The Colour Magic

1983

The City of Ankh-Morpork lies on the river Ankh. The Ankh? Well, you know what they say about the Mississippi? Too thick to drink, too thin to plough. The Ankh runs even thicker.

Unseen University has it's main campus there and turns out Wizards of all powers. One of the least powerful Wizards is poor Rincewind, of whom it was said that the amount of Magic would actually go up on his death.

He does have a facility with languages though, so when a stranger arrives on the dockside speaking a weird mixture of languages he offers his services as a translator. Especially after he sees how much gold the visitor is carrying. Particularly after he spots the visitor's travelling trunk (it travels. By itself). This visitor is a Tourist by the name of Two Flowers. Rincewind translates this as fool, then amends it to bloody great fool. Together the couple travel out into the middle of the great central continent of the Disc World where multiple weird and strange things happened to them.

They met the dragons that disappeared if you stopped believing in them - not a thing you want to happen when you're several hundred feet up in the air!

In a temple dedicated to the number 1 greater than 7, they run foul of a demon that does not like magicians and even Rincewind managed to irritate it. For some reason, the couple have attracted the eyes of the gods and it took divine intervention to get them out of this.

 As a final indignity, the pair of travellers find themselves about to be thrown over the edge of the world in order to determine the sex of Great Atuan

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You might recognise some of the characters in this book from other well known fantasy series. The Colour of Magic was originally written as a satire on the fantasy genre with little thought that the Discworld would become the massively successful series that it did.

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