Some things are so rare and bizarrely surreal that I feel incredibly lucky to be alive, and incredibly lucky to be living in the one alternate dimension that had the good fortune to create such a thing. I felt it when I dove in a cenote in the Yucatan, and saw the cloud of sulfur below me, hugging the massive bell-shaped stalactites along the wall, begging anyone to drift into the white haze and not come back up. I felt it when I did a front flip into a river in view of Machu Picchu (pronounced “peek-chu”, in Quechua ”Machu” means old, “Picchu” means mountain, but “peechu” means balls. “Just know when you mispronounce it, you’re calling it “Old Balls”, our guide said).
I often feel it when I think I’m getting away with something. Stealing something from the natural world I shouldn’t have seen, or watching something I think must have been created for only a special audience. I feel that way every time I rewatch Flight of the Conchords, thinking simultaneously “thank god this exists,” and “who the hell greenlit this show?”. It feels like they made it just for me. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld feels that way to me.
Reading Guards! Guards! for the first time felt like finding a treasure chest in the middle of New York, full of gold that everyone was too busy being late for a meeting to open. Trying to explain Discworld feels like coming back from a continent that none of your friends have been to, and trying to explain what life is like there. There are stories, and highlights, and little things you can share, but you know you’ll never come close to the real thing. Mostly, describing it will only give someone the impression that they actually know the thing, when what they really only know is the impression they got from a few short sentences. I’m not going to try to summarize any plots or characters here. Don’t make me complicit in your bad imagination.
If there’s a better character writer in all of fantasy than Terry Pratchett, I certainly haven’t found them. I’d be hard-pressed to name a better character writer in all of literature than Pratchett. I think what often happens in fantasy is writers build characters they think lived way back when, but what Pratchett does in Discworld is put characters he feels he knows, feels he’s seen around him, into the story. He has quite a license to bend rules until they scream since he started it as a parody, but what results is a beautiful backdrop to highlight the absurdity in our world. In a way, Ankh Morkpork is London, or New York, or Philadelphia (if you’ve really got an imagination), because the characters are real people.
When I moved to New York, my parents and a lot of people would ask me about crime, or if I feel safe. What I’d say was, “It’s pretty much like any place, really. Most people are just trying to work, and live, and get through their day.” When I traveled through South America, similar worries cropped up from my parents, and I gave them the same response. That’s one of the things I feel Discworld gets so right about human nature, and it shows how much Pratchett valued people.
Being able to write characters that pull people into a story like a black hole is a by-product of caring immensely about the people around you. About the barista making your coffee, about your cab driver taking you to the airport, about everyone who lifts a small piece of this world so it can keep on spinning. I think that takes humility, and there’s a quote I love from Pratchett on that subject. In a 2011 interview, he was asked if he ever gets old of fans saying immensely kind things about him, and he responds:
“You get very embarrassed, for heaven’s sake. Because you know when you go home, you’re just your wife’s husband and you’ve got to go clean out the cat box.”
If you’re looking to get into Discworld, I recommend starting with Guards! Guards! or Small Gods.