Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The Colour of Magic

Episode Date: January 22, 2022

Our first dive into the works of Sir Terry Pratchett with The Colour of Magic! A pessimist bum and an eternally optimistic tourist stumble their way past the destiny Fate is so desperately trying to lay out for them. We talk satire, fate, and the unstoppable power of luggage. Follow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction as always i'm darius and today uh i have with me as always my co-host katho how's it going katho howdy and today we are uh doing something new we are doing the color of magic the first book by terry pratchett of the disc world series a pretty famous one and again one that i had not read before this point actually i don't think you

had either no i had not i had it on my shelf yeah so it's new in the fact there was something neither one of us had read uh up to this point despite being um you know pretty famous to be honest with you but i despite all my reading throughout my life i had missed terry pratchett completely just never read anything he'd ever written i knew everyone always talked about him but i just never never came up had you read anything by him up to this point or is this your first pratchett um this is technically my first Pratchett. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'd encountered adaptations of things by him before. Um, I'd watched, uh, this is so basic of me. Uh, I had watched good omens, which is Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman wrote that book together. The show was actually pretty funny.

Um, gay angels, you know, gay angel and demon david tennant can't really go wrong um people people do seem to like david tennant i i do like david tennant i i am a or at least was a first what one two three like four seasons of doctor who the reboot one from uh you're one of the oh you're a doctor who nerd um sorry i'm doctor who nerd up to like halfway through matt smith's stuff and then i stopped the show was pretty good so if anyone you know there was a really funny attempt at a petition to get it removed because it's deeply let's say sacrilegious sacrilegious is a good one a good way to sacrilegious to your average american evangelical everything's sacrilegious to them so except ironically themselves um and yeah the sacrilege they do but whatever um look guys the left the left behind thing is totally real everything is sacrilegious except you know the open worship of mammon so you know

whatever that's a joke for all you christian theologists out there but the the joke of course being with the the petition that it wasn't on Netflix. All the tricks they wanted to remove from Netflix and it was on like HBO or Amazon. It's on Amazon Prime. And they had to take down the petition and then put it back up again and have people re-sign it. Beautiful. Which is prices.

So, yeah, today we did what was his uh jerry pratchett's first uh novel in the disc world series which is the most famous it has like roughly 30 000 books in the series last time i checked and this one establishes a lot of things that i think were like jokes or cliches that i have like been made aware of but didn't know that this is where they came from because you could correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure this is the first place we get the idea and like popular fantasy that the world is just on the back of a turtle is that i mean other than native american myths and yeah otherwise obviously like you said, in like fiction fantasy type stuff, the idea that like –

In Western fantasy, probably. I don't want to make any grand statements on that just because again, it is like a heavily borrowed thing from traditional Native American mythologies. But I'm pretty sure this is where people get the idea that i could see you know turtles all the way down or something yeah um i think i mean i do think he he definitely was like i wanted to be on the back of the turtle but that's not enough it needs to be able to rotate so he put it on the back of some elephants on top of a turtle um yeah so you have to so in this in in the disc world series is because the planet literally is a flat disc is a perfect it's a perfect circle it's a flat disc the disc itself rests on the back of four elephants and it rotates and the four elephants are standing on the shell of great

atuan the turtle who is slowly swimming through space from where and to where nobody knows. But he explains right in like the first few pages that once scientists discovered that the disk was on the backs of elephants, on the backs of a turtle, like all the great scientific minds were bent on discovering more about all of this and that he mentions it at the very beginning, but you don't hear anything more about it to the end, is that the top scientists on the disk at the time are incredibly concerned with finding out the gender of Atun, the turtle, which we feel is a bit weirdly appropriate

considering Terry Pratchett is British. And with what's going on in the UK right now it seems a bit ironic that people that end up being bad guys in the story are just obsessed with finding out the gender of a thing when the gender of the thing is

completely irrelevant to what it does they're like and even Lady Luck tries really hard to like give them a fake benefit of the doubt where she's like oh no it's it's seriously like it's important you know like they need to know if it comes across another turtle if it's for mating purposes i mean the people here seem to think it's important i guess yeah it's literally like is literally like a 1983 joke about how an obsession with discovering the gender of a thing is completely pointless. Just wanted to make sure that we're aware of that off the bat.

Yeah. It does become like – it's pretty funny when you think about it just because of I'm sure many of our listeners are aware of the couple months ago, people trying to claim, you know, terse trying to claim Terry Pratchett as someone who would be on their side only to have his daughter and Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman being, like I said before, he helped him write Good Omens, but they were also like best friends. Have them come on there and be like, no, actually, no, like, don't try this.

Only to have one asshole, like write an article saying that both sides should really not try. And yeah, you know. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up, nerds. We know that Terry Pratchett's daughter knows just as much about Terry Pratchett as random turf on the internet who probably has never read this world. I think the last bit I want to say about that is if you read this book and just get a feel for his attitude towards things, I feel like it shouldn't be that hard to, to, to intuit that, like, he wouldn't be a turf. Like, just from the way he handles, like, the world, like, his attitude towards writing things, I think you can just kind of feel that that's not, like, he wouldn't be, like, hold such, like, hardcore, like, bigoted views about things that would be so unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah. Not saying that, like, your gender identity is unimportant to you as an individual, but, but like in terms of a thing that people that aren't you should be worried about like it doesn't like that's something that he would have again he did have and would have like a bad person care about and then the story would point out how stupid it is to be caring about that thing yeah like i mean even in the way he presents certain characters in the book as it is like he he presents exaggerations of masculinity for example with haruna making fun of it yeah so i think this i think we should make a quick note here that if you haven't read the color of magic it is it's a it's a comedy book. It's funny. It's intentionally funny. And the whole book is him skewering and making fun of fantasy as a genre.

He's writing a fantasy book while also taking shots at fantasy and tropes and cliches within fantasy. He specifically described it as trying to do for fantasy what blazing saddle did for westerns where like it is a good one but also makes fun of them for being what they are and for the tropes they use yeah i mean like that's something i was not prepared for off the bat because i didn't know that going in i thought it was just a fantasy book and then like the first few pages are just like full of jokes and i was like oh that's not whoa

i didn't um wasn't prepared for that with um obviously i feel like this is probably a tired comparison but it i think it's apt even though it's not perfect so i'm sure if anyone is listening that is a long time fan of uh terry prett. You've probably heard this comparison before, and you'll probably roll your eyes. But a good comparison I've heard is essentially, like you said, either Blazing Saddles of that, or kind of like a Douglas Adams with like a Hitchhiker's Guide, where it's very intentionally making fun of the tropes of the genre, but it's also just like pretty good genre fiction.

Yeah, it straddles that line of like being a satire of a genre while also being a good, like an interestingly good example of the genre. Some of the accolades in this book actually make me laugh a lot when you realize who they're coming from. I just thought I'd point this out because I think it's funny. And I just opened the front page of the book. Someone wrote, a famous author wrote as an accolade for Terry Pratchett in general, that Terry Pratchett is more than a magician. He's the kindest,

most fascinating teacher you ever had. It just stood out to me because it's from Harlan Ellison, who wrote, I have no mouth, but I'm a scream. So I'm like'm like okay guy who wrote one of the most disturbing stories i've ever read in my entire life and he's just like terry pratchett's such a nice he's just such a nice guy and you're like what is this a bad thing like i'm nervous now um so so the story of the color of magic focuses on uh i'm say, two and a half characters. The main two being Rincewind, the failed wizard, and Two-Flower, the insurance clerk who is a tourist. And the half character I included there is Two-Flower Luggage, who sort of counts as a character. I mean, so the basic summary is like Two Flower comes from a specific empire that most people can't go to, which is like super rich and super advanced.

And he comes to like Rincewinds, like home city, to be a tourist, to go on vacation and to like see these places that people in his homeland only tell stories about, like sort of going to the barbarian lands to see what it's like. And this is very rare. It doesn't really happen. And Rincewind gets tasked with like making sure nothing bad happens to Two Flower. And Two Flower has a specific ability to just be in trouble all the time and be surrounded by trouble all the time well he gets himself into trouble all the goddamn time yes i'm saying it's like it's it's his talent and so rinse wins whole thing throughout this entire novel is like desperately trying to stop two flower from putting himself in danger failing constantly and then being saved by like random acts of the gods or quote

unquote chance. And the two of them surviving. And then eventually at the end, you find out that people are actually kind of scared of them because of everything they've lived through. That everyone assumes they must be super powerful because of everything they've survived. And that, of course, the joke is that we as the reader know that they've survived all of that through complete nonsense well i mean the the bit towards the end especially where they're like being accosted on top of that floating disc by like the 15 year old

with the wand that just makes people disappear um yeah and she's like she's like oh you must be powerful wizards or whatever and he's like no i'm really not and then you find out he's like trying to tell her i'm really i'm really a shitty wizard and then later on you find out that they think they're powerful because fate the god himself came down to their like people and were like fucking sacrifice these two i hate them uh yeah like fate himself is like these two need to die and like the fact they've avoided fate up to this point everyone assumes that they must be like uber powerful and it's just because they're like bumbling idiots who have attracted the favor of lady luck by pure happenstance well that's the only way to attract Lady Luck to you.

Because if you say her name or invoke her in any way, she's like fucking leaves. If you invoke, hey, I need luck, you're never going to have luck. Luck just happens. And so the general arc of the story is that at the beginning, they are just lucky. And then Lady Luck notices them

because they are just lucky. And then she sees how much fate wants them dead. And then she just helps them because she thinks it's enjoyable to like stymie fate from having what he wants they they were so successful at avoiding like fate in general that like death has apparently encountered him multiple times in the wrong place and been like this isn't where you're supposed to fucking be right now where the hell are you because one of one listening, one of the schticks in the book is that all wizards are visited by death himself, not one of his servants. Death is like an entity that you can converse with if you're a wizard.

If you're a wizard and it's time for you to die, death himself will appear. And you can talk to him sometimes. And so he keeps appearing to Rincewind being like, it's time for you to die death himself will appear and you can like talk to him sometimes and so he keeps appearing to rinse wind being like it's time and rinse winds like i don't think so and death will be like i think it is and rinse wind will be like nah not yet and then some just nonsense will happen and he'll get away from death honestly eventually eventually death actually kind of gives up on trying to get them yeah he goes off and does something else and sends a random servant to him because he knows he would fail anyways. Yeah.

He knows he just gives up. So we talk about sort of, uh, it's specifically, it's a, it's a, it's a comedy, it's a comedy story. It's making fun of a lot of tropes from fantasy genres. If we start from the beginning of the color of magic, when Two Flower comes to Ankh-Morpork, to like the capital, like he's way richer than everyone on accident just because the place he comes from has more gold

and he doesn't know it. He has stuff that everyone thinks is crazy technology, but of course in Pratchett's style, it is technology, but it also doesn't work the way you think it should it's like he's he describes a camera that like two flower has a camera that takes pictures and you're like oh okay i know what a camera is but then you find out it's not like that there's just a little demon that lives inside the camera and looks at what you're pointing the camera at and like draws a picture real quick and like that's how cameras work and the thing is it's like that's exactly what

rinse wind is like oh my goodness is there's something in there that just like paints it for you like the first time it comes out he's like there's a little guy in there and then he opens the door and the little demon and the little devil in there will like talk to you and be like yeah man what's up i need more paint so like every time especially from like stuff from two flowers land every time it's like this is technology except it's not and that always disappoints rincewind too which i think is a really interesting kind of thing about his character he's so not good with magic and in both i mean the the books kind of imply he would have been a shoddy wizard even if he hadn't gotten a like one of the world ending spells stuck in his head stuck in his

head erasing all other forms of magic he could do um but like he's has like an interesting fascination in the at least it's brought up in the first couple sections of the book with wanting something better than magic. Yeah. Because so I think in our sort of talk before the show, we did, we're describing Rincewind as a character. And I think we hit upon the description that Rincewind is,

is both a literal and figurative sense, a disenchanted wizard because he was training to be a wizard, but then accidentally then like on a bat, looked at a forbidden book and got like a forbidden spell stuck in his head, which basically stopped him from doing all other magic. So he's like in the fact that he's kind of a wizard, but cannot do magic. But also like he,

as a person, he looks at the world through a very disenchanted lens. Like things happen and he's just like, ah, whatever. It's bullshit. Who cares? And so that's why I think tying it back, why he's in chance, like in trance with the technology that two flower brings,

because he looks at it and he's like, oh, finally something that might be cool like it's going to be technology it's like better and more useful and then it turns out to just be an alternate kind of magic and he's like oh come on yeah it's just magic in a different way and he's like oh fuck i thought yeah he constantly brings up in the first section bottling lightning um yeah which is something we all know is electricity yeah so like um pratchett loves to do that loves to describe a thing the way the characters in his world would conceive of it and like the obviously humor there comes from like you as the reader knowing what they're talking

about without like having to be directly told it most the first section is full of that more so than any other section in the book yeah because he's sort of setting the stakes for like how the world is like set up and i want to give prrick credit this world is one of the most detailed and like meticulously constructed fantasy worlds as far as the cosmology is concerned it's like like physic like the the i want to call like the physics and the cosmology of the world like all of it is inherently um logical all that is inherently like non-contradictory like he comes up with like names for like the different sides of the disc and like all these things that people within the world would understand and even the stuff that's wild like oh there's the dehydrated sea which is an ocean that's actually not an ocean because the water has been dehydrated.

But like even in doing that, he explains it in such a way that you're like, it's silly, but it's also logical. You know, like, does it make sense? Like even the stuff that's magic is like logically constructed magic. And I think that comes from something we're discussing. Part of the fact, one of the things he's skewering is he's also making fun of D&D and the way D&D magic worked at the time. Yeah, so he's just very kind of explicitly making fun of the early...

And it really hasn't survived in its original form until like fifth edition. No, I think it didn't just die out by around 3rd edition. I think Vancy and Magic. Pure Vancy and Magic. The idea of memorizing a spell, using it, and then forgetting that spell until you read it again.

Until you memorize it again. Which was, at the very least, was at least 1st editions. I'm not an old D&D expert. It may have made it old dnd expert but like it may have made it it may have made it to second edition but i could be right but um at the very at the very minimum it was the traditional way that magic was handled in dnd back then and he's very clearly making fun of that at multiple points in this book especially with rinse wind having no space

in his head for any other spell but then all and like he can't learn any new spells because that spells in his head and it won't leave unless he casts it but he doesn't want to cast it because it could end everything he doesn't know literally he doesn't know what it could do one of the things it could do is just like end existence so he's like i don't know um yeah i just don't do spells anymore he gets very close to casting it multiple times i think the closest he gets is in the wormberg yeah in the world when he's falling yeah um so you have this disenchanted wizard who i identify with a lot because things happen to him and he's like oh this sucks why does this i don't want to do any of this and

they're and they're like you know oh you've got to do the thing and he's like but do i can i just not there were a few moments of actual like agency that come from where he's like okay i'm gonna do it i guess i mean one of the main times he actually does do a thing is because a magic sword makes him do it. Oh, well, yeah. But I'm thinking of, you know, I mean, he's also thinking about his own head when it comes to Two Flower. Because if he fucks up, they're just going to, I mean, who knows if the guys would remember well enough to get his head chopped off. But, like, with the dryad in The S of eight where he's like shit. And he does a thing and jumps right through like the portal thing that

they were making. Okay. Yeah. That was the first time I think he legitimately made an action for the sake of two flower and not entirely for himself, even though it was also saving his own life. Oh yeah. So again,

this is a character I identify with because like the universe just like shits on him and every time he's just like i guess right just god damn it is that do i have to and then the universe is like yes you have to and he's like oh fuck i guess god damn it yeah even the last line reflects that of the entire book reflects that, where he's kind of dangling under the edge of the... Off the edge of the disc. On an upside-down moving tree on the underside of the disc with its own flora and fauna going on down here.

And he starts to fall at one point. And it says, the whole of creation was waiting for Rincewind to drop in. He did so. There didn't seem to be any alternative. So it's like he does the things because he doesn't have a choice. Yeah. And Pratchett foils him spectacularly

with the character of Two Flower, whose name is, of course, one of the jokes of the book, because Rincewind is the only person who can understand Two Flower. He's the only one that speaks like a language that Two Flower also speaks. But Rincewind's actually not that good at his job of being a translator. And so one of the jokes is that it's two flower, which is by Lily, which is just a mistranslation of Billy. Yeah.

So two flowers name is Billy. Everyone in the world thinks he has four eyes because he wears glasses. Yeah. Well, what's really funny about that is that the original edition of the book, some of the art actually had him with four eyes. That's because they didn't put any there um that should just remind everyone that that that uh writers rarely have control if ever

unless they have a big enough name to be able to have control they rarely have control over the art that goes on their book yeah and so two flower is uh the foil for Rincewind because Two Flower is this like naive to the point of death. Yeah. Like naive optimist who is just like wandering through the world like a newborn babe being like, what's this? What's this? Like he's in there like Jack Skellington in Christmas World. He's like a caricature of annoying tourist is what he is yeah like he is yeah like the perfect annoying tourist caricature

where he's like i've heard stories about heroes i'd love to go see a hero i've heard his stories about brigands i'd love to meet a brigand and then they so the the running thing is that the two of them get into some sort of likeament, which could result in their death. And Two-Flower is always like, huh, well, isn't this neat? And Rincewind goes, but we could die. And Two-Flower goes, I don't think we will. Well, the upsetting thing is that he's always right. He's always right.

He's always right despite the fact that like. Despite the fact that like object objectively, he's wrong that in every situation they should be dead, but he is unerringly correct in the fact that they don't end up dead. And that I think is where the overarching themes of the book is the fact that they keep getting into things that should kill them. And by rights, they should be killed except they're just not because fools are always lucky. Like, you know, luck protects drunks and fools. Like that's, and that's exactly what's going on here. And so then Pratchett essentially uses the different

sections of this book to skewer either specific other authors and specific tropes within them so one of the first ones we end up skewering uh like we mentioned earlier is the um concept of like masculinity and heroism and heroes and it's specifically making fun of like cohen and the barbarian because he describes heroes as being strong and bold and great fighters and just spectacularly stupid. They're all

himbos. All himbos. It's just so every hero is a himbo. Oops all himbos. Oops all himbos. And the one we get introduced to, we hang out with, is a character named Harun. Harun the Barbarian, who is essentially described as being Conan. Like, he just is.

Like, it's Conan the Barbarian. But he's described as being a particularly smart hero because he can formulate entire sentences. art hero because he can formulate entire sentences. And even in the world, like when they're talking about them, they talk about these as being like pure, powerful souls. These heroes are pure souls, powerful souls,

but they're also just spectacular idiots. And like the whole thing is like just showing that like this big masculine hero who slays monsters is actually just calculating how much profit he can get it is just like a dnd hero it because early versions of dnd and i mean yeah yeah because your experience was through loot yeah so it was like it's like they're just sitting there calculating how much experience am i getting like 800 gold out of those yeah so like harun harun despite being very dumb one thing he is that he's good at two things fighting and calculating like risk versus reward of any given situation so like when he's faced with the dragon princess in the Wormberg,

despite barely understanding what she's saying, he can like look at, he like looks at the jewelry on her, looks at the stuff around the room and makes a calculation of roughly how much everything should be worth and how much she might be able to give him if he does what she says, and then makes a decision based on that. And so like,

he's literally just like a D andnd barbarian where he's like i'm only gonna do this if i get money out of it he's like i can fight i can do money i can fuck that's all i do that's it and he gets to do all those things more or less because after this whole incident with the dragon riders, he ends up, I mean, it's implied that he ends up like becoming the husband of like this wit lady wizard or sorceress or whatever you call them who controls dragons. And so like, it's just because he's big and strong and dumb. And she specifically wanted someone who was big and strong and dumb. Someone who was big, strong and too dumb to like challenge her. Yeah. But like he also is is protected by luck

haroon is also like protected by lady luck uh like she specifically is using him at one point when they do like the dice game like they do the board game when the gods are actually just playing dnd and like she's i do want to point out and under you. Sorry, like an underappreciated joke in the sending of eight at the beginning. Now there's there's a there's a God who's like the big one who they call blind IO. And he got his name because where his eye socket should have been,

there was nothing but two large areas of blank skin his eyes like float around the room they're like independent like independent of him and float around whatever his name's IO and he has no eyes yeah but like so Harun is this hero who's big and dumb but like is also protected by Lady Luck

and I think for the same reasons that Two Flowers protected by Lady Luck that he just like he just does stuff and like it's like she just likes him and so he gets lucky so they're like oh how did you know that there'd be treasure there and he's just like well it makes sense you kill the monster there's an altar under the altar there's going to be treasure that's just how it works it's like listen this is this isn't my first campaign he's like i've done a lot of i've done a lot of dungeon delving i've played in a lot of this dm's campaigns i know that where there's an altar i look underneath it there's money there okay yeah i just know how that works

so like it's also obviously like a parody of again like i said you're sort of classic pulp fantasy heroes they interact with him quite a bit until he becomes like the husband of like the worm lady um they in the second story when they're with run they or when they first meet him it's called the sending of eight in this story they fight a lovecraft monster yeah like it's just a lovecraft monster or whatever um yeah it's like dolshamaroth it's called the devourer of souls it's just a love crafty and tentacle beast which they beat by hitting it with an incredibly bright camera flash which blinds its big hideous eye it also kind of reminded me of a um uh of a beholder from dnd a little yeah it's like a yeah. It's a Beholder with tentacles. So yeah, this one is

obviously playing off of H.P. Lovecraft. You're Belshamaroth. And again, this ties all back into his excessive world building, because this creature is the reason that no one

can say, no wizard actually likes saying the letter eight the number eight oh then yeah hey the number eight there we go me be big brain i promise yeah well the eight is also it's they can't say the number eight tell it's tied to belsham harath which is like a devourer of souls and is evil but also it's they can't say the number eight it's tied to belsham harath which is like a devourer of souls and is evil but also there's eight colors in the rainbow and the eighth one you can only see if you're a wizard because it's the color of magic it's like it's and that is the color octarine yeah uh so like it's it's again it's really complex and important world building that is used to like tell very silly jokes. It's an interest.

It's a very interesting story construction that I will be completely honest. I didn't quite enjoy at first, it's like the first two sections of the book, but by like the second two sections, the story, the world building, and like this way he writes started to click a lot better for me uh because the beginning of the story just felt sort of like a sitcom and i uh despise sitcoms um but like later on it i don't know it fell more into place for me into like a story that i enjoy the um i think personally if i had to pick like a least favorite section it's

probably the sending of eight i wasn't um super excited by that one at least with the color um with the color of magic the first one i kind of enjoy i enjoyed like the weird interlocking pieces sort of scenario where you where you essentially have a chain of events that two flowers arrival starts and they all happen independently of one another and then all culminate in one big bar fight um that sets the city on fire that that completely like after the fact sets the city on fire because he like throws out oil and you know they all get out and they escape and nothing's burning well nothing's on fire actually set the bartender sets the bar on fire on purpose to get the insurance money wait was that specific i thought

he was just trying to light a light and then no because he died yeah but he didn't intend to i know because he was he was trying to burn it down to get the insurance money but he didn't intend to. I know because he was trying to burn it down to get the insurance money, but he wasn't expecting there to be gas in the air. Yes, he thought he was just going to burn down his own bar for insurance money. Especially given the fact that he just got the insurance policy. Yeah, so Two Flower is an insurance salesman back in his home nation the people of this world don't understand insurance but he convinces the the guy who owns the bar that he should get insurance and then i think in a you know project joke here the man gets insurance on his bar and then immediately tries to do an insurance scam yeah immediately tries to do

immediately like less than 24 hours. We're talking like maybe four hours apart. He gets insurance and then immediately tries to do an insurance scam and burns down the entire city. Yeah, and it's actually pretty, it's like a classic sort of comedy punchline scene where you'd already seen death in the city and he's like i'm i gotta be here tonight it's really important um and you're like what uh if it makes if it makes listeners

feeling better anytime you have to picture death speaking you can do uh you can take a cue from like the live action like the tv adaption of this story and picture death using christopher lee's voice yeah because because christopher lee plays death in the tv adaption so just think of saruman uh being death or or dracula or whatever your christopher lee touchstone is yeah his tinderbox was damp and he's like trying to light a match really badly. And then a lighted taper appears in midair right beside him. And all of death's lines in the book and the written book are all written in different texts. Like they're written in a different font.

In the audio book, what they did was they gave him like a resounding echo. So like in the audio book, whatever he talks, it's like, my name is death like it's like he's talking in a giant cavern but he essentially hands him a lighted taper and then he turns around right as he's about to throw it down the steps and he like lights it up and lights up death's face and he's like oh no and he's like yes and then right outside rinse

wind and two flower are running away and it just explodes yeah death literally hands the bar owner like the lit taper to start the fire because death is like this has to burn down that's why i'm here so let's just get this moving let's get this moving so i can get all these souls out of here this is my job uh and and the whole time he's like he passes rinse wind and he's like i'm supposed to meet you like on the cliff side of something in like an hour where what why are you here he doesn't meet you like 300 miles away in like in like three hours why Why are you here? And Rincewind's like, I don't know about that. It's like, I think your clock's wrong. Well, no, Death actually offers to lend him a horse

so he can get to the designated place on time. He's like, can you be there like on time? Just for me. He like literally offers to get him there. Yeah, I love this stupid, like almost cat and mousy sort of game that Death plays, not just with Rincewind, but you kind of assume that wizards in general, I mean, they probably don't have as many regular run-ins with death to the point that they then don't die in for them to be able to have regularly had conversations with death.

Yeah. Like, Renswin almost seems, like, personally acquainted with death yeah like rinswin almost seems like personally acquainted with death he becomes so because for a little bit there death becomes obsessed with like getting him and then death eventually just gives up yeah by the end it's like he's like physically comes to him and gets mad at him and is like you gotta get he's he's supposed to he's fated to die you gotta kill him and he's like sure whatever i mean there's a plague going on i gotta be there so i think this is where we introduce i think one of the other uh sort of world building and theme thematic themes that sir pratchett does is he literally takes time out of the book from like the narrative to name the gods many of them and show them sitting around like a board game and basically

playing D and D except kind of against each other. It's like a competitive board game where like the people, the actual people on the disc are just pieces in their game. And like, they're like rolling against each other. It's like one God will be like, I have a troll and it makes this attack and then a different god will be like i've got a hero who does this instead and they roll die and depending on the dice outcome it like changes the actual fates of people on the planet and that's where you get sort of the frame we get later where like lady luck is actively like using rinse wind and two flower against fate and fate is actively trying to kill

them because like she beats him at the board game using them and so like that's where like fate sort of gets it out for them i think and that we can talk from it about a higher theme as i think in a an interesting theme of pratchett's world here is when you're talking about sort of like free will or fate. Like people can make decisions and do things, but also their actions are just completely controlled by the gods playing games. So like in the end, I don't think any characters actually make any choices at all of their own free will well i'm i think i mean maybe it's just expressed quietly but i think the gods focus is on different places at different times so it's like you know they were all sitting around watching this specific board game now of course i don't know if that's just you know gods are actually not limited that way and it's

just pratchett showing us this specific instance of them looking at rinse wind and it is pretty funny when the troll gets introduced because he like eo like just sets the troll down and then right in front of them without any real warning a troll just appears yeah there's on the road and a troll just like apparates in front of them and they're like where the fuck did this thing come from and the troll doesn't even know how it got there yeah the troll because a god literally just moved him there um but the way that that scene there is presented at least is almost showing just that scenario but it's like there's other things obviously going on around the world at the same time so it's like our is it free will is there no free will or is this just

the gods are specifically playing a game with them at that time yeah it's like you don't have free will if the god is looking at you and doing something that involves you but like as long as they're focused like over there somewhere like you can do whatever you want but um but there is also like an element i think just because there is a god called fate um there is an element that that's just a game they're playing and their real world job is you know his would be assigning fates essentially yeah and but the only way that it seems that you get out of that is having other gods kind of fiddle with it a little bit where you have like lady luck giving a little bit of a gap that effectively leads to them at least i mean spoilers i guess they don't die i don't i think we should be past giving spoiler warnings i'm also kind of talking

i'm also kind of talking to you a little bit but they they don't die in their fall well i assume not because there's like 50 000 more books yeah but rinsewind only appears as a main character in like a handful of them two flower only appears in like three or four uh i can actually see right here i happened to click on rincewind's wikipedia rincewind's mentioned in a lot of books yeah he actually appears in the color of magic he's in light fantastic he makes a cameo in mort he's in sorcery he's an eric he's in interesting times he's in the last continent he's in the last hero minor character in a couple other books like he appears a few times yeah so like um there's enough books um maybe it'll be similar to like how we're probably gonna have to

go about wheel of time whenever we get to that and the way we're and the way we're doing like leguin books we just do one at a time yeah um but like there's no telling when like a discord book would come out there's no telling whether it would be like who it would be about and where it would be set and yeah essentially the only reason that they escape fate at the end is because lady luck is kind of pushing for them. So it's like a god opposing another god that lets them slip by the net that fate has essentially created. Yeah, so like, I kind of think that free will is not really a thing.

Yeah. I mean, well, just the fact that there's a deity named Fate that assigns fates is pretty aggressive. Yeah, it's pretty aggressive. But at the same time, there's, I mean, did the ancient Greeks think that fate, I mean, they had the fates, but did they think everything was predetermined? I think the way, I thought the way the Greeks viewed the fates wasn't like every action of your daily life.

It was determined. It was sort of more like your eventual fate yeah and i and i think like you're like how how you're gonna come to an end or be how you're gonna be remembered that sort of thing i think they were the ones that like cut the string of life for you and i think like personally that's more the vibe i get from like fate himself because it's obviously it's obviously he's not totally omnipotent in terms of his abilities because he's obviously clearly fucks up um but the same thing goes for death same thing goes for lady luck it just you know um so i don't know

if i would say it's like hard determinism but i would say that people's lives can be tempered with um at any given moment so i suppose actually does make it a lot more like the way the ancient greeks viewed the gods where like you might have an eventual fate but like you can kind of do what you want but also a god the gods that are fickle at any point may just like reach out of the heavens and fuck with you yeah or help you maybe who knows you know um if you're anything like lady luck and i mean like you mentioned before um and i didn't realize it until you mentioned it but it's like oh luck is it's like jinxing it if you actually acknowledge that luck is there yeah that's why you cannot say her name because you're literally jinxing your life that's why it's why you can't try and worship her and it's

like because people tried to worship lady luck at one point a bunch of gamblers and stuff and they all died horribly way in like horrible ways within like a week of starting the whole thing um because they just kept pressing their luck i guess i guess you're just kind of pushing your luck that whole time and you just end up dead like pratchett loves that kind of thing where again where it's like they were literally and figuratively like pushing their luck and it turned out terribly for them like he it's you know he, he's a big fan of that sort of double meaning for all the stuff that's going on. The next one he does called the lure of the worm, or as the audio narrator called it, the worm.

That just makes me chuckle so much. It's like Dan Gillian. Oh my God. Yeah. I can't, I'm just going to say it that way now because I heard the audio narrator say it so many times. So in the lure of the Wyrm is like a direct reference to Anne McCaffrey and her Dragon Riders of Pern like series. Like it's a very specific like dynamic the way he describes the riders, their relationship to their dragons. Like that's the fact that the dragon riders have like exclamation points in their names um that's not in pern pern it's there's a lot of quotation marks if i'm yes there's a lot of apostrophes yeah um but he uses the exclamation points in a similar way and see i didn't know

that because i did the audiobook so i didn't even know that their exclamation points in a similar way. See, I didn't know that because I did the audiobook, so I didn't even know that they were exclamation points. I just know that he pronounced them weird. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how the audiobook would have pronounced some of them because they're like, it's like K exclamation point S-D-R-A. Is that like

K-Sydra or is it like K-Sydra? I mean, I could, honestly, I could open the audio book up and tell you. I found her dad very funny. It's kind of complicated, but her dad is the former dragon lord. He died and then was brought back to life by her. Well, no, he didn't die. Oh, okay.

So, because he's a super, super powerful wizard. And the only way to become the new dragon lord is by killing the old dragon lord. And then fighting your siblings until you're the only one left. That's how it works. And so she was good enough to poison him. But she wasn't good enough to overcome her two brothers on her own. And so the powerful old wizard just refused to die until one of the children prevailed over the other ones so he was just hanging out as in like a suspended state of death until one of

oh until one of them could win a suspended state of undeath that is untethered from time in such a way that he sees past present and, and future simultaneously. So he constantly is like saying things like, I will say to you, I mean, or did I already say it to you? Or did it happen? Or will it happen? I think it's going, I think it's happening right now. Yeah, it's got this weird thing because he sees all time is happening simultaneously. So he's got that Dr. Manhattan vibe of like, I will have said to you 10 minutes from now this thing and there's a there's a really fantastic line um where two flower is essentially like he's like i have the disadvantage of being uh seeing everything all at once he's like that

doesn't really sound like a disadvantage and he goes you don't think so imagine every moment being at one in the same time a distant memory and a nasty surprise and you'll see what i mean that's there's just lines like that where you where while you're sitting there and that's the thing that's always my thing about you know satire in general is a lot of times you'll sit there and you'll read it and you'll chuckle while you're reading it but if you were to read it out loud to somebody else it would never land right it would never never land right yeah no there's there's a line in here that reminded me almost disturbingly so um to the really famous first line from hitchhiker's guide where they're talking about the mage wars it says the precise

origins of the mage wars have been lost in the fogs of time but disc philosophers agree that the first men shortly after their creation understandably lost their temper um it's lines like that that line it was like that's a douglas adam's line um that's very hitchhiker's guide right just essentially being like well they were made and they were pissed off that they existed so they said fuck you and started killing things with magic um honestly the lure of the worm is whether we get the rest of like his skewering of like conan because the larissa or leah whatever her name is called larissa but you know what i mean larissa um liessa or liana she basically just uses her own to like beat her brothers and then marry him and it's just haroon being like

yeah what if i just do the thing i get the, and then I can be lord and it'll be great. She even – in my head, I almost even pictured her as like a Conan woman. Well, I mean she's described as being essentially naked. Well, yeah. But like the pulp fantasy design of like a warrior woman. Yeah. That's immediately like – We've all seen Xena Warrior Princess. Yeah, it's very Xena Warrior Princess.

Like almost like the old comic booky style yeah yeah is is immediately what i envisioned when she was described with like red hair like i imagined like like something covering her crotch where it was like it's like the swimsuit thing where it like it's like the sides of the thighs um i was like this is just very very 80s um which is appropriate because this was in 1980 what 83 83 yeah so i want to go on though to what i think is the most compelling and interesting section of the entire book, which is the last section, Close to the Edge. So Close to the Edge, to me, has the most... I think the jokes land the best in this section. I think the overall themes come more to the front, and I think it asks some of the more compelling philosophical questions, I think, in this last section. Where like everything up to it was sort of a build up, I guess, to this last section.

Well, first off, you kind of intro into it out of fighting dragons into this one. Pratchett does some incredible nonsense in that they're flying through the air on a dragon to get away from the enemies. And then the dragons only exist because you imagine very hard that they exist. Well, then two flower passes out from lack of oxygen. So they fall out of the sky as they're falling out of the sky towards the ocean. Rincewind panics. And essentially, because they're in a very powerful magic field, Rincewind is very strongly wishing they were somebody else. And so they just instantly appear on the inside of a passenger jet.

Yeah, a modern 1980s passenger jet. A modern 1980s passenger jet where they're just in the aisle of a passenger jet. And then he's sort of describing it like you know he's describing a passenger jet like after a second, but he's also describing a little weird. And maybe I was a little confused at first because, again, it was audiobook style, but they like make their way to the cabin. And then in the cabin, there's a guy holding a thing and they just sort of take it from him. Just surprising. You find out that they've just foiled a hijacking of a plane by a guy with a bomb.

They've just accidentally walked into the cockpit while the hijacking was happening two flowers still passed out by the way carrying two flower and then just sort of like grabs the bomb off a guy because he doesn't know what it is or what and just like all the pilots were like oh you're so heroic and he's like i mean i don't didn't do anything that i know of yeah things start like the way it kind of almost describes it is if they had been born in and lived in an entirely separate universe the whole time so like old memories are starting to come in of of this new existence as they're being there. What he describes is, again, the way he makes his world building sort of scientific and logical is that because they're now in this reality and they have now affected it, like the matter, the matter that makes up these two people now exists in this reality when it shouldn't so in order to make order to fix it reality sort of unzips backwards to the beginning of time and then re-zips itself in a way that

makes sense for them to be there so like essentially creates a reality in which these guys existed in their world where like he becomes a nuclear a. His name is now like Scandinavian. Yes, but it's just a Scandinavian version of his name. It's a Kurioswinder. So he's Dr. Reinsvand, and Two-Flower becomes Jack Zweiblooman. So if you know German, Zweiblooman. That's fucking awful.

Yeah, Jack Zweiblooman and Dr. Reinswand. So reality unwinds itself, then rewinds itself to make them exist in this timeline. And they do the thing, but then like the luggage, which we have not talked about yet, breaks through the back of the plane like a fucking monster. And suddenly Rincewind is like, oh shit, I don't want to be here. And they pop back into their own reality.

But then that causes the one ours, when they were just in, to have to unzip itself again and realign itself to be without them, which he then goes on to explain causes all sorts of repercussions across the entire universe, including like exploding stars and ruining planets and making species go extinct and all sorts of other things. Because I think he's essentially referring to like the, like, you know,

sort of concept that like the continuation of like matter that like you have to matter can't exist and not exist. It has to be consistent. And so like by moving it around between realities you've caused all sorts of ripples across reality well yeah because if there was if they added their matter to our world that would require that there that that matter had always been somewhere else at some point in time before they existed so it's like that would have been another star or it would have been something else in another star and so different things would have been another star or would have been something else in another

star and so different things would have exploded in different ways and you would have ended up with a different reality entirely so it fixed itself once and then they left again and it had to fix itself back again which caused even more issues because you had to remove matter from so it's like it's all over the place yeah they just like pop into place. Yeah. They just like pop into an, to like a 1980s airliner, stop a hijacking and then pop out again. And it's important to, to note that his magic system and the way, well,

not necessarily like the fancy and stuff, but the, the way that his metaphysics kind of work with magic, where there's like energy fields that are essentially radiation of old magic and where you have situations like that where it's all about conservation of matter and all these like scientific elements um likely originated because he was a you know he wrote for scientific journals um before he wrote fantasy specifically a lot of nuclear physics. Yeah, so his background is in nuclear science.

And so it sort of informs the fact that he pictures magic as an actual physical element that most people can't detect unless you're trained to detect it, like radiation. most people can't detect unless you're trained to detect it like radiation. And that like the, in the ancient days, the major wars use so much magic that traces of it and hotspots of it just remain in the world, much like radiation after, you know, Chernobyl or a nuclear explosion. There's just sort of radiation in the world. Yeah. It's, it's a very um nuclear inspired um and once again alongside the blinking drag the the dragons that um you had to describe to me what the uh dragon riders of pern were about um but i'm just gonna say we can add that and pratchett's magic radiation to an ever-growing

list of things that this podcast is teaching me that aragon uh took from somewhere else it keeps the list keeps getting longer by the time we actually get to talking about aragon we're gonna have like essentially a cohesive list of where he got all the little pieces of this world single thing he got we're gonna find somewhere else and it's like it's like well this comes from le guin and this comes from this comes from mcafree and this comes from pratchett and this comes from um like i i'm i'm sorry i don't want to sound like we're shitting on Christopher Paolini. I'm not. I mean, and he was young when he wrote it too.

So it's not that big. He wrote the first book when he was like 14 or 15. I just. So like, I don't want to, I'm not faulting him for that. And also, as I've said many times, you're only as good as the people you steal from, like as an artist. And so like, I'm not faulting him for that. It is just a very interesting exercise to be able to read an author who is so

very clearly influenced by the same stuff that we were influenced by. Yeah. Like, you know, ever, I use Aragon as a touch point at this point because I, like I know he took from so many specific and, and he took rather directly um so it's like um first me noticing oh this is pretty star warsy then i started you know the gears start turning and i start noticing other things especially when i started reading the gwynn um where i was like oh that's literally just earth sees magic system it's just it's just the earth sea magic system with now with terry pratchett's

you know radiation after effects if you decide to nuclear explosion yourself um in the case of paulini and dragon riders of pern dragon bonding dragon bonding um i'm just i'm building up a collection in my head So we're actually going to have to make sure We also read Anne McCaffrey then before We do Pauline so you can know what's going on Yeah I didn't notice this at first but there's also

In the acknowledgements of the book The accolades from the book Anne McCaffrey Likes Discworld 2 You gotta love it Yeah So that little scenario aside, they eventually plunge into the sea, and then

the next bits were only sort of are referenced, we don't actually go through them, they get captured by some slavers, they have some other adventures that are just mentioned in passing. But where the story really picks up is when they get essentially to the rim of the world. Because, again, the world is a flat disk.

You can, and stuff does, routinely fall off the edge of it. They don't fall off the edge of it. They get caught by a net that's been stretched along the edge of the world that they call the circum fence. Because it is the outside of the thing. And Rincewind is like, oh yeah, the circumference. And they're like, yeah, the circum fence. And you're like, yeah, okay.

Okay. And they run into this guy who I don't remember why I can't remember his name. Tethys. They are captured by Tethys the sea troll, who you learn after a bit of time is actually not from this world at all he was on his own world which is essentially an inversion of our world where most that they live in the water and that they in order to hunt they get on boats that go across land to hunt like land creatures and then they make it back to water to be safe. So it's sort of like a flip reverse, like fishing vessel, except they're hunting like antelope and shit because he's actually made of water.

Well, at one point, his boat made it to the edge of their world and he fell off and like fell through space past multiple other planets past multiple other like realities and eventually crashed into this one where he was taken as a prisoner by the krellians and this is where i think they pose a question one of the first sort of philosophical questions that i found incredibly uh interesting and i think it's important especially for people sort of of our political persuasion. So they're literally on the edge. This is a conversation between Tethys and Rincewind and Two Flower. They are on the very lip, very edge of the disc. Like they could just take a step and fall off the planet. And we know for a fact that other planets and realities exist because Tethys came from one and passed multiple other ones. So that's clearly established. It's also clearly established that

when the Krullians show up, they are more than likely going to enslave Rincewind and Twoflower and cut out their tongues. They're going to have their tongues cut out and they're going to be forced to be slaves. Tethys has been forced to be a slave. He doesn't have his tongue cut out because he can't because he's made of water, but they would have if they could have, I'm sure. So they have this conversation where they ask Tethys why he hasn't tried to go home again. And in there, like you also have Rincewind saying that he'll do anything to not be enslaved. And it basically comes to the point where they're standing looking over the lip of the world. And Tethys says to the effect, we could just jump off.

And I've been thinking about it for like four years, but I still haven't done it. And Rincewind is like, I want to escape slavery and I'll do anything to get out of it. And Tethys is like, you can go ahead. You can jump off the edge. No one knows what happens when you do that. And Rincewind is too much of a coward to do it. And the point you take from there is that, and Tethys says that the vast majority of people don't have the the bravery aren't brave enough to jump off this edge and so the the lesson pratchett's telling us here is that most people

the vast majority of people when faced between remaining in the slavery they currently exist in or taking a leap into the unknown will just stay enslaved. They will accept that fate of slavery instead of taking the leap into the unknown, which may be death or maybe paradise. There's no way to know before you get there. And I feel that this is an incredibly apt thing for, you know, communists or anarchists or anyone like that to think about. Because in a way, we are essentially proposing to the general public that they need to jump off the edge. And I don't think we should be surprised when a lot of people don't want to. And I do think Pratchett's making an important point here. It's immediately what springs to my mind.

And we'll probably, we'll have to talk about this at some point, but immediately what springs to my mind is the ones who walk away from Obelos. It's just the same general thing of, of, you know, do you stay knowing what you know, or in this case, in the case of this, you know, knowing that you're going to be a slave, or do you do the unthinkable and leave do you do the unimaginable really um yeah which which brings us across to the you know the was it the book quote where we have to you know we have to do the unthinkable or face the unimaginable or do the impossible or face the unimaginable whatever it is um and you

know that's just generally the situation that we as a species are kind of looking at is kind of teetering over the edge going are are we going we know that terrible things are going to happen do we you know stick here where we feel safe or do we jump off the edge where we're not certain of safety, but there's at least a chance of, you know. Something better. Yeah. Because like Tethys could jump off the edge and possibly, maybe, end up back home again. But he might end up somewhere else entirely. Or he might go through a star and die.

Who knows? He might go through a star and die who knows he might go through a star and die um and i we i think people with you know more you know revolutionary bent have to understand that we're essentially to a lot of people not to everyone but to a lot of people are asking them to make this choice between like the reality and the slavery that they currently exist in and just the vast unknown and i and even i don't think it was unintentional obviously that pratchett in the end thinks that most people won't do it. I mean, yeah. Every night I come out here and look down and I never jump. Courage is hard to come by here on the edge. Courage is hard to come by here on the edge.

And the immediately following section, I think, is also kind of pointed in a funnier way because it's Pratchett. But I suppose one could contrive some sort of, I don't know, some sort of a thing that could preserve one against the cold, said the little man thoughtfully. Some sort of a ship that one could sail over the edge and sail the far off worlds to. I wonder. And then Rincewind, he's just not having any of it. He don't want to think about it. He's like, oh, no, no, no, no. And he's like, don't even think about it. Stop like oh no no no no and he's like don't even think about it stop talking like that to hear it's almost like a uh almost like a reactionary thing where it's like oh i hear this thing i know no no no no no no no no no yeah two flower in this instance would be oh it's prince when yelling at it. No, but I'm saying, starting with Twoflower, this instance

is sort of like a... Someone like us who is saying, but think of it. There could be a way for us to go over this edge safely. There is a way we could do this in a manageable way.

And Rincewind is just... He's like, no. He's stuck on the height. Absolutely not. I will not take that leap, even if you think it could be safe. And you know what's really funny to me is that immediately, this big serious discussion

about jumping off the edge, probably the most like pointed and kind of beautiful passage in the entire book. Within the next couple pages you get a bunch of hydrophobic mages laying face first on a lens on a tensor on a tensor's floating disc um like like strapped face down on a glass disc, staring at the water, using pure power of hatred and loathing, not hatred, loathing, to

push themselves away from the water with magic. So the Krulians come at the direction of the god Fate to collect these two to make them sacrifices so the Krulians can actually send a fish-shaped submarine

over the edge of the world to go down and figure out what gender the turtle is. And the way they're collected, yeah, is literally by some mages of some intense or floating disk. And they have these specific mages trained on the island of Krell who are trained to like loathe water not hate because as pratchett says hate is also an attractive force you have to loathe water with every inch of their being so they they magic into existence a disc and then they strap to the disc wizards who have been trained their whole lives to loathe and abhor water and then push them out over the water because then the pure hate of these wizards for water simply repels them from the surface of the ocean it's like the wizards themselves generate like a like a positive um like magnetic field

and then the water is a positive magnetic field as well so it's like they're creating like a magnetic field that pushes them off of the water out of pure loathing yeah they loathe water so much that they literally cannot they will like force themselves away from it unwillingly the hydrophobes are like seriously to me the funniest fucking thing in this entire goddamn book and i so yeah later they when they're breaking out of crawl they encounter two hydrophobe wizards one of them goes to cast a spell and two flower just spits on him and the spit hitting his hand causes him to like scream and writhe in pain and then the other one they just like shove him and he flips over the ledge and lands in a pond but he can't land in the pond

because he's a hydrophobe. So he's just sitting in like a bubble of air on the surface of the pond screaming. He's like suspended above it. Like he's just suspended. It's so easy to incapacitate. It's just so funny. They describe a different,

uh, like slave who had to watch the circum fence, who almost gets eaten by the luggage and who then develops such an intense hatred of water that he unintentionally becomes a hydrophobic wizard and then moves to the driest part of the world to get away from all water and still thinks that it's too damp. And still he goes to a place with negative rainfall and finds it a he still finds it damp uh yeah it's a really fun little bit of world it's it's so ridiculous because at the end of the day the only purpose these things have is to fly these

discs across water like what and and they they die at a young age. Because your body is mostly water. Yeah, because they loathe themselves. Because they hate the water inside their bodies. Yes. So they just die. They have to drink dehydrated water, whatever the fuck that is, in order to stay alive. I mean, there's a whole ocean of dehydrated water on the disc. There's the dehydrated sea. So that's the whole thing this is the dumbest

shit i love it it's oh it's wonderful so then we get to like the this final like little stint on krull at the edge of the world i think is real fun because they get captured they get told that they're going to be sacrificed to you know bring good fortune to the to the heroes that are going to go over the edge in this like big metal fish. And then lady luck appears to them and is like, I'm going to give you one chance to save your skins because I think it's funny. And they do, they fight their way out. And then throughout the fighting,

they essentially end up on the submarine and, and Tethys shows up cause he gets brought by the luggage. And then like as soon as they're near the submarine, you can tell Two Flower is like, I'm going to that fucking submarine, bro. And I'm going over the edge of the world. And the whole time Rune Swind is like, that's not the thing we're going to do. And Two Flower is like, oh, I wouldn't even imagine it. I'm doing it right now. Yeah.

Couldn't even imagine it. I'm doing it right now. Yeah. And like, and, and Tethys of course wants to, because he'd like to go home someday. And so they have these suits on and then Tethys and a two flower get in the sub rinse.

Wind doesn't make it in, but it gets pushed over the edge anyway. He is in like a space suit though, or a scuba suit or whatever. Yeah. Like some fancy astronaut suit. And so they go over the edge and that's when uh he gets actually gets caught on a branch of a tree temporarily and instead of death appearing death sends like a servant which is a demon that's just scrofula scrofula to like collect him and rinse wins like you're not death i'm not coming with you and scrofula's like, come on, man.

This is like my big shot. Like, let me kill you. I'll get a promotion. He's like, who would know? No one would know. No one would know. Just let me kill you. And Rincewind's like, no, death doesn't kill.

Death just like collects. That's not how this works. And Scrofula's like, dude, come on. Just let me kill you. And then as he goes to kill him, course because he's not allowed to uh rinse he misses rinse wind because rinse wind's branches broken rinse it has fallen off into the great void of space it's like because scrofula can't kill him even when he tries just some shit happens to make sure he doesn't make sure rinse wind falls into space he's a but you're not death who are you scrofula scrofula death couldn't come there's a big plague

on in pseudopolis he had to go and stalk the streets so he sent me no one dies of scrofula i've got rights i'm a wizard uh you wouldn't you'd be dead and then he accidentally uh brace it to uh rinse wind that reincarnation is real yeah because he's not good at his job he accidentally let slip that everyone gets reincarnated he's like he's like reincarnation uh reincarnation can only be improvement and improvement and then he like on your hand over his mouth like he's basically telling rinse when he should go ahead and die because getting reincarnated would only be better than the life he's currently living

and he's like thank you for telling me the truth and the branch snaps and he falls and once again it's like everything else in the book inevitable he just falls because there wasn't any alternative

he just goes that's just what he has to do so a couple specific things Just falls because there wasn't any alternative. He just goes. That's just what he has to do. So a couple of specific things I know you wanted to mention. Let's talk about the craftsman who made the fish that becomes a submarine. Okay. Because this is also, I think, a philosophical point we could think about for a little bit here. Despite the fact that him being like a two-page character. Yeah.

It's actually like a two page character. Yeah. It's, it's like a, it's actually like a pretty depressing story. This incredibly talented master craftsman who's been all around the world, but every time he goes to new places, he makes, he creates a wonder. A world wonder that everyone talks about. And then the guy, because they know that this guy makes these wonders,

he comes over, he makes a wonder. And then whoever he made the wonder for always will give him a shit ton of money and then go, but we got to make sure that no one else can actually like, like you can't make one of these for anybody else because like this has got to be special. So the first one poked his eyes out. Did his eyes go first or what on his hands? His eyes go first and then his hand. And then the third one, they tried to imprison him there. And he cut off his legs. He used the silks and a bunch of bamboo to launch himself out. Yeah, but it cost him his legs or something and then um he's having

a conversation with the guy who he built the giant like fish ship for and he's like so what do we agree to he's like i didn't agree to get paid i just agreed to be let uh to just be allowed to leave uh that's that's it and he's like well i lied and then he gets shot by an arrow and he like looks down at the arrow and and he's like well that's just shoddy craftsmanship so this guy's a matt he's the master craftsman he makes things that no one else in the world can make but every time he makes something he gets maimed. Every time. And in this conversation, they're having it, and the master astronomer who has hired him to make the ship asks him flat out, why you keep taking these jobs if you know you're going to get maimed at the end? Like, why do you keep doing this?

He essentially just says, because I'm good at it. That's it. I'm going could kill it he's like he could you could be go off and be like a lettuce farmer or something it'd be a hell of a lot safer and he's like yeah i'm good at it and then they kill him yeah um it's it's kind of depressing it's i don't know if he's intending it to be like a a. Like almost kind of proletarian thing. You know. The maker getting. Doing all this stuff for the. For the ruler.

For the ruler. Only to get shafted at the end. Because it really does. He's like I'm a master craftsman. This is what I do. And I get punished for it. But I can't stop doing it. Because it is the one thing in the world I'm good at.

And there's like, it's like, huh, that's unfortunate. Yeah. And then get shot. I do love that. The last thing he says is he complains about the craftsmanship of the arrow

that just stabbed him. And he's like, yeah, he does. That's bad craftsmanship. He's like, that's shoddy. Come on now.

Like, okay. At least he has a sense of humor. One last character that we have mentioned and we have not discussed let's talk about the fucking luggage ah what the fuck so rins win the unstoppable force the immediate the what's that an unstoppable force meets an it is both an unstoppable force and an immuable object. It is... It is eternal. So there's a kind of wood called sapient pear wood,

which is like the most magical thing in all of existence. If you're a wizard of like the 11th level or whatever, you can occasionally get like a rod or a wand made of sapient pear wood. Two Flower has an entire like luggage chest made out of it that just sprouts little human legs on the bottom and runs around and follows him wherever he goes. Like when they first said it sprouts legs,

I in my mind of course pictured like little mechanical legs and then realized that I was wrong. And they were actually just little like person legs out the bottom when i first actually read it i almost kind of thought it was actually like a a modern like luggage thing that you pull behind you with wheels on it yeah i'm like i saw the art where i initially thought he was going for like a joke on the tourist thing again only to find out that no it's it's a literal chest with feet underneath it that are running now of course you could probably imagine whoever you want you could imagine it with the mechanical feet and it would still be pretty valid just because i don't think it ever says specifically human feet.

No, but it just says little legs, feet, and legs. And then the art from the cover of the book is definitively little human feet. Yeah, but the thing is that the art from the original cover of the book also has two flower with four literal eyes instead of two flower with glasses. So there are potential mistakes. So this luggage is an unstoppable force of nature because it's so magical.

It will follow Two-Flower forever. Wherever he goes. Even if it's to other dimensions. And so an ongoing story, an ongoing thing throughout the books is like they'll have to run somewhere or get teleported somewhere or magic off somewhere and the luggage just follows no matter what

it's always coming that's how it like breaks through the back of an airplane when they pop into our dimension it just appears in the airplane because it's trying to get to him. The thing is, it's also like has a personality and will like get annoyed at people. It also eats people. Yeah. Well, no one knows what happens to them when they get eaten. Yeah. So like the lid opens and the lid has teeth, like little square teeth. It also has a tongue.

But also if you open it, if you open it it just has two flowers luggage in it but also if you open it it has other things in it but also sometimes it's just a mouth with a tongue and teeth that can eat people and and it can eat somebody without killing them too because it puts what's his name in his mouth tethys the troll yeah and then spits him back out yeah spits him back out again that's how he gets tethys there but like so it's just this oncoming force that becomes almost this like foreboding object by the time you get to the final section edge of the uh close to the edge where like they've gone so far without the luggage they just assume it's gone but then we keep getting like

cutbacks to what the luggage is currently doing so it'll be like oh these two are at tethys is hot and then it'll be like flashback the luggage is breaking its way out of a pirate ship yeah it's in the deepest abyss portion of the ocean it literally went into like the Discworld version of the Marianas Trench and like chewed its way out. It like killed a giant squid on its own by kicking it in the face. And then it doesn't actually explain like the weird specific fusion-y thing it kind of does with Tethys. But eventually they do see it moving as they – well they they don't see it moving if um if he had looked if they had looked out so it eventually it eventually by going across the floor of the ocean gets covered in seaweed and then it breaks out and like starts following them towards krull

when it gets to tethys instead of eating him it just like takes him into the chest and carries him. And then it eventually, while they're getting ready for the ceremony to launch the ship, it like appears in the harbor and crawl, fights its way through the guards, makes its way up to the area where they're having this thing. All the wizards all unleash all their magic on it, but sapient pear wood is too strong for that.

So all their magic comes to nothing. It like kills a bunch of guards and eats some people well their magic their magic doesn't it like i can't pull like it just doesn't do it it doesn't makes it kind of angry and then oh shit it just describes it like swirls up and boils and like comes to nothing yeah it essentially comes to nothing but it all of them get like mixed together bounding off into like a magic storm above it yeah um that does nothing to the luggage but like is like melting floors and like just destroying everything else around it because it just can't harm the box and the box just keeps coming and the only thing that stops it from its like vengeance rampage is two flower being like oh hey there you are buddy and the luggage is like oh sweet sweet you're there and then but he calls it like right before they launch the ship and then the ship launches and then the luggage

and rinse wind are both just falling through space behind the ship on their own the luggage continues on while rinse while rinse wind gets stuck on the tree and then eventually falls but like eventually falls but like the luggage literally just leaps off the edge of all its feet like i just kind of it's pretty easy in my head to imagine it just kind of running off and it runs and literally just leaps and it falls his little feet flailing as he falls behind the thing yeah like it's often it's literally personified not just by pratchett but like characters in the story will be like he got the feeling the luggage was glaring at him or he got the fear it's the he got the feeling the luggage was squinting menacingly at him so like even characters in the story get the

feel of like intent and personality from this like sentient luggage that can also eat you yeah but it's also just like representative of this completely unstoppable force I think that also I do also think it's sort of a representation of fate because like there's literally nothing they can do to get away from the luggage no no it's gonna find them

there's nowhere they can go that the luggage will not also go and so like I also do think it's sort of like a physical manifestation of like their fate inevitably coming to them but like in a more helpful way yeah yeah hell yeah yeah aside from almost eating rinse wind in like the first chapter yeah well rinse wind was being a bitch he was being a little bitch um so he kind of deserved it. Yeah, and the luggage was like, you better get moving or I'm going to eat you. Well, the luggage serves the same thing that the magic source does later, where it's like, no, you have to go save Two-Flower.

You don't have a choice. Krang is like a little asshat. Rincewind is like, what if I don't want to? And the luggage is like, I'll fucking kill you. And then later, Rincewind's like, what if I don't want to? And the luggage is like, I'll fucking kill you. And then later Rincewind's like, what if I just leave? And the magic sword Krang is like, if you try to leave, I'll fucking kill you. You have to go do hero shit now. Yeah, anytime he tries while holding Krang to do something non-heroic, it causes him intense pain.

it causes him intense pain um crane is a bitch is a sentient magic sword that just wants to do killing uh so how classic dnd too i'm sorry literally it's just like a cursed sword there's there's like they have specific rules for that in 5e now because of sentient magic items being so popular i don't know why they are though i've can't i've been i've been a dm for like four years and i've never used a sentient well i mean the ring that's why that's why they were popular the ring's not even sentient really i mean it it has a will um it's a discussion for another yeah don't get me started don't get me started it's a discussion for another time don't get me started don't get me started okay so one thing i i don't know if we may have made clear at the start here or at the beginning of the episode pratchett's writing is fantastic like he writes amazingly well his prose is great

even though they don't always hit for me i can see that like his like sense of humor and like his his like timing for like jokes is good his world building is top tier absolutely top tier story construction the way that like all the thing all the pieces of all the puzzles all interlock and interact with each other throughout the story. Fantastic. This is an amazingly well-written book. Like even if parts of it weren't my favorite, I can't deny the like the ability of the author here. You know what I mean? Like even if it wasn't my favorite book I've ever read most of the time,

I can't deny like the craftsmanship that went into making this book work. And if you do like a little bit of lighthearted fun in your fantasy, you will love this book. It's very good. What he wants to be, his prose is fantastic. I'm assuming you probably, before we end here,

I'm assuming you probably want to read that one passage. Well, I'll read that one passage there's another passage I just forgot existed and I think it's funny but this one I've seen this one brought up before I'll read this one and then read

the actual good quote but I want to read this one because I think it's really funny this is the pirate captain from that discovers the box after it busts out from the um this is some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or daring do some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth but the captain had long ago decided that he would on the whole prefer to achieve immortality by not dying it's that's a good example of a of a joke from him but so again like a lot of his writing is

like something prosaic and then punchline prosaic and this one i i put on my twitter a little bit ago yeah i think this might be the perfect example of the power of his prose and then the whiplash of his punchline. A cynical whiplash punchline usually delivered from Rincewind's perspective.

Or if not from his perspective, it's a detail about Rincewind. The narrators of these are omniscient. So it's, but this is about Octarine specifically. They see the rainbow. As we described, you see there's rainbows. There's actually an eighth color that most people can't see.

Only wizards can see it. It's Octarine, which is the color that you always see when you're doing magic. And so it's prominent throughout the story that like whenever Rincewind sees Octarine which is the color that you always see when you're doing magic and so it's it's prominent throughout the story that like whenever rinsewind sees octarine he's like oh shit magic magic be happening but they were pale in comparison to the wider band that floated beyond them not deigning to share the same spectrum it was the king color of which all the lesser colors are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections it was octarine the color of magic it was the king color of which all the lesser colors are merely partial and wishy-washy

reflections it was octarine the color of magic it was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind it was enchantment itself but rinse wind always thought it looked a sort of greenish purple i i do appreciate that he picks greenish purple two colors that you wouldn't be able to mix exactly that's yeah that's the whole point um without just making brown so i'll change brown everybody well only to rinse yeah um it's it's it's so perfect because it's like this is the king color it is the color of creation

it is the color of unadulterated magic where the imagination overpowers the material where anything can be and Rincewind thought it kind of looked like shit it just looks kind of like green purple I guess which again is just it's doing

a lot in there where like you're seeing the world building and i think that is also a little bit of statement of the way pratchett views like fantasy i think is the way pratchett feels like storytelling that it's like the king color like this is creation this is more important than the material this is like you know this is pure imagination yeah it's like that first bit is like a statement of like pratchett's sort of like view of like storytelling and magic and all that sort of thing but then he also has to like continue doing character building for rinsewind so yeah he has to be like yeah and rinsman thought it was shit yeah and and so like yeah this is definitely a a satire of you know the the thing that identifies most good satire or parody is that it's intimately familiar with source material um and uh it's very clear from all of this that Pratchett knew – he read a lot.

He read a lot. Yeah, and like that first – It's in D&D, you know? Like that first section, like the way he's describing that, you could put that from like any other author talking about the way they view like the power of stories or something. You know what I mean? Like the way he describes it. Like that could be any other author talking about – that could be like Tolkien's on fairy stories like that could be like a different author, like describing the power that stories play in our world. But what makes it Pratchett is he finishes it off with being like, and some of us think some people think it sucks yeah and like i think that's what really sort of sets in my experience so far

what's like setting pratchett apart from everybody else is that yeah he is intimately familiar with what he's doing but also is willing to take the piss oh yeah he's just willing to take the mickey right out of it um he's okay with that but like, on the whole, even if we didn't, this was more of a rambling discussion. It wasn't quite as formalized as some of our previous episodes, but like it's because this, I don't know, the story sort of lends itself to it. There's just a lot going on.

There's lots of, if we were going into like every little pun or reference he made, we'd be here all night. Yeah. The absolute list of references um he references everything under the sun he like and he just like throws it in there so if you're not really looking for it you don't see it but then when you're like oh okay he was referencing this other thing if you look back on it there are things like the names of currencies and the the like little bits of world building where if you don't know what he's referencing

you don't notice until you look it up and then you're like wow everything in this is like a pointed joke about like literally everything he like names or like describes is in some way like referencing another thing that already exists it's incredibly detailed um a very i don't even know how you keep all that straight well a very classic um based on i don't know if it's a classic thing that he does but i have seen in many different locations while researching more stuff for this book um that he does like to claim that if something does resemble something else, it probably subconsciously, you know, made its way in there. But a lot of times he's like, I didn't consciously do that, but that is something I would do. I didn't do it on purpose, but it is something i would have done i would have done he's like

like even the name of the city ang morpach um yeah he argued that he wasn't actually referencing like the ang or there was something by the name of morpach that people were like oh you were referencing that and he was like no i i think i think i just like thought I heard that and I was like, that sounds pretty good. And in reality, he was actually basing it more off of the whole idea of Buddha and pest being Budapest. So it's like. Yeah, it's just like it's just a thing, but also it references the other things. I didn't even think about it and it just does. Again,

everything has this deeply complex. Like the more you think about it, it's like, it's fantastic. So I recommend it's also an easy read. Like, this is not something where you're going to have to like devote, like an incredible amount of like mental energy to like read it.

You know what I mean? I don't mean that dismissively. Like it's, it's not like, you know, difficult to read. He writes very clearly, even when he's describing really complicated things, his prose is very clear. Quite a good author.

We will of course eventually make it onto the next books at some point, but we got to space these things out, obviously. So thank you guys for listening. If you want to follow us on social media, you totally can. Our social media links are in the description as always. Yeah. Like I say, if you want, contact us on social media. If you want to talk about the books or offer suggestions for things we should read, stuff like that, go ahead and hit us up.

If you think we planned that far in advance, we don't. So, you know, if you suggest, if you suggest something, it might be helpful to do so. If you,

if you suggest something we like, it might be in like the next couple of series, if we didn't have anything planned. So we like to be responsive. We know that at some point we've got a couple of things lined up, potentially, potentially. There's, you know, big milestones. be responsive we know that at some point we've got a couple things lined up potentially um potentially there's you know big milestones specific episodes we want to do but what happens in between them

that's just the magic baby that's you know wherever the turtle wherever the turtle takes us so thank you all very much for listening and uh we will see you soon bye bye bro are you fucking real man come on