Something extraordinary happened over Christmas: I took my kids to see a big screen adaptation of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, starring Hugh Laurie and Emilia Clarke, who are Big Name Actors from Popular Things. This is significant, because it’s a Discworld novel. And Discworld has never quite become the juggernaut that it always felt like it ought. To my absolute shock and delight, it remained a story of Discworld in its translation to a CGI cartoon for children. It’s remarkably faithful to the book, which is just one in a series that’s dozens long. Rincewind and Twoflower even have brief cameos. I might have welled up at the sight of Terry Pratchett’s name in the opening credits, because I realised this was my kids’ first exposure to his wonderful mind, and vowed to encourage them to explore it further if they showed interest.
I can’t remember how old I was when I first became aware of Discworld, Terry Pratchett’s extraordinarily rich and tonally diverse fantasy universe in which he set 41 of his fifty-odd novels, not counting the myriad spin-offs, atlases, encyclopaedias, and novelty in-universe diaries, but definitely counting the one he wrote with Neil Gaiman which was adapted into a beloved TV miniseries on Amazon Prime Video in 2019 and did so well that it somehow got renewed for a second season despite being conceived and marketed as a one-off (which is the exact opposite of how Netflix runs things, but that’s a moan for another day).
The success of Good Omens is relevant here because, well, it’s proof positive that we’re still captivated by the creations of Terry Pratchett. For those of us of a certain age, his children’s literature (Truckers, Diggers, Only You Can Save Mankind etc) were formative experiences in the way that a certain wizard-based series was for kids who came after. For many of us, Pratchett’s works were rare examples of books that teachers made us read, which we actually enjoyed.
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