The Colour Of Magic
I've read this book a few times, and the first time I must have been pretty young because I was blown away by the structure at the start of the book with Rincewind and Twoflower escaping a city fire, then telling the story of how they met, until the story finally explains the fire and then catches up with the storytelling. It still works very nicely, actually, and this time I was also impressed by the way that he starts out describing A'Tuin, then seguing to the Krull scientist, then seguing from him to the distant city fire and getting into the story proper from there. It's very slick and it makes it all the more satisfying when Rincewind and Twoflower actually get embroiled in the expedition to determine A'Tuin's sex which had previously seemed to be merely a frivolous piece of introductory worldbuilding.
But as most people have noted here, the episodic middle section of the book feels far too loose and driven by various contrivances and dei ex machina (if that's the correct plural!), such as the gods happening to be playing a game, or the luggage showing up very time Pratchett needs to get the duo out of trouble. He doesn't have the knack that, say, Douglas Adams has of making these ridiculous contrivances feel utterly logical and justified. I would have much preferred events to be driven by the Patrician having sent a bunch of assassins and such after them or something like that. (The Patrician instead disappear from the story as abruptly as that magic sword.) As is, it feels a bit too much like Pratchett confessing to the reader that he just wants to get onto the next funny bit. And honestly, by the end of it I was a bit tired of the two characters getting into a scrape then Rincewind shrieking and Twoflower remaining calmly enthusiastic until it was over. I think the book could have stood to be 50 pages shorter.
But all that aside, there's still so much good stuff here. The world-building alone, with all the clever stuff about how direction would work and how fields of magic cause stuff like sunlight trickling over the disc like syrup and being farmable, is fantastic. One other thing I did really like about it was the sense of magic being this volatile, massively dangerous and unpredictable force and something any sensible person stays away from.
Looking forward to Light Fantastic and then rewatching that awful David Jason adaptation!
The Light Fantastic
Just (re-)watching the Color Of Magic adaptation now (the one with David Jason). Apart from feeling a little cheap [edit: I went elsewhere than YouTube and found some 1080p blu-ray versions in the hopes of alleviating this a bit, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to direction, cinematography, costume etc rather than fidelity], it has that h2g2 movie feel to it where the subtle humour and clever narrative structures have been replaced with bum jokes and actors mugging. David Jason is an interesting choice - he's about twice the age Rincewind should be and doesn't match the scrawny, scrappy image I have in my head. They do tie the age change in to his feeling of a wasted life due to the Octavo spell, though, which works, and Jason certainly has the ability to play a perceptive fast-talking coward with a sarcastic streak, though a few minutes in he seems to be going with 'bumbling'.
I didn't like the 'wizzard' on his hat the first time I saw this, seemed like another ham-fisted Garth Jennings-esque bit of dumbed down characterisation, but apparently this does actually get introduced in later Rincewind books (I don't think I saw it mentioned in TCOM or TLF..?). Hopefully it comes off a bit smarter when Pterry does it! I think they still could have been a bit more subtle with it.
Finished the first half of the adaptation. I'll watch the second half now as well, but yeah this is pretty terrible. It's aiming for a sort of mash-up of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings and lands somewhere around Carry On Columbus. I think really the tone they should have been aiming for was something like Iannucci meets League Of Gentlemen, and an episodic tv series format probably would have served it much better than the two tv movies they went for. But even outside of the general tone: stuff like the editing, the score, the writing, the costumes and make-up is all really clumsy and cheap. And again it reminds me of the h2g2 movie (and stuff like the Watchmen or Sin City movie) in the way that they make these weird, pointless little tweaks all over the place that ruin jokes and cool moments. I guess this is what happens when you give the Discworld series to the Leon The Pig Farmer guy.
I agree with most that this is a bit of an improvement on TCOM - any extreme good luck is attributed to the Octavo spells protecting Rincewind, most bad luck comes from the Unseen University hunting them from afar (or just from Twoflower being a wally), which all ties into the story a lot better than the god stuff; they add a couple of people into their party as they go (Cohen and Bethan, who also get their own character arc), and make some allies, there's an antagonist in Trymon and an overarcing plot thread in the star, all of which serves to make it feel less episodic and more like a full story.
I actually really like the magic shop stuff, it's a cool idea in itself and I also love the correct explanation for why these shops exist. It's one of the things that stuck with me through the years. I also like that it gives the luggage a bit more of an origin story than just 'it came from Twoflower's continent where everything is expensive and fabulous'. (Another thing that had stuck with me from reading this as a kid was the seemingly unsolvable cliffhanger (or cliff-faller, I guess) of Rincewind falling off the disc into space being resolved by the spell simply shifting the entire disc down and to the left a bit. Brilliant!)
And the true threat of Trymon being his cold dedication to admin, bureaucracy, and power for power's sake, climbing the corporate ladder simply because that's what you do, was very interesting.
Probably my one issue with it was that the final confrontation with Trymon boils down to him and Rincewind rolling around having a schoolyard scrap. I would have appreciated something a little smarter there (from both Pterry and Rincewind!). Also, I guess I'm not a massive fan of Cohen conceptually - he feels like the last vestiges of the 'parodying fantasy tropes' stuff from TCOM.
Final thing, not sure if I had just forgot this or I realised it for the first time here, but the two books that combine to make a single story have titles that both refer to the same thing - Octarine - just phrased differently, which is a very neat meta flourish.
A Stroke Of The Pen
Honestly, these felt like warm-up exercises, or stories he was telling to his kids (lots of comedy sound effects) after they gave him random prompts. Like whenever the slightest whisper of an idea popped into his head (several after a couple of glasses of sherry at Christmas, apparently - what if Santa quit, what if Santa was ousted, what if 'my true love gave to me' meant 'my true love sent to me via the Royal Mail') he'd just start writing for an hour or so until he ran out of steam or realised that it wasn't a very good idea after all and then wrap it up in a couple of sentences, bung it in the post to the newspaper editor and never think about it again.
I got to Dragon Quest ('what if dragons were reasonable!') and gave up. I was going to ask on here if there were any other particularly Discworld-relevant ones, so I might flick through the Quest Keys one.
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