Terry Pratchett

"Change is afoot in Ankh-Morpork--Discworld's first steam engine has arrived, and once again Moist von Lipwig finds himself with a new and challenging job"--

A Discworld Novel

Raising Steam

Itâe(tm)s all change for Moist von Lipwig, swindler, conman, and (naturally) head of the Royal Bank and Post Office. A steaming, clanging new invention, driven by Dick Simnel, the man with tâe(tm)flat cap and tâe(tm)sliding rule, is drawing astonished crowds - including a few particularly keen young men armed with notepads and very sensible rainwear âe" and suddenly itâe(tm)s a matter of national importance that the trains run on time. Moist does not enjoy hard work. His . . .vital input at the bank and post office consists mainly of words, which are not that heavy. Or greasy. And it certainly doesnâe(tm)t involve rickety bridges, runaway cheeses or a fat controller with knuckledusters. What he does enjoy is being alive, which may not be a perk of running the new railway. Because, of course, some people have OBJECTIONS, and theyâe(tm)ll go to extremes to stop locomotion in its tracks.

Sarah Sammis

Gavin

I've been putting off reading this for 8 years, and sadly I was right to. The magic has gone, in two senses. The jokes are flat, the theme repetitive, the jokes repetitive or failed callbacks across the series (nobless obligay). Severe shortage of his inspired similes. The theme is Progress, Disenchantment, and I have loved Pratchett's human view on it, when it was subtler.

Far too many cameos, in the pure sense of "hey I member them". Perhaps self-consciously a final encore. Far too many rushed innovations, filling in British trainspotter culture in a rush.

There's yet another species to emancipate and, harder, to normalise. The goblins are the nerd race, apparently: clever and smelly and hunted for sport. This looks glib, compared to say the manumission of the golem-slaves, but then nerdiness is an understudied element in the unfinished industrial revolution and the nature of the modern world.

  Their scruffy little faces were wreathed in smiles at the sight of something metallic and complicated. It was a sign of the times, he thought, and it looks like time for the goblins. 


The villains are also a repeat from "Thud", except even harder to empathise with. Terrorism is quite modern. Here we have religious fundamentalists as mere idiots:

  Ardent had followers, stupid followers, and he also had powerful friends. And that was it. Politics. Politics was like those little wooden sliding-pictures games for children: you had to move all of the pieces in the hope of finding a place where the whole picture slotted together.


The counterattack against the grags is one of the few instances I can remember where the violence is just violence, unlamented.

The general Weberian disenchantment of the later Disc is undermined by the steam engine itself having sentience. This is consistent with Small Gods / Moving Pictures / Soul Music, where mass belief in an idea gives birth to a quasi-real egregore.

At the same time that the wizards - the singular wielders of absolute power - are being sidelined, Vetinari is shrinking. He is still tyrant here, but his viciousness is pathetic, limited to reflexive sarcasm and insisting on a pet project train line. Actually Pratchett's retaining Vetinari the benevolent despot into the Victorian age of the Disc is quite edgy and rich. Despite his protests, Ankh-Morpork is not London, not New York: it's Singapore, or Kowloon. Human rights without democracy; economic freedom without representation. At the end, the Disc is completely modern - apart from the government! I don't have a good theory of whether this is unrealistic. 

The gag is that Vetinari is benevolent while being an assassin and a torturer, a fearsome, malevolent altruist. But he hasn't been conspicuously violent in 10 books and here he's a cipher, a shrugging habitual snarker.

I was surprised to see Pratchett include (in an aside by an extra) the anti-globalisation McWorld viewpoint: progress as destroying something.

  He wasn’t a philosopher and couldn’t even spell the word, but the voice of the goblin officer rang in his head. He thought, what would happen if goblins learned everything about humans and did everything the human way because they thought it was better than the goblin way? How long would it be before they were no longer goblins and left behind everything that was goblin, even their pots? The pots were lovely, he’d bought several for his mum. Goblins took pots seriously now, they sparkled, even at night, but what happens next? Will goblins really stop taking an interest in their pots and will humans learn the serious, valuable and difficult and almost magical skill of pot-making? Or will goblins become, well, just another kind of human? And which would be better?

 And then he thought, maybe a policeman should stop thinking about all this because, after all, there was no crime, nothing was wrong … and yet in a subtle way, there was. Something was being stolen from the world without anybody noticing or caring. 


The solution to this true sighing is to note that cultures are for people, and that if people freely choose to leave a culture behind, up to the last member, then we have gained more than we lost. 

Anyway. The Discworld remains the most nourishing and loveable way to show young people the key to human history and to humane ends.

Eugenia Andino

Dentro del estilo habitual de los libros de Mundodisco, me ha sorprendido porque tiene un argumento bastante simple, resumible en una línea. Pocas sorpresas, y un análisis divertido y correcto del mundo industrial.

Bryan Alexander

A humorous novel about the invention of steam-powered trains in a fantasy world.

I read Raising Steam in two noteworthy contexts. First, it was for a local science fiction book club. Second, by sheer coincidence I'm preparing one of my fall classes, a seminar on innovation and tech. Steam power is actually a story we'll track. So this book came at the right time!

One more point: somehow I've only read one Pratchett novel. I'm not sure why I missed his epic career so badly. I might just not have been in the right mood whenever a title crossed my desk. But this means I likely missed all kinds of Discworld references.

So: an entertaining novel. Pratchett's sharp yet genial sense of humor is evident throughout, from cute names to turns of phrase. The story of steam power is also fun to follow. It reminds me of science fiction stories where aliens or humans in alternative timelines echo our invention history. 

I was surprised at the politics, which are quite libertarian. Throughout the novel Pratchett's characters urge on private enterprise as a social good, from the rising tide lifts all boats idea to the benefits of overall economic expansion. At the same time governments are dinged, and collective action outside of business doesn't seem like a good idea. As I read China Miéville's Iron Council (2004) came to mind, as another novel where trains appear in a fantasy world - but in a Marxist revolutionary way. (And both books have golems.) If these were American rather than British novels I'd easily think of them as left/right treatments of the same topic.

However, after the first 100 pages I found my attention flagging. I want to resist easy puns about losing steam, but the narrative kept slipping away from me. Moist was only mildly interesting as a character - again, maybe he'd have been more compelling had I read the other books with him in them. The dwarf rebellion plot became repetitive, flat, and weirdly unappealing (I like stories of revolution, and also dwarves). Scene after scene either repeated the same ideas (Moist is tired, trolls are huge, the tyrant is tyrannical, steam is good, inventors are clever) or only offered marginal twists. 
 Ultimately my chuckles faded and I lost interest in the novel's ideas.

I mentioned that sf book club. Pratchett fans there largely agreed with my assessment, and pointed me to other novels that were more fun. So I have a copy of Guards, Guards! on my stack and am looking forward to it. And I'm grateful to the book club for expanding my Pratchett awareness.

bluepython508

To the consternation of the patrician, Lord Vetinari, a new invention has arrived in Ankh-Morpork - a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all of the elements: earth, air, fire and water. This being Ankh-Morpork, it's soon drawing astonished crowds, some of whom caught the zeitgeist early and arrive armed with notepads and very sensible rainwear. Moist von Lipwig is not a man who enjoys hard work - as master of the Post Office, the Mint and the Royal Bank his input is, of course, vital . . . but largely dependent on words, which are fortunately not very heavy and don't always need greasing. However, he does enjoy being alive, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse . . . Steam is rising over Discworld, driven by Mister Simnel, the man wi' t'flat cap and sliding rule who has an interesting arrangement with the sine and cosine. Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a fat controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs and some very angry dwarfs if he's going to stop it all going off the rails . . .

Raising Steam A Discworld Novel

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