Artikelzusammenfassung

Reprieved confidence trickster Moist von Lipwig, who reorganized the Ankh-Morpork Post Office in 2004's Going Postal, turns his attention to the Royal Mint in this splendid Discworld adventure. It seems that the aristocratic families who run the mint are running it into the ground, and benevolent despot Lord Vetinari thinks Moist can do better. Despite his fondness for money, Moist doesn't want the job, but since he has recently become the guardian of the mint's majority shareholder (an elderly terrier) and snubbing Vetinari's offer would activate an Assassins Guild contract, he reluctantly accepts. Pratchett throws in a mad scientist with a working economic model, disappearing gold reserves and an army of golems, once more using the Disc as an educational and entertaining mirror of human squabbles and flaws (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Moist von Lipwig, the savior of the Ankh-Morpork post office, has gotten settled into a routine. He's filling out forms, signing things, will probably get to be head of the Merchants Association next year, and he hasn't designed a stamp in months. He's so bored, in fact, that he's taken to climbing the walls of the post office and breaking into his own office. Lord Vetinari, always brilliant in his ruthlessness, recognizes an opportunity when he sees one, and offers Moist the job of running the royal mint. Moist tries to refuse, pretending that he's satisfied with the stable life, but he can't deny the urge for adventure and intrigue for long. The mint is, in the finest Ankh-Morpork tradition, a strange and oddly old-fashioned place, with bizarre traditions so ingrained the long-term employees can't imagine doing them any other way. Moist is the perfect innovator, with his wildly creative solutions to problems, for changing the way the entire city thinks about money. In the transition from the gold standard and old money, Pratchett brings up all the details that make Ankh-Morpork one of the most satisfying contemporary fantasy cities and continues in his trend of beautifully crafted, wickedly cutting satire on the underpinnings of modern human society. Making Money is smart, funny, and a thoroughly entertaining read. Schroeder, Regina

“You ride along on his tide of outlandish invention, realizing that you are in the presence of a true original among contemporary writers.”
–The Times

“Terry Pratchett is a comic genius.”
–Daily Express

From the Hardcover edition.

The long awaited, brand new adult Discworld novel.

It’s an offer you can’t refuse.

Who would not to wish to be the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork’s Royal Mint and the bank next door?

It’s a job for life. But, as former con-man Moist von Lipwig is learning, the life is not necessarily for long.

The Chief Cashier is almost certainly a vampire. There’s something nameless in the cellar (and the cellar itself is pretty nameless), it turns out that the Royal Mintruns at a loss. A 300 year old wizard is after his girlfriend, he’s about to be exposed as a fraud, but the Assassins Guild might get him first. In fact lot of people want him dead

Oh. And every day he has to take the Chairman for walkies.

Everywhere he looks he’s making enemies.

What he should be doing is . . . Making Money!

From the Hardcover edition.

It's an offer you can't refuse. Who would not to wish to be the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork's Royal Mint and the bank next door? It's a job for life. But, as former con-man Moist von Lipwig is learning, the life is not necessarily for long. The Chief Cashier is almost certainly a vampire. There's something nameless in the cellar (and the cellar itself is pretty nameless), it turns out that the Royal Mint runs at a loss. A 300 year old wizard is after his girlfriend, he's about to be exposed as a fraud, but the Assassins Guild might get him first. In fact lots of people want him dead. Oh! And every day he has to take the Chairman for walkies. Everywhere he looks he's making enemies. What he should be doing is ...Making Money!

Terry Pratchett, geboren 1948, verkaufte seine erste Geschichte im zarten Alter von dreizehn Jahren und ist heute einer der erfolgreichsten Autoren überhaupt. Neben Douglas Adams und Tom Sharpe gilt er als Großbritanniens scharfsinnigster und pointensicherster Komik-Spezialist. Er lebt mit seiner Frau Lyn und seiner Tochter Rhianna in Wiltshire.

Chapter 1

Waiting in darkness – A bargain sealed – The hanging man – Golem with a blue dress – Crime and punishment – A chance to make real money – The chain of gold-ish – No unkindness to bears – Mr Bent keeps time

THEY LAY IN THE DARK, guarding. There was no way of measuring the passage of time, nor any inclination to measure it. There was a time when they had not been here, and there would be a time, presumably, when they would, once more, not be here. They would be somewhere else. This time in between was immaterial.

But some had shattered and some, the younger ones, had gone silent.

The weight was increasing.

Something must be done.

One of them raised his mind in song.

It was a hard bargain, but hard on whom? That was the question. And Mr Blister the lawyer wasn’t getting an answer. He would have liked an answer. When parties are interested in unprepossessing land, it might pay for smaller parties to buy up any neighbouring plots, just in case the party of the first part had heard something, possibly at a party.

But it was hard to see what there was to know.

He gave the woman on the other side of his desk a suitably concerned smile.

‘You understand,Miss Dearheart, that this area is subject to dwarf mining law? That means all metals and metal ore are owned by the Low King of the dwarfs. You will have to pay him a considerable royalty on any that you remove. Not that there will be any, I’m bound to say. It is said to be sand and silt all the way down, and apparently it is a very long way down.’

He waited for any kind of reaction from the woman opposite, but she just stared at him. Blue smoke from her cigarette spiralled towards the office ceiling.

‘Then there is the matter of antiquities,’ said the lawyer, watching as much of her expression as could be seen through the haze. ‘The Low King has decreed that all jewellery, armour, ancient items classified as Devices, weaponry, pots, scrolls or bones extracted by you from the land in question will also be subject to a tax or confiscation.’

Miss Dearheart paused as if to compare the litany against an internal list, stubbed out her cigarette and said: ‘Is there any reason to believe that there are any of these things there?’

‘None whatsoever,’ said the lawyer, with a wry smile. ‘Everyone knows that we are dealing with a barren waste, but the King is insuring against “what everyone knows” being wrong. It so often is.’

‘He is asking a lot of money for a very short lease!’

‘Which you are willing to pay. This makes dwarfs nervous, you see. It’s very unusual for a dwarf to part with land, even for a few years. I gather he needs the money because of all this Koom Valley business.’

‘I’m paying the sum demanded!’

‘Quite so, quite so. But I—’

‘Will he honour the contract?’

‘To the letter. That at least is certain. Dwarfs are sticklers in such matters. All you need to do is sign and, regrettably, pay.’

Miss Dearheart reached into her bag and placed a thick sheet of paper on the table. ‘This is a banker’s note for five thousand dollars, drawn on the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork.’

The lawyer smiled. ‘A name to trust,’ he said, and added: ‘traditionally, at least. Do sign where I’ve put the crosses, will you?’

He watched carefully as she signed, and she got the impression he was holding his breath.

‘There,’ she said, pushing the contract across the desk.

‘Perhaps you could assuage my curiosity, madam?’ he said. ‘Since the ink is drying on the lease?’

Miss Dearheart glanced around the room, as if the heavy old bookcases concealed a multitude of ears. ‘Can you keep a secret, Mr Blister?’

‘Oh, indeed, madam. Indeed!’

She looked around conspiratorially. ‘Even so, this should be said quietly,’ she hissed.

He nodded hopefully, leaned forward, and for the first time for many years felt a woman’s breath in his ear:

‘So can I,’ she said.

That was nearly three weeks ago . . .

Some of the things you could learn up a drainpipe at night were surprising. For example, people paid attention to small sounds – the click of a window catch, the clink of a lockpick – more than they did to big sounds, like a brick falling into the street or even (for this was, after all, Ankh-Morpork) a scream.

These were loud sounds which were therefore public sounds, which in turn meant they were everyone’s problem and, therefore, not mine. But small sounds were nearby and suggested such things as stealth betrayed, and so were pressing and personal.

Therefore, he tried not to make little noises.

Below him the coach yard of the Central Post Office buzzed like an overturned hive. They’d got the turntable working really well now. The overnight coaches were arriving and the new Uberwald Flyer was gleaming in the lamplight. Everything was going right, which was, to the night-time climber, why everything was going wrong.

The climber thrust a brick key into soft mortar, shifted his weight, moved his foo—

Damn pigeon! It flew up in panic, his other foot slipped, his fingers lost their grip on the drainpipe, and when the world had stopped churning he was owing the postponement of his meeting with the distant cobbles to his hold on a brick key which was, let’s face it, nothing more than a long flat nail with a t-piece grip.

And you can’t bluff a wall, he thought. If you swing you might Making Money get your hand and foot on the pipe, or the key might come out.

Oh . . . kay . . .

He had more keys and a small hammer. Could he knock one in without losing his grip on the other?

Above him the pigeon joined its colleagues on a higher ledge.

The climber thrust the nail into the mortar with as much force as he dared, pulled the hammer out of his pocket and, as the Flyer departed below with a clattering and jingling, hit the nail one massive blow.

It went in. He dropped the hammer, hoping the sound of its impact would be masked by the general bustle, and grabbed the new hold before the hammer had hit the ground.

Oh . . . kay. And now I am . . . stuck?

The pipe was less than three feet away. Fine. This would work. Move both hands on to the new hold, swing gently, get his left hand around the pipe, and he could drag himself across the gap. Then it would be just—

The pigeon was nervous. For pigeons, it’s the ground state of being. It chose this point to lighten the load.

Oh . . . kay. Correction: two hands were now gripping the suddenly very slippery nail.

Damn.

And at this point, because nervousness runs through pigeons faster than a streaker through a convent, a gentle patter began.

There are times when ‘It does not get any better than this’ does not spring to mind.

And then a voice from below said: ‘Who’s up there?’

Thank you, hammer. They can’t possibly see me, he thought. People look up from the well-lit yard with their night vision in shreds. But so what? They know I’m here now....

Die Meinung des Kunden

Gar nicht mal übel...

Ja, ich hätte mir auch ein anderes Thema als Moist van Lipwig gewünscht, nachdem "Going Postal" ja gerade erst erschienen war. Ein wenig Abwechslung in den Hauptpersonen hält die Scheibenwelt interessant.

Trotzdem ist das Wiedersehen mit Moist van Lipwig in bekannter Terry Prachett-Manier angenehm, unterhaltsam und kurzweilig. Vielleicht ist der Anschluss an das Vorgängerbuch für viele Leser zu logisch, doch ich finde, dass Making Money definitiv zu den besseren Discworld-Büchern gehört.

Parallel zur realen ökonomischen Diskussion stellt sich die Frage, ob eine Bank wirklich Gold als Sicherheit für ausgegebenes Geld benötigt. In Notzeiten kann man dieses nicht einmal essen, wären Kartoffeln als Sicherheit demnach nicht viel sinnvoller?

Der verrückte Professor ist in diesem Fall Hubert mit seinem Igor, und erinnert an all die Computer-Spezialisten, die mit virtuellen Modellen die Wirtschaft vorhersagen wollen. Eine Figur, die zur Discworld passt, und über deren Einführung ich mich gefreut habe.

Veterinaris Gegenspieler Cosmo ist wunderbar widerlich, Moists Verlobte wie immer in eine Rauchwolke eingehüllt, und was der vermutete Vampir und Haupt-Kassierer Bent denn nun wirklich ist, bleibt bis zum Schluss unklar.

Die Geschichte liest sich flüssig, man trifft alte Bekannte, und es bringt wie immer Spaß, die Discworld zu besuchen.

Vielleicht nicht das ideale Buch für Discworld-Neulinge, für alte Freunde allerdings eine wunderbare Fortsetzung.

Gerade im Hinblick auf Terry's Erkrankung freue ich mich über jede Neuerscheinung und hoffe, dass die Scheibenwelt nicht zu schnell ein Ende findet.

Don't let Moist have another sequel

What a boring read. Moist stumbles through the (long) story which has some resemblance to going postal. But unfortunately he isn't the going postal Lipwig who charms himself out of dire situations and sets stakes far too high to be reachable only to cleverly find a way of which no one could have possibly thought before, after all he was hanged already........... this time he is outsmarted by policemen, neither his new comrades nor his new enemies are as brilliant as the completely postal ones and he doesn't seem to be a match for Adora Bell dearheart who should probably be the next main charakter in one of the hopefully neverending discworld novels. After all she is far more interesting and spiky, whereas moist seems rather lost and featureless.
Three stars from me bcs. it's a medium read, were this a only Prattchet rating it would definitively be lower........

Vetinari volunteers von Lipwig

In "Going Postal", Pratchett introduced Moist von Lipwig, a condemned confidence trickster, at his "end", hanged at the order of Ankh-Morpork's Patrician, Havelock Vetinari. It wasn't Moist who was executed, however, but Albert Spangler, his most frequently used alias. That identity was swept away to enable Lord Vetinari's wish to rejuvenate the City's postal system. Moist was up to the task, transforming an ancient, creaking and nearly obsolete civil service into a humming success. The rejuvenation kept the post office a City institution instead of divested into greedy, private hands.

But success isn't Moist's desired state. He craves danger, illicit activity, deception and the thrill of the chase. To keep his hand in, he must break into his own post office! Vetinari didn't spare Moist on a whim. He knows his man and his methods, deftly manoeuvring the talented thief for his own ends. "Tyrant" or no, Vetinari lives for the City of Ankh-Morpork, using whatever means available to keep it going effectively. With no other vested interest and lacking anything like an army for enforcing his aims, Vetinari relies on guile and one of the most devious personalities in literature. He uses that talent to manoeuvre Moist's taking over the Royal Bank and Mint. Moist will be "making money" in a new way.

"Ankh-Morpork" of course, won't be found in any Rand McNally [in case you were thinking of looking]. That's because Vetinari's City is the largest on the Discworld. Pratchett has produced over three dozen books on this world, which is only partly imaginary. His slogan for the series: "Discworld is a world, and a mirror of worlds" reveals the reflection there is us. There are a few exotic characters residing on the Discworld. The City Watch hires trolls, dwarves and even promoted a werewolf to Sergeant, for example. These are minor characters here, although golems move to near-centre stage in this tale. One of them, who's discovered "ladies' magazines" and books on deportment, has donned a blue dress and dubbed herself "Gladys". She is Moist's personal maid, demurely turning her back when he dresses.

Golems are seen as a threat by many in Ankh-Morpork. They do the repetitive, mindless tasks without murmur or complaint. If they cause job loss with such behaviour, however, the economy will suffer - as will the Bank. Run by the Chief Cashier, Malvolio Bent, who staunchly defends traditional standards, innovation has little place in the Bank. A nephew of the former Chairman has introduced speculative forecasting on the City's economy, including what might transpire in conditions of mass unemployment. Scorning anything as crude as an abacus, Hubert has expanded on the ancient water clock to create The Glooper, a maze of glass pipes, valves and buckets to trace the impact of small changes in the flow of money. Hubert calls it his "analogy machine". Silicon being the basis for glass and computers is a point to remember.

Hubert is a Lavish, the family that has run and controlled the Royal Bank for generations. The Lavishes, are, well, lavish. They are Old Money, which means they know how to save, spend, and use it for their own ambitions. One Lavish, Cosmo, has even more grandiose plans - take over the management of the Bank, and depose Vetinari in the process. Moist, as the new Master of the Royal Mint, and keeper of the present Chairman, a multi-breed dog named Mr Fusspot, stands in Cosmo's path. Moist seems immune from Cosmo's machinations, until a figure from the past arrives. Cribbins knows Albert Spangler from old and intends to benefit from the knowledge. Only Vetinari is aware of who Moist actually is, keeping that secret for his own purposes. Now, Moist's past is rising up like a restless shade. How will Ankh-Morpork respond when it learns their admired Postmaster and Master of the Royal Mint is a former crook? Especially when it's discovered that the gold reserve keeping the economy ticking over and backing up Moist's innovation of paper money has mysteriously disappeared?

To those who've read Pratchett, extolling his style and wit will be redundant. He's a master at word bending, double meaning and adapting. The Bank's cellar, a huge vault, was excavated by a former Chairman on speculation that it would attract a beneficent god. "If we build it, wilt thou comest?" is a typical Pratchett tossed-off line. Yet, as any fan will testify, he's not limited to petty wit. He understands issues confronting us all, conveying them with panache. He does this through his characters, at whose creation Pratchett is a master. Moist is one of his finer efforts, but his on-going depiction of Vetinari through the Discworld series has made him a favoured character: "Do I need to wear a badge that says tyrant?" Pratchett's characterisations, and the twists and arabesques of his plots, spiced with an accomplished knowledge of his topic, keeps his books not only on the "Must Read" list, but rewards those who pick them up again and again. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Noch besser in der Hörversion

Yes, of course, all the other reviewers are right - this is not a really totally absolutely new masterpiece, but hey, we buy Pratchett because we like more of the same. And Moist von Lipwig is ok as a protagonist, Lord V is wonderfully tyrannical - I mean, we don't really expect anything to change in Ankh M.
Maybe I got more laughs out of this novel because I (wisely?) bought the CD version, read by genius Tony Robinson. The audio version might also be abbreviated, so all the boring bits are missing, but the good ones are still there, like the Nichtlachen-Keinwortz Syndrome bank clerk Bent is suffering from. Yup, I definitely had a wonderful week going to and back from work with Tony and Terry providing the entertainment.

A gol(d)en(M) age...?

Well, here we have it, Terry's 2nd installment in the Discworld-Moist von Lipwig Series. And what do I thin k of it? Well first of all, I have to admitt, that in all his Discworld-series Im mostly into the whitches an Sam Vimes. Moist turns out to be too much troubled an too much, well... predictable?!. All in all, the story's well written - as expected, and as well designed as any other of his novels. There are enaugh puns, enaugh twists an' far to much criticisms on modern society to be boring - or to be memorable... choose as you wish. Nevertheless the bood is fun, it is fastpacing and writen in typical "prattchet"... it has it funny moments, and it's puns, it's quotes and it's polarizations... but in my opinion it lacks a villain... but when Adora and Moist share a dinner on sheapshed... with sunglasses, because moist can't eat anything that looks him in the eye... oh well...

so be sure to go on the typicall prattchet-ride, be sure to gett everything that you wanted for...

but know, that this book ist goot, but not at his best...

Making Money (Discworld)

Artikelzusammenfassung

Die Meinung des Kunden

Gar nicht mal übel...

Don't let Moist have another sequel

Vetinari volunteers von Lipwig

Noch besser in der Hörversion

A gol(d)en(M) age...?

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