The Discworld

My favourite author is Terry Pratchett. He writes fantastic novels which all set in the Discworld. I can't say which of his books I like the most, so instead of describing all of them, I will just describe the discworld to make you understand why I like Terry Pratchett's style. First of all the discworld is a slightly convexe, flat disc (complete with edge-of-the-world to drop-off and the obligated waterfall) resting on the backs of four huge elephants which are in turn standing on the back of an enormous turtle, named Great A'Tuin who slowly swims through space . The Disc is heavily influenced by magic.

Pratchett parodies in his novels the fantasy-genre and creates concurrently an own quite believable world, where he treats serious subjects with often dark humour. For this he applies all the popular fantasy figures. Wizards for example are known to be always smoking and therefore always breathless (from Tolkien). They fight against nameless things, which always try to come to the "real" world ( Lovecraft). There are female dwarfs, which are discriminated by traditional dwarfs ( because they say that there are just male dwarfs). There are heroes in pension age, abstinent vampires, a multi-ethnical police group, as well as witches, goblins, trolls, fairys, banshees and golems.

The business man with the name "Ruin-Myself" Snapper is famous for his strange business ideas. After every bankruptcy he sells again awfully tasting sausages to pay his depts. In the different books he comes again and again and one can find him in different forms in all parts o the Discworld.

The manlike personalised Grim Reaper is also nearly in all of the novels a popular minor character. There are also some novels where he is the main character. The special thing about the death is (beside his blue eyes) that he always talks in capital letters, which hints the uniqueness of his voice (the author describes it as if a coffin lid is slammed closed). It also leaves a lot of space for humour, for example when the Death is not explicit talked about in one novel but when someone bump into a person in a crowd and the other one excuses himself in capital letters which hints that they will soon see each other again in a job-related manner (for the Death). Another running gag, which is also mentioned in many books are the speech disorder, writing mistakes or special wording of several protagonists.

The Disc's nature is fundamentally teleological, which means that its basic composition is determined by what it is "meant" to be.The Discworld generally conforms to its own laws of narrative causality, which means that if a story or legend is told often enough and believed by enough people, it becomes true.

For example, characters in "Guards! Guards!" describe the marauding (noble) dragon as an "impossible" creature, yet it is able to fly and breathe fire because that is what dragons are expected to do. Similarly, a witch gone evil may meet a bad end after building a house of gingerbread. A hero will win only when outnumbered, since million-to-one chances are dramatic enough to "crop up nine times out of ten".

Knowledge of stories, their use and how to change them forms the basis of many forms of magical power. The habit of many Discworlders to take metaphor literally has combined with the power of belief to produce some very odd areas. The Place Where The Sun Does Not Shine, for instance, is a deep crevasse in Lancre, incidentally located between a rock and a hard place.

I absoloutly love Terry Pratchett's stories because they are not only funny but he also parodies issues such as music, movies, the autenticity of the medias, religion, philosophy, politics and many others. Not even computers are missing because there is a magical machine called HEX which works as a computer and for other technical things (such as cameras for example) you just take a box with goblins inside. For me it is also funny to meet again all the characters because if one character is a main character in one book it will most possibly also be a minor character in several others. So it like you already know how the world works and how the people think but you also have a new unbelievable story in each book.
World count: 770