Book:Raising Steam/Annotations

The very first trainspotter appears on page 50.

Doubleday hardback (UK), pXXX and throughout: Swine Town - a previously unregarded bucolic backwater, which becomes a strategic location for a railway depot located halfway between two important destinations. Compare Swindon, which until the railway was built connecting London to the (then) second port city of Bristol was a very minor agricultural village. The Bristol railway, the Great Western, was built with the intention of bringing fresh perishable produce swiftly to the markets of the capital, whose river was so foul the local fish was utterly inedible. Swindon (whose name means Swine Town) became an oasis of heavy industry in Wiltshire, an otherwise entirely agricultural economy. Until privatisation, it remained a key strategic location in the British rail network, its factories building locomotives and directly feeding them into the system. Today, Britain incredibly imports railway locos and carriages from Europe and - believe this - transfers them to their destination by road. It is possible we've lost the plot somewhere.

Doubleday hardback (UK), p112 et seq:

• This page probably holds the all-time record (outside of Soul Music) for the maximum number of sly allusions, annotations, and shout-outs to music, history, and other works of literature on a single page. To take them in order:

Line 6 - It's all about the Locomotion... The whole theme of the discussion between Mustrum Ridcully and Lu-Tze is indeed about the irrestistable advent of the new. Everybody's doing a brand-new dance now! Indeed.

Line 9 - the Ginnungagap is placed in its correct Discworld context as the primal chaos from which an ordered world emerged, with the proviso that if left badly managed, it will slide back into that chaos again.

Lines 13-14 - The only problem I have yet to solve is how to get from the dying world into the new world... Lu-Tze is referring back to earlier history monk stories. The Abbot has no problem with this - he is an adept at being serially reincarnated from a dying world into a new one! Lu-Tze has to go about things differently.

Lines 15-16 - even the Abbot is concerned about the arrival of steam-engines when it isn't steam-engine time - an aphorism originally coined by the chronicler of strange and anomalous things, Charles Fort. The full Fortean quote is:

If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. (Charles Fort, Lo!)

Lines 30 - end ...even the very wise have neglected to take notice of one rather important Goddess...Pippina, the lady with the Apple of Discord. This invokes the Greek Eris, Goddess of discord, who famously incited war among Gods and men with the Golden Apple casually rolled into a roomful of vain deities, all of whom thought an apple inscribed "KALLISTI" - to the fairest one - was of course theirs by right. The fallout from the war among Gods became the ten-year Trojan War on Earth.

The following conversation between Ridcully and Lu-Tze emphasises the need for balance between Chaos and Order. This is also a central theme of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, where the Golden Apple is a plot -point, Eris walks the earth still as Goddess of disorder, her adherents greet each other with "All Hail Eris!", and the Chaos-Order thing is symbolised as Eristic forces versus Aneristic forces.

At the top of Page 113, Lu-Tze concedes that even the history monks can become a less than beneficial force once they get complacent and become part of the established order - he deliberately uses the term "bureaucracy" to describe this danger. This not only brings the Cosmic Auditors to mind - guardians of never-changing sterility - but also Shea and Wilson's assertion that chaos is born, out of sheer desperation, from stifling strangling bureaucracy - which is Order taken to a destructive extreme. Shea and Wilson have a word for this state in their philosophy, and yes, it's a German word - Beamtenherrschaft, Bureaucracy.

Doubleday hardback (UK), p124: Another sign of the changing times. A large troll halts the train as it slows to a bridge. The passengers hold their breath apprehensively. No, it's not a shake-down for toll money, nor is it the prelude to an anxious request as to whether the train is carrying any billy-goats, gruff optional. The troll works for the railway company. He has a red flag to prove it. The only toll he wants to exact is public recognition that his building-gang constructed the bridge the train is about to cross. As a saying about the future has it, everyone will want his five minutes of fame.... and the future is here. Why dwell on the past?

Doubleday hardback (UK), p180 and perhaps throughout: The first mention of the leopard being able to change its shorts (Vimes about Moist). Wondered when this was going to come up...

Doubleday hardback (UK), p190: A would-be saboteur emulates the passing of Ned Simnel and leaves this world in a massive cloud of pink steam. By the way, the steam is necessarily pink in these circumstances because.... Also, the uneasy suspicion forms in the mind of Moist Von Lipwig that the Iron Girder is sentient and somehow engineered a situation where a Dwarf who tried to do her harm was wafted to his afterlife in a cloud of hot pink steam. This is strikingly like an event in the Stephen King novel (and movie) "Christine", about a classic American car with sentience and a negative opinion of people trying to do her harm...

Doubleday hardback (UK), p223 et seq: Mrs Georgina Bradshaw, the chronicler of the railway network. Refer to Wikipedia: [George Bradshaw] in the middle 1800's was a railway fan who made a living of writing traveller's guides, even meticulously collating timetables so that, ultimately, a traveller using Bradshaw guides could plot a railway journey, together with stays in recommended cities and local hotels, to confidently craft a journey from Waverley Station, Edinburgh, to Kursky station in Moscow - within five minutes of accuracy all along the way.

Doubleday hardback (UK), pp228-229 and footnote p228: The inevitable spin-off: model railways and train sets. Lady Effie is heard to complain that the trackside model of Sir Harry King makes him look too fat... a Fat Controller? whatever will they think of next...

Doubleday hardback (UK), pp229-230: Although Iron Girder is (fortunately) better adjusted to a human rival than Stephen King's Christine: she is heard to purr approval to Emily King buffing up her nameplate till it shines, and indicating her affection for Dick Simnel. it would appear I.G. is only malevolently inclined towards people who are actively attempting to injure her.