Raising Steam

For those of us growing up with Terry Pratchett as a go to author, there is the knowledge that Terry sets the bar almost absurdly high. I perhaps can best sum it up by saying I stopped reading fantasy books in my early teens, yet here I am in my high forties picking up Raising Steam. I don’t remember when I first got the Colour of Magic, I was young, but I was instantly captured. I don’t honestly remember if I even picked up on all the humor, but i was pretty well read and while he wasn’t one to put on airs, he was a gentleman about it. He made his humor for the most part accessible, but even within that his humor could have nuance and subtlety that you wouldn’t get until your second read. Here’s the thing: Terry Pratchett’s books were so fascinating they stood on their own without the humor. I don’t know how many nights I sat totally taken away from this world and reading without laughing even a bit (while still acknowledging in my head, that was funny!).

Alas, with Raising Steam, I have to wonder if Terry’s onset of Alzheimer’s didn’t have something to do with this book. It had all the things you would find in a normal Terry Pratchett fantasy, great characters, great bits, absurd humor and that oh-so-present feel of the UK. However, it didn’t have that cohesion or flow I’m so used to – it felt like a bunch of Terry Pratchett bits cobbled together. The story itself is interesting (trains come to Discworld!) and features Moist Von Lipwig, who is an entertaining fellow. However, there feels to me like a lot of meandering passage, which of course Terry did often but this felt too much like it didn’t actually meander anywhere meaningful. There were a lot of times when I was left wondering where he was going with it, only to be left holding nothing.

That Being said, there is still enough of this book to enjoy it, to enjoy the humor and to enjoy the visual imagery that occurs in this book. Call it 2 and half stars from me. And if this is your FIRST Discworld book, please, please go look for earlier volumes. He was an incredible author in his prime.

Agree with all the other reviewers who said Pratchett did not write Raising Steam. I love Discworld, and the Moist Von Lipwig books are my absolute favorites. It breaks my heart to give this one a negative review. At first I blamed the plodding, tangential plot and the flat jokes on Sir Terry’s disease, but I don’t think any degree of dementia could prompt an author to so deeply misunderstand his own characters. Moist is dull! Vetinari is unsubtle! Harry King is slow-witted! Death is vindictive!

Also, the body count is weirdly high and the deaths are described in a sort of gruesome detail that’s at odds with the tone of most of the Discworld books (there’s a difference between body HUMOR and body HORROR). And while Sir Terry may have made a lot of jokes about death, he never treated deaths so carelessly (whoever wrote this book even mocks a mother’s grief at the violent deaths of her two sons). Raising Steam centers and lionizes things like industrialization, financial success, and fighting skills, rather than the relationships and personal growth that are centered in most of Discworld. I feel like if this author wrote Jingo, Vimes would have valiantly led a tiny band of Watch to slaughter the entire Klatchian army.

On the deepest level, there’s none of the fundamental wisdom that I expect from Terry Pratchett. Whenever I finish a Discworld book, I feel like I have a slightly better understanding of the world – even on re-reads! When I finished Raising Steam, I was like “Finally, that’s over.”

Ok, now I’m gonna go re-read the whole Discworld series however many times it takes to erase the memory of this thing.

The thing you must be aware of when reading “Raising Steam” is that Terry Pratchett wrote it after having been diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. At this point in his life, he was unable to read or write, he dictated the entire book, and there was doubtlessly someone who edited it for him. Seen as a novel written by someone with severe brain damage, it is an amazing effort. Compared with the other Discworld books, however, it was a pale echo of what had gone before.

I see this book as Terry Pratchett’s way of winding up Ankh-Morpork, largest city on the Discworld. Steam power has finally come to Ankh-Morpork, and this is the story of how this perpetually technology free fantasy world adapts to the coming of the Industrial Age.

The trouble is that it is more an account of what happened, than an actual story. The steam engine is invented, people become interested, tracks are laid, trains begin running. You’re taken through every step of the process with no doubt that they will be completed, and no degree of dramatic tension.

There are antagonists, in the form of Dwarven terrorists who oppose the train and all that it symbolizes, and this is one of the strongest parts of the book; however any tension they may generate tends to fall flat. The story isn’t boring, it is just told in such a matter of fact way, that there is no doubt that the good-guys will prevail, and no doubt about how they will manage it.

In the end, all the loose ends are tied up, the heroes are given happy endings, roll on the Industrial Age, and a new Ankh-Morpork. It is not the greatest book, but it is still entertaining and eminently readable, and, for me at least, was a warm-hearted farewell to the Discworld we all know and love, and to it’s creator as well.

PS: I know that Terry Pratchett wrote another Tiffany Aching book after this, but, as they were aimed at younger readers, have never viewed them as fully part of the Discworld mythology, but as something running parallel to it.

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…

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.