I’ve been re-reading the Discworld series. All 40 or so books. In publication order. Starting with “The Colour of Magic”.
Right now I’m on #5, “Sourcery”. Which, in a lot of ways, feels like a retread of a lot of the ideas Pratchett was playing with in #3, “Equal Rites” – both of them involve a wizard’s power being passed down to their very magical child, with some part of said wizard’s identity hanging around, trying to direct how the child grows up.
“Rites” had the additional narrative of said wizard being a woman, who had to deal with the fact that Women Are Witches and Men Are Wizards, despite her magical power being very much Wizard Power, but both of them feel like their core issue is the way really powerful magic kind of detaches its practitioner from the world – Esk and her fellow student Simon end up forming a working partnership to investigate the power of Pointedly Not Doing Magic, and thus presumably keep themselves interested in the world, but Coin ends up stepping out of the Discworld into a little magical pocket universe.
And none of these characters are ever heard from again.* Pratchett’s narrative attention will continue to be concerned with wizardry now and then, but these particuar wizards are too competent for comedy.
Arguably, #5, “Mort”** has core similarities to these two books – they’re about the use of immense power. Esk, Mort, and Coin all get given frightening amounts of power by their stories; Esk and Mort both renounce it, while Coin renounces the world instead. It’s as if Pratchett set out to write a story about gender issues in “Equal Rites”, and found something midway through it that was compelling enough for him to explore as a theme for three entire novels. With, of course, the default male protagonists afterwards.
It is also rather disconcerting to read Discworld novels that concern themselves with the affairs of wizards that don’t have Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully. He won’t be appearing until 1990’s “Moving Pictures”; until then, it seems that every time we visit the Unseen University, we’re introduced to a new set of wizards at the top of its administrative structure. Magic is dangerous, even for the assorted comedic types Pratchett is using for the average wizard; partially because doing serious magic starts to attract Things from outside of reality, but mostly because advancement in the ranks is by means of killing someone ahead of you. Once Ridcully came along, this stopped, due to him being rather a bit of a bad-ass – though that too would fade in his later appearances, with what felt like a cultural shift happening in the Unseen University and a lot less emphasis on Wizards Killing Wizards For Comedy. (I think we also never see another female wizard after Esk? She tried to change the world of wizarding, and had next to no impact on it.)
Really, I tend to think of the Discworld as a comedic, harmless place, but there is a hell of a lot of death going on in these stories. It just never happens to anyone he makes us care about. And then he’ll distract you with an over-the-top, cartoony moment. (Quite literally sometimes; there’s a moment in “Mort”*** where a wizard accidentally drinks a whole bottle of love potion, and ends up running around for a moment with his loins quite literally on fire.)
* okay yes I know Esk has a cameo in the last Tiffany Aching book in 2010, but that’s a gap of thirteen years before Pratchett feels like writing her again.
** that’s the one where Death takes an apprentice, if you’ve forgotten.
*** Hell, look at that entire book. It’s about Death. And Pratchett begins portraying Death as a creature who wants to be rather friendly, insofar as this is possible when his entire raison d’etre is the taking of souls after their bodies die. Every death we see Mort personally attending to, as he learns to do Death’s Duty, is a tranquil, welcomed one. There are brief mentions of other ones that are messier, but never on-screen…