TerryPratchett

Two-off.  "Strata" and "Dark Side of the Sun".

Don't forget "Only You Can Save Mankind"...

And its other two eminently forgettable entries (Johnny and the Dead is one of them, utterly forgotten the other - Johnny and the Bomb)

Was it the same main character?  I wouldn't group them together... Anyway, Johnny and the... didn't particularly interest me, but I did like OYCSM. - Kazuhiko

Yes, they are. Not just Johnny, but all his friends - Yo-less and the others, especially the smart girl. But I do think that OYCSM was the best - SunKitten

• Large numbers of fans reckon that (incredibly unusually for a long comedy series) it's actually kept getting better as it goes on.  On the evidence of recent ones like Thief of Time or The Truth, AlexChurchill agrees with this camp.
  
• There are a significant number of purists prefer the first two, could tolerate the next two, and dislike everything from then on.
  

I liked them for a while longer - but he really does seem to have run out of jokes.  --Vitenka

I personally think he still writes really good books, they just are not _funny_ books anymore...  He started off trying to prove that heroes aren't actually heroes (and even said something to that effect in the intro to Carpet People) but now, oh look, Vimes is a 'hero' and almost qualifies as an ActionHero? in some bits.  Bleh. - Kazuhiko

I'll go a bit further than that. I think that he's become a much better storyteller over the course of the Discworld series, whilst becoming slightly less funny. My favourite books are the later ones, because of the vastly improved narratives. The Colour of Magic was funny, but it didn't have a plot so much as a series of random happenings strung together. Thief of Time is very nearly as funny, with a far better narrative. -- StuartFraser

I think your hero rant is quite unfair.  There is no loss of integrity for an author to realise an earlier opion to be in error and change it, quite the reverse in fact.  I would suggest that having initially discarded the hero concept Pratchett explored characters like Rincewind, Granny Weatherwax and Vimes who were definitely not heroes, in fact would variously run away, glare, and laugh at the suggestion and in exploring them discovered that in fact they were heroes, a secret initially so carefully hidden that even they didn't know it, and largely still don't --NR

I can't say if having your characters be heroes or be people who happen to get the job done is 'in error'.  I just personally much preferred the non-hero style. --K

';'Who stole the leg of time?''

I think it was Kenny (edit - Terry is another option). But I wouldn't swear to it. I could check, but I'm really not that bothered.

• I'd like to be a camp of my own... the first two arn't great, he gets into his stride with Equal Rites and Mort, and then gets better and better up till about Interesting Rites and Small Gods, where he peaks.  After that it kind of levels off - they're still great, but they're getting much of a muchness - Sally
  

I'd agree with that.  My personal favourite is 'Men of Arms'.  After that, there seem to be no more earth-shaking events.  Terry can't do overly big things without destroying the places he's created and needs for the backdrop of future stories, so we get stories which don't do much except for (say) leaving Ankh-Morpork with a newspaper, or tourism politics, where cast members go to other places to solve problems there.  And you /know/ they're going to solve them, so why worry...  Still fun to read, mind you, but they feel more pedestrian. --Angoel

• There is a theoretical possibility that some people don't like the Discworld series at all.  Very few of them seem to admit it (AngelaRayner is among the few), although I'm sure this Wiki must have at least one or two :) (PeterTaylor didn't when he first read some, aged ~14, but now falls in the first category)
  

• I would dare to suggest that 'Purist' is not the right term for people in the latter category.  I think (perhaps wrongly) that the first two are heavily derivative from DouglasAdams but with later works we move towards a more genuinely Pratchett work.  I admit that this view is based on a grand total of zero investigation. --NR
  

• The next book (after Wee Free Men, which is apparently a children's book) is going to be called "Monstrous Legions" (or something along those lines) and is due out sometime around October (he just finished it).  It is going to be set somewhere a long way off from Ankh-Morpork and will tell the story of a girl who dresses up as a boy to join the army.  Kazuhiko thinks he may well skip this one.
  
• The book after that (which he has just started) will be a sequel to Wee Free Men.  Kazuhiko thinks he will probably skip this one.
  

That would have been a shame - those two are actually better than most of his DiscWorld? stuff.  Very much playing around with celtic legend, with a spritz of granny.  Monstrous legions was crappy, though a tolerable retelling with trolls added.  --Vitenka

• Kazuhiko is now wondering why on earth he is talking in third person and will now move his voice back inside his own body...
  
• I asked if he had any plans for a non-discworld novel.  I think he might have taken it as a slight from the way he phrased his answer but it sounds like he does have a science fiction book in production which is based on the idea that there are an infinite number of parallel universes / Earths and we have suddenly discovered that it's really rather easy to travel between them.  We are, however, the only Earth with people on it.  What happens when space, resources and money become effectively meaningless?  I'd really like to read this one but it sounded a bit like a 'backburner' project and he obviously intends to write discworld novels for the rest of eternity.
  

I agree it's good. They've been getting less funny, but with more depth to them, IMO - Thief Of Time wasn't funny in a joke piled on joke way the way the early books were, but was actually a rather well done JamesBond / action semi-spoof that drew me in in a way the early books didn't. - MoonShadow

MonstrousRegiment? seemed to me to be a bit of a shallow book.  It had very few jokes, and a very short plot expanded to fill a very large novel.  The whole 'pointless war' cynicism was quite well done, but I doubt I'll be reading it again.  ThiefOfTime?, OTOP is funny as anything whilst also being a genre spoof.  Perhaps I just have less fondness for spoofs of french revolution stuff (since I also disliked the guards/time-monk/history crossover).  --Vitenka

I beieve you are referring to Nightwatch.  I'm sorry, but I think I am physically incapable of thinking a Discworld book not good.  This is probably not a goood thing.  --FR

I liked it very much. I felt it was much more deserving of accusations of 'literature' than some of his previous offerings, in that it actually 'addressed issues' as well as being a good read. I don't think I put it down until I'd read through it. Then again - it's not his best work. And I don't think it's more than TP's usual surreality.--Requiem

I  think that if you look deeply, there are a lot of issues addressed in earlier books (although not really the first two) that aren't quite as overt as those in latter books. I like most of the books after TLF, but Going Postal isn't anywhere near as good as his other recent ones. -- Androidkiller

Oh, I thoroughly enjoyed Going Postal - some of the passages in it were fantastic, and I really liked the clacks setup :) - SunKitten (I know people like that....)

Given that what she said she was doing for the first time is Pratchett's stock-in-trade... --Requiem

Her claiming to 'not be writing fantasy' is laughable.  Her claim to 'not know what fantasy is' is reasobale only because it's so very hard to define.  But we know it when we see it, and when we read her books we see it.  --Vitenka (Gone plural for a moment there)

'Not writing fantasy'... grr, artsbabble. --Requiem

Which is very good... anyone up for partying up in there exploring it? --RobHu