The best I can say is that parts of it read like early Michael Moorcock; (The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Date:	19/03/01 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Imagination; well built world, but he subcontracted the bricks; B+

Disadvantages: Weirdness; no real system to it, very derivative; C-

The fact is, I have had a very ambivalent relationship with Pratchett as a fan over the last decade or so. I know at least one person whom he himself, Pratchett, demands be removed from his presence whenever they come into contact; I have bumped into him myself at conventions, and in person he's a dour, unfriendly sod.

Back when I was an amateur writer and amateur thinker - I'm still an amateur writer in the sense of unpaid but I'm as good as at least nine tenths of the books on any SF bookshop shelf, and I would have proved it long since but for the fact that the submitting process is designed to reject, not accept, and don't you bloody dare tell me otherwise, I know too many other unpublished authors - I really enjoyed Pratchett, bought everything right up to Men At Arms, but when I sat down to the first year of my degree and the first (unpublished) novel, some of the fire went out of him from my point of view, and now, post-graduation and post very bitter experience with the unpublishing industry, I am actively looking for a corner to hide them all in and wondering whether my paper loving conscience can take the stress of binning them all. For all the chance of my rereading any of them, it would be no great loss, but there's a point of principle at stake.

There's also no really possible exception to reviewing the long past. As Clarke said - and he too is, incidentally, a writer who had retreated from human contact, who except to a select few whose names are already made chooses not to exist; even including a jibe in a fan letter about his advice to read Somerset Maugham's notebooks, Maugham being a definite homosexual and pederast, being a probable source of awkwardness during the recent accusations - that he was a homosexual and pederast - went unremarked. I don't know whether to admire or despise the man for having become about as communicative as HAL after Bowman unplugged him. See how Pratchett sends me off
on tangents? Anyway, Clarke claimed that his generation was the last that were able to read everything. Which may in line with Sturgeon's Law be just as well, as it could be argued that no-one would really want to. Which sentiment I thoroughly agree with. After all, someone has to protect your sensibilities.

The way I buy things is simple enough. One of everybody I think I can stand (sometimes two, just to be sure), read that, see if I like it, go back and collect the rest if I do. I go through phases of reading one writer's work, one after the other. In February it was, for a reason even I find hard to explain, Gerald Seymour. (Who is far and away in advance, in the field of human understanding, of the vast majority of SF authors I could name, despite hardly being great literature himself, so don't you get on your high horse.) March, rounding off Stephen Baxter. April, Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels.

At one point, on secondment in London, Rebus is upbraided for being too soft by his colleague George Flight, who reminds him how nasty some of the people can really be out there with the memorable line "Ever see a thalidomide porn film?" Rankin is, at least now, a meticulous researcher who works closely with the police, so I have little doubt that somewhere... I bring this up because I had intended to use that as counterpoint to the saccharine, suicidally misguided libertarianism of Orbital Decay, but now I come to think of it Pratchett certainly deserves such harsh counterpoint. Where is the night side of human nature? Not to be found here. Ankh-Morpork's being an ugly, dirty city - well, yes. It's the nature of the beast. Any damn fool could tell you that, several have written it. No special insight required. Trying to the contrary, Pratchett is, certainly at this point in his career, a descendant of the 'tea and biscuit apocalypse' school of writing.

There are at least two sides to Pratchet
t; the high-falutin' intellectual stuff, which to be honest is really much later than this, and the low comedy. As a dabbler in low comedy and an arts graduate, I share part of that - and I'm damned if I can fathom the thought processes necessary to put them together. I'm starting to suspect he doesn't. I talked about Banks 'cribbing from reality'; I'm starting to suspect that Pratchett does exactly the same, taking snatches of life, with no idea how they actually relate to one another. Whether he does this with his eyes open - whether he is careless or merely shameless - is an interesting question. Shameless primarily, although whether he or anyone would have the sheer skill to investigate well enough to find out is an open question. (What I'm really using as a model is the sociological work of Norbert Elias.) Why it is even remotely necessary for the progress of western civilisation to have someone around who writes cannibalistically like this is another problem.

I strongly advise anyone to read Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories, recently reissued. Pratchett owes this man at least as much a debt as Tony Blair owes John Major, for instance - or AB-CD owe AC-DC. So much is very nearly the same that you have to doubt his originality. It seems deliberate. Bravd and the Weasel are a 'tribute' of sorts. In which case, why bother retelling what were, when you come down to it, excellent fantasy stories, far and away above Pratchett's coreless, erratically driven, magpie-derivative character psychology? Good question. There are a few decent ideas in The Colour of Magic, but so few of them are new ideas. The basic plot has a failed wizard from a college of magic which was much scarier in the early novels shanghaied by the civil government into looking after a tourist, Twoflower, and having all kinds of horrible things happen to him on the way. The best I can say is that parts of it read like early Michael Moorcock; ech
oes of Wheldrake in Twoflower, although he bears no resemblance to the Chinaman he later became. Pratchett here stands guilty of theft and vandalism against the historical process, guilty of treason in the first degree committed against the Chinese people who suffered for their country and were - are - made to suffer by it.

Overall, then, it does not seem so good in retrospect as it did at the time. It was very funny fantasy, from which no-one really expected originality; Pratchett has since become a genre of his own, almost, and the moment of departure looks rather confused. The Krullians, demented dwellers on the Edge, display flashes of what could have been - a literate, intelligent, rather wicked story, told entirely on it's own terms. Alas, it was not to be.


Imagination; well built world, but he subcontracted the bricks; B+
Weirdness; no real system to it, very derivative; C-
Scene-setting; No better than most farce, strange but far from new; C
Characterisation; no obvious connection between the people and their world- nice in themselves, but hold on here...C+

Overall; could and should have branched out into something very different from what he eventually became; C

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