Raising Steam

“Everything that makes Pratchett one of the world’s most delightful writers.” --Cory Doctorow, author of Mister Simnel has produced a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all the elements--earth, air, fire, and water--and it’s soon drawing astonished crowds. To the consternation of Ankh-Morpork’s formidable Patrician, Lord Vetinari, no one is in charge of this new invention. Who better to take the lead than the man he has already appointed master of the Post Office, the Mint and the Royal Bank? Moist von Lipwig is not a man who enjoys hard work--unless it is dependent on words, which are not very heavy and don’t always need greasing. He does enjoy being alive, however, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse. Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs, and some very angry dwarfs if he’s going to stop it all from going off the rails.

 “Spectacular. . . . A tremendous synthesis of everything that makes Pratchett one of the world’s most delightful writers.”
    —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

“Consistently funny, wise and clever. . . . Filled with characters who leap off the page and metaphors that make you laugh out loud.”
    —Newsday
 
“Salted among all the treacle miners and nascent trainspotters are some serious ideas about technology and the irrevocable changes it brings. . . . [Pratchett] seems to be having fun. . . . And forty books in, why not?”
    —The Washington Post

“Delightful. . . . How many writers are more fun to spend time with? . . . Pratchett melds politics, finance and the occasional dark turn with his fantasy and humor, and as ever his footnotes are not to be missed.”
    —*The Seattle Times
*
“A Dickensian mirror of contemporary western society. . . . Raising Steam is the latest transformation of a remarkable fictional world that has evolved and grown with its creator—and it shows how . . . the Discworld has taken on a life of its own.”
    —Tor.com

“From the first, the novels demonstrated Pratchett's eye for telling detail and the absurdities of the human condition. . . . 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 (London)

“Terry Pratchett’s creation is still going strong after thirty years. . . . Like Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories. . . . It is at the level of the sentence that Pratchett wins his fans.”
    —The Times (London)

“As always, Pratchett’s unforgettable characters and lively story mirror the best, the worst, and the oddest bits of our own world, entertaining readers while skewering social and political foibles in a melting pot of humanity, dwarfs, trolls, goblins, vampires, and a werewolf or two.”
    —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Brimming with Pratchett’s trademark wit, a yarn with a serious point made with style and elegance.”
    —Kirkus Reviews

Autorentext

TERRY PRATCHETT is the acclaimed creator of the globally bestselling Discworld series, the first of which, The Color of Magic, was published in 1983. Raising Steam is his fortieth Discworld novel. His books have been widely adapted for stage and screen; he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, and was awarded a knighthood for services to literature. After falling out with his keyboard, he now talks to his computer. Occasionally, these days, it answers back.

Klappentext

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The international bestselling author of the hilarious Discworld series--a writer who's been compared to Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut--introduces the first steam engine into his complex, zany fantasy world. "Everything that makes Pratchett one of the world's most delightful writers." --Cory Doctorow, author of Boing Boing
**

Moist von Lipwig is not a man who enjoys hard work--unless it is dependent on words, which are not very heavy and don't always need greasing. He does enjoy being alive, however, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse. Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs, and some very angry dwarfs if he's going to stop it all from going off the rails.

Zusammenfassung
**NATIONAL BESTSELLER 

Steam is rising over Discworld. . . .**
 
Mister Simnel has produced a great clanging monster of a machine that harnesses the power of all the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and it’s soon drawing astonished crowds. To the consternation of Ankh-Morpork’s formidable Patrician, Lord Vetinari, no one is in charge of this new invention. Who better to take the lead than the man he has already appointed master of the Post Office, the Mint and the Royal Bank?
 
Moist von Lipwig is not a man who enjoys hard work—unless it is dependent on words, which are not very heavy and don’t always need greasing. He does enjoy being alive, however, which makes a new job offer from Vetinari hard to refuse. Moist will have to grapple with gallons of grease, goblins, a controller with a history of throwing employees down the stairs, and some very angry dwarfs if he’s going to stop it all from going off the rails.

Leseprobe
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…