Discworld

CompleteAll books have been published

The Discworld is the fictional world where English writer Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels take place. It consists of an interstellar planet-sized disc, which sits on the backs of four huge elephants, themselves standing on the back of a world turtle, named Great A'Tuin, as it slowly swims through space. The Disc is the setting for all forty-one Discworld novels; it was influenced by world religions which feature human worlds resting on turtles, as a setting to reflect situations on Earth, in a humorous way. The Discworld is peopled mostly by three main races: men, dwarfs, and trolls. As the novels progress, other lesser known races are included, such as dragons, elves, goblins, and pixies. Pratchett first explored the idea of a disc-shaped world in the novel Strata (1981).

Publication Order

All 41 Discworld novels in the order Terry Pratchett wrote them, from The Colour of Magic in 1983 to The Shepherd's Crown in 2015. This is how the Disc was built - Pratchett started by parodying fantasy conventions and gradually evolved into one of the sharpest satirists in English literature, using his flat world on the back of a turtle to hold up a mirror to our round one. Reading in publication order means watching Ankh-Morpork grow from a sketchy backdrop into a fully realised city, seeing characters like Sam Vimes and Granny Weatherwax develop across decades, and catching the crossover moments where sub-series collide. The early Rincewind books have a different tone to later novels - lighter, more purely comic - and some readers find them a slower start, but they establish the world that everything else is built on. Publication order is the purist's choice and the way Pratchett's own evolution as a writer unfolds.