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. Continue reading Unpacking Discworld.