These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 56, “do { Podcast(); } while ( unreadPratchetts > 0 );“, discussing the 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” with guest Sean Williams.
Iconographic Evidence
Conspicuously missing from this section is that illustration from the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys, but despite what much of the Internet is like it’s not actually okay to publicly share artwork without the artist’s permission. It’s not on Josh Kirby’s official website, but if we find it somewhere else public, we’ll point you to it. Sven shared it with us on the Pratchat Discord, so subscribers with access can see it there; we may also share it privately with other subscribers via Ko-Fi.
Notes and Errata
- The episode title is valid C++ code, assuming that the function Podcast exists and updates the value of unreadPratchetts to avoid the podcast going on forever. Or is that what you all secretly want?
- Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) – who’ll be mentioned quite a bit this episode – was an American science fiction author, many of whose novels and short stories have been famously adapted for the screen. These include The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (adapted twice as Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (more about that in another note) and A Scanner Darkly, among others.
- You can hear Sean’s episode of Splendid Chaps, “Three/Family“, over at the Splendid Chaps website. It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 2013, at the pop-up Adelaide Fringe venue the Tuxedo Cat, and released on 23 March 2013.
- Strata was Pratchett’s third novel, first published in June 1981, about two and a half years before The Colour of Magic. It’s features a science fiction version of the Discworld – a planet shaped like a flat disc, which seems to have been built by ancient aliens. It’s more-or-less a parody of Larry Niven’s popular Ringworld books, with many specific jokes and references. But we’ll say no more about it here, as we’ll definitely be covering it on the podcast in future.
- The Ferals (1994-1995) was an Australian children’s television program on the ABC starring a mix of humans and puppet animals: Rattus, a rat; Modigliana, a feral cat; Mixy, a rabbit (her name is a pun on myxomatosis, a disease used to control wild pest rabbits in Australia); and a “dopey dog”, who it turns out is both not a dingo and not a Darren – his name is actually Derryn. While the original show only ran for two seasons, the puppet characters were very popular and continued to host and appear on other shows for several years. This included the five-minute Feral TV, in which the ferals ran a television station headed up by Kerry the Cane Toad (a clear parody of Kerry Packer, then owner of Australia’s Channel 9 TV network) and his assistant Rodney, a cockroach.
- The story was written for the 1990 anthology Digital Dreams, edited by British writer, editor and sociologist specialising in religion, David V. Barrett. Barrett has a long history editing and writing for speculative fiction and similar magazines, including Vector and the Fortean Times. He also edited Tales From the Vatican Vaults, a collection of short fiction based on the premise of secret Vatican files being released to the public in an alternate history where Pope John Paul I reformed the Catholic Church. It was published in 2015, and features a few stories by authors who contributed to Digital Dreams. As we discussed, authors in the collection include Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynn Jones, Dave Langford, Storm Constantine, Ian McDonald, Keith Roberts and Andy Sawyer. You can see the cover and full list of authors at the book’s entry in the Speculative Fiction Database (SFDB).
- The short story commentary in which Pratchett says “short stories cost me blood” and “I doubt I’ve done more than fifteen in my life” is “The Sea and Little Fishes”, which we discussed in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” The book in which this commentary appears, A Blink of the Screen, contains thirty-two short pieces of fiction. Admittedly, a few of those don’t really count as stories – see #Pratchat53 for three examples – but that’s not counting the four volumes of his early short stories for children, published separately.
- Neil Gaiman’s short story about the troll under the bridge is titled, er… “The Troll Bridge” (or sometimes “Troll-Bridge”). It seems to have been first published in the short story collection Snow White, Blood Red in 1993, two years after the first publication of Pratchett’s story of the same name. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1994, and has appeared in a few other places, including Gaiman’s own anthologies Angels and Visitations (1993 – probably the collection Sean is thinking of), Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and M is for Magic (2007), and was adapted into the comic book Ben read in 2016 by Colleen Doran. While he was certainly better known as a comics writer at the time, Gaiman had written and published several short stories by 1990, though his most famous short fiction came after Digital Dreams. One of his notable earlier stories is 1984’s “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” – the title clearly riffing on Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – about a young man who finds an assassin in the phone book and discovers they do bulk discounts, a very Pratchetty idea.
- We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s 1995 short story for the collection Camelot, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.
- The “internal monologue” is the way many people think to themselves: in words. But while common, this is far from a universal experience – and most people assume others think in the same way as they do. Finding out otherwise often blows people’s minds, as with the cascade of articles and viral social media posts that cropped up in the way of this 2020 tweet:
- “Atari” was never that widely-used as a synonym for game consoles, but “Nintendo” was – which is why some sources credit them with aggressively re-popularising the still fairly new generic term “game console” in the 1990s, so they could hang on to the trademark. It worked! And while some folks did (and do) use “Playstation”, “XBox” or even “Game Cube” as a stand-in for game console, those never became as widespread. (Earlier consoles were referred to as “game systems”, but by the time Nintendo massively dominated the market in the early 1990s, “console” – which differentiated a dedicated system for games from a more versatile personal computer, and from an arcade “cabinet” that could only play a single game – had become the preferred term.)
- Genericisation can indeed make a product’s name ineligible as a trademark. This process is also known as “trademark erosion” or “genericide”, and in America – where most of the famous cases have occurred – it’s controlled by the Lanham (Trademark) Act. The Lanham Act allows a registered trade mark to be cancelled if it “becomes the generic name for the goods or services, or a portion thereof, for which it is registered”. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act 1995 has a similar clause: the mark can be cancelled if it “becomes generally accepted within the relevant trade as the sign that describes or is the name of an article, substance or service”. This has happened to some significant and surprising things: Aspirin and Heroin were both once trademark names used by the Bayer company! To protect against this modern drugs are often given a specific, non-proprietary name, with different company’s specific versions having trade names as well. Other famous examples include cellophane, dry ice, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, videotape and zipper! Examples like Hoover, Kleenex and Google (see below) have certainly become generic terms for a kind of thing, but not to the extent where a trademark has been revoked or expired. In Australia, the legal test seems to be whether the trade mark has become the only term used for a product or service.
- The Google company went through a major restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc, a new company which owned Google (the Internet services company that runs the search engine, GMail, YouTube and various other online services) and several other companies that were previously subsidiaries of Google. The driver behind this wasn’t a worry about genericisation; rather Google stated that wanted to make the company more accountable and give subsidiaries more freedom. But Google is commonly used to mean “search the Internet”, including as a verb (“I googled it”), and this has come up in court as a reason to cancel the trademark, as per the Lanham Act mentioned above. In 2017, a case in Arizona set a new precedent that the test for genericisation was whether the “primary significance of the trade mark in the minds of the consuming public” had become the product, rather than the producer. They ruled that while people did use “google” as a verb, they also understood Google was a company and not the only way to search the Internet.
- Amstrad was a British computer company created by English tycoon and politician Alan Sugar. It operated between 1968 and 2010, and was most famous for their personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These included later iterations of the ZX Spectrum, which Amstrad bought from its original creator Sinclair Research, and the Amstrad Mega PC, a Windows-PC which also had a built-in Sega Mega Drive game console (known as the Sega Genesis in the US).
- Hitachi is a Japanese company founded in 1910, which has grown into a conglomerate best known for their technology products. They no longer make personal or mainframe computers, but do make everything from military vehicles to air conditioners and the Hitachi Magic Wand, a “vibrating massager” introduced in 1968 which experienced a huge swell in sales when it featured in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City.
- The 1980s-style retro-VR cyberpunk videogame trailer Ben remembered was for the game Jazzpunk, released in 2014. You can watch the live action Jazzpunk trailer on YouTube.
- William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the first and most influential cyberpunk stories, was first published in 1984, so around six years before Pratchett wrote “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”. Neuromancer popularised many terms and concepts which are now essential parts of the genre, and it’s also the only novel ever to have won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards.
- “Carnie” is an American nickname for “carnival worker”; the traditional Australian equivalent is “showie”, short for “showman” or “showwoman”, since we call them “shows” rather than carnivals. We previously talked about this in #Pratchat51, where our previous research suggested the Australian term might even be a little older than the American one. (The surname in this story – and, most of the time, in real life – is spelled “Carney”.)
- We dance around this a little in the episode, but clues in the story suggest that “Seagem” – the name for the artificial reality company that becomes a generic name for AR machines – seems to come from the acronym CGEM, which probably stands for “Computer Generated Environment Machines”.
- The term AFOL, an acronym for “Adult Fan of Lego”, can be traced back to the newsgroup rec.toys.lego, where it was first coined by Matthew J. Verdier on the 14th of June, 1995 after another user, Jeff Thompson, was the first to use the phrase “adult fan of Lego”. It was a niche term for a decade or so, but in the 2010s not only had more people who grew up playing with Lego returned to it as adults, but the Lego company themselves realised there was a whole underserved market of adult Lego fans, and started making sets which would appeal to them. Unlike some other niche adult fandoms for things traditionally seen as “for kids”, the AFOL community often mingle with and involve young Lego fans too, and you’ll see whole families at Lego conventions, in stores and at events.
- The word “paragorithm” appears in the context of Darren thinking you wouldn’t need something very complex to simulate most conversations with people, since they’re “just to reassure each other that they’re alive”. It might be a neologism Pratchett invented for “parallel algorithm”, a set of instructions for completing multiple tasks at once. These were relatively uncommon in computing at the time the story was written, since most computers weren’t capable of processing multiple instructions at once, but modern multi-threaded processors are specifically designed to do this and make extensive use of parallel processing.
- “Technobabble” describes jargon-filled scientific-sounding nonsense, originally the sort used by technologists in the 1980s, but increasingly over time the sort used in science fiction to make it sound like the characters understand things we don’t. The term seems to have been derived from “psychobabble”, a term used to deride similar nonsense jargon used in popular psychology, coined in 1975 by writer R.D. Rosen and popularised by his 1977 book, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling. Rosen specifically used the term to mean “an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardised observations” – he was critical of the way psychology at the time sought to reduce the “infinite variety of problems” faced by people into a very small set of formal definitions.
- “Handwavium” and “phlebotinum” are common fannish terms for substances, devices or phenomena in science fiction which behave in mysterious ways that nonetheless explain otherwise nonsensical events.
- “Unobtainium” (or “unobtanium”) was originally engineering jargon, coined in the 1950s, for any theoretical substance that could solve a specific problem, if only it existed. It grew to also encompass substances that existed but were too expensive or rare for practical use, and by the 2000s had appeared in its traditional usage in several science fiction novels and films. In 2009, James Cameron used it as the seemingly actual name for the rare and highly valuable super-conducting mineral sought by the mining corporation his film Avatar, to much derision.
- The book of Doctor Who memories mentioned by Ben is Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry. There are far too many celebrities of interest to Pratchat listeners for us to make a full list, but we will mention that the authors Ben Aaronovitch, Michael Moorcock and Gideon Defoe all appear, as does the creator of the often-mentioned-in-this-episode Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker.
- As Ben mentions in the footnote, Handwavium is also a delightful Doctor Who podcast hosted by friends of Pratchat, “a fan & her Da (no, a fan & his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to her a daughter and father duo discussing Doctor Who, this is the best show for it! Find it at handwavium.net.
- My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. We won’t spoil any more about it than Liz has already said, but we will note that it has been optioned to be adapted as a film by none other than Australia’s own Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerly.
- The terms “fridged” and “breeder” refer to pervasive harmful tropes in the way women are portrayed in fiction, in both cases having them contribute to someone else’s story without getting to be characters in their own right. A “breeder” is a woman who only matters to the story as a mother or potential mother, while “fridging” is when a woman is killed off or harmed primarily to provide motivation for a male protagonist. The latter term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as the phrase “women in refrigerators”, named for a specific example of the trope from the Green Lantern comic. We previously discussed fridging in our discussion of Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
- Space Invaders is a videogame developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, first released in 1978 as an arcade game by Taito Inc in Japan and Midway/Bally internationally. In case you’ve never seen it, the player controls a gun at the bottom of the screen that can move left and right, and fire straight upwards; the goal is to shoot increasingly fast and numerous waves of invading aliens before they reach the ground. Home console, computer and arcade machine versions of the game are still available today, largely unchanged except for nicer graphics and sound effects (though these often emulate the original designs). Elite is a videogame developed by British designers David Braben and Ian Bell, and first published by Acornsoft for personal computers in 1984. The player is a space pilot who operates as a freelance trader, buying and selling goods or turning to mercenary work or piracy to earn money and upgrade their ship. Its combination of space combat, wireframe 3D graphics and freedom to decide how you played made Elite a massive hit, and it spawned several sequels: Frontier: Elite II (1993), Frontier: First Encounters (1995) and more recently Elite Dangerous (2015), though these have become progressively more sophisticated. (Ben was probably thinking of Frontier: Elite II, the first one he encountered, which is why he thought there was a much bigger gap between Elite and Space Invaders.)
- VR, Virtual Reality, is an entire simulated 3D world, while AR, Augmented Reality, is layering elements of a simulated world onto the real one. This has become a big deal over the last decade, with the launch of games like Pokemon GO that let you catch monsters at your local sightseeing spots, and hardware like the Google Glasses, that promise to deliver that Terminator-like heads up display without needing to surgically replace your eyeballs. So far, only the kind of AR that uses your mobile phone camera has really caught on, but there are new glasses and similar products touted every year…
- It’s well-documented that Neil and Terry exchanged floppy disks via mail to write Good Omens. Here’s one of many sources for this info: Neil answering a fan’s question about the book on Tumblr in 2019.
- Ben probably mentioned Pratchett’s interview with Bill Gates in one of our bonus episodes. It was for GQ Magazine in 1995, and unearthed by Marc Burrows during research for his biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, in May 2019. (You can see his viral tweet, which includes an excerpt, below.) The idea that Terry had predicted “fake news”, online misinformation and and the return of nazis twenty-four years earlier was written up in The Guardian, Gizmodo and many other news sites at the time.
- Grand Theft Auto, abbreviated GTA, is a series of videogames launched in 1997. The first two games were modest successes, and featured a top-down 2D city in which the player could steal and sell cars, cause car crashes and commit other crimes as they tried to get to a goal number of points, expressed in dollars. Grand Theft Auto III translated the open world of the game to a 3D environment, and it and its sequels have been hugely successful; Grand Theft Auto V is still one of the biggest selling videogames nearly a decade after it was first published in 2013, in part because of its online mode, which lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, it has been a constant source of controversy. Some of it is deserved; for example, the games are pretty misogynistic, featuring no playable female characters (except for ones you create yourself in the online version), and relying on ageing tropes of crime fiction for its female NPCs, who are all wives, sex workers and family members. It’s also held up as evidence of videogames’ influence on young people, supposedly leading them to crime and violence, but the evidence of that is less certain. The culture of players around the game, however, is definitely a problem, as it is with the broader world of mainstream videogames.
- “The Minority Report” was originally a novella by Philip K Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe magazine in January 1956. It imagines a future in which three mutant “precogs” have pre-cognitive abilities, and predict all crime, but the creator of the Precrime department is led to discover more about how it all works when they predict he’ll murder someone he’s never heard of. It was adapted as a film, Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise in 2002, and a sequel television series set a decade later. The film and TV show change many things about the original story, including the nature and abilities of the precogs, and the ending of the story. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
- As mentioned, the story’s title is a reference to the opening lines of the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by English author Andrew Marvell. It was first published after his death, in 1681. The opening lines of the poem are: “Had we but World enough, and Time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Other uses of “World Enough and Time” include the episode of Doctor Who mentioned by Ben (the penultimate episode of the tenth series, first broadcast in June 2017), and several books, including novels by Robert Penn Warren, James Kahn, and Joe Haldemann, the latter changing the title to Worlds Enough and Time.
- Terry’s poem “An Ode to Multiple Universes” was first published in the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book in which it was collected is untitled but generally known as Terry Pratchett’s Folio or the MMXIV Green Folio, and was published for the 2014 Discworld Convention, where copies were given to attendees with a special bookmark labelling it a present from Terry. Fifty copies made it to the Australian Discworld Convention in 2015, and a few more were sold via discworld.com with proceeds going to charity.
- Of Sean’s more than fifty novels, he suggests Pratchett fans might enjoy Her Perilous Mansion, his standalone middle grade fantasy novel first published in April 2020. The sequel, coming later this year (2022), is Honour Among Ghosts.
More notes coming soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.