Discworld Read-Along #5: Sourcery
The fifth book in Discworld—if you’re reading chronologically—is Sourcery, the third Unseen University book. Once again, we are put into the head of Rincewind to go off on another world-saving adventure. The result is… well, I’ll just wait to give my thoughts on this one for a moment. First, let’s do some basic introductions.
I’m T. L. Bainter, and this is my ongoing Discworld read-along! We read one Discworld book approximately every month and are proceeding through the series chronologically. I’ve been a big fan of Discworld and Terry Pratchett for many years, and I don’t even know how many times I’ve read Discworld itself, though this is (shockingly) my own first chronological read-through of the series. Whether you’re a long-time fan of Discworld or you’ve never touched a book in the series before, I hope you’ll join the read-along and the associated discussion!
Summary of Sourcery
Let’s kick things off with a quick summary of Sourcery. This is our first time jumping into Rincewind’s story since The Light Fantastic, a direct sequel to The Colour of Magic. In Sourcery, Rincewind must go on a wacky adventure with a motley crew that includes sentient luggage as he seeks to reclaim Unseen University from the hands of a power-mad magic user.
Wait, no, that’s The Light Fantastic.
Actually, yes, I was right… it’s Sourcery.
I guess that’s the plot of both of them.
Okay, in seriousness: the story of Sourcery really kicks off during a ceremony intended to decide the next Archchancellor of Unseen University. The hat, which will be placed on the head of the next Archchancellor, senses that something is wrong and desperately wishes to be whisked away by a thief so that it cannot be put on the head of the sourcerer [sp] that it knows is coming for it. This thief turns out to be a woman named Conina, who (as the name already strongly implies) is the descendant of Cohen the Barbarian. Surprising for the old fellow, but I guess it makes sense. The archchancellor’s hat is stolen away by Conina, Rincewind, and Luggage—though the hat really had no idea that Rincewind is terribly lacking in the magic department and so may not be of much help.
The sourcerer is a young boy named Coin, the eighth son of an eighth son (the number eight is of great importance on the Disc, much as the number seven is in our own world). Coin’s magic is quite impressive, and while some of the wizards are uncomfortable with him taking power, they go along with it out of fear. And so Coin unleashes great, powerful magic upon the world, which the wizards of Unseen University led by him move to take over the world because, well, they’re just better suited for it than normal men.
Rincewind and Conina make their way back to Unseen University after being captured by marauders, where Rincewind realizes he can’t stop Coin with magic… so he settles for using a brick stuffed into a sock. The boy, Coin, begins to argue with his staff—an artifact that holds the soul of his rather overbearing father—and eventually destroys the staff, releasing the soul from the staff so that Death might claim it. Amidst this chaos, Rincewind is snapped into another dimension, unable to return.
My Thoughts on Sourcery
As you may have already guessed, I have one glaring issue with Sourcery: it’s just The Light Fantastic with extra steps. Kinda unbelievably so, actually. As I was listening to it, I just kept seeing similarities between it and the previous Unseen University book that we’d read in this read-along. It’s something I had not actually noticed before, because as I’ve mentioned, I’ve never read the series chronologically, and Unseen University isn’t a collection I often revisited at all. Reading these books virtually back to back now, I can see that the rough outline of each book is virtually the same.
The thing is, Sourcery tells this story better than The Light Fantastic did. I actually didn’t think The Light Fantastic was all that bad—it’s not my favorite Discworld novel, but it really wasn’t so bad. Sourcery is a better version of the story, and had multiple elements I enjoy (y’all know I like pirates), but I still enjoyed it less than The Light Fantastic because it felt like I had just read this story a couple of months ago.
Sourcery, like The Light Fantastic, suffers from being a bunch of well-written, amusing scenes that are held together by loose plot threads. The end result is a fun read that falls apart if you look at it too closely. I enjoyed the characters, I enjoyed the set up, and every scene was fun to read, but the end result was messy (and not in the usual messy fashion that makes Discworld so great). Especially after having just read Mort, the plot’s brokenness and inconsistency were far more apparent.
It’s tough to give this one a rating, to be honest. As I said, it is technically better than The Light Fantastic, so I should at least give it the same rating as The Light Fantastic (which I gave 4 stars to). However, I enjoyed it less than The Light Fantastic because… well, it’s basically the same as that story, which I just read. So my options I have are this: retroactively give The Light Fantastic 3 stars and then give Sourcery 4 stars, or give Sourcery 3 stars.
I settled on just giving Sourcery 3 stars, while acknowledging that the discrepancy in my rating of these two books is based solely on the order in which I read them this time around. I’m certain that if this weren’t a chronological read-along and I’d read Sourcery before The Light Fantastic, my star rating for these two books would be the other way around. It’s just the way it played out this time through!
I do want to say that while Sourcery isn’t my favorite, a couple of my absolute favorite quotes from all of Discworld come from the opening pages of this book, specifically with the conversation around debt. I think the quote I cite the most in real life is when Death is asked what makes living worthwhile, and he just says “CATS.” On top of that, though, the amusingly true statement that, without love, humans would be “RARE” always gets me.
Your Thoughts on Sourcery
Now we come to what is, personally, my favorite part of these discussion posts: the thoughts of those of you reading along with me in this series! I got some great thoughts from you on Sourcery, which I’m excited to dig into here. If you’re not aware, I always post here on YouTube and on Twitter asking for your thoughts on the current book we’re reading as part of this read-along. Whatever you say there could end up being part of this discussion video, so make sure you keep an eye out for those posts, which usually go live a week before the discussion video does!
Your Star Rating
First, let’s take a look at the star rating for Sourcery. Collectively, across Twitter and YouTube, the star rating was a rather resounding 3 stars. I feel a little less guilty about my own low rating in response to that—it seems we all had similar thoughts on this one. Some folks did chime in with 5 star ratings! I’m glad you had such a good time with this one, if that was you!
Awesome Moments in an Unremarkable Book
This comment comes from Wolervine (why would you do that to me, there’s no way I’m going to pronounce that name as anything but Wolverine), who simply states:
Some awesome moments in an unremarkable book.
This is excellently said and perfectly sums up what I said earlier. There are several great scenes, moments, quotes, and other such aspects to this book, but the way that they’re all strung together ends in a lackluster retelling of The Light Fantastic. Harsh, but a fair assessment. I appreciate your honesty here! Especially for those of us who love Discworld, it can be challenging to be honest about its pain points.
It’s a Road Trip
Jeremy Hulka provides solid insight here that might make the Rincewind books more enjoyable for some of you. Jeremy says:
If you go into it remembering that Rincewind books are just a road trip, then it’s fun.
This is really well said, and very true! If you embrace the road-trip-with-your-pals vibes for these books, then they’re definitely more fun to read than they otherwise would be. I would give this a light counter for Sourcery because, in this one, it didn’t feel like the road trip served much of a purpose, as opposed to The Light Fantastic’s road trip, which, while not always sensible, did make sense for the most part.
Penultimate Farewell and a Capstone to Early Discworld
This comment comes from EvilDM Mark3—which, if I haven’t praised your name before, I will now: if that’s a TTRPG reference about you being an evil DM, I respect it. Anyway, this comment is full of great insight, and I’m going to read it in its entirety here before discussing it, though I’m redacting/changing a few things that may be considered significant spoilers for future books. Mark3 says:
I keep forgetting how early this book is, considering how it marks the end of the “early“ depiction of unseen University. The next time we see the place, it will have appointed [a new] archchancellor and things will not be the same ever again.
After the climax of this novel, [we have the events of] Eric, and then it’s about 10 books before we see him again, almost as if this was originally intended as a farewell. It would certainly have been a fitting one, the coward of 1000 retreating backs first steps up to fight the inevitable and then is about to help possibly the one person more afraid than himself, the abused boy that is Coin.
It’s also the penultimate appearance, unless I’m very much mistaken, of the Things, before their last hurrah in Moving Pictures.
These, among many other things, are reasons I feel that Scourcey feels like the capstone to Early Discworld. From here, we hit the period where the story starts to feel less like parodies of other works and more like stories in their own setting that occasionally parodies other fiction.
Is just a pity that despite how significant it is, it is less a good story than it is with two dozen great scenes and a few memorable characters in a trenchcoat.
While the thoughts given don’t necessarily increase one’s enjoyment of Sourcery, they do instill a great deal more respect for this novel. Mark3 is definitely correct in that this feels very much like the conclusion of early Discworld. We’re about to move into bigger and better things, with Wyrd Sisters coming up next, and Guards! Guards! just around the corner. While I’m stoked for what’s to come in this read-along, this comment did make me bittersweet for these early books, and increased my appreciation of them. Thanks very much for taking the time to write this comment!
What’s Next?
It’s a little hard to believe, but we are just two books away from Guards! Guards!, the first book in the City Watch collection and the book that I usually tell people to read first if they’ve never read Discworld. I’m stoked to revisit that one, but before we get to that, we’ve got Wyrd Sisters, another fun Discworld novel that takes place in the Witches collection, making it something of a sequel to Equal Rites. I’m really eager to read both of these, so I feel like these next two months are going to fly by!
You can grab a copy of Wyrd Sisters via the links below; if you do get them there, I get a portion of that sale, so I greatly appreciate you tossing that my way. It helps me stay sane and replace all the mugs that I keep breaking. Mostly the mug thing, though.
My discussion video for Wyrd Sisters is going to be live on April 26th! That means that if you want to participate in the discussion post before the video comes out, you need to have the book finished by April 19th. Otherwise, you can hop into the next video for a discussion on April 26th.
Conclusion
As always, the time you spent checking out this discussion post is greatly appreciated. This read-along would just be a read-alone if it weren’t for those of you checking out this chronological Discworld readthrough with me, so every one of you means a great deal to me. I do want to apologize for the delay on this video—getting sick robbed me of my voice for a while, and I still feel like a bit of a mouthbreather to be honest, but it’s definitely better than it was. Now that I’m back in the saddle, I’m eager to roll out some more content!