Tag Archives: Terry Pratchett

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Color of Magic’ by Terry Pratchett

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“He talks pretty big for a gutter wizard,” he muttered.

“You don’t understand at all,” said the wizard wearily. “I’m so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it’s just that I’m suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I’ve got over that then I’ll have time to be decently frightened of you.”

Terry Pratchett’s first book in his long-running Discworld series, The Color of Magic, has an explosive start with the city of Anhk-Morpork (doubtless based on Dallas-Fort Worth) in flames and main characters Rincewind the wizard and Twoflower the tourist dragging themselves away from it. Both the wizard and the twin city, “of which all the other cities of time and space are, as it were, mere reflections,” found themselves completely unprepared for the arrival of a new type of visitor, a tourist. Here they have a man who doesn’t speak any of the languages, has plenty of money to spend, and hopes to see some of the legendary, fantastical people and events he has read about in his homeland far across the sea. Heroes, bar fights, dragons, magic–how fun it would be to see some of that!

Twoflower the tourist is guided into a tavern that happens to be tolerating the presence of Rincewind, who isn’t really a wizard because he was kicked out of magic school, but he can converse in many languages and consequently approaches the tourist as he attempts to talk to the innkeeper via a phrase book. The two can understand each other, and Rincewind is hired as a tour guide, a challenge he may not be able to rise to.

More than that problem, however, is the problem of helping his patron survive the night, because not only does he overpay in pure gold coins (not like any coins you’d find on the streets of Morpork), but his luggage is made of rare, very expensive wood and follows him around on its own tiny legs like a faithful, aggressive dog. Even without eyes, it leers maliciously at perceived threats. Rincewind immediately discerns there’s no telling what that thing could do when cornered or its master harmed.

Because Twoflower doesn’t understand the natural, human yearnings of the Morpork heart, he is instrumental in burning it to the ground, which can’t be a spoiler because you can see the flames on page one. But that story only takes you to page 87. There are more stories as the two travelers ride to the next city–all of it zany, funny, and ridiculous. The last story in this book is quite beautiful.

The humor isn’t particularly chaste, but it never gets bawdy. I wonder if that holds throughout the series. Once I thought it sounded just like The Princess Bride, and a couple times I noted turns of phrase that echoed Wodehouse.

I’ve read you can pick up the series at any point, because there isn’t a grand narrative to follow. The second published book, The Light Fantastic, does appear to be a direct sequel to The Color of Magic, so there’s some sense of order to some of them.

Fiction

Penguin Is Recording All Discworld Books in New Audio Series

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Penguin Books UK is releasing a new, cohesive audiobook series of all 41 books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The video here will show you who’s involved and how much work everyone is doing to pull this off.

I can’t quite tell what’s available yet, but the first book, The Colour of Magic, will be released at the end of July 2022. Look over all the books, including all print and digital editions, on Penguin’s website.

Writing

Resisting the draft

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No review tonight. Instead, a little writing update. I’m sort of at a milestone, having sort of finished the first draft of the next Erling novel, whose name – I think – will be King of Rogaland. I didn’t really want to call it that, having used the word “king” in my last title, but it seems to be what the book wants to be called.

I say the first draft is “sort of” finished because I’ve already identified a major revision I need to make, which will involve ripping up a fair amount of the work I’ve done.

Which is, I keep telling people, precisely the way it’s supposed to be. The first piece of advice I give to young writers is, “Don’t worry about making the first draft perfect. Your first draft is supposed to suck. That’s its function. The first draft is raw material – unshaped clay, unchiseled stone. It’s what you make a real story out of.”

What amazes me is that I don’t follow my own advice. I sit here thinking what a failure the book is, because the first draft is flawed.

It’s like I don’t even listen to myself. Considering all the time and money I’ve spent maintaining this font of wisdom in my life, I don’t even use it.

No wonder I never made the bestseller lists.

Now, to take your mind off my miseries, here’s a short film – about a half hour. It’s an adaptation of a Terry Pratchett story (or at least based on his characters; I’ve never read Pratchett). But it impressed me in many ways.

Authors

Destroy My Unfinished Works

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“There goes the browsing history.”

On August 25, Rob Wilkins, friend of late author Terry Pratchett and manager of the author’s estate, followed his friend’s posthumous directions by putting the hard drive with Pratchett’s unfinished docs under a steamroller.

Stuart Kelly considers whether such wishes should be honored. For instance, Virgil asked for the Aeneid to be burned after his death, and the king refused to allow it (via Prufrock News).

One could no doubt elaborate on the “broken” hexameters of the poem – something I was taught during schoolboy Latin – but the question that interests me is whether having an imperfect Aeneid is better than having no Aeneid at all. Of course, not having it would mean not knowing what we might have had; but there must have been an ethical tangle when Rufus and Tucca went against what they knew the author had wanted.

Fiction, Writing

Grammar Nazis and Adaptations

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A ‘ground-breaking’ study was released this month stating that personality, more than any other factor, influenced the way people reacted to typos and grammar errors.

“In other words,” Russell Working writes, “if you are annoyed by grocers offering a discount on banana’s, you probably trample the neighbor’s flowerbeds for fun and kick your pet skunk when you have a bad day at work.”

Close your mouth; it isn’t that shocking.

More book adaptions are coming to screens near you. After stating he would not, Neil Gaiman has announced that he will be adapting Good Omens, the novel he co-authored with the late Terry Pratchett, for television. Gaiman had been respecting his friend’s wishes, saying they had agreed to only work on Good Omens material together, but Sian Cain explains, Pratchett left a posthumous letter, asking Gaiman to “write an adaptation by himself, with his blessing. ‘At that point, I think I said, “You bastard, yes,”‘ Gaiman recalled, to cheers.”

Cain continues:

Multiple attempts to adapt Good Omens have fizzled out in the past: in 2002, the director Terry Gilliam was lined up to helm an adaptation starring Johnny Depp and Robin Williams in the two lead roles. In an interview with Empire in 2013, Gaiman revealed this adaptation had fallen through because Gilliam’s pitch to Hollywood for financing came just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “[Terry] said, ‘Hilarious movie about the Antichrist and the end of the world,’ and they said, ‘Please go away, you’re scaring us.’”

Also, screenwriter Terry Rossio is working on adapting Pratchett’s Mort, and daughter Rhianna Pratchett is working a script of Wee Free Men, both for the big screen.

Fiction

Sin: Treating People as Things

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Leah Libresco talks about the moral wonders of Discworld in “The Little Way of Terry Pratchett.” In these magical stories, sin is essentially treating people as things.

“It’s an insidious sort of error that harms me along with the person I’m rejecting. They’ll be hurt by the way I treat them, but I’m wounded by my self-inflicted blindness. I’ve robbed myself of the chance to see the other person as God does, and to love them in his way.”