Reviews of The Colour of Magic (1983) and related work

• Sequel: The Light Fantastic (1986)
  • Spin-off: “Troll Bridge” (1992)
    • Adaptation: “Troll Bridge” (2019)
• Spin-off: Equal Rites (1987)
  • Sequel: Wyrd Sisters (1988)
    • Adaptation: Wyrd Sisters (1997)
  • Sequel: Witches Abroad (1991)
  • Sequel: Lords and Ladies (1992)
  • Sequel: Carpe Jugulum (1998)
• Spin-off: Mort (1987)
  • Sequel: Reaper Man (1991)
  • Sequel: Soul Music (1994)
  • Sequel: Hogfather (1996)
• Sequel: Sourcery (1988)
• Spin-off: Guards! Guards! (1989)
  • Sequel: Men at Arms (1993)
  • Sequel: Feet of Clay (1996)
  • Sequel: Jingo (1997)
  • Sequel: The Fifth Elephant (1999)
• Spin-off: Pyramids (1989)
  • Spin-off: Small Gods (1992)
• Sequel: Eric (1990)
• Spin-off: Moving Pictures (1990)
• Sequel: Interesting Times (1994)
• Spin-off: “The Pratchett Portfolio” (1996)
• Sequel: The Last Continent (1998)

The Colour of Magic (1983)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

This novel is the first in a series of 41 novels, plus a few short stories, written by Pratchett and set on the Discworld. It is typically comical, but it is atypical in many ways: Its plot is a disjointed picaresque, the characters are relatively thin, it ends on a cliffhanger, and its main subject of parody is the literary genre of fantasy itself. Plotwise, the first section—involving a fire in Ankh-Morpork—would have sufficed to fill one of the later novels. Foundational works parodied here include:

• The geography is Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970) turned on its side, plus a Hindu mythology.
• The magic system is from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950) via Dungeons & Dragons.
• Bravd and the Weasel are Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from stories like “The Howling Tower” (1941). Pratchett confirmed this but denied that Ankh-Morpork is Leiber’s Lankhmar. Pratchett’s scenes at Dunmanifestin are Leiber’s similarly interstitial scenes at Godshome, also part of the Swords series of short-story collections about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
• Hrun is Robert E. Howard’s Conan. Hrun’s birthplace, Chimeria, is Howard’s Cimmeria, but Hrun himself is perhaps filtered through Carl Critchlow’s Thrud.
• The Wyrmberg section is Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight (1968).
• Kring is Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer. The connection Pratchett makes between the number eight and magic may be derived from Moorcock’s eight-pointed emblem of Chaos.
• Bel-Shamharoth is H. P. Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothoth, via Lovecraft’s imitators in sword and sorcery.

Pratchett’s tourist character, Twoflower, represents a social satire of contemporary British behaviour: He’s oblivious, with a camera, undeservedly hard currency and difficulty tracking his luggage. The name Rincewind, but not the character, is from J. B. Morton’s satirical work under the name Beachcomber. His alma mater, the Unseen University, is a pun on the 17th-century Invisible College, buried among Pratchett’s funnier astronomical puns.

Given the focus on genre self-parody, Rincewind makes a good protagonist. To me, he represents the kind of drop-out university student who has been disillusioned by a look at the true complexity of the world and the difficulty of understanding it. The irony is that in Rincewind’s case, he literally studied efficacious magic and was still disillusioned. By that trick, Rincewind also represents the petty, nit-picking reader like me who goes looking for self-consistency in a fantasy world. Pratchett crams in several good jokes about the laws of nature on the Discworld, making them at once self-contradictory in outline and conservative in effect. For example, the difficulty of achieving something by magic on the Discworld cannot be less than the difficulty of achieving it by other means, negating the fabulist idea of magic as getting what you want without the effort. Pratchett, himself a nit-picking SFF fan, would remain basically consistent in his own worldbuilding for the next 40 novels.

References here: Moving Pictures (1990), “Troll Bridge” (1992), After the Campfires (1998).

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‣ The Light Fantastic (1986)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

Pratchett starts converging on the more coherent, character-centric storytelling he would be famous for. The means are not yet elegant, but you can see the author’s thoughts turning gradually away from fannish in-jokes to a long-term project more able to stand on its own. For example, the part introducing Herrena the barbarian heroine parodies the sexist objectification of women on fantasy book covers. This is a funny bit, standing in contrast to Pratchett’s objectification of bare-breasted barbarian women in the previous book. Unfortunately, Herrena would never be an important character. Trymon, the villain, is also funny: A parody of scientific-management ideology infiltrating the baroque academy of magic.

References here: Lords and Ladies (1992), Men at Arms (1993), Interesting Times (1994), Hogfather (1996), The Last Continent (1998).

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‣‣ “Troll Bridge” (1992)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

Cohen is, even more than Hrun of The Colour of Magic (1983), a parody of Conan the Barbarian. He’s introduced in The Light Fantastic. This story is about the passing of his age of heroism, which is inconsistent with the earlier novels where younger heroes like Hrun are still perfectly current. There are bridge trolls still working in both The Colour of Magic and Equal Rites (1987).

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‣‣‣ “Troll Bridge” (2019)

Seen in 2021.

Crowdfunded, with end-credits filk. It has the same basic problem as Wyrd Sisters (1997), being too straight an adaptation, too literary, with almost no concern for differences in media.

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‣ Equal Rites (1987)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

With this novel, Pratchett graduated from the first novels’ frenetic sightseeing and parody of SFF to a different mode based on original characters.

There are only faint signs of a reboot. For example, Galder Weatherwax was Chancellor of the Unseen University in The Light Fantastic. A man named Cutangle is now Archchancellor. He and Granny Weatherwax turn out to be childhood friends while Galder Weatherwax isn’t mentioned. He would later be crowbarred back into continuity as a cousin of Granny’s. One attempt by fans to account for this has Galder dying in the same year that Eskarina is apprenticed to Granny, and yet, Cutangle seems never to have heard of a magical Weatherwax from the Ramtops.

There is ample continuity in other respects. A parallel journey of 500 miles is fast-forwarded in the same sort of disjointed picaresque as the previous books. Bel-Shamharoth makes another appearance, and the Lovecraftian-fantasy creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions drive the plot as they do in The Light Fantastic. The only great change is that Pratchett plays to his strengths. He refers openly to Gormenghast, the original “fantasy of manners” that is the model of this and each subsequent Discworld novel. Granny, in particular, is a fully realized and rounded character that brings life to the setting for the first time.

References here: Mort (1987), Sourcery (1988), Lords and Ladies (1992), “Troll Bridge” (1992).

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‣‣ Wyrd Sisters (1988)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

This is probably the first time Pratchett found a really rich premise for the Discworld. His witches are an improvement over Shakespeare and the trio in The Black Cauldron (1985), a similar compromise between stereotype and character. Of these witches, only Granny Weatherwax returns from Equal Rites, while the colleagues she had in that novel do not return here.

References here: Lords and Ladies (1992).

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‣‣‣ Wyrd Sisters (1997)

Seen in 2018.

Oddly faithful. It preserves even the most literary jokes, which doesn’t make sense for a film, and it animates the silent movie gags instead of using film. It’s also too cheaply produced to bring any visual pleasure to the adaptation, and it adds a few stereotypes (like the enhanced appearance of WxrtHltl-jwl, pronounced here) but its overall faithfulness is sort of endearing.

References here: “Troll Bridge” (2019).

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‣‣ Witches Abroad (1991)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2023.

This is a solid entry, except for the long middle section which mixes UK tourist satire with a picaresque. That part is similar to the first two Discworld books, but with a more complicated relationship with fiction. The main target here is not contemporary SFF but French fairy tales in the style of les précieuses and the later Charles Perrault, but sources aren’t discussed. Other “stories” referenced here and usable in magic include The Count of Monte Cristo (1844).

References here: Lords and Ladies (1992).

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‣‣ Lords and Ladies (1992)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2023.

Whereas Wyrd Sisters (1988) is a bit of a reboot from Equal Rites (1987), Lords and Ladies has more continuity than any previous Discworld novel. It unites the wizards from the first sub-series of Discworld novels with the witch sub-series again, and in so doing, it addresses Granny Weatherwax’s relationship with Galder Weatherwax from The Light Fantastic (1986): a point of no interest whatsover, except to make the series as a whole more internally consistent, which makes it better. More centrally, Magrat pursues her relationship with Verence from Wyrd Sisters, immediately upon her return from the journey described in Witches Abroad (1991), which is also referenced here. The relationship between Granny and Magrat was frayed and then patched up in Witches Abroad, but breaks here, in a fairly logical manner.

Aside from the continuity and the strong characters, the plotting is rather weak. I like how the elves torpedo the self-confidence of anyone who faces them, but their weakness to iron is fairytale magic with no humour or ingenuity to it. The wizards, however entertaining, don’t need to be present, and it’s an unlikely coincidence for Granny to be childhood friends with another archchancellor after Cutangle. These minor defects don’t matter much when Pratchett is at the very top of his game. Nanny Ogg’s bath scene is particularly good.

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‣‣ Carpe Jugulum (1998)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2024.

Another solid hit. The false climax in the middle of the book is chilling. Pratchett is able to keep the established characters fully engaging and evolving with the best of them, while also weaving a characteristically clever take on vampires into the setting as another metaphor for modern forms of exploitation.

I was moved by a new character, “Mightily” Oats. Like Rincewind in the series starter, Oats is a disillusioned former student with little talent for his job, but with Pratchett’s finely honed skills, the sketch of Oats’s mediocre life is touching.

References here: The Fifth Elephant (1999).

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‣ Mort (1987)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

The trunk of the plot here is a moral coming-of-age fantasy like Equal Rites (1987), replacing the feminism with a rebellion against fate, and the Lovecraftian horrors with more novel forms of pastiche. Pratchett was happier with this one, and it is indeed more elegantly structured, without Equal Rites’s picaresque middle section.

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‣‣ Reaper Man (1991)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

An excellent ensemble affair with three interacting plot threads and good ideas throughout. There is no apocalyptic threat. As in Moving Pictures (1990), modern technology is central: A blacksmith invents the combine harvester and the build-up of life force in Ankh produces a shopping mall. Both are used for good jokes and clever social commentary, not to substitute for a plot.

Death, by far the most common recurring character throughout the franchise, is the star, but Pratchett performs even better with the faculty of Unseen University and Poons’s new friends, the “Fresh Starters”. Since there’s not quite room for everything that’s going on, some of the characters in the latter plot thread are arguably too flat, and perhaps there is a touch of meanness in how they’re written. Reg Shoe is a cynically dismissive parody of a political activist. The Notfaroutoes (Nosferatus) are kitsch vampires, the joke being that they’re lower class and therefore inferior. A more conservative writer like J. K. Rowling would have dehumanized such characters because they’re out of alignment with the social hierarchy around them, but Pratchett is gentle, merely bringing out the humour in incongruity. By the same token, the ending is moving; Pratchett, who would die of early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2015, is able to juggle a personified Death in a situational comedy without ignoring what death means to real people.

References here: Feet of Clay (1996).

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‣‣ Soul Music (1994)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Like Moving Pictures (1990), it’s too thinly connected to the secondary world to achieve much.

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‣‣ Hogfather (1996)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2024.

Even more than its immediate predecessor (Soul Music), Hogfather is deep into the franchise’s lore, and its quirks. Its protagonist is Sustan Sto Helit, Pratchett’s “Goth Mary Poppins” who’s the daughter of Ysabell from The Light Fantastic (1986) and Mort from the novel that started the Death-centred branch of the franchise. Subplots include the faculty of Unseen University, originally from the Rincewind-centred branch, and Nobby Nobbs, from the Watch-centred branch. Death himself is a major character, but this is the point where Death becomes a stand-in for Pratchett himself.

The plot is that the Auditors—recurring villains with minimal character—hire a non-magical psychopath to disable the Hogfather who, like the Father Christmas of Pratchett’s native Britain, is both a gift-giving children’s god and the god of an older ritual at the winter solstice. To carry out his task, the psychopath infiltrates the realm of the Tooth Fairy and uses the sympathetic magic of The Golden Bough (1890) to command all children, through their teeth, to stop believing in the Hogfather. The Auditors intend for his “death” by disbelief to make the new year’s first sunrise less romantic, all for the purpose of ending all life. That’s deliberately convoluted and moderately clever. The author tries—as usual—to build a sort of detective story around it. The personification of Death knows the plot from the start and he features heavily trying to stop it, but Pratchett pads out the investigative phase as if he didn’t like the reveal. There’s a talking raven, returning from Soul Music and now behaving even more like a Disney sidekick. There’s a poorly written scene that leads up to and introduces the Cheerful Fairy, a drawn-out joke about exasperated first-year school teachers as a cultural archetype. The mall from Reaper Man is now a prosaic feature of life in Ankh-Morpork, another part of the creeping presentism of the Discworld’s development. Hex, the computer, is funny, but more anthropomorphized in this outing than ever before.

The symbolic layer of the novel is also pretty thin. The internal logic goes: Literal death is the same for all mortals; therefore Death personified in the Discworld is egalitarian; therefore, Death impersonating Santa Claus is egalitarian; therefore there are multiple scenes in the novel where Death asserts that magical gift-giving should be unrelated to “socio-economic factors”. This Death is not simply naïve, or the butt of a joke. He’s got the author’s pathos for social justice, but having Death simply assert the author’s point of view with his on-the-job mentor is quite different from having Vimes, in Men at Arms (1993), lay out the “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”, which is closer to a coherent argument that can be applied to the real world, and funnier too.

The personification of Death is also fighting the author’s war for humanism and the imagination, through metafiction, against humourless and omnicidal strawmen. Death actually says, in a concluding soliloquy, that people require fantasy, which is the genre of literature Pratchett wrote. The Auditors (Editors?) thus come to represent the bureaucracy of a publishing world hostile to Pratchett’s work. The use of a prosaic mall santa in his secondary-world fantasy may be intended as a prank escalation from the argument that J. R. R. Tolkien had with C. S. Lewis over the integrity of literary fantasy, which would put the more conservative Tolkien and Lewis closer to the side of the Auditors.

Soul Music and Hogfather don’t feel like the thin parodies in the very first Discworld novels, but I do think Pratchett was churning out the sequels more quickly than he was coming up with great ideas for them.

References here: “Ferengi Love Songs” (1997).

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‣ Sourcery (1988)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

This is an improvement in tone and plotting over The Light Fantastic, but a regression relative to the two spin-offs that had already been launched up to this point. As in The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites (1987), the ultimate threat in the plot is the Dungeon Dimensions responding to the careless use of magic, and there is a lot of magic in this one. Pratchett’s descriptions of that magic, and his jokes, are on point, but the detour to Klatch is a slurry of tiresome orientalism and simplistic characters. It doesn’t quite make sense, for example, that Rincewind is still incapable of magic after the Octavo’s spell has left him; he’s just not allowed to develop. It’s fun to see the Librarian taking a more significant role for the first time, as a kooky humanist after Pratchett’s own heart, as well as Vetinari being named after his initial appearance in the first book.

References here: Eric (1990), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997).

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‣ Guards! Guards! (1989)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

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‣‣ Men at Arms (1993)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

The silicon brain heat sink is the perfect symbol of Pratchett’s Discworld: The mad genius of a late-night D&D session, building a world by probing its limits, including its limits as fiction. Its foundations were laid in The Light Fantastic (1986).

References here: Hogfather (1996).

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‣‣ Feet of Clay (1996)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2024.

A satisfying sequel with an interesting symbolic layer. Men at Arms is driven by Pratchett’s interest in social justice, and that driver is even more pronounced here, but it doesn’t carry quite the same passion as Interesting Times (1994). Ankh-Morpork corresponds to London, and when he applies his passion to this fantasy version of London, Pratchett is more willing to entertain a British conservative point of view. He does this consistently in three of the plot lines.

In the first of the three, Cheery Littlebottom is a dwarf woman who wants to look pretty in the feminine manner of human women. This is a comedic contrast to the dominant culture of Pratchett’s dwarves, who are extremely private about sex and have no gender roles. Prior to this book, his dwarf society was a comic vision of an equality-feminist utopia: A society of true and spontaneous equity, where you don’t have to tell anybody what sex you are (if any!), nobody asks, and only your sexual partners are likely to find out. This was comical only in the incongruent detail that outward appearances aligned completely with a traditional masculinity (beards, mining, etc.) while private thoughts included a lot of shyness and confusion about the biological differences. Cheery represents difference feminism, another strain. To be more precise, with her strong and spontaneous sense of gender identity, and her desire to express this identity in public, Cheery represents the naïve sex-and-gender essentialism associated with social conservatives. The result is not a funny send-up of the 1980s/’90s debate between equality and difference feminists, but a string of scenes where Cheery’s experiments with makeup and other personal adornments gently confuse the people around her.

In the second progressive-conservative plotline, Nobby Nobbs enters high society as an earl. This is a classic British class-based comedy of manners. It’s basically similar to the Notfaroutoe plot thread of Reaper Man (1991), in that Nobby brings his lower-class habits into an upper-class context, and the incongruence is meant to be funny. It’s part of a common pattern in sequels, where each of the established characters gets to do something new, but Nobby doesn’t change in the experience. He, too, has an essential nature that aligns well with conservative notions about a less privileged group. In Nobby’s case, it’s workers.

In the third progressive-conservative plotline, golems aspire to a kind of freedom, for themselves and others. They represent both chattel slaves and wage slaves, eventually adopting Marxist language. That is fitting because they also represent a step in the industrial revolution of the Discworld. In the conclusion of this arc, which is the main plot of the novel, one freedom-fighting golem concludes that it is “frightening to be free” and that people “make new chains for themselves”. Samuel Vimes, the progressive in charge of the Watch in this whole thread of novels within the Discworld, concurs. The golem goes on to say that although he will continue to liberate golems, he will do so by paying for them. This reminds me of the consistent message of the Epistles (ca. 110 CE), that slaves should not revolt or run away. They should just keep working.

Justifying his plan for liberation by legal tender, the golem says, with typesetting shenanigans not reproduced here: “No one else to do it for us. We will do it by ourselves.” This, finally, is identity politics in the sense of “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977): Definite personal identification with a downtrodden intersectional group, combined with a loss of hope that other groups—being outsiders—will help your own. This is compatible with Cheery’s project to convince other dwarf women to express their femininity in the same way she does, but it is incompatible with hope in Vimes’s progressive project. Vimes is helping others, doing good things for less privileged groups. Pratchett’s ability to emulsify hopelessness with his own progressivism is probably a good thing for the Discworld’s depth of colour, but it’s still a wrong note in my opinion.

The larger plot is good, but not stellar. Bonus points for the distinction between the villain’s bad puns and Pratchett’s own examples.

References here: The Fifth Elephant (1999), “Seventy-Two Letters” (2000).

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‣‣ Jingo (1997)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2024.

It’s fun to see both Vetinari and his inventor, Leonard of Quirm, actively taking part. The Dis-organizer is buffed up and funnier than before, and Reg Shoe, the zombie watchman, makes his debut, which is all good. The plot doesn’t make much sense and the villains are dehumanized, but it’s clever that there is no supernatural force behind the mystery despite Vimes’s initial gut feeling.

The previous Watch novel’s pattern of conservative comedy is much weaker here. Nobby Nobbs does have another comical boundary-crossing experience, but in this case, Pratchett is careful to point out that the new experience does change the man’s perspective.

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‣‣ The Fifth Elephant (1999)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2024.

A solid outing, repeating but moderating the paradoxes of Feet of Clay (1996). Superficially, Cheery’s performative difference feminism is promoted to a continental driving force of social change, but she ultimately retreats from it. The real driver is social liberalism, implemented as the natural outcome of a mostly blank-slate model of sapience. Pratchett skillfully moulds social constructionism to his setting. Basically, the way the worldbuilding has shaken out is that all sapients are a people who work the same way on the inside. The author takes pride and delight in deconstructing qualities normally associated with “races”, such as dwarves, attributing these qualities to culture instead.

In Cheery’s case, this general movement is superimposed on the story of a personal gender transition that goes from a masculine-coded nominal neutral to the probing confusion of Clay to a bold, sequined and fabulous lifestyle reminiscent of a trans woman in her “second teenage” years, to moderation with maturity. It’s done well for what it is, but there’s a lingering bitterness in the way that Pratchett abandoned a more impressive SFF construction of dwarf gender politics to do this instead. The author also repeats the motif of a classist fish-out-of-water sitcom. In this case, it’s Fred Colon, promoted over his natural ability, with boring consequences.

The general movement touches the Igors, introduced in Carpe Jugulum (1998) and promoted here to a culture that combines Frankenstein (both Victor and Adam) with the hunchbacked assistants of early adaptations to film. A smooth move. Meanwhile, the puns are on point and Vimes gets a couple of person-versus-their-brain jokes that are right out of peak Simpsons (1989).

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‣ Pyramids (1989)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

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‣‣ Small Gods (1992)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2023.

Here, the plot overtakes the characterization again and the pace is rapid, but this time the plot is very good.

References here: Interesting Times (1994).

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‣ Eric (1990)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2022.

A relatively short Discworld novel, originally released in an illustrated form, perhaps for a younger audience. This one is a light parody without a major threat, starting with the Faust myth in something like Marlowe’s version, not Goethe’s later Faust, Part One (1808). Pursuing the wishes of the demonologist, Pratchett parodies Mesoamerican religion and the myths of the Trojan War. In the latter, the incident with the Trojan Horse is central, not anything that happens in The Iliad (ca. 700 BCE) or its sequel. Pratchett does make a wonderfully level-headed version of Odysseus though.

This novel takes a closer look at demons on the Discworld, but much of the content is recycled. The parody of the Divine Comedy (1320) done to depict Hell is centred on an impopular new manager who resembles Trymon in The Colour of Magic but uses bad slogans rather than scientific management techniques. Eric the summoner is a lot like Nijel the Destroyer in Sourcery (1988). Rincewind is his usual self.

References here: Interesting Times (1994).

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‣ Moving Pictures (1990)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

This one has got little to do with fantasy. Both a still-picture camera and a parody of early space travel were featured in The Colour of Magic (1983), but in this book, the parody of moving pictures—a modern technology—is central. It doesn’t work all the way.

References here: Reaper Man (1991), Soul Music (1994).

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‣ Interesting Times (1994)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2023.

Neil Gaiman wrote that there was a “foundation of fury” beneath Terry Pratchett’s superficially jolly persona as a writer of comic fantasies. Interesting Times is the first Discworld novel where this fury is obvious, though not overpowering. The writing is shot through with moral outrage against rulers who stunt their subjects and then hold them in contempt, but it’s still as funny as ever.

The real-world target of the satire is unclear. Maybe that’s important to the humour, but the effect that blurs the target can easily be mistaken for ignorant mockery of the foreign. In The Colour of Magic, Twoflower represented British tourists of the 1980s travelling to poorer countries, but here, Twoflower’s home country is clearly a fantasy version of East Asian cultures, especially Imperial China (Great Wall, Forbidden City, cannon, Confucianism) and feudal Japan (ninjas, sumo wrestlers, samurai, isolation). The description of the sumo wrestlers is contrary to historical reality, and dismissive: They are simply fat, and it is rice they eat, not chanko nabe. Similarly, the stagnation of the Agatean Empire is represented by a book, named The Art of War. The book describes precisely what to do in any military situation, like a recipe book. It must therefore be radically unlike the real thing, that is The Art of War (ca. 450 BCE). The title, “Interesting Times”, alludes to a backhanded insult known as the “Chinese curse”, which is probably not Chinese.

While Twoflower has merely taken on a different symbolic role as a political prisoner in this novel, his emperor has been retconned: A boy has been replaced by an old man who seems to have been fully institutionalized by decades in office. This change helps Pratchett express his anger at the injustice of oppressive cultural institutions such as foot-binding and eunuchs. Beside the emperor, who personifies institutional injustice, there is the primary villain, Lord Hong. He’s the ruthless and rising man of ambition, a recurring character type in Discworld novels who personifies a more active and personal evil. Hong is preceded in this function by Trymon in The Light Fantastic (1986), Astfgl in Eric (1990), and Vorbis in Small Gods (1992).

Ironically, the murderous Cohen the Barbarian from The Light Fantastic is not a villain. He gets to serve as the voice of conscience for a while. Cohen is also substantially funnier than before, leading his Silver Horde, but the best running joke is Rincewind’s dysfunction after some time alone on an island, short-circuiting his sex drive with his longing for potatoes.

References here: Feet of Clay (1996), The Daily Show (1996), The Last Continent (1998).

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‣ “The Pratchett Portfolio” (1996)

Paul Kidby (artist), Terry Pratchett (writer).

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‣ The Last Continent (1998)

Terry Pratchett (writer).

Read in 2024.

The British evolutionary biologist and geneticist J. B. S. Haldane is supposed to have made a joke once that if a god had created life, then that creator must have had an “inordinate fondness for beetles”. This apocryphal quip is the basis for the faculty-of-Unseen-University thread of the plot. The cast of characters in this thread is now fully developed. Ponder Stibbons, playing a leading role, is particularly good as a parody of a devoted research scientist in Rincewind’s world, where there’s magic, gods, pervasive metafiction, and a hostile workplace culture. Ponder’s boss, Mustrum Ridcully, has himself evolved halfway into the comic niche of his predecessor’s enemy, Trymon, in The Light Fantastic (1986). Ridcully now represents modern managers of the sort who, with false cheer, says his door is “always open” and dismisses all criticism.

Rincewind’s own plot thread is a regression from the character-based comedy of the best Discworld books to the picaresque of the very first books in the series, just a little less disjointed, and lacking the satirical content of Interesting Times (1994). Here, the subject of parody is not fantasy literature or authoritarian government, but pop-culture motifs involving Australia. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), Crocodile Dundee (1986) and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) are just the most obvious movie-based ones. It’s all good-natured and funny, but empty. Even Death is in a light mood.

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