Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

The latest entry in Terry Pratchett’s sprawling DISCWORLD series, Raising Steam, is an example of what I call the “innovation” series-within-the-series. Just like there are sets of books that focus on specific characters and areas of the Discworld, there’s an increasingly large set of books that take on specific technological innovations entering the fabric of Discworld society.

We’ve seen this as far back as 1990’s Moving Pictures (in which the movie industry hit the Discworld) and 1994’s Soul Music (rock and roll, or as Pratchett calls it, “music with rocks in it”). Recently, Pratchett seems to be on a roll with this type of narrative, having introduced the character Moist Von Lipwig and then covered, in relatively short order, the postal system (Going Postal... Read More