Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

[lightreads]

Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I've applied a lot of words to Discworld books over the years, not all of them good, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time I'm going to call one of them boring. Bo-ring. So boring.

He's written this book a good fifteen times already, and most of them were better. A new piece of technology confounds the Discworld (the railroad), there are arguments, protests, less than a handful of good jokes, and an allegedly feel-good interlude about social progress in which, in this case, we have yet another "I'm really female, so there!" revelation from a dwarf.* This is number twenty five, roughly.

*Which was actually the most interesting thing in the book for me, because it pissed me off enough to actually get my blood flowing again. Because, like, all dwarves live as men, which apparently means that women don't get to be women because….they don't wear skirts? So when they "rebel," what they do is have their armor recast to include breast molds. Because that's what being a lady is. No for real.




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Comments

[malka]

The identity stuff around Pratchett's female dwarves makes me deeply sad when I think about it too hard. The subtext of many of the scenes seems to be that they're not fully real dwarves and they're also failing at female. As a woman in a strongly male-dominated profession, I hear that song enough in real life. I end up carefully not thinking about the dwarves so I can maintain my use of Discworld as light escapist reading.

(I haven't read this particular Pratchett, so I don't know if it continues the subtext, but it's been in several of the others.)

[lightreads]

Yes to all of that. And the thing that bugs me more the more I think about it is that structurally, this whole thing comes down really heavily on the side of endorsing a particular kind of femininity as real or innate or whatever. Like, okay, female dwarves have lived as male dwarves for a very long time, so clearly there isn't a well-developed concept of "feminine behavior" in dwarf society, if you know what I mean. So when they decide to be ladies openly they default to this whole stereotyped notion of exaggeratedly feminine dress, shape, etc. As if that's, like, the universal understanding of what ladies are. Which is plausible as a way to react to oppression -- clumsily copying what they observe from humans and others, and missing all the nuance. But that's me making excuses for Pratchett that I really don't think he deserves on this one.