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Wednesday
Last week I reported on visiting the site where the du Pont family made their fortune in gunpowder. They also have a great museum there celebrating inventors, although upon reflection I think it may be in part a public relations move. Better to be seen as a Thomas Edison or a George Washington Carver than a merchant of death.
It so happens that, while visiting the museum, Julia and I were also listening to Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam, which has the same celebratory feel. Although it’s a fantasy novel, Pratchett taps into the excitement that gripped 19th century England over the invention of the railway, with his engineer hero Dick Simnel harnessing steam to create “Iron Girder.” Eventually the train is involved in a heroic and hair-raising mission to thwart an attempted coup by fundamentalist dwarfs, who have been blowing up telegraph towers and massacring innocents. (Pratchett has modeled them on Islamic State terrorists.)
Pratchett’s engineer exudes the same drive and inventiveness that we saw highlighted at the museum. Working in his garage (of course), he convinces his skeptical mother by waving in front of her “something that looked like a small wand, which might have been made for a miniature wizard”:
This’ll keep me safe, Mother! I’ve the knowing of the sliding rule! I can tell the sine what to do, and the cosine likewise and work out the tangent of t’quaderatics!
A little later, recalling a father who has been killed in an explosion, Simnel tells her,
I remembered what Dad said about t’time he were watching t’kettle boiling and notice t’lid going up and down with the pressure, and he told me that one day someone would build a bigger kettle that would lift more than a kettle lid. And I believe I have the knowing of the way to build a proper kettle, Mother.
We then watch Simnel persuade millionaire Harry King to invest in Iron Girder. The engineer says, with justifiable pride, “I’ve made a machine that can carry people and goods just about everywhere and it don’t need ’orses and it’s run on water ’n’ coal. It’s my machine, I built it and I can make it even better if you can see your way clear to advance me some investment.”
Although a tight-fisted man who has made his fortune handling the city’s sewage, King is entranced when he sees Iron Girder steaming down a short circle track laid down for demonstration purposes:
Harry was uncharacteristically silent. The thrumming of the machines was like a kind of spell. Again, the metal voice of steam rang out over the compound like a lost soul and he found himself unable to leave. Harry wasn’t a man for introspection and all that rubbish, but he thought that this, well this was something worth a closer look. And then he noticed the faces of the crowd around the compound, the goblins climbing up to gawp at this new raging devil which was nevertheless under the control of two lads in flat caps and very little to speak of in regard to teeth.
Like the du Ponts, who shifted from gunpowder to nylon, King (to the joy of his wife) shifts from being “the King of Shit” to a major backer of the new technology.
Terry Pratchett has sometimes been seen as an anti-Tolkien, in that his own fantasy world has made peace with the industrial age and also embraces multicultural diversity. Tolkien, who understandably longed for a pre-industrial rural England as he experienced the horrors of World War I trench warfare, casts Saruman as a diabolical tree-destroying industrialist and the goblins and orcs as the industrial proletariat. DEI advocate Pratchett, by contrast, shows goblins gaining the grudging respect of society as they prove indispensable to social progress.
Whereas Tolkien depicts goblins as little more than vermin, which is how the public sees them in Pratchett’s novel Snuff, Pratchett shows them possessing special talents. In fact, by the end of the novel, a goblin has invented the bicycle. Discworld society eventually grants them rights, along with trolls, dwarfs, werewolves, vampires (but they must be black ribbon members who have sworn off human blood), and other storybook monsters.
These other creatures are also contributing to the railway. For instance, Troll lawyer Thunderbolt, who has a voice “like gently flowing lava,” whose body is as hard as a rock, and who carries “a rich plant life in his visible cavities,” handles the necessary patent applications. “I am diamond through and through and therefore I cannot tell lies for fear of shattering,’ he informs his clients.
From the Hagley Museum we learned the importance of patents and the patent office in the invention process.
When reading Raising Steam, one can help thinking of Trump’s attacks on immigrants. Pratchett may be targeting Muslim fundamentalists in his novel, but the fanaticism of terrorist dwarfs who want to return their kingdom to the old days applies just as much to those MAGA Americans who want to make America white again.
What both Pratchett and the Hagley Museum make clear is that new inventions arise from individuals exercising their freedom to follow their dreams. In other words, the more a society opens its arms to diversity and to individual initiative, the more it will thrive. It’s why independent university research and a broad-minded immigration policy are critical to social health.
Pratchett strikes a feminist blow as well. By the end of the novel we learn that the dwarf king who restores order and who has reached historic accords with the dwarfs’ traditional enemies (trolls and goblins) is actually female.
After defeating the fundamentalist dwarfs and regaining her kingdom, the queen concludes with the kind of rousing speech we need from our leaders today. Referring to the historic train ride that has allowed her to return home in time to put down the rebellion, she declares,
What a voyage that was! And the wonderful discovery of loggysticks [logistics]. The train is the future, bringing people closer together. Think about it. People run to see the train go past. Why? Because it’s heading to the future or coming from the past. Personally, I very much want the future and I want to see to it that dwarfs are part of that future, if it’s not too late.
When it comes to 21st century challenges, millions of Americans also want to be part of the future, not trapped in MAGA nostalgia. We’re currently on our own daring train ride, battling those who want to derail it with landslides, sabotage, and direct attacks.
And with this battle in mind, it’s worth mentioning another Pratchett character since he can serve as a model in these dark times. “A life without danger is a life not world living,” proclaims Moist von Lipwig, a former conman who has used his skills to reform the postal system (Going Postal), get the central bank back up and running (Making Money) and now ensure the success of the railway. While he claims he wants a dull, comfortable life, he brings excitement to making basic governmental services work.
In other words, we can’t take for granted the life we’ve been accustomed to. We must tap into those energies of the past that made our country great and renew our commitment, even if doing so requires us to be dedicated, risk-taking, and courageous.
