{"id":5133,"date":"2020-03-02T05:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T13:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=5133"},"modified":"2020-03-01T07:12:50","modified_gmt":"2020-03-01T15:12:50","slug":"mark-reads-raising-steam-part-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2020\/03\/mark-reads-raising-steam-part-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads &#8216;Raising Steam&#8217;: Part 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the fourth part of <i>Raising Steam<\/i>, Moist and Vetinari are convinced, and Adore Belle deals with a disaster. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read <i>Discworld<\/i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s weird watching a neighborhood change.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen it happen so many times over the course of my life. If you went to the hood I grew up in, the drug dens wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be there, and neither would the run-down homes and parks. The street finally got paved; the entire public infrastructure is different, actually, as there is <i>literally<\/i> a new avenue where there wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t one. There are nice bike paths, a convenience store that sells fancy, bougie food, and rumor is they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re finally building an elementary school out there, too. It was <i>not<\/i> a nice neighborhood when I lived there! It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a huge reason why my parents were able to buy a FOUR bedroom house for under $100,000. No one wanted to live there!<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t long before the dream communities starting coming in, and they all had names JUST like the ones Pratchett satirizes here. I honestly don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the appeal of them. Why would you want a house that looks <i>exactly<\/i> like everyone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s? What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s appealing about that sort of monotony? But I suppose that people who live in these gated, planned communities aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t thinking about these things. Indeed, I feel like Pratchett completely nails it on the head: they want to live far enough away from a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dirty\u00e2\u20ac\u009d city to have access to it, but to live in their own little paradise. And it won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be too long before those people start voting against the interests of the people in the city, saying it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unfair that they have to pay so much and use so little. And how much you wanna bet that after ten years or so, the people from these suburbs and communities will want to buy up property in the city that <i>other<\/i> citizens made cool, and so they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll push everyone out to get what they want? Again! And guess who gets screwed in practically every iteration of this cycle?<\/p>\n<p>The poor. The lower class.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Anyway, Pratchett knows what he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s talking about here. And I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m also curious if the flight he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s describing here\u00e2\u20ac\u201dof the lower middle class\u00e2\u20ac\u201dis something we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see again. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to happen when all these \u00e2\u20ac\u0153far-flung\u00e2\u20ac\u009d cities are suddenly incredibly accessible because you can take a train there? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m speaking from experience here, as I lived in Los Angeles and watched the community of Beverly Hills (and it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just them, for the record) lose their fucking SHIT when Metro planned to extend the Purple Line through their fine city. They fought it tooth and nail, employed blatantly racist\/classist logic in doing so, and so Metro pettily approved a plan where the train is now just going to go around them. Which is so goddamn funny to me, on the one hand, because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re losing out on business opportunities. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also tragic because the very people they claim are going to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153invade\u00e2\u20ac\u009d their city ARE ALREADY THERE. It just takes fucking <i>forever<\/i> to get there by public transportation, but the lower class is definitely the badly paid workforce running much of Beverly Hills.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Clearly, this stuff gets me HEATED.<\/p>\n<p>Moving on! I made this comment on video, but I really want to expand on it. I did not actually consider how incredible it must be for these people to see a steam engine. I know I wrote earlier that Pratchett has been dragging <i>Discworld<\/i> into the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153modern\u00e2\u20ac\u009d age, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not <i>contemporary<\/i>. The majority of these books were set in a secondary world fantasy that was pre-technology, pre-Industrial age. But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the case now, and I really think we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re about to see a massive revolution in multiple areas sweep over the Disc. Some of that is openly discussed here, yet I still like that Pratchett gives room for Moist to simply marvel over what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just happened. He is getting an experience few of us ever will: he is watching the world change <i>forever<\/i>. The <i>Science of Discworld<\/i> books got me contemplating that very phenomenon, as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been lucky enough to live in an age where cell phones came into being. As well as computers. Laptops! Tablets! Sometimes, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m on my Switch (playing as Kirby in Smash Bros. because I love nothing better than getting really good at a character that pisses off other people), and I just\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t deal with the <i>idea<\/i> of it?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>And now, Moist gets to ride on a machine that <i>feels<\/i> alive, that seems indistinguishable from magic, that is going to allow people and objects to travel <i>smoothly<\/i> from point A to point B WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT THE VEHICLE GETTING TIRED. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no resting feet or giving horses a break or sore arms from rowing. Maybe you might get sore from shoveling coal and wood into the furnace? And maybe you might get so overwhelmed by the entire process that you zone out like Drumknott does? But that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s it. THAT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S IT. Obviously, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not perfect, and Dick Simnel has to test so many things to get it working better and faster. Well, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the building of the actual railway. Who is doing <i>that<\/i>? How are they going to secure the land rights to build it? Will their be communities\u00e2\u20ac\u201dlike Beverly Hills\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwho will reject it? Oh god, I wonder if Pratchett is going to satirize NIMBYs? Do they have people like that in the UK?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Seriously, what <i>will<\/i> come next??? I DON\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T KNOW.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>I reference Vetinari\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s line because, once more, I remain shocked at how much the grags are escalating their attacks. I expected something like this much later in the novel, but nope! It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening <i>now<\/i>. This time, that clacks tower in Sto Kerrig was set on fire, and two goblins were hurt. I assume that Adora Belle and Angua purposely chose to cover up the goblin retaliation on the one dwarf they found, right? Is that what that scene meant? Anyway: if the dwarfs are already willing to take lives, how much further are they willing to go? That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s usually a last, desperate step, and this was the grags\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 FIRST step!!!<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to get so much worse before it ever gets better.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtu.be\/oSuQU1xu81g<\/p>\n<p><b>Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/books\/9781250169211\">You can now pre-order my second YA novel, <i>Each of Us a Desert<\/i>, which will be released on September 15, 2020 from Tor Teen!<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8211; If you&#8217;d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, <a href=\"http:\/\/eepurl.com\/ey636\">sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the fourth part of Raising Steam, Moist and Vetinari are convinced, and Adore Belle deals with a disaster. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read Discworld.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[463,565,248],"class_list":["post-5133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-raising-steam","tag-terry-pratchett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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