“He started to get the big awards and the critical acclaim,” Burrows says. By the end of his life Pratchett had achieved bestseller status, inspired a devoted fan following, and been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Over dozens of books he used fantasy and young adult literature as a playground to explore a wide range of serious topics such as discrimination, authoritarianism, and mortality. “That’s the elevator pitch for the first Discworld novel.”īut as the Discworld series developed, Pratchett’s approach became more and more thoughtful. “The reason Pratchett took off is because fantasy was popular, and he had the idea of doing for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for sci-fi,” Burrows says. The decade was a high point for the “funny fantasy” movement, in which authors like Pratchett, Robert Asprin, and Craig Shaw Gardner poked fun at the fantasy genre’s many absurdities. Pratchett rose to popularity in the mid-1980s with humorous, pun-filled novels such as The Colour of Magic.

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