Discworld: The Complete Guide to Terry Pratchett's Flat Planet

Discworld travels through space on the backs of four elephants, who stand on the shell of Great A'Tuin, a star turtle with its own tiny sun in orbit. That is the joke Terry Pratchett started with in 1983. What he built on top of it, across forty-one novels and thirty-two years, is the most humane body of work in modern fantasy: a flat planet where the gags about wizards and guilds keep turning, mid-sentence, into truths about policing, faith, death, war and what people owe each other.

Nobody has to read Discworld in publication order, and everybody argues about where to start. This guide maps the whole thing: the arcs that function as series inside the series, the standalone masterpieces, an honest answer to where to start, and everything the Disc became on screens large and small.

The arcs

Discworld is not one series but half a dozen braided together, each following its own cast through the same world. The City Watch books are police procedurals that turn into political philosophy. The Death books are the tender ones, about the anthropomorphic personification who develops a fondness for humanity. The Witches run on headology and hard rural sense; Rincewind runs, full stop. Tiffany Aching is the young-readers arc that adults quietly rate among the best things Pratchett ever wrote, and Moist von Lipwig arrives late to modernize the city one scam at a time. Pick an arc, read it in order, and jump arcs whenever you like: the Disc rewards wandering. Forty-one novels exist in all; the shelves below hold every arc's heart.