Going Postal

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This article is on the novel Going Postal. For the violent social phenomenon, see going postal.

Template:Infobox Discworld Going Postal (ISBN 0385603428, published by Doubleday) is Terry Pratchett's 33^rd Discworld novel, released in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2004. Unusually for a Discworld novel (other than the children's books and the Science of Discworlds) Going Postal is divided into chapters. These chapters begin with a synopsis of philosophical themes, in a similar manner to some Victorian novels. This experiment was not continued with the next novel, Thud!

The cover illustration of the British edition, by Paul Kidby, is a parody of a poster for Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

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Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Moist von Lipwig, con artist and all-around fraud, unexpectedly finds that instead of faking his own death to escape the law, someone has faked his death for him. Unfortunately, that someone was Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, and now Lipwig has a choice: either he tries to get the Ankh-Morpork Postal Service up and running as its new Postmaster General, or he steps through a very specific (vertical) door and Vetinari (along with the rest of the human race) never sees him again. Lipwig pretends to accept the job offer and tries to run, but he is hunted down by an implacable golem, Pump 19, and returned to the Post Office.

With great reluctance, Lipwig takes up his duties, only to find things are even worse than he imagines. The Post Office has not functioned for decades, and the building is full to overflowing with undelivered mail. Two eccentric employees remain, more concerned about following the Post Office Regulations than seeing the postal system restored. There's a Post Office cat, but it is even more set in its ways. And worst of all, he learns that within the last couple of months, while he was waiting to "die" in his prison cell, a whole string of newly-appointed Postmasters have met their own deaths in the Post Office building. Lipwig eventually discovers that most of the men where killed by failure to safely interact with a sort of "ghost reality" which can overlay the physical structure (or lack thereof) in the Post Office. A wizard at Unseen University explains to him that this phenomenon is caused by the fact that words have power, and masses of them are currently crammed into every available inch of space in the Post Office.

Passing a dangerous test conducted by the few surviving members of a secret (or more accurately ignored) order of postmen, Lipwig "officially" becomes Postmaster, and also learns that the Post Office was once a very efficient operation, but the trans-dimensional sorting machine they used became so highly tuned that it was sorting letters before they were written, and then it began spewing out masses of letters which might have been written, and the Post Office fell apart under the strain.

Lipwig introduces the innovation of postage stamps to Ankh-Morpork, hires golems to deliver the mail, and finds himself going head to head against the monolithic and monopolistic Grand Trunk clacks line,. While doing all this, he meets and falls in love with the tough, chain-smoking golem-rights activist, Adora Belle Dearheart, and the two begin a relationship by the end of the book. Dearheart is the daughter of the original Clacks founder, before the company was taken from him by tricky legal maneuvering, and she still has useful contacts amongst the clacks operators.

The unscrupulous Clacks chairman, Reacher Gilt, who in philosophical terms is a giant version of Lipwig, sics a banshee assassin on the Postmaster, but only succeeds in burning down much of the Post Office building. The banshee dies when he gets flipped onto the space-warping sorting machine. Lipwig finally makes an outrageous wager than he can deliver a message to Genua faster than the Grand Trunk can. "The Smoking Gnu", a group of clacks hackers, sets up a plan to send a killer poke into the clacks system that will destroy the machinery. Moist talks the Gnu out of it, however, and instead opts for a somewhat more psychological attack on the Grand Trunk. This plan succeeds, and Gilt ends up walking through a very specific door..

Going Postal, as a Discworld novel, is filled with references and parodies — here the references include GNU, crackers (specifically, phreakers), AT&T, and The Smoking Gun. A critique of libertarianism is also a theme in the book, dovetailing with an extended parody of Atlas Shrugged and more generally the works of Ayn Rand.

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