Book 5: Sourcery

As any author will tell you, they write from their own experience; they write what they know. That is why fantasy is never what it seems. The Discworld is not an alien world in a distant dimension that is nothing to do with real life: what goes on here is as real and as immediate as any history or science book. It's just that the language of description is rather more complicated.

The story is simpler than it looks. A child is gifted with effectively unlimited power, and guided by the malicious spirit of his dead father to use it against his (the father's) enemies, incidentally destroying the world in the process. The only person who can stop him is the rogue wizard Rincewind, distinguished by his total inability to perform any sort of magic at all.

Note the simplistic moral message here: evil cannot be defeated with its own weapons, it must be fought cleanly and fairly, no matter what depths it stoops to itself. This message is a common theme in fantasy - it's the whole premise of 'Lord of the Rings', for instance.

This is deliberate. The book describes in detail how the fantasy world is constructed and the relation it bears to reality. The name 'Sourcery' relates to the source of the world itself; Coin the Sourceror is a reflection of Pratchett the author. It is no coincidence that the book was written about ten years into Pratchett's development of the Disc, and Coin is about ten years old in this book. Even the child's name, 'Coin', is an obvious reference to the act of creation.

It is clear that the book as a whole is inspired by roleplaying games. The clue to this is, of course, the character of Nijel the Destroyer, as the one who has the manuals and understands the rules and nature of the narrative. The other characters are all trying, unsuccessfully, to play roles: Conina is a barbarian thief trying to play a hairdresser; Creosote is a ruler trying to be a poet; the vizier is a stereotype who wants to be a sourceror (i.e. one who 'makes his own destiny'). Rincewind plays every class in this book: warrior, thief, sage, wizard - even priest, in his dealings with the Hat.

Coin is the game master, the one who moulds reality around the hapless players. As any experienced game master knows, this is more difficult than it sounds: as soon as you allow yourself to be bound to certain rules, the players will find loopholes to exploit; but if you change the rules too often, the world will quite literally fall apart at the seams. It is Rincewind, the most accomplished player of the Great Game, who persuades him that his tinkering is endangering the whole campaign, and he should leave the world alone.

Mike Kew

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