I'm glad I'm reading the "Discworld" books in order. There are thirty-eight of 'em so far, published from 1983 to the present year. That's more than twenty-five years of one author's experiences and perspectives lined up on more pages than I care to count. Equal Rites, the third volume in the series, is so drastically different from the first two it makes me wonder what's to come as Terry Pratchett matures with his characters.

While The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic were delightful and sloppy little stories, like small, laughing boys romping in the mud, Equal Rites sets itself on a linear path of plot and meaning that borders on the no-nonsense. Pratchett has something to say in this book, and he says it. It kind of makes me wish Rincewind had popped into the story to get into some trouble and complain. But if you decide to read thirty-eight books in a single series, then sulk because not every book is exactly alike, you never wanted to be entertained by an author. You wanted a trained monkey.

Equal Rites gets the base premise into play as soon as possible: a dying wizard passes on his magic to what he assumes is the infant eighth son of an eighth son. Nobody bothered to check the infant's gender. Maybe it never occurred to them that a girl would choose such a dramatic time in which to be born.

But what's been done is irreversible. A very female girl has been infused with the very male powers of a wizard, and no one is more upset about this than local witch Granny Weatherwax.

"It's the wrong kind of magic for women, is wizard magic, it's all books and stars and jommetry. She'd never grasp it. Who ever heard of a female wizard? ... Witches is a different thing altogether. It's magic out of the ground, not out of the sky, and men never could get the hang of it."

From there, you see that this won't be your garden variety girl-power story. Published in 1987, a year in a decade that was a shameless sewer of gender politics if there ever was one, ER is Pratchett's thoughtful interruption of the endless grousing. He presents for the reader's consideration superiority complexes and generalizations coming from both sides of the argument, the tendency for both men and women to dismiss as frivolous the works of the opposite sex. Stuck in the middle, whether she likes it or not, is young Eskarina the female wizard. Children always suffer the most when adults are busy being petty.

After the torture of listening to the condescending mewls of a particularly sexist wizard named Treatle, nine-year-old Eskarina can't untangle her reactions to a war much bigger and older than she is:

Why was it that when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She'd be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.

She'd be a witch and a wizard too. And she would show them.

This may be one of the top-five most insightful passages I've read on the feelings a female experiences when her gender has been made out to be everyone's business but her own.

Gender is a part of one's identity, which wouldn't be such a problem if people claiming to be experts (as if it were possible to be better at being a man or a woman that everyone else) didn't spend so much time and effort on making decisions on what one's identity should be. Men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, and you would never have known if a guy with a Ph.D. and a best-selling book hadn't told you so. The fact that you've been a man or a woman all your life, mingling with the opposite gender for an equal length of time, doesn't count for anything. Not when the experts are talking. They construct conventional thinking then claim no responsibility when everyone turns up unhappy.

Conventional thinking is laid out as it really is in ER, forced to take the blame for human injury as Granny Weatherwax insists against all evidence to the contrary that there is no such thing as a male witch, and as the wizards of Unseen University don't even want a woman in their dining hall. The feminine side of magic embraces raw nature to such a degree it doesn't bother to read or write anything down, while the masculine side is so preoccupied with acquiring knowledge and power it forgets that when people are ill it's best not to store them on hard beds in bare stone rooms.

It's all summed up tidily as Eskarina states that wizards need a heart, and witches need a head.

Harsh, but tidy.

In Terry Pratchett's assessment of the issue: If females want to be wizards nothing should stop them from trying, and if males want to be witches that's entirely their business. Both genders bring something important and irreplaceable to the table. Both genders should get over themselves.

While the third "Discworld" novel wasn't what I imagined it would be (when you expect humorous fantasy and get philosophy it's always a bit of a jar), it puts serious thought into a subject that too many people are only too happy to gloss over at the expense of absolutely everyone. And for that reason I am glad I read it.

That, and finishing the third volume puts me that much closer to book #5, which is the next novel starring Rincewind.