Nice bills
Schöne Scheine (English title: Making Money ) is a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett . It is the thirty-sixth Discworld novel. Schöne Scheine was published in 2007 and in 2008 won both the Locus Award and the Nebula Award for the best fantasy novel. The action takes place in Ankh-Morpork. After Ab die Post, Schöne Scheine is the second novel with Feucht von Lipwig as the main protagonist . The ex-fraudster is supposed to reorganize the city's banking system. A Herculean task , as it turns out.
Beautiful Bills , according to Pratchett, is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, with the fictional affecting the Discworld while the non-fictional dominating all areas of banking, capitalism, and any agreement on money .
action
The incumbent Post Minister Feucht von Lipwig is bored in his institution, which is now functioning far too well. Routine is not his thing. As a facade climber, he secretly breaks into his own office at night, acquires an illegal manslaughter and finally joins the club of extreme sneezers.
The patrician Havelock Vetinari is aware of this situation and, as he has another acute personnel problem to solve, he offers Feucht the post of director of the Royal Mint, which is traditionally linked to that of the manager of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. He describes all the excitement and adversity associated with the new job down to the last detail and Feucht refuses. Vetinari shows him the bank and introduces him to the age-old, clever and quirky Tüppi Üppig , the current director, and Feucht refuses again. He sees himself as an almost married man who has to think about his future, i.e. his family. The patrician even has this given in writing.
Unsuspecting, Mr Lipwig went about his routine activities the next day when, under police protection and additionally accompanied by Mr Schräp , the most expensive lawyer in town, a small dog was delivered to him. This dog is "Mr. Quengler" , the last consolation of the recently deceased Tüppi Üppig . In her will she left the dog owner of already 1% of the bank shares an additional 50%, so that Mr. Quengler is now de jure the bank director. So that he would be well cared for, she again placed Mr. Quengler in the care of Feucht von Lipwig , for a fee of 20,000 dollars per year, including the threat that, should the dog die an unnatural death, he would deposit 100,000 dollars with the Assassins Guild for Lipwig's inhumation are. With which the former post minister, against his declared will, is now de facto bank director and master of the royal coin .
Conflicts are inevitable. On the one hand it is the unspeakable Ample -Clan on the heels, led by the monstrous twins Cosmo and Pucci . Even if they hate each other like the plague, when it comes to money, they stick together. The mega-correct, humorless main cashier Mavolio Beuge , the arithmetical heart of the bank, also opposes the new leadership. Last but not least, Krippling turns up, a bad old acquaintance from Feucht's criminal past, and tries to blackmail him.
Ultimately, however, these are only secondary theaters of war. The real problem is the bank itself, which no one pays into anymore because no one has any more trust. That is the situation at the back door, the patrician is shaking the front door with his large-scale project Ankh-Morpork goes Underground and is clearly calling for innovative financing models. Feucht is clear that he must make the Drögen banking business and a show begins by saying, adds a golden cylinder his golden suit he wears as Postmaster General, as he is entitled to a master of coin. Visually, its appearance can hardly be topped. He has two ideas for increasing liquidity . He lowers the minimum deposit requirement in retail banking so that anyone can open an interest-bearing account for as little as $ 5. More important, however, is the invention of paper money . The success of his postage stamps suggests Feucht that he will get away with it if the paper money manages to combine a dignified appearance and forgery-proofness . The only man who could guarantee that is Eulrich Janken , the genius who previously forged Lipwig's stamps so perfectly that the originals looked like forgeries. Unfortunately, he is currently on death row because of this offense, which forces Mr. Lipwig to stage a discreet, non-violent prisoner liberation.
While the bank director is rearranging the banking world, his opponents are just as inactive as his friends. Cosmo Luscious pulls the main cashier Mavolio Beuge on his side by threatening to drag his darkest secret into the public eye. The blackmailer Krippling has meanwhile also been put into service by Cosmo and slowly the noose is tightening around Moist's neck. So that nobody thinks that Schöne Scheine is a patriarchal 08/15 thriller from the orbit of the financial world, Feucht's fiancée, Adora Belle Liebherz , known as "Spike", is finally returning to town. She organized a major excavation on behalf of the Golem Foundation, which has now been successfully completed. However, she does not know exactly what the success consists of, but she does know that it is about a large number of ahemian golems that have a modal logic connection with gold.
The stress in this tense situation leads to the infallible Mavolio Beuge making the first calculation error of his life and suffering a nervous breakdown. He locks himself in the walk-in safe and threatens to suffocate there. Feucht , Spike and Gladys , the bank manager's golem secretary, break open the safe and rescue it at the last second. An action that calls for the guard on the scene, which at some point understands what is going on and who has done what, but not why there are less than 10 tons of gold in the vault. Someone who would also like to know that is Feucht von Lipwig , who at the beginning of his term of office apparently confirmed in writing that the gold is where it is no longer, albeit without checking it. In the middle of the process of clarifying this relevant question, Ankh-Morpork's citizens are about to storm the bank, the results of Adora Belle Liebherz's excavation expedition arrive . Four thousand golems, flanked by 19 golf horses, march in rows of four onto the here-there-everything-place and begin to guard the city. The city catches its breath until it begins to frantically debate what one could do with these golems. The proposals range from the establishment of a new empire to the use as work slaves for starving urban branches of the economy. All of these considerations suffer from a fundamental deficiency. Nobody can give orders to these golems; - except for Moist from Lipwig in his golden suit. Perhaps Feucht reminds her of an Ummian priest in this act. In any case, he tells the golems to leave the city and dig in something outside themselves. However, he holds back the golf horses. He is still postal minister enough to know that with half a dozen of these horses, the postal service could advance into a completely new dimension.
The whole excitement distracts the people and the authorities for a short time, but Feucht has to answer to the judge the next day for the lack of gold. The first thing he admits is that his past was rather criminal, with which he robs Cosmo or Krippling of an essential leverage . While the unrest over this revelation slowly subsides , Mavolio Beuge has his appearance, or perhaps better said Marco Bognigno . This is the maiden name of the main cashier and it is the name of a famous clown family. His coming along accordingly; - with a red nose, white make-up, deliberately throwing cream cakes and defending people with a ladder, he puts himself in the limelight. The patrician succeeds in briefly luring old Mr. Beuge out, who hands him a few dozen privately kept cash books for the royal bank. Then he leaves Mr. Beuge in the care of the clown guild.
The new documents clearly prove responsible for the disappearance of gold is the family voluptuous . This is the time when Cosmo freaks out and publicly demonstrates that he is very sick. For some time now, he has been living the obsession of wanting to be just like the patrician and to replace him at some point. This led to the fact that he not only tried to walk a few miles in his much too small boots, but also bought Vetinari's signet ring that was much too narrow and had worn it ever since. What happens if a ring that is too small is worn under a glove for weeks? Well, we're glad we didn't have to smell or see this. Fortunately, the ring is made of Stygium, an alloy that heats up extremely strongly in light. When Feucht sees the presents from Lipwig hidden under Cosmo's glove, he pulls him out into the bright sunlight. The near-perfect amputation that the exposed ring now undertakes probably saved Cosmo 's life. He wakes up, physically much healthier, in the Lord Vetinari Station of the city insane asylum , where he soon feels at home. After all, he is the only true patrician among all the obviously deranged swindlers.
Others
Newly translated by Bernhard Kempen; also as (abridged) audio book, speaker Boris Aljinovic, ISBN 3-86604-691-X .
German edition
- Munich, 2007. ISBN 3-442-54631-1 .
Web links
- Table of contents
- Remarks
- Quotes
- Off the post at LSpace (English)
- Off the post . Entry in the German-language DiscWiki
Individual evidence
- ↑ 2008 Award Winners & Nominees . In: Worlds Without End . Retrieved September 28, 2009.
- ↑ Juliette Hughes: Meeting Mr. Pratchett . In: The Age , February 17, 2007.