glowing in critical acclaim and adulation. It was easy to take Pratchett and his books for granted, that is until there were no more.

But whilst that state of affairs is sad, it does mean we can now sit down and consider the Discworld series as a whole, and its position in the wider fantasy and literary canons. Pratchett was a funny, human writer, a reluctant (but accomplished) worldbuilder, a canny satirist and a fierce critic of human nature. His books fairly overbrim with intelligence, vigour and, occasionally, genuine anger at the state of the world. Discworld was the mirror he used to shine a light on real-world concerns, sometimes just to gently poke fun at them and sometimes to eviscerate them with savage, forensic analysis. If he occasionally faltered - there's a few (and only a few) books he wrote mid-series which sometimes felt a bit too reminiscent of earlier books - it was only briefly and usually still entertainingly.

A lot of that came later, though. The first book in the series, The Colour of Magic (1983), was conceived as a one-off, an attempt by Pratchett to improve his writing career that was, if not in danger, than certainly faltering. His debut novel, The Carpet People (1971), had been a successful children's book but Pratchett had been reluctant to get typecast as a kids' writer. His next two novels, The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981), had been adult-aimed science fiction, with a more serious edge. They'd been greeted with near-total bafflement and faded into obscurity almost instantly. Despite that, Pratchett had been tickled by the idea in Strata of a flat planet and, having failed to make the subject sing in SF, reworked it into a satire of fantasy tropes. This proved much more successful and The Colour of Magic became a near-instant, surprise hit.

The Colour of Magic exists in a bit of an odd state when viewed from 2021. As a satire of fantasy, it works. It's funny and breezy and succeeds because it has a serious edge to it as well. Pratchett is smart enough to know that it's much better to satirise something you love, and that a lot of comedy that despises what it's poking fun at just ends up being obvious and mean-spirited. Pratchett was a deep-seated, genuine fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, Anne McCaffrey, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and the book overflows with affectionate pastiches of those authors (well, apart from Tolkien, which Pratchett thought was too obvious). So Rincewind and Twoflower meet barely-concealed analogues of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, with Ankh-Morpork here feeling like Lankhmar with the serial numbers filed off, before teaming up with Conan the Barbarian Mk. II and getting into trouble with Budget Cthulhu and an entire civilisation of Dragonriders of Pern-wannabes. A few Zelazny-isms get trotted out, with Ankh-Morpork being apparently the ur-fantasy city, the one all other fantasy cities are but shadows of, like Amber if Amber had a massive homelessness and civic disorder problem. Pratchett's erudite wordplay also recalls Vance's Dying Earth, although even Pratchett struggles to match the sheer vocabularic firepower of on-form Vance.

Taken on its own merits, this is all entertaining, if risking being dated horribly: the authors who were the touchstones of any self-respecting fantasy collection in 1983 certainly are not in 2021. Fortunately, Pratchett uses the satirical strokes of the setting to propel his own narrative and his own characters. Rincewind, a wizard who can't use proper magic due to a powerful uber-spell sitting in his brain, scaring off all other comers, works as the Only Sane Man protagonist who frequently responds to any given situation exactly how most people would (i.e. running like hell) and only finds himself motivated to apparently heroic action through the threat of an even worse punishment or by coincidence. Rincewind isn't quite at the Harry Flashman/Ciaphas Cain level of "selfish coward whom things work out for anyway," but he's at least nodding in that direction. Twoflower is also an engaging character, his early appearance as a hapless buffoon quickly replaced by his characterisation as an intelligent observer of events unfolding around him, which he sometimes feel doesn't apply to him as a tourist (despite no-one else knowing what a tourist is).

Of course, The Colour of Magic also has to be contrasted against the later Discworld novels. In that light, the novel may be considered an absolute primal example of Early Instalment Weirdness (warning: TVTropes link), with a lot of things that clash with later books. Pratchett's writing style is much less polished here, his sense of humour a bit broader and more obvious than normal, and character development is less-assured. Both the Patrician and Death are characterised much more differently to their later appearances (with Death's motivations and character being heavily retconned just three books later, in Mort), to the point that some fans have pondered if it's actually a different Patrician here. The book is solid, but also a bit disposable. Readers approaching the novel from the knowledge it has forty successor books which have cumulatively sold a hundred million copies and is one of most critically-acclaimed fantasy series of all time, may feel a bit baffled at the slightness of this work.

The book is also oddly-structured, in being four self-contained, episodic narratives that have been combined to form a novel-length work, like a fixup novel. I'm not sure why - Pratchett never seems to have considered individually publishing the four episodes as short stories in magazines - but it both gives the novel a feeling of pace but also of being rushed, with each of the sections of a very short novel (which is barely 280 pages long in paperback as it is) roaring along at manic speed before transitioning to the next episode.

If you want to find out why Pratchett is one of the 20th Century's best-selling British authors and most popular fantasy authors of all time, The Colour of Magic (***½) may disappoint or leave you a bit puzzled. This is embryonic Discworld, slotting pieces to place to serve as the foundations for later greatness. But as a stand-alone, affectionate satire of fantasy, and not just the usual suspects, it remains quite entertaining. The story continues (for the only time in the series) directly into the sequel, The Light Fantastic. The novel is available in the UK and USA now.

Note: I published an earlier review of the book here.

A History of Epic Fantasy - Part 10

Dare we say it, but some people think that fantasy is a bit funny. Humorous. Comical. Small people with furry feet saving the world from a giant flaming eyeball? Sentient dinosaurs who use gravity as a source of magic? It can sometimes all be a bit daft, no matter how many Pratchetts or Eriksons successfully employ the genre to make sharp points about real life.

Comic fantasy novels are reasonably common. Good comic fantasy novels are surprisingly rare. Fantasy as a genre can be po-faced and self-parodying enough, so writing a genuinely funny book which successfully riffs off the genre without simply collapsing into lazy cliches seems a lot harder than writing a genuinely good epic fantasy novel. But some authors have made careers based on the attempt.

In September 1977, just a few months after the double-whammy of Lord Foul's Bane and The Sword of Shannara, Piers Anthony released (via Del Rey) A Spell for Chameleon. This novel was set in a fantasy world which bore a curious resemblance to Florida, and was considerably lighter-hearted and more playful than its contemporaries. This became the first book in the Xanth series, which as of this year stands at 41 volumes in length. The Xanth books have some genuinely interesting and fantastical ideas, but also rely a little too heavily on puns and poor wordplay for laughs. The books have also gathered a distressing reputation for sexism, with the bemusingly-titled fifteenth novel in the series, The Colour of Her Panties, being particularly singled out for juvenile and distasteful content. Anthony has also written more serious fare, most notably the epic Incarnations of Immortality sequence, but humour is never far away in his works. Xanth is the longest-running American comic fantasy series (more books are expected for years to come, even with the author now in his eighties), but is largely unknown outside of the States.

Another writer who started rising to prominence at the same time was Diana Wynne Jones. Her Chrestomanci sequence is her best-known work, which started publication in 1977. Jones wrote widely and well in a number of subgenres for decades, usually for children. In 1998 she wrote Dark Lord of Derkholm, which riffed off epic fantasy. Its sequel, The Year of the Griffin, also playfully invokes the Harry Potter series by being set in a wizarding school. However, Jones's definitive work of epic fantasy remains The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, published in 1996. The blurb is worth recounting in full:

This authoritative A-Z constitutes an essential source of information for all who dare to enter into the imaginative hinterlands. It provides acute insights into such mysteries as how HORSES reproduce, the various types of VIRGINS and the importance of CLOAKS to those wondering about going on a quest with a fellowship (of the Ring or otherwise).

Features include:

• A map (obviously)
•  Live background on those you will meet, including: BARBARIAN HORDES, lots and lots of wild-seeming people advancing under a cloud of dust in order to devastate more civilised parts, and ELVES, who claim they did not evolve like humans...certainly there seems to be no such thing as the Elvish ancestral ape.
• Full details on the catering arrangements: BEER always foams and is invariably delivered in tankards (what do you mean, "it tastes awful")?
• Useful hints on coping in Fantasyland: ARMOUR is generally regarded as cheating. TORTURE is obligatory at some stage.

The Tough Guide to Fantasyland remains the definitive guide to the cliches and hazards of the genre, and is recommended reading for all fantasy writers and fans.

Direct parody is rarer in fantasy, perhaps due to legal considerations. In 1969 the National Lampoon released Bored of the Rings, a comic novel based, of course, on Tolkien. It was extremely successful. In 2003 the British SF author Adam Roberts released The Soddit (based on The Hobbit) and followed it up the next year with The Sellamillion (you get the idea). These can be quite witty, but are limited by the source material.

Parodies and mickey-taking of famous modern fantasy novels are proving harder to write, as more recent writers employ humour directly in their works. Part of the success of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire can be traced to the character of Tyrion Lannister, who on occasion seems to be on the verge of breaking the fourth wall and directly commenting on the insanity of the situations he finds himself in. Other comic characters like Dolorous Edd also keep laughs coming even in the story's darkest moments. Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch's novels also have a air of knowing self-deprecation about them.

More difficult is taking the genre of fantasy and using it and humour to directly make valid points about both the genre and life in general. But one author has done it with resounding success, becoming the biggest-selling single author of secondary world fantasy since J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

The Colour of Magic

Terry Pratchett published his first novel, The Carpet People, in 1971. It was a humorous book about a tribe of tiny people who lived in a carpet, a world threatened by a destructive force known as Fray. Whilst well-regarded, it was only a modest success. Pratchett's second novel, published in 1976, was a science fiction novel called The Dark Side of the Sun, with employed some offbeat comical ideas but was more serious. It was not successful at all. In 1981 Pratchett published his third book, a serious science fiction novel called Strata. Influenced by Larry Niven's Ringworld, it was again not a major success and it looked like Pratchett was doomed to be a minor footnote in the annals of fantastic fiction.

However, Strata had contained within it an interesting idea. During the novel the characters discover an unusual, huge flat planet floating in space. It serves as the book's "Big Dumb Object" (similar to Niven's Ringworld or Clarke's Rama). Pratchett was taken with the idea but found that he could not explore it to its fully extent in SF. So he decided to repurpose it for his fourth novel. The flat planet remained, but was now mounted on the back of four elephants who stood on the back of a giant, space-faring turtle. The planet was now inhabited by hundreds of millions of people belonging to pre-technological civilisations, with magic and gods as force of reality.

The new novel was called The Colour of Magic and was published in 1983. The book was an overt parody and satire of sword and sorcery, most notably the works of Fritz Lieber: the great metropolis of Ankh-Morpork is heavily influenced (in the opening novel at least) by Lieber's Lankhmar. The book was a big hit, selling out of its initial print run. Building on good reviews and word-of-mouth, the book took off in a massive way and Pratchett quickly wrote a sequel, The Light Fantastic, publishing it in 1985. Again Pratchett satirised sword and sorcery, this time using the character of Cohen the Barbarian to riff on the works of Robert E. Howard. Readers wanted to hear more about this world and wanted more adventures with the wizard Rincewind and his hapless tourist companion, Twoflower, but Pratchett found the idea of using the same characters in book after book limiting, not to mention the fact that he was running out of authors to parody. For the third novel in the series, Equal Rites, Pratchett changed tack. He introduced two new protagonists, a witch named Granny Weatherwax and a young woman named Eskarina Smith, and used the book to comment on sexism, discrimination and resistance to change.

Thus the Discworld was born, a world where Pratchett could examine any topic he chose using any characters he chose. Disliking doorstops and cliffhangers, Pratchett also made each book self-contained and able to be read in any order, although he also contained enough continuity to reward regular readers. Ankh-Morpork's evolution from a standard medieval fantasy city to, forty volumes later, a proto-steampunk metropolis is particularly cleverly handled.

Pratchett used Discworld to address the foibles of modern life. He attacked the cult of celebrity in Moving Pictures and Soul Music, ossification and ludditism in Pyramids and the media in The Truth. He also told one of the best coming-of-age stories ever in his exploration of the character of Tiffany Aching (from The Wee Free Men to The Shepherd's Crown), and also addressed old age with Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg. He also explored middle age and rejected the idea that those later in life could not change with the character of Sam Vimes (starting in the Guards! Guards!). Most famously, Pratchett scathingly attacked fundamentalism and religious hatred in the brilliant Small Gods. Finally, through Mort and Reaper Man he movingly examined the idea of death and mortality. Discworld may represent the finest use of fantasy and the secondary world to date, to say intelligent and sometimes challenging things about the real world in an approachable manner. Int his manner Pratchett is less of an heir to Tolkien or Lieber and more the successor to Dickens.

Discworld isn't an epic fantasy, although its worldbuilding, story construction and characterisation outclasses those of almost every epic fantasy ever written. But it shows the huge potential for fantasy to reach and move readers when used in an imaginative and intelligent way. In the mid-1980s fantasy became a battleground between writers striving for more intelligent and, some might say, grimmer explorations of the genre and those who wanted popcorn fun, with the next vital milestone in the genre waiting in the wings.

The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork is the greatest city on the Discworld - a flat planet carried through space on the back of four elephants standing astride a giant turtle - and has seen fire, flood, famine and even the odd barbarian invasion during its long history, but even it is unprepared for the arrival of a much more devastating threat: tourism. Twoflower is the first visitor to the city from the distant Agatean Empire, and is happy wandering around taking 'pictures' of the 'sights' with his magic box and soaking up the 'authentic' atmosphere. This behaviour in Ankh-Morpork would normally result in him having the lifespan of a mayfly confronted by a supernova, but luckily the wizard Rincewind has kindly 'volunteered' to be his guide and protector in return for not having his extremities removed by the city's Patrician, who is anxious to avoid insulting a foreign power with an army in the millions.


Unfortunately, Twoflower's attempts to introduce the concept of fire insurance to the hardy and creative business-owners of Ankh-Morpork results in an enforced flight from the burning metropolis and the beginning of a long and very strange journey across the Disc, taking in dragons, spaceships and the fabled temple of Bel-Shamharoth along the way. All the while the only spell that has ever managed to lodge itself in Rincewind's mind is very keen to get itself said, which could be a very bad idea indeed...

Published in 1983, The Colour of Magic was the fourth novel by Terry Pratchett. His debut book, The Carpet People (1971), had been a modest success, but The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) had both been remaindered and it looked possible that this might be Pratchett's last published novel unless it took off in a big way. It didn't look too original either, being a fantasy rewrite of Strata (which saw a spaceship from Earth discover a mysteriously flat planet and investigate it). Of course, it was a big success, buoyed by good reviews, and became an eventual bestseller. Pratchett wrote a direct sequel, The Light Fantastic, and then more books set in the same world with different casts of characters. As of this time of writing the Discworld series consists of thirty-six novels with the thirty-seventh due in a couple of months and Pratchett is the world's biggest-selling living fantasy author after J.K. Rowling and Stephen King. Not bad for such humble beginnings.

The Colour of Magic, as the first book in the series, of course shows the Discworld in a far more embryonic state than later books. The subtler, satirical streak that develops over the first half-dozen books or so is also missing. Instead, the novel is a much broader and somewhat more obvious pastiche of swords 'n' sorcery. The targets that Pratchett goes after are interesting as Rincewind and Twoflower encounter cultures and monsters that Lovecraft, Howard and Leiber would have found quite familiar.


For all its distance from the later Discworld books, The Colour of Magic is still an entertaining and funny book. Pratchett's previous two novels had funny elements, but had broadly been trying to be more serious, 'proper' SF books. The Colour of Magic is clearly written with more confidence and in a more relaxed style. Even today it still raises a smile, possibly as some of Pratchett's targets have come back into vogue (the Cthulu-esque section resonates a bit more these days, especially), and taken on its own merits the book is solidly entertaining. Pratchett's characterisation still needs some work and his interpretations here of Death and the Patrician are notably different from the later books, but it was from this seed that the author began his ascent to becoming one of the dominating forces of modern fantasy, and it still holds up.

The Colour of Magic (***) is a bit old-school, but still amusing and entertaining, much faster-paced than his later work but at the same time lacking some of the subtlety and intelligence of other books in the series. It is available now in the UK and USA. Sky One broadcast a television adaption of the book and its sequel, The Light Fantastic, last year, which is now available on DVD in the UK and USA and on Blu-Ray in the UK.