Two Reviews by: Skep | Toriaz
The Discworld Series #1
- Category:Fantasy Fiction, Humorous Fiction
- Date Read:13 October 2025
- Pages:210
- Published:1983
High fantasy – the stuff with elves, goblins, swords, and magic – is kind of in a weird place right now. I could be wrong about this (I am wrong about many things, after all), but at face value . . . I don’t think anybody actually takes a fantasy setting seriously. Not without upsetting the formula, at least; maybe if it’s set in a modern city, or reinvents common fantasy races in interesting ways, or is just incredibly gritty, peppered with incestuous sex scenes and characters regularly getting killed off. Then we might be willing to look at it differently. But as far as standard sword-and-sorcery goes, it almost seems like you can’t use the familiar fantasy tropes and maintain a consistent sense of gravitas.
The most recent major piece of media I consumed that made the attempt was Baldur’s Gate 3, and even then it couldn’t help but delight in some of the jokiness common to the average Dungeons & Dragons group. Haha, this party member is a druid, and you can bump uglies while he’s a bear, isn’t that comical! Oh, your companion never said he was a vampire and you caught him trying to feed on you in the middle of the night, but instead of being a huge breach of trust that would completely destroy most relationships, he talks in a melodramatic way so it’s actually cute! And man, isn’t it funny that this game has so many NPCs that only exist in the world for you to stumble upon and have a laugh at!
. . . Once again, I have managed to turn a review of something into a rant of something else. I’ll get on with my point.
With the obvious exception of The Lord of the Rings, I’m not sure that fantasy was ever serious. The difference between then and now, I suspect, is that the genre once existed in a small enough niche that it could at least pretend it was. But as such a niche grows in popularity, it opens itself up to parody; and The Colour of Magic likely exists purely to tear down that façade.
But where Baldur’s Gate 3 tries to have its cake and eat it too – selling a daring, dramatic adventure in a hostile world and then peppering it full of in-jokes and gag characters – Pratchett informs us from the outset that this universe he’s giving us isn’t going to make any sense, nor is it intended to. Yes, The Colour of Magic contains the same in-jokes and gag characters, but that’s what it says you’re getting on the tin. None of that awkward dissonance here, thanks.
For those yet unfamiliar with Pratchett’s series of Discworld novels – of which The Colour of Magic is the inaugural entry – what you need to know is that the entirety of the land mass is flat and frisbee-shaped (and rests on the back of four giant elephants, which themselves are perched upon the back of an even larger turtle bearing them all through space, if such details are important to you). Life on the disc is somewhat shaped by the presence of magic, which tends to make the unusual become commonplace. But to a greater extent, civilization carries on much as it always has; entirely absorbed in its own self-interest.
A ship arrives in the bustling and largely downtrodden metropolis that is Ankh-Morpork bearing a man named Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist. Blundering through this foreign destination with all the undeserved confidence of a middle-aged father of three, he meets our protagonist, a wizard named Rincewind. Eschewing the tropes typical of main characters in fantasy novels, Rincewind isn’t exactly what you’d call a mighty hero. When staring in the face of any threat, his primary solution is to run away frantically and hope for the best; as a matter of fact, though he is recognized as a wizard, he knows no spells but one, which he kiiinda learned accidentally and which might(?) destroy the world if it’s ever said. However, as Rincewind speaks a number of languages (and, as such, is the only individual who can actually communicate with the tourist), it becomes his duty to see that no harm comes to Twoflower, because Twoflower comes from a land which is wealthy, and I mean REALLY wealthy, to the point where his modest travel funds could set up the average Ankh-Morporkian as a king. They travel the land together. Shenanigans ensue.
Discworld as a series doesn’t have a set chronological order. Most attempts I’ve seen to develop some sort of reading sequence split the books into a number of groups based on recurring characters or themes, which themselves may have some continuity between them. If you decide to jump in by release order, however, The Colour of Magic is the first you’ll hit. I mention this because, while Discworld is beloved in part for its wide cast of varied, amusing, yet relatable characters and a setting that is both unorthodox yet comfortingly analogous to our own world . . . The Colour of Magic contains little of what the series would grow to become (aside from the humour, of course. No dearth of that).
This makes sense if you think about it; I doubt Pratchett had any indication when he started that he’d eventually churn out a few dozen of these things. If you believe you might only have one shot at exploring this wacky world you’ve invented, then yeah, let’s take two characters designed more to react to the events around them rather than influence them directly, and march these guys around to a number of locales that could only exist on the Disc. And this approach obviously worked; after all, you don’t get to write a few dozen more books if the first one doesn’t hit. But the fact that The Colour of Magic lacks the series’ later charms somewhat and – to be clear – is more obviously a parody of the genre, and is thus more susceptible to being a product of its time . . . it’s difficult to recommend this as an introduction to Discworld as a whole.
As I mentioned, the story starts off in Ankh-Morpork, as we see how the rough-and-tumble city reacts to the arrival of a foolhardy visitor toting around a fortune’s worth of gold. Without question, this is the best part of the book, and it’s telling that Ankh-Morpork becomes a central Discworld fixture in the entries yet to come. Pratchett’s style of writing and humour shines the most in these scenes, where he’s able to remark on the unwavering predictability of human self-interest in comically real ways.
And then he burns it all down.
Literally, the near-entirety of Ankh-Morpork goes up in flames as a result of some light insurance fraud, and our two would-be heroes escape the fiery wreckage to go do . . . something else. I think Pratchett drops the already paper-thin plot at this point in favour of just having Rincewind and Twoflower wind up in, and subsequently escape, mildly interesting situations. However, this is a short book and we have a lot of the Disc to see, so we can’t focus on any of these places for too long or explore any nuances they might possess; meaning that the temple of unspeakable primordial evil, the big net around the edge of the Disc that catches whatever flotsam the current carries out, and the kingdom preparing to send a bathysphere into space to finally learn the gender of the World-Turtle are little more than set pieces to be discarded once the joke stops being funny. I know I praised the book earlier for bold-facedly saying “look, we agree this is all in service of an amusing bit, all right”; but if you tell me that the magic in this one location is so dense that a mountain has formed upside-down . . . the mental image of the upside-down mountain IS the joke, ha ha, we can move on. But we don’t; there’s a civilization of dragon-riders here who live in the mountain, and now we interact with them for a quarter of the book. Except the focus isn’t on exploring how life adapts to an upside-down mountain, nor does the mountain itself provide any influence unique enough to justify its continued existence in the story. So it’s . . . just a lingering joke then?
In fact, the plot shifts here to show us that the same buildup of magic that created the mountain is also responsible for the dragons, manifesting them into being simply by the riders believing there should be dragons. We’re given glimpses at something bigger at play; great halls that have been abandoned for some time, and a character who implies that today’s dragons don’t have the same splendour as they once did. But these details lead nowhere, and, in fact, we come away with the distinct feeling that the dragons needed to be imaginary just so Twoflower could imagine one for a dramatic escape, because Pratchett seems entirely uninterested in resolving a scene by any means other than deus ex machina (and quite literally so on at least one occasion). No, giving me a detailed, after-the-fact explanation of how Disc salamanders store and emit light to justify why a camera flash exists in this fantasy world doesn’t make the fact that it accidentally scared away Cthulhu during the peak of the action any more fulfilling. Pratchett spends an exceptional amount of time running in circles explaining why something is present in this word, while entirely forgetting to make us care about it.
Dragging out a joke beyond all reasonableness is sadly commonplace in this book. Going back to the camera example, of course a tourist needs a camera, and Twoflower brings one with him on vacation. But the inhabitants of Ankh-Morpork have no idea what such a device is, and when they question Rincewind about it, he glibly suggests – for lack of a better answer – there’s a demon living inside that paints the picture. Fair enough; if you were a time traveller bringing a camera back to the Middle Ages, you might say the same to the citizens of the day, because how do you go about explaining lenses and light-sensitive chemicals? Except Rincewind soon learns that there IS actually a little painter imp living within the camera shell like it’s his studio apartment. It’s clever. But then . . . the picture-imp kind of becomes a minor character for a while, mostly one who complains about being out of paint? It’s fine, though, because Pratchett forgets about him entirely halfway through the book. I have the same reservations about the Luggage, something of a fan-favourite character. Think of it like a walking treasure chest with dog-like loyalty and a nasty habit of eating people who get in its way (kind of a weird thing for Twoflower to casually own, but okay). In this case, despite only having this one schtick, it will be prominently featured in most stories centred around Rincewind, and again, it mostly just exists to make a sudden appearance and get the protagonist out of otherwise-unsolvable jams.
Another aspect of Pratchett’s writing I have to critique is that, for as creative and elaborate as he is in finding humorous ways to portray the mundane (like explaining how residents of the Disc build dams to harvest the sunlight as it slowly seeps across the land at dawn), reading this book is sometimes an act of mental gymnastics. Looking at Twoflower’s appearance from the perspective of other characters, he’s twice described as having “four eyes”. This is supposed to indicate to us who are familiar with the term “four-eyed” that he’s wearing glasses; but he’s a strange visitor from a foreign land in a fantasy setting, so like . . . maybe he just has four eyes? We’re on Book 1, Chapter 1 of your series here; we don’t know what kind of people there are, and you won’t make any other references to glasses elsewhere in the book to adjust our expectations accordingly. At another point in the story, Rincewind is preparing to ambush a character as he walks through a door, and he swings the sword where he thinks the neck ought to be . . . and then we’re told the sword lodges in the door frame, and then the character talks, entirely unscathed. It’s not until somewhere on the next page or so where we learn that, oh, you remember how this character is made of water? Well, he grows and shrinks like the tide, and he’s just smaller than expected today. So now we have to go back in time and revise our mental image of how the scene played out, when we could have just stated up front “turns out, his head was lower than expected” and explained why later.
But lest I once again come across as too negative, let me be clear on this point: I own over 20 Discworld books. I’ve read most of them once already. I thoroughly enjoy this zany world and Pratchett’s tongue-in-cheek examination of society, which is why I want to revisit it now. But I need to warn you off The Colour of Magic so you don’t end up doing what I nearly did, which is making it the first Discworld entry you start with, growing bored halfway through, and putting it down. This is my equivalent of telling you “no, really, it’s great once you make it past the first season.”
With that in mind, I would like to propose a fan-curated Discworld reading order, in a vein similar to that of the Machete Order for Star Wars. Start with The Colour of Magic. Read through until Rincewind and Twoflower escape the Ankh-Morpork fire. You’ll get an introduction to Rincewind, Ankh-Morpork, and the Discworld itself. Each is an absolute, enduring highlight of Pratchett’s imagination and cleverness, and combined are why Discworld ultimately resonated with me years ago in spite of this underwhelming entry being my initial jumping-on point.
Then skip the rest of the book and move on to almost anything else.
The Discworld Series #1
- Category:Fantasy Fiction, Humorous Fiction
- Date Read:2 February 2020
- Pages:285
- Published:1983
“If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards!’”
- Rincewind’s description of Twoflower
This is not one of the best Discworld novels. It took Pratchett a few books to fully get into the flow of writing them and to develop his style. It is far more episodic than the later books, and it feels like the main characters stumble from one situation to the next, rather than appearing in a consistent narrative. But despite its flaws, The Colour of Magic is still very funny and a good introduction to the Discworld series. The book introduces some of the bizarre geographical details of the Disc (it’s a flat circular world supported on the backs of four giant elephants, each of whom stand on the back of Great A’Tuin, a giant space turtle (yes, Pratchett drew inspiration from Hindu mythology)), and some of the major characters, such as Rincewind, an incompetent Wizard, Death, an anthropomorphised incarnation drawn from the Western tradition who pursues Rincewind and SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and the Patrician, a kind of Machiavellian ruler of Ankh-Morpork. These three characters and the nature of the Disc are further expanded in later books, as Pratchett started to get a feel for what he wanted to do with this series.
The plot is fairly simple - Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist, arrives in Ankh-Morpork, eager to see all the sights and experience all the thrills he has read about many, many times. Although he regards himself as poor clerk, his ‘luggage’ (which possesses lots of little feet and a will of its own) is packed with gold. Twoflower is considered extremely wealthy by Ankh-Morpork standards, and therefore becomes the target of all the criminals in the city, which basically means he is the target of just about everybody, Ankh-Morpork not being known for its lawful citizenry. Twoflower befriends Rincewind, who has been thrown out of the Unseen University, and hires him as a guard. The two stumble around causing chaos for a few scenes: the book begins with Ankh-Morpork burning to the ground as they flee to ‘safety’ outside the city. After this, they continue to blunder from one adventure to the next, narrowly escaping each time by implausible means, seeing a lot of the Disc as they do.
Rincewind is completely inept and a coward whose main concern is saving his own skin. As a young student wizard, he opened one of the forbidden spell books in the library at the Unseen University. A powerful spell jumped out of the book and lodged itself inside his head, permanently scaring every other spell from him. Rincewind has no idea what spell he has inside him, but at desperate moments he is tempted to let it out, just to see what happens. He gets plenty of chances to do that as he flounders from one near-death experience to the next. And they are literally near-death experiences too – as a wizard, Rincewind has the right to be collected by Death himself, portrayed by Pratchett as a typical incarnation of the hooded skeleton carrying a scythe – and Rincewind gets to talk briefly to Death several times in the book, usually before fleeing.
Most of Rincewind’s problems are caused by the eager but clueless Twoflower who is determined to see every sight he possibly can, and experience everything the world has to offer. He is the Discworld’s first tourist. Multiple near-death experiences fail to make any impression on him, except to occasion regret at something he has missed as a result of his close calls.
Along the way the text manages to satirise many of the standard tropes in the fantasy genre. There are the heroes who go around doing heroic things, a female warrior wearing only the skimpiest clothing imaginable, dragons, Cthulhu or some other character out of Lovecraft, and the Gods who play dice with the fates of the Discworld inhabitants. There are many vaguely familiar allusions throughout the book. Everyone will pick up different things according to their background in the genre.
While this isn’t the best of the Discworld books, it is still an enjoyable read, and is loaded with great one-liners and witty observations about life, which are a hallmark of Pratchett’s writing. I think Pratchett’s humour got better in the later books, but this still has some very funny moments and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.
The Discworld
“A double rainbow coruscated into being. Close into the lip of the Rimfall were the seven lesser colours, sparking and dancing in the spray of the dying seas.
But they were pale in comparison to the wider band that floated beyond them, not deigning to share the same spectrum.
It was the King Colour, of which all the lesser colours are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.
But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish purple.”
The Discworld’s First Tourist
As is noted in Skep’s review, the representation of Twoflower in uncertain. On page 26 of the Corgi edition of The Colour of Magic we are told that Blind Hugh finds himself “looking up into a face with four eyes in it.” Whether Twoflower is from a race that has four eyes, or whether Twoflower merely wears glasses, is a matter of conjecture, as demonstrated by the following representations of Twoflower by Discworld artists Josh Kirby and Josh Kidby.
