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Terry Pratchett: The colour of magic
Review by Joachim Klein
The book "The colour of magic" is the first part in a series
of books by the British author Terry Pratchett (18 books are available in English, 15 are
already translated to German).
All of them have one thing in common: They take place on the discworld, a world consisting of a flat disc, which is carried by four elephants standing on a giant turtle.
Such a bizarre world is not only inhabited by normal humans, but also a place, where wizards, trolls, dragons, witches and other strange creatures live.
The story
Ankh-Morpork, the biggest and dirtiest city of the discworld, is the home of Rincewind, who
is probably the most incompetent wizard of the whole discworld. He likes his life, because
it is completely boring and stripped of any excitement.
This changes when the first tourist of the discworld, Twoflower, who is rather naive (his greatest desire is to meet a real barbarian, without realizing that this could shorten his life by a significant amount), comes from a distant continent to visit Ankh-Morpork and engages him as a guide. Twoflower is accompanied by his luggage, which moves on hundreds of little legs and which is filled with a heap of gold (gold has less value where Twoflower comes from). The thieves organized in the thievesguild (only licensed thieves are allowed to work in their "profession") wouldn't miss such an opportunity for a world...
My opinion
When you have accepted the bizarre background and the strange persons, you will be excellently entertained by this book (and all the other books about the discworld). Terry Pratchett fills his books with puns, hints at films and other books, comical situations and interesting characters.
He has become a master in the skill to only hint the point of a gag andlet the reader's mind complete the gag without the point actually written down on paper. This is extremely effective because the reader's phantasy can fill in the gap better than any author could.
The translation to German is quite good, which is a very difficult task. Of course it is impossible to translate all the puns from English to German and some of the hints are only understandable for British people. So everybody who believes to be fit in English should get the English edition of the book, which is not a big problem in Germany.
I like Terry's books and haven't been disappointed by any one of his books. Instead, each one is better than the one before... It is not necessary to read the books in the order they were published. Of course, if you start with one of his later books you can't understand the hints at the books that have been published earlier.
Terry Pratchett on the Internet
There are many fans of Terry Pratchett on the Internet. They have collected many interesting informations about him and his books. This is a small excerpt:
- www.lspace.org
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The fans can find here everything they long for:
- A list with all the hints at other books and films in the books, which have been found up to now.
- A bibliography
- Interviews and reviews
- FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
- Dates for events and signing-tours
- alt.fan.pratchett
- This is the newsgroup, where you can discuss with Terry Pratchett and and other fans his books. (Yes, Terry is reading this newsgroup and probably even responds...)
- pterry@unseen.demon.co.uk
- Terry Pratchett's email-address.
An internet project of Integrierte Gesamtschule Bonn-Beuel
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Stand: 29.03.1998 |
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