General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

Going Postal

Going Postal is a comic fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, the thirty-third book in the Discworld series and the first to feature the con artist Moist von Lipwig, who is spared the gallows on condition that he revive the decaying Post Office of the city-state Ankh-Morpork.¹^•² It was published by Doubleday in the United Kingdom on 1 October 2004 and by HarperCollins in the United States on 28 September 2004.¹ The book is the first of the Moist von Lipwig novels, which publishers also group as the start of the Industrial Revolution series of Discworld books about new technology reaching the Disc.²

Key fact	Detail
Series position	Thirty-third Discworld novel; first in the Moist von Lipwig series¹^•²
First publication	UK hardback: Doubleday, 1 October 2004; US hardback: HarperCollins, 28 September 2004¹
Premise	Con artist Moist von Lipwig, imprisoned in Ankh-Morpork, chooses between execution and the job of Postmaster General²
Central conflict	The moribund Post Office, closed for 20 years, competes against the Grand Trunk clacks semaphore monopoly³
Title origin	Taken from the expression "going postal", which arose in the 1980s from incidents involving stressed US postal workers⁴
Sales	Became the UK's biggest selling hardback novel for 2004⁵
Adaptation	Two-part Sky1 television film, first broadcast in 2010, starring Richard Coyle as Moist von Lipwig⁶

Plot

Moist von Lipwig, a swindler working under the alias Alfred Spangler, is hanged for his crimes, or appears to be; the rope is rigged so that he survives, and Lord Havelock Vetinari, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, offers him a job he cannot refuse: postmaster general of the Ankh-Morpork Post Office.³ The post office has not been open for twenty years, having lost its trade to the clacks, an Internet-like communication system of semaphore towers.³ Moist's first impulse is to escape, but Mr. Pump, a golem assigned as his parole officer, quickly catches him.³

The decaying Post Office building is filled with musty mounds of undelivered mail, maintained by the ancient Junior Postman Groat and his callow assistant, Apprentice Postman Stanley, and haunted by dead postmen.³ To save his skin, Moist restores the postal service to its former glory with the help of the tough-talking activist Adora Belle Dearheart.² His efforts bring him into conflict with the Grand Trunk clacks company, a greedy monopoly led by the piratical chairman Reacher Gilt, who will stop at nothing to delay Ankh-Morpork's post for good.²^•⁷ The story culminates in a race between the post office and the dysfunctional clacks system to see whose message can be delivered first.³

Form and structure

Unusually for a Discworld novel, Going Postal and its sequels are divided into chapters, each beginning with a synopsis of philosophical themes in a manner similar to some Victorian novels and to the stories of Jules Verne.⁴ The title comes from the expression "going postal", a term that arose in the 1980s from several incidents involving mentally stressed US postal workers.⁴

Themes and satire

Reviewers read the novel as a satire of the modern telecommunications industry. Publishers Weekly wrote that it "hilariously reflects the plight of post offices the world over as they struggle to compete in an era when e-mail has stolen much of the glamour from the postal trade".³ Kirkus Reviews described it as a comedy in which Pratchett "satirizes the modern telecom business", following Moist's attempts to resuscitate mail service against the corporate operators of the clacks towers, a series of semaphore towers that can send a message hundreds of miles in no time at all, but at a hefty price.⁸ Kirkus noted that, apart from a few heavy-handed statements about the public good versus private profit, the satire is slid in around the edges of the main action.⁸

Pratchett's biographer and publisher Colin Smythe, who has documented the Discworld series since its beginning, characterizes the book as a story about redemption in which a man who inflicted casual cruelty as a con artist is forced into a new life and becomes the better for it, with a moral toughness that keeps Pratchett from being merely frivolous.¹ The Times praised it as "one of the best expressions of his unstoppable flow of comic invention".²

Publication and reception

Going Postal was the thirty-third Discworld novel and became the UK's biggest selling hardback novel for 2004.⁵ A number of copies of the first US edition were issued with a blank extra leaf signed by the author, marked with a golden "Signed First Edition" sticker; 1,570 such copies were shipped to booksellers.¹ The book has been translated widely, with editions in Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Ukrainian, among others.¹

One bibliographical discrepancy exists in the record: Publishers Weekly's 2004 review called Going Postal the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, following 2003's Monstrous Regiment,³ while Pratchett's publisher and his bibliographer list it as the thirty-third.²^•¹

Adaptation

The Mob, the production company that had previously adapted Hogfather and The Colour of Magic for television, produced a two-part adaptation of Going Postal for Sky1, broadcast at the end of May 2010.⁹ Richard Coyle played Moist von Lipwig, with Charles Dance as Lord Vetinari.⁶ Pratchett was closely involved in the production, acting as an on-set Discworld expert, and reported only "some minute problems" with the adaptation, though the ending and some smaller features were amended.⁹ The Guardian's television review called the result "lovingly detailed and fantastically good fun".⁶ A later Penguin audiobook is narrated by Richard Coyle, who starred in the television adaptation, with Bill Nighy reading the footnotes and Peter Serafinowicz as the voice of Death.¹⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Creative written works and worlds › Genre fiction categories › Science fiction, fantasy, and horror › Fantasy novels and series

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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