I think that the dominant theme in Terry Pratchett’s writing is systems of organization, whether they be political, scientific, religious, or magical, and how they interact with the messy granularity of individual life. Even in his earliest Discworld novels, before they become social satires rather than genre parody, he comes across like a kid showing off the neat, clever model that he built.

I wonder if Dwarf novels have to be published with every each and every revision because it’s a sin to destroy a word.

Pretty impressive that Ankh-Morpork became the Disc’s financial capital, given that even insurance was a bizarre foreign concept to them in The Colour of Magic

And another thing! It’s not that war, torture, slavery, and all of the many, many other manifestations of man’s unhumanity to man don’t exist in the works of Terry Pratchett; it’s that he’s not willing to just shrug his shoulders as an author and say “well, that’s just the way that things are; enjoy some misery porn, dear readers.” He rather says “bad things happen, generally because of a bunch of yobs or arrogant pricks who don’t think about their thoughts and actions and who see other people as things, and here’s a story about some characters putting a stop to all of this nonsense”

I love the fact that apparently even the Elves of Fairyland–sadistic, unempathetic, child-stealing, terror-begetting mass murderers that they are–are afraid of Lord Vetinari.

The ubiquity of versions of CMOT Dibbler throughout cities on the Disc is actually an artefact of the Law of Narrative Causality. There are certain stories that are endemic to cities, and many of them require the existence of an unscrupulous small-time wheeler-dealer.

Okay, so the overwhelming likelihood is that I have followers from non-English-speaking countries who are fans of Discworld, so could you please tell me: How do the puns work in translation?

By my (objective) reckoning, at least 36 out of 41 Discworld books are better than any Harry Potter novel.