Pratchett's pen transforms the fantastic into " a glorious vehicle for satire on contemporary mores and institutions.
It is through satire that we are brutally made aware of many worldly problems. In Pratchett's Discworld series, with well over forty novels, the imagined fantastical spaces that are disturbingly recognisable are where the device of satire is comically employed. Perhaps this is the genius of Terry Pratchett's Discworld where the familiar is made strange and the strange made uncannily familiar. It is on this unfamiliar and imagined Discworld that we are able to follow the stories of many cultures and subcultures that seem so similar to our own. Now imagine that these four elephants in turn are carrying an enormous disc and on this disc myriad beings exist. Imagine a great turtle swimming through space carrying four elephants on its back. As Tiffany interacts with her uncanny doubles, she assimilates those parts of herself rendered uncanny by the process of adolescent maturation and her reclamation of her alienated selves broadens the scope of her agency. In each of the five novels the double presents Tiffany with an opportunity to confront and resolve her specific pre-adolescent and adolescent anxieties. This article explores the significance of the dialogic relationships that develop between the character Tiffany Aching and the various doubles that challenge her in Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series (2003–2015). This dynamic encourages a greater interaction between the protagonist and the double and reflects the postmodern conceptualisation of identity as constituted through the self's constantly shifting response to others, and itself-as-other. But where traditional Gothic literature positions the protagonist and the double as antagonists, some contemporary literature for younger readers suggests an alternative, dialogic relationship between the two. The Gothic double is an effective motif through which to explore the self's relation to itself.
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