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Liked? That was his thing. Every single book was a piss-take of something from the real world. He often took real occupations and set them in his fantasy world

Liked? That was his thing. Every single book was a piss-take of something from the real world. He often took real occupations and set them in his fantasy world to satirize them. His humour was to take something from our world, put it in discworld, and then point out how ridiculous it all was. What always amazed me was the diverseness of it. Whether he was taking the mickey out of hollywood, newspapers, rock music, somophore, stamp collecting, he seemed to have an eclectic knowledge about so much. But not savagely, it was with the gentle fondness that underlies the best humour of friends ribbing each other.

mattkevan 2y ago
I learned a lot of history, politics and folklore reading Pratchett’s books. If he mentioned something specific I generally found it was real or at least echoed something real. His knowledge, wisdom and love of humanity was something special.
pdpi 2y ago
One of the important features of satire is that you kind of need to really, deeply, fundamentally get the thing you’re satirising. Which makes it even more insane how he managed to satirise so many different topics.
- bombcar 2y ago
  He also developed an appreciation and love for the things satired; you can see it in the development of characters over time, many started out as a one-dimensional parody and grew to be actual characters with depths, while still remaining true to the original parody.
ajb 2y ago
I meant specifically the ones where it's so obscure that you only find out it was real later. But yeah he was amazing at satire across the board.
redwall_hp 2y ago
There are random computing references stuffed into Discworld too. Granny Weatherwax lives around a mountain range called the Ramtops, after RAMTOP on the ZX Spectrum. The Clacks optical telegraph network can contain routing instructions in its messages, and its operators basically have a hacker culture. They also have a group called "the smoking GNU," with GNU being a set of instructions for the message routing. The wizards have a computer named Hex, which is powered by ants that move data around, so it has a label that says "Anthill Inside."

mattkevan 2y ago

I learned a lot of history, politics and folklore reading Pratchett’s books. If he mentioned something specific I generally found it was real or at least echoed something real. His knowledge, wisdom and love of humanity was something special.

pdpi 2y ago

One of the important features of satire is that you kind of need to really, deeply, fundamentally get the thing you’re satirising. Which makes it even more insane how he managed to satirise so many different topics.

bombcar 2y ago
He also developed an appreciation and love for the things satired; you can see it in the development of characters over time, many started out as a one-dimensional parody and grew to be actual characters with depths, while still remaining true to the original parody.

ajb 2y ago

I meant specifically the ones where it's so obscure that you only find out it was real later. But yeah he was amazing at satire across the board.

redwall_hp 2y ago

There are random computing references stuffed into Discworld too. Granny Weatherwax lives around a mountain range called the Ramtops, after RAMTOP on the ZX Spectrum. The Clacks optical telegraph network can contain routing instructions in its messages, and its operators basically have a hacker culture. They also have a group called "the smoking GNU," with GNU being a set of instructions for the message routing. The wizards have a computer named Hex, which is powered by ants that move data around, so it has a label that says "Anthill Inside."