The Light Fantastic
From the back cover: In The Light Fantastic only one individual can save the world from a disastrous collision. Unfortunately, the hero happens to be the singularly inept wizard Rincewind, who was last seen falling off the edge of the world....
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16mentions
14people
2009–2026years
31% recommend56% neutral13% critical
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- So many good memories... reading the Light Fantastic for first time, getting Eric in that big format with many illustrations, the witches, Vimes and the guards during my uni years, Mort, Maurice, and so on and so on... and then... the profound melancholy in the Tiffany Aching books that brings tears to my eyes...
- This has stuck with me for years.
“Yes, yes,” said Bethan, sitting down glumly. “I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?”
“Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. “Luters, I expect.”
Excerpt From The Light Fantastic
Great author.
- I don't know about that - we don't have any real scale equivalence in actual life forms so I'll use celestial objects as an example. The movement of other planets has almost no impact on our daily lives - the moon may impact the tides and the sun leads to our day night cycle but we can't effectively impact that and so, for the average person, life goes on without more than a momentary thought given to how things are going on up there. Though, we are all vaguely aware that we could suddenly and arbitrarily be killed by an asteroid impact (much like a colony being arbitrarily chosen to become some kid's ant-farm - or being run over by a truck) it isn't in the front of our minds because we need to get back to filling out that TPS report.
Still, as a society, we have a number of dedicated individuals that do study celestial movements and would try and prevent a sudden asteroid impact, and we all do remain vaguely aware of what's going on up there. So I'm not certain how much I agree with the fact that ants cannot understand us. Sure we can't sit down and have tea with an ant and talk about the weather, but if the moon was a gigantic dragon that just moved really slowly in a mostly predictable manner then how we interact with it might not be particularly distinguishable from how we interact with it when it's just a chunk of rock.
A good parallel to think of here is probably Discworld, I might suggest reading The Light Fantastic if you never had to get a bit of a sense of how we might interact with celestially sized lifeforms and just how one-sided that relationship could potentially be.
- "The Light Fantastic" was my first introduction to Terry Pratchett back around 1989 or so. I was definitely hooked. To me, the first two books are lot more like Douglas Adams' books: vehicles for cool ideas and good humor, but not particularly interesting or insightful stories. The Discworld books would have played out pretty quickly if they'd stayed that way.
But then he got better. Much better. Much, much better.
- Discworld! I just finished the second one, The Light Fantastic, and loved it. Terry Pratchett is a brilliant and very funny author.
I find after long days of technical thinking I really enjoy a lighthearted funny piece of fiction to help me unwind and get to sleep. At this point I don't think I could handle much more math or computer science and stay sane.
- He definitely grew significantly as a writer over time, and I would agree that some of his early work isn't particularly strong (The Light Fantastic, for example, is relatively bog-standard comic fantasy without any of the depth his later work showed).
If you start reading at the very beginning of the Discworld, you're slogging through the weaker stuff, and it's easy to get discouraged. A smoother path is to pick one of the defined sub-series (the guards are very popular, but my vote goes to the witches) and start along just that track; you'll get to the strong stuff much faster.
