Miniseries: The Colour of Magic

[Eishtmo]

See, that's not how I understand it at all. Terry willed that all of his materials be destroyed via steam roller so that no one can ever continue his work. Surely if he wanted Rhianna to continue it he wouldn't have done that(?)

Actually it does work. Those notes would be for HIS series, not HER series. If he wanted her to take over, then it would be on her terms, with her stories and ideas, not his.

[Darth Wedgius]

My PDA from a parallel universe insists that we're all saying the series isn't as good with Rhianna writing it and she should have insisted that The Shepherd's Crown was the last book.

This leads to a lot of questions, foremost of which is... What kind of universe still has PDAs?

[AllanO]

This leads to a lot of questions, foremost of which is... What kind of universe still has PDAs?

Well you can still buy a new iPod touch, so I guess you have one of those.

Also, I loved that Chuck referenced Sourcery while explaining eighth son of an eighth son. It's probably the weakest Discworld novel but I quite liked it.

I would have said Eric was the weakest Discworld novel, but I have not read the last two (Raising Steam and Shepherd's Crown).

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There have been some good suggestions for start here books, my suggestion is that you pick the books that he wrote whilst in good health. It is generally agreed that once he got ill, Pratchett started to get more heavy handed with his political and religious views and the general tone got darker. Which is fine if those things do not bother you but others found them to be wanting. Its not a Discworld book, but ''Nation'' is notorious for being a sermon.

Note that he wrote Nation before he was diagnosed. He wrote an essay where he said the theory that he wrote Nation in response to his diagnosis was great but not true it was finished well before. So it may just have been that he got old and crankier.

But he was always pretty cranky as he put it to Gaiman when they had a set back during the book tour and Gaiman told him to calm down “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.”

I think while his allegory and commentary (places where his fantasy world had people and events that seemed very Earth-life like) got less subtle and more direct in the last few books, there was some pretty blatant examples of that sort of thing in earlier works such as Small Gods.

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Personally I like the first couple of books in part because they are different, if cruder in many ways than the later ones.

In addition to all the actual fantasy authors at work there, there are also some jabs at Dungeons and Dragons thrown in for good measure in Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic, I seem to remember the implication that the Wizard's magic worked a lot more like it did in Dungeon and Dragons in the first book or two.

[CmdrKing]

HOnestly, reading Snuff (and to a lesser extent this was true in Raising Steam as well), the Embuggerance's main impact on the quality of Pratchett's work was less that the stories were less interesting or Discworld-y and more that his capacity to couch his messaging in humor and wordplay waned, so you got the full impact of what he was saying rather than having to have a think about it.

[griffeytrek]

This is the only Discworld book I have ever purchased and attempted to read.
I got up to (I think) chapter 8 (I recall a little demon popping out of the camera and saying they were out of pink) before I put the book down and never went back.

It was a little too dense with shtick for me. I liked all of the bits, but there seemed like there was no break between all the insane-goofy for me to just chill out and process what I was reading.

From the description in the video (that what Discworld started out as and what it became) I guess this was the wrong book to start with.

Is there a preferred, "START HERE" book for newcomers? Because I have seen so many ideas from the setting discussed in a manner that makes me curious that I WANT to like it, but... there are so many god damned books...

It is like the Harry Dresden problem I have, where everyone keeps telling me, "It gets good around book X, but you need to read the early books to see everything being set up"... and I read the first 3 and was like, "Okay, it is fine, I guess, I understand why people like it."

All of the Diskworld books are semi independent. But they mostly intertwine. The earliest books don't quite fit in with the later well defined and established world. The Color of Magic and Light Fantastic are really more parodies of old school fantasy novels, and less really strong works on their own. Equal Rights introduces an important character in Granny Weatherwax, but she is wildly different from her later established self that you can almost ignore it. It only gets referenced again lightly in one of the final books. Mort is important as backstory, but may not be a good starting place. Go back to it later. At the beginning Diskworld is just a humorous high fantasy world simply spoofing stuff like the Conan or Fritz Lieber stories. And that is mostly the case through the first 5 books. Starting with Wyrd Sisters it starts to become it's more established reflection of a world with magic, just on the edge of an industrial or Victorian age.

To start I would recommend Wyrd Sisters and Guards Guards. They introduce two of the strongest sub themes of recurring characters. The Witches of Lancre and the Ankh Morpork City Watch, and pretty much define the world for the remainder of the novels. Hogfather is also a fun read and good intro, even though it is the 4th book in its sub series.

Chuck gets one thing sort of wrong. The Patrician in The Color of Magic and Light Fantastic is not Ventinari, yet. Ventinari actually appears for the first time in Sourcery. And we really see him as the character he is known as, the ever 5d chess playing ruler, in Guards Guards, which defines him going forward. The assumption is the Patrician in Color of Magic and Light Fantastic is Mad Lord Snapcase, near the end of his rule.

[griffeytrek]

Admittedly I haven't read Shepard's Crown, but do we have any evidence that Sir Terry wanted his daughter to continue writing novels in the Discworld canon? Or is it all inference? Last I heard was that Rhianna Pratchett was to be the caretaker of the series, but that this meant being consulted for adaptations and such, not writing new books.

According to Wikipedia...
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/terry-pratchett-my-daughter-rhianna-will-take-over-discworld-when-im-gone

[Rhianna] will be a co-writer on the BBC Discworld series The Watch,

The Watch will continue the well-loved City Watch saga where the books left off, and Rhianna will be an important member of the writing team. The author tells me that he will be happy for her to continue writing the Discworld books when he is no longer able to do so. "The Discworld is safe in my daughter's hands," Pratchett assures me.

And then after Terry died...
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/terry-pratchett-discworld-series-comes-to-an-end-as-daughter-rhianna-rules-out-future-books-10312426.html

confirmation came today that there will be no more Discworld novels after The Shepherd's Crown.

When acclaimed author Pratchett died in March aged 66 after suffering from Alzheimer's, fans of his fantasy series speculated that his daughter Rhianna, a video game writer, may take up the baton and pen some herself.

But earlier this month, Rhianna said that she will not be writing any Discworld books or giving "anyone else permission to do so".

Larry Finlay, managing director of Pratchett's publisher Transworld, told The Bookseller that the writer's legacy will be "preserved and curated...according to his family's wishes".

It's not absolute, but it seems as if Terry wanted Rhianna to write more books, but after Terry died, Rhianna finally put her foot down about where she draws the line.

And, maybe it was all in my head, but The Shepherd's Crown looked a lot to me like Terry's last attempt to get Rhianna to change her mind on the issue.

Maybe if Rhianna writes a book about a shopkeeper in Ankh-Morpork, it can be about fathers who ask too much of their children with regards to carrying on their family business.

Perhaps it was because I (and a lot of others) did have some interaction with Rhianna back in the day on various video game forums, that I always got the idea that Rhianna was to be the steward of the IP, and specifically not the writer of new novels. Largely because she is not and never has been a novelist. It's just not what grabbed her back then. She's an excellent script writer who has also written the stories of some excellent video games. I would love to see her give us a new video game adaption of her fathers characters at some point (Gog.com why do you fail us by not resurrecting that long lost game) . And she would seem a good choice to oversee any of her fathers IP to screen. But I don't believe she's ever had any interest in writing his books?

[Independent George]

Chuck gets one thing sort of wrong. The Patrician in The Color of Magic and Light Fantastic is not Ventinari, yet. Ventinari actually appears for the first time in Sourcery. And we really see him as the character he is known as, the ever 5d chess playing ruler, in Guards Guards, which defines him going forward. The assumption is the Patrician in Color of Magic and Light Fantastic is Mad Lord Snapcase, near the end of his rule.

No, Chuck is 100% correct. Pratchett explicitly stated in interviews that it's Vetinari - that's what Chuck is talking about in his review.

[AllanO]

No, Chuck is 100% correct. Pratchett explicitly stated in interviews that it's Vetinari - that's what Chuck is talking about in his review.

I think it was actually a series of usenet posts, one here: https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.books.pratchett/kBy-RgLTI5w/3anrnndZA3wJ

I think the key one Chuck quoted? (about being Vetinari written by a more stupid writer) is quoted in this message, can't find the original: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.fan.pratchett/kBy-RgLTI5w/yypJUZqmQoYJ

I only found all this thanks to this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/discworld/comments/9lbo5u/question_about_the_fat_patrician/ which links to one of those usenet posts and this annotation of Colour of Magic https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/the-colour-of-magic.html

[hammerofglass]

The facts that Rhianna's writing interests are directed to videogames and comics and that her style of humour is completely different (the Overlord games were hers) probably have something to do with it.

[AndrewGPaul]

I actually rather like Snuff and Raising Steam. Yes, the characterisation is off - Vimes and Vetinari and so on don't talk like Vimes and Vetinari - but I can sort of gloss over that. Snuff continues the "rehabilitation" theme of Unseen Academicals, and adds something interesting to the setting. I like the goblins, myself. Raising Steam had an interesting "retro travelogue" feel and in a way reminded me of bits of China Miéville's Iron Council. While the polish was gone, I thought both of them were fairly serviceable.

In hypothetical future works, the tensions between modernising goblins and the more traditional communities is something to work with, although you'd need to make sure it's not a retread of the dwarfs' story. There's also the opening up of the territory of the Evil Empire; we started to see bits of Uberwald in The Fifth Elephant, but that was only the important people at the top. There's also the hublands plains and Llamedos to be explored, as well as Howondaland. I also wonder sometimes how the more "fantastical" places survive into the more "rational" age the later books portray. Does the Wyrmberg have a railway station or a Clakcs tower? Is Ponder Stibbons ordering in monoliths from those druids from The Light Fantastic?

I'd like a major sub-series in Klatch. Not a spinoff of Jingo; that'd just be The Watch in turbans, but something to really dig into that side of the Circle Sea. Or perhaps let Susan go home for a while; despite hiding as a governess in Ankh-Morpork, she is still duchess of Sto Helit.