The Light Fantastic Review

First of all, of all the Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic and the Light Fantastic should be read in order.

I won't spoil it too much by explaining this in detail - but the key element is that the Colour of Magic more or less ends with the protagonist, the hopeless wizard (Or wizzard if you go off Rincewinds hat) and his tourist friend 'Twoflower' falling through space having gone over the edge of the disc.

Now Rincewind is saved, by a spell in his head. Sounds strange enough? It transpires that at some point in his youth he opened the spell-book that contains the eight most powerful spells the 'Octavo'. Upon doing this, one of the spells jumped out of the book and hid in Rincewinds head.

It turns out that in order to prevent the Disc being destroyed the eight spells have to be read together - the problem, one is in Rincewinds head and he's nowhere to be found. The result of this is a host of wizards capering around trying to capture Rincewind.

On his travels in 'The Light Fantastic' Rincewind meets one of my favourite Discworld characters, a legendary barbarian hero, who goes by the name of 'Cohen the Barbarian'.

Cohen is an interesting character - the concept very simple, what happens to the barbarian hero who is so successful he is never killed? The answer of course is he gets old, if he still continues to be so successful he never gets killed and he continues 'heroing' then he gets very old...

This is infact what has happened to Cohen, who is now a wiry, spry old man with toothless gums but nearly a century of combat experience.

Eventually the hilarious capers through enchanted forests and encounters with gnomes, wizards and trolls they end up back at Ank Morpork. The final battle creates a door to the 'Dungeon Dimensions', Rincewind of course prevails, and Twoflower leaves - giving the manic, sentient chest known as 'The Luggage' to Rincewind as a parting gift.

And the eight spells? United at last, and at the right time, they are able to do what they were supposed to do and facilitate the hatching of a host of baby star turtles.

The Light Fantastic is a great read, in some respects better than 'The Colour of Magic, but it really is important to have read the first one in this case. I personally doubt anyone with a molecule of a sense of humour to read this and not smile at the image of 'Cohen the Barbarian'.