In the beginning there was . . . a turtle.
Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place which might sound and smell very much like our own, but which looks completely different. Particularly as it’s carried though space on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown). It plays by different rules.
But then, some things are the same everywhere. The Disc’s very existence is about to be threatened by a strange new blight: the world’s first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land. Unfortunately, the person charged with maintaining that survival in the face of robbers, mercenaries and, well, Death, is a spectacularly inept wizard . . .
We all wish to be witty, but few of us are as funny as we think. I’ve learned the hard way that, the less jokes I make, the funnier I get. This is not a problem that ever troubled Terry Pratchett. His puns and witticisms tumble across his pages like a carnival: broad, abstruse, rude, learned, atrocious and hilarious in turn. His is the Marx Brothers way: it’s fine to crowd each page with jokes, if at least one per page makes your reader laugh, or smile with their whole face.
Terry Pratchett is much loved and, since his death last year, sorely missed. In his last three decades, Pratchett wrote 41 Discworld books (ah, but shouldn’t he have written just one more, in honor of his friend Douglas Adams?). He was a creative Niagara Falls, pouring out fresh books, ideas and bad puns. And this is part of what put me off reading Discworld books for so long: the shelf looked like more than I could swallow, or wanted to.
I did read one Discworld book, twenty years ago. A friend, knowing I liked fantasy, wordplay, and rock, gave me Soul Music. It was pretty fun, I enjoyed its energy and good humor; but there I left it. Pratchett does have many charms, but you need to in the mood for him. However, by all reports he grows on you, so that if you like Pratchett after two books, you will love him after twenty.
I have read another book, which Pratchett co-write with one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. It’s the second-best Gaiman I’ve read, after American Gods.
Good Omens is a rollicking romp with a sly and wicked sense of humor — one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. If you’re looking for some holiday cheer in this dark (long nights, one Trump too many) and stressful time of year, then treat yourself to this book. To be digested with liberal applications of beer, wine or spirits.
So I knew from those one and a half Pratchett books that he has many talents I find appealing — but I wasn’t sure Pratchett had any filters on his creative torrent, nor whether I had enough patience to wade through said torrent to find his good stuff.
Eventually, Discworld grew too large and eye-catching to avoid any longer. Fantasy and Humor are my two favorite flavors of escapism. Here at their overlap, Pratchett has compiled a bustling world full of striking characters and skillful plots; and he sifted into his mix the vast jamboree of subjects he knows or cares about. He was extremely bright and sensitive, and sane, which keeps his humor tethered to kindness and faith in all of humanity. Between those fine qualities, and his continual hammering away at his craft, his writing improved considerably across his career.
With all that in Pratchett’s favor, we’re still talking about 41 books. Pratchett’s run on very nimble feet, but that’s still about a year of reading. So I bought the very first Discworld book Pratchett wrote, figuring I’d decide when I was done just how eager I was to dive into more of them. Now, some of you have already read a Discworld book, or two, or perhaps all 41 of them. For you who haven’t, and you who have, let’s see what Discworld looks like, floating through this vast cosmos that Pratchett created around it. Here is the opening of the prologue of the first book, The Colour of Magic:
In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . .
See . . .
Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.
In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.
Most of the weight is accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.
The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartz-windowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.
So the Discworld rests on four gargantuan elephants, standing on an even larger turtle, swimming slowly through interstellar space. On the disc we find countries and cities, some more Rimward, others Hubward, arranged in an approximately Middle Earth-like traditional fantasy world. Only with many more singularities and anachronisms, because as soon as Pratchett builds another vivid patch of Discworld, he needs to poke fun at it and laugh at its impracticality, pomposity or other inherent contradictions. He is a great builder, probably second only to Dickens in all of literature, for his exceptional parade, the hundreds of characters passing through his books. And then popping up in other Discworld books.
The characters in The Colour of Magic look, at first glance, like the ones we know from more serious fantasy books. The story opens on a cool, dark hilltop, a few leagues outside the great city of Ankh-Morpork, which is rapidly catching fire: “Where it licked the Wizard’s Quarter it burned blue and green and was even laced with strange sparks of the eighth color, octarine” — which is the color of magic. Our first two characters, watching Ankh-Morpork burn and betting over what started the blaze, are a barbarian and a thief, Bravd and The Weasel, a parody of or homage to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
In the course of our journey we meet priests and patricians, dryads and dragon-riders, townsfolk high and low, a mountain troll and a sea troll, a Crocodile God and a being who is the opposite of both good and evil. Our hero, Rincewind, is an incompetent, cowardly wizard; I found him a likable rogue, but many readers say Rincewind (who has his own series within Discworld) doesn’t measure up to the heroes of other Discworld series (The Watch, The Witches, Death, Moist Von Lipwig and Tiffany Aching & the Nac Mac Feegles), who apparently are more lovable, colorful, funny, or all of the above.
Pratchett takes great joy in the world he’s building, and in every character in it; you can see that in the electricity running through every page, and how easy it is to get sucked into his word-paintings. But he’s also a very naughty boy. He takes this Discworld, which is a bit too staid and stuffy overall, and drops in Twoflower — the first tourist ever to visit Discworld. Twoflower has no idea what all of his money is really worth (so all the locals are soon trying to swindle or rob him), and no sense of how things work here, of all the habits and traditions that everyone else takes for granted. He is, for Pratchett, a perfect agent of chaos.
Twoflower lands in Ankh-Morpork with far more gold than is safe to carry around, and just one ally, his trunk. The Luggage is made of sapient pearwood, it’s stubbornly loyal to Twoflower and tries to protect him from danger, and it follows him halfway across the world on all of its tiny legs. But we can see that Twoflower will surely perish early, since Discworld is rife with magic, evil and all manner of beasties. Until the gods get involved, as in the Trojan War, with some throwing their dice in Twoflower’s favor, while others plot against him. Rincewind, against his own craven self-serving judgment, gets attached to Twoflower as a protector.
The road from Ankh-Morpork to Chirm is high, white and winding, a thirty-league stretch of potholes and half-buried rocks that spirals around mountains and dips into cool green valleys of citrus trees, crosses liana-webbed gorges on creaking rope bridges and is generally more picturesque than useful.
Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard (B. Mgc., Unseen University [failed]). It was one of a number he had picked up since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one. Picturesque meant—he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word—that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant “idiot.”
As they rode leisurely through the thyme-scented, bee-humming air, Rincewind pondered on the experiences of the last few days. While the little foreigner was obviously insane, he was also generous and considerably less lethal than half the people the wizard had mixed with in the city. Rincewind rather liked him. Disliking him would be like kicking a puppy.
The salient question here, as in every review, is: Should you read The Colour of Magic?
There’s a lot to like about Discworld. I bought this book before heading to a cousin’s wedding in Knoxville, as an airplane read, and it was an apt delight. It flowed quickly by, kept me smiling, and did indeed make me want to read more Discworld books. Pratchett is full of an infectious joy, which comes out in his jokes, his love of wordplay and discovery, his characters, his nicely puzzled out plot, and the welcome feeling that he cared for all of his creation, and every reader too.
Where should you start reading in Discworld? Well, Pratchett said: read the books in the order he wrote them. If you plan to read all 41, that makes sense: his world and themes and skills all grew as he kept writing. If you read the series chronologically, you can follow all their interweavings, and appreciate how Discworld grew organically in Pratchett’s imagination.
But, there are other orders to read the Discworld books in. The most colorful advice is the chart at left, which offers various paths, and can be seen more legibly here, in:
The most comprehensive guide I found was the
which explains the pros and cons of reading the entire series chronologically vs. going theme by theme, and also lists the Discworld books for younger readers and various companion volumes that Pratchett worked on with different collaborators.
But after showing you that wealth of options, my advice to you is: do none of the above. If you’ve never read any of the Discworld books, and you’re neither sure how much you’ll enjoy Discworld, nor how many Discworld books you’ll eventually read, then just start by reading Small Gods. My opinion comes second-hand, from reading some discussions about the best reading order. Everyone says that Small Gods is one of the funniest and most colorful Discworld books. The added bonus is, it’s one of the few stand-alone books, so you don’t have to worry about back story or where the characters came from. Though, this being Pratchett, no doubt some of them pop up in other books.
My own plan is to read Small Gods next, and sometime later get to The City Watch Series (which many readers like best of all the themes). Then I’ll discover whether the eight Watch books, devoured together, convert me into an acolyte, eager to read the remaining 31 tales.
This diary is dedicated to my absent friend, Youffraita. She is so lively and colorful that she deserves to be a character in Discworld. She would have such a hoot there, stirring up mischief and glee.