Discworld is a series of 41 books written by British fantasy author Terry Pratchett and published between 1983 and 2015. According to Pratchett fan Cory Doctorow, the Canadian author and activist, they got better over time: "Pratchett’s early novels, including his early Discworld novels, are merely okay, and his later novels are great."
“In Discworld, Pratchett has set up a world where the power of faith is something that humans have but don’t fully understand, and it can literally create things. So the gods in Discworld are a function of the strength of the belief of their followers. This is a beautiful, crazy concept, and Discworld is full of these beautiful, crazy concepts. And yet, it’s not that farfetched, because when you have a particular format in which you squeeze your idea of deity, the larger the church or the religion, the more you are able to continue to perpetuate and enforce it. So it’s not coming out of nowhere.” Read more...
The Best Speculative Fiction About Gods and Godlike Beings
Karen Lord, Novelist
“Most people will have heard of Discworld. There are 41 books in the series. Pratchett was an amazing and prolific writer…Snuff is one of those great ones, and it stands alone quite well. It is a cozy murder mystery set in a stately manor in the equivalent of the English countryside—a place called The Shire, in which the local magistrates are the great and the good, and in which they are all complicit in a murder…The hero of this book is Sam Vimes. He’s one of the most important heroes of the Pratchett canon. He’s a cop and he’s on vacation. A delightful trope of the police procedural is the cop on vacation who stumbles upon a murder, and this novel has some of the best little tasty elements of that. His loving and quite well-drawn wife, Sybil, has told him he’s overworked and has conspired with his colleagues and his boss (who’s effectively the dictator of the city for which he is chief of police) to force him to go on vacation. Of course, Vimes immediately literally stumbles upon a murder.” Read more...
Cory Doctorow, Novelist
“This book is Pratchett at his best, for me. It’s a really solid thriller. What he does with the Vimes character is that he makes a policeman: just any copper. He’s a copper who thinks like a copper. He doesn’t trust clues. And because it’s the Discworld, he’s a copper who knows his frame of reference: he knows about Raymond Chandler, he knows about Poirot. He’s the type of character who’s constantly winking at the genre that he’s also a part of. Somehow, despite all that winking, he’s an actual brilliant character, who solves the mystery by being dogged, in the same way that Marlowe does, but has Sherlock Holmes-like abilities of deduction. He can also sit down and ponder things through like Poirot. So he’s got elements of all the best detectives. But then, it’s a fantasy. It’s also a time travel book. And Pratchett does all these things brilliantly. He gives you everything you’d want from a time travel book – like, he goes back in time and intersects with a younger version of himself, who he has to train up to be the man he’s going to become.” Read more...
Stuart Turton, Novelist
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (Discworld series Book 28)
by Terry Pratchett
🏆 Winner of the 2001 Carnegie Medal
The Colour Of Magic (Discworld series Book 1)
by Terry Pratchett
The first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. There are another 40 of them in the series.
