61 pages • 2 hours read
Terry PratchettThe Color of Magic
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Prologue Summary
A giant turtle, Great A’Tuin, swims through space carrying the Discworld on its back. The disc rests on the backs of four enormous elephants. Although the existence of the turtle has been confirmed, cosmochelonians and astrozoologists have not yet determined its sex. The astrozoologists of Krull are preparing a vessel that can be lowered over the edge of the world to investigate.
Part 1 Summary: “The Color of Magic”
The city of Ankh-Morpork is burning. Bravd the Hublander and his friend the Weasel watch the rising smoke from a hilltop. Two people on horseback approach them, followed by a beast of some kind. Bravd and the Weasel recognize the wizard Rincewind. The other rider is Twoflower. Twoflower is responsible for the inferno demolishing Ankh-Morpork. Bravd and Weasel expect Rincewind to be afraid of them, but he has been so afraid for so long that he is “suffering from an overdose of terror” (10). He will have to calm down a little before he can be properly afraid of the two highwaymen.
Bravd goes to investigate the bulky box on legs that has been following the wizard and Twoflower. Rincewind warns them that the object is protected by a power called reflected-sound-as-of-underground-spirits (which translates to “echo” of “gnomes”, or economics).
Rincewind recounts his and Twoflower's adventure:
A beggar, Blind Hugh, sees a ship disgorge a passenger and a large ironbound chest. The passenger hands Hugh a gold coin with an approximate value of $8,000. He consults a phrasebook and asks to be directed to a lodging house. Hugh escorts him to a tavern. The stranger’s ironbound chest rises from the ground on hundreds of little legs and follows its owner. At the inn of the Broken Drum, Broadman, the innkeeper, asks the stranger for three coppers. Not understanding the language, the man hands over three large gold pieces.
Rincewind the wizard has been sitting in a corner. An accident has left him with a powerful and dangerous spell lodged in his brain. While still a student wizard at Unseen University, Rincewind had opened the Octavo, the book which contains the magic left over when the creator was done creating the universe. There were eight spells in the book. Now there are seven. Number Eight has lodged itself in Rincewind’s brain, and since then, he has been unable to perform any other magic. He realizes the chest is made of priceless sapient pearwood.
Rincewind has a gift for languages, so he tries speaking to the man until he finds a language the stranger understands. The man introduces himself as Twoflower. Rincewind tells him, “If you stay here you will be knifed or poisoned by nightfall. But don’t stop smiling, or so will I” (21), but Twoflower cheerfully dismisses his concerns. Twoflower has come to tour the lands around the Circle Sea to see all the fabulous things he has read and dreamed about back home in the Agatean Empire, where he sells something called “inn-sewer-ants.”
The innkeeper takes the gold coins to an alchemist to have them assayed. They are pure gold: Twoflower is carrying around enough gold to purchase the entire city of Ankh-Morpork and most of the surrounding countryside. The alchemist sends a message to the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, the Machiavellian (scheming and amoral) ruler of the city.
Twoflower hires Rincewind as a guide and pays him six gold coins in advance. Rincewind reflects that the sensible thing would be to take the money and get as far away from the city as possible, but only “a real heel” would abandon someone as innocent as Twoflower in a city as lawless as Ankh-Morpork (27). Undeterred by his conscience, Rincewind buys a horse and makes tracks for the city gates.
Rincewind is arrested by the city guard and taken to the Patrician. The Patrician has received a message from the emperor of the Agatean Empire threatening to attack the lands around the Circle Sea if anything happens to Twoflower. Wizards, even failed ones like Rincewind, can see into the far octarine end of the spectrum, the color of imagination and of anthropomorphized personifications of natural processes—like Death. Rincewind catches a flicker of octarine in a corner of the room as Death briefly manifests. The Patrician threatens Rincewind with a long, slow death unless he agrees to act as Twoflower’s guide.
Rincewind returns to the inn to find a brawl in progress. Several gangs of thieves and assassins have converged in the hope of getting hold of Twoflower’s gold. Rincewind bluffs and dodges his way to Twoflower’s room. He finds Twoflower unperturbed by the ruckus downstairs. The trunk is open, and Rincewind is tempted to see what is inside, but he sees the lid quiver and changes his mind.
The riot eventually dies down. Rincewind guides Twoflower on a tour of the city, and Twoflower takes pictures with a little box. Rincewind, who “often [suspects] that there [is] something, somewhere, that [is] better than magic” (42), hopes the box has some way of collecting light and printing it on light-sensitive material. He is disappointed to learn that it only contains an imp who paints whatever the box is pointed at.
The Patrician receives a second message, this one from the Grand Vizier of the Agatean Empire. The vizier, called Nine Turning Mirrors, doesn’t like the idea of the empire’s citizens wandering around where they don’t belong, and he doesn't want Twoflower coming back and infecting other citizens with dissatisfaction. The Patrician sends for the head of the Assassins’ Guild and arranges for Twoflower to be disposed of.
Rincewind is still escorting Twoflower around the city when he is distracted by the camera imp. He looks up to see that Twoflower has disappeared. One of the kidnappers from the Thieves’ Guild is about to kill Rincewind when the Luggage attacks, distracting the thieves long enough for Rincewind to get away. When Rincewind finally stops running, the Luggage catches up to him. It refuses to let Rincewind move until he agrees to try to rescue Twoflower.
Rincewind has no idea how to find Twoflower. The camera imp asks him why he doesn’t just use magic. Rincewind explains that the Law of Conservation of Reality means that the effort required to use a spell is equal to the effort of doing the same thing manually; he’d hoped that Twoflower’s Empire was proof of “better” magic, but thus far, he has only been disappointed.
At the gates of the headquarters of the Thieves’ Guild, Rincewind lures the guard away by tossing out a trail of gold coins until he is far enough away from the gates for Rincewind to knock him unconscious with a bag of gold. The thief wakes to find his leg being held in the jaws of the Luggage. Rincewind interrogates him and learns that Twoflower is being held in Broadman’s inn.
Ymor, the head of the Thieves’ Guild, waits at the inn for Rincewind to come to Twoflower’s rescue. Twoflower is selling the innkeeper an insurance policy on his inn. Shortly after, Ymor asks Broadman what that was all about; Broadman explains that “Inn-sewer-ants […is] like a bet that the Broken Drum won’t get burned down” (55). If it does, Broadman will be paid a lot of money. Broadman heads down to the cellar to collect the materials for starting a fire.
Zlorf Flannelfoot, the head of the Assassins’ Guild, enters the inn. Zlorf and Ymor agree that Zlorf will assassinate Twoflower and Ymor can rob him afterward. The door opens and reveals Rerpf, one of the leaders of the newly-formed guild of merchants and traders. As vice-guildmaster in charge of tourism, he has brought a contingent of heavily-armed trolls to protect Twoflower.
Rincewind is approaching the tavern when he encounters Death, who is surprised to see him. Death tells him, “OF COURSE, WHAT’S SO BLOODY VEXING ABOUT THE WHOLE BUSINESS IS THAT I WAS EXPECTING TO MEET THEE IN PSEPHOPOLOLIS” (60), which is hundreds of miles away. Rincewind has once again missed an appointment, and Death is beginning to feel peevish about it, but there is nothing he can do to stop Rincewind from running off.
Rincewind and the Luggage interrupt the standoff in the tavern. Rincewind distracts the occupants of the inn by flinging a bag of gold through the window, and the Luggage explodes through the front door. A melee ensues. Twoflower, who is enjoying the excitement from the safety of the rafters, cuts the candlewheel loose from the ceiling. Rincewind scrambles into the rafters himself and they wait for the fighting to die down. Once all the combatants are either dead or have fled, Rincewind drags Twoflower out of the inn just as flames erupt behind them. As the fire spreads, they buy a couple of horses and flee the city, which is now a cauldron of flame.
That is the story Rincewind told to Bravd and the Weasel. His plan now is to escort Twoflower to the city of Quirm.
Part 1 Analysis
The entire novel is told as a picaresque narrative. The picaresque genre features a protagonist who is an outsider to society, often a benign scoundrel who ignores laws and morality but rarely acts with malice. Rincewind is such a character, as are Bravd and the Weasel. The picaresque protagonist, or picaro, rarely undergoes much personal growth in the course of the story. He is often a vehicle for social commentary and satire. A picaresque narrative is typically structured as a series of encounters with no particular end in mind, although the final episode will usually have some small climactic moment which signals the end of the adventure. In Part 1, this is Rincewind and Twoflower’s escape from the burning Ankh-Morpork.
The prologue opens with a lyrical description of Great A’Tuin swimming through space:
Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination. In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight. Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven (3).
Each of Pratchett’s Discworld novels opens with the familiar description of Great A’Tuin. The familiarity raises a frisson of anticipation much like the familiar words of a religious litany—which is fitting, since much of Pratchett’s work explores myth and religion.
By immediately establishing the cosmology of his fictional universe, the author sets the rules for the story and tells the reader what to expect. Pratchett takes inspiration from ancient mythology: Myths of several Earth (Roundworld) cultures hypothesize that the world rests on the backs of elephants or turtles. Hindu mythology, specifically, contains legends of world-elephants riding a space turtle. But these, of course, are only myths in real life. In the Discworld universe, the turtle and the elephants are material fact, which “astrozoologists” and the like study much the same way Roundworlders investigate our own planet. This is the reader’s first intimation of the theme of The Science of Discworld Magic, as the characters in the novel use the scientific method to study their magical universe.
The theme of The Science of Discworld Magic runs through all four sections of the story. In Part 1, Rincewind explains some of the natural laws that govern magic. As Rincewind and Twoflower travel the Disc, they encounter several facets of magic: the power of imagination, for instance, or the use of the scientific method to analyze a magical world. Rincewind, ironically, fantasizes about technology the way we fantasize about magic. He thinks that magic is illogical and unreliable. We tend to imagine that magic would be an easier way to do things, but Pratchett has created a world in which any given task will cost the same amount of energy to accomplish, regardless of the means employed. This breaks The Color of Magic away from a standard fantasy novel, in which a powerful wizard (such as Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, or Merlin from Arthurian legends) can simply cast spells to solve problems or defeat enemies. Rincewind is not only a picaro, he is a subversion of a typical “wizard” character.
Part 1 employs a frame narrative to introduce the story of Rincewind and Twoflower’s adventures in Ankh-Morpork. Bravd and the Weasel are watching the burning of the city for their own reasons, unrelated to the appearance of Rincewind and Twoflower. Their presence gives Rincewind a reason to relate his recent adventures.
Pratchett recounts both the frame narrative (Bravd and the Weasel) and the primary narrative (Rincewind and Twoflower) in the third person point of view. It is more common for frame narratives to be in first person–for example, if The Weasel were to say, “This is the story that Rincewind told us,” or if Rincewind said, “this is the story as it happened to me.” But The Color of Magic is narrated by an omniscient third person narrator; this allows the story to alternate between the focal character and world-building background information. Though omniscient, the narrator in The Color of Magic typically limits focus to a single focal character per scene (mostly Rincewind).
The primary theme of Part 1 is The Magic of Economics. Pratchett introduces this theme when Rincewind warns Bravd and the Weasel that the Luggage is protected by a powerful force called “reflected-sound-as-of-underground-spirits” (12), or later, “echo-gnomics” (69, 70).
Rincewind (and most others in Ankh-Morpork, besides the Patrician) has a limited and simplistic understanding of economics. When the Patrician asks him what would happen if everybody went to the Agatean Empire and brought back a fortune in gold, Rincewind sees only the most direct and concrete outcome: that everybody would be rich. The less obvious consequence is that gold, if abundant, would lose its value; the cost of goods would also rise to absorb the available wealth. Rincewind’s understanding of money is so concrete that when he has access to the gold carried by Twoflower’s Luggage, he throws it, uses it as bait, and hits people over the head with bags of it.
Ankh-Morpork is unprepared to deal with complex economic ideas like insurance. In a lawless, deeply individualistic city, the citizens aren’t used to thinking in terms of cooperation. The criminal guilds (including the Beggars’ Guild) rule themselves, but this is merely enlightened self-interest: They know that if they take too much from their “clientele,” they will only end up damaging themselves. There is, technically, a form of law enforcement in the city called the Watch, but the Watch is similarly made up of self-serving individuals who do not get involved in most incidents unless it benefits them. In later books, Pratchett describes this as a simple matter of practicality: the Watch has to work harder to reduce crime while the criminals only have to work less.
The creation of the Merchants’ Guild marks the turning point for Ankh-Morpork society. When the merchants realize they can profit by cooperation, they begin to exert pressure on the criminal guilds that will, over the course of the next 40 books, have a civilizing effect on the city.
At the time of this story, however, the law consists of the Watch, the Guilds themselves, and the Patrician. The Patrician is a law unto himself. Crime is more or less what he says it is, as when he declares that Rincewind has paid for a horse with false coin. Rincewind had in fact paid several thousand times what the horse was worth, but the Patrician operates on the Machiavellian principle that anything which benefits the kingdom is justified. This is the same principle on which the guilds are taxed.
Over the course of the series, Pratchett often states that the Ankh-Morpork system works. But he invites the reader to make comparisons between the world of the story and the real world in which we live. Ankh-Morpork functions because, despite rampant crime, everyone more-or-less understands how to keep the city in balance. But does it work well? This question is Pratchett’s underlying commentary on the state of modern society, a topic he addresses repeatedly over the course of the Discworld series.
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