Royal Mail to Issue “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” Stamps | Hacker News Reader

Royal Mail to Issue “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” Stamps

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133 pointssohkamyung57 comments

if anyone here hasn't had the joy of reading Terry, just know that it was absolutely delightful and nails both humor and fantasy and social commentary in a way that very few people in history have ever done. I regret many things in life but reading the Discworld Novels is not one of them.

opinion is also split on where to start, since it is generally agreed that the early books weren't the best, and yet the recurring characters do develop over time. I started with Feet of Clay, which took me like 3 attempts before i finally "got it". I now often recommend Small Gods to people, because it is a self contained book with only cameos from recurring characters, and it has really nice commentary on religion, reflexivity, and the role of belief in our actions and realities. I also particularly recommend the Night Watch series, just because Vimes is pretty much Terry's self insert, and as a business minded person I also loved the later Moist series (eg Going Postal).

GNU Terry Pratchett. may your timeless stories be endlessly told and retold.

Small Gods and Good Omens are the best starts; then, I'd hit up the Granny Weatherwax books, eg, Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, etc.

Been watching the 2nd season of Good Omens, was thrilled to see a reference to C.M.O.T. Dibbler in it.

I think it varies for people; if you're at all into "cop thrillers/mysteries" than I think starting with the Watch books is a great introduction.

Honestly, the only thing NOT to do is read them in order of publication - his earliest works are good, but they're better read when you already know Discworld (imho).

The first in the “witches” series is “Equal Rites”, but is, IIUC, considered a very weak entry. The rest of the witches series don’t really acknowledge the events in it, and they start off the next book with a blank slate, not assuming that you have read the first one. If you really just want to read the witches series, I’d suggest that you instead start with the second book, “Wyrd Sisters”.

My personal favourite: Equal Rites (I found the balance between humour and message just perfect, and the message is incredibly humane).

The funniest: Pyramids (The groan-inducing punchline about the brothers alone is worth the price of admission, and it's basically stand-alone!)

The best: Night Watch (Sam Vimes' moral anger in full glory).

Weakest: Either Monstruous Regiment or Carpe Jugulum.

I think Monstrous Regiment was supposed to be a young adult entry? But I'm surprised you included Carpe Jugulum, when for me "making money" was by far the worst. it seemed so derivative, as if it had been generated with an LLM trained on his previous work (or maybe a ghost writer helping out a very sick pratchett..)

I admit there are a couple I've never read (they're sitting on the shelf next to me - Raising Steam, Unseen Academicals, Making Money). That way I'll always have another Terry Pratchett novel to read.

I felt that Carpe Jugulum was a retread of Lords & Ladies, and the formula was getting stale by that point.

If Monstrous Regiment is YA, it has to go up against Tiffany Aching, and it definitely loses there.

I always tell people to start with Guards! Guards! because I'm a huge City Watch fanboy. But depending on the person I might recommend Small Gods or Monstrous Regiment instead.

After reddit's hostility towards users became clear, I started reading Discworld books again. I think my all time favourite will always be Thud!

Soul Music is a personal fave.

The line I'd use to sell anyone on it:

   Death has a mid-life crisis and goes off to join a foreign legion.

Soul Music was the first of the books I read and was a wonderful introduction to the series.

> After reddit's hostility towards users became clear

You mean the API thing? For me it was a month earlier when they put my 13-year account into a Kafkaesque shadow-hell.

(TLDR: Randomly shadowbanned as if a spambot, all content removed, appealed, appeal GRANTED with an "oops" apology, but nothing was actually fixed, can't use appeals-page to contact them because it falsely claims my account is normal, I can't private message anybody, weeks of modmail to admins with no reply, etc.)

just create a new account and move on?

How unhelpfully dismissive. Even if I was willing to let 13 years of content/memberships/friend-links/etc. be destroyed, do you honestly think I didn't try that?

I resurrected a 6-year-old account I had used as a throwaway, since it already had some qualifying age and karma, allowing me to to actually post in relevant help-subreddits. (For example, I posted a bug-report in /r/bugs.)

Yet within couple weeks, IT HAPPENED AGAIN: Totally vanilla usage leading to the exact same series of events, plunging the other account into the same inexplicable bugged state.

Do you have roommates or other people sharing your Internet connection?

It really, really sucks that reddit messed up your account. I've grown incredibly attached to some of my online personas and I'd be devastated if they were taken from me.

It's like my bewilderment when talking to people who think your comment history should be private. I want people to see who I am, and how I respond to different situations. Even those times when I've made mistakes and jumped to bad conclusions.

It says a lot about the state of the reddit codebase when they can't even edit post titles. Likewise the recent deletion of private messages points to a serious lack of talent and really terrible code.

Makes me think that the API works were almost completely due to an inability of reddit's engineers to write anything but the most basic code. And modifying more complex code is right out.

I started with The City Watch series, and it felt like a great introduction.

I'm (slightly) disappointed they missed the opportunity of http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com/

(I made a bot to reply emails, and I added that header.)

GNU Terry Pratchett.

I have to pitch in and also recommend Unsong[1] by Scott Alexander, of Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten fame. If you always wished to read a Pratchett book, but with jokes about technology and where the protagonist is a DRM breaker, this is that book. Genuinely one of the best things I've ever read.

[1] https://unsongbook.com

I thought that had a really promising start then lost the plot and the finish had very little relation to the premise of the start

It's good (great, even, for a free book) but it needs an editor.

If you want Pratchett and also Gaiman, then both Good Omens the book and Good Omens the TV version are fucking fantastic.

The Pratchett/Gaiman collab is one of my absolute favourites, I like it a lot more than Gaiman and Moore on Watchmen.

Yes, they really are. And if you like them Gaiman's 'Neverwhere' is also really good.

Good omens TV show really carried the tone of the book really well (except for the heaven and hell scenes).

So if you need a lower barrier of entry to Pratchett books, the series might be a good start.

Season 2 has just come out! It's really fun :)

Small Gods will always be my favourite (not least because I got mine signed by the man himself, many years ago in Dorchester. Though isn't the joke that he signed so many books that it's the unsigned ones that are more valuable?). For starters though, I'd pitch Wyrd Sisters or Guards! Guards! Both are wonderfully constructed, early, but late enough that he's stopped satirising fantasy novels and has started satirising the world.

My wife and I are both starting with Hogfather, which seemed as good as any and worked as an easy gift (I can't recall if I bought it for Christmas or Father's Day)

Recommended "Making Money", I was ordered not to read it in bed because (1) I can't stop and (2) I couldn't stop laughing.

i loved The Death of Rats growing up. SQUEAK.

Small Gods was one of my favorites though I recommend people just start at the beginning. The earlier books are great too , you just have to read them more like goofy fantasy novels from the 80s. They set up a lot of the general attitudes about magic and the Discworld in general that mostly carry through as the books continue.

I’ve recently started rereading the series in publication order. At the moment, I think my favorite is “Reaper Man.”

It has a fantastic story and humor, of course, but also some really wonderful lines. I feel like that title is where he really found his voice.

I like to start with Mort and the Death books then move on to the Witches books

> since it is generally agreed that the early books weren't the best

They're fine in their own right, but the first two are much more straight parody fantasy epics, and jarringly different from the rest of the series (a few later ones also fall into this category, particularly Eric). I'd say from book 3 on (Equal Rites), though, you're largely into the series proper.

After WW2, the post offices around the world discovered that philatelists would pay for mint (unused) stamps. This was extremely profitable for the post office, because they could sell you a piece of paper for $$, and never have to deliver any mail.

The result was the end of philately. A veritable blizzard of stamps of every description were issued. Stamps printed after WW2 have simply no collector value. You might as well use them for wallpaper.

The same thing happened with coins.

On the other hand, stamps themselves got more interesting for non-collectors. For people who aren't interested in "collecting" or investing in stamps, just using them, it got easier to choose fun, aesthetic, and meaningful stamps for the same price as boring ones.

This is a fairly significant plot point in "Going Postal" btw, not including the devaluation phase

This made me curious if they also released Warhammer stamps at some point. I did a quick search and it turns out they did in June this year!

Hah, I posted a discussion on that!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36260116

Not so much as a passing mention of the official Discworld Stamps, designed by Bernard Pearson and officially endorsed by Sir Pterry himself. :-(

http://www.discworldstampcatalogue.co.uk/shshome.php

Related - has anyone listened to the new audiobooks with Bill Nighy, Peter Serafinowicz, and so on? I'm interested because they're unabridged and look like they have very high production values, but they're also quite pricey (understandably so) if you want to buy them and download them permanently.

I have not, but I listened to all of them as narrated by Steven Briggs and quite enjoyed them. They are also unabridged, and were all available for free through Libby through my library.

Having different voices for the footnotes is the main thing from the new one that I could see being a big improvement—Briggs's footnotes are read in the same tone as the rest of the narration.

Briggs is very good. I will always have his voice and cadence in my head for Vimes. I was very happy with the audio books, and sadly I can’t often say that. The Audible versions are of mixed audio quality, some pretty bad, which is strange.

So far I've found them good (Small Gods & Witches), but Bill Nighy, who does the footnotes in the most bland ADR tone after an annoying charm effect, is by far the worst part. If you can get past or enjoy those the rest is great.

I'll be disappointed if there's not a cabbage stamp in the mix.

Alas, no Lord Vetinari stamp seems like a real missed opportunity.

I was surprised at how much I liked "Going Postal", it's a different tone from the earlier Discworld stuff, but still great.

Going Postal and Making Money were great. After those it started to feel slightly off. Sadly.

I wish we could have gotten one for each city watch member, and Vetinari too.

But they do look good, and Vimes is included so I'm happy.

Death, but no Binky? Harrumph.

Since it has not been mentioned yet:

Discworld Noir is easily one of the best adventure games of all time. And apart from it being very difficult to get running due to heavy reliance on platform specific hacks and DRM of the time, once you get past that it holds remarkably well (meaning in terms of graphics and music etc) for its age.

puts usps to shame with their themes like floral geometry and strawberries and schoolbuses

I mean they have a ton of different stamps (and you can find older ones, too) - but you have to dig to find them, they rarely appear in your local post office: https://store.usps.com/store/results/stamps/

Here's a USPS stamp set o_O

https://www.mysticstamp.com/Products/United-States/1549/USA/

Not really a fair comparison since those USPS examples are all "extra postage" stamps that you only use if you have oversized letters or are trying to use up old stamps. The equivalent Royal Mail stamps are even less imaginative - just different hues of the same drawing of the Queen[1].

[1] https://shop.royalmail.com/postage-and-packaging/make-up-val...

Kidby's still got it. These are great.

He is, but for me the gloriously over the top Kirby covers are what I see when I think Discworld

Hasn't Discworld gotten multiple rounds of stamps or am I remembering wrong?

They even come with an explanatory pamphlet.

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