Making Money

Where Discworld began — lighter on satire, heavier on absurdist adventure. Ideal for readers who want to explore Pratchett's range beyond the Lipwig arc.

Making Money is a relatively late, structurally confident Discworld novel built around a specific satirical thesis. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are the series' rollicking, shaggy-dog origin point — less interested in skewering economic systems than in gleefully demolishing every fantasy trope in sight. The protagonist Rincewind is the anti-Moist: catastrophically incompetent where Moist is brilliantly resourceful. If you liked Making Money and want to understand where Pratchett's imagination came from, or if you're curious how the Discworld's Ankh-Morpork looked before it became a fully realised satirical city-state, these paired novels are the obvious starting place. Readers searching for 'books by Terry Pratchett similar to Making Money' who want a different flavour of Discworld will find this duo a fascinating contrast.

A con artist's masterclass in using financial systems as weapons — shares Making Money's fascination with how money, trust, and identity can be weaponised by one clever person.

Edmond Dantès and Moist von Lipwig would recognise each other immediately: both are men of extraordinary persuasive intelligence who understand that financial systems run on belief as much as gold. Where Moist uses that insight comedically to rescue a failing bank, Dantès uses it as a scalpel for meticulous revenge — but both books centre on a single charismatic operator who grasps how institutions work and bends them to his will. The Count of Monte Cristo also shares Making Money's interest in the gap between what money represents and what it actually is, explored here through Dumas's spectacular set-pieces in Parisian high society. If you enjoyed the financial-system satire in Making Money and want something that takes the same ideas into darker, grander territory, this is the ideal next read. A perennial answer to 'books like Making Money but more epic'.

Formally inventive satire about institutional roles and identity — for readers who loved Making Money's argument that systems shape people as much as people shape systems.

Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award for doing something structurally audacious: using the format of a TV screenplay to satirise how Asian-American men are slotted into prescribed roles by entertainment and broader social institutions. The resonance with Making Money is thematic and tonal — both books ask what happens when a person is handed an institutional role they didn't choose and are expected to perform it convincingly. Both use their unusual formal choices (Pratchett's footnotes and comic timing; Yu's screenplay conceit) to make the satire land harder than straight realism would allow. Where Pratchett is warmer and more comedic, Yu is drier and more pointed about race and identity. If you're searching for 'books like Making Money that use humour to say something serious about how society works', Interior Chinatown belongs on that list.

Shares Making Money's core question — what do institutions, money, and civilisation actually rest on? — explored through collapse rather than comedy.

Station Eleven approaches Making Money's central philosophical question from the opposite direction. Where Pratchett uses comedy to show that money is a shared fiction held in place by public trust, Mandel dramatises what happens when that trust evaporates overnight. Her post-pandemic world is haunted by the ghost of a civilisation that forgot how fragile its foundations were. Both books reward readers who want their fiction to think seriously about institutional systems — the difference is tone and genre: Making Money is warm and funny, Station Eleven is elegiac and literary. Readers who finished Making Money thinking 'I want more fiction that takes economic and social structures seriously as subject matter' will find Station Eleven a natural and rewarding companion, even though it arrives at its conclusions through grief rather than satire. A strong recommendation for 'if you liked Making Money try something more serious'.