Introducing Rincewind and Death in a pastiche of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, Conan the Barbarian, Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away and even Anne McCaffrey's Dragon books.
In 1983, a small British publisher issued a novel by a virtually unknown British fantasy author. It soon became clear that Colin Smythe (the publishers) couldn’t cope with the unexpected success of Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (ISBN978-0552152921, 249pp) and handed it over to a major publisher. Twenty-five years later, and the rest as they say, is history.
Discworld
It’s only when reading the prologue, setting Discworld’s place in cosmology, that the reader realizes again how mundane the setting for Discoworld has become, and how unexpected and above all strange it must have seemed then. What Pratchett now describes in a paragraph or two then took whole pages to explain.
“In a distant and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists quiver and part…
See…
Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters.”
The Colour of Magic
The story opens on a hillside, watching the destruction of Ankh-Morpork, metropolis of Discworld in the company of Bravd the Barbarian from the frozen Hublands, and his brown cloaked colleague The Weasel. Fans of heroic fantasy will recognize an affectionate tribute to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd (Both are giant barbarians from frozen lands, simple, uncomplicated souls, both named with a single vowel amidst a mouthful of consonants) and The Grey Mouser (both named with colours, small, clever/tricksy, urban creatures).
The Colour of Magic -unlike any of the thirty-plus novels that followed- is a series of pastiches. Into the seething, corrupt mass that is Ankh-Morpork (which even sounds like Lankhmar) a heaving pit full of rogues, cutpurses, killers and magicians comes a tourist and his quasi-intelligent, self-transporting Luggage.
Rincewind The Magician
The tourist –Twoflower- is Discworld’s answer to a grinning Japanese tourist who snaps images (using a magic box containing a homunculus that paints images on a tiny easel until the paint runs out) and cheerfully explains the concept of risk management, or in-sewer-ance to venal innkeepers looking to make a quick gold coin by ‘accidentally’ burning down their taverns.
Fortunately for Twoflower, like all fools he makes his own luck, in this case by meeting Rincewind, a failed magician of dubious character. It is Rincewind’s animal cunning that keeps Twoflower alive and out of the clutches of assorted thieves and assassins.
When Ankh-Morpork burns down, Rincewind, Twoflower and the swordsmen run to the hills. Later they separate, and in a stunning mixture of Conan the Barbarian and Larry Niven’s Magic series come face to face with a creature from the very beginning of Discworld.
From there Rincewind and Twoflower pause to battle with dragons who are clearly an affectionate tribute to Anne McCaffrey, before journeying to the very edge of the Discworld and beyond..
