Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam ... the last Discoworl Book?

I just finished reading Raising Steam, which came out on March 18. It is the 40th book in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Before I get started, I must make clear that this post contains no insider information - I have neither read nor heard anything in interviews or news stories etc etc about it being the last book in the series. This is simply my pondering on its possibility.

I am also not saying that I am guessing that it will be the last. I have not checked on Pratchett's condition or any other comments he has made about the impact it might have on future work (other than that his condition is not as much of a blockade to work as it was was thought it might be, and that he has new dictation methods that help).

Nor am I even saying that I think that it should be the last. I am simply exploring it's possibility as a capstone book along certain lines that I have thought about in the series. So this post is really I guess about examining an idea of the series as a whole and what it is.

So, what am I thinking about here? First of all, it is the 40th book ... that's not only a nice round number, it has also had numerological significance in some classical materials, most especially the Bible. I am not sure that would play in Pratchett's thoughts, even though I personally like a 40 book series alot. But who knows, Pratchett might like the whole 40 thing, but I'm not sure it's that consequential either way, at least for the purposes of this post.

But the thought of the series ending at book 40 was what sort of started me pondering as I read the book. What came out of the pondering eventually didn't have that much to do with the 40 thing. It had more to do with the relationship of a fictional, magical, allegorical world to the real world. Obviously some things can be analogical. And Pratchett also does a LOT of social parody and commentary. But I think there is more and I'm trying to give some shape to those thoughts.

The Characters (main protagonist series)

Before I get to that larger "relationship of the magical/fictional to the real" thing, I want to put some ideas out there about characters (after all, fiction is really always about the characters), meaning the major protagonists who have sub-series (Rincewind/Wizards, the Witches, Tiffany Aching, Death/Susan Sto Helit, Sam Vimes/City Watch, and Moist Von Lipwig).

One thing that makes me think along the line of capstone conclusions is that I think he has wrapped some major protagonist sub-series up rather nicely in the latter books of the series. Again, nothing has been said and it is entirely possible that he will write another witches book, or another Vimes book, or another Rincewind book, or another death book. But several of these have seem to come to ideal conclusions as far as literature goes. In Snuff, he brought Vimes to a very nice place for a conclusion. Actually I think he did it in Thud, but Snuff could be emblematic of the whole of the ongoing Vimes as father and figure outside AM. I thought Thud wound up being the wrap up to what, maybe unintentionally at first, could be called a Vimes trilogy. It starts with Fifth Elephant, which is Vimes the husband. Night Watch, as the center book to that trilogy, digs deep into his character and his concept of his future: He becomes his own father figure in the past as he is on the verge of becoming a real father (this is still possibly my favorite discworld book ... I love the song and the role it plays, I love the secret brotherhood that includes the opposite poles of Dibbler and Vetinari ... I love the deep humanity in it). Thud is then him being a father of his newborn, a very primal protective role, translating his protector-of-the-city role into his protector-of-the-family role. Snuff then sort of glimpses the whole development down the line by showing the inception (Vimes' relation to young Sam as he begins developing his own personality).

Like I said, TP very well may write more, but I think if he doesn't then Snuff could be viewed as a very satisfactory capstone. (the fact that there is one element beyond a core structure - here, another book beyond a trilogy - is not completely unheard of in Western tradition: in Judaism the 7th day is the day of completion, and Christianity holds onto this strongly, but develops Sunday as the 8th day, Sunday, the Ogdoad, beyond this in the way eschatology transcends natural history ... and TP seems to really like that number 8 too, so maybe he is familiar with this strand in the tradition ... but mainly I am saying that I can see a core wrapped-up trilogy AND and culminating book beyond that without the two being contradictory). ... SO, that is Vimes potentially wrapped up.

[RECAP NOTE/CLARIFACATION: Vimes has the most books of anybody in the whole 40-book series ... to be precise, he has 8 books ... TP really likes him; I really love him]

The Rincewind/Wizard's series was always sort of rambling to begin with, but I think that with Unseen Academicals we might have seen as far as it can go ... it's hard to top the heavy character and psychological themes in it. The running Rincewind again would be a regression (although I love those books in their place in the series), and besides, the silver horde bought the farm in Last Hero.

Death and Susan Sto Helit ... well, Death could go on forever, but I think that that is precisely why he needed a human protagonist to make Death work as a protagonist. Mort and Isabella ran their course as human protagonist in one book (Mort ... and I loved her giving him the sandwiches while flying on Binky, great scene), and then TP hit stride with the development of Susan. And notice Susan has a trilogy too. And I would argue that it brings her to a pretty well-rounded conclusion. It starts with her as a student (Soul Music), then as a Nanny (Hogfather) and ends with her in a more permanent profession as a school teacher (Thief of Time).

As far as the Witches and Tiffany Aching, Pratchett said he can't do any more TA books as YA (young adult) books. She has grown up (LOVE the last lines of I Shall Wear Midnight), and so any further books for her would have to be part of the Witches series. But I also sort of wonder if, in doing the Tiffany Aching YA series, he didn't also bring the witches series to a suitable conclusion. In the role that Granny Wetherwax plays in those books, she is really kind of passing a torch, or at least I think so, at least in a loose sort of way.

NOW, back to what I said about Vimes wrapped up in Snuff, because the fact that there is a lot of Vimes in Raising Steam might seem to contradict this. But, at least as far as I can remember, we only get introspection on one Character in RS, and that is Moist. We hear Vimes say a lot, but we don't hear him think. The character (or several sometimes) that you hear think is/are the main character/s. RS is decidedly a Moist book because he is really the only one that I can remember hearing think. And it is MVL's third book, which would make a nice trilogy ... particularly as we now have him and Adora Belle married (note, the dinner scene at Harry King's gives a glimpse into TP's conception of roles in AM ... 3 couples attending the "world stage" players: Sam and Sybil, Moist and Ador Belle, Harry and Effie ... actually sort of reminded me a little of the decent of the Edilla in CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, at least that positioning of the couples attending the power players).

But the question of Vimes' presence in RS did contribute somewhat to my thinking of this as a last book. As I read I was trying to discern how much of an ensemble cast book it might be, which is always a nice thing in wrap-ups: Vetinari, Vimes, Moist, Ridcully, and some cameos by supporting actors from other books like Sallie the vampire (but Susan Sto Helit or Tiffany Aching would be a bit difficult to include).

So that is all of the major protagonist series: Rincewind/Wizards and their rambling tales brought to a very powerful character book in Unseen Academicals; The Witches culminating in the Tiffany Aching series (which TP has said can't continue as YA books); Death's necessary human protagonist, Susan, completing a trilogy in which we find her in what seems to be a culminating profession for her; Vimes' final trilogy capped with the one-beyond book Snuff; and Moist Von Lipwig with a trilogy ending in showing him and ABD married.

The Discworld "Project"

The other avenue along which I think of RS as a possible culmination is a bit harder to describe, and so I have to try to keep it brief, because it could contain a lot of rabbit holes and go on forever. First there is the consideration of the relation of the fictional/magical to the real. All of the "technology" in the discworld usually has magical, or at least mechanical, versions of real-world technology. The iconograph is imps doing basically what cameras do in real life (including traffic cams ... very nice). On the mechanical side, the clacks runs on plain old semaphore, but is pretty much the telegraph, telecommunications, and pretty much the internet (including "cracking" which is pretty much hacking), and HEX (a computer, and even, in Hogfather, an AI) is an ant farm (although this is a bit more on the "mysticism" and "soul" side, rather than strictly magical or mechanical).

BUT, and this is VERY important ... there is no electricity. There can't be electricity in a world with magic. I don't know where this trope starts, but I have observed it in at least two other authors. Both of those authors have an electrical world and a magical one overlaying each other, with magic always playing havoc on electrical technology. These two are Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series (very much looking forward to Skin Game coming out in May) and, of course, JK Rowling's Harry Potter series.

I don't think Pratchett can get into internal combustion engines, I just don't think it meshes, but that would be a whole different discussion (rabbit hole).

BUT here is the interesting thing to me about RS. The mechanics are pretty much exactly the same as they were in the real world. In a series where so many aspects of real science/physicality are transferred to other things representing them (imps, ants, semiphore etc) for the purpose of examining the workings of human life through parody and analogy, it seems to me like crossing over the actual real-world mechanics into the fictional/magical world brings it to a place where the fictional has come as close to the factual as it is going to get, and that seems like a possible closing point to me.

But that discussion must go a little further (hopefully without falling down any rabbit holes). I have never taken TP's discworld to be typical fantasy, at least not in the way the genre seems to define itself these days. It's much more parody in the vein of Jonathan Swift. BUT there is something to it being a magical world, just as there is something to it having its own mythological reality (the gods, the disc on the back of the elephants on the back of Atuin the turtle). Take the idea of the discworld, for instance. There is a point to it that brings out something in the way Pratchett looks at the real human world, brought out in how he constructs the mythological one. A disc is both flat and round. In the history of our real world, these concepts conflicted. The real world concept of a flat earth, in ancient times, had four corners ... it was square. The scientific theory that developed as the globe concept was usually called "round earth." TP's disc is both round and flat. In the real world concepts/theories, those two qualities butted heads as contradictory; so the magical/fictional world keeping of both in one image (the disc) is technically a paradox (CK Chesterton LOVED to talk about paradoxes as avenues to truth ... and TP, for all his metaphysical and religious differences with Chesterton's worldview, IE traditional Catholic Christianity, LOVES Chesterton on literature and fairy stories)

The same is true for the magic elements/tropes in discworld. I can't pin out all of them, for many of the ways they parody parodoxes in the real world are pretty loose. But I CAN say this ... they tend to be taken from phases in thinking that are properly called magical.

For understanding this I need to give a little background. Before "magic" was "magic" it was called physics, literally ... some of Aristotle's main works were his Physics, his Metaphysics, his Poetics, and his Rhetoric. The big one here is his Physics. Actually the name used in the middle ages was "natural philosophy," in a very literal sense, a philosophical exposition of the natural world. A lot of the magic tropes used by TP and other fantasy writers come from a much later period, late-Medieval and Renaissance, at a time when "magic" had become thought of as "magic" as we now think of it, almost in contradiction with "physics" as a "science."

But back before that time, science and philosophy had not be separated out. BUT we do have in those more ancient materials, particularly on physics, the inception of the "magical"  (as distinct from the scientific) in the idea of the "occult." This is not yet the "occult" of Satanism and "black magic" we know now. It is the original meaning of the word "occult," which is "hidden" (the same word that is the base for "Occlumency" in Harry Potter). Natural physics has to do with causes and effects of force and mass/weight that we can observe. But those thinkers, in trying to examine all of physics, had to ponder those things that are inexplicable by these means. The one that stood as the symbol for all was the lodestone, a magnet. I can see when my hand pushes something and calculate from the weight of the thing that a certain amount of force must be applied, or observe that it sits on a rough or smooth surface and thus friction impacts the amount of force necessary. But I cannot directly observe how a magnet moves metal. Therefore, these ancient thinkers thought, there must be hidden qualities ... probably governed by laws similar to what I can see, but just not observable - hidden qualities governed by hidden principles. From this ancient form of philosophy about physical nature came the ideas, eventually, of "magic."

(Side Note: St Thomas Aquinas believed in such "occult properties" ... including in connection with influence by astral bodies, stars. But he only agreed with one side of that thinking. He agreed that there are qualities that cannot be observed with the naked eye that CAN be impacted by the position of stars at the time of inception of the thing, be it a made thing or a human being etc ... but he disagreed with what is called the "semiological" side. Semeia means "signs." In language and linguistics it is used for discussing language as a systems of signs, words standing for things. But here, in this "natural philosophy" realm, it meant astrological phenomena as "signs of the future, basically what we now call astrology and horoscopes ... for Aquinas, that side of astrology was right out)

The reason I bring all of this in is that there is another part of that ancient system of thought, which I am going to call "pre-magical."In that system of thinking, sort of the base of it actually, there is the 4 elements cosmology. All physical matter was thought to be some composite or other of the 4 elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Air. You find this in The Last Air Bender in an explicit form. You find it in Harry Potter in a thinly veiled way, but one that JKR openly stated about the 4-house system: Slytherin = Water, Gryffindor = Fire, Hufflepuff = Earth, Ravenclaw = Air/wind.

AND ... you find it in Rasing Steam, explicitly stated. Numerous times he states steam as containing or representing in an ideal way the combination of all four elements.

My main goal is in my calling that "pre-magical" and what TP does with it in RS.  The 4-elements cosmology is some of the most ancient thinking: pre-magical, but also the sources of "magical" thinking. And he brings in the 4-element cosmology in the same novel in which his magical world is closest to the real word (what I mentioned about about steam technology in RS being basically real steam technology, rather than imps or ants etc).

What I am saying is that he brings together the most ancient (steam as perfect icon of the 4 elements) and the closest contact of his magical world with the real world, especially in the modern/industrial period (steam as the actual steam locomotive of our history) ... in the same book.

My Main Point

I'm not trying to say, "Wow! this makes this the most comprehensive and amazing book in the history of the world! Why can't everybody see that ?!?!?!?" My main interest is just to say that such a book-ends quality (the ancient and modern as bookends around the time periods in which "magical" thinking develops) might make it a nice capstone for the series overall.

But like I said, he may write more. and if he writes more, I will read it (at least more discworld novels, I haven't really gotten into the Science of Discworld stuff. I think it sounds like fascinating ideas, but I don't have the same motivation for it; I am more into the narrative fiction). He may write more stand alones (like Moving Pictures, or Pyramids, or Small Gods, or Monstrous Regiment ... or maybe even a sequel to MR; I really loved the Polly Perks character), and I won't consider it some "betrayal" or "cheapening" of any of the current protagonists if he writes more of their books. Even if they aren't as stellar as what has gone before, I'll still like them for being TP and his wit.

BUT, for now, with the series in its present shape and at 40 books (a nice round number I like for numerological reasons), I kind of enjoy pondering the shape of that body of literature as having protagonist character arcs that have come to completion and a whole arc of the mythological world itself that has come to completion as a unique parody examination of the modern world through a fantasy lens.

I just like doing that. I like the shape the series and sub-series have. They may not stay in their present forms, but while they are in them, I enjoy thinking about that shape ... and I enjoy the shape itself. I think that it's great if he writes more, but I also think that if he does not write any more discworld novels, the series will still stand as a very well-shaped complete literary corpus to be proud of.