Discworld

Gaiman has been explicit that the finished voice of Good Omens is Pratchett's, and that Pratchett did the final assembly of the manuscript. The Discworld apparatus is all present: the footnote used as a second comic channel, an anthropomorphised Death who speaks in capitals, cosmic bureaucracy treated as an office problem, and a plot that arrives at decency by way of farce. Filed MEDIUM rather than HIGH because Pratchett is a co-author rather than an influence at arm's length. It is recorded because a reader tracing where the book's manner comes from is asking a real question, and Discworld is the honest answer.

The Colour of Magic opens by parodying Leiber directly. Bravd and the Weasel, the two adventurers watching Ankh-Morpork burn in the first chapter, are Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a large barbarian and a small sly one, named closely enough that the joke only works if you know them. The city is the larger debt. Ankh-Morpork is Lankhmar rebuilt for comedy: a corrupt, ancient, river-split metropolis run by guilds and a patrician, where the Thieves' Guild is a licensed profession with paperwork. Pratchett began Discworld as a parody of the genre and picked the two writers most worth parodying, Leiber and Howard.

The early Discworld books are parody, and Tolkien is the largest thing being parodied: the quest, the wizard, the reluctant small person, the dark lord whose defeat restores a king. Pratchett read The Lord of the Rings at thirteen and described it as the book that made him a reader; he also spent forty years pointing out what it had made the genre lazy about. Both halves are in Discworld, which is why the series outgrew parody: it kept asking who cleans up after the quest. Filed MEDIUM. The debt is to the whole tradition Tolkien fixed rather than to the text.

Pratchett named Peake among the writers who formed him, and Ankh-Morpork owes Gormenghast more than it owes any secondary world with elves in it. Both are governed by ritual nobody remembers the purpose of, administered by functionaries who outrank their masters in practice, in a structure so old it has become geography. The Patrician's clerks and the Unseen University's committees are Barquentine's ledgers played for comedy rather than dread.

Pratchett's Cohen the Barbarian, introduced in The Light Fantastic, is a parody of Conan: the sword-and-sorcery barbarian hero grown old, toothless and still fighting.

Discworld #20 : The Hogfather – Reworks Dickensian Christmas themes through fantasy and satire.