For questions about Discworld, a series of comic fantasy books by Terry Pratchett.
Discworld is a series of comic fantasy books by Terry Pratchett terry-pratchett, set on the Discworld, a flat world.
Discworld books are chock-full of jokes and more or less obscure allusions to historical anecdotes, classical mythology and fairy tales, earlier writers, contemporaneous pop-culture and more. Many of these are documented in the collaboratively-maintained Annotated Pratchett File (APF).
The Discworld books are organized in several storylines. The suggested reading order of these books has been the subject of intense debate.
The Discworld
The Discworld is a flat disc balanced on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a turtle floating in space. A Discworld year lasts 800 days.
The Discworld is ruled by narrative causality: what happens is what the Story makes happen (however, the characters write the Story to some extent). The gods of the Discworld are constrained by narrative causality as well, and their power is tributary to the people who believe in them.
Most of the Discworld has humans as a dominant species, but it is also populated by dwarfs, trolls, gnomes and other fantasy species as well as various kinds of undead.
Discworld books
The Discworld series includes:
- 41 novels (6 of which are aimed at younger readers)
- several short stories.
- 4 Science of Discworld books combining the Discworld with popular science, coauthored with mathematician Ian Stewart) and biologist Jack Cohen
- 2 quiz books by David Langford
- yearly editions of the Discworld Diary
- the Discworld Companion by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs
- several maps (the Mapps)
- other companion material
Adaptations
- 18 Discworld novels have been adapted for the stage by Stephen Briggs.
- A few have been adapted into television movies or miniseries.
- The BBC has made several radio adaptations.
- 3 novels have been adapted into graphic novels.
External references
- The Annotated Pratchett File, an explanation of many jokes and references in Pratchett's books
- Discworld reading order guides
- The Discworld timeline
- The L-Space Web
- Other resources
- The alt.books.pratchett (abp) and alt.fan.pratchett (afp) newsgroups
