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The Discworld series is over.

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From Rhianna Pratchett:
To reiterate - No I don't intend on writing more Discworld novels, or giving anyone else permission to do so. They are sacred to dad.
I will be involved with spin-offs, adaptations and tie-ins, but that's it. Discworld is his legacy. I shall make my own.
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The final (41st) book, The Shepherd’s Crown will be published in August.
 
Good.

Not that I don't love the series. I do. The issue is, it was Terry Prachett's thing. No other author could do as well--at best, they'd be imitating what Terry did. Remember the Dune prequils? The best thing for this series is to be left alone, as a monument to what a great author can do. I'm thrilled that his daughter realizes this, and chose to make the correct artistic choice (if not necessarily the best financial choice).

If nothing else, they broke fantasy out of the horror-or-Medieval dichotomy it seemed to have been stuck in for so long. A novel that thought through the implications of magic during industrialization--much less a series--is pretty unique.
 
I have to thank Brian Herbert for definitively proving that literary skill is not an inheritable trait.
 
Oh hell no don't stop at 20. There is a lot of greatness found after that. For one thing, that's when the Tiffany series starts, and she's one of my favourite characters in the whole series, with I Shall Wear Midnight in particular being really good.

Then we have Going Postal, on my fluid top three list, in which Moist von Lipvig is at his very best*. Then there's the two best (and darkest) Vimes books, Night Watch and Thud. Carpe Jugulum is less fun than you're usually expecting from Discworld, but it's a really good book nonetheless (I had to re-read it to find out this); and both The Truth and Monstrous Regiments have some seriously biting social commentary.

*He's still good in Making Money, but sadly Raising Steam pretty much castrated him as a character (and was a weak book overall...). Of course, at this point Pratchett was struggling with Alzheimer, and in any case, after 40+ books, one should be allowed to have one's best work behind them.
 
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The Night Watch series as a whole is worth reading, regardless of when it was written. As is the Tiffany series.

Hawk one said:
Of course, at this point Pratchett was struggling with Alzheimer,
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You can see that in Snuff as well. The book was....weird. Disjointed in strange ways, not as fluid as the other books were. More brutal as well. The previous stories in the Night Watch seris were brutal, sure, but there was a lightheartedness that was absent in Snuff.

...and in any case, after 30+ books, one should be allowed to have one's best work behind them.
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Very true. I've never understood the notion that if a book, movie, album, whatever isn't better than the previous best, it's crap. Snuff was a very good book, one I am very happy I got to read. It's not as good as, say, Thud, but it's still a damn good read.
 
I saw what happened to Dune and Foundation after their authors died.

This is for the best.
 
Dinwar said:
You can see that in Snuff as well. The book was....weird. Disjointed in strange ways, not as fluid as the other books were.

[snipped]
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I agree with you on this (and I also agree it was still good), and there's a rather specific reason for why -I personally- think Snuff was a bit weird:

The characters started doing monologues to a much bigger degree than usual.

It seems like a strange thing to complain about, but if we go back to The Fifth Elephant's description of knockermen, it's one of the most powerful description sequences that Pratchett's ever written. I've gotten goosebumps from reading it, it's that good. I could feel being in the cave, being alone, being in great danger, imagining hearing the knocks of Agi Hammerthief...

And here's the thing: Although technically Cheery was explaining to Vimes about all of this, we didn't see her making a monologue about it. Instead it was presented more as if we were reading Vimes' thoughts once he'd understood the entire explanation. Or perhaps how we would understand it after getting the explanation. And then once the main explanation stops, only then do Vimes and Cheery start talking about some details, and even if Cheery's still explaining, it's a proper dialogue kind of talking, which is how the talking should be.

But in Snuff, we're getting characters -especially Willikins the butler- explaining things directly to Vimes in monologues, but with roughly the same tone that the knockermen was described... But it just doesn't work the same. It disrupts the fluidity. And in the case of Willikins, it forced upon him a change of character that felt... well, out of character.

And this tendency carried over even more in Raising Steam, which erased the character of the characters, as they were all doing the same type of explaining monologuing in the same polite manner.
 
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Hawk one said:
I agree with you on this (and I also agree it was still good), and there's a rather specific reason for why -I personally- think Snuff was a bit weird:

The characters started doing monologues to a much bigger degree than usual.
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Very well said, all of this post! I have been toying with this idea, but you've put it in word far better than I can.

I can kind of see why it happened in Snuff. The book wasn't as much about finding clues, or exploring cultures, or the like, as it was finding out about something that happened that everyone knew about but no one wanted to talk about. There are very conversation-heavy books like this out there. But it really doesn't work for Diskworld, I think.
 
Cleon said:
I saw what happened to Dune and Foundation after their authors died.

This is for the best.
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Agreed.
ALthough I have to mention that the last couple of novels in the series writtenby Herbert and Asimov were pretty weak.
 
Hawk one said:
Oh hell no don't stop at 20. There is a lot of greatness found after that. For one thing, that's when the Tiffany series starts, and she's one of my favourite characters in the whole series, with I Shall Wear Midnight in particular being really good.

Then we have Going Postal, on my fluid top three list, in which Moist von Lipvig is at his very best*. Then there's the two best (and darkest) Vimes books, Night Watch and Thud. Carpe Jugulum is less fun than you're usually expecting from Discworld, but it's a really good book nonetheless (I had to re-read it to find out this); and both The Truth and Monstrous Regiments have some seriously biting social commentary.

*He's still good in Making Money, but sadly Raising Steam pretty much castrated him as a character (and was a weak book overall...). Of course, at this point Pratchett was struggling with Alzheimer, and in any case, after 40+ books, one should be allowed to have one's best work behind them.
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In the Wee Free Men, I think, Roland vehemently states that he hates some of the Queen's parasitic beings (I think they were "Dromes") for stealing peoples memories and identity. I did wonder if Pratchett had noticed that something was wrong when he was writing that.
 
I very much enjoyed the series until and including book 24, The Fifth Elephant. The tendency to then slowly turn the Discworld into a copy of our modern world did not appeal to me. Pratchett had already started this in the Fifth Elephant with the Semaphores, but after that book I felt that good storytelling took a backseat to exploring the various technological and societal changes.

Night Watch was an exception and it is one of my favourite books. Snuff is the last book I bought and I never finished reading it.
 
In any case this doesn't affect the TV series and movies that Rhianna is working on getting made. A tv series about The Watch and movies of The Wee Free Men and Good Omens are all still in the works.
 
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