Books Like Terry Pratchett

Start with Guards! Guards! rather than The Colour of Magic — Pratchett's Discworld takes a few books to find its voice, and the City Watch novels are where it peaks. Sam Vimes is one of fiction's great characters: a deeply cynical policeman in a city of magic and chaos who nonetheless shows up and does the job. Pratchett writes comedy the way the best comedians do — as a delivery mechanism for ideas. The satire is sharp, the puns are terrible, and the emotional moments hit harder for being unexpected.

Adams and Pratchett are the twin peaks of British comic speculative fiction, and The Hitchhiker's Guide is Adams at his best: a planet destroyed to make room for a bypass, a depressed robot, a man called Ford Prefect. The comedy is relentless but the underlying despair gives it weight — Adams uses humour to ask genuine questions about meaning and existence. Essential for any Pratchett fan. The audiobook narrated by Stephen Fry is also essential.

Pratchett and Gaiman writing together is one of literature's great collaborations. Good Omens follows an angel and a demon who have grown fond of Earth and want to prevent the Apocalypse — which has been inconveniently scheduled for next Saturday. Gaiman brings the mythology, Pratchett brings the jokes, and the result is a novel that is simultaneously funnier and more moving than either writer achieved alone. The ideal Pratchett gateway for readers who haven't tried Discworld yet.

Grossman writes Narnia and Harry Potter for people who were shaped by those books and want to examine that shaping honestly. The Magicians is genuinely funny — Quentin Coldwater's social awkwardness at Brakebills is comic and painful in equal measure — but it's also an unflinching look at what it actually means to discover that magic is real and it doesn't fix anything. For Pratchett fans who want their comedy to have an existential undertow.

If you haven't started Discworld: begin with Mort. Death takes on an apprentice — a teenage boy named Mort — and the novel that follows is Pratchett at his most accessible and most moving. Death is one of his great recurring characters: genuinely curious about humanity, unable to understand it, sad in a way he can't quite name. Mort demonstrates exactly what Pratchett does better than anyone: making you laugh until the joke turns around and punches you in the heart.

Goldman's novel — framed as an abridgement of a classic Florinese adventure — is one of fiction's great pieces of sustained wit. The adventure elements (sword fights, giants, a man in black) are genuinely exciting; the comic frame (Goldman arguing with his fictional editor, inserting himself into the narrative) is consistently funny; and the love story underneath it all is completely earnest. For Pratchett fans who want comedy that takes its emotional beats seriously.

A different kind of antidote to Pratchett — serious, quiet, philosophical. Le Guin's Earthsea is the anti-Discworld: a world where magic has genuine weight and cost, where the greatest danger a wizard faces is his own pride. A Wizard of Earthsea is the ideal companion to Pratchett for readers who want to understand what fantasy can do at its most disciplined. Le Guin and Pratchett are the two most important British fantasy writers of the 20th century.

The novelisation of the beloved British sitcom captures everything that made the show essential: Dave Lister (the last human alive), Arnold Rimmer (a hologram of the worst person Lister ever knew), Cat (a creature who evolved from Lister's cat over three million years), and Kryten (a neurotic mechanoid). Red Dwarf is to science fiction what Pratchett is to fantasy — a sustained comic deconstruction that loves its genre too much to mock it without affection. Essential for Pratchett fans who want something lighter.