The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 2: The Light Fantastic

When we left Twoflower and Rincewind at the end of The Colour Of Magic, they were plummeting to their doom off the edge of the Discworld.

As endings go, that one felt pretty final. After all, it’s hard to survive falling off the side of a flat planet into space. However, the solution is pretty neat and manages to link the story back to a comedic idea from the first book which becomes a major plot point for this one.

It was also the only direct sequel that Patchett had written so far in his career, and the only instance of one happening in the entirety of the Discworld series. While many books belong to a series within the series, this is the only book that follows on pretty much immediately after the last one (you can make a case for Lords And Ladies coming straight after Witches Abroad, but there is a mention of time elapsing between the two). It’s also a radically different book to the last one: whereas that was a fairly episodic adventure that mostly explored the Disc, this book jumps straight into a fairly standard ‘80s fantasy plot and proceeds to tear it a new one.

The Disc, being worn on the back of the world turtle Great A’Tuin and the four elephants that ride his/her back, is headed towards a weird red star. There are some unusual side effects, not the least of which is that loads of people are drawn into lethal cults, minorities are being hunted down and murdered because… well, because they are minorities, the climate is getting warmer… and, somehow, Rincewind appears to be the key to the future, or lack of future, of the whole world. That is, if the wizards, led by the ambitious Trymon, can catch himThis is a wild ride. The parodies continue – most famously with a geriatric version of one of fantasy’s most famous creations – but are less broad than in The Colour Of Magic. Here, Pratchett appears to want to tell a genuine story and he does a pretty good job of it. The adventures of Twoflower and Rincewind as they try to discover and avoid their fate are gripping and hilarious at the same time. I know I said last time that I really love The Colour Of Magic, but this is a fantastic book which is much better than its predecessor: the story is tighter and a little more disciplined; the characters are more finely drawn; and the jokes are even funnier. It also introduces the wonderful character of The Librarian, a seemingly innocent wizard who gets mysteriously transformed into an orangutan and who stubbornly refuses to change back, preferring the lack of existential angst his new form gives him.

We also get a rather fulsome portrayal of the Disc’s premier city in this book. Despite being largely burnt down in The Colour Of Magic, Ankh-Morpork is shown here as the primary cause of Rincewind’s motivation. He just wants to go back home to it, and his memories and impressions of the city provide a lot of the humour in this entry in the series. I’d make a case that here is where the city begins to become a character in its own right. Certainly, after this adventure it becomes slightly more modern than the population centres around it and this is continued all the way through until the last volume. It’s something we’ll discuss more as we go along.

Anyway, the next 39 books are proof that our heroes manage to save the world, so it’s hardly a spoiler to say that things end quite well for Rincewind and Twoflower, and the same can be said for the series. Sales of this volume were even healthier than the first, which was still chuffing along quite nicely by this point.

I’d waited two years for this book. If I’d been in a wealthier demographic, it wouldn’t have been quite so long but I was the type of fan that had to wait for the paperback. I‘d long known of the existence of this novel: in a now-famous interview with Neil Gaiman, Pratchett had said that there was a sequel coming. Two years later I held it in my hand. Fortunately, I would never have to wait so long for another book in the series again.

But it was well worth it. I knew from about five or six pages in – roughly at the point where we get a wonderful send-up of a scene from Alien – that this was going to be just as good. And what helped it was the existence of a better story and a wider variety of gags. The first book had been content to poke fun at Fantasy in general; here we got a variety of spoofs from across a huge variety of genres. The Light Fantastic really does set the tone for some future volumes in that it takes some broad themes – not just related to fantasy and science fiction – and lays into them.

There’s also a broad tarring of people being idiots: we get the first proper airing of Pratchett’s idea that people by themselves are great, but as a group they are really stupid (I’ve yet to see a lot of evidence to contradict this).

And we get the first serious incursion from what Pratchett referred to as The Dungeon Dimensions, a vaguely Lovecraftian realm that frequently tries to invade our own. These were used a couple more times before Pratchett tired of them, realising that nothing really compares to the horror of human beings trying to take power from people they view as being of less worth than them, or as someone puts it in a later book, “treating other people as things.” It’s stated explicitly here when Rincewind and Twoflower are listening to a preacher talking about what changes will come when the Disc reaches the Red Star:

“The voice didn’t believe in gods, which in Rincewind’s book was fair enough, but it didn’t believe in people either.”

Trymon is the first of these villains. But he won’t be the last…

At any rate, the disc is saved – through some less-than-divine intervention by Rincewind – and things end happily for our two heroes and we get a rather lovely hint of a possible future. If the series had ended there, I would have counted myself supremely fortunate. Fortunately, for all of us, there was more to come, and quite quickly, too.

Coming Up Next: The Wizards, though depleted in numbers, have regathered their strength. But is it enough to repel a very determined 8-year-old girl who just wants Equal Rites?