The Colour of Magic

A couple of months ago I finished reading the last of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (or to be more precise the non-young adult novels; more on that in a moment), Raising Steam. It’s not at all unusual to hear people remarking on how much the Discworld series evolved through its forty-one novels and thirty (real-world) years of development. Oftentimes the first two books in the series receive remarks that I remember thinking, the first time I read them, were unfair, yet I also don’t remember them having the sophistication of highlights in the series (The Night Watch, or Snuff). So it only seems fitting that eight years after I first read them that I should return to read them all again. This time I’ll do it in publication order (I’d previously read through each storyline, which became, confusing when I encountered the large jump in Ankh-Morpork’s development in Unseen Academicals), and I’ll also read the Tiffany Aching Books (which I’ll confess I’ve just never got round to, and will probably need to read for a first time in parallel to preparing this blog series).

A note, and a warning, before going on. There will be spoilers. Don’t read this if you haven’t read The Colour of Magic, and be prepared for references to later books in the series as well. I don’t intend to include specific spoilers for the later books, but I also don’t promise to be careful enough not to.

Recollections

It seems right to start by noting what I remember from my first read-through of The Colour of Magic, around seven years ago. My principle memory is of it having a large number of laugh-out-loud jokes (which I wouldn’t ascribe to later novels in the series), and terrible, groanworthy, excellent puns (which persist through all the books). The friend who persuaded me to start reading Pratchett had assured me that they were very much my sense of humour, and that is entirely true, if not necessarily entirely flattering.

Beyond all of this, I can’t actually remember much of the plotline of this book, just that it is crammed full of references to science fiction and fantasy, and lampoons as many tropes as it can (I have vague memories of a Loevcraftian spellbook at one point which has tentacles, for example). By the time I read this the entire Discworld had been completed, with Pratchett having died in 2015, so I knew this book would have many sequels, and time to pace things out as much as required (though to my relief Pratchett had a slightly better handle on good pacing for long-running stories than Robert Jordan, another author I would quite happily devote a big re-read to). However, I don’t think it reads that way, and I seem to remember the pace at which it introduces new parodies and new ideas as being somewhat breakneck in pace. I guess I’ll see if that holds up, or if that’s just how it seems looking back.

The re-read

The Colour of Magic often seems to have a bad rap as being a bit rough around the edges, and going into this re-read that was not how I remembered it. However, on second reading, and with the fairly recent experience of reading the much more masterful works at the end of the series I started to understand what people meant. This novel is very clearly a direct parody of a certain era of fantasy literature, and, to be honest, one which I’ve generally avoided. Perhaps that’s why, looking back on things, this book appealed to me so much. Knowing the use Terry would put the setting to in later years, however, the storyline often feels rather… hollow.

I found The Colour of Magic oddly hard to get through this time around; the novel feels weirdly disconnected, and really is just a handful of short stories which have been glued together by the common thread of having Rincewind and Twoflower as the protagonists. I also found Rincewind a much less relatable (or, honestly, enjoyable) character than I remember, so I’ll be interested to see whether he improves to meet my expectations as his novels go on, or whether I’ve now just got people like Sam Vimes to compare him to.

The high point of the book for me is The Luggage; the absurdity appeals strongly to me, and it also feels exactly like the sort of thing which would organically be created by a Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party. The low point was the Lure of the Wyrm story. It just didn’t appeal to me, and as it turns out, I’d completely forgotten about it since the first reading.

So, as things go, perhaps not the strongest start, and I now sympathise with why people often recommend skipping over this novel when first entering the universe of Discworld. Onwards, to The Light Fantastic, which has a similar reputation…

Specific observations

See also The Annotated Pratchett File, which is both excellent and very nerdy. Highly recommended.

Both as an astronomer, and someone living through the culture wars of 2024 the opening to the book, has an especially wry humour. While The Lord of the Rings sets the story with the story of an arcade jeweller, our introduction to the Discworld immediately lampoons academic astronomy, with a description of the two schools of thought about the behaviour of the turtle on the back of whom the world rests. A “vital question” of Discworld astronomy regards the sex of the turtle. Knowing Pratchett’s vigorous support for LGBT rights (and especially transgender rights) later in the series, and with the 2024 political climate on these issues it’s easy to read this as satire. However, I suspect it’s just part of the later setup for why the “Big Bang” theory of the Universe is so called.

Very early in the main story we encounter some of what I recall as fundamental building blocks of the early Discworld experience, with the first cryptic pun (reflected-sound-as-of-underground-spirits = echo-gnomics), and the first footnote (though I think this is also the only footnote in this novel, but such sparsity of parentheticism will not be an ongoing feature).