Welcome back to the Terry Pratchett Book Club! Did you drink water today? Do you have a fluffy pillow nearby (for screaming into)? Have you spent your allotted five minutes staring into the great abyss and contemplating the universe?
Then you should be all set to move on, and think a bit about “The Sending of Eight”.
Summary
The prologue of this section is concerned with the gods of Discworld, who have a more interesting lot than gods of planets made with “less imagination but more mechanical aptitude”. At the Hub of the Disc, at the top of a high mountain, the Disc gods are currently sitting about and playing a board game that takes place on a carved map of the world. It is being played by Blind Io, Offler the Crocodile, Zephyrus the god of slight breezes, Fate, and the Lady. (Chance and Night are already out.) The Lady is assumed to be next to go, but there’s an interference in her dice roll. Blind Io gripes about playing fairly.
Rincewind and Twoflower are making their way down the road to Chirm as the wizard learns more words from Twoflower’s language, and Twoflower conversely learns that magic requires too much memorization. This is because when magic was tamed by the Olden Ones, they required it to respond to the Law of Conservation of Reality, which means that magic must operate using the same amount of effort that it would take to perform a task using physical means. Rincewind explains that he thinks the world ought to be more organized than all that, which Twoflower claims is fantasy. The wizard hears a sound and there’s a slight breeze, and suddenly a mountain troll is standing before them. Rincewind chucks his sword at it, which suddenly bounces off a boulder and sticks into the troll’s back, kicking it. The horses get spooked, sending Twoflower off into the woods. He comes across a stone with a spider-or-octopus carved on it, and words (that he can somehow understand) letting him know of the temple of Bel-Shamharoth is only a thousand paces away. He heads in that direction.
Rincewind finds himself at the mercy of all the animals Twoflower’s horse managed to irritate, and is hiding in a tree with a poisonous snake and Death, who would prefer it if the wizard finally gave up. He is saved by the appearance of a hornet’s next and a dryad, who prevents him from falling to his doom. (Back in the game of the gods, there are only two players left—the Lady and Fate, who has brought forward a figure of great terror with many suckers and tentacles.) Rincewind finds himself inside the tree with the dryad Druellae, who informs him of where Twoflower has gotten off to. Rincewind knows of Bel-Shamharoth—the Soul Eater—and Druellae insists that he come with her to watch his friend’s fate; he is her prisoner and will die shortly after. Rincewind had believed the dryads died out with the coming of humans to Discworld, but there are many in this tree, and they use magic to create a projection of what is happening to Twoflower.
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Twoflower arrives at the temple, and there is another horse. The other fellow at the temple is Hrun the Barbarian, one of the Disc’s greatest heroes. He arrived there because the Luggage lured him to the temple, and he is currently having a tiff with Kring, the sword he recently stole for his own. Rincewind decides to try and make a break for it, but he’s caught by the dryads and Druellae demands that he prove he is a true wizard by showing that he knows even a simple spell. The only spell Rincewind knows leaps to mind, and he tells her to read his mind as she did before and see it. She does, and it sends her into a panic, telling the other dryads to take him out of the tree and kill him. Rincewind vanishes from the tree and appears where Twoflower is inside the temple, warning the tourist not to say the number eight out loud if he wants to get out alive.
Rincewind then explains to Twoflower the incident that got him kicked out of the Unseen University, reading a spell from a grimoire once owned by the Creator of the Universe. (Magic books leak magic unless they’re properly contained, and this book was contained quite well, but he broke in to read it.) This spell vanished from the book and will only be known when he uses it, or once he dies. Twoflower seems to think they’ll be fine if they can just meet Bel-Shamharoth and explain what they’re doing there. The Luggage shows up, followed by Hrun, and Rincewind tells the hero not to say the number eight—but Kring says it anyway.
They’re all about to die and a great roving eye is on them, but Rincewind picks up Twoflower’s camera and the “flash” goes off, prompting Bel-Shamharoth to retreat into the depths. It turns out that the flash was a box of salamanders, which live off the octarine wavelength of light. Hrun tries to pry up the altar to look for treasure as Rincewind realizes that the temple is starting to come down around them—Time has finally come to show its affects on the temple all at once, having staying away for millennia. Hrun calls his horse, and Twoflower and Rincewind hitch a ride out of the temple while the Luggage runs out behind them. Twoflower wants Hrun to accompany them to Chirm to see that they arrive safely, but Rincewind knows the hero can’t be trusted… until he comes up with the plan to keep Hrun on the hook by claiming that only they can work the “magic box” that gives Hrun pictures of himself.
The Lady wins the board game.
Death watches Rincewind get away yet again, and can’t figure out what it is about the wizard that irks him so.
Book Club Chat
This section is obviously taking a lot of inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft and also from Dungeons and Dragons gameplay, which brings me to a question that might ruffle people a bit—do we think that Pratchett brought both of the elements to bear in his first book because he really loved them, or because he kind of wanted to get them out of the way? Or maybe some aspect of both these factors?
Pratchett is an extremely knowledgeable writer who loves his homages, but there’s something particularly bemusing about taking one of fantasy’s most well-known authors and a game that was getting hugely popular by the 80s (when this was published), and just shoving them into a section of the first Discworld book. It’s hard not to imagine Pratchett thinking, oh good, I can get this out of the way now. Lovecraft isn’t really tonally matched to what Pratchett does overall, but everyone loves a great big tentacle monster and the temples built around them.
I remember being utterly puzzled by this section when I first read it, outside the conceit of the gameplay, which I genuinely loved—and I should add that I wasn’t a D&D player at the time, so that wasn’t the appeal. There’s a lot of great tension built into it, particularly because Pratchett is great at writing big unknowable things and pairing them down into terms that you can actually hold onto. The image of Fate’s eyes, the Lady being favored to be the next play out and taking the whole game, the fact that Blind Io has eyes everywhere, it’s all packed with these delicious images. (Hang on, I definitely wrote a short story about gods playing chess in college, I’m pretty sure I was homaging him without even thinking of it. Yeah, that’s kinda making my day right now. Thanks, Sir Terry.)
Rincewind getting captured by the dryads is a such a creepy little side quest. The dryads are a fun creature to fixate on here because they’re assumed female, and in creating a male version, Pratchett gets to play on that presumption. In most other aspects of fantasy (as in life), female is an addendum to a presumed baseline: she-devil, she-wolf, Entwives, satyress, and so on. In this case, with dryads presumed to be female, it is the appearance of male dryads that gets called out—so we get he-dryads. It’s also fun because they’re just big muscly tree dudes, while the dryads seem to be the ones in charge of the place and the magic overall.
Of course, there’s a major juxtaposition between old magic and current magic in this section. Rincewind had assumed that dryads died out, but they’re clearly alive and well and still hanging about. Their magic is elemental and tied to the earth, as opposed to average Disc magic, which is all tied up in learning and tedious complexities. Which is just another way of saying that people don’t get shortcuts—everything that we do still requires an output of effort relative to the task. Rowling tried to suggest this in the Potterverse and its version of magic, but never managed to explain it in a way that made much sense, but Pratchett manages to do so in a few sentences. It takes him no time at all to establish that magic isn’t a fun workaround, and when Rincewind complains that there isn’t more of an order to things, Twoflower’s response is “That’s fantasy.” Ouch.
Consequences are real on the Disc in a way that we don’t normally accept in other fictional universes. It occurred to me that Rincewind reading his spell from that grimoire is incredibly similar to Doctor Strange reading from the forbidden time book in his eponymous MCU film. But as always in Hollywood narratives, Strange is rewarded for his disobedience, becoming master of the Time Stone because he shows an affinity for it. Rincewind gets kicked out of school, and now owns a spell with consequences he cannot anticipate. (It occurs to me that this is also a very American v British dynamic in fiction—American narratives prize individuality and ignoring authority in practically every scenario, whereas British narratives are less enamored of the concept.)
But there are still things that don’t add up. Like Death wondering how this failed wizard keeps avoiding his appointments with him. The world can’t be free of irritants, after all.
Asides and little thoughts:
- The continued preoccupation with the camera—it’s affect on people, how it works—is so clever. People got so angry at the proliferation of cameras in phones and the advent of selfies that they forgot that we’ve always been this enamored of taking pictures of ourselves.
- I want a box of magical pink salamanders.
- Time suddenly rushing through and making its mark on the temple all at once is one of my favorite visuals in any fantasy novel.
Emmet Asher-Perrin would like to note that their favorite number has always been eight. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
Pratchett doesn’t really have Lovecraft out of the way after this section- the Dungeon Dimensions, and the Things that inhabit them will play a role in several books.
I think at this point, Pratchett is still finding the voice of the books, and his exploration of fantasy tropes is going to become substantially richer and deeper as they go on. Instructive as to that might be the comparison of Hrun and Cohen the Barbarian, but my copy of Colour of Magic is in another castle so I can’t deep dive on that at the moment.
do we think that Pratchett brought both of the elements to bear in his first book because he really loved them, or because he kind of wanted to get them out of the way?
I think that Pratchett revisits Lovecraft so often that the first is more likely than the second. You’ve got the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions. There’s a lot of Lovecraft in “Moving Pictures” – the temple and the sunken city at Holy Wood, and Victor doing his revision (“What extradimensional creature’s distinctive cry is ‘Yerwhatyerwhatyerwhat?'” “Yob Soddoth.”) and various running jokes about things being eldritch (“what, oblong?”)
Dungeons and Dragons, though, doesn’t appear again, as far as I remember. We don’t see the gods playing tabletop games with mortals again until we get to The Last Hero. And there aren’t really any jokes that are specifically about D&D, rather than about tabletop gaming in general; even the spell names (“Sumpjumper’s Incendiary Surprise”) are probably from Vance directly rather than from D&D (in turn inspired by Vance). In 1982/3 when Pratchett was writing TCOM, D&D wasn’t as mainstream as it became later – I don’t think many people would have got a joke about beholders or whatever. I’m not even sure if Pratchett was a gamer.
I don’t really think that a big theme with Pratchett is the importance of obeying properly constituted authority rather than individual choice…
Written before I saw comment 1.
Great read along.
It might be useful to feature https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/index.html – especially for older books, the number of references that I’ve caught only by someone teaching me about them continues to surprise me, even when I think I’ve found “all of them,” after many readings. They often inspire other literary adventures!
Yeah, Lovecraft references abound in Discworld: the Necrotelicomnicon, Nylonathotep the Laddering Horror, the fate of Mr. Hong’s fish shop on Dagon Street.
I also don’t think the game is really a D&D reference. The trope of the gods using humans as pieces in a game goes back pretty far. I can’t come up with any examples off the top of my head, but I know they’re out there. It might also be a nod to Einstein’s statement about God not playing dice with the universe. Rincewind is much more the Lady’s token being moved around the board than her avatar or someone she’s having fun pretending to be.
I always thought that the gods playing the game was more a nod to Clash of Titans (the original, obviously), than D&D. I agree that many of the spell names have a Vance/D&D feel about them, but that game reminds me MUCH more of the game that Zeus and the others were playing than D&D. In a normal D&D game, players are very rarely ever ‘out’.
I also agree with the previous posters – we’ll be seeing quite a bit more Lovecraft as we follow Rincewind, though we don’t generally get a lot of it with the other story lines. I also agree the Pratchett was still finding his voice; in fact I don’t think he really hits his stride until ‘Guards, Guards’.
Tabletop Roleplaying of the Gods always makes me think of Norse mythology, which has the Gods playing Tafl back near the dawn of time, although I don’t think there was an imputation of this being a metaphor for them playing with the fates of man.
I always thought that the gods playing the game was more a nod to Clash of Titans (the original, obviously), than D&D.
Ah, good catch – and that was 1981, so about the right time too.
ajay @@@@@ 2
Dungeons and Dragons, though, doesn’t appear again, as far as I remember. We don’t see the gods playing tabletop games with mortals again until we get to The Last Hero. And there aren’t really any jokes that are specifically about D&D, rather than about tabletop gaming in general;
For what it’s worth, this site (excerpting some rec.games.frp.dnd newsgroup discussion from 17 years ago) has the following post:
@Ajay: I don’t know if Pratchett was a ‘gamer’ in 1980, but I know that he contributed writing to mods for the Elder Scrolls series, so he certainly became one along the line :p
(https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-01-29-the-story-behind-the-oblivion-mod-terry-pratchett-worked-on)
Terry Pratchett’s daughter, Rhianna Pratchett, is an award winning video game writer. Although she was a small child when this book was written, I assume she got her interest in video games from her father.
The Lady’s dice roll is reminiscent of Ways’ fighting style in The Dark Side Of The Sun. When you go far enough down the improbability curve, the border between luck and reality warping gets blurry.
@1,2: Exactly, the Dungeon Dimensions appear frequently in the early books, and they’re more Pratchett needing an antagonist than him feeling forced to use them; later he’ll use the Auditors instead, who can be considered as their polar opposite. As for the gods playing D&D, I don’t remember any further reference to that, but there is a footnote about gods playing dominoes. It seems that they enjoy board games.
I have a recollection that the luggage may have been once explained as having been invented by Pterry as a work around in a D&D campaign for how the heroes carried the loot around. While D&D may have become bigger later it was quite mainstream for UK nerds in the late 1970s/early 80s along with the Steve Jackson adventure books – I grew up in the UK equivalent of the rust belt and it was certainly part of my adolescence.
@13: And then the video game goes almost full circle with Rincewind complaining “Why can’t I just have an inventory window like anybody else?” (the Luggage had got drunk on the alcohol Rincewind was storing in there).
@13: As an aside, it should be pointed out that the Steve Jackson of those adventure books is a British author and not the same person as the American game designer of the same name. I got really confused by that a few months ago and it took me a while to straighten out.
Another influence on the gods-playing-games-atop-mountains bit is likely to have been Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pegana (in the public domain and available via Project Gutenberg, for those who haven’t had the pleasure). Here’s the preface, in its entirety:
In the mists before THE BEGINNING, Fate and Chance cast lots to decide whose the Game should be; and he that won strode through the mists to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and said: “Now make gods for Me, for I have won the cast and the Game is to be Mine.” Who it was that won the cast, and whether it was Fate or whether Chance that went through the mists before THE BEGINNING to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI—none knoweth.
(Irritatingly, PG loses the diacritics that Dunsany used. Oh, well.)
There’s a zaniness to various of the Pegana denizens that can feel very Pratchettesque. Kib, for example, clearly wants to have a nice biblical-sounding scripture but is utterly inept about what should go into it. Mung’s dry biting justice-fueled wit is echoed in Death’s, though Death is thankfully not half as vindictive. The gods of the hearth (in the story of Roon) would easily encompass Pratchett’s Herne the Hunted. And so on!
I always thought the gods playing games with the universe was a Zelazny call-out, but I can’t recollect why.
I’d been gaming for a couple of years at this point and I’d read a little Lovecraft so this section was just a hoot for me. As others have said, there are Lovecraftian moments and homages all the way through the series but they become less common in the much later books. What I loved – when I finally got round to reading the REH stories so I could compare them – were the Conan references with Hrun. At the time I knew exactly what sort of stories were being sent up and it later felt really cool, when I learned about the friendship between Lovecraft and Howard,that Sir Pterry was pairing their creations (or funny facsimiles thereof) up in the same story.
Probably everyone knows this, so apologies, but the luggage was also inspired when Pterry saw a tourist with one of the early iteration suitcases on wheels (before they got the design kinks sorted) that had four wheels on each bottom corner and were towed by a strap. Anyone who has used one would recognise the tendency for the flippin’ things to go off on their own at the slightest opportunity!
The conceit of the gods playing games with mortals’ lives is an old one that goes right back to classical times. However I’d argue that the most likely direct influence is Ray Harryhausen’s 1963 movie ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (acclaimed by Tom Hanks as the best film ever made, according to Wikipedia) which would have been well known to Pratchett’s readers in the early1980s from frequent TV showings. There’s a good article about the history of this trope by classical scholar Daniel Unruh here:
https://danielbunruh.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/gods-playing-games/
In all this talk of Gods [and others] playing games, I’m surprised no-one has mentioned this:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4yXBIigZbg
Later on there’s the character of Nijel the Destroyer, who literally carries around manuals that tell him how to be a barbarian hero and though they satirize the old-timey Charles Atlas manuals about how to exercise and become strong to avoid bullies and get girls, they’re also described pretty much as D&D rulebooks, so Pratchett will at one point reference the game even if it isn’t in this instance where the gods are playing with mortal’s fates in Core Celesti. I agree with others pointing out that the gods’ game looks more like a nod to Clash of the Titans or a different game than tabletop RPG’s, and probably inspired by other sources in fiction and not by real life D&D.
I read a bit of Night Watch today. It’s a pity we’re going to take months to get to that one, because that June 2020 would have been a great time to read it.
@21 The Seventh Seal cops a lot of references throughout the Death books – “how does the horsey one move again?” – and is, I think, a favourite of Sir Pterry’s. H
@15: Just to add to the confusion, three of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were written by the American Steve Jackson!
I remember Pratchett telling a great story at one of his signings, about running a D&D session for the middle aged women he worked with, because they were worried about their children playing it. So it sounds like he was familiar with gaming pretty early on.
A typo: “and sticks into the troll’s back, kicking it” should that be “and sticks into the troll’s back, knicking it” instead? and a second “appearance of a hornet’s next” should probably be “appearance of a hornet’s nest”
The Colour of Magic seems like a collection of longish stories, as opposed to a cohesive novel. One could pretty much read different incidents independently without too much loss in continuity other than wondering how Rincewind and Twoflower found themselves in business class at 35,000 ft.
While I see (and enjoy) the themes of D&D (and I think the dice references make it D&D specific) and Lovecraft, I would like to comment on why Lovecraft recurs throughout the books while D&D does not.
I think Terry ultimately didn’t want to go down the road of Deus ex Machina. We see this in his restrictions on magic (and, later, in his treatment of witches as well as other gods). Too many SFF series find themselves written into a corner because some characters become too powerful to be dealt with leading to contrived “finales” like the defeat of Thanos.
When this re-read started, I thought to myself “it’s been ages since I read CoM, I should probably give it another read to refresh my memory”. I’ve now gone through six Discworld books since then, and the only really stopped because I have new books to read, so thanks for that ;)
Fate and The Lady show up again to play games with Rincewind in Interesting Times, although that side of things is then taken over by the Chaos Butterfly.
It seems like my childhood in the ’80s UK was somewhat anomalous, because although I’d heard of D&D, I didn’t know anyone who played it. Instead we had that scourge of pocket money, Games Workshop.
@10 foamy, thanks for the link to that article. I think I’ve read it before, but it just reminded me again of what a lovely bloke Terry was.
@27, I’d bet on “killing” it, myself.
Thanks for the lspace link! I really enjoyed reading the Mort annotations. I started a reread of all Pratchett books this year.
Having fun reading along with Colour and then reading the comments :)
Late to this party, but just in case anyone is still paying attention…
I don’t think Pterry was trying to get Lovecraft out of the way. The pastiches in the picaresque CoM and TLF are all of genres that were hugely influential in the – decade, say – leading up to his writing them. The Cthulhu Mythos remains massively influential today, despite HPL himself, and his original stories falling out of favour. And the Mythos, filtered through DnD style game playing, was a bedrock of Discworld for quite some years to come.
I have always thought the Dryads were a sideswipe at those in Piers Anthony’s early Xanth books (another popular series, best allowed to fade into history…)