Supplemental Sourcery Thoughts

The Apocralypse of the present moment

I started this Substack with a post about teaching a course on The Lord of the Rings in autumn 2024, and the uncanny, unlooked-for resonances Tolkien’s epic had with that particular moment. Apropos of “an election that would prove a dispiriting vindication of a politics based in cruelty,” I found comfort in the novel’s core humanity, especially as embodied in the character of Samwise Gamgee. This resonance, I noted, exemplified “the serendipity of reading something that the events of the present moment inflect in powerful and surprising ways.”

It's not that I wasn’t expecting to find such serendipities in my Discworld reread, but I think I assumed they would happen later, when Sir Terry’s iterative world-building is more refined and his political philosophy more fleshed out. But no: Sourcery, the fifth book of forty-one, rang my bell, not least because it resonated with another piece of writing I’ve been working on that had, until this moment, been more or less unrelated to Discworld.

But now? Well, let’s boil down a few of Sourcery’s main components. An all-powerful petulant child with daddy issues? Surrounded by men of questionable competence hungry for a taste of the power on offer? Who together seek to remake the world in their image because they see themselves as natural rulers?

Yeah, you’re right—how could that possibly seem relevant to the present moment?

For the record, the other piece of writing I’m working on (as distinguished from the half dozen other other pieces I’m working on) is my contribution to the growing sub-genre of think pieces about the tech right’s (mis)use of Tolkien as template and reference point in creating intellectual scaffolding for their weird monarchic-libertarian-technofascist¹ political vision. My spin seeks to widen the lens a bit to look at the appeal fantasy has for these people more broadly and offer some thoughts on the relationship certain strains of myth-criticism have with the Yarvin-Thiel-Vance axis.²

As I said, I hadn’t really been thinking of Sir Terry for that piece, but I suppose I’m widening my lens a bit more. Consider this a prelude.

1. Dear Shareholders: We’ve Built the Torment Nexus!

At the heart of Sourcery is a fairly obvious allegory of nuclear power in the hands of febrile, venal men. Magic is what Discworld has instead of standard Roundworld physics³: it’s what holds the world together and functions as the cohering and organizing force. Access to pure, unadulterated magic is thus not at all unlike the harnessing of atomic power—especially in the sense that the idea of “harnessing” it is a comfortable delusion. Whatever leash is put on an elemental force of nature exists at the sufferance of the elemental force of nature and is at best temporary.

In a passage I quoted in my main Sourcery post, Rincewind summarizes this principle succinctly: “That’s what you people never understand,” he says, “You think magic is just something you can pick up and use … Magic uses people … It affects you as much as you affect it ... You can’t mess around with magical things without it affecting you” (186).

This trope is hardly new. The convention of power corrupting individuals, transforming them, turning both well-meaning and opportunistic people into monsters, is as embedded in ancient mythology as it is in contemporary pop culture, from Prometheus to his modern iteration in Frankenstein to Willow’s heel turn at the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s sixth season. Huge swathes of SF are devoted to such thought experiments, and yet such cautionary tales not only don’t inspire caution, they often inspire people to create the very technology being cautioned against.

Prometheus Brings Fire (1817) by Heinrich Friedrich Füger; Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in the upcoming new adaptation by Guillermo del Toro (!); Evil Willow (Alyson Hannigan) in Buffy the Vampie Slayer.

William Gibson, in one example, didn’t depict infinitely connected virtual cybernetic space in a future where corporations have superseded nation-states as a utopian vision: Neuromancer (1983) and the two subsequent novels of the Sprawl Trilogy⁴ were definitively dystopian, with cyberspace shown as an integral factor in the dissolution of civil society. But such was the vividness of its vision that not long after the novel was published, computer engineers were hosting conferences on Gibson’s novel, asking “How do we build this?”⁵ Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg’s determination to build the “Metaverse” appears blissfully ignorant of the term’s origin in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, in which a hypercapitalist future akin to that imagined by Gibson leads to a comparable collapse of civilization into enclaves of privilege punctuating an otherwise lawless, Hobbesian America.⁶ As we watch the development of A.I. proceeding apace and all the dystopian potential it portends, perhaps one of the most frequently cited lines I’ve come across is Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum ) in Jurassic Park: “[Y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”⁷

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it,” observes Death’s grand-daughter Susan in Thief of Time (#26). “If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”

2. The Teatime of the Billionaires

All of which is by way of saying that though Sourcery obviously allegorizes nuclear power (as discussed in my main post), the broader conceit is about as timeless as they get. Even when a given iteration is more specific to its moment, the theme will tend always to resonate. In 1988 when Sourcery was published, the Cold War was on the downslope, but the nuclear anxieties of the Reagan era were still acute; the descriptions of the battling enclaves of wizards sending salvoes of unthinkably powerful magic at each other’s remote towers would, I have to imagine, have landed differently for readers then as now.

In the present moment it’s not the spectre of nuclear weapons that is evoked, but it’s also not not nukes. Rather, it’s the finger currently on the End-of-the-World Switch, who that finger belongs to, and what he represents.⁸ My earlier characterization of “an all-powerful petulant child with daddy issues” most obviously makes the connection between Coin and Donald Trump, but it could equally apply to Elon Musk—and indeed, Musk and what he represents is in many ways the more apt analogy. I don’t know whether the other ubiquitous billionaires⁹ surrounding Trump and populating his Cabinet also have daddy issues,¹⁰ but they certainly love to imagine themselves as something akin to a wizardly class whose putative genius can work magic.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current development of A.I., which engages in literal magical thinking: its principal boosters forecast a post-work utopian future when we achieve Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I.) but tend to do a lot of hand-waving about how it gets there. As Adam Becker, author of More Everything Forever,¹¹ drily observes of their dodgy science, “Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics.” Whether or not Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity—which posits A.I.’s exponential growth as it learns to educate itself until it arrives at a machine-based hyperintelligence beyond our imagination—is feasible or realistic, promises of its utopian potential require a singularly non-scientific leap of faith. That said, even though such high-profile exponents as Elon Musk and Sam Altman allow for the non-zero chance of a Skynet-style apocalypse, they reject any suggestion of guardrails being erected or brakes being applied. The fact that Trump’s current signature legislation, the “Big Beautiful Bill” (as of this writing not yet passed), would establish a law against state-level regulation of A.I. for ten years is about the purest expression of hubris I can imagine … which is saying a lot, considering that overweening hubris (along with billions in net worth) is effectively the price of admission to the broligarchy.

A.I. also epitomizes the disregard for people that manifests in the billionaire class. All its prophets’ hand-waving about a post-scarcity, post-work future remains stubbornly vague about how the vast majority of people will benefit from the putative wealth to be generated. It seems far more likely to anybody who has read Neuromancer or Snow Crash—or who has been paying attention to the world for the past few decades—that what will happen is huge numbers of people will lose their jobs and yet more wealth will move upward into the billionaires’ coffers. Even if the promise of A.G.I. is a red herring, A.I. itself will have, and indeed is already having, a detrimental effect. As Adam Becker notes:

A large language model is never going to do a job that a human does as well as they could do it, but that doesn't mean that they're never going to replace humans, because, of course, decisions about whether or not to replace a human with a machine aren't based on the actual performance of the human or the machine. They're based on what the people making those decisions believe to be true about those humans and those machines. So they are already taking people's jobs, not because they can do them as well as the people can, but because the executive class is in the grip of a mass delusion about them.

In Mountainhead, the recent film by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, four tech moguls meet for a weekend at the titular Mountainhead retreat, a lavish confection of glass and steel owned by the poorest of the four.¹² Perhaps the most chillingly funny line is when Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the wealthiest of the four and a conflation of Musk and Zuckerberg, asks Randall (Steve Carell) “Do you … believe in other people?” As the film progresses and civilization collapses due to the sophisticated A.I. just released on Venis’s social media platform, the four watch it unfold on their phones, steadfastly deny any culpability, and keep a close watch on their net worths as people die and nations fall. Is this an opportunity, they wonder, to “coup out” even more spectacular power for themselves?

Mountainhead is of course fictional, and its satire is hit and miss, largely because of how broad and heavy-handed it is. That being said, one wonders if that heavy-handedness is a fault in the writing, or whether it’s unavoidable—whether there is simply no subtlety in these characters’ real-world models for a talented writer¹³ to work with. Venis’s question about the reality of people is a reflection of Elon Musk’s habit of referring to people who disagree with him as NPCs—“non-player characters” from video games with no agency and no purpose other than to facilitate the hero’s journey.

As Granny Weatherwax maintains, in a sentiment that becomes axiomatic in the Discworld novels, the origins of evil lie in treating people as things—of denying them reality, as Venis does, or subjective life, as Musk does. At broader issue, as is dramatized in Mountainhead and on display in the broligarchy’s monomaniacal drive to innovate without checks and thus to accumulate, is the dispensing with any sense of social responsibility and obligation. Baked into the ethos of “disruption” is license to treat everything from extant laws and regulations to social mores and conventions as mediocrity’s resentful roadblocks to genius.

3. Flinging Shit at Other Trees

What Sir Terry explores in Sourcery is precisely this disconnect between humanity’s capacity to invent and create unthinkably powerful things and our moral incapacity to employ them responsibly—the inability, indeed, to exercise the sort of forbearance cited by Ian Malcolm, that perhaps we shouldn’t have created them in the first place. Much of the Discworld series articulates Sir Terry’s basic humorous observation about human nature: “[W]e’re monkeys! Our heritage is, in difficulties, climb a tree and throw shit at other trees.” This, to Sir Terry, is the wonder and frustration of our species. “I find it far more interesting,” he says, “in a sense, far more religiously interesting, that a bunch of monkeys got down off trees and stopped arguing long enough, to build this; to build that; to build everything.”¹⁴ The flip side of this wonder however is the rage that simmers beneath the humour, his fury at our congenital self-destructive tendency to play with powers beyond our comprehension,¹⁵ along with the arrogance of assuming we’re smart/strong/capable enough to both control the powers we’ve unleashed and possess the wisdom to deploy them justly.

It shouldn’t be lost on us that the precipitating action of Sourcery is rooted in resentment and a sense of genius spurned. As he argues with Death, Ipslore the Red rails against his former colleagues at Unseen University: “[L]isten when I tell you that they drove me out, with their books and their rituals and their lore!” he shrieks over the noise of the storm’s pathetic fallacy. “They called themselves wizards, and they had less magic in their whole fat bodies than I have in my little finger! Banished! Me!” (9). The incredulous “Me!” is the tell in this moment, betraying his conviction of being somehow sui generis. Though he alludes to his expulsion being due to his transgression of Unseen University’s monastic celibacy rule,¹⁶ what he communicates is less the sense of a tragic love story than the fury of a self-regarding “genius” outraged that he should be subject to the same rules as everybody else. His illicit marriage becomes the vehicle for his revenge, as he fathers a brood of sons knowing the eighth will be a world-tearing sourcerer. Reluctant to cede power even in his moment of death and convinced of his capacity to direct his son’s sourcerous abilities, he transfers his essence into his staff—cheating Death, albeit only temporarily,¹⁷ as well as becoming an allegory of every spectral father whose memory torments his child through adulthood.

It is worth recalling here that the fusty rules and conventions governing the wizards of Unseen University—and indeed the fact that wizards are largely located within the University walls—exist principally as a guard against sourcery. The references in previous Discworld novels to the “Mage Wars” get fleshed out a bit, as we learn that the cataclysmic wars of two millennia earlier, which left large swathes of the Disc uninhabitable, were due to the ubiquity of sourcerers. So terrible was that conflagration that its memory persists in the Discworld’s present day but is attenuated enough that the wizards—some of them, anyway—are seduced by the lure of the power Coin displays. Some however remain ambivalent—I quoted the thoughts of the wizard Spelter in my main post, but it bears repeating. As Coin declares his intentions to unmake the current wizarding order and impose magical rule, he looks around and gets assent from all the wizards there. His gaze finally falls on Spelter.

“You’re very quiet, Spelter. Do you not agree?”

No. The world had sourcery once, and gave it up for wizardry. Wizardry is magic for men, not gods. It’s not for us. There was something wrong with it, and we have forgotten what it was. I liked wizardry. It was right. A wizard was all I wanted to be.

He looked at his feet.

“Yes,” he whispered. (118)

Coin’s initial encounter with the wizards is telling. Though his display of raw magic is shocking, putting to shame that of one of the most senior wizards there (and then disappearing him with a gesture), a sense of self-important decorum and tradition asserts itself (however fleetingly). When Coin presumes to assume the title of Archchancellor, seventh-level wizard Ovin Hakardly is on hand for some red-faced professorial harrumphing.

“Are you mad?” he said. “No-one but a wizard of the eighth level may become Archchancellor! And he must be elected by the other most senior wizards in solemn convocation! (Duly guided by the gods, of course.) It is the Lore! (The very idea!)” (73)

I should note that Sir Terry’s wizards are such spot-on parodies of a certain kind of tenured professor that I’m never sure whether to laugh or feel attacked. Hakardly is a case in point: he “had studied the Lore of magic for years,” and that long process had “made its mark on him” such that he seemed “as fragile as a cheese straw” and “the dryness of his endeavours had left him with the ability to pronounce punctuation.” In my main post I suggested that, despite being a singularly terrible wizard, the fact that Rincewind had been at it for twenty years had imbued in an innate wizardliness that went deeper than actual magical ability. I used the French term déformation professionnelle, which does in fact literally translate to “professional deformation,” and which refers to the ways in which the career or vocation you adopt fundamentally affects or even transforms the way you think and behave. (As someone who has been a professor for as long as Rincewind’s been a wizard, I can attest to two things: I’m a much better professor than he is a wizard, and more than two minutes of conversation with me will give you definite university vibes, not always in a good way.)

All of which is by way of saying: Sir Terry uses the University as both a symbol of sclerotic tradition and a gentle nod to the salutary effects such hidebound conventions have. Coin is, for all intents and purposes, a disruptor, someone who wishes to sweep away what he sees as the detritus of complacency and fusty old habit. Hakardly continues his defence of the institution in a way that doesn’t exactly endear us to him: “Talented you may be, but magical talent alone is not enough. There are many other qualities required of a great wizard. Administrative ability, for example, and wisdom …” (74).

Oof. Nothing like defending the mystic arts by citing administrative ability.

Coin brings Hakardy, and everybody else present, up short when he asks “[W]hy is it that wizards do not rule the world?” As it happens, Sourcery has already answered this question, though not, as it were, out loud. A spot of narrative exposition informs us,

The reason that wizards didn’t rule the Disc was quite simple. Hand any two wizards a piece of rope and they would instinctively pull in opposite directions. Something about their genetics or their training left them with an attitude towards mutual co-operation that made an old bull elephant with terminal toothache look like a worker ant. (37-38)

“It is a simple question,” Coin says when he is met with confounded silence. Looking at the confused faces surrounding him, he continues, “There are in this room … four hundred and seventy-two wizards, skilled in the most subtle of arts. Yet all you rule are these few acres of rather inferior architecture. Why is this?” (74). Why indeed—it’s not as if wizards aren’t jealous of their own power. It’s established in The Light Fantastic that they are quite happy to assassinate those ranked higher in order to advance. “The higher levels of wizardry are a perilous place,” Sourcery notes. “Every wizard is trying to dislodge the wizards above him while stamping on the fingers of those below” (25). “You squabble for power,” Coin observes, but points out that such squabbling doesn’t extend outside the University’s hierarchy: “beyond these walls, to the man who carts nightsoil or the average merchant, is there really much difference between a high-level mage and a mere conjuror?” (75)

What transpires, of course, is entirely predictable: enough time has elapsed to weaken the memory of the Mage Wars; wizards are given a taste of power such as they’ve never known simply by the presence of the sourcerer; and Coin offers them a vision of themselves that elevates them above the nightsoil man and the average merchant, and indeed every other person of the non-magical classes. “Is it really true,” Coin asks them in mock incredulity, “that the wise suffer themselves to be ruled in this way?” But the Archchancellor’s Hat, itself a sentient magical object, has arranged to have itself stolen by Conina the Barbarian, who scoops up Rincewind and absconds to Klatch. There the Hat wastes no time in seducing the Seriph’s Grand Vizier, who has a modicum of magical talent, into having his own delusions of wizardly grandeur. And the natural factional nature of wizards takes over: soon they’ve hived off and are building their towers from which they remotely bombard each other with spells.

And, not for nothing, but in so doing they precipitate the End Times—the Apocralypse, which I won’t rehash here, as I unpacked it in my main post. As already noted, when Sourcery was published in 1988 the obvious allegory was nuclear conflict; our present apocralyptic moment offers us a murderer’s row of analogues, with climate change and The Rise of the Machines not least among them … but again, don’t forget whose finger is currently on the End-of-the-World Switch.

Where we end in Sourcery, however, is on a hopeful note—with the unlikely scenario of Rincewind riding to the rescue. The rescue itself is … messy. But there’s a symmetry in having the ineptest of wizards end up being in his own way the wisest, the one who by all rights should lust for magical ability more than his accomplished brethren. Instead, Rincewind’s one accidental blast of magic frightens him and gives him a clearer understanding of the stakes than anyone else.

REFERENCES

Burrows, Roger. “Cyberpunk as Social Theory: William Gibson and the Sociological Imagination.” Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, and Memories. Eds. Sallie Westwood and John Williams. Routledge, 1997. 235-247.
Murphy, Graham J. William Gibson’s Neuromancer: A Critical Companian. Palgrave, 2024.
Ouellette, Jennifer. “Silicon Valley billionaires literally want the impossible.” Ars Technica, 25 April 2025. https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/
Pratchett, Terry. Sourcery. Corgi, 1988.
---. Thief of Time. Corgi, 2001.
---. “Terry Pratchett on religion: 'I'd rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel.’” The Guardian. 19 December 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/video/2009/dec/19/terry-pratchett-religion

NOTES

1. I’m not usually in the habit of offering compliments to MS Word (or any Microsoft product, really), but apparently “technofascist” is in its dictionary, so …

2. An actual Axis of Evil, if you like.

3. I mean, obviously. With our physics, a massive disc on top of four ginormous elephants standing on a cosmic space turtle swimming through the void quite literally wouldn’t fly. Or rather, it would fly off in all directions. That’s just Thaumatology 101, duh.

4. Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).

5. Roger Burrows writes in “Cyberpunk and Social Theory” (1997) that the “Gibsonian concept of cyberspace has begun to transmute into a tangible reality—his technological vision has fed back into both computer and information systems design and theory … financially underwritten by the Pentagon, Sega, Nintendo and various other global corporations” (238). Istvan Csicsery-Rony, Jr. similarly notes that Neuromancer “influenced not only literature, film, and games but coursed through technical publications, conferences, hardware design, and technocultural discourse at large” (qtd. In Murphy 12).

6. Shortly after reading about Zuckerberg’s rebranding, I had to vent to the first audience I encountered, which happened to be my first-year English class. They listened, bemused, as I went on at some length about how (a) he either hadn’t read Snow Crash, or hadn’t understood it, and (b) his grasp of the word “meta”—not a word, really, a prefix—was utterly fakakta. I ended up writing a more succinct version of the rant and publishing it at The Conversation, which you can read here.

I later apologized to my first-years.

At some stage in the future I’ll be going whole hog on here that particular subject, about how Zuck, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos fundamentally misapprehend the SF texts and history they claim as their philosophical touchstones. The working title is “Billionaires Can’t Read.”

7. A joke made by Jon Lovett—former Obama speechwriter, now co-host of Pod Save America—has lodged in my mind and now lives there rent-free. A few months ago, I don’t remember which episode, he said that we need to remake The Terminator (1984), except that this one will take place in a world in which there had been a film called The Terminator. So when Kyle Reese saves Sarah Connor that first time and then tells her about the future war with the machines, she says, “Oh, wait—so, like that movie?” To which he replies, somewhat hysterically, “YES! We can’t fucking believe you saw that movie and then went ahead and made Skynet anyway!”

8. There’s a moment at the end of the video for the Genesis song “Land of Confusion” (1986) in which Ronald Reagan, rendered as a Spitting Image puppet, reaches for a button that says “NURSE” but presses the one saying “NUKE” beside it. The gallows humour here of course is about an addled and aging Reagan, but for whatever profound differences I have with his politics and legacy, he was someone who took seriously the responsibilities of his office. That seems almost quaint in the present moment, while also putting my milquetoast-liberal self in the awkward circumstance of acknowledging that, yes, I’d swap Donald Trump out of office for 1986 Ronald Reagan in a hot moment.

9. Writing the words “ubiquitous billionaires” just caused something like physical pain.

10. I suspect it is not an uncommon affliction in that select group, however.

11. Subtitle: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.

12. With a paltry net worth of only $500M, Jason Schwartzman’s lifestyle app C.E.O. is nicknamed “Souper” by his friends … as in “soup kitchen.”

13. Which, if you’ve seen Succession, you know Jesse Armstrong is.

14. He made these remarks at a public event hosted by The Guardian’s Book Club in 2009. It is worth watching in its entirety, as it’s one of the rare moments when you get Sir Terry’s general philosophy distilled.

15. This is, to be clear, just one facet of Sir Terry’s rage. Unfortunately I can’t avoid quoting Neil Gaiman on this point, as he articulates it most succinctly: “There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld,” he writes, “And that anger, it seems to me, is about Terry’s underlying sense of what is fair and what is not. It is that sense of fairness that underlies Terry’s work and his writing.”

16. This moment gives us my other favourite line from Death in this novel. “What would humans be without love?” Ipslore demands. RARE, Death replies. (9)

17. Another great line: YOU’RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, Death says, exasperated. “That’s what being alive is all about,” Ipslore points out. (12)

(Well, he’s not wrong.)