The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett (Discworld 2)

"Radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic. It was a rather disappointing purple colour."

A rare direct sequel for the Discworld books, we begin this volume where The Colour of Magic left off.

Rincewind is no longer in the mortal danger we left him at in the first book, thanks to the spells of the Octavo wishing to keep him alive since one of their number is in his head, and the critical event they’re waiting to be read for is coming soon. Of course, Rincewind and mortal peril are very well known to each other, so he’s still going to be dealing with quite a lot of such peril in this book, despite his desire to do otherwise.

Rincewind and Twoflower are quickly reunited, with the Luggage coming along a bit later. It doesn’t take them, or anyone else for that matter, long to realize that something is wrong. A red star in the sky is getting larger and larger, creating all kinds of chaos all across the Disc. With the wizards at Unseen University catching on that they need to read the eight spells of the Octavo, and with one of the eight stuck in Rincewind’s head, our plucky protagonists soon find themselves neck deep in the aforementioned peril, as they have to deal with talking trees, a gingerbread cottage, pursuing wizards, druids, heroines, heroes, and crowds panicked by the encroaching star. The red star drives a lot of the plot, instead of Twoflower wanting to see everything, so it’s a more focused book than The Colour of Magic. The luggage also gets to be a bit more homicidal here than before, although that may sound hard to believe after the prior book.

We first meet Cohen the barbarian in this volume. Like Hrun from the previous book, he’s a take on Conan, but in Cohen’s case, he’s what happens when a barbarian hero keeps heroing well into his elderly years. He’s skinny but wiry, has a huge beard, back problems, and missing all of his teeth, but he’s still a force to be reckoned with. He fits the original idea of Conan as strong but canny as opposed to the more modern interpretation of the character as a big brute, which is closer to what Hrun represented in the previous book. Cohen isn’t quite as prevalent as some other major Discworld characters, but he will crop up now and again in other volumes and is great fun here.

Other characters of varying importance to the series include: Ysabell, Death’s adopted daughter, who will become much more important in the future; Herenna, the henna-haired harridan who is a kind of Red Sonja figure; and Bethan who was slated to be sacrificed by the druids to reboot their repaired stone circle, but ends up falling for Cohen despite their age difference and initial anger at being rescued, and despite her efforts to remain a viable sacrificial candidate for years.

Unseen University and its inhabitants play a large role in this book. At this stage we still don’t have any characters that stay with us long, barring the Librarian, who is transmogrified into his beloved orangutan form in this book. This is due to the fact that early on in these books, assassination is a key part of advancing among wizards, but they still feel right here, and add a bit of both comedy, action, and terror to the proceedings, especially that last bit near the end when the dungeon dimensions get involved.

Death is present as he generally is in these books and is already showing a more amiable side here. The wizards of UU summon him via the rite of AshkEnte, which happens to him from time to time. He’s not a huge fan of being summoned like this, but one must keep up appearances. At one point Twoflower is teaching Death and the other horseman of the apocalypse how to play bridge, although they never get the name right, and Death was actually surprised that humans live long enough to learn such a convoluted game.

This is still a very early Discworld book, of course, so it lacks the later books' direct relation to real world events told from a satirical fantasy perspective and is still quite the lampoon of classic high fantasy. But it has more of a plot than its predecessor, and the world is more cohesive, so it comes off better, and therefore gets a slightly higher rating.

3 and a quarter talking trees out of 4.

Special mention must be made of Herenna’s introduction:

In fact, the hero, even at this moment galloping towards the Vortex Plains, didn't get involved in this kind of argument because they didn't take it seriously but mainly because this particular hero was a heroine. A red-headed one. Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, thighboots and naked blades. Words like 'full,' 'round' and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down. Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.

Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a shot sword. All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.

Riding with her were a number of swarthy men that will certainly be killed before too long anyway, so a description is probably not essential. There was absolutely nothing pert about any of them. Look, they can wear leather if you like.

Some fun quotes:

"Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course — it was not round and shiny — but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc."

"It was always a considerable annoyance to any Disc citizen with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell."

"'But our guest, whose name is legend, must tell us truly: what is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?' The warriors leaned closer. This should be worth hearing. The guest thought long and hard and then said, with deliberation: 'Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.'" (Cohen lacks teeth, so those aren’t typos, and due to his age, he has a different take than Conan did).

Morella is a Gen Xer who likes strange things a bit too much.

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