The Colour of Magic

Rincewind, a wizard who knows exactly one spell and cannot cast even that one safely, is hired to guide Twoflower, a cheerfully naive tourist from the wealthy Agatean Empire, through Ankh Morpork, the sprawling, corrupt city that anchors most of the flat, elephant carried, turtle borne Discworld. Twoflower's Luggage, an animate, many legged chest that follows him everywhere and defends him with terrifying loyalty, causes almost as much chaos as it prevents, and a tavern fire the pair inadvertently starts burns down a large part of the city within the book's first chapters. From there Rincewind and Twoflower survive an encounter with the tentacled god Bel Shamharoth, get caught up with dragon riders at the floating castles of the Wyrmberg, and are captured at the Circumfence, the great net strung along the edge of the world, by the people of Krull, each new setting an excuse for Pratchett to take a specific fantasy cliche, the barbarian hero, the dragon rider, the ancient evil god, and turn it slightly, gently sideways. The novel ends with Twoflower launched unexpectedly into space aboard a makeshift device while Rincewind, mid sentence, falls directly off the edge of the Disc, a cliffhanger the next book picks up rather than resolves within these pages.

Pratchett writes in quick, punning, footnote heavy prose that treats fantasy conventions with genuine affection even while mocking them, and the novel reads fast and episodic, closer to a string of linked short adventures than to a single sustained plot; readers who come to Discworld through its later, more structured books sometimes find this first entry looser and less confident than what follows, which Pratchett himself later agreed with.