Book:Raising Steam/Annotations

The very first trainspotter appears on page 50.

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. 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 Ginngunnagap 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?