Articles with the Tag Terry Pratchett

Sourcery — Terry Pratchett

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Cover of Sourcery


Sourcery
Terry Pratchett
285 pages
published in 1988

Sourcery is the fifth Discworld novel and the first one after the initial two novels to star Rincewind again. Over time fan opinion has switched to thinking the Rincewind novels are the weakest in the series, but I’ve always liked them myself and I think Sourcery holds up as well as any of the other early novels. It’s the first novel in which there’s a real villain, the first time we get to see what makes a real villain in Pratchett’s eyes.

On a surface level there are some similarities to Equal Rites: again there’s a powerful, untrained magic user coming to Ankh Morpork to shake up the Unseen University, but this time he’s not so benign. Coin is not the eight son of an eight son, but the eight son of a wizard. And when a wizard has an eight son, that son doesn’t become a wizard himself, but a sourcerer, a source of magic. The magic he yields is not the tame, nice magic which is the only kind of magic the Discworld has known for ians, but wild magic, the magic from the dawn of times. Not perhaps the kind of magic you’d want a ten year old boy to have, even if his dead father has possessed his wizard staff to give him counsel.

Needless to say, Rincewind finds himself in the middle of events, even though he does his best not to be. His survival instinct, like those of most of the lower lifeforms at the Unseen Univeristy is good enough that he manages to flee the university just before the sourcerer arrives, taking the Luggage as well as the Librarian to the Mended Drum. Unfortunately, that’s where Conina finds him. Conina, unwilling barbarian heroine due to her father, Cohen the Barbarian, but who’d rather be a hairdresser, has stolen the Archchancellor’s Hat at its own request, to keep it out of hands of the Sourcerer. Now Rincewind is the one wizard who can get it to safety.

If there is any safety to be found on the Disc. With the coming of sourcery, the wizards, who had been more or less peacefully been united in the Unseen University and its complex hierarchy, quickly rediscover the old wizard truth that the natural number of wizards is one. They start building towers and magic wars and the Apocralypse are threatening. And only Rincewind and Conina, as well as wannabe barbarian hero Nijgel the Destroyer, son of Harebut the Provision Merchant, stand against it. Oh dear…

What I’ve said before and will say again about Terry Pratchett is that the real strength in his writing is his humanitarian philosophy, his love of sloppy, sentimental, illogical, emotional humanity, that forms the heart of the Discworld series. His worldview infuses the entire series and it’s hear that for the first time it is made clear, though it would only be spelled out later: the worst evil in the world is seeing people not as people, but as things. Here it’s sourcery that shapes the world according to its whims in search of a supposed magic utopia, without taking any notice of the cost in human life or anybody else’s opinions. It doesn’t want to hurt people, it just doesn’t see them.

Opposed are Pratchett’s all too human heroes and villains, petty, dumb, squabbling, cowardly. They do the right thing because they can do no else, they may be thieves or murderers or worse, but they’re never indifferent. Sourcery is the first Discworld novel in which this basic contradiction is made clear and therefore important in the evolution of the series.

Mort — Terry Pratchett

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Mort
Terry Pratchett
272 pages
published in 1987

If anybody can lay claim to being the first breakout star of the Discworld series, it has to be Death. Started off as a bog standard personification of an abstract concept, managed to work his way up through several cameos in the first three books to this, his first start turn in a novel. Four more would follow, though none in the past decade. He’s not quite his cuddly self here yet, still a bit on the evil side, not as human as in e.g. Hogfather.

Nevertheless Death is being humanised, or why else would he end up looking for an apprentice? Anthropomorphical personages don’t need successors, now do they? Yet still Death ends up on a dusty market square in a small village at the stroke of midnignt taking on a most unlikely apprentice: Mort. Mort is one of those boys who are all knees and legs, who think too much for what they’re doing. An apprentice with Death is literally his last opportunity, but as his father said, there may be opportunities for a good apprentice to eventually take over his master’s business, though Mort is not sure he wants to.

Somebody who is sure she doesn’t want him to is Ysabel, Death’s adopted sixteen year old daughter, who takes an immediate dislike to Mort from the moment he arrives in Death’s domain. Ysabel is eternally sixteen, somewhat on the plump side and spends most of her days reading the tragic lifestories of princesses. Not a good match for the relentlessly practical minded Mort.

Mort himself is more impressed by the princess he meets when on the duty with his master, when Death comes to claim the life of her father, the king of Sto Lat. Death tells him that she herself is due to die a couple of weeks later, as the result of an assassin hired by the same duke of Sto Helit who killed her father. Said duke is destined to unify Sto Lat and Sto Helit and be remembered as a great ruler. When Mort argues that’s not justice, Death says there’s not justice, there’s just us.

Needless to say, when Mort gets his first job alone as duty Death and one of the people he has to collect is the princess, things don’t go quite according to plan. He saves the princess’ life, but history isn’t stopped that easily. All around the princess people are behaving as if she died, while not too far from Sto Lat, the old history has taken hold, and is moving towards the city….

This sets up a great Pratchettian conflict between doing what is the right thing to do and what’s the human thing to do. The right thing to do would be to let the true history take hold and let the princess die; the human thing to do is to try and cheat destiny in some way. Mort choses the human side, Death has no choice but to be on the side of right.

This is quintessential Pratchett, the first time it has been put so clearly in the series, but not the last time. He’s always on the side of the sticky, complicated, illogical human side of things rather than necessarily the right side of history. It’s what gives heart to his novels.

Equal Rites — Terry Pratchett

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Equal Rites
Terry Pratchett
283 pages
published in 1987

With the third novel in the series, Equal Rites, it became clear that the Discworld was more than just the sum of its characters. Gone were Rincewind, Twoflower and the Luggage, as an entire new setting and cast turned up. This wasn’t something that had been done much — or ever — in fantasy before, not often done after either. It must’ve seemed a bit of a gamble at the time, but this freedom to change protagonists and settings is what made the Discworld series, what has been keeping it from going stale for so long. If you don’t like one particular subseries, there are several others that you can read. Of course it also helps that Pratchett has been such a good writer for so long…

Equal Rites is the first Witches story, though the Granny Weatherwax that shows up here isn’t quite the one we get to know better in the later novels, differing somewhat even from how she’s portrayed in Wyrd Sisters three books onwards. The plot of the story is all about how if you’re a wizard on the verge of dying and looking for an eight son of an eight son to hand your staff over to, it helps to not be too hasty and check that eight son of an eight son isn’t actually a daughter…

Which it turns out to be and Eskarina “Esk” Smith duly turns out to have wizardly powers. Unfortunately, girls can’t be wizards and besides, in Bad Ass there’s nobody to teach her wizardry anyway. Instead, once her talents become too much to be ignored, she’s apprenticed to Granny Weatherwax to become a witch. Witchcraft is very different from wizardry though, much more headology and herb knowledge, less turning people into frogs or spewing flames from a staff.

It turns out to not be enough for Esk, she needs to learn proper magic and runs away to Ankh Morpork, followed by Granny Weatherwax. On the way she meets an apprentice wizard named Simon, one of the greatest magical talents the Unseen University has seen in eons. He’s very good in theoretical magic, where he can explain things so well that he can make his audiences become ignorant on a much more fundamental level than ordinary people. Simon, while brilliant and a decent bloke all around is unfortunately somewhat of a beacon for the things from the Dungeon Dimensions, always looking for a way into the Discworld, which is the dimensional equivalent to close to the shops and near the buses. Of course it’s up to Esk to save him, but she has her own problems as well, starting with the struggle to be actually taken seriously by the wizards of the Unseen University.

Equal Rites is beside the first witches book, also the first Discworld novel in which we get a closer look at non-Rincewind wizards, who don’t come out looking all that well. Chauvenistic, overtly proud, constantly scheming amongst each other to advance their careers (usually by making sure the wizard standing in their way is no longer doing so for reason of death), they’re still a while away from their later portrayals. Wizardry is also somewhat more dangerous than it would be later, with the wizardy death toll not insignificant here and in the next two books…

Though Pratchett is firmly on Esk’s side regarding her ambitions, he’s still fundamentally conservative here: the status quo of female witches and male wizards is quickly reinstated, Esk and Simon get their happy ending and exit stage left and nothing more is heard of female wizards for the rest of the series. There is somewhat of an separate but equal vibe to this whole wizards and witches setup, certainly in these early stages.

On the whole Equal Rites is a giant step forward in Pratchett’s evolution as a writer; it feels much more like a proper Discworld novel than the first two books did.

The Light Fantastic — Terry Pratchett

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Cover of The Light Fantastic


The Light Fantastic
Terry Pratchett
285 pages
published in 1986

The Light Fantastic is of course the second Discworld novel and a direct sequel to The Colour of Magic starting in media res with Rincewind having fallen off the Disc. To his own amazement he does not actually fall to his death, but is saved by the Great Octavo Spell that had taken up residence in his head. It turns out that this hadn’t actually been an accident all those years ago that had gotten it in his head and all other magic spells afraid to stay near it, but had been in preparation for just this moment. The Discworld is heading towards a huge red star and unless the spell and its seven counterparts are said at exactly the right time, the world will be destroyed…

There’s three years between the publication of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic and it’s noticable in Pratchett’s writing, which has improved a lot between the two novels. It’s also much less parody orientated, but still nowhere near the Discworld we’ve gotten to know and love. We do get a first glimmer of some of the subjects that Pratchett would engage more fully in later novels, including his humanitarianism. For the moment however, the Discworld is still much closer to a standard fantasy world than to what it would later become.

This might be a good point to say something about Pratchett’s humanitarianism. Though he does have a cynical side, in his heart he does seem to believe in the essential goodness and deceny of people. His villains mostly are people who have stopped thinking of other people as people: treating people like things is the original sin in Prachett’s worldview. Against it he puts the essential emotional sloppiness of his heroes, who with all their flaws are to a person willing to take a punt on the needs of the many if it means sacrifising the few. The first time this is really visible is still a few novels away, in Sourcery, but from The Light Fantastic onwards you can already see hints of this worldview coming to the fore.

In this novel, it’s the star people, the fanatics who start organising pogroms against wizards and other magical folk as the red star comes closer to the Discworld and magic starts to fail. These are the archetypical Pratchett villains, thought hey only play a bit part here: organised, systemic evil and firmly set against all the good things in life. Against that he sets the everyday moral failings of his heroes: Rincewind is a coward and the first to admit it, the Luggage is not very nice in general and let’s not even mention Cohen the Barbarian, whose job it is to slaughter pre-eminent religious authorities just because they have a habit of tying up temple maidens as sacrifice for their pet demons…

The Light Fantastic is a better novel than The Colour of Magic, but not yet a good novel. There’s promise, but it’s not being fullfilled yet.

The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett

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Cover of The Colour of Magic


The Colour of Magic
Terry Pratchett
285 pages
published in 1983

The days are getting shorter, the nights are longer and I got the desire to reread some old favourites. It’s the time of year for comfort reading, as you may notice in my reading patterns from year to year and this time I wanted to lose myself in something actually good, rather than going for something mindless. Which is why I decided to reread the Discworld series from the beginning, though I won’t guarantee I’ll finish the series.

Which brings me to The Colour of Magic, the very first Discworld novel. Over the years it has gotten somewhat of a bad reputation amongst Pratchett fans as not being up to the standards of the series, not being as funny or interesting, not a good place to start the series as a new reader. All of which has a kernel of truth, but at the same time it was the novel that kickstarted the whole series and if it really had no merit, it would’ve been the last book in the series. It is rough and ready, it doesn’t quite fit in with the Discworld as it would evolve over the course of the series, but it still has a certain charm.

Most of this charm of course is due to the Discworld itself, one of the great fantasy creations, an idea so brilliant and yet so obvious you wonder why nobody else thought it up earlier to use as a setting for a fantasy series. The idea of the world being shaped like a disc, rather than a ball and carried by four elephants who themselves stand on the back of a giant turtle, with the moon and sun small satellites of the Disc, is of course inspired by various mythologies about the shape of the earth; Pratchett himself had used the idea of a discworld in a more dark humoured science fiction novel, Strata. But it was only in The Colour of Magic that he put it all together.

What he uses this wonderful setting for is parody,as he moves through several cliched fantasy adventures through the course of the novel, through the travels of the Discworld’s first tourist and his reluctant tour guide. It’s somewhat of a picaresque novel, a series of loosely connected adventures with no real overarching plot. It’s also incomplete, as it ends on a cliffhanger.

It all starts with the arrival of that first tourist, Twoflower in Ankh-Morpork, where luckily for him, he meets up with failed wizard Rincewind, a man who has honed his survival instincts to a fine edge, to the point that he’s already running away when most people would still ask why. As Twoflower takes a liking to him and once the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork explains he’s a citizen of the Agatean Empire, the richest, most powerful and secretive empire on the Discworld, it is in his best interests to steer Twoflower away from danger, Rincewind becomes his guide. Which is sorely needed as Twoflower himselfs believes the best of everything, is convinced that his status as tourist will shield him from all dangers and in general is blind to any danger.

Which is how he ends up selling innsewerants to a landlord for about twenty times the value of his pub, setting into motion a conflageration that consumes the whole city, leaving him and Rincewind to flee for their lives. From there on their travels take them on a tour of the whole Disc. It’s all in service of parody, as they meet up with heroes like Bravd the Hublander and the Weasel, Cohen the Barbarian and others vaguely reminiscent of other, more serious fantasy heroes..

What’s striking about these adventures is how crude it all is. Take Death for example, who is downright cruel is his appearances here, taking great pleasure in spoking Rincewind and actually taking the lives of various animals directly, not at all the mellow Death we learn to know and love only a few novels later. It doesn’t really feel like the real Discworld, with several elements contradicted by later novels (as shorta kinda worked out in Thief of Time).

All in all this is a decent enough read, but reading it in hindsight it’s clear Pratchett is still learning how to make the Discworld work for him, isn’t quite there yet. Reading it on its own will give you the wrong idea of what the Discworld series is really like.