The Color of Magic: The Wizard's Quarter

In this first book, Ankh-Morpork, and the rest of the Discworld, is not as well-defined as it becomes in later books. Only to be expected. And Pratchett's first "hero" isn't much of a hero - an incompetent and cowardly wizard named Rincewind (truth to tell, my least favorite of all of Pratchett's recurring heroes.)

After the prologue, Pratchett opens with:

Fire roared through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork. Where it licked the Wizard's Quarter it burned blue and green and was even laced with strange sparks of the eighth color, octarine.

The first two characters introduced are Bravd the Highlander and his partner, the Weasel, who are on a distant hillside watching the city burn when Rincewind rides a horse into their midst.

Accroding to the LSpace Wiki, "Bravd and Weasel are parodies of the popular sword & sorcery heroes Fafhrd and Gray Mouser created by Fritz Leiber." Bravd is similar to Fafhrd and Weasel to the Gray Mouser.

Indeed, in the four interconnected novellas in this book, Pratchett parodies quite a few genres...and will continue to do so in future Discworld novels.

The Color of Magic: Krull

Pratchett, in his prelude, references the Steady State Theory and the Big Bang Theory of the origination of the Cosmos, although he refers to it as the Steady Gait theory (A'tuin continues at a uniform crawl, or gate) or the Big Bang Theory (A'Tuin is crawling from its birthplace to the Time of Mating, where the giant star turtles would mate in one fiery union from which new star turtles would be born.

The kingdom on the Edge that desires to know Great A'Tuin's sex is called Krull.

In the same year that The Color of Magic came out, so did a science fiction fantasy movie called Krull, which starred Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony.

However, there are many other sources which could have inspired Pratchett to the name.

Confessions of Felix Krull, by Thomas Mann

An unfinished 1954 novel by the German author Thomas Mann. It is a parody of Goethe's autobiography Poetry and Truth, particularly in its pompous tone. The original title is Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren, erster Teil, translated a year later in English as Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years.

Originally the character of Felix Krull appeared in a short story written in 1911. The story wasn't published until 1936, in the book Stories of Three Decades along with twenty-three other stories written between 1896 and 1929, the year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Much later, Mann expanded the story and managed to finish, and publish part one of the Confessions of Felix Krull, but due to his death in 1955 the saga of the morally flexible and irresistible conman, Felix, remains unfinished.

A spoken-word adaptation of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5 from the first book (dem Buch der Kindheit) of Felix Krull performed by O. E. Hasse was included as a companion disk to the 1965 Teldec (Telefunken-Decca) release of Schwere Stunde (performed by Thomas Mann).

Wolfgang Krull
Wolfgang Krull (26 August 1899 - 12 April 1971) was a German mathematician working in the field of commutative algebra.

He was born in Baden-Baden, Imperial Germany and died in Bonn, West Germany.

Responsible for:
* Krull dimension
* Krull topology
* Krull's intersection theorem
* Krull's principaljavascript:void(0) ideal theorem
* Krull ring
* Krull's theorem
* Krull–Schmidt theorem

Colour of Magic covers

British cover of The Colour of Magic

American version: The Color of Magic