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The blurb:
Moist von Lipwig is a con man turned civil servant. As head of the Royal Bank and Post Office of Ankh-Morpork, he doesn't really want or need another job. But when the Patrician Lord Vetinari gives you a task, you do it or suffer the consequences. In Moist's case, death.
A brand-new invention has come to the city: a steam locomotive named Iron Girder, to be precise. With the railway's introduction and rapid expansion, Vetinari enlists Moist to represent the government and keep things on track.
But as with all new technology, some people have objections, and Moist will have to use every trick in his arsenal to keep the trains running...
This is the 40th Discworld novel, and the second-last one published. Because I'm reading them by series rather than by publication, I'm jumping around a lot, which sometimes means the effects of The Embuggerance are suddenly, awfully obvious. Snuff grieved me because it was such a rapid fade after the brilliance of Night Watch and Thud!; this is still a downward arc, but not so steep because Making Money wasn't so long ago, chronologically speaking, and that wasn't too far from Going Postal. But the slope's still there, and the drop in sharpness is still bleedingly, heartbreakingly obvious.
For one thing, everyone speaks with the same voice: Moist sounds like Vetinari sounds like Rhys Rhysson. The only character who stands out is Dick Simnel, and that only by dint of a blunt-weapon Yorkshire-like dialect that sounds more lifted from the Goodies' Eckythump episode with a little flavour of the feral kids' dialogue from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome ('the knowing' for some reason feels particularly feral-kidsish) than meaningful characterisation.
For another, the plot feels rushed, glossing over the sort of real-world realities Pratchett previously turned into plot points. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, you can only lay so much track a day. You have to dig and refine ore, shape the sleepers, transport them—it feels like everything happens unrealistically fast, is what I'm getting at. Moist's impossible challenges are just hand-waved away rather than overcome by his efforts or his wit.
I'm looking forward to going back to earlier novels in the Witches and Wizards sets. This one just felt like a slog.
Started: 4 October 2025
Finished: 13 October 2025
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