Raising Steam recap

Dick Simnel, a young engineer whose father died experimenting with steam, works out how to control it with mathematics and builds the Disc's first locomotive. Backed by the waste magnate Harry King, he brings her to Ankh-Morpork, where the crowds are entranced and Lord Vetinari installs Moist von Lipwig as the government's man on the railway. Moist buys land, calms landowners, and drives a line to Sto Lat and then further, while goblins take to the new machinery and the world reorganizes itself around speed. Among the dwarfs, fundamentalist grags led by Ardent preach against daylight, machines, and everything the railway represents, and begin destroying clacks towers and killing their operators. When they move against the Low King and threaten a coup in Uberwald, the railway is asked to do the impossible: lay track and run the King home across the continent in days. The run is made under constant sabotage and attack, with Vetinari aboard. The coup fails, and the King then reveals to the dwarfs that she is a woman, and becomes the first Low Queen.

Previously, in earlier books: Ankh-Morpork, the Disc's largest city, is governed by Lord Vetinari, who permits new things on condition that he understands and controls them. Moist von Lipwig, a talented confidence trickster caught and given the choice between hanging and public service, has since been made to run the Post Office, the Mint, and the Royal Bank, and has become respectable and extremely bored; he is married to Adora Belle Dearheart, who runs the Grand Trunk clacks company, the semaphore towers that now carry messages across the continent. The dwarfs are ruled from Uberwald by Low King Rhys Rhysson, and are divided between those who live and work above ground among other species and the deep-down grags who preach that this is a betrayal of what dwarfs are. Goblins, long treated as vermin, have recently been recognized as people. Commander Vimes still runs the Watch, and the world is industrializing faster than anyone in it quite realizes.

Dick Simnel, a young engineer from a small northern works, has spent years finishing what killed his father: making steam do useful work reliably, by measurement and calculation rather than hope. He succeeds, builds a locomotive, and takes her to Ankh-Morpork in search of the money and the land needed to do anything with her. He finds both in Sir Harry King, who made a fortune out of the city's waste and has the nerve to back something nobody else understands. The engine is set running on Harry's ground, and the effect on the public is immediate and slightly alarming: people come in their thousands simply to watch her move, and pay for the privilege. Lord Vetinari, watching this from a distance, understands at once that a machine which can carry hundreds of people faster than a horse is not a fairground attraction but a change in the shape of the world, and decides that it will not be allowed to happen without him.

Vetinari appoints Moist von Lipwig as the government's man on the railway, which suits Moist entirely, since respectability has been slowly killing him. The work is exactly the sort he is good at: buying rights of way from suspicious landowners, talking his way past objections, staging demonstrations, and making people want the thing he is selling before they have worked out what it will cost them. A line is driven out toward Sto Lat, and passengers appear in numbers long before there is much for them to travel to, simply because travelling is now possible. Harry King's fortune grows, Simnel refines his engines, and the railway begins to generate its own gravity, pulling in workers, engineers, financiers, and hangers-on. Adora Belle, who runs the clacks, takes a professional interest in what a competing communications and transport network will do to hers.

The railway spreads outward from Ankh-Morpork faster than anyone planned, and the world begins reorganizing itself around it: timetables, freight, commuting, seaside excursions, and a general expectation of speed. Goblins, newly recognized as people, turn out to have a striking aptitude for machinery and signalling and become indispensable on both the railway and the clacks. Not everyone welcomes it. Among the dwarfs, the deep-down grags preach that daylight, machines, and dwarfs living among other species are destroying dwarfishness itself, and the movement, with the grag Ardent among its voices, hardens from argument into organization. Clacks towers begin to burn, and their operators are killed. The Low King, Rhys Rhysson, finds his authority questioned by dwarfs who no longer accept that a king who tolerates the modern world is a king at all.

The attacks become a campaign. Towers are destroyed, railway works are wrecked, track is torn up, and people are murdered, and the pattern makes it plain that this is not local anger but a coordinated attempt to cut the new world's communications. Moist keeps the line running through sabotage and threats, using nerve and showmanship where he has nothing else, while Harry King's money and Simnel's engineering are stretched to hold the network together. Vimes and the Watch take an interest in the violence spilling into the city. Among the dwarfs themselves the argument turns dangerous, and Bashfull Bashfullsson, a grag who is both scholar and fighter, states publicly that dwarfishness is a matter of what dwarfs do rather than how deep they live, which is not a safe thing to say. Vetinari makes clear how much rests on the outcome.

The crisis becomes political. The fundamentalists are moving to unseat the Low King and install a ruler of their own, and dwarf law and custom require the King to be present in Uberwald, at the Scone of Stone, or the throne can be declared vacant. Ordinary travel will not get him there in time, and the roads are watched. The impossible request lands on the railway: build the line the rest of the way and run the King home across the continent in days. Simnel, Harry King, Moist, and everyone they can hire set to laying track at a speed nobody has attempted, with surveying, bridging, and rail-laying going on ahead of the train that will use them, and with the certain knowledge that every mile of it is known to the people who intend to stop it.

The run begins, and turns into a running battle. Track is torn up ahead of the train and repaired behind it, bridges are burned, and armed dwarf fighters attack the carriages while the engine is moving. Moist spends much of the journey on the roof and the tender, improvising, bluffing, and fighting, and is joined by an unexpected passenger: Lord Vetinari, who deals with attackers on the moving train himself and without fuss. The crew, dwarfs, humans, and goblins together, keep Iron Girder running, and Simnel nurses the engine through demands no locomotive was designed for. Meanwhile in Uberwald the coup proceeds on the assumption that the King cannot possibly arrive, and Bashfullsson works to hold the moderate dwarfs steady until he does.

The last stretch is the worst: the heaviest sabotage, the most determined attacks, and a final desperate improvisation to get the train across a stretch of ruined line. The train reaches Uberwald, and the Low King arrives at the Scone of Stone in time. The coup collapses, and its leaders are exposed as having murdered clacks operators, railwaymen, and their own countrymen in the name of a dwarfishness most dwarfs have no wish to return to. The fundamentalist movement, which had depended on being seen as the true voice of the deep mines, loses the argument in public and in front of everyone who matters.

With the throne secure, the King makes a second announcement to the assembled dwarfs: she is a woman, has been throughout her reign, and intends to go on ruling. Coming immediately after what the traditionalists have just been shown to be capable of, the revelation is accepted, and she becomes the first Low Queen of the dwarfs. Afterwards, the railway is no longer an experiment but the new shape of the world: lines pushing out in every direction, Harry King richer than ever, Dick Simnel free to build better engines, goblins established as skilled and well-paid workers, and Iron Girder herself somewhere between a machine and an object of real belief, looked after accordingly. Moist, having found that running a railway is the first respectable job he has ever actually enjoyed, keeps it, with Adora Belle beside him and Vetinari, as always, holding the reins.

The emergency line is finished and the train runs the whole way to Uberwald, fighting through torn-up track, burned bridges, and armed grag fighters, with Moist, Simnel, the goblins, the dwarfs of the crew, and Lord Vetinari himself defending it, and Vetinari dealing with attackers on the moving train personally. The Low King reaches the Scone of Stone in time, the coup collapses, and the fundamentalist movement is broken as its leaders are exposed as having murdered clacks operators and railwaymen for the sake of a version of dwarfishness that most dwarfs do not want. The King then makes a second announcement to the assembled dwarfs: she is a woman, and has been throughout her reign, and she intends to go on ruling as the first Low Queen. The dwarfs, having just been reminded what the alternative looks like, accept her. Afterwards the railway is no longer an experiment but the new shape of the world: lines spreading in every direction, Harry King rich beyond reckoning, Dick Simnel free to build better engines, goblins established as skilled workers, and Iron Girder something between a machine and an object of genuine belief, cared for accordingly. Moist, having discovered that running a railway is the only respectable job he has ever enjoyed, keeps it, with Adora Belle beside him and Vetinari, as ever, holding the reins.