Imagine a world shaped like a pizza, thousands of miles across and at it's center lies the Hub (an Olympia-like mountain where the large gods of Discworld live). The seas continually fall off the edge into space, and that's not even the strange part. Discworld is resting on the backs of 4 elephants that stand on the back of the Great A'Tuin - a giant star turtle that swims through space.
The first couple of books are okay to read, but that was not where I started reading the series. All good writers progress in the work as they grow older - their writing evolves and the world around them shapes them as much as they shape their writing. I once took a 2-day writing seminar from Orson Scott Card and he rightly says that when a writer usually starts out they us cliches as part of their story. That it's like a big bunch at first - maybe 80-90% or something. But when you get really good at it, then the percentage goes the opposite way and its only 10-20% cliche and the rest is original.
I first read The Thief of Time, 26th in the Discworld series and published 18 years after his first novel, The Colour of Magic. So I read a pretty polished novel as my introduction to Discworld - and I loved it. One of the main characters Lu Tze, uses Rule #1 to get around in life. Be very aware of helpless looking old, small, bald men who are smiling. Pratchett puts quite a spin on popular culture (ie - in a kung fu movie the ninja/kung-fu/karate master always looks like you could blow him over with a feather), and it's always his own spin. We'd probably say "Fake It, 'Til You Make It!!"
Rule #1 is called different things by different characters in the series. Mistress Wetherwax refers to it as headology - it being a main ingredient to being a witch. Wear a pointy hat, wear black, have skulls, spiderwebs, warts, and set your cottage back a big in the woods. Another main character, Tiffany Aching, calls it Boffo - after learning about it from on of her witch teachers - a Miss Treason who was 111 when she died. Boffo is...The Boffo Novelty & Joke Shop, No. 4 Tenth Egg Street, Ankh-Morpork - where you can buy everything that any self-respecting witch needs, but just hasn't the time to do, like really great dribbly candles. A good dribbly candle takes ages to do correctly. Or huge cauldrons that bubble green, and comes with extra satchels of the bubbly stuff if you get the deluxe package. All reasonable priced.
Some other cliches-spins that Discworld has are...C.M.O.T. (Cut Me Own Throat) Dibbler, who at this low price (for a mystery meat sausage) is already cutting his own throat. Cohen the Barbarian (who's 70 yet quite spry still) and his Silver Horde. His daughter Coninna also stars in a novel. Vampyres who belong to the Ubervald (think Transylvania) Temperance Movement - the black ribbon signifying a pledge to give up human blood (they prefer the b-word). One such vampyre is a photographer in the local newspaper and turns to dust every time he uses too much flash. It happens so often that he soon starts to carry a small glass vial of blood - which breaks when the dust falls and the blood restores him back into man-shape.
Trolls are made out of rock, with diamond teeth, and love to eat different stones and who's drugs have names like Slab. Lance-Constable Carrot (of the City Watch) is likely the Heir to the Ankh-Morpork throne, but was raised in Ubervald and thought (until he was 17) that he was just a really tall dwarf. The City Watch are an affirmative action organization though, and soon have dwarfs, a werewolf, an Igor, a zombie or two, and trolls working for them.
Death is a skeleton in a black robe with cowl that carries a scythe, has radiating blue light as eyes and ALWAYS TALKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Death tries to understand humans though, and so adopts an orphan as daughter, and then takes on an apprentice - who fall in love/save a queen/get married in one novel and then you learn they die in another. But they've had a girl, Susan Sto Helit (Sto Helit being the duchy that the queen gave to her father for saving the queen and crown), and Miss Susan as she likes to be called inherited from her grandfather (but not genetically or by blood inherited) the abilities of Death - like walking through walls, stopping time, and TALKING like her granddad when she wants.
Death is also the Death for everything except for vermin who have their own Death of Rats and who always SQUEAKS IN CAPS, although you can't ever understand him, and he has to get a talking crow to translate for him sometimes. Death's white horse (not grey) is named Binky, and he gets to ride out with the other 3 of the Four Horsemen (and sometimes a Fifth Horseman KAOS, who goes by Ronnie Soak and is a terrific milkman most of the time.)
Music turns out to have been the sound that starts the Big Bang at the creation of the universe and eventually takes over a young druid harpist and he creates Music With Rocks In and demons from the Dungeon Dimension try to break through into ours. Holy Wood is where moving pictures rip a hole in the fabric of space-time and they try again to enter.
There is much, much more of course, in fact there are 39 books so far. Pratchett himself was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007, but wants to continue writing until he (my words) forgets what a novel is.
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