#Pratchat46 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“, featuring guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins, discussing the second instalment in The Long Earth series written by Pratchett and Stephen Baxter: 2013’s The Long War.

  • The episode title references the Kinks song “The Village Green Preservation Society“, and our own love for and defence of Helen Green (now Valienté). We previously mentioned the song – and Ben’s favourite cover version, by Kate Rusby – in our episode on Johnny and the Dead, #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. (See below for more on the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.)
  • We’ve covered all of the Discworld books Deanne mentions:
  • We link to Speculate in the episode’s podcast post, but it’s worth mentioning that both of your Pratchat hosts have appeared as panellists at both of the Speculate events held so far, in 2018 and 2019. Speculate co-director Joel Martin has also been a Pratchat guest three times, including for #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, our episode on The Long Earth.
  • As discussed in #Pratchat31, Stephen Baxter is best known for his Xelee Sequence of space opera novels, and for writing the official sequel to H G Wells’ The Time Machine, The Time Ships. See the episode notes for #Pratchat31 for more information.
  • The next two books in the series are The Long Mars and The Long Utopia, not The Long Cosmos as Ben says; that’s the final book in the series.
  • There’re some hints as to how the Long Earth series was planned in Chapter 18 of Marc Burrows’ The Magic of Terry Pratchett. Pratchett and Baxter planned out the series as a five-book arc when they first decided to write it together; no specific date is given, but this seems to have been around 2010 or 2011. It was a true collaboration, each contributing writing, and editing the other’s work, and complete drafts of the final three novels were finished in 2013. Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking of those books while Terry worked on his final solo projects, though he did visit Pratchett once or twice for more ideas.
  • Monica “Spooky” Jansson disappears for about 160 pages in Ben’s paperback edition. After Chapter 1, she’s not seen again until Chapter 23.
  • Given the rough timeline available from The Magic of Terry Pratchett, it seems likely that The Long War was indeed being written in 2011 and 2012.
  • We don’t think we ended up coming back to it, but there is a hint that there might be another direction in which to step. In Chapter 54 Bill recounts a story to Joshua about a comber who, on a bet, spent the night drunk and naked on “the Cue Ball”, a Joker Earth whose surface is weirdly featureless and smooth. Spooked by a sound the next morning, he tried to step while hungover and claims he stepped not East or West, but in some other direction… No doubt this will either never be heard of again, or form the entire basis of one of the sequels.
  • Leukaemia – originally Leukämie in German, from the Greek words leukos (λευκός), “white”, and haima (αἷμα), “blood” – is the collective name for a number of forms of blood cancer. It usually begins in bone marrow, where blood cells are manufactured, and the risk of contracting the disease does increase with exposure to radiation. There are four main types of leukaemia, with many sub-classifications, but Spooky’s specific diagnosis is not specifically mentioned – indeed, the word “leukaemia” is only mentioned once in the entire book, in Chapter 23.
  • The first book starts with Step Day in 2015, but most of the action – including all of “The Journey” – takes place in 2030, with flashbacks to various events in the fifteen years between. As we later mention, this book takes place 25 years after Step Day, in 2040.
  • For the record: Helen is 18 in 2031 when she marries Joshua, who is 29. Liz and her maths are right when she says they met the year before, a meeting which occurs in chapter 50 of The Long Earth.
  • The American War of Independence, aka the American Revolutionary War, was fought by citizens of the then thirteen British colonies in America between 1775 and 1783. The Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives from the colonies, who gathered in a “Continental Congress”. We could go on, but there is a lot written about this stuff on the Internet, so we’ll let you do your own research. Ben does mention the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest by a group called the Sons of Liberty against laws which allowed the East India Company to sell tea in America without paying the same taxes levied on citizens of the colonies. A whole shipment of the company’s tea was thrown into Boston harbour, and while the Sons of Liberty had a good point, it still stings to know all that good tea went to waste…
  • “Old Faithful” is one of several geysers in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. A geyser is formed when an underground reservoir of water is close to a volcanically active area; the water is heated by magma, turning into steam, and enough pressure forms to force the cooler water on top out of a vent at the surface. Old Faithful erupts every 44 minutes to two hours, but even that amount of variation is unusually predictable – a result of it being relatively separate to the other geysers and geothermal systems in Yellowstone. It’s been recorded erupting more than a million times, but like all geysers it is not a permanent feature. The Yellowstone Caldera is the most active volcanic system in the United States, and is thought to have had three major eruptions occurring 2.08 million, 1.3 million and 631,000 years ago. Its most recent eruption was much more minor: a lava flow that happened 70,000 years ago. Geologists seem to be of the opinion that a “super-eruption” like the one 1.3 million years ago is very unlikely, though it will erupt again at some time in the future.
  • When Ben says “your brain’s not fully cooked” until you’re 25, he is quoting Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, the Australian science communicator. Dr Karl – not to be confused with the other Dr Karl, the fictional medical doctor from Neighbours – has been broadcasting mostly via ABC radio since 1981, and has written 47 books, mostly collections of short articles about popular science. He often talks about the fact that human brains are still developing well past the teenage years, though he more recently has given the age of 20-23 for when the brain is “fully cooked” – i.e. when cognitive development is thought to have completed. You can find Dr Karl’s various books, podcasts and more on his website.
  • Joshua and Helen meet in Chapter 50 of The Long Earth. Unlike most of Helen’s story in that book, it’s not written from the perspective of her diary, though something we didn’t mention was that Joshua is already famous well before setting off on “The Journey”, as he saved dozens of kids on Step Day who got lost on a stepwise Earth. Upon meeting him, Helen exclaims “The Joshua Valienté…” and starts to blush. To be fair, they’ve heard of her, too: her diary is actually a blog, and is read by many folks. Joshua thinks that she is “kinda cute”, and also likes the look of Reboot, considering it the kind of place he could live.
  • Sally makes it clear to Joshua that they will only be friends in Chapter 43 of The Long Earth, where she says: “Joshua, you are fun to know, and a good companion, reliable and all that, even if you are a little bit weird. Someday we might be friends. But please don’t make comments about my legs. You’ve seen very little of my legs since most of the time they are inside premium grade thorn-proof battledress. And it’s naughty to guess, OK?”
  • The thing about Ghostbusters not being comedy came about in the wake of the latest trailer for the upcoming sequel, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which at first had many fans asking where the comedy was! In response, many younger fans came out to declare surprise that anyone would think the original was a comedy, and so a Twitter trend was born.
  • Tim Ferguson is the source of Ben’s figure that comedy requires four laughs per minute, on average – but you won’t find this specific pearl of wisdom in his book The Cheeky Monkey. Ben actually picked it up in one of Tim’s online sitcom writing workshops, which he runs semi-regularly.
  • Our previous episode was #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, which discussed Pratchett’s short story “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”.
  • The Snowpiercer television series, released on Netflix in May 2020, is based on the 2013 South Korean-Czech film Snowpiercer directed by Bong Joon-Ho, of The Host and Parasite fame. The “Snowpiercer” is a high-speed train that circumnavigates the globe, now covered in snow after an attempt to alter the atmosphere and reverse climate change went wrong and plunged the world into a new ice age. The train is segregated, with poor workers stuck in the rear carriages while the wealthy elite enjoy luxury in the forward cars. The film stars Chris Evans as a leader of a revolt by members of the tail section, and also features Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-Ho, Jamie Bell, John Hurt and Ed Harris. The series is a retelling, not a sequel, and stars Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly as analogous characters to Evans and Swinton, respectively. The series and the film are both adapted from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige; the first volume was published in 1982 by writer Jacques Lob and artist Jean-Marc Rochette, with later volumes by Rochette and Benjamin Legrand in 1999, 2000 and 2015.
  • All jokes aside, helium really is a precious resource – liquid helium is an important coolant used in industry and scientific work, and indeed party balloons account for only 10% of the world’s helium use. Or at least they did, before the pandemic. Helium demand has lessened in other industries, where fears of running out had led to caps and rationing, but while availability has improved in the last year, prices are still at an all-time high. Accordingly, plans are underfoot to try and recycle and reuse helium, and stop it from being lost to the upper atmosphere.
  • “Bosun Higgs” is a reference to the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle very important to the Standard Model of physics. Bosons are particles which carry forces, and differ in many ways from fermions, the particles that make up mass. Other bosons include photons (electromagnetic force), gluons (the strong force which holds quarks together) and gravitons (the still-theoretical particles which propagate gravity). Higgs bosons are produced by the Higgs field, which gives other particles mass. The Higgs boson is the subject of Leon Lederman’s 1993 book The God Particle, though It was proposed as an explanation for mass by Peter Higgs and his team in 1964, but remained theoretical as while it is massive compared to other bosons, it is also highly unstable and quickly decays. Its existence was confirmed in 2013 by scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider, and Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on the boson in 2013.
  • While the September 11 terror attacks certainly had a big impact on air travel restrictions, these were really a tightening of security measures brought about in the 1970s because of the frequency of aeroplane hijacking in the 1960s. These were extraordinarily common in the wake of the Cuban revolution, and especially so between 1968 and 1972. The security measures started in 1969 with profiling of passengers, asking individuals to submit to questioning and personal metal detector tests. The first metal detectors used for everyone were introduced in 1970 in Louisiana; this became a nation-wide practice in the US in 1973, with X-ray screening of baggage added in 1974. These measures spread to the rest of the world during the 1970s by agreement of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which establishes internationally agreed rules for civilian air travel. Since 2001, additional security measures have included “random” chemical tests of passenger clothing and baggage for explosives (ask your brown friends how random it feels to them), the requested removal of shoes, coats and hats during security screening, and the use of full-body scanners, though these have been controversial.
  • For many years Australia has had incredibly harsh policies regarding the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who arrive by sea. As well as indefinite detention – mostly offshore – a particular claim of the last few (conservative) Liberal-National coalition governments has been that they “stopped the boats“, a phrase particularly loved by cabinet minister Peter Dutton, previous Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and current PM Scott Morrison – who infamously has a trophy in the shape of boat, gifted by a supporter, bearing the legend “I stopped these”, from his time as Immigration Minister. The government frequently claims that the inhumane treatment they meet out to asylum seekers is meant to deter any more from coming, and thus stop the predatory people smugglers who charge them outrageous sums of money to make the dangerous journey. They’ve claimed now for many years that the boats have stopped, when the truth is that they have not – they are merely being intercepted at sea by the Australian Navy as part of “Operation Sovereign Borders” and so are not reported as “arrivals”. The pressures in nearby countries forcing desperate, persecuted people to try and reach safety by any means have not gone away, and those are the main factors. And yet cruel policies of long, indefinite detention, lack of support, denial of long-term visas and vilification in the media continue, as a way to court the votes of those who approve of strong border protection. It’s a source of shame for many of us in Australia; if you’d like to support the plight of asylum seekers in Australia, please consider supporting a couple of our favourite charities: the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and RISE.
  • Brexit – the removal of Great Britain from the European Union – really started becoming a thing in the early 2010s, though the first floating of a public referendum on the topic wasn’t until early 2013. It was a promise of Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron that he would bring about such a referendum if he won the 2015 general election, so while the idea was around when The Long War was being written, it seems unlikely it was a major influence on the novel.
  • We discussed Terry’s own favourite of his books, Nation, in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • For more on Pratchett’s first use of “Jokers“, see our episode on The Dark Side of the Sun – #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
  • The kobold Finn McCool is named after one of the great heroes of Irish mythology, Fionn mac Cumhaill. His adventures form the Fenian Cycle (an Fhiannaíocht in Irish), and also feature his people, a band of warriors known as the Fianna. His exploits are too numerous to go into, but form a cycle of stories as vibrant and exciting as those of King Arthur or Hercules. Ben recommends having a read.
  • “Kink-shaming” is pointing out someone’s kinks (specific sexual interests) with the intention of embarrassing them, often as supposed evidence that they are not a good person or have something “wrong” with them. This is not a new practice, but has in recent years been highlighted for the damage it does: it makes people ashamed of their kinks, and thus less likely to embrace the things that will satisfy them; it reinforces the idea that only regular “vanilla” sex is acceptable; and it conflates harmless (when consensual) kinks and fetishes with actually harmful behaviours, derailing serious conversations we need to be having. It’s more or less the opposite of the sex-positive movement, which seeks to reinforce a healthy embrace of positive sexual communication and behaviour.
  • The Kinks were a English rock band formed in Muswell Hill by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1963. The original line-up featured Ray, Dave, Pete Quaife and Mick Avory; Quaife left in early 1969, but the other three remained members throughout the group’s subsequent history and several alternate line-ups, including talk in the last few years of a reunion album. Their last public performance was in 1996. The bands’ biggest hits include “You Really Got Me” in 1963 from their first album Kinks, the single “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” in 1966, “Waterloo Sunset” from 1967’s Something Else, and “Lola” from 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Underground, Part One. The album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was a passion project of Ray Davies, a concept album released on the 22nd of November 1968 – the same day as The Beatles, aka The White Album. It was the last album on which bass player Pete Quaife played. Its production was quite long, and late in the process Ray Davies asked for the release to be postponed so it could be expanded into a double-album, but only got permission from their record label to add three more tracks. The “twelve-track mono version released in Europe” mentioned by Bill in the novel was the original shorter version, released in France, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Italy, but never in the UK, making it a bit of a rarity, with a different line-up of songs and some alternate, earlier mixes.
  • Local examples of the kind of “Instagram experience places” Ben is thinking of include Sugar Republic (giant candy props) and ArtVo (large-scale perspective art you can photograph yourself in).
  • Bounce, the “trampoline place” mentioned by Deanne, is one of many indoor trampoline parks around Melbourne and indeed the world. Their website says they’re part of a “global freestyle movement”, though we struggled to find out where this idea comes from. Basically it’s like BMX or skateboard stunts but without a vehicle, performed while jumping on a trampoline, jumping off and running up walls and so on. Bounce has several outlets, but there are also other businesses offering similar experiences.
  • That cat you can hear meowing in the background is the fabled third Pratcat, Kaos, who has lived with Ben since late December 2020. Despite what he would have you believe, he is fed five or six times every day, and not once a century when the Moon is in the Eighth House…
  • We discussed The Fifth Elephant – where Vimes is hunted by the von Überwald werewolf clan – in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King.”
  • Ben is probably wrong to say that English is not the majority language of the world – but it depends how you count it. According to stats published by the language reference journal Ethnologue, Mandarin Chinese has about 921 million native speakers, Spanish 471 million, and English 370 million. But if you include folks who speak it as an additional language, English edges into first place with 1.348 billion speakers, compared to Mandarin’s 1.21 billion and Hindi’s 600 million (with Spanish having a total of 542 million speakers worldwide).
  • The Beagle matriarch, Granddaughter Petra, is presumably named after Petra, the first pet featured on long-running British children’s program Blue Peter. Petra, a dog of indeterminate breed, joined the show in 1962; when Peter Purves (previously of Doctor Who fame) became a presenter in 1967, he also became Petra’s permanent handler to help her be more comfortable in the studio, and she lived with him when not filming – an arrangement used with presenters and crew for all subsequent Blue Peter dogs. She died in 1977, and was commemorated by a bust at BBC Television Centre (later moved to MediaCityUK). She was followed by the most famous Blue Peter dog, Shep, a border collie who stayed with the show from 1971 to 1978 and was famously attached to presenter John Noakes, who often had to tell him to calm down while trying to present. The current Blue Peter dog is a beagle/basset hound cross named Henry, and the programme has also had cats, tortoises and parrots as pets.
  • Ben briefly mentioned the Kromaggs, antagonists from the 1995 US parallel universe TV series Sliders, in our episode on The Long Earth. They are also non-human ape-descendants, though presumably their ancestor was Cro-magnon man, giving rise to the name. Their society is technologically advanced and militaristic; they have flying craft that can “slide” between parallel worlds, and when first encountered they have conquered around 150 Earths, stripping them for resources and enslaving their human populations. It is revealed in later seasons that they originally came from a world where they lived alongside humans, but when they grew violent they were exiled using sliding technology and prevented from returning. This becomes part of the back story of the protagonist Quinn Mallory, though by the later seasons multiple cast changes and shifts in tone and focus had lost a lot of early fans. (Ben mostly dropped off around the end of season three.)
  • The “love languages” are a popular way of describing the ways in which humans express and receive love, made famous by Baptist pastor and radio host Gary Chapman in his 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. Of the original five, we mention “Acts of Service” (doing things for your partner) and “Words of Affirmation” (telling them you love them or giving them verbal praise); the other three are “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch”. Psychologists and counsellors have since expanded on this, either by adding one or more additional specific languages, or redefining the concept such that languages are unique to each relationship dynamic or individual. The original book has sold more than 11 million copies, though, so the concept of the original five love languages has become deeply entrenched in popular culture discussions of love and affection. Chapman has since written ten other books about similar subjects, though note his work has not been without criticism – he is not professionally trained in psychology or counselling, and holds some deeply conservative and homophobic views, making the widespread applicability of his ideas suspect. He has also been opposed to later expansions of the idea, rejecting the addition of other languages as just “dialects”.
  • Tintin is the fictional young Belgian journalist who is the protagonist of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of French-language comic albums written by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907-1983), better known by his pen name, Hergé. Tintin first appeared in a newspaper supplement in 1929, but became hugely popular, starring in 24 full-length albums between 1929 and 1986 and selling millions of copies. Tintin is accompanied by his faithful dog Snowy, a small white fox terrier, and often aided by his best friend, merchant sailor Captain Archibald Haddock. While the books are largely great adventurous fun, it should be noted that it makes use of many racist caricatures and stereotypes common in the first half of the twentieth century, though some of the albums hold up better than others. Its cultural influence is huge, though; 1980s new wave/pop group The Thompson Twins is named after Thomson and Thompson, a pair of bumbling moustachioed detectives (who are not related, but look near-identical) from the series, and no lesser a team than Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish banded together to make a CGI film adaptation in 2011, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
  • The Aboriginal concept of connection to Country is hugely important; rather than have us tell you about it, we encourage you to learn about it from First Nations sources, for example Common Ground. While its expression in Australia is unique, the concept is common to many traditional cultures around the world.
  • The hugely popular sci-fi franchise Stargate, which began with the 1994 feature film, is just the most famous expression of the “ancient astronauts” idea, popularised by Swiss author Erich von Däniken in his scientifically panned but bestselling 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? It’s notable that in the work of von Däniken and others, it only ever seems to be non-Abrahamic gods who are said to be aliens. (Star Trek at least had an alien claiming to be the one true God, though that was in the generally hated film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.) If you want to learn more about the harm done by such racist theories, this article by Sarah Bond for Hyperallergic is a great overview.
  • The “Bury Your Gays” trope has a sadly long history; you can find some further explanation and a long list of examples at TV Tropes.
  • Frank Woods is not mentioned in The Long Earth – he’s a totally new character, making Ben’s annoyance about his role at the end of book many times greater. Ben may have been thinking of “the boy genius” Franklin Tallyman, who signs up with Jack Green’s company as a blacksmith and is instrumental in the founding of Reboot. He also repairs the Mark Twain when Joshua and Sally come through Reboot on their way back to Datum Madison. (Ben will soften on Frank in the next next book.)
  • An “OTP“, short for “One True Pairing”, is a fan or fan group’s favourite couple in a show, book series or other work of fiction. “Shipping” is itself short for “relationshipping”, and is used as a verb for actively wanting two (or more) characters to get together, regardless of what a show or book’s writers will actually have them do. Non-romantic versions are sometimes called “BroTPs” or FrOTPs.
  • “The ‘In’ Crowd” was originally recorded by American singer Dobie Gray in 1964; it featured on his album Dobie Gray Sings for “In” Crowders That Go “Go-Go”, and also on Dick Clark’s popular radio documentary program Rock, Roll and Remember. There have been a few influential covers since, most notably UK English singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry, who released it as a successful single and on his 1974 album Another Time, Another Place. (Ben is also partial to the Mike Flowers Pops version from their 1996 album “A groovy place.”, though the original is yet to be surpassed.) The chorus and verses feature the refrain “I’m in with the ‘in’ crowd”, and so it’s the most likely reference for Lobsang’s line “I’m in with the Oort Cloud”. The Oort Cloud, by the way, is the theoretical cloud of icy “planetismals” (essentially, very small planet-like objects, much smaller than true or dwarf planets) which forming the the boundary of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’s named for Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who revived this old theory in 1950 as a way of explaining the origin of comets with very long periods. The Oort Cloud is a looooong way from the Sun, with its objects lying between 0.03 to 3.2 light years away. Voyager 1, the Earth craft furthest from Earth, won’t reach it for another 300 years, though it will no longer have power left to send images back to Earth by then.
  • Joshua’s lost limb getting “Star Wars’d into a new hand” references the fact that multiple characters in the Star Wars franchise lose their hand (or other limbs), only to get prosthetics that are so lifelike and functional as to make the loss effectively meaningless in a dramatic sense. The first to do so (in terms of real world chronology at least) was Luke Skywalker, whose right hand is cut off by Darth Vader during their duel in The Empire Strikes Back; he gets a new hand before the credits even roll. (For the nerds: it’s an L-hand 980, produced by Antilles BioGen.) Vader himself lost his right arm from the elbow in a duel with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones, and gets a cybernetic replacement that’s stronger than his natural arm – again within ten minutes of screen time! Anakin later loses it, along with all his other limbs, in Ben’s most hated part of Star Wars – Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith – paving the way for him to become “more machine now than man”. He eventually loses one of his cybernetic hands again in his final duel with Luke in Return of the Jedi, but he dies soon after so no-one bothers to replace it.
  • In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent makes his own Scrabble tiles when trapped on prehistoric Earth. In the story, the Earth is a hugely complicated computer built by a species from another dimension to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, after their previous computer, Deep Thought, calculated that the Answer to the (unknown) Question was “42”. Without knowing the actual Question, the Answer makes no sense, and so Deep Thought designed the Earth to find out. Arthur and his friend Ford discovered this, then ended up travelling back in time and crashing on Earth in the early days of human beings. Arthur has the early humans pull letters at random out of the bag as a way of testing how the planetary computer’s program to calculate the Ultimate Question is going; the results are not encouraging. This happens near the end of the Primary Phase of the original radio series (in Fit the Sixth), in the final episode of the original television series, and at the end of the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
  • As we mentioned in our The Long Earth episode, The Gap is an American clothing store established in 1969. They’ve been involved in several controversies, but we’re particularly displeased with what they’ve been up to since #Pratchat31: in particular forcing Australian social enterprise Clothing the Gap to change their name to Clothing the Gaps, costing them a great deal of money and energy. Clothing the Gaps is majority Aboriginal owned and run by health professionals as a way to support the “closing the gap” movement, which isn’t about shutting down the US brand (tough that’s something we’d like to do now), but rather about addressing the massive gap between health outcomes like life expectancy and the prevalence of many preventable diseases, between Aboriginal Australians and the general Australian population. Their stuff is great and we recommend you check them out at clothingthegaps.com.au.
  • Robur is the “science tyrant” antagonist of Jules Verne’s novels Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer) and Maître du monde (Master of the World), as mentioned in #Pratchat31. His craft, the Terror, is ten metres long and can travel on land, on or under the sea, and through the air at incredible speeds, but it is struck by lightning and destroyed. Robur’s body is never found, though his captive, Inspector John Strock, survives the crash…so you never know.
  • The train-based war game based on Deadlands was Deadlands: The Great Rail Wars, released in 1997. Unfortunately there were no train miniatures – players fielded teams of humans (and maybe other creatures) who fought in standard Wild West terrain, though they did use steampunk gatling pistols and magic.
  • There is indeed such a thing as a train that lays its own track; the real world kind are used to lay new track for the passenger and freight trains that will follow. Here’s an example from China, featured on trainfanatics.com. Ben was thinking of something more fictional, though he hasn’t been able to track it down (no pun intended); listener Graham Kidd suggested the 1974 science fiction novel Inverted World by British author Christopher Priest, which features a city travelling north on train tracks, which cannibalises the tracks already used to build more tracks ahead. It sounds great but isn’t the one Ben’s thinking of!
  • We’ve found some claims that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones were also good friends, though we’ve not found any evidence of that; we have found proof that they met, though, in the form of this Institute of Contemporary Arts talk, “Whose Fantasy?”, from 1988, chaired by Neil Gaiman, and featuring both Pratchett and Wynne Jones, along with John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. It sounds like a bootleg recorded from the audience, but it’s quite a good listen!

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