Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

Conman Moist von Lipwig is sentenced to death-by-hanging, but is saved at the last second by Ankh-Morpork's Patrician, who then tasks him with resurrecting the Post Office (this passes for a career path on Discworld). Moist finds his task complicated by a tiny staff, a headquarters overrun by decades' worth of undelivered mail, and competition from the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, who can send a message across the entire continent in the time it takes a mailman to have his first cuppa of the day. It falls to Moist, several golems and a very punctual cat to save the Post Office and restore a decrepit Ankh-Morpork institution to greatness. Or something adjacent to it, anyway.  

Going Postal, the thirty-third Discworld novel, is a super red-hot, contemporary piece of timely fiction. It's Sir Terry Pratchett's exploration of zeitgeisty ideas like late-stage capitalism and ensh!tt!f!cat!on, the way a beautiful and amazingly convenient idea/business is taken over the money people and the product is made ten times worse in the relentless pursuit of extra profit, and any attempt to compete with it is ruthlessly crushed by lawyers or the competition just being bought out.

Of course, Pratchett had no truck with the linear progression of time, hence this hugely topical piece of modern metafiction actually came out in 2004, which may indicate that Pratchett was a peerless seer of the future or he was just engaging with constant truths of human nature.

Most book series, let alone fantasy book series, struggle when they're thirty-three volumes deep. The author can be forgiven for phoning things in, settling back on their laurels or employing thinly-veiled cover versions of their earlier character and storylines and collecting the cheque. After teetering a little on the precipice of that in the mid-twenties of the novels, Pratchett decided to go the more difficult route of challenging himself with new characters and new audiences, such as the YA focus of the Tiffany Aching sub-series. Going Postal appears to be familiar, with the story once again exploring the introduction of a real life concept to the fantasy metropolis of Ankh-Morpork and the resulting mayhem (one of the oldest standby plots in the series), but it's got a much sharper bite than some of the earlier novels in the same vein, and the protagonist - an unrepentant conman and charlatan - is a bit darker than Pratchett's norm. Pratchett's protagonists are sometimes well-meaning bumblers who end up becoming heroes reluctantly, or older, more established, overly-cynical veterans who are dragged back into being in the thick of events, or hyper-competent people constantly bewildered by the incompetence of everyone else in the world. Moist von Lipwig is different, and maybe a bit more challenging than most of Pratchett's characters, being a lot more selfish and less sympathetic.

This all combines to make Going Postal feel incredibly familiar and quite new and fresh, which is an impressive achievement. The book also makes a statement by starting with a bang and just keeps going, with Moist plucked from certain death into uncertain-death-by-tedious-bureaucracy and the story moving like a freight train, despite its (by Pratchettian standards) generous 470+ page count. We get cameos by the City Watch and Unseen University wizards, but for once they don't take over the book. We also get a bit more of Patrician Vetinari than normal, and more insights into how Vetinari keeps the messy engine of the city running without going stark raving mad. The semaphore towers - the "clacks" - have been a key part of the background worldbuilding for quite a few novels now but here take front and centre, with plenty of exploration of how the service works and its own arcane customs (like the memories of deceased tower operators kept alive in the network, zooming back and forth along the network).

Pratchett packs a lot in, including further exploration of the golems and a potential romance between Moist and the chain-smoking Adora Bell Dearheart. Maybe even too much: the romance doesn't get a huge amount of development and he seems to lose a little bit of the thread with what to do with the villain at the end, who first appears to being set up as an ongoing antagonist to Moist but Pratchett seems to change his mind at the last minute.

But it's hard to argue with the results. Going Postal (****½) manages to feel safe and edgy at the same time, bringing in ideas both new and old and unfolding with some vigour. Pratchett is on fine form here, and with Moist von Lipwig he has created a compelling new protagonist whom you'll look forwards to seeing again.

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A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

Tiffany Aching has begun her apprenticeship as a witch, working for Miss Tick, who has one soul but two bodies. After a dull start to her work, they are accosted by a hiver, a formless spirit which can possess living bodies, driving them to acts of malice. Tiffany has to fight for her body and soul, but fortunately has a group of surprisingly capable allies: the diminutive, oft-drunk Nac Mac Feegle, and the formidably competent Granny Weatherwax.

A Hat Full of Sky is the thirty-second Discworld novel and the second (of an eventual five) to focus on the character of Tiffany Aching. Originally published in 2004, Terry Pratchett had decided to write a series of Discworld books aimed at younger readers. Amusingly, due to Pratchett's utter refusal to talk down to children, he doesn't entirely seem to know how to do this, so has knocked off the occasional double entendre from his writing and shaved off about 100 pages from his average page count but otherwise carried on as normal.

As a result, A Hat Full of Sky feels like vintage Pratchett, just more focused (no bad thing; some Discworld books tend to circle the drain a few times before finding their point, which is not the case here). The cast is much smaller than normal, the scope more intimate, bordering on the claustrophobic. Given the nature of the story is very internal, this feels appropriate.

The main story, ostensibly, is about Tiffany getting possessed and "turned bad," although Pratchett seems to be ahead on the curve on how this could have been tedious. Tiffany only spends a small amount of time possessed by the hiver, with most of the book revolving around events before and after. Pratchett is often less interested in the most obvious route to humour or action, and more interested in causes and results. Pratchett is also a very human writer, so here his focus is more on the impact caused by events on Tiffany's character and even feeling empathy for the hiver, the "monster" of the story.

That's not to say the book isn't funny. Pratchett's skill at wordplay and minor-but-amusing worldbuilding details (some of them drawing on real-life folklore, as the afterword attests) remains undimmed. He also spends a bit more time making the Nac Mac Feegle a deeper and more interesting culture. Them showing up drunk, head-butting a badger and yelling "crivens!" can only get you so far, so here a more thorough exploration of Rob Anybody's character and the motivations of his new queen - who finds the tribe's allegiance to Tiffany bemusing - adds more depth to a group previously only known for knockabout comedy value.

Pratchett also deploys Granny Weatherwax with restraint, though she has more page-time than in The Wee Free Men. One of Discworld's most iconic, formidable and impressive protagonists, it would be easy for Granny to take over the narrative and deal with Tiffany's problems for her in five minutes, so Pratchett is good at using her tactically during the book's finale, so as not to outshine our actual protagonist. Tiffany herself develops nicely here, the traditional "why am I not being taught actual magic on Day One of learning to be a witch?" storyline being quickly displaced by a more thoughtful, intelligent examination of responsibility, empathy and consequences.

A Hat Full of Sky (****) is Pratchett at his most focused and disciplined here, delivering a smart, tight story. It's not the most expansive Discworld story and some may prefer the more widescreen/deranged antics of, say, the City Watch in Ankh-Morpork, but it's a very solid read.

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Wertzone Classics: Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett

Borogravia is a minor but bellicose country, with a long history of invading its neighbours under the pretext of religious commands given by the deity Nuggan. With Nuggan's commands becoming more unhinged (banning ginger hair, garlic, cats, jigsaw puzzles and the colour blue), the reasons for war become increasingly random as well. Its neighbours, finally fed up by its constant aggression, have joined with the regional superpower of Ankh-Morpork to finally end the threat once and for all.

With war raging - or shambolically bumbling around - bar worker Polly Perks decides to go searching for her missing brother. She poses as a man to join the army and is assigned to a new regiment, only to find out almost the entire company has had the same idea. With women doing men's work also deemed an Abomination Unto Nuggan, the regiment has to keep their heads down, infiltrate an enemy keep, and work out how to rescue/escape their assorted family members, and, if possible, end the war before it causes any more damage.

Throughout his prolific career, Sir Terry Pratchett had a knack for using his witty dialogue, sharp prose and keen knowledge of history and culture to explore many different concepts. In most cases, he produced a brilliant Discworld book exploring a certain idea, like the press or the dangers of fundamentalist religion. But, when he turned his attention to the idea of war, he uncharacteristically dropped the ball. Jingo was perfectly okay, but lacked his trademark intelligence and depth.

Ten books later, he decided to give it another go, and this time nailed it. If Jingo was about the superficialities of going to war for absolutely no sane reason, Monstrous Regiment is about war as a much more complex force. Here we have burned-out homesteads, villages standing amidst salted fields and people's homes being invaded for reasons they don't really understand. Borogravia is fighting a defensive war against invaders, but it's also been a bellicose lunatic in the past, and is being flattened under the weight of the abuse heaped upon it by its own rulers. This creates a complex stew of ideas and themes, which is where Pratchett is at his best.

Polly and her fellow soldiers have little interest in the greater geopolitical complexities of the war, instead just trying to rescue individual people from the maelstrom. But, thanks to a chance encounter with newspaper reporter William de Worde (cameoing from The Truth), their mission inadvertently becomes famous across half the continent, and takes on a grander importance. It's also symbolic of the losses Borogravia has suffered, where an entire regiment is made up of women because there's increasingly few men left able to fight.

As in his best, most cutting books, Pratchett remembers to keep the funny: the regiment consists of an assortment of funny characters, the most memorable being Maladict, a suave, reformed vampire who has sworn off blood but developed an equally crippling addiction to coffee. But there's an undercurrent of seriousness here that is powerful: more than a few of the recruits have been victimised, and how they deal with trauma is a subtle but constant theme of the book. Sergeant Jackrum also emerges as one of Pratchett's most fascinating characters, a counterpoint of his more familiar Commander Vimes (who has a few brief appearances in the novel as an Ankh-Morpork liaison) who went down a decidedly more disturbing path (with more than a whiff of Life on Mars' Gene Hunt to them as well, for good and ill).

The book unfolds with a very deliberate pace: at just under 500 pages this is one of the longest Discworld novels but it earns its length by dividing the narrative into several distinct sections as the mission unfolds, as well as the larger-than-normal cast giving Pratchett a lot of characters to develop. But this also gives the book the feel of holding a stick of dynamite that's about to go off. Pratchett is known for being funny but he is absolutely at his best when he is angry, and I get the distinct impression as he wrote the book and continued researching things like the treatment of people in war, especially women and "non-conformists," he got progressively angrier. By the time the book concludes, the humour is so laced with white-hot rage that it is positively acidic. But Pratchett also never loses control. He doesn't go into some lecturing rant (a weakness some of his other books suffer from) and he never dissipates the focus on the story or characters.

Monstrous Regiment (*****) is Pratchett's take on war - actual, messy, horribly murky war - and gender and politics. It's a long book, by his standards, but he maintains the pacing and tension to deliver one of his finest and most thought-provoking novels.

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The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is serious and studious for her age, and has little truck with myths and superstition. When her brother is kidnapped by an evil supernatural force from another universe and she is offered an alliance with the Nac Mac Feegle, a species of diminutive-but-psychotic warriors, this offends Tiffany's worldview. But pragmatism wins out, and she has to reluctantly embark on an adventure.

The Wee Free Men is the thirtieth Discworld novel, and when you're thirty books into any series you might be forgiven for resting on your laurels a bit, especially when the previous one, Night Watch, is often cited as the best thing you've ever written. For Sir Terry Pratchett, this was not an option. Having experimented with a Discworld book for younger audiences, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, he decided to start a whole new sub-series within the wider Discworld framework that would be aimed primarily at younger readers.

Pratchett being Pratchett, this meant relatively little changes or compromises to his usual vision. Some of the very occasional double entendre gags are gone, the book is somewhat shorter than usual, but beyond that Pratchett didn't really censor himself at all. If anything, this is a more thoughtful, contemplative Discworld book than the norm, with some enjoyable setpieces interrupted by Tiffany's internal musings on life and her ambitions.

Tiffany is smart, curious and sensible, not given to recklessness but also having a strong moral centre. She may be a quintessential Discworld protagonist, being often the only sane person in the room and constantly wondering why selfishness and hatred even exist. She is cut from the same competence cloth as Granny Weatherwax and Samuel Vimes, but lacks their experience and cynicism. She is a well-drawn protagonist who has to overcome problems presented by capable enemies, rather than because she's holding an idiot ball (something many other writers could learn from).

What is impressive about The Wee Free Men is how much of it is told from within Tiffany's head: the Nac Mac Feegle are not given to in-depth dialogue (although they have a few bon mots of wisdom) and many of the other characters are evil, monsters, stupid adults or even less-communicative children. Just about the only person Tiffany can have a decent 1:1 conversation with is a sentient toad. This means we get to lock into Tiffany's thought processes and motivations in a lot of depth, which is refreshing.

Taking part in a hitherto-unexplored part of the Disc with almost no recurring characters (not even Death, making this the first Discworld novel that he skips out on), at least until the last chapter, The Wee Free Men also makes a viable on-roading point for the entire series. Technically the main villain did (briefly) appear in Lords and Ladies, but that is really not alluded to in the book so is not hugely important.

The Wee Free Men (****½) sheds a lot of the extended subplots that had started padding out the Discworld books around this time and is focused and entertaining, with a small but well-drawn cast of characters. It's funny, but intermittently, with musings on growing up and responsibility. For the first in a new, YA (or outright children)-focused series, it's surprisingly contemplative and thoughtful, and all the richer for it.

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GOOD OMENS renewed for third and final season at Amazon

Amazon Prime Television have greenlit a third and final season of the Good Omens TV series, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Sir Terry Pratchett.

The first season was released in 2019 and was a critical and commercial success, adapting the original 1990 novel. The second season was released in 2022 and saw Gaiman developing an original story based on some ideas he'd discussed with Terry over the decades. This third season will adapt a firmer idea that Pratchett and Gaiman had developed for a sequel novel but never gotten around to putting on paper.

Gaiman will once again serve as showrunner and executive producer, with production due to begin in Scotland in the coming months. David Tennant and Martin Sheen once again return to play the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale.

Wertzone Classics: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh-Morpork, is having a very bad day. His wife is in labour with their first child, and it is the thirtieth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May. But rather than spending his day toasting fallen friends and greeting his child into the world, Vimes is instead chasing down Carcer, a notorious murderer and sociopath with a taste for killing Watchmen. The inadvertent combination of a lightning strike with the standing magical field of Unseen University transports both Vimes and Carcer back to the week of the Glorious Revolution, and Vimes has to stop Carcer and ensure that history unfolds precisely as it did before...which is a bit difficult when their arrival brings about the death of Vimes' old friend and mentor before his time.

There is nothing, or at least very little, as glorious in the world as Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) on his best form. Released in 2002, the twenty-ninth Discworld novel holds a strong claim to be the series' very best, although it is a crowded field.

As with the other (arguable) leading candidate for that title, Small Gods, Night Watch is a book that is both funny and angry. In the earlier novel, Pratchett was furious over religious fundamentalism and how personal faith could and can be perverted into a force of oppression and evil. In Night Watch he studies paranoia and fear, how crowds and masses can be moved by propaganda and oppressed by their own rulers because they fear them. The tone is darker and bleaker than most other Discworld books by design: this isn't the cosmopolitan, successful Ankh-Morpork of the later series, but an old, rough, poor and paranoid city ruled by a lunatic despot. There's a sinister secret police force, there's torture chambers and inquisitions, and there's casual racism (as usual in the series, filtered through the lens of speciesism) that takes even old-skool, dyed-in-the-wool copper Vimes by surprise. There is still humour here, but it's grimmer and blacker than in most of his books.

One of the novel's most impressive achievements is evoking such ideas and reaching such quality in the middle of one of the series' most tightly-woven sub-series. Small Gods was a complete standalone set long before the rest of the series, but Night Watch is a key book in the "City Watch" arc, with frequent continuity references to what's been going in that storyline. However, Night Watch's fish-out-of-water setting does render that somewhat moot: you really just need to know that Vimes is a successful, reforming police commander with a pregnant wife and an ambiguously motivated boss.

The book is dealing with a lot of inspirations: the cover (Paul Kidby's first regular cover for the series following the passing of his more idiosyncratic predecessor, Josh Kirby) is a riff on Rembrandt's "Night Watch," whilst the revolution itself plays on everything from France to Russia and even Bloody Sunday (the deployment of the military to deal with a civil order issue is uncomfortably on the nose, as it means to be). Pratchett is not really interested in a 1:1 copy-past of the real events, though, and is more interested into delving into the rationales for civil disorder, for popular rebellions and mass uprisings, and if revolutions ever really change anything, other than just swapping the name on the door of the top office, and if today's heroic revolutionary leader is tomorrow's tyrannical despot.

Night Watch (*****) is still funny, but Pratchett wraps the comedy around more serious, even grimmer themes than in many of his books. The story is excellent, the characterisation - especially of Vimes, who by this novel has become maybe Pratchett's richest protagonist - among Pratchett's best and the villain is one of the most genuinely hateful in the entire series. It's also an interesting morality play on political states, the meaning of power, and how the masses can be harnessed for good and ill.

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WHEEL OF TIME (finally) crosses 100 million sales

Sales of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series have passed 100 million total books sold worldwide, according to publishers Tor via the Edelweiss Catalogue.

The Wheel of Time series was, for many years, the biggest-selling post-Tolkien epic fantasy series, with immense global sales and popularity ever since its 1990 launch (when the initial hardcover printing of its very first book sold over 40,000 copies in hardcover, figures an author would sell both kidneys and a spleen for today). Its position was eventually usurped by George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which, propelled by the incredible success of its HBO TV adaptation, Game of Thrones, sailed to over 90 million sales earlier in the 2010s. It appears that ASoIaF's sales had outperformed those of Wheel of Time by around 2018.

Last year, it was announced that Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of satirical secondary world fantasies had passed 100 million copies, putting it firmly ahead of both Jordan and Martin.

Other forms of fantasy have, of course, sold significantly more: the Harry Potter books have a likely-uncatchable tally of over 600 million copies sold. J.R.R. Tolkien has over 300 million books sold, whilst the Twilight series has sold an eye-popping quarter-billion copies. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis have sold over 100 million copies as well.

According to the publishers, sales of The Wheel of Time have accelerated significantly, in the lead-up to the release of the Amazon television series in late 2021. The books have sold a cumulative 5 million copies globally since the end of 2020. As well as the TV series, sales have possibly been pushed by the crossover with Brandon Sanderson's enthusiastic and significantly large fanbase (Sanderson's own sales have reportedly recently crossed 30 million) - Sanderson cowrote the last three books in the series after Robert Jordan's passing in 2007 - and possibly the expansion of overseas markets, such as in India and Brazil where the television series apparently attracted significant interest.

The second season of the Wheel of Time TV series will launch on 1 September this year, and we will have to wait to see if sales are propelled further.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

 A band of travellers from Ankh-Morpork have arrived in the town of Bad Blintz. The band consists of a boy with a flute named Keith, a tomcat called Maurice and a lot of rats. A lot of very smart rats. However, as the town suffers from a curiously well-timed rat infestation and Keith and Maurice prepare to enact 'the scam', it becomes clear that something else is at work in the sewers and tunnels under the town. Something that takes an interest in the curiously smart rodents...

Discworld occupies such a huge part of Sir Terry Pratchett's output that it's sometimes easy to forget his other career, that of a bestselling children's author. Thanks to the animated TV show, Pratchett was as well-known for his Truckers trilogy of children's fantasy as he was his adult Discworld series for a while, and his other books aimed at children were also huge successes. His Johnny Maxwell trilogy was the first of his works adapted for live-action television.

It's therefore interesting that it took twenty-eight novels for Pratchett to write a Discworld book for children, and it's also quite remarkable the impact it had on his career. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents was published in 2001 and won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction. Although a British award, it seems to have had a strong impact in the American market, with Maurice being the book that apparently finally broke through and established Pratchett as a solid-seller in the US after years of very patchy performances for the earlier books. Pratchett's performance in the UK also seemed to pick up, and indeed his already-incredible sales performance in the UK (1% of all books sold in Britain in the 1990s were apparently Pratchetts, which was remarkable at the time) would have likely broken even more records had he not also been overtaken around the same time by a certain other fantasy series about wizards and magic. Pratchett no doubt cried about this into his handkerchiefs made of £100 bills.

The Amazing Maurice is an an interesting novel, most notably because Pratchett makes almost exactly zero concessions to his apparently intended audience (his other books are not exactly awash in nudity and swearing). The novel is written in the same manner as his adult books and in fact is actually among the most disturbing Discworld novels, with the revelation of the antagonist in the book being one of Pratchett's more revolting moments. It may have talking rats in it, but the tone is closer to Watership Down (complete with some pretty savage fights and deaths) than to Beatrix Potter. Pratchett seems to do this deliberately, with the rats' belief in a utopian future of animal cooperation stemming from reading a children's book called Mr. Bunnsy Has An Adventure, which becomes a totem of their tribe. Pratchett paints the internal divisions of the rat gang and each character in some detail, with his traditional economical-but-effective storytelling. The book has a darker tone than most of his novels, and whilst there are still a few laughs here, it's a more intense book than many of the Discworld series.

The novel also has some great riffs on folklore, on the allure of storytelling and the inhumanity of humans to both other humans and the natural world. Pratchett is at his best when he's angry about some injustice, and he fires up his anger quite nicely here, particularly on how people treat animals.

It's also quite snappy, coming in at a breezy 270 pages, avoiding the bloat some of the later Discworld books intermittently suffered from. Pratchett sets up his plot and characters, tell his story with impressive depth and characterisation and gets out all in the time that some more traditional fantasy authors are still using to clear their throats and get the protagonist out of his starting village.

There aren't many negatives aside from one, which was outside the author's power: at the time of his grossly premature passing in 2015, Pratchett had a sequel to this novel planned, in which the Amazing Maurice becomes a ship's cat. It's a grievous shame we'll never read that story. But the book is getting another chance to shine, with an animated film based on the novel scheduled for release in late 2022, starring Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, David Tennant, Gemma Arterton, Himesh Patel, David Thewlis and Peter Serafinowicz.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (****½) is Pratchett at his most impressive, telling a darker story than normal but with his trademark wit and skills at character-building. It's also a complete stand-alone, with no connections at all to the rest of the Discworld series and can be read completely independently. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Note: An earlier version of this review appeared here.

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The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett & Paul Kidby

Cohen the Barbarian is one of the greatest heroes in the history of the Disc. He has defeated many enemies, found much treasure and conquered several empires. But his well-earned retirement of riches and power is a bit on the boring side, so he's now come up with a new idea: to return fire to the gods and confront them on their home ground of Dunmanifestin, atop the ten-mile spire of Cori Celesti at the very heart of the world. Unfortunately, this will destroy the Disc and everything on it. Fortunately, the wizards of Unseen University are ready to join forces with Leonardo da Quirm and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch to save the day. Or at least try to.

The twenty-seventh Discworld book is another departure from the standard format of the series. Like the earlier Eric, The Last Hero was written and designed as an illustrated project. Unlike Eric, The Last Hero was never designed to be reissued without its illustrations, and they are more dynamically and essentially integrated into the book.

The Last Hero could be best-described as Discworld: Avengers. Pratchett takes advantage of the enormous cast of characters he's built up over twenty-six previous novels to come up with a story and cast of characters to form a team to save the world. Unfortunately, given the competence rating of the average Pratchettian protagonist is usually in minus figures (especially given the absence of Granny Weatherwax and Susan Sto Helit, and Commander Vimes only gets a cameo), this is not quite the slam-dunk solution it should be. Leonardo da Quirm, Captain Carrot and Rincewind join forces at the not-so-subtle behest of the Patrician and the Unseen University Faculty to stop Cohen's plan, and in the process have to build the Disc's first rocket ship and be the first people to set foot on the Disc's very small moon.

Compared to the form of thematic depth and rich characterisation Pratchett had hit in the mainline novels by this time, The Last Hero is lightweight and, even by Discworld standards, a bit implausible. The buildup and backstory of most Discworld novels is largely missing, and events unfold at very high speed given the epic scope of the story. But the book also works very well in its first aim, which is being a bit of disposable, knockabout fun of the kind we haven't seen since the early days of the series, and even better in its second, which is to act as a showcase for the artwork of Paul Kidby.

The original Discworld artist, Josh Kirby, passed away around the time this book was published. Kidby, who'd been working on art projects related to the setting for a few years already, had already been set up as his successor-in-waiting and this project was already underway at the time. Kidby would go on to illustrate the covers from Night Watch (the twenty-ninth book) onward, so The Last Hero can be read as a statement of confidence and intent here. And it works very well. Kirby's madcap art had a wit and charm of its own, but fans had long complained of a lack of fidelity to the text. Kirby's Rincewind was decades older than the thirtysomething character in the novels, and his constant depiction of Twoflower with literally four eyes rather than wearing glasses was quite odd. But Kidby's artwork is much truer to Pratchett's text and also much clearer and easier to parse, whilst still retaining its own, unique stylised energy.

The artwork throughout the book is excellent, often eliciting a giggle by itself. Many of the pieces in the book have become familiar art pieces for the setting individually, and these range from epic depictions of the view of the Disc and its supporting elephants and turtle from its moon to more intimate portraits of the characters and creatures. Kidby does a particularly great job at capturing Carrot's charismatic heroism and Rincewind's world-weary fatalism.

The story is thin and a little disposable, but fun. Pratchett layers in some melancholy thoughts about aging and feeling obsolete in your work as you get older, but also some traditional comic references to history and science.

The Last Hero (****) won't rank as many people's favourite Discworld book due to the lack of depth in its story, but the exceptional artwork elevates the work beyond being a mere curiosity or Christmas stocking-filler. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

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Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

In Ankh-Morpork a young clock-maker is given the challenge of making a very special kind of clock, one which can measure time so finely that it can find the gaps between moments. Thousands of miles away, a troublesome apprentice joins forces with a monk to investigate a phenomenon which suggests big trouble is coming and, as so often, Ankh-Morpork will be at the centre of it. Death also gets the call-up alerting him to ride out for the apocalypse, which he cannot interfere with...but he knows a relative who can.

Thief of Time is very much one of those Discworld books where Pratchett came up with a killer central idea and then never really developed much follow-through. In his best books, Pratchett would develop a great idea which characters and more ideas and themes would develop organically around but, once in a very rare while, this creative alchemy would not take place and the book that he ended with was just okay. There's a neat idea, there's some funny gags, but the spirit and energy of the best Discworld books is wholly missing.

This is the issue with Thief of Time. It doesn't help that Pratchett is taking on a fairly cerebral idea here - of how time itself works and how people messing around with it can cause problems - but trying to explore it in the context of his Discworld comic fantasy series is not a comfortable fit. We've seen a lot of the gags about the Four Horsemen before (in Sourcery) and the Auditors of Reality are among Pratchett's dullest bad guys (even if he does here come up with a way of giving them more character). Novel co-protagonists Jeremy and Lobsang are somewhat undercooked, and even the usually-magnificent Susan Sto Helit (here in her swansong as a major, and underused, character) and her superb can't-be-dealing-with-the-world snark is absent for vast stretches of the book.

It's not all bad, and by this point Pratchett had developed to the point where he could turn almost anything into an amusing read. There's some nice jokes and the idea of a Fifth Horseman who left the group before they came famous is quite well-played. Nanny Ogg also gets a series of enjoyable cameos, a bit oddly, given that most of the Ankh-Morpork Regulars are missing from this novel when most of it is set in the city.

But the novel mostly feels a bit autopiloted onto the page. The pacing is quite poor - this is a 300-page book at best stretched out to closer to 500 - the more subtle character and thematic points Pratchett is making in other novels around this time aren't really there and an apparent romantic subplot that is supposed to be developing is just absent to a lack of chemistry by the characters, to the point it's genuinely weird that it comes up on the closing page.

Thief of Time (***) isn't the weakest Discworld novel and it has some excellent ideas and a few good gags. But in terms of character and story, it's well below-par for Pratchett in this middle part of the series when he was otherwise producing some extremely good books. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

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The Truth by Terry Pratchett

William de Worde runs a seasonal newsletter for the well-to-do of Ankh-Morpork and other cities, but due to unusual circumstances he suddenly finds himself running the Discworld's first newspaper. As he tries to get to "the Truth," he finds himself the subject of seething rage from those who are unhappy with the stories he prints, those who want him to print their stories (and nobody else's) and those are desperate for him to print stories about their humorously-shaped vegetables. But there's also a Big Story going on, and William finds his interest in the truth of that story might be hazardous to his health.

The Truth marks a couple of notable moments for the Discworld series, being both the twenty-fifth book in the series and the first published after the new millennium. This may be be more subjective, but it also feels like there's a shift in the series at this point, with the series becoming a tad more serious in its pursuit of subject matter. It still has gags and jokes, but they now feel much more focused in support of the story, whilst in some earlier novels the two did not always work in tandem.

The Truth can be described as "Discworld does journalism" in the same way that Soul Music was "Discworld does rock music" and Moving Pictures was "Discworld does the movies" (the Disc inventing movies before newspapers kind of sums up what kind of place it is). However, this is an area which Pratchett has first-hand experience, as he worked in both newspapers and as a press officer for many years. He famously noted how he saw his first dead body about three hours into his very first day working for a newspaper, "work experience" meaning something back in those days. As a result Pratchett brings considerable knowledge to bear on how printing presses work, how journalists talk to people and the widely-ranging responses people have to journalists, from showing off, lying or exhibiting extreme hostility.

These elements all work well, are interesting and can be quite funny, but The Truth also feels distressingly prescient. Pratchett presents the responses to the arrival of newspapers as hyper-exaggerated events for comedic purposes, such as the setting up of rival newspapers that just make stuff up and enraged people trying to track down journalists for revenge, or accusing journalists of lying when they simply don't like the story that's being told. What was grossly-exaggerated in 2000 fells distinctly less so in 2022. This is an area where the book has perhaps become both less funny but also much more prophetic and interesting. The book's motto of "a lie can spread around the world whilst the truth is still putting its boots on," feels even more resonant today then it did at the time.

Beyond that, The Truth works as a great mystery in its own right. It's interesting that the City Watch is investigating the same crime but since this is not a Watch novel, we don't have any insight to what they are doing. Instead we catch glimpses of their investigation through William's story, and Pratchett juggles having to keep William as his protagonist without suddenly making the Watch into idiots who can't solve the crime themselves. It's a fun balancing act which he pulls off with typical aplomb. The book is also an important piece of Terry Pratchett's worldbuilding growth of Ankh-Morpork, which over twenty-five books (and the following sixteen) has grown from being a Lankhmar knock-off to being the greatest, best-detailed fantasy metropolis in the history of the genre.

The novel is also notable as having arguably Pratchett's greatest tip of the hat to his good friend and collaborator, Neil Gaiman. Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin feel like a homage to Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Gaiman's TV series (and later novel) Neverwhere, and it's fun to see Pratchett but his spin on those kind of charismatic but evil villains.

The Truth (****½) might be the Discworld novel that's aged the most depressingly, with its hyper-exaggeration of fake news and reporting having become surprisingly accurate. However, it's also Pratchett working at the top of his game, delivering a strong mystery with great villains and some of his most quotable dialogue. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

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The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

To the distress of Sam Vimes, he has been appointed the new Ankh-Morpork Ambassador to Uberwald, a position he feels as well-suited to as a herring to the role of architectural consultant for a non-fish-related building. At the Patrician's insistence, due to Uberwald's vital role in the international fat trade, Vimes heads off to witness the coronation of the new Low King of the dwarfs*. Of course, there is a crime and, of course, Vimes can't leave well enough alone. Meanwhile, the werewolves of Uberwald have their own crisis going on, drawing in Angua of the City Watch and her boyfriend Carrot. This leaves the Ankh-Morpork Watch under the command of Sergeant Colon...which may not be the idea situation.

The Fifth Elephant is the twenty-fourth Discworld novel and the fifth to focus on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Arguably, this is the most popular of Pratchett's sub-series due to its large cast of colourful, well-characterised characters with emotional and character arcs that unfold across multiple books, with the cynical Commander Vimes as one of Pratchett's most popular protagonists. The Fifth Elephant is also one of the more epic books in the series, adopting a multi-stranded, multi-POV approach more reminiscent of epic fantasy than most other Discworld novels.

The book divides itself into three main plot strands: Vimes as the Ambassador to Uberwald, getting entangled in political intrigue that would make George R.R. Martin at least somewhat nod in approval; Carrot, Angua and Gaspode the Wonder Dog getting into hijinks with the werewolves and non-were wolves of Uberwald; and Sergeant Colon being promoted beyond his ability and leading the City Watch into abject disaster at home. Pratchett's done multi-stranded plotting before, but rarely as accomplished as he does here, rotating between these three primary storylines and several significant subplots: Nobby forming the Disc's police union; a complicated vampire/werewolf/dwarf rivalry; Cheery Longbottom's ongoing crusade to allow dwarf women to be women; the onward march of the Igors; and the mysterious activities of Vimes' newly-appointed attache. There's a lot going on in The Fifth Elephant, maybe more than in any Discworld novel before it, and it's to Pratchett's credit that he juggles these ideas with skill and in a very disciplined 450 pages.

It's also the book that brings in one of the biggest worldbuilding changes to the series: the clacks. Discworld started off as a medieval-aping series, with Ankh-Morpork an effective carbon copy of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar. Since then, the setting has shifted down the timeline (although, fortunately, guns have not caught on). The introduction of the clacks - a continent-spanning semaphore system - starts to shift the setting more into the early 19th Century, with the Discworld steadily gaining a more steampunk, industrial feel to it which sets it apart from other fantasy settings. Pratchett handles this shift with subtle ease (to the point where you can forget the setting has advanced about 500 years in far less than a human lifetime), and it's fun to see it starting to happen here.

There's also a tremendous amount of successful worldbuilding here. We got a taste of one small corner of Uberwald in the previous novel, Carpe Jugulum, but the enormous country is covered and explored in more detail here. In particular Pratchett delves into the society and culture of his dwarfs more than in any previous book, and more than in most fantasy setting, where they're just kind of hanging around without a lot of development.

On the negative side of things, there's perhaps a few too many ideas being fired off here, with several promising plot strands and side-characters underserved due to the concise page count. This might be the Discworld novel most deserving of being longer so Pratchett could explore more ideas in more detail. I'm also not particularly convinced by the idea that even Sergeant Colon could nose-dive the City Watch into the ground within just a couple of days of being left in charge. Whilst never the brightest spark in the plug, Colon has never been the vindictive idiot he's made out to be here. It's particularly bizarre that his fall from grace happens so fast after his successful work alongside the Patrician in Jingo.

That aside, The Fifth Elephant (****½) is a triumph, with Pratchett delivering a large-scale, epic storyline spanning multiple characters and subplots and doing it extremely well, with some of the best worldbuilding in the series to date. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

*Pratchett has no truck with the cooler-looking, but ungrammatical, spelling "dwarves" in his setting.

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Sales of Sir Terry Pratchett's DISCWORLD series pass 100 million copies

This isn't new news - it was alluded to in 2020 - but it did slip under the radar somewhat at the time. Sir Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy series has now sold over 100 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling SFF series of all time.

Pratchett's Narrativia production company announced the figure back in 2020 (and suggested it had actually been achieved five years earlier). Sir Terry published 41 Discworld novels in total, beginning with The Colour of Magic in 1983 and concluding with The Shepherd's Crown in 2015, published shortly after the author's passing. The Discworld is a flat planet which is carried through space on the back of four elephants standing in turnon the back of an enormous turtle. The series started off as a parody of fantasy, but developed in a sophisticated literary series musing on a huge variety of subjects. Pratchett was highly-feted during his lifetime, sometimes compared to Charles Dickens for his way of using popular, well-written stories to make points about class, life, morality, religion, superstition and technology.

Selling 100 million copies of a single book series is a huge achievement. In science fiction and fantasy, this feat has only been accomplished previously by J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Stephen King's interconnected (but loose-knit) universe of horror and fantasy novels, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth books, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight Saga, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia series and Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games saga. The figure catapults Pratchett past the likes of Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin.

The figure puts Pratchett's lifetime sales at probably well over 110 million (Pratchett published more than 20 non-Discworld books as well, including popular collaborations with other authors, and even more non-fiction), making him one of the ten biggest-selling SFF authors of all time.

Both Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series are not far behind though, with the former estimated to have sold well over 80 million copies (and potentially more) and the latter on well over 90 million. TV adaptations of both series have helped fuel a recent boom in sales, which could also soon put them into the 100 Million Club.

Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

King Verence of Lancre has welcomed travellers from across the Disc to the naming of his daughter and heir. Amongst the visitors are Mightily Oats, of the Church of Om, and dignitaries from Uberwald who like their drinks glasses to be warm and filled with blood. This sounds like a case for the Lancre witches, but young Agnes is suffering from divided attention and Granny Weatherwax has gone to ground, prompting a search by Nanny Ogg. The undead have come to Lancre, and don't seem keen to leave...

Carpe Jugulum, the twenty-third Discworld novel, returns to the Kingdom of Lancre and the adventures of the witches' coven led by Granny Weatherwax, one of the most popular sub-series within the larger series. It's a book that has a straightforward narrative, boiling down to vampires vs. witches, but also uses its straightforward story and structure to tell, in the best tradition of Pratchett, a more complex story about good, evil, morality and responsibility.

In the novel we meet "reformed" vampires. Through years of mental training against superstition and stereotypes, they've overcome many of the weaknesses of their kind. They've also trained themselves to "sip" from victims, keeping them alive for repeated use rather than killing lots of people. The vampires claim that this is progress, and they have overcome evil in pursuit of the common good, with the best results for both vampires and humans. However, it quickly becomes clear that this has just provided them with another form of control and oppression. The overt, cliche-ridden face of evil has instead been replaced by a bureaucratic, over-explained form of it, which feels even worse. The vampires beg the question, is slavery better than murder, and if so, does that still make slavery a good thing?

This leads to one of Pratchett's best encapsulations of the nature of evil and sin: people treating other people not as complex individuals worthy of respect, but as things, reducing them to statistics and not caring about their own volition; talking at people rather than with them. It's one of the Pratchett's most powerful arguments and it resonates through the novel as he explores it from different angles.

Pratchett is at his best when he is angry about something, as he was with fundamentalist religion in arguably his best novel, Small Gods (here echoed in the character of Oats, who is also a member of the Church of Om which was central in that book). His anger here is somewhat cooler, but he makes his point extremely well.

This overcomes a potential weakness of the book in terms of its basic plot and structure. "Vampires show up, take over Lancre, and get into a struggle with the witches and their allies," is extremely close to "Elves show up, take over Lancre, and get into a struggle with the witches and their allies," which we've already seen in Lords and Ladies. Although the specific plot points are different, the overall feeling of the novel is familiar. But still, if you can't tap yourself for ideas and inspiration, who else can you? And it helps that Pratchett uses a familiar structure to make an important thematic point about morality.

There's also some nice continuity moments in the book, like the first appearance of the Nac Mac Feegle in force (a solitary example appeared previously in Feet of Clay) who go on to play a major role in later books. The book is also quite amusing, with Pratchett satirising many elements of the horror genre, and the vampire genre specifically, without relying on the most obvious (and long-exhausted) gags. If there is another weakness, it's that the book dabbles with the idea of characters with split personalities, but doesn't engage with the idea as fully as perhaps it could.

Carpe Jugulum (****½) has a familiar and somewhat predictable structure, but Pratchett uses that to his advantage to relay a powerful message about the nature of good and evil, develop his characters (especially Granny Weatherwax) and trigger some good laughs along the way. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

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