Going Postal
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| Terry Pratchett The Discworld series 33rd novel – 1st Moist von Lipwig story  |
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| Outline | |
| Characters: | Moist von Lipwig |
| Locations: | Ankh-Morpork |
| Motifs: | Fantasy, Redemption, Post office |
| Publication details | |
| Year of release: | 2004 |
| Original publisher: | Doubleday |
| Hardback ISBN: | ISBN 0-385-60342-8 |
| Paperback ISBN: | ISBN 0-552-14943-8 |
| Other details | |
| Awards: | 2005 Finalist nominee for Nebula Award for Best Novel |
| Notes: | |
Going Postal (ISBN 0-385-60342-8, published by Doubleday) is Terry Pratchett's 33rd Discworld novel, released in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2004. Unusually for a Discworld novel (other than the children's books and the Science of Discworlds) Going Postal is divided into chapters. These chapters begin with a synopsis of philosophical themes, in a similar manner to some Victorian novels and, notably, to Jules Verne stories. This experiment was not continued with the next novel, Thud!
[edit] Plot summary
Moist von Lipwig, con artist and all-round fraud, unexpectedly finds that instead of faking his own death to escape the law, someone has faked his death for him. Unfortunately, that someone is Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and now Lipwig is faced with Hobson's choice: either he tries to get the Ankh-Morpork Postal Service up and running as its new Postmaster General, or he steps through a very specific door (which exits into a deep pit) and Vetinari (along with the rest of the human race) never sees him again. Lipwig accepts the job offer, but tries to escape from the city at the next chance he gets. However, he is hunted down by an implacable golem, Mr. Pump (née Pump 19), and returned to the Post Office.
With great reluctance, Lipwig takes up his duties, only to find things are even worse than he had presumed. The Post Office has not functioned at all for decades, and the building is full to overflowing with undelivered mail - thousands and thousands of envelopes. Two eccentric employees remain: Junior Postman Groat, and Stanley, a pin-obsessed boy who, in a very unusual case, was raised by peas. They are more concerned about following the Post Office Regulations than seeing the postal system restored. There's also a Post Office cat, Mr. Tiddles, but it is even more set in its ways than its owners. And worst of all, Lipwig learns that within the last couple of months, while he was waiting to "die" in his prison cell, a whole string of newly-appointed Postmasters have met their own deaths in the Post Office building. Lipwig eventually discovers that most of the men were killed by failure to safely interact with a sort of "ghost reality" which can overlay the physical structure (or lack thereof) in the Post Office. A wizard at Unseen University explains to him that this phenomenon is caused by the fact that words have power, and masses of them are currently crammed into every available inch of space in the Post Office.
Passing a cruel and dangerous test conducted by the few surviving members of a secret (or, more accurately, ignored) order of postmen, Lipwig "officially" becomes Postmaster, and also learns that the Post Office was once a very efficient operation. The cause for its downfall was the time when the trans-dimensional letter-sorting machine, which was created by an infamously terrible inventor ("Bloody Stupid" Johnson), became so highly tuned that it was sorting letters before they were written. Then it began spewing out masses of letters which might not have even been written at all, and the Post Office fell apart under the strain of such an amount of letters.
Lipwig introduces the innovation of postage stamps to Ankh-Morpork, hires golems to deliver the mail, and finds himself going head-to-head against the monolithic and monopolistic Grand Trunk clacks line. While doing all this, he meets and falls in love with the tough, chain-smoking golem-rights activist, Adora Belle Dearheart, and the two begin a relationship by the end of the book. Dearheart is the daughter of the original Clacks founder, though the company was taken away from him by tricky financial maneuvering. Because of this, she still has useful contacts amongst the clacks operators.
The unscrupulous Clacks chairman, Reacher Gilt, who in philosophical terms is a giant version of Lipwig, sets a banshee assassin on the Postmaster, but only manages to burn down much of the Post Office building. The banshee dies when he gets flipped onto the space-warping sorting machine. Lipwig makes an outrageous wager than he can deliver a message to Genua faster than the Grand Trunk can (which is a preposterous claim; messages on the Grand Trunk are known to travel at great speeds. But Lipwig, ever the showman, insists that it is possible). "The Smoking Gnu", a group of clacks-hackers, sets up a plan to send a killer poke into the clacks system that will destroy the machinery, therefore halting the message that Lipwig will race against. Moist talks the Gnu out of it, however, and instead opts for a somewhat more psychological attack on the Grand Trunk: leaving the semaphore towers standing, so Adora Belle Dearheart can take ownership of them. This plan succeeds, and Gilt ends up walking through a very specific door - the very option that Moist avoided.
The novel is filled with references and parodies about computers and the internet, including GNU, crackers (specifically, phreakers), AT&T, Treasure Island (Gilt's cockatoo) and The Smoking Gun.
[edit] Translations
- Пощоряване (Bulgarian)
- Zasl/raná pošta (Czech)
- Posterijen (Dutch)
- Ab die Post (German)
- Mondo disco (Italian)
