Terry Pratchett's flat world rides on four elephants and a turtle
Discworld is a flat planet balanced on four elephants, who stand on the shell of a giant turtle swimming through space. Terry Pratchett used that absurd premise for 41 novels between 1983 and 2015, selling more than 80 million copies in 37 languages while quietly skewering religion, business, prejudice and policing.
The series began with The Colour of Magic in 1983 and ended with The Shepherd's Crown, published after Pratchett's death in 2015; no further novels are planned. The books made him the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. Four Discworld titles made the top 100 of the BBC's Big Read, and fourteen reached the top 200. The novels also won the Carnegie Medal and the Prometheus Award.
Although each book stands alone, most cluster around recurring casts. The first hero, Rincewind, is a cowardly wizard with no talent, because one fearsome spell lodged in his head and frightened all the others away. The witches of Lancre, led by the prickly Granny Weatherwax and the cheerful Nanny Ogg, rarely use magic, preferring shrewd psychology they call headology. The City Watch novels follow Sam Vimes as a hopeless three-man night patrol grows into a proper police force; Pratchett complained that the Watch made any Ankh-Morpork story turn into a Watch story by default.
Death himself is a seven-foot skeleton who rides a horse named Binky and speaks in small capitals without quotation marks. He appears in every novel except two, adopted a human daughter and took on an apprentice in Mort, and grew fond of humanity over the millennia. At Unseen University, promotion once came by assassination, and the Librarian, turned into an orangutan by a magical accident, refuses to be changed back.
The satire ranges widely. Small Gods tackles religion, Thud takes on fundamentalism and urban tension, Making Money covers finance, and Snuff deals with racial exploitation, while other books send up opera, rock music, cinema and football. The young witch Tiffany Aching, guarded by six-inch blue-tattooed Nac Mac Feegle, anchors five novels for younger readers.
Source: Discworld
