Because he used to be active on Usenet and signed his posts that way.
Nice for you, but this is clearly not the case for everyone.
The DW I have liked very much were Small Gods and Going Postal. OTOH, when I tried to plunge into the world with the starting books of the Rincewind, Witches, and Guards sub-series, I was decidedly not hooked.
I think the transition was with the city watch books. Vimes’ and Carrot’s careers grew across multiple books.
I did not mean in my post to sound like if you don’t like every single DW book, then there is something wrong with you. I hope that is not the case as it was not at all my intention. I know some genre snobs like to convey that sentiment. I was mearly pointing out that for me, they have all been enjoyable. (I did not read them as series. I read them in published order intentionally.)
I think everyone’s tastes in books are a little different. I hope that clears up my intention.
In fact, I think they are some of the very best.
pTerry is odd in that the books got better and better. Only the last few, (which is likely due to his Early-onset Alzheimer’s) have declined.
Do not think then, if you read The Colour of Magic )which is a fun and slightly silly parody of class fantasy) that the Night Watch is anything like that.
The “unsurprising surprise” is how varied people’s views are of the various categories of his books.
E.g., I like best the Death/Susan and “tech” ones. The Watch ones are okay. The wizard and witches ones are generally dreadful. (And now you can add “most recent books” as a new category of bad.)
And the Tiffany Aching ones are just plain … not readable. Barely qualify as books.
This means that I am at odds with a lot of other people, some of whom have already posted in this thread.
That’s a key thing about the Pratchett books. Get used to liking some and not others. Get used to some people have very different opinions on which are good and which are bad.
As to the “moving forward” issue withing the books. I think Pratchett is trying to get to a key point before he can’t contribute anymore. E.g., when Vimes takes over for Ventinari or similar major shift.
I think they first started getting interesting as a series when they showed a world changing from the inside out, rather than resisting change from the outside, and that began with Guards, Guards. Soul Music and Moving Pictures weren’t that interesting because they just hit the reset button to the fantasy status quo at the end: the Big Bad was defeated, and nothing changed. Guards, Guards had the fantasy Big Bad, but it differed in showing how people reacted and changed in response to it. It was about the characters rather than the threat, and it began altering the stasis of the series: it was the beginning of the evolution of Vimes, who brought the Watch along with him, and the city changed with them, from the Lankhmar of Colour of Magic to the nigh-Edwardian world of Raising Steam.
Okay, I’ll allow it.
Still don’t plan to adopt it, though.
And crucially, Vimes was the first really Everyman hero: prior to that, his protagonists had either been fantasy archetypes, or parodies of archetypes. Vimes could react and change in a way that Rincewind - who is a terrible character*, to the point of barely being a character at all, just a tiny set of mannerisms, and who should have been written out years ago - never could.
Rincewind may be a little (okay, a whole lot) thin as a character, but I don’t think that’s exactly a fault. The first two books are pretty weak, but I like the rest of his travels. His role is to show up, wherever he goes, just as everything is going decidely wahoonie-shaped. He’s not really a character you follow for his personal charms, it’s just entertaining to watch the world tumbling around him. And watch him be profoundly unhappy and mopey about it.
It also never occurred to me until now just how similar Rincewind is to Karl Pilkington.
That was the book that got me started on Pratchett. I was familiar with Gaiman and had a roommate who recommended the Discworld series and said: start with this, then. It was laugh out loud hysterical, especially the footnotes.
Personally I like anything with the witches in it, and find the wizard books tedious and strained. Other readers are the complete opposite.
I had heard that Mort was a great entry point. So I read it. Eh: wasn’t bad. Wasn’t great either in my view.
Could be me though: should I have loved it? Was there some deep meaning that I could have taken away but I somehow missed? Because I basically gave up on the series (though to be fair I happily finished the book). Then again, I’m more of a nonfiction kind of guy.
ETA: Oh yeah. It’s fantasy right? Calling it sci fi seems a stretch, what with all the Atlas-like elephants.
Mort was my first Discworld book. I didn’t really like it the first time I read it, though that might have been because I read it at field school and probably wasn’t giving it enough attention.
However I read it again recently and enjoyed it a lot.
I liked Mort, but in general, I think with Pratchett’s early Discworld books, he was still fleshing out the world and the humor.
Naah, it starts with the Witches (proper, not Equal Rites) - although there’s obviously continuity in the Rincewind books (hell, TCOM ends on a cliffhanger!) it’s between Wyrd Sisters and Witches Abroad that there’s a sense of character growth and change.
I always thought The Color Of Magic and The Light Fantastic was one novel split down the middle by the publisher.
You might read TCoM as a cliffhanger ending, or just a “and they they fell off the edge of the world and were never seen again” ending - I don’t remember any real foreshadowing of the second book at the end of the first, and I’ve read 'em enough times since I first stumbled across them in about 1983. Obviously Pterry decided there was enough potential for some more stories there, and so it’s proved, but if the series had finished after one book there weren’t any loose ends that particularly needed tying up.
I think all worthwhile human wisdom is contained in the Discworld books, from “The only sin is treating people as things” to “There is no justice, there’s just us” to “Remember – wild, uncontrolled bursts…”
I listened to most of these books before reading them, and I can’t recommend Nigel Planer’s readings enough. He gives characters sort of caricatured voices, like an Asterix comic come to life. Steven Briggs takes over at The Fifth Elephant, and he’s made the Moist von Lipvig and Tiffany Aching books his own.
I liked Planer’s reading of Maskerade and Reaper Man, but he bugged me on Lords and Ladies.