The Color of Magic: A Discworld Novel (Paperback)

"The Color of Magic" is the first story in the series. This paperback edition comes with an appendix that makes a handy travel guide for first-time tourists of Terry Pratchett's amazing fantasy land. It includes a brief musing on Discworld, a synopsis of the main cast of characters in the series, a nonmap (after all, how can a sense of humor be mapped?), a guide to Discworld on thirty dollars a day, and even a crossword puzzle to quiz you on what you have learned on your maiden voyage.

The bumbling wizard Rincewind, a wizard college dropout and the quintessential coward, is appointed as guide and protector for the four-eyed tourist Twoflower, who hails from a gold-rich city on the Counterweight Continent and who has come to the bustling metropolis of Ankh-Morpork to see the sights. As the story opens, Ankh-Morpork is in the process of burning to the ground, and Rincewind and Twoflower are fleeing to safety. Accompanied by a frightening piece of many-legged luggage, the twosome experiences one misadventure after another. They are threatened by thieves and magic spells, made pawns in a dice game of the gods, dogged by Death, chased by dragons around the upside-down mountain of Wyrmberg, and shipwrecked at the edge of Discworld. The end of the story leaves the reader hanging in midair (literally), but that's OK - because there are many more volumes that follow in this richly creative and hilarious series. These novels are like potato chips - bet you can't read just one!

Eileen Rieback

The general plot of Pratchett's novel is a romp around a fantasy world. A place where the world is flat, and people who tried to show it was round were proven wrong years ago. It's carried through the cosmos on the back of four giant elephants, the magnitude of whom is so great that simply trying to imagine it makes your head spin. Even more mind-boggling, these elephants stand atop Great A'Tuin, the star turtle, who moves with extreme deliberance over tens of thousands of years, and has thoughts so vast that time itself pales into insignificance.

Our heroes? Well there's Rincewind, the dropout wizard who failed Unseen University, the Wizard's universal school in all dimensions including ours, and TwoFlower, the tourist with the living luggage (and what stroppy luggage it is too). Happening upon each other in a pub, Rincewind finds the odd fellow strangely endearing; mainly because he is paying for a pint of ale with three times the value of the pub in solid gold. Their quest leads to run-ins with goblins, the local malitia, an entire array of very scary trees, demons with a penchant for the number eight, the local barbarian (who is usually for hire) and a crackpot set of scientists determined to travel to the edge of the world, and beyond...

Pratchett's writing style is both warm and intoxicating. He involves the reader from the very first page with such wild fantasy that it simply must be true! His wacky, irreverent humour is simply so fresh that I have not encountered such entertaining and strongly visual prose since Douglas Adam's and his series of books including "The Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy."

If you're a little mad at heart, love a new perspective on things and want to be thoroughly engaged in a genuinely fun read that you won't want to put down till it's finished (and the fact that it isn't written in chapters aids to this end) then this book is an absolute must. Thoroughly recommended!

For the yet untutored fan, "Color" is a great starting point to learn about the Discworld. The book is short, using most of its plot to describe the geography of the Disc and to introduce the earliest hero of the series, a cowardly and untalented wizard named Rincewhind. He's a thaumaturgical flop, but a comedic king.

Most of the Discworld novels are complex satires of our own world. "Color" begins, though, as a straight spoof of the fantasy genre. It isn't even a complete tale without the following novel, "The Light Fantastic." But it's the first bright grain of sand in the vast, murkey Nothing. Pratchett's own imagination was already birthing such wildly beautiful concepts as intelligent luggage and working classed pixies. Slightly philosophical police already skulk through the fans' beloved city of Ankh-Morpork and try not to be noticed by any criminals.

This book stands well enough on its own merit. It is a fun, Saturday afternoon romp that lets folks laugh at the "in" jokes of the fantasy genre. Non-Discphiles can file it next to "Bimbos of the Death Sun" by Sharyn McCrumb or "Bored Of the Rings" by Henry Beard and Douglas Kenney. Pratchett fans can tell themselves that the author has done better. Sure he has. The next book was better, and the one after that was jaw-dropping, and the next was eye-popping ... so don't knock "Color of Magic" until you've grokked it. If you really must be dazzled, go find the book with the shiny turtle on it.