You can read a few pages already on Amazon.
Ah, good. Moist von Lipwig returns.
My copy arrived about 3 hours ago.
:mad: I hate your kind!
BTW, I heard Pratchett interviewed on NPR the other day. Because of his unusual form of early-onset Alzheimer’s, he can no longer read; so he writes by dictating to voice-recognition software.
I hope he has a good editor. My boss dictates everything with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the results are bizarre – all the words are spelled right, but many are homophones or near homophones for the apparently intended words; it is sometimes an effort to puzzle it out. And no proper name will ever be spelled right if it is in any way unusual – it might even appear as two or more words roughly homophonous to the syllables.
It’s called Amazon.uk.
Brave new world!
So how was it?
Thanks, but, of course, it’s priced in pounds. Can I buy it with an American credit card?
Sure. I have hte last 20 books or so in uniform cover editions from Amazon UK.
Mixed feelings so far. It’s like another author has picked up the story lines, and he isn’t quite as good. The “voice” is different. But I’m liking it better than Snuff and Unseen Academicals (a low bar, because I actively loathe those two books).
Does anyone else get the impression from the first two Moist books that Vetinari is grooming him as his successor? I guess we’ll find out in this one, if at all.
I got that idea from “Making Money”. When I read “Going Postal”, I thought Moist von Lipwig was just going to be another William de Worde; an occasionally recurring but not that important of a character.
I downloaded “Raising Steam” yesterday and just started in on it today and haven’t gotten too far yet. It’s obviously an Industrial Revolution novel.
Not necessarily good - Making Money sucked.
Actually, very good. If not a return to top form, at least a few levels up from the junk that was Unseen Academicals and Snuff. It was a pleasure to read as opposed to a slog. Hell, even Rincewind gets a couple of shout-outs in passing! A solid B+. You can tell that Pterry has had to change the way he writes, but some of the old Master shines through in spots.
Ordered it from amazon.uk. Raising Steam is . . . how to put his . . . quite disturbingly optimistic and upbeat. Not like Pratchett’s usual stuff at all, no tragic-sense-of-life here. Partly because its mostly POV of Moist von Lipwig, who is endlessly excited at being involved in the next big thing and on fire with its potential. I suppose that’s appropriate when introducing a setting analogous the early Age of Steam. But, while he worked hard to put in a lot of action, there’s no real suspense, the ending is entirely predictable.
Of course I read the book unwillingly watching for signs of Pterry’s senile decline. 
And I did perhaps find one – this is the first Discworld novel where some of the footnotes are not funny, not even intended as jokes. Before they were always jokes.
Something else – in earlier Discworld novels, Status Quo Is God. In The Colour of Magic, Rincewind dreams of a “different kind of magic” – he’s thinking of technology – and thinks he’s found it when he meets Twoflowers and his camera; which it turns out just has a picture-drawing imp inside. In Holy Wood, the world-changing film industry is gone by the end of the story and never heard of again. But then, recently, the printing press was introduced, and then the clacks was introduced, and they stayed and changed the world; and now rail.
Are you sure? It seems to me that Monstrous Regiment had a few that were quite serious, though I can’t remember specifics.
IIRC, he’s thrilled with it and wishes he’d had the software before he had Alzheimers, and that’s it’s made the whole writing process much easier for him.
I got it from the library today. It’s now sitting on the table with a bookmark on page 57 while I read a different book instead.
I’m having a very hard time getting into it, obviously. Pratchett’s voice has completely changed over the last few novels. Understandably, but even so. . . I think he’s losing his ability to write humor.
For me his characterisation has deteriorated badly, to the point where everybody is just vaguely well-intentioned and cooperative: Moist and Vimes should not be amiably on the same team, and Harry King has lost his edge of wide-boy menace.
I finished the book a couple days ago & thought it was decent. Better than Snuff and way ahead of Making Money. Glad to see Moist get a better story than his previous adventure.
One thing I didn’t get…
When the train was crossing the bridge into Uberwald, how was it “flying”? Did the golems that were sent to the bridge pick up the train and run it across?