A comic satire on religious dogmatism first published in 1992, Small Gods is set in the theocratic state of Omnia in a barren corner of Discworld ruled by the Quisition. There, the great god Om – who has accidentally assumed the shape of a tortoise and lost his divine powers – has fallen to earth and landed in the Citadel’s vegetable garden.
Om gets the attention of a novice monk named Brutha, seemingly the only one who can hear him, and sets about convincing him of his godliness. Meanwhile, Vorbis, the fearsome head of the Quisition, tricks Brutha into helping him track down the heretics who insist the world is flat and attached to the back of a turtle travelling through space. Brutha is persuaded to go on a journey to Ephebe, home to a community of philosophers, where Omnian soldiers ransack the city and burn down its libraries.
