Moist von
Lipwig, con artist and all-round 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
is faced with a Hobson's 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, Mr. Pump
(née 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 were 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 away 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, sets 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, Treasure Island (Gilt's cockatoo) and The
Smoking Gun.
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