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The Discworld
Sourcery

Book 5...

Sourcerers are born the eighth son of an eighth son of eighth son and were the main cause of the great mage wars that left whole areas of the disc uninhabitable; this is the long standing reason of why wizards are not allowed to marry or have children. The first few pages of the novel deal with the sourcerer's father, who cheats death by making a prophecy that Death must honour or risk destroying the Discworld. The rest of the novel deals with the sourcerer's plan to have wizards rule the Discworld, and the efforts of a small group - including Rincewind the Wizard, Nijel the destroyer and Conina the Hairdresser, daughter of Cohen the Barbarian - to thwart those plans.

 

An interesting book that steals its central idea shamelessly from Equal Rites, but adapts it, polishes it and repaints it to make it look slightly different, Rincewind is back and he's just as ungifted, but that's not the point, as in a world intoxicated by magic he's the only voice of sanity and reason, even if he reasons that the only sane thing to do is run away, the direction of course being unimportant. The Sourcerer is packaged very much in the role of a petulant child who has no concept of good or evil or death. This leads to the mage war that resonates for much of the last 1/3 of the novel, an interesting idea that goes right back to The Colour of Magic and the Wyrmberg. Like Equal Rites the action ends up in the Dungeon Dimensions, only this time they have the irate Rincewind and a sock filled with sand to deal with and he seems to be doing alright for himself as the book ends. What happens to him next is a story for another time though.

.....the number between 7 and 9.....