We are back once again with a question that I see asked
quite frequently on social media that I have answered maybe dozens of times,
often enough that I think its about time to get my thoughts in order here so I
can just direct them to this post rather than just type more or less the same
thing every time. The question in this instance being one of where to start
with the Discworld book series by the late Terry Pratchett.
It’s a simple question but the answer is a little more complicated than one
might imagine. Before I get to that though I will say a little about it and my
relationship with the series for the uninitiated.
The Discworld is a series of comedic fantasy novels written
by Terry Pratchett from 1983 until his untimely death in 2015. If you were
around nerd culture any time in the early 90s to the time of the authors
passing you’ll know exactly what I’m on about, the books were everywhere.
Easons and Waterstones used to have them on prominent display in their
respective genre fiction sections and would do deals on them to entice shoppers
in. They were reviewed in the genre fiction press, SFX did every single one
since it started publishing as did all the other speculative fiction journals
of note and they invariably reviewed well. He put the whole genre of comedic
fantasy on the map in a way that it hadn’t been and spawned numerous, often
poor, imitators. The only place you didn’t really see giving him the love was
in mainstream discourse. This was well before the mainstreaming of nerd
culture, you’d see little about it on TV except the time Tom Paulin on late
review called him an amateur for not using chapters, a quote which made it to
the book covers.
I was a fan myself. I first got into them when I was 14, I
tapped my friend David’s collection to take on holiday with me to Donegal and
read all of them and the couple that I’d scored from the library. I would go
onto read all of the ones published up to that point over the following years
and got those out subsequently as they were released. I also read as much of
Pratchett’s other books as I could get a hold of, his earlier sci-fi works like
Stratra and The Dark Side Of The Sun where he was working out a lot of the
ideas that would become the Discworld, his YA fiction, the Discworld themed
pop-science books that he did with two professional science educators and may
be one of my most formative reads in terms of how I see the world. I also got a
lot of the ancillary materials, the Maps, David Langford’s guides and quizbooks,
the art books by Josh Kirby and Paul Kidby, who did the iconic covers for the
books.
So that is all to say that I feel qualified to answer the
question, where to start and what order to do the series in.
The first thing to get out of the way in answering this is
whether or not to do it in publication order. That seems like the obvious thing
to do, yeah? If you’re a fantasy reader in particular who isn’t daunted by a
big series and is happy to commit to something like that, you’ve likely done
that with another series already. The thing is that the Discworld is not like
conventional fantasy series in which there’s a consistent set of characters or
an overarching narrative, like Wheel Of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. The
single thing that remains consistent between books is the setting, a giant flat
disc-shaped world that sails through the universe on the back of four elephants
which are themselves on the back of giant turtle. The books are all written to
stand alone, though there are some sets of characters and locations that recur
that I will be referring to as sub-series. There can be dense and intricate
plots in each story, but the plots are ultimately there to serve the humour
which is the main purpose of the books. The whole thing is an elaborate
playground that is a sort of mirror of our world but powered by magic that
allows the author to interrogate different elements of the social imagination
for the purpose of comedic satire.
In theory then, you can literally read the series in any
order. Even in the sub-series, you’re only getting minor spoilers, like if you
have read any of the watch books after Guards Guards! you’ll at least know that
none of the original 4 guardsmen who show up in the subsequent books are going
to get killed by a dragon nor that Vetenari’s imprisonment is going to last.
Aside from that you don’t have to for narrative purposes,
the other argument against publication order is that the first two books are
not that much like the rest of the series, arguably worse (though I personally
wouldn’t got that far), and people who might potentially enjoy the books what
Pratchett gets into full swing could be put off by them. I personally think
that’s fair as while I like The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic (the
former much more than the latter) they’re just objectively different to what
the series becomes.
These follow the adventures of Rincewind, a Wizard who can’t
do magic and Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist. The first book ends on a
literal cliff-hanger which is picked up immediately in the second, that’s the
only time the series does anything like this. The Patrician and Death both show
up and act out of what will become their character. There’s a lot of free
associative high fantasy whimsy in the humour that won’t be a big feature of
the books for long. They are mostly a riff on fantasy tropes, in The Colour of
Magic the two main characters clip into our reality for a couple of pages,
again the only time in the series anything like that happens (even the later
books that feature Rincewind). The Colour Of Magic is also unique in that it
feels like a fix-up, being made up of four short-story length sections (though
as far as I know they were never published separately prior to the book
itself). So not worse by any means in my subjective opinion, just different.
That said, there are two different groups of people that I
would actually recommend doing publication order to:
1.
People who are already familiar with and enjoy
the stuff Pratchett was riffing on and influenced by when he started writing
the books, I’m thinking specifically Douglas Adams and Fritz Lieber, but also
Micheal Moorcock, 70s/80s British humour in general, the early classics, i.e.
Tolkien, Howard, Lovecraft etc.
2.
People who are going to commit to reading the
whole thing, sight unseen. Maybe they’ve read some of Pratchetts non-discworld
books or they just know themselves well enough to know that its going to be
their thing. That and they’re happily cognisant of the issues the first couple
in the series might present themselves with and will plough on regardless.
So, if not publication order, where then to start?
So, I have mentioned the sub series. Whilst some of the books stand completely
alone and some are only connected thematically, most of the books are part of a
sub-series which are set in the same location and/or have a recurring cast of
characters. These may on occasion intersect with each other, its complicated.
As I have said earlier, even these may be read in any order but I think it is
optimal that you do actually do them in the order they came out as it is nice
to see the characters and their situations develop and pay off over time. For
that reason in my opinion the first book of one of these is one of the best
places to start.
These are as follows:
·
Mort – this is the first book where the
anthropomorphic personification of mortality, the grim reaper aka Death who
shows up in nearly every book and SPEAKS ENTIRELY IN CAPITALS WITH NO QUOTATION
MARKS LIKE THIS gets his own dedicated book. The titular character Mort is
taken on as his apprentice, hilarity ensues. This is the start of the Death
series.
·
Wyrd Sisters – while this is not the first book
to feature the chief Witch Granny Weatherwax, it’s the first to be set in her
home country of Lancre (which is kind of the Scottish Highlands analogue of the
Disc but has Cornwall coding in there too, some adaptations give the residents
West Country accents) and feature her coven. It’s a riff on Macbeth, but so
much more than that.
·
Guards Guards! – This is the first book to
centre the Watch, the police of Ankh-Morpork, the chief city of the Disc. It’s
a lot of fun, some argue the exact point where the series goes from ‘Good’ to
‘Great’. It’s a fun mash up of police thriller / mystery, and high fantasy. One
could argue that the cops being the good guys makes it copaganda and therefore
ideologically suspect, I don’t disagree per sé but the take on policing and law
and order in general is cynical and there’s enough nuance in there that it’s
not that much of an issue, at least to me.
·
The Wee Free Men – This is the first featuring
Tiffany Aching, a young girl who is set to become the witch or wise-woman of
The Chalk, which feels a bit like the Discs analogue of the rural Home Counties
area of England. As such it is witch-adjacent, Granny Weatherwax does show up
as an advisor and mentor to the main character much as she does in her first
book Equal Rites. That said these books are very much their own thing, Granny
being there is basically an Easter Egg for the adults who have read the
previous novels and have deigned to read this since it is actually the only
series that is marketed as YA and intended for a younger audience. This and The
Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the first Discworld YA and only YA
stand alone, to my mind make for the perfect onboarding point for tweens to
older teens, particularly those who have already read and enjoy a bit of YA
fantasy. And it isn’t like adults aren’t going to enjoy these, the Tiffany
Aching sub-series are good examples of what YA is and what it can do at its
best.
·
Going Postal – This is the first of the Moist
Von Lipwig books. It’s a bit of a departure as it’s the first non YA Discworld
book to be divided into chapters. Its arguably part of a longer thematic
subseries chronicling the Disc, or at least the part in proximity to
Ankh-Morpork, undergoing a process analogous to our industrial revolution. Most
of this takes place in the stand alone books but it’s a bit of a running theme
in the Watch books as well as policing in the city gets progressively
modernised by Vimes as it goes on. In this one the postal service gets
overhauled by a former gifted and ingenious con man who gets roped in against
his will by Vetenari. Moist is low key one of the best characters in the Disc
and this is representative of the late stages and most mature portion of the
run, some would argue its objectively the best written of the books I’ve listed
so far.
So those are the first books of each of the sub series. You
could also again start with the first books as Rincewind’s various adventures
around the Disc constitute a series in themselves. He ends up getting a lot of
the high fantasy “we need to stop the end of the world” shenanigans. Of the
stand alone books, there are a few that I would consider good jumping in
points. These are:
·
Small Gods – this might be the best book in the
series, or at least a close second to Nightwatch which while great does come
deep into the watch subseries and definitely rewards familiarity with the wider
lore and is a good example of one you probably ought to leave until you’re
already immersed. It’s Pratchetts most definitive philosophical statement as it
deals with organised religion and is animated by his deeply held secular
humanist beliefs. On the Disc the way that religion works, with it being a
magical space powered by the element narrativium that permeates the universe
and ensures that reality takes the shape of stories, if people believe in gods
that brings them into existence and they become sentient autonomous beings with
godlike powers, who mostly live in the great tower Cor Celesti at the Disc’s
centre where they idly play something like DnD with the lives of the mortals
elsewhere as depicted through the first couple of books and feed off of the
faithful belief of their followers. Not so in the desert country of Omnia which
is a violent and expansive theocracy, it is monotheistic and seeks to supplant
all other faiths with Omnianism. You’d think their god Om then would be doing
well, but the religion has been so ossified and calcified into the bureaucratic
structure of the organised church to the point where there’s only one person
left who has a genuine faith and he can only manifest as a small turtle. Now if
you think that sounds very fedora tippy, nu-Athiest-y then you wouldn’t be
entirely wrong. Pratchett was very outspoken in his advocacy for atheism back
in the day and no doubt shared a portion of his fanbase with the 4 horsemen.
Unlike them though he didn’t turn into a massive wanker the second 9/11
happened and cosy up to the American Christian right and their war of terror
against the middle east. It’s a good time.
·
The Truth – This is one that could be considered
in the Industrial Revolution series. These follow a loose format of: X industry
/ facet of modernity comes to the Disc, hilarity ensues. In this case its
Journalism. This is something Pratchett was more than familiar with having been
a journalist then press officer in his career prior to writing full time. It’s
clever and quite fun, there’s an elaborate political thriller plot that is executed
really nicely, its got one of the best cast of characters and while the main
turns up later you don’t get one with the full crew like this again.
·
Monstrous Regiment – This is a take on the time
honoured pop culture trope of the girl who cuts her hair to go join the army,
as seen in popular broadside ballads over the last couple of centuries. It’s
one I would recommend to anyone who is trans or gender non-conforming
themselves as it is as clear a statement on all that as you could ask for since
Pratchett himself passed before JK Rowling lost the plot and initiated a
culture war and felt the need to weigh in personally on the issue. It certainly
made for a firm rebuttal to those claiming on socials that he would have been a
TERF. And it’s a good book on its own merits, feels almost like a Sharpe novel
with a bit of a fantasy twist.
So, those are my recs as someone who has read the whole
thing. Doing the sub series in order with each other at least is as far as I
would go as far as general advice or sticking strictly to the publication
order. If you want to do all the Witches or Death books, then all the Watch,
then the Rincewind / UU Wizards books, that’s fine, or jump between them it
doesn’t matter. I actually didn’t do any of that myself to be fair. When I
started my journey over the Disc myself at 14 I read the first book having picked
up a copy at a second hand stall at my first Q-Con. I got the most recent one
(Masquerade) due to one of those dodgy book subscription things you used to get
in every 2000AD back in the mid 90s. Some of the ones I borrowed from David
were the second books in their respective sub-series, so I read Reaper Man and
Witches Abroad before Mort or Wyrd Sisters. Until I actually got caught up and
was getting them as they were coming out I was all over the place. It didn’t do
my appreciation of the books any harm, and that’s why I’d say that
fundamentally it’s not that important. Read what you want, in any order you
want. Read the blurbs and if something catches your fancy get stuck in.
