Sourcery
When last seen, the singularly inept wizard Rincewind had fallen off the edge of the world. Now magically, he's turned up again, and this time he's brought the Luggage.But that's not all...Once upon a time, there was an eighth son of an eighth son who was, of course, a wizard. As if that wasn't complicated enough, said wizard then had seven sons. And then he had an eighth son -- a wizard squared (that's all the math, really). Who of course, was a source of magic -- a sorcerer.
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1recommend
6mentions
6people
2020–2026years
17% recommend83% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I have been reading through the Discworld books in publication order, and they have been downright delightful.
I have only finished the first eleven, but thus far all of them have been fun and most of them have little nuggets of wisdom that really do invite thought into a deeper theme. Thus far my favorite has been Mort, but I also ended up really liking Sourcery as well.
I hadn’t read any Pratchett while he was still alive, I hadn’t even heard of him in fact, but given how prolific he was and the level of cleverness in his stories, I wish he was still alive.
- This reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery.
The wizards don’t become sourcerers themselves - they become enthusiastic users of someone else’s sourcery. Their years of learning don’t protect them from mistaking access to power for mastery of it.
- “It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery
- I mean addressing the initial proposition - of course a work of satire/parody of the real world is going to be a better basis for thinking about the real world than a work of escapism!
The rest of it, I think, won't persuade anyone to read Discworld novels who's resisted them so far. Those who have and love them will find it a pleasant enough survey.
Oh and I personally think that Equal Rites is the best entry point to the series rather than Sourcery. But then I was reading them in publishing order anyway and eagerly waiting for each new one to come out. Damn I miss being able to look forward to a new Pratchett novel; he was a Wodehouse for my generation.
- I am currently reading "Sourcery" by Terry Pratchett. Your remark is literally one of the plot points of the story.
- > Good Omens: Gaiman and Pratchett team up, what’s not to love?
It's a good book, but aesthetically it suffers in my mind because it's a rewrite of Pratchett's earlier book Sourcery.
