Something I love about Terry Pratchett's books, and why i love the ankh morpork books so much, is that he also loved civilisation.
And i don't mean "force technological progress, all hail harsh and unforgiving bureaucracies, plow down everything that was before", i mean that when a bunch of people live together, then you need to organise The Public to make their lives good. And not against, but in service of the people living there. The small minded, unpleasant, nosy, selfish people. All of them.
And civilisation needs tireless small acts and work to build something that is larger than the sum of it's parts, and it's annoying, and sometimes hard to see the big picture, and you cannot do it alone.
But, when you don't forcibly stop them, many many people will look at a bunch of resources at their disposal, and say "so how can we organise them so that they help people the most efficiently, that we can make life easier for all people".
And that's why i weep with joy when i see this happening in real life, whenever there is something structured with the goal of people living there (and not just existing and being wrung dry for the benefit of others).
And i feel like Terry Pratchett felt the same.
And while you can also see it in the witch books, and very clearly at that, many people like to idealise rural life and write off urban life as hollow. And that's why i singled out the ankh morpork books, because ankh morpork has all the things people claim as negative about city life, and still says "look at the beauty of humanity and being alive".
The utter beauty of the postal service, of bureaucracy, of maintained streets and the white chalk horse. Of streets so old they burrowed into the ground, of canalisation, of records maintained since thousands of years.
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