Terry Pratchett's Discworld - Sourcery

So, what do you do after creating a hit? That’s going to be the interesting question for today’s Pratchett

We move to 1988 – the end of the pound note, the creation of the Liberal Democrats, the first ever computer virus was created; and people began to discuss the world wide web concept and where did that idea go? I’m starting secondary school in a new place and my is that going to be fun…

My copy is dated 1996 which I’ve ready covered at the first year of uni

My copy

Publisher – Corgi

Price - £4.99

There was an eighth son of an eighth son. He was, quite naturally, a wizard. And there it should have ended. However (for reasons we’d better not go into), he had seven sons. And then he had an eighth son…a wizard squared…a source of magic…a Sourcerer.

One of the interesting features of the Discworld is its stories are not easily solved by magic. That’s a really good feature as it outs the focus on the characters and the humanity but in the fifth Discworld Pratchett decided to examine why. The Wizards so far are ambitious, power crazed but fairly incompetent as they don’t work together. This novel tries to show why. But I think it’s one of those stories that feels like it’s aiming a little too high and instead starts to repeat the earlier books…a lot.

The plot is fairly simple. A wizard in exile has an eighth son and pkans revenge on wizards for creating the circumstances that led to his wife’s death and loss of his home. He deals with Death and his son Coin inherits a mysterious magical staff. Coin arrives at Unseen University seizes power and starts a magical civil war. The only hope to prevent the coming Apocralypse is Rincewind; a fierce would be hairdresser and a not so fierce barbarian called Nijel. The world may be doomed.

Arghhh. I found reading this painful after getting through Mort where I praised the book taking another different direction and then we return to Rincewind and I think at this stage I have to admit I’m not a fan of his series by this third book. Ok let’s try and find some nuggets of joy. There are some lovely moments of writing and see #DiscworldReads on twitter for details. I like the use of the Loibrariran and concepts we will see returned to regards the magical power of books to warp space. Conina is quite a smart character playing with stereotypes and nice to have a competent female warrior again but sadly falls into instalove. Nijel the Barbarian also has some fun lines. There are some interesting ideas seeing the wizards suddenly all powerful and villainous – people are being killed here and in some ways all future wizard books see them move towards to basically university academics.

So what has got me so frustrated – repetition. We are back to wizardly offspring and weird magical staffs from Equal Rites. Wizardly politics return from the first two books and even Death feels to have slightly gone back a step. The magical shop from The Light Fantastic becomes a genie in the lamp. It feels incredibly laboured - some neat ideas but there is little here that really sizzles for me and about halfway through it really feels run out of steam. It’s been a long time since I’ve read this and I’ve little desire to return. Overall conclusion I wanted a bit more inventiveness and instead it feels like a return to the original template and suffers for it.

Next week – Wyrd Sisters