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Raising Steam: (Discworld novel 40) (Discworld series) by [Terry Pratchett]

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Terry Pratchett

Raising Steam: (Discworld novel 40) (Discworld series) Kindle Edition

by Terry Pratchett (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3,945 ratings

Book 40 of 41: Discworld

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‘I could tell which of my fellow tube passengers had downloaded it to their e-readers by the bouts of spontaneous laughter’ Ben Aaronovitch, Guardian

The Discworld is very much like our own – if our own were to consist of a flat planet balanced on the back of four elephants which stand on the back of a giant turtle, that is . . .

Change is in the air for Moist von Lipwig, swindler, con-man, and (naturally) head of the Royal Bank and Post Office.

A steaming, clanging new invention – a steam locomotive named Iron Girder, to be precise – is drawing astonished crowds. Suddenly it’s a matter of national importance that the trains run on time.

Moist does not enjoy hard work. His input at the bank and post office consists mainly of words, which are not that heavy. Or greasy. And it certainly doesn’t involve rickety bridges, runaway cheeses or a fat controller with knuckledusters.

What Moist does enjoy is being alive, which may not be a perk of running the new railway. Because, of course, some people have OBJECTIONS, and they’ll go to extremes to stop locomotion in its tracks.
____________________

The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Raising Steam is the third and final book in the Moist von Lipwig series.

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386 pages
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Transworld Digital
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7 Nov. 2013
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3577 KB
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Laugh-out-loud funny...A chuffing wonderful book. ― SFX

Terry Pratchett’s creation is still going strong after 30 years as Ankh-Morpork branches into the railway age…There are sly nods to the history of railways and a cheeky reference to The Railway Children. Most aficionados, however, will be on the look-out for in-jokes and references from previous novels – of which there is no shortage…It is at the level of the sentence that Pratchett wins his fans. ― The Times

The genius of Pratchett is that he never goes for the straight allegory. . .he remains one of the most consistently funny writers around; a master of the stealth simile, the time-delay pun and the deflationary three-part list. . .I could tell which of my fellow tube passengers had downloaded it to their e-readers by the bouts of spontaneous laughter. -- Ben Aaronovitch ― The Guardian --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It is hard to understand nothing, but the multiverse is full of it. Nothing travels everywhere, always ahead of something, and in the great cloud of unknowing nothing yearns to become something, to break out, to move, to feel, to change, to dance and to experience—in short, to be something.

And now it found its chance as it drifted in the ether. Nothing, of course, knew about something, but this something was different, oh yes, and so nothing slid silently into something and floated down with everything in mind and, fortunately, landed on the back of a turtle, a very large one, and hurried to become something even faster. It was elemental and nothing was better than that and suddenly the elemental was captured! The bait had worked.

Anyone who has ever seen the River Ankh sliding along its bed of miscellaneous nastiness would understand why so much of the piscine food for the people of Ankh-Morpork has to be supplied by the fishing fleets of Quirm. In order to prevent terrible gastric trouble for the citizenry, Ankh-Morpork fishmongers have to ensure that their suppliers make their catches a long, long way from the city.

For Bowden Jeffries, purveyor of the very best in seafood, the two hundred miles or more which lay between the fish docks at Quirm and the customers in Ankh-Morpork was a regrettably long distance throughout the winter, autumn, and spring and a sheer penance in the summertime, because the highway, such as it was, became a linear furnace all the way to the Big City. Once you had had to deal with a ton of overheated octopus, you never forgot it; the smell lasted for days, and followed you around and almost into your bedroom. You could never get it out of your clothes.

People were so demanding, but the elite of Ankh-Morpork and, indeed, everyone else wanted their fish, even in the hottest part of the season. Even with an icehouse built by his own two hands and, by arrangement, a second icehouse halfway along the journey, it made you want to cry, it really did.

And he said as much to his cousin, Relief Jeffries, a market gardener, who looked at his beer and said, “It’s always the same. Nobody wants to help the small entrepreneur. Can you imagine how quickly strawberries turn into little balls of mush in the heat? Well, I’ll tell you: no time at all. Blink and you miss ’em, just when everybody wants their strawberries. And you ask the watercress people how difficult it is to get the damn stuff to the city before it’s as limp as a second-day sermon. We should petition the government!”

“No,” said his cousin. “I’ve had enough of this. Let’s write to the newspapers! That’s the way to get things done. Everyone’s complaining about the fruit and vegetables and the seafood. Vetinari should be made to understand the plight of the small-time entrepreneur. After all, what do we occasionally pay our taxes for?”

Dick Simnel was ten years old when, back at the family smithy in Sheepridge, his father simply disappeared in a cloud of furnace parts and flying metal, all enveloped in a pink steam. He was never found in the terrible haze of scorching dampness, but on that very day young Dick Simnel vowed to whatever was left of his father in that boiling steam that he would make steam his servant.

His mother had other ideas. She was a midwife, and as she said to her neighbors, “Babbies are born everywhere. I’ll never be without a customer.” So, against her son’s wishes, Elsie Simnel decided to take him away from what she now considered to be a haunted place. She packed up their belongings and together they returned to her family home near Sto Lat, where people didn’t inexplicably disappear in a hot pink cloud.

Soon after they arrived something important happened to her boy. One day while waiting for his mother to return from a difficult delivery, Dick walked into a building that looked interesting, and which turned out to be a library. At first he thought it was full of poncy stuff, all kings and poets and lovers and battles, but in one crucial book he found something called mathematics and the world of numbers.

And that was why, one day some ten years later, he pulled together every fibre of his being and said, “Mother, you know last year when I said I were going ’iking in the mountains of Uberwald with me mates, well, it were kind of . . . sort of . . . a kind of lie, only very small, mind you.” Dick blushed. “You see, I found t’keys to Dad’s old shed and, well, I went back to Sheepridge and did some experimenting and”—he looked at his mother anxiously “—I think I know what ’e were doing wrong.”

Dick was braced for stiff objections, but he hadn’t reckoned on tears—so many tears—and as he tried to console her he added, “You, Mother, and Uncle Flavius got me an education, you got me the knowing of the numbers, including the arithmetic and weird stuff dreamed up by the philosophers in Ephebe where even camels can do logarithms on their toes. Dad didn’t know this stuff. He had the right ideas but he didn’t have the . . . tech-nol-ogy right.”

At this point, Dick allowed his mother to talk, and she said, “I know there’s no stopping you, our Dick, you’re just like your stubborn father were, pigheaded. Is that what you’ve been doin’ in the barn? Teck-ology?” She looked at him accusingly, then sighed. “I can see I can’t tell you what to do, but you tell me: how can your ‘logger-reasons’ stop you goin’ the way of your poor old dad?” She started sobbing again.

Dick pulled out of his jacket something that looked like a small wand, which might have been made for a miniature wizard, and said, “This’ll keep me safe, Mother! I’ve the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t’quaderatics! Come on, Mother, stop fretting and come wi’ me now to t’barn. You must see ’er!”

Mrs. Simnel, reluctant, was dragged by her son to the great open barn he had kitted out like the workshop back at Sheepridge, hoping against hope that her son had accidentally found himself a girl. Inside the barn she looked helplessly at a large circle of metal which covered most of the floor. Something metallic whizzed round and round on the metal, sounding like a squirrel in a cage, giving off a smell much like camphor.

“Here she is, Mother. Ain’t she champion?” Dick said happily. “I call her Iron Girder!”

“But what is it, son?”

He grinned hugely and said, “It’s what they call a pro-to-type, Mother. You’ve got to ’ave a pro-to-type if you’re going to be an engineer.”

His mother smiled wanly but there was no stopping Dick. The words just tumbled out.

“The thing is, Mother, before you attempt owt you’ve got to ’ave some idea of what it is you want to do. One of the books I found in the library was about being an architect. And in that book, the man who wrote it said before he built his next big ’ouse he always made quite tiny models to get an idea of how it would all work out. He said it sounds fiddly and stuff, but going slowly and being thorough is the only way forward. And so I’m testing ’er out slowly, seeing what works and what doesn’t. And actually, I’m quite proud of me’sen. In the beginning I made t’track wooden, but I reckoned that the engine I wanted would be very ’eavy, so I chopped up t’wooden circle for firewood and went back to t’forge.”

Mrs. Simnel looked at the little mechanism running round and round on the barn floor and said, in the voice of someone really trying to understand, “Eee, lad, but what does it do?”

“Well, I remembered what Dad said about t’time he were watching t’kettle boiling and noticed t’lid going up and down with the pressure, and he told me that one day someone would build a bigger kettle that would lift more than a kettle lid. And I believe I have the knowing of the way to build a proper kettle, Mother.”

“And what good would that do, my boy?” said his mother sternly. And she watched the glow in her son’s eyes as he said, “Everything, Mother. Everything.”

Still in a haze of slight misunderstanding, Mrs. Simnel watched him unroll a large and rather grubby piece of paper.

“It’s called a blueprint, Mother. You’ve got to have a blueprint. It shows you how everything fits together.”

“Is this part of the pro-to-type?”

The boy looked at his doting mother’s face and realized that a little more exposition should be forthcoming. He took her by the hand and said, “Mother, I know they’re all lines and circles to you, but once you have the knowing of the circles and the lines and all, you know that this is a picture of an engine.”

Mrs. Simnel gripped his hand and said, “What do you think you’re going to do with it, our Dick?”

And young Simnel grinned and said happily, “Change things as needs changing, Mother.”

Mrs. Simnel gave her son a curious look for a moment or two, then appeared to reach a grudging conclusion and said, “Just you come with me, my lad.”

She led him back into the house, where they climbed up the ladder into the attic. She pointed out to her son a sturdy seaman’s chest covered in dust.

“Your granddad gave me this to give to you, when I thought you needed it. Here’s the key.”

She was gratified that he didn’t grab it and indeed looked carefully at the trunk before opening it. As he pushed up the lid, suddenly the air was filled with the glimmer of gold.

“Your granddad were slightly a bit of a pirate and then he got religion and were a bit afeared, and the last words he said to me on his deathbed were, ‘That young lad’ll do something one day, you mark my words, our Elsie, but I’m damned if I know what it’s going to be.’ ”

The people of the town were quite accustomed to the clangings and bangings emanating every day from the various blacksmith forges for which the area was famous. It seemed that, even though he had set up a forge of his own, young Simnel had decided not to enter the blacksmithing trade, possibly due to the dreadful business of Mr. Simnel Senior’s leaving the world so abruptly. The local blacksmiths soon got used to making mysterious items that young Mr. Simnel had sketched out meticulously. He never told them what he was constructing, but since they were earning a lot of money they didn’t mind.

The news of his legacy got around, of course—gold always finds its way out somehow—and there was a scratching of heads among the population exemplified by the oldest inhabitant, who, sitting on the bench outside the tavern, said, “Well, bugger me! Lad were blessed wi’ an inherited fortune in gold and turned it into a load of old iron!”

He laughed, and so did everybody else, but nevertheless they continued to watch young Dick Simnel slip in and out of the wicket gate of his old and almost derelict barn, double-padlocked at all times.

Simnel had found a couple of local likely lads who helped him make things and move things around. Over time, the barn was augmented by a host of other sheds. More lads were taken on and the hammers were heard all day every day and, a bit at a time, information trickled into what might be called the local consciousness.

Apparently the lad had made a pump, an interesting pump that pumped water very high. And then he’d thrown everything away and said things like, “We need more steel than iron.”

There were tales of great reams of paper laid out on desks as young Simnel worked out a wonderful “undertaking,” as he called it. Admittedly there had been the occasional explosion, and then people heard about what the lads called “the Bunker,” which had been useful to jump into on several occasions when there had been a little . . . incident. And then there was the unfamiliar but somehow homely and rhythmic “chuffing” noise. Really quite a pleasant noise, almost hypnotic, which was strange because the mechanical creature that was making the noise sounded more alive than you would have expected.

It was noticed in the locality that the two main coworkers of Mr. Simnel, or “Mad Iron” Simnel as some were now calling him, seemed somewhat changed, more grown‑up and aware of themselves; young men, acolytes of the mysterious thing behind the doors. And no amount of bribery by beer or by women in the pub would make them give up the precious secrets of the barn. They conducted themselves now as befitted the masters of the fiery furnace.

And then, of course, there were the sunny days when young Simnel and his cohorts dug long lines in the field next to the barn and filled them with metal while the furnace glowed day and night and everyone shook their heads and said, “Madness.” And this went on, it seemed forever, until ever was finished and the banging and clanging and smelting had stopped. Then Mr. Simnel’s lieutenants pulled aside the double doors of the big barn and filled the world with smoke.

Very little happened in this part of Sto Lat and this was enough to bring people running. Most of them arrived in time to see something heading out toward them, panting and steaming, with fast-spinning wheels and oscillating rods eerily appearing and disappearing in the smoke and the haze, and on top of it all, like a sort of king of smoke and fire, Dick Simnel, his face contorted with the effort of concentration. It was faintly reassuring that this something was apparently under the control of somebody human—although the more thoughtful of the onlookers might have added “So what? So’s a spoon,” and got ready to run away as the steaming, dancing, spinning, reciprocating engine cleared the barn and plunged on down the tracks laid in the field. And the bystanders, most of whom were now byrunners, and in certain instances bystampeders, fled and complained, except, of course, for every little boy of any age who followed it with eyes open wide, vowing there and then that one day he would be the captain of the terrible noxious engine, oh yes indeed. A prince of the steam! A master of the sparks! A coachman of the Thunderbolts! --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.


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Moist von Lipwig/ Industrial Revolution series	✓	✓	✓

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DSO9RMC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Transworld Digital (7 Nov. 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3577 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 386 pages

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Terry Pratchett

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Terry Pratchett sold his first story when he was fifteen, which earned him enough money to buy a second-hand typewriter. His first novel, a humorous fantasy entitled The Carpet People, appeared in 1971 from the publisher Colin Smythe. Terry worked for many years as a journalist and press officer, writing in his spare time and publishing a number of novels, including his first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, in 1983. In 1987 he turned to writing full time, and has not looked back since. To date there are a total of 36 books in the Discworld series, of which four (so far) are written for children. The first of these children's books, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, won the Carnegie Medal. A non-Discworld book, Good Omens, his 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman, has been a longtime bestseller, and was reissued in hardcover by William Morrow in early 2006 (it is also available as a mass market paperback (Harper Torch, 2006) and trade paperback (Harper Paperbacks, 2006). Terry's latest book, Nation, a non-Discworld standalone YA novel was published in October of 2008 and was an instant New York Times and London Times bestseller. Regarded as one of the most significant contemporary English-language satirists, Pratchett has won numerous literary awards, was named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature” in 1998, and has received four honorary doctorates from the Universities of Warwick, Portsmouth, Bath, and Bristol. His acclaimed novels have sold more than 55 million copies (give or take a few million) and have been translated into 36 languages. Terry Pratchett lived in England with his family, and spent too much time at his word processor.  Some of Terry's accolades include: The Carnegie Medal, Locus Awards, the Mythopoetic Award, ALA Notable Books for Children, ALA Best Books for Young Adults, Book Sense 76 Pick, Prometheus Award and the British Fantasy Award.

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Marius

Scrapes 3 stars, but only just... (attention - spoilers!)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 January 2017

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As a long time fan of Discworld, I have always found the characterisations wonderful, particularly given Terry Pratchett's wonderful ability in writing dialogue. The way characters develop over a series of novels - the witches and the night watch in particular - is what makes Discworld engrossing. I bought this to finish the Moist von Lipwig series, which started so well with Going Postal and Making Money.

Wow, was I ever disappointed! Dialogue is stilted and out of character, the narrative is confused, and the main Discworld players go absurdly off point with little (and not so little) asides. There's a glimmer of a good Discworld novel in there somewhere, but only a really die hard fan could enjoy this. It is very much NOT representative of Pratchett's writing style.

Random characters from other series appear to give their two pennies' worth. Lu Tze pops up briefly to have a word with Mustrum Ridcully, on the lines of 'Isn't it a bit early in history for railways', 'No, if railways have happened, then it's time for railways'. Then nothing is heard from them again.
The 'gang' encounter a tribe of gnomes (remember Buggy Squires and the Nac Mac Feegle?), who emerge fearfully from their holes after one of the many 'battle scenes', and randomly offer the information that they make shoes. 'Did you say you make shoes?' asks Moist. 'My railway workers need big boots.' The gnomes agree to make hobnail boots in return for being left alone. Not very gnome-like. And that's it. Totally random.
Vetinari, usually so inscrutable, lays bare his worries, motivations and internal struggles to anyone who will listen. Some tyrant...

Make no mistake, this is very badly planned, written, and edited. All writers rely heavily on their editor, who is a very important part of producing the final product. But in this case there are 3 possibilities.
1) Terry Pratchett wrote this but it was uncharacteristically rubbish, and his editor didn't point it out for some reason.
2) It is the work of a ghost writer, possibly from Pratchett's skeleton notes, and Pratchett's editor thought it was the best a third party could do.
3) Pratchett's editor tried to put something together from Pratchett's notes, was reluctant to leave anything out, and therefore it wasn't properly edited.

Look, it's not terrible. In terms of story, it's the next logical move for Moist von Lipwig. It's an interesting move towards the future for Discworld, the history of which has basically been story of human endeavour from the dark ages up to industrialisation, crammed into about 30 Discworld years or so. If Sir Terry hadn't been so ill it would probably have been very different, and we would all be looking forward to the next 3 books. As it stands, it's not worthy of the man, being badly written and badly edited.

Fans, used to Terry Pratchett's usually crisp style, will struggle but like it in the end. And I'm sure it will spawn a whole load of fan fiction, which will probably be fun.

Basically, as a fan, I'm only a bit miffed at paying the Kindle price. I would consider the paperback price a waste of money.

As a standalone book, I would give this 1 or 2 stars. I gave 3 because it at least is Discworld. Just not as you know it...

39 people found this helpful

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Mike Watkinson

The end of the line; a sad decline

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 November 2019

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If, as I do, you ignore his 'young adult' output, this is the last Discworld novel. I'll be perfectly blunt about this - the only reason this is not the worst Discworld novel is because Snuff came first. The contrast in style with their immediate predecessor, Unseen Academicals; indeed with the rest of the canon; is unmissable & unmistakeable. I'll go so far as to say that if this were handed to you in plain covers with all the names changed from the recognisable Discworld ones, you might possibly think it was an attempt at imitating Sir Terry's humour. You simply wouldn't recognise it as his writing.

He was always, until the end, a sharp & witty writer; witty both in the sense of being humorous & of being intelligent, barbedly so at times. As an author, he was an elegant assassin with a dancing pen. Not in Snuff or here. The prose, the plot, the humour are all lumbering, cumbersome, ponderous, never mind that instead of sharp comment, his themes in both books are overt & clumsy moralising, essentially along the lines of "Why can't we ignore each others' differences & just get along?" He went from being an assassin to being a troll, crudely whacking you over the head with a club.

It's moot as to who actually wrote these last two books. The ideas are undoubtedly his, but the style is so radically different; hopelessly, horribly laboured, over-written, over-explained; that you can't help but wonder whether the actual words were his, or those of his 'assistant'. The point is moot because, obviously, he approved them both, but it's difficult to imagine he would have released works like this in his prime. With these two final books, he was, I am sad to say, very much at the nadir, not the peak, of his powers.

Raising Steam is marginally the better of the two, but it remains still a 4/10 book that suffers badly by comparison with the rest of his work. There are idiotic impossibilities & implausibilities, apparent continuity errors e.g. what we're briefly told about Adora Belle's infancy doesn't sit well with what we've previously been told about the history of the clacks in Going Postal. There are constant random insertions (never mind the overuse of footnotes that add nothing to the story & next to nothing to the humour) that have little or nothing to do with the plot & everything to do with the moralising (a human & a dwarf getting married, a troll & dwarf meet, apparently decide to leave their spouses & go off together, etc; and there's the utterly, utterly dreadful "Railway Children" interlude - if you know the film or the book, you'll recognise it immediately & it's impossible to understand why Sir Terry allowed such an appallingly poor piece of prose to be published). It's clumsy & disjointed.

The humour, as with Snuff, relies far too much on lame wordplay & weak puns. The worst example is "loggysticks". We're told that Dick Simnel has invented the concept of logistics. It's a feeble pun anyway, but once the realisation strikes you that everyone who uses it will have heard "logistics" spoken & likely will never have seen it written down, it fails utterly to be funny, especially since it is repeated several times. Poor use of language, I am afraid, is a constant theme. One of the most marked departures from previous work is the dreadful verbosity of characters, particularly familiar ones such as Vetinari. Everyone had their individuality, and part of that individuality was how they spoke. Now, there's a 'well', a sir, a my lad, a my friend, a repetition of this ilk in pretty much every single damn bit of dialogue, and everyone over-explains & lectures in everything. Take the name away & every character sounds the same.

But then characters are another issue - they're such dreadfully one-dimensional caricatures. Take the major new introduction. Dick Simnel. Dick is the son of Ned Simnel who featured briefly in Reaper Man. Who spoke perfectly normally, as did everyone in his part of the world. But Dick is a caricature. Dick is a railway engineer ''Oo invented t'railway" & therefore is a bluff, blunt, "Ee bah gum" Yaaarkshuure man (& although he never uses the whole phrase, he does "Ee" & "by gum" separately several times). And that, really, tells you all you need to know about him, which says a great deal about the book.

Inevitably, if you are a Discworld fan (& if you are not, then why you are reading this!), you will have to read this. There's still enough of the old Terry in this that it isn't a waste of time. But don't expect too much of it.

9 people found this helpful

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Manno

Disappointing. As slow as a snail race without the excitement of a wager and other drunken participants.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 July 2018

Verified Purchase

Very disappointing - not a patch on his previous work. In honesty I only read the full book, partially out of respect for his previous work, partially hoping it was just a slow-starter and partially because I'm a tight Yorkshire man who paid a fiver for a few kilobytes of text.
Rhetoric aside, this appears to be the work of a ghost writer who has a character guide, a basic story but unfortunately no imagination. The "exciting" action scenes were so dull they were over before I realised they were supposed to be an action scene. One book left to finish my collection and I don't know whether I can bear it...

11 people found this helpful

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Greg Mclane

Funny and exciting not classic Pratchett but very close

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 April 2017

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When I first read the book I tended to agree with the poor reviews saying it was a shadow of former brilliance etc. Having re-read it recently I have completely changed my mind. Ok it's not quite as good as Going Postal and Making Money but the were brilliant. Thud and 5th Elephant are not as good as Night Watch and Guards Guards (imo) but they are still very, very good. On the second read having forgot what people said about it I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. The character development of Harry King and even more so the Goblins were excellent. I will admit Moist and Vetinari were occasionally a little out of character, a little less rounded than usual. However this can be over looked because the plot and humour is still there it's bursting with fun and adventure. If like me you are a TP fan and have not read this because of other reviews give it a go. Forget what's been said and try not to compare. Read it and enjoy it for what it is. Sadly there will never be another.

13 people found this helpful

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Raising Steam: (Discworld novel 40) (Discworld series) Kindle Edition

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