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My February entry into my rereading Discworld project was The Light Fantastic. I’m going to pretend the fact that I actually read it in the final days of January means I’m a proactive overachiever, and not that I was just procrastinating on the things I actually had to do this weekend because I slept poorly and didn’t want to do anything that required effort or brainpower. Reading Pratchett, fortunately, while it takes some attention–more than scrolling on my phone, as evidenced by the amount of time I was supposedly reading while actually scrolling on my phone–but less than most other things.
The Light Fantastic continues the rather episodic adventures of Rincewind–plus his traveling companions Twoflower, the Luggage, and the Great Spell that lives in his head–after he falls off the edge of the Disc at the end of the last book. He survives through what is not quite technically a deus ex machina, since the gods aren’t really paying attention (they’re tied up in litigation with the Ice Giants), but more sort of a librum ex machina–i.e., the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo really need him alive, because one of their number is stuck in his head.
Once again, I am aware that this is not really a great one for a Discworld book, but it’s still so much funnier than most other books that I still had a pretty great time. We meet Cohen the Barbarian, and the immortal “horse d’oevres” pun is in this one. We learn a little bit more about the Luggage’s mysterious backstory. There’s even a sensibly dressed female sword-swinging heroine, although she has the bad luck to be employed by an evil wizard, so the narrative can’t let her win. You can see the beginning of some ideas that will be fleshed out much later in the series, like the biology of trolls and the role of belief in shaping reality (i.e., much more literal on the Disc than here). Overall it was a great way to spend a cold winter day where I didn’t really want to do anything else, and I’m looking forward to revisiting Equal Rites next month!
The Light Fantastic continues the rather episodic adventures of Rincewind–plus his traveling companions Twoflower, the Luggage, and the Great Spell that lives in his head–after he falls off the edge of the Disc at the end of the last book. He survives through what is not quite technically a deus ex machina, since the gods aren’t really paying attention (they’re tied up in litigation with the Ice Giants), but more sort of a librum ex machina–i.e., the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo really need him alive, because one of their number is stuck in his head.
Once again, I am aware that this is not really a great one for a Discworld book, but it’s still so much funnier than most other books that I still had a pretty great time. We meet Cohen the Barbarian, and the immortal “horse d’oevres” pun is in this one. We learn a little bit more about the Luggage’s mysterious backstory. There’s even a sensibly dressed female sword-swinging heroine, although she has the bad luck to be employed by an evil wizard, so the narrative can’t let her win. You can see the beginning of some ideas that will be fleshed out much later in the series, like the biology of trolls and the role of belief in shaping reality (i.e., much more literal on the Disc than here). Overall it was a great way to spend a cold winter day where I didn’t really want to do anything else, and I’m looking forward to revisiting Equal Rites next month!
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