Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels are fantasy, set on a world of wizards and barbarian heroes. But as the series has progressed, elements of a different sort of story have appeared. The Discworld, and especially its greatest city, Ankh-Morpork, is the home of a variety of inventors, and several novels have traced the effects of their inventions, from firearms to semaphore towers—and now, in the latest novel, the printing press. This technology is pre-Steam Age, but like steampunk, Pratchett's fiction uses the technological innovations of earlier ages as a model and metaphor for the present.

The Truth begins with a meeting between a young man who makes his living writing informational letters about Ankh-Morpork to various foreign rulers, and a group of dwarves who have invented moveable type. They have the good fortune to live in a city whose ruler, Lord Vetinari, sees trade and technology and information as advantages—a city which, as a result, is huge and rich. They are left alone, to fumble their way into publishing the Discworld's first newspaper. And when Lord Vetinari is accused of treason and high crimes, the Ankh-Morpork Times gets drawn into the chaos that follows, sometimes cooperating with and sometimes harassing the City Watch, heroes of several earlier novels in the series.

In fact, Pratchett is celebrating some of the primeval libertarian values in this novel, which means that as well as being funny, and as well as offering a slantwise look at the social impact of technology, it gives libertarian readers a set of heroes worth cheering for. Pratchett has never been more explicit about these ideas than in Lord Vetinari's final speech of the novel, in answer to the hero's assurance that he and the watch can pull together: "Oh, I do hope not, I really do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions…It's the only way to make progress."