The Truth
Terry Pratchett
Ankh-Morpork gets a newspaper
The Truth is novel 25 in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It is about "the Press," meaning newspapers. It is also the second in the Industrial Revolution subseries -- the first was Moving Pictures, about Hollywood and the film industry. However, I feel both of these novels fit into a larger not-officially-recognized subseries, whose theme is something like "The Discworld imports Earth culture." Other novels in that series would be Soul Music, which is about rock and roll (known in the Discworld as "music with rocks in"), and Maskerade, about opera.
The problem with those novels is that I never really had the feeling that Pratchett was any kind of authority on rock music, opera, or film. (To be fair, I listened to Moving Pictures when The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece was fresh in my mind, and Tom Hanks is a tough act to follow.)
That objection doesn't hold for The Truth -- like many authors, Pratchett has labored in the prose mines of journalism. He presents its foibles with authority. I doubt he actually has a lot of experience with hand-set type, but he writes as if he does.
The Truth also feels like a City Watch novel. Our old friend Sam Vimes (who is Commander VImes at this point and also, I believe, Duke Vimes) is a major player, as is the Patrician. And the story is concerned with equality under the law, or something close to it, like most of the City Watch series.
The story begins with William DeWorde, estranged son of one of Ankh-Morpork's wealthier and more obnoxious lords. William keeps the wolf from the door by writing newsletters for prominent readers. A gang of dwarves discover a method of turning lead into gold, which is to cast the lead into type and print things, far more efficiently than the Engraver's Guild can do it. The gold comes from printing thousands of copies of William's newsletters and selling them on the street.
The story, which begins simply, does not remain simple, of course. In the end Ankh-Morpork is changed forever. It's a good story, one of the better Discworld novels.