Thursday, March 21, 2013

With a Wink and a Nudge

Sourcery continues along it's way, going about wrapping up the story as most early Pratchett novels do. There's the moment of reflection, and realization, and then the final confrontation. Rincewind's just realized that he is in fact a wizard, and now has to do something about it before magic causes reality to go entirely out of whack.

Although I'm not quite there yet, in the end, what's kept me from unabashedly enjoying Sourcery is its self-awareness. Rather than making fun of fantasy without being aware that it's doing so, almost all of the passages of exposition or where the narrator delves into a characters thoughts, there's some winking nudge at the genre's mainstays. This is fine, and the whole thing's well-written, but it's just not what I'm after in a fantasy novel.

Just as an amazing video game offers an entirely different world to explore and interact with, one of my major criteria for an excellent fantasy novel (or series) is one that creates such a world. The Discworld is indeed clever, but it's just too tuned into its own purpose.

At any rate, the section where Conina, Nijel, and Creosote are travelling to Ankh-Morpork in the genie's lamp thanks to the fractal properties of reality is simply mind-blowing. In fact, the magic of the Discworld in general is quite possibly the best non-distinct system I've come across.

So, though the ending's still a mystery, Sourcery certainly has some merits.

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