"The only turtle to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram": Let's Read Discworld

[Zyzzyva]

Let's celebrate Terry Pratchett's life by appreciating what he gave to the world.

I've already read most of the series, so this won't be a speculation heavy thread (at least on my part: you guys can feel free to speculate about everything; please spoiler-tag everything from a later-published book, of course). But it's also been a couple of years on all of them, and I want to reread them, so let's do this thing!

Coming: one week from now: The Colour of Magic! Either the whole book or the first two parts, not sure yet. I'll probably pace myself to whatever the thread wants. The Kidby paperbacks are pretty popular in libraries, everybody read along!

[Zyzzyva]

Well, let's get this ball rolling. The first half of The Colour of Magic, away!

So first off, let me apologize to everyone who got told that the first books "aren't as good as" the later ones, including my me earlier this week. Yes, fine, the later ones are better, but the first half of The Colour of Magic is pretty good. The opening joke about the citizens of Ankh bravely responding to a fire on the far side of the river by "feverishly demolishing the bridges" is pretty much where Pratchett hitting on all cylinders wants to be, as is the unexpected and brilliant "beTrobi is a weirdly idiomatic language/wet copper armour" callback towards the end of the first story. If later Pratchett stays in that zone nearly continuously, well, that's hardly knocking this book, is it?

The parody aspect, ok, that's a little weirder. I'm pretty sure the first story frame story is a parody of Fafnir and the Grey Mouser, which I haven't read, but it flows ok and isn't really reliant on anything more than having watched Conan the Barbarian once in high school. The second one is, I guess, Lovecraft, but is even less reliant on anything beyond "dark temple full of tentacles, go". So that's not so bad. We'll see how it goes after we hit Dragonlance/Dragonriders of Pern in the second half.

Also - was this originally short stories? Anyone know? It's not so much the self-containedness as the fact that "tourist" is introduced once in each story, as is the backstory about Rincewind reading the spell from the Octavo. I'd entirely forgotten that the Disc uses Vancian casting, incidentally. In general, there's some interesting worldbuilding in this part - Krullian mock-cosmology, the characterization of Ankh-Morpork, the lines about the humans and trolls mostly outcompeting the dryads and elves, all the business about the number after seven and the Octavo. The Disc is getting shaped, even if some of it's in directions that it will turn out not to end up going in. It's kinda fun, standing here at the beginning, and seeing all these open possibilities on every side. What other legs of the trousers of time could this have gone down?

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Rincewind is a little out of character at the very beginning, but arguably that's just because the Lady - who is explicitly distinguished from Chance in what I can only call a colossally obnoxious piece of misdirection on Pratchett's part - hasn't promoted him to "protagonist" yet. He's drifting towards his mature characterization pretty clearly by the midpoint of this book.
The Patrician is firmly in character - I wouldn't be willing to swear that his dry, condescending speech about hyperinflation isn't repeated verbatim in Making Money - which just makes the fact that he's physically off-model all the weirder. I seem to recall he shows up like this in Sourcery as well. We'll see.
Rincewind and proto-Vetinari interact. That's just wrong.
Death is kinda a ****.
Twoflower wants to meet dragons and elves. I forget how the dragons go in part two, but him stumbling into the Munstrum Ridcully role in Lords and Ladies would be hilarious.

Next up: I prove myself unable to distinguish Anne McCaffery and Weis/Hickman! Let the mocking begin!

[Eldan]

Not so much Lovecraft, really, or not directly. More Howard. Conan fought Lovecraft's elder gods or their spawn several times.

[Zyzzyva]

Not so much Lovecraft, really, or not directly. More Howard. Conan fought Lovecraft's elder gods or their spawn several times.

Fair enough. I've read Lovecraft but have never read Howard (although I have read a couple of Howard knockoffs). I should probably get on that at some point.

[veti]

If later Pratchett stays in that zone nearly continuously, well, that's hardly knocking this book, is it?

I'm in the minority camp that holds TCoM is actually better than many of its successors, so - no, I wouldn't say you're "knocking" anything.

The parody aspect, ok, that's a little weirder. I'm pretty sure the first story frame story is a parody of Fafnir and the Grey Mouser, which I haven't read, but it flows ok and isn't really reliant on anything more than having watched Conan the Barbarian once in high school. The second one is, I guess, Lovecraft, but is even less reliant on anything beyond "dark temple full of tentacles, go". So that's not so bad. We'll see how it goes after we hit Dragonlance/Dragonriders of Pern in the second half.

That's "Fafhrd". No, I don't know how it's pronounced either.

I love that first section. The way Rincewind tells his story in flashback to the two adventurers is the perfect device: it makes us cringe right along with Rincewind as we watch Twoflower introducing inn-sewer-ants and reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits to Ankh-Morpork, because we know where the story is headed even though we don't (yet) know Ankh-Morpork for ourselves.

In general, there's some interesting worldbuilding in this part - Krullian mock-cosmology, the characterization of Ankh-Morpork, the lines about the humans and trolls mostly outcompeting the dryads and elves, all the business about the number after seven and the Octavo. The Disc is getting shaped, even if some of it's in directions that it will turn out not to end up going in. It's kinda fun, standing here at the beginning, and seeing all these open possibilities on every side. What other legs of the trousers of time could this have gone down?

Interesting, but unreliable from the point of view of the Cosmology As Later Developed. The shape of the Disc, Great A'Tuin, the character of Ankh-Morpork, and the Broken Drum - these are about the only things that remained un-altered, I think. The nature of elves, trolls, gnomes, dragons and even magic - is changed beyond recognition in later books. (I'm not sure what kind of magic user the dragon-riding woman is, but she's clearly neither Witch nor Wizard.)

Hrun the Barbarian later gives way to Cohen, and the prohibition on wizards mentioning the number 7a - is never mentioned again, as far as I can recall.

I can't remember which book it's in - certainly one of the first four or five - but somewhere, Terry writes a preface mentioning that "there is no map of the Discworld, it's not that kind of world". The Discworld Mapp was finally published in 1995, after Interesting Times, but it had definitely taken shape before then - if I had to pin it down, I'd guess that the world started to stabilise about 1989, the year of Pyramids and Guards! Guards!.

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Rincewind is a little out of character at the very beginning, but arguably that's just because the Lady - who is explicitly distinguished from Chance in what I can only call a colossally obnoxious piece of misdirection on Pratchett's part - hasn't promoted him to "protagonist" yet. He's drifting towards his mature characterization pretty clearly by the midpoint of this book.
The Patrician is firmly in character - I wouldn't be willing to swear that his dry, condescending speech about hyperinflation isn't repeated verbatim in Making Money - which just makes the fact that he's physically off-model all the weirder. I seem to recall he shows up like this in Sourcery as well. We'll see.
Rincewind and proto-Vetinari interact. That's just wrong.
Death is kinda a ****.
Twoflower wants to meet dragons and elves. I forget how the dragons go in part two, but him stumbling into the Munstrum Ridcully role in Lords and Ladies would be hilarious.

I read the Lady's unspoken name as a four-letter word starting with L, and notably serenaded (by name) once by Marlon Brando.

Many of the character details are later changed. Rincewind is described as "scrawney, like most wizards" - that's later retconned to "scrawney, very much unlike most wizards". He's also described as "an alumnus" of the university, which is later (Interesting Times, I think?) explicitly denied. The Patrician - I'm told Terry himself insists that it was Vetinari, but I find it hard to reconcile the mental images. Oh well. And Death is an entirely different character, there's just no reconciling him.

[Zyzzyva]

That's "Fafhrd". No, I don't know how it's pronounced either.

No, really. How's his name spelled?

Interesting, but unreliable from the point of view of the Cosmology As Later Developed. The shape of the Disc, Great A'Tuin, the character of Ankh-Morpork, and the Broken Drum - these are about the only things that remained un-altered, I think. The nature of elves, trolls, gnomes, dragons and even magic - is changed beyond recognition in later books. (I'm not sure what kind of magic user the dragon-riding woman is, but she's clearly neither Witch nor Wizard.)

Hrun the Barbarian later gives way to Cohen, and the prohibition on wizards mentioning the number 7a - is never mentioned again, as far as I can recall.

Oh, definitely: hence my cod-philosophical musings on alternate Discworlds. I think twice four gets mentioned a couple more times, actually, just usually in footnotes.

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I know the Octavo spell is set up to be a massive plot point and just sorta leaks out of the series; I'm kinda curious now if it even gets mentioned in The Last Continent.

I read the Lady's unspoken name as a four-letter word starting with L, and notably serenaded (by name) once by Marlon Brando.

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I think that's more or less canonically true; that's why I think mentioning "Chance" as a different party is kinda unfair.

[Dexam]

Many of the character details are later changed. Rincewind is described as "scrawney, like most wizards" - that's later retconned to "scrawney, very much unlike most wizards".

This could actually be justified, as in one of the later books Terry makes mention that wizards have fashions. In the first books, "scrawny" is in fashion among the wizarding community; post-Sourcery, the fashion has moved on¹ and Rincewind has moved away, usually as fast as he can run.



1 = closer to the all-you-can-eat buffet table.

[veti]

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I know the Octavo spell is set up to be a massive plot point and just sorta leaks out of the series; I'm kinda curious now if it even gets mentioned in The Last Continent.

I seem to recall the Creator loses his book in Eric, but at that point it's an unremarkable-looking exercise book. I don't recall any explicit mention of Rincewind making the connection between that and the Octavo, but it's hard to believe he wouldn't. So maybe my memory is making the whole scene up...

[Eldan]

No, really. How's his name spelled?

There's a few jokes about it in the books. Fafhrd insists that this is how his name should be spelled, even if his native clan doesn't even use that writing system. Mouser proposes "Faffert".

This could actually be justified, as in one of the later books Terry makes mention that wizards have fashions. In the first books, "scrawny" is in fashion among the wizarding community; post-Sourcery, the fashion has moved on¹ and Rincewind has moved away, usually as fast as he can run.
1 = closer to the all-you-can-eat buffet table.

In the earlier books, the wizards are also much more murderous towards each other, as the books move on, the university system (and later Ridcully) kick in more strongly and they become much more sessile academics of a more spheroid shape.

[BWR]

I'm in the minority camp that holds TCoM is actually better than many of its successors,

You and me both. Not that later Discworld was in any way bad (well, not most of it) but as the Disc got more used, better explored, more well-defined, it started losing its magic. When you started learning how things worked it didn't work as well. It became less making fun of fantasy tropes and more and more soapboxing.

[Eldan]

On a few other differences mentioned above:

Trolls, I think, are still quite similar to their later characterization. One thing is different: they dont' seem to grow to mountain size in later books. But apart from that: made of stone, strong, tough, diamond teeth, silicone brains.

Elves might have changed, though they are only mentioned in a half-sentence here. Perhaps they were outcompeted by industrial, iron-clad humans and became their more well-known demiplane-inhabiting magical raider-selves later.

Similarly for dragons: they actually work remarkably well with the Wyrmberg. In Guards, Guards, it is mentioned that the dragon called forth takes on characteristics of its summoner and is made stronger by their imagination. Hence Twoflower's beautiful, noble beast. And dragons aren't all that difficult to summon: it takes willpower and a bit of magic, but neither a wizard nor a witch. The Wyrmberg has a strong magical field, and the nobles of the Wyrmberg have the will, too.

[Spacewolf]

You and me both. Not that later Discworld was in any way bad (well, not most of it) but as the Disc got more used, better explored, more well-defined, it started losing its magic. When you started learning how things worked it didn't work as well. It became less making fun of fantasy tropes and more and more soapboxing.

Unless you have a pretty low bar for someone to count as soapboxing I'd say that's going over the top. The only two which I'd say have it noticeably are Jingo and Snuff, out of those I'd say Snuff is the only one where it detracts from the book.

Hell I'd say the reason the later books are better is because they actually evolve the world rather than just hit the reset button or pretend that the big event in the last book wouldn't have consequences.

[Eldan]

And the philosophizing about human nature starts pretty early too. Guards, Guards, at the latest. "If only one man stands up.." and the Patrician's "everyone is evil" speech stand out.

[veti]

Unless you have a pretty low bar for someone to count as soapboxing I'd say that's going over the top. The only two which I'd say have it noticeably are Jingo and Snuff, out of those I'd say Snuff is the only one where it detracts from the book.

We'll have to agree to differ on that.

Hell I'd say the reason the later books are better is because they actually evolve the world rather than just hit the reset button or pretend that the big event in the last book wouldn't have consequences.

One of my beefs with the later books is that despite "evolving" the world, they still do hit some kind of reset button either at the end or at the beginning, and a whole bunch of features are either added to the world out of nowhere, despite being (I would think) salient enough to have been at least mentioned at some point in the previous 30-odd books, or - which is worse - written into it for the duration of just one book, then never heard of again. And the recurring characters (most notably Granny and Nanny, but to a lesser extent also Vimes, Carrot, Rincewind, Ridcully and the entire faculty of UU) have some decent character growth in their earliest books, but then - seem to stagnate. I won't go into more details here - if you don't see it, or if it doesn't affect your appreciation of the books, then why should I try to spoil your enjoyment?

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to diss the Disc, but as a literary canon - it's not without its issues. How seriously those affect your enjoyment is, of course, entirely subjective.

[Spacewolf]

Fair enough, each to his own and all that.

[Zyzzyva]

Well, since I'm kinda chewing through paper here, I'm going to plow on. New schedule: a book whenever I finish it until I get bored or the library runs out of copies. Part two of The Colour of Magic away!

I still haven't read Dragonriders of Pern. But the dragons in that are telepathic but not imaginary, right? And the kalahari clicks are making fun of unpronounceable fantasy names, or am I just projecting? Eh, it's still funny. Hrun is a riot, and even if his arc is basically over

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and his niche gets filled by Cohen later

his ludicrously pragmatic approach to heroics is fun. I'd certainly read Hrun the Cimmerian Chimerian (and yeah, now that I've embarrassed myself by not recognizing Howard, now's when he drags out the obvious names ).

On a related note, I'm kinda disappointed that Rincewind and Twoflower have adventures that aren't explained between parts 3 and 4. I wanna hear about Rincewind's adventures in the Great Nef! At least the cliffhanger will hopefully be resolved at the start of the next one (and a Discworld book with a cliffhanger ).

Finally, "breakaway oxidation phenomena" is one of my favourite jokes in the whole series, just because it's the author snarking his day job.

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Rincewind thinks a horse is better than fleeing on foot. Keep trying, buddy, you're almost there.
Death eats Greicha. Yeah, never showing Death's interactions with people from an outside perspective is a better approach. That said, him blowing off Fate's revenge quest to stalk the streets of Pseudopolis just because it's his job is drifting towards his mature characterization again.
Krull is, by Disc standards, ludicrously high magic. I'm going to be curious to see how the ratcheting down of the setting's magic levels goes.
The digression about "re-annuals" is a decent Pratchett footnote, except it's in parentheses in the body of the text. That's just wrong.

Next up: ...I have no idea what's next up. Everything my brain mentally classes as "the first two Rincewind books" has already happened. Maybe I never read it?

[veti]

Next up: ...I have no idea what's next up. Everything my brain mentally classes as "the first two Rincewind books" has already happened. Maybe I never read it?

The Light Fantastic is next. It's a much more conventionally linear heroic-journey story, with a villain bent on acquiring Supreme Power or something of the sort, and culminating with

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Rincewind saving the world through a quite remarkable act of courage, for the first (but not last) time.

It ends with Twoflower gifting the Luggage to Rincewind, out of gratitude.

If any of this is news to you, then maybe you haven't read it.

[Zyzzyva]

The Light Fantastic is next.

Well I knew that. I just can't recall details, and none of your spoilers helped. Possibly I really did just never read it?

[pendell]

But the dragons in that are telepathic but not imaginary, right?

Correct. They are real dragons with a thought-out biological cycle and place in the food chain. They can achieve a telepathic link only with their rider, however, and maybe a very few other individuals. Dragonriders of Pern is SF, not fantasy in the strict sense. And it's a good set of books.

Reading this with interest.

ETA: In The Light Fantastic we discover that one reason Rincewind is such a terrible wizard is because he's got one of the Great Spells in his head, and while it's there nothing else can inhabit his brain. IIRC.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Eldan]

Is the Great Spell never mentioned in book one? I'd swear it was.

[Zyzzyva]

Is the Great Spell never mentioned in book one? I'd swear it was.

It is. From the first 15 or so pages of Light Fantastic, though, I'm guessing that this book goes into more detail as to what it means.

[veti]

It's a funny thing. Not that long ago, I could re-read the entire Discworld series in a couple of weeks. But with two kids... now it takes that long to finish one short book.

But I finally made it, and started on The Light Fantastic.

Even this early in his career, Pratchett had a way of working his title into his writing in subtle and interesting ways. In this book, "light" gets mentioned a lot, even though the "octarine glow" that's explicitly linked to the title is not all that important. We hear for the first time about the slowness of light on the Disc, the Light Dams of the Great Nef (too bad Rincewind never took us there), the great shadow of the Hub. We see the whole Disc transformed twice - once by the Octavo, with a ghostly white image and an octarine explosion, and then more gradually by the eerie glow of the approaching Star.

The principles of druidic magic (that the whole universe is powered by the four elemental forces of Charm, Persuasion, Uncertainty and Bloody-Mindedness) are never mentioned again after this book, but they inform all of Pratchett's writing to an enormous extent. If there were such a thing as a Discworld RPG, I think those would be each character's prime stats.

[Zyzzyva]

It's a funny thing. Not that long ago, I could re-read the entire Discworld series in a couple of weeks. But with two kids... now it takes that long to finish one short book.

But I finally made it, and started on The Light Fantastic.

Don't I know it. I've been stalled 2/3 of the way through The Light Fantastic for days.

[Eldan]

I'm actually up to Moving Pictures now on my re-read.

[veti]

It strikes me that The Light Fantastic has dated, more than most books in the series. The style of fantasy it's lampooning - with its competing "colleges" of magic, ridiculously macho men and underdressed women adventurers, and impending doom looming over the world - is a style that I, for one, don't see very much in evidence nowadays. In the 80s it was common enough, but I can't remember the last time I saw a book cover featuring one of that particular brand of impracticably-dressed females. (Of course the artwork is still out there, and still being produced... but it's rarer to see it in bookshops now.)

Then there's the skit on the rivalry between heroes and wizards, in which homophobia is not just acceptable, it's the assumed default position of both sides. It's a reminder of how quickly the social norm has shifted.

All of which is a shame, because in many ways this is a gem of a book. I'll try to write a detailed appreciation once I've finished this re-read.

I'm actually up to Moving Pictures now on my re-read.

Hah. Either you don't have kids, or they've reached the age of being part-way to civilised.

[Eldan]

No kids. And a long commute, I can put in an hour of reading on the way to work, an hour on the way back and one or two hours in the evening.

[veti]

At first glance, The Light Fantastic is a fairly generic spoof of fantasy as commonly practised in the 70s and early 80s. It does to hacks like Tanith Lee, Poul Anderson and L Sprague de Camp, what Douglas Adams had previously done to Star Trek and Close Encounters. And for some time, I came to think of Pratchett as merely an imitator of Adams, just with more wizards and fewer airlocks.

But on later re-reading, I realised there was more to him than that.

First, let's deal with the obvious. Unlike The Colour of Magic, in which the four parts each take aim at a single, easily identified popular author (well... to be honest I'm making an assumption about part 4), TLF combines them all into one coherent world. (Crazy, but coherent.) Then it addresses the question: what would happen, really, if we lived in a place like this? Not some theoretical or idealised form of humanity that has grown up in this world and lives in harmony with it, nor yet "humans with pointy ears and a curious lack of flaws such as insecurity, bloody-mindedness and spite", but us, ourselves, with all our foibles and hangups.

So for instance, we see the staffing and promotion processes of Unseen University:

Behind every wizard of the eighth rank were half a dozen seventh rank wizards trying to bump him off, and senior wizards had to develop an enquiring attitude to, for example, scorpions in their bed. An ancient proverb summed it up: when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.

From the luckless shaman in the forest, the druids trying to sacrifice Bethan, to the cursed shopkeeper and even the star people - the people in this book hold widely differing worldviews in lots of ways, but they're all recognisably us.

All this, of course, is precisely what Adams had done in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide series. In places, you can see the shadow of Adams looming over Pratchett's prose style. Consider, for instance:

[Rincewind] was trying not to think about rocks on the ground. He was trying to think about rocks swooping like swallows, bounding across landscapes in the sheer joy of levity, zooming skywards in a --
He was horribly aware that he wasn't very good at it.

To me, this scene echoes Adams's rather more concise "The ships hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't."

But at the same time, it also highlights how Pratchett exceeds Adams. There is a love of language, a joy in the use of words for their own sake. Where Adams is terse and cutting, Pratchett softens his jabs by knowing when to reach for a thesaurus and couch them in flights of language that occasionally approach poetry. Which goes some way to explain why I re-read Pratchett far more often.

Narratively, it's nice to see all the characters develop. Rincewind shows not only great courage and determination, but also loyalty - he's come a long way from the weaselly figure whom the Patrician had to bully into looking after Twoflower. Twoflower himself, without losing his starry-eyed optimism, concludes that he's seen enough and wants to go home. Cohen decides to settle down and get married - to a girl 70 years younger than himself, but the thought is there. Even the Luggage shows a vulnerable side.

The only major character who goes quite undeveloped is Bethan. That's a shame, and may explain why - unlike all the others - she's never mentioned again. I'm not sure how to explain this weakness in the story. That Pratchett can write decent female characters, he demonstrates amply in the very next book. (Maybe he chose the topic of that one specifically in order to practice this skill. It's possible.) But in this one, he doesn't seem to know what to do with her - how to fit her into his pastiched world.

But he'll learn. In three books' time, although we won't see Bethan again, we'll see a much more interesting version of her character. Looking forward to it.

[russdm]

and reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits to

I couldn't remember the bit in italics was supposed to refer to.

I have read most of the books and anything featuring either Rincewind or Death I enjoy most. Moist is pretty funny as well. Vimes is nice and all, though I read less of his books. I also don't have all of the books and I am intending to acquire some more at some point.

[Lethologica]

<review of The Light Fantastic>

That was a pleasure to read.

[pendell]

No kids. And a long commute, I can put in an hour of reading on the way to work, an hour on the way back and one or two hours in the evening.

Long commutes are precisely what audiobooks are for. That's how I "read" the Harry Potter series .. listened to all seven books while stuck in traffic, over the course of several weeks.

I owe it all to a certain talk radio host for polluting my AM radio dial during my evening commute. Given the choice between that and "smooth jazz" on FM, I finally sucked it up, went down to my local library, and checked out some CD audiobooks.

Respectfully,

Brian P.