If you haven't read a Discworld book I'm going to throw my vote behind Guards! Guards! as a great starting point.
I re-read it recently and it was even better than I remember it being when I first read it as a teenager - I think because my extra life experience meant that I understood the themes of the novel more. Incredibly insightful social commentary.
I will seconds Guards! Guards! it's what I always suggest to friends as a starting point and it leads more naturally into a coherent series as you follow Vimes and the city watch - as an alternative the witches are quite hilarious especially if you're familiar with Shakespeare (a particularly good one here might be Lords and Ladies). The Lipwig books are also quite excellent featuring a lot of most folks favorite characters but I think they work better if you're familiar with the setting.
Lastly, I think a really good shout out is Monstrous Regiment which is absolutely hilarious, especially if you don't know the characters and just incredibly wholesome.
Vimes is my favourite character arc; I don't always rate Guards Guards but it is essential entry to Night Watch (IMO one of the best books).
Also a shout out for underrated options; Soul Music (great tag line, lovely observational comedy) and Carpe Jugulum (some fan favourite characters, but also one of my fav bit-part characters - Lacrimosa)
In terms of underrated options: I have a very strong affection for Pyramids. It's almost completely unconnected from the other books - it starts in Ankh Morpork but quickly heads out to Djelibeybi (Child of the Djel) - the Discworld's ancient Egypt. And it's loosely about quantum physics.
Pyramids is also my favorite (so far, still working through the series chronologically)!
Without too much of a spoiler, but at the point whenever, uh, the physics and time gets weird, I was dying laughing about the interactions between the pyramid building brothers.
I also read it during the week my son was born this year and generally have some really positive associations with it :)
Another sort of weird one is Small Gods which is intensely good and definitely very message driven. Small Gods, Pyramids, Soul Music and Night Watch are probably peak pratchett when it comes to actually being fantastical - a lot of his writing is very grounded but in those books he really leaves the beaten path to explore something very... odd.
Is obviously also a reference to Jelly Babies - the rubbery sweets that were preferred by the fourth Doctor Who.
I have to say that Pyramids has always been one of my favourites, it doesn't have the depth of Nightwatch due to less history with the characters, nor does it have the biting satire of Small Gods, but as standalone "typical Discworld" novel it is outstanding.
I should re-read it again soon. Having moved countries I didn't transport all my books, but once I arrived here I made damn sure that I bought the complete set again. They're great comfort-reads.
For me the line that always sticks in my memory involves Pteppic getting dressed "and then he turned and slowly fell over". (I love the "Ptraci" lines too. Always paying off to be slightly foreign.)
Monstrous Regiment was my first one! It's nice as a standalone book and I think really shows off the compassionate satire that the essay is talking about
Guards! Guards! is great, but the thing about Pratchett is that his writing got significantly better every few books until the very end of his life. Later entries in the series -- Night Watch and Thud! -- are much better.
As such, I'd recommend Going Postal as the entry point for the uninitiated.
Men at Arms (the direct followup to Guards! Guards!) was my first Pratchett book and really had me hooked. I think any of the Vimes-centric books are great starting points, because the detective mystery style of plotting keeps the pages at a steady balance of exposition and development. The books focused on witches, wizards and religion can be too on-the-nose, and the ones that use more abstract themes or go deep into one character are easier to grasp after having that entry point of Vimes chasing after a villain.
I actually rather disliked Thud!; it feels like it's another "what if guns were evil demons that possessed you?" book like Men at Arms (but this time it's the concept of revenge? or something?), with an added layer of "what if racism was bad?", and in the end it felt like he'd forgotten to write any jokes.
To balance out this non-progressive take, Vimes' character arc is "what if a good cop made cops good?", which probably wouldn't work in real life.
I kind of feel that you need to read the Colour of Magic to get a proper introduction to the Discworld itself though (just ignore the story though, it's rather flimsy), but it might not be necessary to read it first.
I honestly wouldn't recommend it as a first book - and I appreciate the TV mini-series that collapsed Colour of Magic and A Light Fantastic into a single coherent story.
Also, it had Tim Curry.
But the discworld doesn't actually need all that much introduction - each book is pretty self-sufficient but learning more about the characters just adds more to when they show up as Cameos (except, I'd point out, Monstrous Regiment, where not knowing who the "Butcher of Ankh Morpork" is actually adds to the story)
> [M]y vote behind Guards! Guards! as a great starting point.
That was my introduction, when it came out, but I recommend Hogfather to most as it captures the wide breadth of his writing. There's a lot of great comedy in it, but also some serious and scary moments.
I've read the Tiffany Aching books aloud to both my daughter and my son and they both loved them.
Partly (mostly?) for the spectacle of me trying to read a Nac Mac Feegle accent :)
FWIW I only recently learned that "crivens" is maybe a real expression, a much-shortened form of "Christ defend us". In the same way as "God blind me" reduces to "blimey"...
But it's an easy and quick decision / try: Discworld to me is a bit like Hitchhikers guide to galaxy, where I tell people to just read the first page - either you'll be laughing and hooked, or go "huh?"; either way it's not one of those books where you need to read 27 chapters and get to know characters etc before you make up your mind. It's a specific type of humour that not everybody appreciates, but those who do appreciate it rather quickly.
I would recommend any Discworld book wholeheartedly, anything with Rincewind is hilarious (The last continent is a favorite of mine), also I think Moving Pictures is pretty interesting commentary on modern entertainment. I read them all over a decade ago and some of the lines I remember still make me chuckle. EDIT: Also the movie(s) Going Postal are great..."The Smoking Gnu" :)
The main problem with Rincewind is that the entry point for his story is The Color of Magic+The Light Fantastic, which as the first two Discworld novels are much weaker than later books in the series. Guards Guards is just a much better first book to read, that or Equal Rites is more representative of the quality Discworld would come to have.
Then again my first Discworld novel was Making Money and I loved it even without context (and the “Industrial Revolution” sub-series starting with moving pictures remains my favorite to this day), so you could probably just start at Sourcery and go from there anyway.
Completely agree on this point. The first two Discworld novels, while still hilarious, take being a high fantasy story much more seriously than the later stories do. I'd go as far as to argue Pratchett still hadn't found the "discworld voice" in those first two books.
My first was Reaper Man, which isn't a bad place to start. Better from a context point of view to start with Mort perhaps, but not necessary.
His take on Death often fills the role of the outsider, trying to understand us and by doing so exposing our oddities, much like Data in Trek and other such characters. Possibly that is why the books that feature him heavily are some of my favourites.
Though it's worth noting that him learning that sympathy is actually a plotline across several books, and at the very start of the series he's more of a cold and stereotypical Death figure.
Guards! Guards! is excellent. I'd vote for Wyrd Sisters too.
Incidentally, I think the Wyrd Sisters cartoon is the most successful Discworld adaptation (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyrd_Sisters_(TV_series)). I must admit, I've not tried the recent series based (very loosely it seems) on Guards! Guards! I don't what to be That Fan who says they got everything wrong but...
Tried watching the recent series ("The watch"). Not Pratchett.
I hesitate to use the word "unwatchable", but this series comes close. It is both an awful adaptation of the Discworld universe—and awful even otherwise.
The very first words I new of Guards Guards were read to me by Pratchett at a small con in London (at Imperial College?) before the book was published. And before he was super famous. The room wasn’t even full
As a long time Pratchett enjoyer I thought it was pretty well done, it certainly wasn't a screen version of Guards! Guards! but it was pretty clearly inspired by it and, honestly, it managed to bring humor of its own right to the party.
I certainly wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to Pratchett but it is quite Pratchett adjacent.
No, thanks. There was a reason why Pratchett described his characters the way he did and this show didn't respect that at all. This show didn't get inspired by Discworld, it just used some character names to get some track that it wouldn't get otherwise.
Were there any specific character decisions you didn't appreciate?
I know the plot was a rather confused mismatch of several different Watch books - especially Thud! (The Summoning Dark), Night's Watch (The Carver plot line), Guards Guards! (The dragon summoning) along with several smaller references to other novels. But I do think it was rather coherent as long as you realized it wasn't following the books at all.
Lady Sybil for example was never meant to be the characterization they gave her in the show. She didn't need to fight crime because crime didn't happen on the circles she moved, what happened around her was the other type of crime: politic. She didn't need an Amazonian body and two axes to be listened because she had not only the influence of a noble woman but also the confidence of a whole life educated to be that way. She was a big woman with a bit of insecurity in her early days and that made her more human and more approachable. This show took all the effort Pratchett put into creating awesome characters and threw it through the window. So, no, thanks, this is a hard pass for me.
It's too bad Neil can't be persuaded to showrun a Discworld anthology series or something. The only video to really nail Discworld was Hogfather. (Going Postal had excellent casting but the script diverged way too far from the book.)
Yeah. I have heard that there will be a "Season Two" of Good Omens. Apparently, Gaiman and Pratchett were working on a sequel, when PTerry goot too sick to complete it.
That's not what happened. Gaiman and Pratchett outlined a sequel to the Good Omens novel when they were at a comic book convention together in 1989, were sharing a room, and couldn't sleep. Aside from that outline they were never working on it together as they were busy with their own projects. Gaiman dug up this outline and is turning it into a second season of the show.
Small Gods is the one I managed to get signed. A bookshop in Dorchester, and Pratchett gave an excellent talk before. I say "managed to get signed", though the joke at one point was Pratchett signed so many books, unsigned copies were the rare ones.
> “At least you can say that in Pratchett’s books, the bloody elves never sang!”
Terry Pratchett I think is one of my favourite writers to read. The absurdity of his fantasy settings is just the right level of entertaining for me. Everything flows so smoothly that I sometimes get the subtle jokes only on my second read-through.
There are many many jokes that are so obscure as to be almost impossible for non-British readers to discover. A trip through the l-space wiki will point out many (and there’s some I’ve noticed that aren’t listed there).
Anytime something is named, it’s probably a joke or reference of some sort.
It’s also quite fun how many of the “inpossible” setups or situations are just literally copies of real-life stories.
For a modern and non-British take on this genre I would strongly recommend The Tales of Pell by Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson, if anyone’s looking. It’s got that same vibe of absurdist humor with real life references in a fantasy setting. The politics are less about class and more about identity.
Last Continent instead makes a lot of Australia jokes. Though the first one I remember is the brewery built on the opposite of an ancient sacred site which the aboriginal peoples actively wanted desecrated.
As a kid I somehow stumbled into Discworld first by playing the point-and-click PC game where Rincewind was voiced by Eric Idle (probably after much fumbling through soundcards settings). This is how I discovered the book series and have been a fan ever since. Such amazing books on so many levels!
Same for me! Except I played it on PS1. I didn’t find out about the book series until like 10 years after. For better or for worse I now have a picture in my brain for Rincewind, Twoflower, and The Luggage purely based on the game. But still love it.
I believe that Sir Terry was probably one of the greatest humans to walk the Earth. Not only was his work wonderful, but he was a really decent chap, as well.
Humble, well-educated, polite, honest, and, from everything I've heard, a joy to work with.
I had been to two book signings of his and had a chanse to listen to him answering q&a session, reading his book and telling some stories (and even talk for a brief moment when my friends from local fun club tried to ask him for interview).
I must say that he seemd to be everything You are saying he was and more (the way he declined my friends was so humble and honest that You could feel that he genuinly felt sorry that he did not have more time for them).
I also saw his awesome ring with death on it. Im not much into mens jewelery but this things was honestly amezing (speaking as a discworld fun of course)
If you're not aware of it, the Annotated Pratchett File¹ is a joy for the dedicated Pratchett reader. It collates explanations and observations on the many, many well-layered jokes in his works. I read a lot and felt like I was getting some pretty obscure jokes, but the APF opened my eyes to historical and cultural allusions that had whooshed en masse over my head! I'm in awe at Terry's erudition. I wish he was still around writing for us :'(
To truly get every joke you need a very in-depth knowledge of ancient, medieval, and modern history and literature. Even his basic puns often as not pull from famous European poetry or art.
The obvious send-ups are east to identify but reading through APF gives you the full depth, and it’s pretty incredible.
One thing that surprises me whenever Discworld comes up is that nobody ever mentions Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. I get that it doesn't really tie into any of the other story arcs, but it is indeed a Discworld book (the 28th). It's also one of the few that was intentionally written for children.
I read it with my 11 year old daughter and was expecting it to be fairly ho hum, but was absolutely blown away by the story and the satire.
Not only do I highly, highly recommend it for reading with children, it's absolutely a great read for adults.
I agree. I’m a big fan of the DEATH story arc, but outside of Mort and Reaper Man, Amazing Maurice might be my favorite book in the series. So very well written and felt like Pratchett was at his best.
I quite love that story and at least my age says I am an adult. Very recently I wrote a short (~320 words) review of it in preparation for my English C2 exam and it even was fun to write about it :)
I love Terry Pratchett. I have read (and reread and reread) nearly everything he has written. His early works were more monty-pythonesque than his later ones (less plot, more random hillarity). I advise against a "let's start from the beginning and read to the end" strategy where Color of Magic or the Light Fantistic were your starters.
Pratchett is a superb satirist (Vonnegut is the only equal I have discovered). His dialog is great. There are so many chuckle worthy moments. And then there are just really deep profound moments as well. You can read them in any order. There are reappearing characters, but each book stands on its own. They focus more on immediate content than overall plot arcs. The more you soak yourself in discworld in general, in any order, the funnier and more rewarding it all gets.
The book that has the most cross over with the reasons we all post to HN is probably Going Postal, because it satirizes the world of information dispersal. Who owns the content? Who gets to be the gatekeepers, etc.
If you like Monty Python style humor, you'll probably enjoy those that have Rincewind and/or the Unseen University the most.
I love any of the books with Death in it (Hogfather, Reaper Man, Mort, Soul Music, Thief of Time).
My son loved all of the Sam Vimes books. If you love police/detective stuff, this is for you.
If you want a little more plot, the Tiffany Aching series has that. Read all of these aloud (multiple times) to all of 3 of my girls.
I don't even know how best to introduce/characterize/promote The Witches (Weatherwax, Ogg, et al). If you value common sense and wish there were more of it in the world?
If you couldn't be bothered to read, then watch the BBC mini series "Good Omens", it's on Prime. It's derived from a book of the same name written by Pratchett and Gaiman (though I think Terry did most of it, since it feels much more Pratchett than Gaiman to me). And they did a superb job of adapting and staying true to the book.
> If you couldn't be bothered to read, then watch the BBC mini series "Good Omens", it's on Prime. It's derived from a book of the same name written by Pratchett and Gaiman (though I think Terry did most of it, since it feels much more Pratchett than Gaiman to me). And they did a superb job of adapting and staying true to the book.
I'm not sure I agree. I find the book definitely has a clear signature of both authors, which makes it so great. I love Pratchett and some of Gaiman works are absolutely genius (although I find that unlike Pratchett reading a book from him is not guaranteed to appeal to me, even for his popular books), so this combination is just a dream team, the only way it could be topped is if their story was published in an anthology edited by George RR Martin).
Discworld was a real joy of mine in my early teens. I think some of my early computing forays including a Discworld mailing list I found on a webring via Yahoo or somewhere. I had the Discworld official map on my wall and used to love getting the editions printed as tiny hardbacks.
Probably my favourite sub-series was the Witches and Nanny Ogg. As I caught up to the newer books I found myself enjoying them less because it felt like there was more and more philosophising. Probably what happened was that they got a bit more sophisticated and I was too immature to understand many of the themes and allusions.
Time to start working through them all then! I recently reread Colour of Magic and it was enjoyable but also clearly had far too much going on.
Either Pyramids or Moving Pictures was the only one that I really struggled to enjoy for some reason.
> it felt like there was more and more philosophising
If you're referring to the much-later books like Unseen Academicals, then sadly I think Terry's alzheimers affliction was probably to blame. As I understand it he reached a point where he was no longer able to type, but could still dictate. Certainly somewhere in that process they lost the tautness of the earlier works. Something to enjoy still (for me) but not quite the glittering jewels of his intellectual peak.
I own the full set of books, and I have to say that Unseen Academicals is such a chore to read that I've only finished it twice.
Quality varied throughout the run, but that was the only one that I actively didn't like. Even the last few, getting simpler, or more verbose, didn't bother me as much as that one did.
Yes, from Making Money onwards I think. I haven’t actually read the most recent few because of that. It’s a shame to hear that but still, what a body of work to leave.
If you are a discworld fan it's worth reading Strata, one of his earliest works.
This is set in a disc shaped world as well and you can see the early shape of the discworld concept (the world but also the style of the books). It's like seeing him work out his voice.
I love discworld a lot. But Good Omens is, for me, the essence of the craft of dark humourist fantasy. So many observations on humanity.
Strata was first Sir Terry book for me - I read it when I was teenager and was reading science fiction only. Imagine my suprise reading Colour of magic next, having strata in back of my head, waiting for the damn space ships to appear.
And they never did, not in a single discworld book I have read later in my life (dark side of moon aside coz its not part of the series).
Anyways ... I also recommend strata - the ideas on this book are so vivid and clever that they stay with You for the rest of your life (mechanical deamon with small wings using super fast teleportation as a way to implement flight always comes to my mind whenever I hack a solution with unexpected tools)
It is hilarious how much Strata owes to Niven’s “Ringworld”, if you have read that as well. It goes to its own places in the end but it sure does spend a lot of time as a direct parody of that book.
I have not seen anyone mention the long earth series, a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. It is based on a very interesting concept. Very different in its style to the discworld books, but shows off how good a writer Pratchett was even when straying from his usual fare.
To me, Lobsang and Sister Agnes (even as they appeared in The Long Cosmos) felt much more Discworld-y than did almost any part of Raising Steam.
I have fond memories of the ascendant of the Discworld series, Strata, which is IMO better than the book it’s riffing on (Ringworld). Likewise I enjoyed The Dark Side of the Sun, which riffs off a different theme from Known Space (though I don’t recall any of that theme ending as a theme in Discworld).
Good Omens was also another fantastic collaboration, between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
> I have fond memories of the ascendant of the Discworld series, Strata, which is IMO better than the book it’s riffing on (Ringworld).
This isn't hard, as Larry Niven's Ringworld universe books are 1/2 "what if 1960s California culture was in space" and 1/2 "men reacting to high school physics problems".
I think you could write an effective parody of them by just having scenes where one character recites Wikipedia particle physics articles and another one gasps and says things like "this changes everything!".
A friend loaned me their complete set of Discworld books at about the time "Mort" came out; they didn't re-print the USA Roc editions of the earlier titles until "Guards, Guards" got popular and there was a while there where they were quite valuable and hard to find.
Pterry's Usenet presence was a large factor in the popularity explosion; I recall returning the favor of loaned book with printouts of the alt.fan.pratchett FAQ.
Ok let me geek out a little. Terry Pratchett was a god among man. A truly special human being whose works are on par with the likes of Shakespeare and Wagner in describing and exploring human nature.
He's well known for his fantasy novels, but he was also a humanist and an advocate for the right to die. Here's a great documentary by him, on that subject:
On a more Hackernews note, there's a special HTTP response header that is secretly used worldwide to honor Terry. X-Clacks-Overhead. A reference to the books in which it is said that a person never dies as long as his name is sent over Clacks (the Discworld internet / telegram).
Thank you for sharing this. Going Postal was my first Pratchett book. I did not know about this X-Clacks-Overhead. This has made my day, and nearly brought tears to my eyes.
Loved playing this for several years, an absolutely mindblowing game with a great (if rather small) community! Eventually had to stop because I just didn’t have the time to play regularly anymore, but I still miss this world…
Mr P lived up the road from here and his family still does. (Wilts/Soms:UK)
Pratchett came very dangerously close to writing serious literature. He also managed to write some of the most profound commentary on religion that I have ever seen. Try Small Gods for a rather unsubtle start.
If you want to do Pratchett then start at the beginning and work out - that's my advice. I was about 15 when the Colour of Magic came out and now I'm 52ish. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with randomly diving in but why not start at the beginning - no matter how daft it looks now? I actually rather like the first two books - naiive? yes!
Everyone has a favourite book because he attacked so many themes with alacrity. I see loads of calls for "read Monstrous Regiment" here - and it is an absolute belter. It is a very polite and beautifully handled feminist treatise with a hefty nod to the bloody nonsense that is civilisation in Europe.
"Small Gods" is not polite in any way and nor is "Winter Smith" - both are quite searing indictments on religion.
Anyway, Sir TP wrote stuff and it is rather good. I'm an engineer and the railway related stuff hits home even though I trained as a Civ Eng and now do IT! I shudder to think what would have been written by a Sir TP who understood say Python. We got Ant Hill Inside and the College of Inadvisably Applied Magic - we got off very lightly.
before his untimely death, he collaborated with Stephen Baxter for an amazing series of 5 books exploring parallel earths. definitely worth a read if you want something just a little bit different from an amazing writer.
If you've never read any Pratchett and want to try it out, rather than read one of the many Discworld novels, or any of his sci-fi, or the Bromeliad or Johnny Maxwell trilogies, I'd instead recommend the stand-alone novel Nation. It is my opinion that it is the most concise demonstration of everything great about Pratchett's writing.
While I really liked Nation, I don't think it represents the random laugh/giggle on the train type humour that is so common in the discworld novels. For me the humour is a bit more subtle in Nation.
Does anyone know where to find the 1978 column Pratchett wrote about Star Wars? It's referenced in the article but I don't see a source and would love to read it.
I found a little more info about it but unfortunately no copy:
"‘SO, BANG GOES THE PERSONAL TOUCH’, Bath & West Evening Chronicle, 22 April 1978, p. 10.
This is TP’s ‘Star Wars‘ piece that he tended to mention when talking of his years at the Chronicle, but I could not track it down when I searched the issues in the British Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London (now closed and moved to the town of Boston Spa). Perhaps it was in an issue missing from their collection, or I was looking in the wrong issues. Star Wars was released in London in December 1977, but only reached Bath the following April. Discovered by David Moger, to whom my thanks. CS"
I've had a look to see what's in the Bodleian and the British Library from there, but it doesn't look like 1978 is online. Post-1998 is on LexisNexis, and the BL's (paid) online service has up to 1950, but there's a gap in the middle. You could almost certainly go and read it in the BL reading room in London, though: their print/microfilm coverage of British newspapers is very good.
I was lucky enough to visit a Pratchett exhibition at the Salisbury museum, near where he lived for most of his adult life. It had a bunch of his books, papers, things from his life, even his desk with six monitor set-up, one of which was playing Doom on loop!
His deep love of the people of the landscape and people of Wiltshire and the surroundings, most obvious in the later Tiffany Aching books, was huge for me as a teenager growing up in this area. Articulated how I feel about my home better than I ever could.
I recently started reading Discworld after many years of thinking I would not like it – I honestly don’t know why!
The humour is great and it has way more fun with itself than I expected. If like me you have been putting off after ignoring many recommendations: just give it a try!
As there won't be any more coming (alas! alas!) I rather envy you the prospect of as-yet-unread Pratchett novels to come. Savour them; a first-read is always special. Happily for me they bear much repeated re-reading.
Thanks! It feels like how I imagine someone just discovering Breaking Bad must feel. It’s sad that I never appreciated Terry Pratchett’s work during his lifetime. At least we can be thankful he produced a lot of work!
In a way he’s like Weird Al - technically Al is a parody artist but he had an excellent mastery of many, many styles of music.
Similarly Pratchett is technically a fantasy author but some of his books are actually crime/detective novels, sci-fi, even romance.
Many people who say “I only read fantasy” are quite surprised when you point out many of the Guard books are just straight detective stories; similar to how many people are shocked to realize that Blues Brothers, is at heart, a musical.
That's exactly one of the reasons I love the books. They seem to be able to wrap up a ton of concepts/stories I like in a way that preserves the quality and to top it off, incredibly fun to read.
Some of the books also ventured pretty close to darkness, Night Watch had humorist tracesd, but mostly it was a timejump back into a bleak, darker past.
I agree. Night Watch made me laugh, and angry and scared at the same time. All wrapped up in superb writing. After reading the book (a few times) I decided Sir Pterry had reached the top of his game.
... And then I read Thud. And then Snuff. Stunning books, that really made me think about some of the terrible issues we're still trying to deal with in our own Roundworld!
One of the joys is when you re-read one of his books and discover its tie-ins with the other books in his universe. Small Gods has a tiny but important role for Lu Tze the history monk, who subtly interferes with the story to see it to its conclusion. But I completely missed it as a plot point until I’d read Thief of Time, which explained the whole point of the history monks. Then they show up again in Night Watch.
His fictional universe evolved - but also circled back and reinforced itself. (Mostly!)
> When you combined the sales of all of his novels together, he became simply the most popular single British author of the 1990s
I'm honestly surprised that Pratchett's ~20 novels beat the three Harry Potter books released in the 90's. That may be because I'm an American though, and while I knew one guy that had read some Pratchett in school seemingly everyone had read Harry Potter.
I mean clearly HP craze has smashed Discworld in the end. But the first three HP books were released in the late 90s, whereas Pratchett wrote 16 novels through the decade (and something like 5-6 in the 80s). So he had volume on his side.
While he did, Harry Potter books are huge. Looking at the best selling books article on Wikipedia, all of the Discworld books sold 90 million total copies, the first Harry Potter sold 120 million. So I'm guessing that claim is only for books sold during the 90's, but Rowling sold far more copies of books published in the 90's
Interestingly; the first HP book was published in 1997 but the print run was only 500. The book wasn't published in the US till late 1998 and by that point hadn't even sold half a million copies.
I believe it kind of blew up in sales through 1999 but the UK -> US lag meant most of the sales were in the 2000s.
One thing I love about Discworld is how it evolved between novels. Each of them added a piece to its history and you could see how the events of one book affected the lifestyle of the citizens of Ank-Morpork in others.
I absolutely adore the discworld books. I've reread many of them several times over the years, they are without doubt a significant contributor to both my world view, and my vocabulary. I can't wait to raise my children with them.
I typically recommend either Small Gods, Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids or Mort as an entry into the discworld. There are so many good start points though.
I can never decide whether to recommend reading a specific character arc, or to read them in publishing or chronological order. I've enjoyed re-reading character arcs a lot though.
I highly recommend the *unabridged* original audio books, especially the later stories narrated by Stephen Briggs or Celie Imrie (Witches series). The earlier stories narrated by Nigel Planer sounded like he was still in his "The Young Ones" [0] character and grated on me for many years although now I find him easier to accept when I re-listen (which I do frequently!).
Unfortunately (for me at least), the recently re-recorded collection (by the Pratchett estate) using different voice artists (Indira Varma, Peter Serafinowicz, Bill Nighy, Steven Cree) don't capture the same 'magic' as the original voices and often fail to recognise and pronounce the subtle double and triple entendres (e.g. of the Nac Mac Feegles) - which suggests they and the editors don't fully appreciate the humour Pratchett intended.
Don't miss the "The Science of Discworld" series (book I (1999), II:The Globe (2002), III:Darwin's Watch (2005), IV:Judgement Day (2013)) where the chapters alternate between stories of the Wizzards (voiced by Stephen Cohen) of Unseen University accidentally creating Roundworld (Earth and our universe) and then tinkering with its evolutionary timeline in a battle with the Elves, eventually leading to humans leaving the planet using a Space elevator, and serious explanation and exposition of the sciences by Jack Cohen and Professor Ian Stewart (voiced by Michael Fenton-Stevens).
Those make a great introduction to science for kids young and old!
"The Folklore of Discworld" and some of the loosely related stories such as Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook (voiced by Penelope Keith - a skit on the Victorian era "Bradshaw's" railway travel guide [2] and a spin-off from "Raising Steam", featuring her travels on the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Plains Hygienic Railway), "The World of Poo" (Sam Vimes son's fascination with collecting poo specimens) and, unrelated to Discworld but written in the same tongue-in-cheek style "Dodger", a tale set in Victorian London featuring a lovable Tosher discovered by 'Charlie' (Charles Dickens).
I would like to disagree to the extent that I find Nigel Planer’s Rincewind to nail the character in my mind. His reading of
“The Last Continent” with Rincewind vs the various Australian tropes is a family favorite.
If you see the Hogfather screen adaptation he plays the role
of the wizard Sidney.
I don’t know how close he was to Pratchett - but he has recently written a novel that supposedly was influenced by Discworld[1] (but not of Discworld)
I find Pratchett's incessant moralizing and judging and lame caricatures to be unappealing. And when you remove that meat what's left is an extremely conventional and mediocre skeleton. It's like Stephen King with the horror switched out for glitter. Walmart grade stuff.
And all the old ladies are randy witches who ride Harleys. Ugh.
That's what the actual old British ladies I know are like. The men are into model trains.
The high level of smart quips is kind of annoying but maybe that annoyingness is just transference from being made to watch too much Doctor Who. Well, it's better than American quip-based humor writing.
I re-read it recently and it was even better than I remember it being when I first read it as a teenager - I think because my extra life experience meant that I understood the themes of the novel more. Incredibly insightful social commentary.