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The blurbs:
The Colour of Magic: On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious but inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course THE EDGE of the planet...
The Light Fantastic: In this sequel to the much-acclaimed The Colour of Magic, Rincewind, Twoflower and the many-legged luggage return to the Discworld with the help of the Octavo and overcome the attempts by the wizards of the Unseen University to capture them, and then save the Discworld from an invasion from the Dungeon Dimensions.
Sourcery: There was an eighth son of an eighth son. He was, quite naturally, a wizard. And there it should have ended.
However (for reasons we'd better not go into), he had seven sons. And then he had an eighth son...a wizard squared...a source of magic...a Sourcerer.
Sourcery sees the return of Rincewind and the Luggage as the Discworld faces its greatest—and funniest—challenge yet.
Eric: Discworld's only demonology hacker, Eric, is about to make life very difficult for the rest of Ankh-Morpork's denizens. This would-be Faust is very bad...at his work, that is. All he wants is to fulfill three little wishes:to live forever, to be master of the universe, and to have a stylin' hot babe.
But Eric isn't even good at getting his own way. Instead of a powerful demon, he conjures, well, Rincewind, a wizard whose incompetence is matched only by Eric's. And as if that wasn't bad enough, that lovable travel accessory the Luggage has arrived, too. Accompanied by his best friends, there's only one thing Eric wishes now—that he'd never been born!
I don't usually do joint reviews but, in looking back over these four books, my reaction to them all was pretty much the same, with pretty much the same commentary, so I figured let's be efficient about this.
As the observant among us might note on looking at the reading dates below, I read these out of order, because that's when I could get them from the library. Here's the thing though: I don't think it mattered that much. The Colour of Magic has a definite starting point, with Twoflower's arrival in Ankh-Morpork and Rincewind's order from the Patrician to be Twoflower's guide but, aside from that, there's a very Saturday-morning-serial vibe about them, with each one ending with Rincewind being launched into more peril and the next one starting with Rincewind fully appreciating his new peril. From there, the hapless tourists pop in and out of peril, meeting as many high-fantasy cardboard cutouts as Pratchett can find to make some fun of.
Honestly, while I appreciate the poking of fun at the 70s high fantasy stereotypes, I can see why people generally don't recommend that new readers start with these ones. They're lightweight and fluffy, not that memorable: to the point that the only real lasting memory I have is of Sourcery being considerably grimmer than most other Discworld novels. There's considerable change in characters who will end up being more visible too, with the wizards of later books being considerably less power-obsessed and murdery, for instance. (Side note, I've had the feeling ever since I started that the wizards are in kind of a dimension that's at right angles to rest of Discworld or something. They're in there but they're considerably goofier than the city watch or the Patrician even when they interact.)
Anyway, that's the gist of all four of these: they're lightweights, lighter than they have to be. Even Mort, which was written pretty early on, has much more meat on its bones than these. They're not badly written or anything, far from it—but coming back to these after something like Night Watch, Thud! is like dropping into another series entirely.
Sourcery 4 - 9 November
The Colour of Magic 9 - 17 November
Eric 29 - 30 November
The Light Fantastic 12 - 20 December
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