The Colour of Magic\u00a0was Terry Pratchett\u2019s first book in the Discworld series, published in 1983. It originally began as a loving parody of classic fantasy \u2014 especially the kind of stories where heroes are always brave, wise, and impossibly handsome. Pratchett looked at the genre and basically thought:
\u201cWhat if the wizard is actually terrible at magic\u2026 and completely terrified?\u201d
The result was Rincewind \u2014 a cowardly wizard who would much rather run away from adventure than face it. Together with the endlessly optimistic tourist Twoflower, he travels across Discworld, a flat world carried through space on the backs of four elephants standing on a giant turtle.
What makes the book special is that it both mocks fantasy and deeply loves it at the same time. Beneath all the absurd humor are small observations about people, politics, fear, and stupidity. Pratchett did not write fantasy to escape reality \u2014 he used fantasy to explain reality in a funnier way.
And even here, you can already see what later made him legendary:
you start laughing at the chaos\u2026 and then suddenly realize he is describing humanity with uncomfortable accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Terry Pratchett – The color of magic.The Colour of Magic\u00a0feels like someone dropped Monty Python into a fantasy world and gave existential anxiety a wizard hat.Behind all the chaos, luggage with legs, and people exploding accidentally, Pratchett quietly whispers: humans are ridiculous\u2026 but somehow still lovable. The Colour of Magic\u00a0was Terry Pratchett\u2019s first book in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,37,30,33,35],"tags":[82,84],"class_list":["post-1118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-english","category-terry-pratchett","category-the-color-of-magic","category-tore-toread","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-the-color-of-magic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluefeather.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}