On the Back of the Turtle

The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett (HarperTorch, ISBN 978-0-06-1-2-71-1).

For years now, I've been seeing this guy Pratchett taking up more and more space in the shelves of the Fantasy & Science Fiction sections of your average bookstore. Friends would tell me how good the books were, how funny, how many references to literature were in them. I stayed away as I'm not as much interested in fantasy as I am in science fiction (unless it is older fantasy), I generally don't like humorous tales (but for a few exceptions) and I did not want to get involved in Yet Another Endless Series.

That was the main reason. Fantasy seems to churn out a lot of these things. You never know when the damn things are going to end. Then the author's go off on tangents, write branching tales, fill in the gaps, throw in prequels and never finish the darn things!

But...one by one the reasons for not to read these books fell. I started reading "new" fantasy (starting with Tim Powers, and eventually branching out into Neil Gaiman and others). I started reading more and more humorous stuff. And...given the number of endless science fiction epics that have grabbed my attention over the years, what's an endless fantasy series. As long as it is well written, that is.

O.K., so I threw in the towell. I picked up The Color of Magic. And was hooked (line and sinker, probably as well).

This entry is less a novel than four connected stories (and I'm entering it as four contributions to the 2006 Short Story Project).

In the first story, The Color of Magic, we meet the wizard who failed out of the Unseen University, Rincewind. He manages to hook up with a tourist from another land, one Twoflower, who dabbles in strange magics such as "insurance" and "economics" and travels about with The Luggage, a very loyal piece of storage filled with gold and very big teeth. During the course of this adventure, they set fire to the city of Ankh-Morpork as Rincewind starts a tradition of getting out a fix...by creating an ever bigger disaster. We also run into Death. Death, you see, personally attends the demise of any wizard. He is often disappointed by Rincewind!

We also run into Discworld analogues of Fritz Leiber's most famous creations, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, here named Bravd and the Weasel.

A real hoot, this tale was.

The rest of the books is made up of The Sending of the Eight, The Lure of the Wyrm and Close to the Edge. These equally amusing tales have us encountering a Conan analogue, Pratchett's takeoff on McCaffrey's long-running dragon series, and a finish at the edge of the Discworld, where an attempt is being made to explore the nature of the giant turtle that the disc ultimately rests on (no, I'm not forgetting the elephants!).

Read more about Pratchett here and here, and about the Discworld here and here. I'm sure I'll be back for more volumes of this series. (I am also sure that most of you out there already know about Pratchett and his tales and I'm the last to know!)