Best 1983 Adventures (1)

By: Joshua Glenn
November 3, 2018

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1983 adventure novels. Happy 35th anniversary!

Terry Pratchett’s comical fantasy adventure The Colour of Magic.

There are plenty of people who will insist that you have to read this book. But you don’t, you really don’t — and if you do, it’s best to keep your expectations low, particularly if (like me) you have a low tolerance for silliness. Having warned you, I will say that the first installment in Pratchett’s sprawling Discworld series — there are over 40 books — is wildly imaginative and intelligent, and can sometimes be quite entertaining. Twoflower is a wealthy, naively optimistic “inn-sewer-ants” adjuster who visits the city of Ankh-Morpork, on Discworld — a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants who stand on the back of a giant turtle. Rincewind, a failed student at the Unseen University for wizards in Ankh-Morpork, takes it upon himself to act as Twoflower’s guide. Together, they face pirates, dragonriders, supernatural entities, and all sorts of stock fantasy characters offering a sardonic twist on the fiction of Tolkien, Lovecraft, Anne McCaffrey, Fritz Leiber, and Robert E. Howard, not to mention mythology, folklore, Shakespeare, and fairy tales. It’s a picaresque, really, divided into four sections; our protagonists are caught up in a game played by the gods, so there isn’t much in the way of plot progression. The puns, inside jokes, and social and political commentary are delivered at a furious pace.

Fun facts: Pratchett, who for years was the UK’s best-selling author, described this book as “an attempt to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns.” More than 80 million (!) Discworld books have been sold.

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Best 1983 Adventures (1)

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