This book highlights the multi-dimensionality of the work of British fantasy writer and Discworld creator Terry Pratchett. Taking into account content, political commentary, and literary technique, it explores the impact of Pratchett's work on fantasy writing and genre conventions.With chapters on gender, multiculturalism, secularism, education, and relativism, Section One focuses on different characters’ situatedness within Pratchett’s novels and what this may tell us about the direction of his social, religious and political criticism. Section Two discusses the aesthetic form that this criticism takes, and analyses the post- and meta-modern aspects of Pratchett’s writing, his use of humour, and genre adaptations and deconstructions. This is the ideal collection for any literary and cultural studies scholar, researcher or student interested in fantasy and popular culture in general, and in Terry Pratchett in particular.

Terry Pratchett's writing celebrates the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and imagination. It constructs an ethical stance that values informed and self-aware choices, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the importance of play and humor in crafting a compassionate worldview, and acts of continuous self-examination and creation. This collection of essays uses inventiveness and creation as a thematic core to combine normally disparate themes, such as science fiction studies, the effect of collaborative writing and shared authorship, steampunk aesthetics, productive modes of "ownership," intertextuality, neomedievalism and colonialism, adaptations into other media, linguistics and rhetorics, and coming of age as an act of free will.

Terry Pratchett's writing celebrates the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and imagination. It constructs an ethical stance that values informed and self-aware choices, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the importance of play and humor in crafting a compassionate worldview, and acts of continuous self-examination and creation. This collection of essays uses inventiveness and creation as a thematic core to combine normally disparate themes, such as science fiction studies, the effect of collaborative writing and shared authorship, steampunk aesthetics, productive modes of "ownership," intertextuality, neomedievalism and colonialism, adaptations into other media, linguistics and rhetorics, and coming of age as an act of free will.

This monograph contends that attending to Pratchett’s work could help to save our world. It draws attention to the astonishing capacity of Pratchett’s novels to inspire and argues that Pratchett’s fantasy novels directly address many of the most significant challenges people in the world face: the explosion of weapons technology; the myriad issues involved in the envelopment of human life by corporatized information technology; the destructive human inattention to, and interactions with, the Earth and its life forms; and the problem of devalued labor. Paradoxically, it is Pratchett’s choice of fantasy that lets him address the reality of major issues that humanity and the rest of life confront now. Pratchett’s novels show us how to better understand and confront the problems the world is contending with. The book will interest both scholars and fans.

Not just another science book and not just another Discworld novella, The Science of Discworld is a creative, mind-bending mash-up of fiction and fact, that offers a wizard’s-eye view of our world that will forever change how you look at the universe. Can Unseen University’s eccentric wizards and orangutan Librarian possibly shed any useful light on hard, rational Earthly science? In the course of an exciting experiment, the wizards of Discworld have accidentally created a new universe. Within this universe is a planet that they name Roundworld. Roundworld is, of course, Earth, and the universe is our own. As the wizards watch their creation grow, Terry Pratchett and acclaimed science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen use Discworld to examine science from the outside. Interwoven with the Pratchett’s original story are entertaining, enlightening chapters which explain key scientific principles such as the Big Bang theory and the evolution of life on earth, as well as great moments in the history of science.

New media and its enormous diffusion in the last decades of the 20th century and up to the present has greatly increased and diversified the reception of Egyptian themes and motifs and Egyptian influence in various cultural spheres. This book seeks to provide new evidence of this interdisciplinarity between Egyptology and popular culture.

NAMED AS ONE OF THE BBC'S 100 MOST INSPIRING NOVELS 'It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination . . .' Somewhere between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a magical world not totally unlike our own. Except for the fact that it travels through space on the shoulders of four giant elephants who in turn stand on the shell of an astronomically huge star turtle, of course. Rincewind is the world's worst wizard who has just been handed a very important job: to look after the world's first tourist, upon whose survival rests the peace and prosperity of the land. Unfortunately, their journey across the Disc includes facing robbers, monsters, mercenaries, and Death himself. And the whole thing's just a game of the gods that might send them over the edge . . . 'If you've never read a Discworld novel, what's the matter with you?' Guardian 'Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own' The Times The Colour of Magic is the first book in the Wizards series, but you can read the Discworld novels in any order.