Raising Steam - BookWyrm

380 pages

English language

Published Dec. 8, 2013 by Doubleday UK.

ISBN:: 978-0-85752-227-6
OCLC Number:: 856191941

(1 review)

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 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. …

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 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...

1 edition

読書狂 reviewed Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett (Discworld, #40)

a nice send off

4 stars

i guess i don't have a whole lot to say about this novel, it was just kind of a nice send off. it didn't feel particularly compelling from a plot perspective, but being, by definition, a traveling, round-the-disc (or at least round the Sto Plains) type of novel, it was a nice round up of all the funny place names you've heard of over the course of the whole Discworld series, and Vimes was in it, and so was Vetinari, and Harry King, and even some other watch cameos, so it just felt like a nice, nostalgic trip around the Disc. i'm not sure it was as funny as previous Discworld novels, but i'm not sure it needed to be. i do think that reading it in 2025, when every single thing is suddenly LLMs In Disguise made the whole "wow, technology is great! what WILL people think of next!" …

i guess i don't have a whole lot to say about this novel, it was just kind of a nice send off. it didn't feel particularly compelling from a plot perspective, but being, by definition, a traveling, round-the-disc (or at least round the Sto Plains) type of novel, it was a nice round up of all the funny place names you've heard of over the course of the whole Discworld series, and Vimes was in it, and so was Vetinari, and Harry King, and even some other watch cameos, so it just felt like a nice, nostalgic trip around the Disc. i'm not sure it was as funny as previous Discworld novels, but i'm not sure it needed to be. i do think that reading it in 2025, when every single thing is suddenly LLMs In Disguise made the whole "wow, technology is great! what WILL people think of next!" hit a bit differently than it was intended, but i'm old enough to remember how it felt to think that the internet could bring us closer together, so i can still see the feeling the ending was intended to stir in me, even if it is a bit distant on the horizon. all in all, well worth a read if you've got all your frequent flier miles punched to the Discworld.

Subjects

Fantasy
Steam Engines
Humour