All fairy tales, adventure stories, and fantasy novels may justly be considered precedents of The Colour of Magic.

Pratchett's mind developed its particular cast from his omnivorous reading, and in this and other Discworld novels he alludes to and borrows from many sources. He owes obvious debts to Robert E. Howard, Anne McCaffrey, and J. R. R. Tolkien. In his frolics with the language, he shows a kinship with P. G. Wodehouse. Readers will certainly be reminded of the Hitchhiker series of Douglas Adams. One of the pleasures and challenges for those widely read in the genre is to identify his references to other texts and to analyze the use he has made of them.