Couldn’t really think of a title here, so I figured I would ramble a bit until I felt like there was certainly the hint of something being said without, in fact, anything actually being said.

I feel I have achieved this goal.

Now then, the following image was co-opted from Poor Mojo’s Newswire (which itself, co-opted said image from Boing Boing, which itself co-opted said image from L-space…and the internets continue to spiral on…)

Having just finished reading (and, ahem, listening to the audio book) Making Money I look upon this diagram and think that it does a disservice to the discworld series.

You can certainly pick up any of the books, at any time, and start reading. Pratchett does such a good job of summarizing past events when it is necessary that you don’t need to have read everything that has come before. Case in point, in Making Money he references some events from Feet of Clay. Now Feet of Clay is a standard, Pratchett length novel, but in Making Money he talks about some of the events in Feet of Clay for a paragraph, but that’s all the reader really needs to understand the context in which the events in the current novel are happening.

But to break the novels up into several “mini-series” within the larger framework of the universe takes away from how Pratchett developed the world. He did not sit down and write five novels based on Ryncewind and then said “Now I’m going to write some books on the City Watch.” The entire universe evolved organically from Pratchett’s mind. The narratives came up out of the ether and Pratchett put them down as they came. There was no prescribed path through the world as he was creating it.

Maybe I take slight offense at trying to break the series down like this because I read it in order of publication and I believe that everything I do is best. I can certainly understand the desire to break the novels down into more easily “digestable” chunks, rather than thinking about 30+ novels as a series (and this list doesn’t take into account all of the anciallary works like the Mapp’s, the Yearbooks, Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, the RPG, etc.).

On some level, this is just me being nit-picky. Whenever anyone comes into the book store and asks for a recommendation in Sci-Fi and Fantasy I always bring up Pratchett. The more people that read him, the better the world will be, I believe, so if such a breakdown helps someone approach the series I should certainly support that.

OK…well…maybe I had no real point then.

Tags: Terry Pratchett

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Post, Writers, Authors, Various Wordsmiths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.