Vibrant recurring characters are at the heart of the Discworld experience. Creator Terry Pratchett has a gift for letting dialogue and pithy description tango together, creating a “you are there” sensation. It’s a good trick, considering “there” doesn’t, hasn’t, and probably will never exist, in the mundane, Roundworld sense.
From the website deviantart.com, alice88’s conception of Lord Vetinari confronting Rincewind, one of the latter’s many worst nightmares.
The opening scene of Discworld’s opening book introduces Rincewind, quite possibly the most inept wizard in the history of wizardry. Rincewind’s cowardice and haplessness get him into and out of hair-raising adventures, even when he hasn’t got much hair because he’s escaped from the complete conflagration of Ankh-Morpork:
a face blotched with superficial burns and punctuated by tufts of singed beard. Even the eyebrows had gone. (From The Color of Magic).
To explain why the city was being burned to the ground would spoil the joke (as always with Discworld, there is a joke), but it can safely be vouchsafed that Rincewind is (ineptly) escorting Twoflower, a cheerful tourist from the Agatean Empire (who turns up again in Interesting Times, Discworld book number 17), at the behest of the Patrician, Lord Havelock Vetinari.
Ah, the Patrician. Libertarians and fascists alike pine for his Roundworld analogue, as liberals yearn for a real-life Josiah Bartlett. The Patrician’s family motto: “Si non confectus non reficiat.” (Latin-ish for, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”) He trained as an Assassin but doesn’t actually kill people anymore—he has people for that. He started out fat but over the life of the series has evolved to a lean, black-clad (coat of arms: black on black), reflectively lethal manager of the chaos that is Ankh-Morpork. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a toddling simpleton compared to the Patrician.
And Discworld contains yet more lethal characters. In fact, it contains the ultimate lethality: the anthromorphic personification of Death, who speaks IN CAPITAL LETTERS and likes cats. Death (skeleton, scythe, black robe, the whole bit) appears in just about every Discworld book and is the focus of at least two of them. In Soul Music (number 16), he has a bit of existential angst and decides to take some time off to find out what it’s all about, really, when you get right down to it. The resulting story line intertwines with that of Imp y Celyn and his enchanted guitar to explain the origin of Music With Rocks In. If you know that Imp is Druidic (he’s a bard) for “small shoot or bud” and Celyn means “holly,” you might be able to make some educated guesses about the outcome.
There is Sam Vimes, captain of the Night Watch, who is a drunk. Even after he sobers up long enough to save Ankh-Morpork from a dragon (with the help of the other members of the Night Watch, who are Sergeant Fred Colon, Corporal Nobby Nobbs, and newbie Carrot Ironfoundersson, who is seven feet tall and was raised as a dwarf), he’s a drunk (in Guards! Guards!, number eight). In The Fifth Element (number 24), Vimes tells Lady Margolotta of Uberwald, “I was a drunk. You have to be richer than I was to be an alcoholic.” But he rises in the world—oh, does he rise. And the City Watch rises with him, figuring out whodunit with a healthy dose of cynicism. The Watch is featured in 12 of the 40 Discworld novels.
There is Gaspode the talking dog, Nanny Ogg, Granny Weatherwax, Lu Tze the History Monk, Susan Sto Helit (Death’s daughter), Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully and the faculty of Unseen University (motto: Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides), the Auditors, zombie Reg Shoe, the Luggage and (mostly) reformed con man Moist von Lipwig. And those are just some of the characters Discworld readers see repeatedly and come to love.
Really, they’re not characters—they’re people. Even the trolls and dwarves and anthromorphic personifications. You owe yourself a trip to Discworld to meet the gang.
Jeannette Porter 