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Oct. 24th, 2011 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsMaybe it's just because Mort was even better than I remembered, but Sourcery ended up being kind of a letdown.
Not that there aren't bits that are great. The end is great! Some of the beginning is great! But the middle seems like it's trying too hard to be The Light Fantastic again - a travelogue full of loosely-linked wacky hijinks with some overhanging doom - except Rincewind is a bit less clever (or at least comes off as less clever without Twoflower) and his buddies a bit more cardboard and the city of Al-Khali a bit more problematic.
Other disturbing facts about Sourcery are that a.) more people die than in any other Discworld novel that I can think of, including any of the ones about Death, which is saying something, and b.) the Patrician spends the entire book as a small bland lizard.
But that aside, I think the problem is that all of Rincewind's Pointlessly Wacky Hijinks with Conina the Barbarian Hairdresser and Nijel the Very Polite Destroyer are completely pasted onto the actual plot. And the actual plot is an important one that makes this book a serious transition point for the series: the wizards get out of control. Leading up to this book, we have one-book wizards who may look a bit silly, but nevertheless spend all their time plotting to assassinate each other for power; after this, we get Ridcully and the Dean and Ponder Stibbons and the University faculty as a stable institution. And the end of Sourcery is actually really awesome, because when Rincewind reaches out to Coin, and Coin has the astounding moral revelation that killing people is wrong - I kind of read that as the place where Disc wizardry changes.
. . . also, I read somewhere that Terry Pratchett was annoyed by Sourcery because people kept trying to get him to write another Rincewind book, so and if that's true then Rincewind's Ambiguous Semi-Death By Dungeon Dimensions Critters is a Sherlock Holmes and the Reichenbach Falls moment, which is kind of hilarious.)
The other thing that is actually legitimately awesome about Sourcery is that the Librarian first comes into his own here, and it's worth putting up with all the pointlessly wacky hijinks in the world for that.
ONE LAST THING THOUGH. So Coin the Baby Sourcerer is the eighth son of an eighth son, right? Where are the other seven? Wild theories cheerfully accepted! (Mine is that they have formed a folk band on the Lost Continent.)
Not that there aren't bits that are great. The end is great! Some of the beginning is great! But the middle seems like it's trying too hard to be The Light Fantastic again - a travelogue full of loosely-linked wacky hijinks with some overhanging doom - except Rincewind is a bit less clever (or at least comes off as less clever without Twoflower) and his buddies a bit more cardboard and the city of Al-Khali a bit more problematic.
Other disturbing facts about Sourcery are that a.) more people die than in any other Discworld novel that I can think of, including any of the ones about Death, which is saying something, and b.) the Patrician spends the entire book as a small bland lizard.
But that aside, I think the problem is that all of Rincewind's Pointlessly Wacky Hijinks with Conina the Barbarian Hairdresser and Nijel the Very Polite Destroyer are completely pasted onto the actual plot. And the actual plot is an important one that makes this book a serious transition point for the series: the wizards get out of control. Leading up to this book, we have one-book wizards who may look a bit silly, but nevertheless spend all their time plotting to assassinate each other for power; after this, we get Ridcully and the Dean and Ponder Stibbons and the University faculty as a stable institution. And the end of Sourcery is actually really awesome, because when Rincewind reaches out to Coin, and Coin has the astounding moral revelation that killing people is wrong - I kind of read that as the place where Disc wizardry changes.
. . . also, I read somewhere that Terry Pratchett was annoyed by Sourcery because people kept trying to get him to write another Rincewind book, so and if that's true then Rincewind's Ambiguous Semi-Death By Dungeon Dimensions Critters is a Sherlock Holmes and the Reichenbach Falls moment, which is kind of hilarious.)
The other thing that is actually legitimately awesome about Sourcery is that the Librarian first comes into his own here, and it's worth putting up with all the pointlessly wacky hijinks in the world for that.
ONE LAST THING THOUGH. So Coin the Baby Sourcerer is the eighth son of an eighth son, right? Where are the other seven? Wild theories cheerfully accepted! (Mine is that they have formed a folk band on the Lost Continent.)
