8. The Colour of Magic

We go through Terry Pratchett’s first book, the Colour of Magic, with a particular focus on the first six pages. A turtle swims through space to an unknown destination, a great city burns, and in the middle of it all the Discworld’s first tourist receives an inept guided tour from a failed wizard.

This is a science fiction book written in a fantasy world - the Discworld is entirely logical, it’s just logical about the wrong things. For Tolkein, magic was perfect, serious and could never be made fun of. For Pratchett, on the other hand, it’s inconvenient and annoying and doesn’t work properly and in this it’s like everything else in our lives. By making it mundane and poking fun at it, he’s making magic actually feel realistic - and as a result showing us how absurd our own world is.

On the subject of inept guided tours, we actually prepared for this episode in defiance of our normal approach. We had a plan, written out in a Google Doc, and it lasted almost exactly as long as Rincewind’s plans tend to. But it’s all for the best - we end up arguing that pulp fantasy is a truer descendent of Homer than the Great Literature of the last two centuries.