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certain fantasy novels, only more so. It manages, in the process, to parody the behavior of tourists just as much as it parodies commercial fantasy.
    It is, like all the Discworld stories, about stories and belief. In this case, it’s about the genre of fantasy as it existed in the early 1980s, and about certain fantasy stories in particular. The commentary is not anything very sophisticated, but just parody gently mocking those assorted well-known works.
    It’s also about the stories our tourist has heard, and his belief in those stories, and in his own safety.
    Unlike most of the later volumes in the series, The Colour of Magic has chapters—or I suppose one could consider them to be four separate novellas making up the novel, since each one is more or less a separate story. Each of the four stories parodies a certain sort of fantasy that was popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
    The first novella, also entitled “The Colour of Magic,” mocks the
genre of Sword & Sorcery 47 in general, with its impossibly squalid and violent cities, its sword-wielding homicidal heroes, its wizards who somehow rarely seem to use their powerful magic very effectively, its corrupt rulers, its taverns and thieves and assassins and intrigue, its maidens and monsters.
    More specifically, the two scoundrels we meet before the story really begins, Bravd and the Weasel, are clearly a parody of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and the city of Ankh-Morpork, while incorporating elements of several cities both real and fictional, 48 seems to owe something to the city of Lankhmar, which served as Fafhrd and the Mouser’s home.
    Rincewind the Wizard: The Series
    This series is defined by the presence of Rincewind and his fellow wizards of Unseen University in leading roles. It consists of:
    The Colour of Magic
Chapter 3
The Light Fantastic
Chapter 4
Sourcery
Chapter 7
Eric
Chapter 11
Interesting Times
Chapter 21
The Last Continent
Chapter 26
The Last Hero
Chapter 33
“A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” (Rincewind isn’t mentioned, but I choose to assume he was present)
Chapter 42
All three volumes of The Science of Discworld
Chapters 29, 35, 43
    The series as a whole is considered in Chapter 52.

    Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were the protagonists of a series of adventures extending from 1939 (“Two Sought Adventure,” published in Unknown ) 49 to 1988 ( The Knight and Knave of Swords ). The characters were the invention of Fritz Leiber, Jr., and his friend Harry Fischer; the poetically inclined northern barbarian Fafhrd was based on Leiber himself, and the witty little thief, the Grey Mouser, was based on Fischer. They were originally created in a series of letters the two exchanged, and then became the protagonists of stories the two wrote. Fischer dropped out early on, before any of the stories were actually published, and Leiber wrote almost the entire series by himself.
    This pair of protagonists were notable at the time for being less than entirely heroic; these were no larger-than-life white knights, but a couple of good-hearted rogues.
    Pratchett’s parody gives us a couple of murderous cutthroats, instead, but manages to capture some of the essence of the characters all the same.
    Their part in the story is fairly small, though; they serve mostly to introduce us to the young and rather sorry wizard Rincewind, who will be our guide for the remainder of the book. Rincewind is not based on any specific character from elsewhere, so far as I can see, but is rather a mockery of the standard fantasy heroes. He’s a wizard who knows no magic, a hero who’s a greedy coward, an adventurer who mostly wants to stay quietly at home.
    And Rincewind winds up, at the insistence of the Patrician 50 who rules
the city, acting as native guide and bodyguard to an Agatean 51 tourist named Twoflower, the first tourist in Ankh-Morpork’s history, who has heard all the stories