Discworld is Good

                                                                                     Discworld is Good

         Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is a unique kind of fantasy where worldbuilding and setting are by far the most important and developed elements. All 41 of the novels are different stories from Discworld, many of them being series in themselves like Going Postal and The Watch, and most of them are overlapping in the timeline. Discworld itself is a strange place, being a gigantic flat earth carried on the backs of 4 elephants which themselves are carried on the back of a giant turtle, the Great A’tuin. The biggest city of Discworld is Ankh-Morpork with a population of 1,000,000 and where theft is legal as long as you have a license. There are wizards who are more performers than sorcerers, dragons inside of the streetlights, and a river so polluted that it can be walked across.

         As you might have gathered, Terry Pratchett has a great sense of humor which can be seen throughout the stories. While I wouldn’t call them very complex, the stories of each of the novels cleverly overlap which makes the stories more interesting. However, the best part of this series is the worldbuilding, and there is a lot of it. Ankh-Morpork, which I mentioned above, is the pinnacle of this, being the most interesting and confusing location in the entire series. The worldbuilding builds up over time to make Discworld as a setting not specific to just one book, and so Pratchett can continue to add new information in each book. It’s good enough that even though the plotlines of the books are sometimes uninteresting, it doesn’t really matter because the additions to Discworld itself as a reality are new. However some of the things in the series doesn’t even make sense within the context of Discworld, like how there is a quite literal mind-control fairy-tale land built by a witch, but for the most part everything works.

However, not all of it is good, like how the plotlines of the books are sometimes formulaic, mainly the ones that take place in Ankh-Morpork. It’s usually something like: the protagonist is hired by the government to fix something in the city, some kind of cult is destroyed, and then the protagonist gets married at the end of it. As well, the characters aren’t particularly interesting except for a few such as Granny Weatherwax and Death.

Discworld is a unique series and just for the worldbuilding alone I would recommend it. However, it also includes an extra entire story and is just in general very humorous. If I had to rate it, I would give it a 4/5.

-Ben