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A review by thekarpuk
Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
4.0
I've dragged my feet on this one for a couple reasons, some of which make me sad when I think about it.
The easy one is that this book, in the first act, has an issue not unknown to Terry Pratchett books, where it feels like we're dancing around a million characters slowly filling in the scenario. There was always a fail rate to this approach, especially with less established characters, but I think the memory issues he experienced in his later issues may have exacerbated this issue. His later books with fewer POV characters tended to work better.
And the other is that it's one of the few Discworld books I haven't read at this point.
I'd been reading Discworld books since high school, and my unfair assumption was that, like many science fiction and fantasy writers, Terry Pratchett would keep on writing into his 80's and 90's.
And it does sort of feel like Discworld fans are spoiled for content. There are fantasy writers that couldn't have put out 40+ books in five lifetimes, so not getting 10 - 20 more is a weird thing to get upset about, but there always seemed to be a new book coming out, even when his health started to decline.
Moist Von Lipwig is a character I honestly wish Pratchett had discovered sooner. When you go to the Wikipedia page for the series, there's a set of books that are just classified as Industrial Revolution, books where society and technology are changing and everyone has to deal with it. They all had one-off characters that rarely reappeared until Lipwig came into the series. He effectively became the mascot of societal change in Ankh-Morpork, and the Discworld universe as a whole was better for it.
The issues with the early chapters is it finds us cutting between Dick Simnel, Harry King, Vetinari, and a host of other characters in rapid pace, and I genuinely worried that the whole book would be like this. But past the first act, it hones in on Lipwig, and the story genuinely gets going. Pratchett once said that a horse took longer to get going because it has more legs, and that sometimes seems like an apt metaphor for his own novels.
Lipwig added so much to the Discworld series because before him there was never a protagonist that really served as a rascal. The Witches and the Guard did ensembles well, Rincewind was for madcap adventures, Death for the really high fantasy premises, but he never really had a rogue for schemes and subterfuge, mostly because Vetinari was busy running the city.
Raising Steam had many of the hallmarks of the series, like lines that come out of nowhere to punch you in the gut, endearing dad jokes, and characters that seem to have a life outside of the pages.
I have one Pratchett book left, and I'm honestly not sure how long it will take me to read it.
The easy one is that this book, in the first act, has an issue not unknown to Terry Pratchett books, where it feels like we're dancing around a million characters slowly filling in the scenario. There was always a fail rate to this approach, especially with less established characters, but I think the memory issues he experienced in his later issues may have exacerbated this issue. His later books with fewer POV characters tended to work better.
And the other is that it's one of the few Discworld books I haven't read at this point.
I'd been reading Discworld books since high school, and my unfair assumption was that, like many science fiction and fantasy writers, Terry Pratchett would keep on writing into his 80's and 90's.
And it does sort of feel like Discworld fans are spoiled for content. There are fantasy writers that couldn't have put out 40+ books in five lifetimes, so not getting 10 - 20 more is a weird thing to get upset about, but there always seemed to be a new book coming out, even when his health started to decline.
Moist Von Lipwig is a character I honestly wish Pratchett had discovered sooner. When you go to the Wikipedia page for the series, there's a set of books that are just classified as Industrial Revolution, books where society and technology are changing and everyone has to deal with it. They all had one-off characters that rarely reappeared until Lipwig came into the series. He effectively became the mascot of societal change in Ankh-Morpork, and the Discworld universe as a whole was better for it.
The issues with the early chapters is it finds us cutting between Dick Simnel, Harry King, Vetinari, and a host of other characters in rapid pace, and I genuinely worried that the whole book would be like this. But past the first act, it hones in on Lipwig, and the story genuinely gets going. Pratchett once said that a horse took longer to get going because it has more legs, and that sometimes seems like an apt metaphor for his own novels.
Lipwig added so much to the Discworld series because before him there was never a protagonist that really served as a rascal. The Witches and the Guard did ensembles well, Rincewind was for madcap adventures, Death for the really high fantasy premises, but he never really had a rogue for schemes and subterfuge, mostly because Vetinari was busy running the city.
Raising Steam had many of the hallmarks of the series, like lines that come out of nowhere to punch you in the gut, endearing dad jokes, and characters that seem to have a life outside of the pages.
I have one Pratchett book left, and I'm honestly not sure how long it will take me to read it.