Interesting Times — Discworld, Book 17

Interesting Times Review

The Chinese proverb that titles this novel — “may you live in interesting times” — is, of course, a curse, and Rincewind has been living under it for the entirety of his career. Interesting Times sends him to the Counterweight Continent, Discworld’s analogue of imperial China, where the Great Wizzard has been prophesied as the saviour of a nascent revolutionary movement. That the Great Wizzard is a man whose primary skill is running away and whose secondary skill is not dying despite constant effort by the universe to the contrary is, naturally, the joke.

The novel is the funniest of the Rincewind sub-series and the one where his cowardice most consistently earns its comedy rather than simply generating it. Rincewind’s relationship with self-preservation is philosophically coherent in a way Pratchett makes explicit here: the universe is full of people making noble sacrifices, and someone has to survive to see what the sacrifices were for. In Interesting Times, this argument is placed against the backdrop of genuine revolutionary politics — the underground movement attempting to overthrow the Emperor — and Pratchett treats both the comedy and the politics with real seriousness beneath the jokes.

The Silver Horde is the novel’s crowning invention: Cohen the Barbarian and his band of fellow octogenarian heroes, all of whom have survived their violent careers by violating every convention that was supposed to kill them. They are planning to conquer the entire Counterweight Continent not because they want to rule it but because it is there and they are not dead yet. The sequence in which they take on the Imperial Army is the novel’s comic high point.

The satire of imperial stagnation — the bureaucratic machinery that maintains itself by making alternatives unthinkable — is lighter-touch than Pratchett’s best work but consistently present.

Discworld Reading Order

Interesting Times follows Rincewind from The Light Fantastic and Eric. It can be read without prior Rincewind knowledge, though Cohen’s appearance will carry more weight for readers who know him from the earlier novels.

The Silver Horde: Comedy as Argument

Cohen the Barbarian, first introduced in The Colour of Magic, reaches his apotheosis in Interesting Times surrounded by the Silver Horde: Caleb the Barbarian, Boy Willie, Truckle the Uncivil, Old Vincent, and Mad Hamish (in the wheelchair). They are in their eighties and nineties. They have survived decades of the most violent profession in the Discworld’s economy not through heroism in the conventional sense but through the strategic application of unfair tactics, the complete absence of romantic illusions about violence, and a refusal to die that borders on personal insult to the universe.

The comedy they generate is Pratchett’s most explicit argument about the fantasy genre’s heroism myth. Adventure stories imply that courage is what keeps heroes alive — that virtue and survival are correlated, that the worthy live and the unworthy die. The Silver Horde are the counter-evidence: they have survived precisely because they do not believe in heroic self-sacrifice, do not fight fair, do not volunteer for the dramatic last stand, and have accumulated in their combined centuries of experience a thorough practical knowledge of how dangerous situations actually work rather than how the stories say they work. The scene in which they confront the Imperial Army is the novel’s funniest set piece and its clearest statement of thesis.

Rincewind Among the Discworld Sub-Series

Rincewind is the Discworld character who generates the most divided reader response. Some readers find his consistent cowardice frustrating — he is the protagonist who refuses to act heroically in a genre defined by heroic action, and his constant running away can feel like an authorial refusal of dramatic commitment. Other readers understand that Rincewind is Pratchett’s most direct argument against the genre’s central ideology: the idea that bravery is a virtue sufficient to carry a narrative, that the person who runs away deserves what happens to them.

Rincewind has run away in four languages, across three continents, from gods, demons, sourcerers, and various manifestations of the Discworld’s more alarming metaphysics. He is still alive. The Discworld’s more heroic figures — noble warriors, courageous knights, men who stand firm in the face of overwhelming odds — are substantially less present in the novels than their alternative.

Interesting Times is the Rincewind novel where this argument is made most directly, because for the first time Pratchett places the cowardly survivor in the context of a genuine political movement with real consequences, and asks what survival means when other people’s courage is producing historical change around you. Rincewind’s relationship with the revolution — unable to dismiss it, unable to join it — is the most psychologically complex moment in his arc.

Pratchett’s Discworld in the Mid-1990s

Interesting Times appeared in 1994, Pratchett’s eleventh year of Discworld publication and the period in which the series reached its largest audiences. The novel entered the UK bestseller lists at number one — Pratchett was at this point one of the most commercially successful novelists in Britain — and consolidated the Rincewind sub-series’ tone, which differs significantly from the Watch or Witches novels: faster, more farcical, less emotionally invested in its protagonist’s development.

The Counterweight Continent setting, introduced briefly in The Colour of Magic, is fully realised here for the first time. Pratchett’s approach to analogous settings — using a fantasy version of a real cultural and historical context — was always more careful than it appeared. The satirical targets in Interesting Times include not just imperial China but the Western fantasy of the mysterious East, the orientalist tropes that the Discworld’s genre position required him to engage with.

Reading Order Note

Interesting Times is Rincewind’s fourth appearance in the series, following The Colour of Magic (1983), The Light Fantastic (1986), and Eric (1990). It is followed by The Last Continent (1998). Cohen appears first in The Colour of Magic and continues into The Last Hero (2001), an illustrated novel that serves as the definitive conclusion to his arc.