[In the following review of Interesting Times, James asserts that Pratchett has grown from parodist to a commentator on the world at large.]

When a new Discworld (or Discworld®) novel is published, it goes straight into the bestseller lists. Pratchett's loyal band of followers has, since the mid-1980s, grown into a dedicated army, and, in the past twelve months alone, it has been rewarded with two new Discworld novels, a series of audio tapes, The Discworld Companion and a detailed street-map of Ankh-Morpork, Discworld's greatest city (motto: QVANTI CANICVLA ILLA IN FENESTRA). Students applying to my department at York University often claim on their entrance forms that their favourite authors are Thomas Hardy and Terry Pratchett. One is a set author; the other is someone they really enjoy reading. Pratchett may well last as long as Hardy, or, more appositely, as P. G. Wodehouse. For the army is not made up just of teenagers (male and female in roughly equal numbers), but of their parents too. Some of the jokes, one suspects, are only understood by the well read; others, perhaps, are missed by all but the young.

A newcomer wanting to understand the Discworld phenomenon would be advised to begin, not with The Colour of Magic (1983), the first of the series, nor with Interesting Times, the seventeenth, but probably with Small Gods (1992) or Wyrd Sisters (1988). It is an odd thing about the Discworld books that they contravene the general law of series, and get better as they go on. The early books had some good jokes and memorable characters, as well as the benefit of novelty, but they did not have strong plots; since then the plots have matured, along with the characters. Pratchett's satire is no longer aimed at the worlds of other fantasy writers (Anne McCaffry's Pern, Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, Larry Niven's Ringworld), but at twentieth-century Earth. In Discworld, our institutions, our follies, even our laws of nature all appear—but twisted, distorted, magnified, ridiculed. There is a slight scholarly cast to the humour; as in Gibbon, many of the jokes are in the footnotes and Discworld itself is explained rationally, within a science that operates at least one dimension away from our own. For example, academics have begun to explore fuzzy logic; in Pratchett, the Unseen University has a chair of woolly thinking—which is like fuzzy logic, only more so. Living is not easy on Discworld: “life is like a bird which flies out of the darkness and across a crowded hall and then through another window into the endless night again. In Rincewind's case it had managed to do something incontinent in his dinner.”

Pratchett's humour takes logic past the point of absurdity and round again, but it is his unexpected insights into human morality that make the Discworld series stand out from other fantasies. Pratchett is pro-feminist, pro-pacifist, pro-anarchist, and pro-just being a thoughtful human being without any of that silly heroism which gets people killed, but he is without any patronizing pedantry.

Interesting Times heralds the return of Rincewind, Unseen University's most incompetent wizard, the aged but still doughty hero Cohen the Barbarian, and Twoflower, the tourist from across the seas whose naivety, enthusiasm and boundless trust brought him into daily mortal danger in the first two books in the series. Twoflower has returned home to the Agatean Empire, a brutal, static autocracy cut off from the surrounding world (Discworld's equivalent of Imperial China), and he has written a book about his time in Ankh-Morpork, “What I Did on My Holidays”. By the time Rincewind arrives in the Agatean Empire, this book has become an inspiration to a secret band of less than proletarian revolutionaries. They are not promising material: obedience is so deeply engrained into all Agateans that their revolutionary songs have titles like “Steady Progress and Limited Disobedience While Retaining Well-Formulated Good Manners”. Luckily for the success of the revolution, they have a number of unexpected allies: the Silver Horde (seven very famous but absurdly geriatric barbarian heroes); a battalion of terracotta soldiers; and a quantum Weather Butterfly. The revolution succeeds; the revolutionaries are frustrated; we are left waiting eagerly for the next volume.