Moe Lane

Snuff: A Novel of Discworld has arrived.  It’s one of the Sam Vimes police procedural ones, which are probably my favorite subcategory of Terry Pratchett Discworld novels*.

Go on ahead; I’ll catch up with you later.

Moe Lane

*Well, yes, except for DEATH, of course.  Everybody likes him.

And so, we go from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline to Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals. No, it’s not out yet. But it will be, in about a month – which should be enough lead time for me to be able to splurge on the hardcover.

Hey, it’s Pratchett.

We remove The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression and replace it with The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, which I imagine is a good deal more cheerful.

Well, I have all the Discworld novels, after all. So I’ve already read every word in the book. Just… in different order, that’s all.

Being known for being a stone-cold Terry Pratchett fan – particularly of the Discworld series – I’ve been asked for recommendations about where someone should start if somebody was interested in the series.  The answer is… it depends.

Essentially, the Discworld has gone through at least 3 upgrades since it was created.  Version 1.0 was pretty much a straightforward comic treatment of the sword-and-sorcery genre, complete with various good-natured parodies of other fantasy series.  Somewhere around Small Gods (in my personal opinion) we got version 2.0, which is where Pratchett started contemplating the Discworld as a place where serious (yet comical) stories could be told (as opposed to straightforwardly comic ones).  At some point – probably around the time that the Science of Discworld series came out – we got version 3.0, which is where we start seeing a fully-conscious examining of the implications of Discworld.

None of these iterations are necessarily superior to any other; but it does mean that new readers may be confused by the sometimes wide divergence in styles between any two books.  I therefore suggest that you go by the sub-series, which I’ll discuss below.  I’m not going to list every book in said sub-series: there are a lot of Discworld books, and they sometimes cross over into each other’s narrative thread. (more…)