The Great Discworld Retrospective: an introduction

Next month sees a significant anniversary of a beloved series. It has fans all around the world who love the amazing adventures that the characters have had in a variety of different settings.

I am, of course, referring to Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. On the 24th of November (the day after that other DW-initialed series turns 60), The Colour Of Magic (Book 1) turns 40.

40!

Discworld is a phenomenon. It’s a series of 41 books that covers a vast range of characters, settings and themes. All upon a flat world sitting on the backs of four enormous elephants who perch upon the shell of a ridiculously big turtle. And it all came from the mind of one man – Sir Terry Pratchett.

I’m taking a look at each one of them over the next year-and-a-half. I’ll be starting with The Colour Of Magic on the 24th of November and every 10 or 11 days after that I’ll be posting about each of the other 40 books. In publication order. The books will be a major focus of this series, but I will be dipping into subsidiary media where appropriate, usually when the book that it has a link to comes up. The reason being is that while I’ve read all the short stories and read/seen most of the spin-off media, the books are what I keep going back to and what everything else is built upon.

They’re the important stuff where most of Pratchett’s energy was focused. 

Anyway, the posts are going to follow the standard Stuff Ian Likes formula: I’ll talk a little about the plot of the book, about the history and background of it and then I’ll talk about what makes it important to me. I’ve been reading Discworld since The Colour Of Magic first came out in paperback in 1985, when I was 15. The Shepherd’s Crown, the last novel in the series, came in 2015 when I was 45. But Pratchett’s death didn’t mean that the novels stopped coming. And not in a creepy V.C Andrews style either: we got the wonderful Long Earth books that had been co-written with Stephen Baxter; the fabulous anthologies… and just this month we were treated to a new collection of short stories that could have been lost to history forever but for the painstaking work of fans. 

So this is just my little tribute to an author and a series that has brought me so much joy over the years and whose books frequently marked important times in my own life.

For those of you who aren’t huge fans of Discworld (as if!), don’t panic: the regular posts will continue at the end of each month. And the podcast will still be coming out in the middle of each month (approximately). This is just a side-project I’m going to be running in addition to the regular Stuff.

But if you are a Discworld fan, I’m hoping you’ll enjoy this as much as I’m planning to.

See you next month!