The Colour of Magic: The First Discworld Novel (A Discworld Novel)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Terry Pratchett Our price £5.00 (£7.99) New from £2.52 Used from £0.01 Pages: 283 (Paperback) ISBN: 0552124753 Pub: Corgi Books Pub date: 1985-01-18 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1501

Editorial Review:

Reader Reviews:

Don't give up (0/0 people found this helpful)

One of the best pieces of book advice I was ever given was from a friend who told me that if I wanted to read Discworld I should do so from the beginning and in chronological order, but that I shouldn't stop if I was less than impressed with the first couple of books. Luckily I followed her advice.

The Colour of Magic is far from a great novel. Flashes of Pratchett genius show through here and there but for the most part it's not nearly so funny or clever as his later books and lacks their sharp satirical bite. It's also a little dated and clearly harks from an era when Conan was big at the cinema. Read it if you want to cover the entire Pratchett canon, but don't let it put you off.

The Fun Never Ends... (0/0 people found this helpful)

...And this is where it begins, with this funny, colourful and energetic tale of a useless wizard, a tourist and a strange little luggage trunk. The plot is virtually non-existent - not that it matters, as there are more ideas in a few pages of its episodic, energetic narrative than there in 250 pages of other, lesser, books. Telling the tale of Twoflower (the tourist) and his guide, Rincewind (the Discworld's most useless wizard) the sheer inventiveness of this novel (the first in the Discworld series) more than makes up for the fact that it's not the funniest. There's really just too much going on in brilliant little book, and it would be impossible to do it justice in a review with such limited space as this, so all I'll say is if you're reading this then you're probably considering buying it anyway, so just take that extra step and put it in your basket...I promise, you won't regret it.

maggiedc (0/1 people found this helpful)

Thank you for quick delivery of book in excellent condition, hope to do business with you again, highly recommended

The Colour of Magic (0/0 people found this helpful)

This is the first of the Discworld novels and I bought it as a gift. I read it many years ago and enjoyed it, especially the footnotes. The Discworld has evolved a lot since this one was first published and the footnotes have all but vanished. This first tale features the Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork and Rincewind's struggle to remain a student for as long as possible. It is a good place to start the series of around thirty-seven books and their diverse settings and charcters.

Where it all began (0/0 people found this helpful)

`The Colour of Magic' was the very fist Discworld book that Terry Pratchett wrote and while the setting has moved on considerably since then the book is still a funny book. The story follows the cowardly failed Wizard Rincewind as he is forced into becoming the tour guide for Twoflower the Discworld's first tourist and this unfortunately puts him in danger from thieves, dragons, vengeful gods and the mysterious inn-sewer-ants.

Reading this book again after so long has been a strange experience because on the one hand `The Colour of Magic' is a great deal different to the more modern Discworld books but at the same time is uniquely Discworld in style. Many of the characterizations of people and places as well as some of the rules that the world works on are vastly different to the later books and yet are still recognisable as the embryonic forms of things taken up in later in the series.

The book itself is actually more like four self contained yet sequential short stories that sees Rincewind and Twoflower explore the Disc and run into and run away from various dangers. The book is just as well written as you would expect from Terry Pratchett and the book not only contains some of my favourite quotes from the series as a whole but also one of my favourite characters, the Luggage.

`The Colour of Magic is a classic book and although the Discworld has moved on tremendously from here, and there are far more books in the series than are better than this than are worse, it is still a must read for every Discworld fan.

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