These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 73, “This Christmas Goes to Eleven”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.
Here’s the Instagram photo of Richard from Cracked and Spineless bookshop in Hobart, showing off his Ineffable Edition of The Definitive Good Omens in 2019!
We’ll be sure to add photos of some of the Christmas food we mentioned here when we can.
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a reference to the famous scene in the 1984 mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap. The film follows famous metal band Spinal Tap on a fairly disastrous tour; at one point guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) shows off his amplifiers which he has had custom made with dials that go to eleven rather than ten, which makes them “one louder”. When asked why he didn’t just “make ten louder”, he replies: “This one goes to eleven.” It seemed a perfect reference for the extreme Christmasness of Father Christmas’ Fake Beard, which also contains eleven stories.
The twelve days of Christmas are a Christian celebration of the Nativity of Jesus. Some traditions have it starting with Christmas Day, and some the day after, which is Boxing Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Australia, and also St Stephen’s Day (the “Feast of Stephen” referenced in the other song featured in this book, Good King Wenceslas). The season is also called Twelvetide, though “Christmastide” is technically a different thing that doesn’t exactly match up, depending on your church. The last night is “Twelfth Night”, as in the Shakespeare play.
Father Christmas is now synonymous with Santa Claus, but this wasn’t always the case. He was the folkloric personification of Christmas in Britain, going back a few hundred years, but by Victorian times began to more resemble the modern Santa Claus, especially after the American version was imported in the mid 1800s. As Ben mentions, Santa Claus’s origins lie with Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas (not German as Ben misremembers), but the modern version also incorporates bits of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas. Ben did once know this, but it’s as if he’s forgotten everything he learned for our Hogfather episode back in 2019! And Pratchett certainly dove deep on the folklore and history when he was writing the novel. But we’re still keen to know what modern sentiment is around the names, because there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between the traditions – Father Christmas has been fully Santa-fied.
The book is still in print as far as we can tell! But this isn’t as easy to determine as it once was…
Pratchett’s other collections of children’s stories also contain a few stories seen elsewhere. Dragons at Crumbling Castle and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner both had deluxe slipcase editions which contained a couple of additional stories, and those stories are included in all editions of the fourth volume The Time-travelling Caveman (though it too had a deluxe edition with a story so far not collected elsewhere). In addition, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner also includes “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, which also appears in Once More* *with Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
Some of these stories were originally published without any title, especially those from the Bucks Free Press. The titles were made up for the purposes of this book. But then again, according to the list in the book, that includes some of the stories which had been previously published in earlier collections under other titles, like “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas”.
Father Christmas’s Fake Beard includes the opening section of Truckers as bonus material. It’s in that book that “Arnold Bros (est 1905)” (not 1903) is revealed to be owned by Arnco Group, along with a great many other businesses, when Gurder, Masklin and Grimma travel to the Top of the Store to learn the truth about the Thing’s warnings of it being demolished. You can hear more about that in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
“Old man yells at cloud” is a meme derived from The Simpsons, specifically the 2002 episode “The Old Man and the Key”. In one scene Homer’s father Abe Simpson needs a photograph for a driver’s license, and uses a photo from a newspaper story about him; it shows him shaking his fist at a cloud in the sky, with the headline “OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD”. It’s been used as a meme since around 2008, usually to denote someone complaining about something for no good reason.
Clinkers are a lolly (or sweet or candy, depending on which flavour of English you speak) manufactured by the Australian confectionary brand Pascall (now owned by Cadbury, in turn owned by Mondelez International). They consist of brightly coloured oval-shaped hard nougat, much like the candy honeycomb you find in Violet Crumble or Crunchie chocolate bars, coated in Cadbury chocolate. We’re not actually sure what Liz’s Dad thinks “Clinker” means, but Ben is pretty close: it’s a generic name for industrial waste products formed by the burning of coal or working of metal, which usually forms small, brittle glassy round shapes – much like the candy.
Isembard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was an English engineer best known for his work during the Industrial Revolution, especially with steamships, railways, bridges and tunnels. There’s a lot to say about him – way more than we can fit in a note – but remember that “Great Man” histories are always over-simplified and leave out a lot of people who were vital to whatever the man in question did, even if he was very great.
It’s been a while since we mentioned the steamroller story, but the short version is that his hard drives containing his unfinished work were destroyed by a steamroller, according to his wishes, in 2017 – the same year Father Christmas’s Fake Beard was published! You can read about it in this Guardian article.
We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook back in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”. B S Johnson’s giant pie was also a disaster. Described informally as “the Great Fruit Pie” (it was made mostly of apples), and under the title “Bloody Stupid Johnson’s Individual Fruit Pie”, Ben remembers rightly that Johnson thought of making a giant pie whistle; however it wasn’t finished until a week after the explosion, and the 30-foot-high “whistling blackbird” is said to be a memorial to those lost to the pie, situated in Hide Park. (The dish created for the pie is now the roof of a house.)
While there is more detail to be found at colinsmythe.co.uk, Ben entirely missed that the book does include original titles and publications for each of the stories in it – they’re in small text on the imprint page, just before Rob Wilkin’s introduction.
More notes to come!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
We’ll shortly be discussing the third collection of Terry Pratchett’s early short stories for children, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard, for our December episode #Pratchat73! This is the first time we’re discussing an entire book’s worth of short stories, and we’ve realised this book isn’t as readily available as others, so we thought we’d better come through on our promise to list the individual stories we’ll be discussing.
Ben’s deluxe edition of Father Christmas’s Fake Beard in its fancy red slipcase.
Here they are, in the order they appear in the book. We’ve noted where else they appear, in case you want to read one you have access to and ask about that!
“Father Christmas’s Fake Beard”
“The Blackbury Pie” – this is a slightly revised version of the original 1967 story; a different version from 1970, retitled “The Great Blackbury Pie”, appears in A Stroke of the Pen. (It’s largely the same, but a lot of the specific details are changed.)
“Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh!”
“A Very Short Ice Age”
“The Computer Who Wrote to Father Christmas” – also appears, under the title “FTB”, in Once More* *With Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
“Good King Wences-lost” – Pratchett seemingly significantly rewrote this story a few years later to produce “How Good King Wenceslas Went Pop for the DJ’s Feast of Stephen”, which appears in A Stroke of the Pen.
“The Weatherchick”
“Judgement Day for Father Christmas”
“The Abominable Snow-baby” – adapted for television for Channel 4 for Christmas 2021.
“The Twelve Gifts of Christmas” – also appears, under the original title of “The Prince and the Partridge”, in A Blink of the Screen.
“Father Christmas Goes to Work at the Zoo” – also appears in special editions of Dragons at Crumbling Castle, in the US version as “Father Christmas Goes to Work”.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 72, “The Masked Dancer”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1989 short story “Turntables of the Night” with guest Andrew McClelland.
Iconographic Evidence
The cover art of the 1997 anthology The Flying Sorcerers is a Josh Kirby illustration of this story. The full jacket illustration also appears in A Blink of the Screen.
Notes and Errata
The quest for this month’s episode title was a long one, but we settled on this riff on The Masked Singer, a popular reality gameshow based on a format originating in Korea. In the show, celebrities perform songs in elaborate costumes that hide their identities and a judging panel and the audience try to guess who they are while also voting for their favourites, with the singer with the fewest votes being unmasked and eliminated each round. Appropriately enough, the Australian show’s most recent season which finished the day before this episode was published featured a singer dressed as the Grim Reaper, who turned out to be Darren Hayes of Savage Garden fame!
The Vengaboys are a Dutch Eurodance group who were huge in the late 1990s, best known for the songs “We Like to Party” and “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!”, the former of which includes the line “The Vengabus is coming”. Ben’s memory is sketchy but he thinks Liz is referring to a comedy bit Andy used to do about the nature of the Vengabus, painting it as something more ominous. (We’ll check up on this and update this note!)
Gilbert and Sullivan are dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), who wrote a series of comic light operas in the Victorian era which have since become world famous. Andy’s love for them was expressed through his most recent comedy show with Martine Wengrow: The Very Model of a Modern Major Musical, a two-person performance of his own full-cast opera in the distinctive Gilbert and Sullivan style which he wrote during the lockdowns of 2020.
Truckers, published in 1989 (the same year as “Turntables of the Night”), is the first book in Terry Pratchett’s trilogy about a band of tiny Nomes trying to survive in the human world. We discussed it way back in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
Good Omens is Pratchett’s famous 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman about an angel and demon who share an unlikely friendship and try to avert the impending apocalypse, a task made more difficulty when they mislay the Anti-Christ. We discussed it in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
The Long Earth is Pratchett’s collaboration with sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, a sci-fi series based on an idea he had around the time of The Colour of Magic about a string of infinite parallel Earths devoid of humans. We’ve discussed four out of the five books; for an overview of the plot of the first three, see #PratchatPreviously, “The Long Footnote”.
Actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz is probably best known for his film and television work in things like Look Around You, Black Books, Shaun of the Dead and The Tick. He has a distinctive deep voice (a feature of his guest role on Black Books), and was famously the speaking voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Maul was physically played by stunt performer Ray Park). He played the demon Crowley opposite Mark Heap’s Aziraphale in the 2014 BBC Radio adaptation of Good Omens before going on to perform the voice of Death in all forty recently released Penguin Discworld audiobooks (they didn’t do The Last Hero), which are otherwise read by a different narrator for each sub-series. (Bill Nighy also appears in every book, reading the footnotes.) Serafinowicz also voices Death in the animated feature film The Amazing Maurice.
Harry Harrison (1925-2012) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat, an interplanetary con man and rogue who starred in several short stories and novels beginning with “The Stainless Steel Rat” in 1957. The final book, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns, was published in 2010.
Harry Turtledove is an American speculative fiction author best known for his works of alternate history. Andy mentions Turtledove’s 1992 novel The Guns of the South, in which time-travellers from 2014 South Africa supply advanced arms to the Confedercy, allowing them to win the US civil war. He is also known for the similar Southern Victory series, in which the Confederacy wins thanks to one small difference in history (no time travel is involved), and the Worldwar series, in which aliens invade Earth in 1942 during World War II.
Hidden Turnings was published in February 1989 and included works by Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Roger Zelazny (best known for The Chronicles of Amber), Tanith Lee and many others. You can find all the details of the book and the stories within at its Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry.
We’ve talked many times of British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011), and especially of her Chrestomanci series about a connected series of parallel magical worlds; Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequel; and her parody of both travel guides and fantasy tropes, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
The panel Ben featuring Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones was “Whose Fantasy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. (Ben found it after we wondered if the two were friends in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”). The talk was indeed chaired by Neil Gaiman, and also featured John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. Ben was on the money when he said it was from around the time of “Turntables of the Night” – it’s from the same year, 1988!
The Flying Sorcerers is a 1997 (not 1996) anthology of comic fantasy stories, organised into three sections: “Hordes of the Things: Comic Fantasies”, “Deadly Nightshapes: Tales of the Supernatural” and “Vacant Space: Stories of Science Fiction”. As well as Pratchett’s story it features work from P. G. Wodehouse, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Michael Moorcock, Roald Dahl, Stanislaw Lem and Angela Carter and many others. You can see the full list of stories on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
Peter Haining has edited and written introductions for a long list of books, mostly compilations of previously published works. As well as The Flying Sorcerers he also published Pratchett works in Space Movies II, The Wizards of Odd and Vintage Science Fiction. He also compiled five major nonfiction books about Doctor Who in the 1980s, including the 25th anniversary book 25 Glorious Years in 1988. Haining’s full bibliography can also be found on the ISFDb.
The Wizards of Odd was published in 1996. It was also edited by Peter Haining, featured a previously published piece by Terry Pratchett as its first story, and used a Josh Kirby illustration for that story as its cover art. In this case it was “Theatre of Cruelty”, which we just discussed in #Pratchat70, “Punching Up”. The full contents are (you guessed it) on the ISFDb.
Hordes of the Things was a 1980 BBC radio series written by Andrew Marshall and John Lloyd (who had just written and produced The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams), under pseudonyms with three initials to emulate J R R Tolkien, and starring Simon Callow and Paul Eddington. A fairly broad parody of Lord of the Rings set in the kingdom of Albion as it faces an invasion of the “Dark One”, it was also loose political satire.
Small caps can be simulated by modern word processing and desktop publishing software, but this is usually unsatisfactory since scaled-down capital letters have a lighter weight (i.e. because they’re shrunk the lines are thinner), whereas proper small caps should have the same weight as full size lower case letters.
Death’s dialogue has varied a bit between editions; in some, like the Corgi paperback of The Colour of Magic and the collector’s library editions of many of the books, he speaks in all small caps – i.e. only small capital letters. In others, like the first hardcover edition of Hogfather, he speaks in mixed small caps, with regular capitalisation. It’s only in anthologies like The Flying Sorcerers where he seems to speak in all caps.
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was an award-winning American science fiction writer. His Chronicles of Amber series, consisting of two sets of five novels published between 1970 and 1991, is about a group of immortals, the Princes and Princesses of Amber, who rule their one “true” world of Amber. They are able to walk between “shadows”, the infinite alternate realities given order and substance by the Pattern, a mystic labyrinth; the royals of Amber gain their shadow-walking ability by walking the Pattern. They organise into several factions and scheme amongst themselves to take the throne. A hugely popular roleplaying game of the 1990s, Amber Diceless Roleplaying, was based on these stories; player characters oppose each other, vying for power, and instead of using dice are simply ranked in order of who is best at what during an “auction” at the start of the game.
“Kalifriki of the Thread” is a short story about Kalifriki, more or less an assassin who can travel between dimensions (called shifting into the “side-by-side lands”) and whose signature method of killing is the Thread, an unusual and seemingly multidimensional weapon or force. In the story, Kalifriki is hunting the Kife, another shifter who inhabits the bodies of others. The character returns in the short story “Come Back to the Killing Ground Alice, My Love”, first published in Amazing Stories in 1992. Both stories were collected into one volume in 2022.
DJ Ian Bell was not only a DJ, he was also a photographer, a music historian, and a record store worker and owner. He died in May 2023. You can hear him talking about his history in this 2019 segment from ABC Radio in Adelaide, played again the week after his death.
Since 2021 Taylor Swift has been re-recording and releasing new versions of her first six studio albums, in part because she regretted signing away ownership of the master recordings as a teenager (she was 15!) in her original contract with the label Big Machine in 2005, and subsequently became responsible for something like 80% of their revenue. After a series of disagreements, including not being able to buy the masters rights, and Big Machine selling out to her former manager, Scooter Braun, she enacted the re-recording plan under her new and much more favourable contract with Republic Records. Because she wrote her own songs, she owns the composition rights, and so controls who can record new versions of the songs – including herself. The new releases are subtitled “(Taylor’s Version)” and so far have included Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989, and they’ve plummeted streams and sales of the originals as her loyal fans stick to her versions.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 71, “It Belongs in a University”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2013 collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, with guests Rev Dr Avril Hannah-Jones and Dr Charlotte Pezaro.
Iconographic Evidence
This is the video from the Waterstones event for the launch of the fourth book, with Terry talking about Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species.This is the Eye of Magnus, the magical Great Big Thing from the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which Ben immediately thought of while reading the descriptions of Ponder Stibbons’ “Challenger Project”.
Notes and Errata
The episode title echoes Indiana Jones’ famous (and very colonialist) line, “It belongs in a museum!” Thankfully the wizards didn’t steal Roundworld from anyone…but if you want to know how this sort of thinking affects people in the colonised countries, we’d recommend Marc Fennel’s podcast (and television series) Stuff the British Stole.
The term “philosopause” is referred to in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, where Jack and Ian describe it as when “elderly scientists … stop doing science and take up not very good philosophy instead”. They didn’t coin the term; it dates back to at least 1996, and probably earlier.
Gregory Benford (1941-) is both an influential science fiction author and a physicist, but not a qualified theologian or philosopher. The first source footnoted in the book is the one for Benford’s idea of human- and universe-centred thinking, and it’s “a creature of double vision”, from Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: Essays on Bridging the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, McFarland Publishers 2009, pages 228-236.
Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge: how do we know what we know, and what qualifies a belief as knowledge?
Liz has talked about “hounding the germ man to death” before; you can hear her talk about Semmelweis in #Pratchat48 (about Thief of Time) and #Pratchat54 (Night Watch). As on those occasions, we recommend this episode of NPR’s Shortwavepodcast to get a good short version of his struggle to just get doctors to wash their hands in a time when no-one believed in germs.
L-Space is originally described as a distortion of space into “poly-fractal L-Space”. While the Librarian frequently travels through L-Space, it’s not presented as a “space” where things exist, but a way to travel through space and time. Books create L-Space.
Narrativia as a Discworld goddess pre-dates this book by a couple of years, Pratchett having named her – and commissioned a statue of her – in 2011, as detailed in this Guardian article. This does seem to be her first appearance in fiction, though the production company Narrativia, which holds the media licensing rights to his works, was formed in 2012.
Charlotte recommended Bill Bryson’s 2003 book A Short History of Nearly Everything, as well as Pratchett’s own Nation. Avril recommended Marilynne Robinson’s 2016 collection The Givenness of Things: Essays.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 70, “Punching Up”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1993 Discworld short story, “Theatre of Cruelty”, with guest Caimh McDonnell.
Iconographic Evidence
Since it was available for free, there are lots of scans floating about on the internet, and it’s a shorter version than the one available for free on the L-Space web, we figure it should be okay for us to share the original two-page spread of the story from Bookcase magazine, including the original version of Josh Kirby’s illustration.
Notes and Errata
The episode title plays on Mr Punch, the concept of “punching up” in comedy (i.e. the idea that the targets of derision in comedy should be those with more power), and the other concept of “punching up” in writing (i.e. adding more jokes and/or pace to a script to improve it).
We’ve mentioned Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series of urban fantasy novels before. They follow the adventures of new police officer Peter Grant as he becomes apprentice to the last wizard in England, who also works for the London police. There are now nine novels, four novellas, a short story collection, nine graphic novels (originally published as separate issue comic books) and a tabletop roleplaying game. The best place to start is probably Rivers of London, the first novel from 2011, which was originally titled Midnight Riot in the US (but is now published there under its proper title). The first comic, Body Work, is also a good place to dip in, as are most of the novellas and short stories.
The Fortean Times is the magazine of the Fortean Society, an organisation founded by American researcher and writer Charles Fort. He collected and wrote about “anomalous phenomena” – unusual events and experiences which had gone unexplained by science, though apparently he did it to keep scientists on their toes rather than because he believed any of the theories put forth in his writing. The Fortean Times is still published in the US, UK and other countries today, and you can find them online at forteantimes.com (though you have to subscribe in print). Fort himself is mentioned in Good Omens.
We can’t find a good reference for the edition of Good Omens with two Thursdays in one week, if that is a real error and not a fevered imagining of Ben’s. But there have been other notable ones: in some recent editions, Anathema is referred to as Agnes in one sentence when showing her index cards to Newt, and a persistent one in earlier editions was Famine saying his name had seven letters when cryptically referring to himself with a crossword clue. Some white editions of the book had a cover misprint in which the text and Crowley’s glass of wine appear, but the demon himself does not!
On Roundworld, “theatre of cruelty” is an artistic concept created by Antonin Artaud, a French poet and theatre maker (among many other things) active in the 1920s and 30s. His theatre of cruelty wasn’t literally theatre, or literally cruel, but rather a reaction against realism. He wanted performance to be something more visceral: a spectacle, incorporating music, dance, lights and everything other than text, performed by “athletes of the heart” who would surround audiences to shock them out of complacency and wake them up to the horrors and violence of real life. While not embraced widely, it’s been an influence on many theatre makers, notably director Peter Brook in his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, including a famous 1966 production of the play Marat/Sade. This YouTube video from CrashCourse is a pretty good overview.
Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock Holmes stories are “A Study in Emerald”, from the 2003 anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, and “The Case of Death and Honey”, from the 2011 collection A Study in Sherlock. “A Study in Emerald” won both a Hugo and Locus Award in 2004, and has been adapted into a board game by Martin Wallace, of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork and The Witches fame.
Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was an American speculative fiction writer whose work encompassed novels, short stories, television (most famously the Star Trek episode “The Guardian on the Edge of Forever”), videogames and more. Angry Candy is his 1988 anthology about death, containing the award-winning short stories “Eidolons”, “Paladins of the Lost Hour” and “Soft Monkey”. Dangerous Visions was a 1967 collection of groundbreaking science fiction stories edited by Ellison and was hugely influential, not least for the way it included sex in the genre. It was followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and he announced a third, The Last Dangerous Visions, in 1973, but it was not published in his lifetime. His failure to publish the book became a controversy in speculative fiction circles, especially after several of the authors who sold him stories died before seeing them in print; British author Christopher Priest wrote about the book for his own fanzine, eventually expanding the piece into a short book titled The Book on the Edge of Forever in 1988. Ellison’s literary estate is now managed by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, who announced in 2022 that The Last Dangerous Visions would finally be published in September 2024, preceded by new editions of the first two books.
Regular listeners will be familiar with Liz’s love for Diana Wynn Jones, and we’ve previously mentioned her 1988 novelette “Carol O’Neir’s Hundredth Dream”. It’s part of her Chrestomanci series of stories and books, set in a magical universe where there are a specific number of alternate worlds.
We’ve also previously discussed American horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), most notably in #Pratchat58, “The Barbarian Switch”. Her famous story “The Lottery” appears in the many collections, including 1949’s The Lottery and Other Stories. Dark Tales is a more recent anthology, published by Penguin in 2016.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 68, “Discus Ex Machina”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s third novel, 1981’s Strata, with guest EJ Mann.
Iconographic Evidence
Australian Bush Heritage’s thread of “Pedro Pascal as Australian frogs” first appeared in a Twitter thread, but we’ve embedded the Instagram version below. (Twitter is…not as stable as it once was.) Make sure you check out all of them!
Here are the first edition covers of Pratchett’s two early science fiction novels. Ben mistakenly remembered Pratchett’s cover for The Dark Side of the Sun featuring dragonflies, not bees; he may be remembering the later cover, also by original Strata artist Tim White, which depicts a robot insect which…well, it’s also not a dragonfly, but it’s more like one than Pratchett’s bees. Though the weird fungal creatures on his Strata cover do look like dragonflies – one of the many details that makes it entirely unlike the book in every way, aside from the inclusion of a lightning bolt.
Strata first edition; cover art by Tim WhiteThe Dark Side of the Sun, first edition; cover art by Terry Pratchett
Below is the earliest post we could find for the photo of the common snapping turtle with the “world” on its back. It’s from the source, the Twitter account for Task Force Turtle; see below in the notes for more on the turtle, and for an article where you can see it if Twitter becomes too unstable to supply this embedded tweet.
The episode title plays with the well-known Latin phrase “deus ex machina”, “God from the machine”. Originally used in Ancient Greek theatre as a literal stage direction, in which actors playing the roles of gods would be brought on stage via a machine, it has come to mean an unexpected plot resolution brought about by supernatural or implausible means, especially if those means have not previously been established in the narrative. We don’t think Strata is an example of this, but the Latin for “disc from the machine” seemed too perfect not to use.
The last in-person Australian Discworld Convention was Nullus Anxietas 7, held in Melbourne in April 2019. We recorded a live episode there: #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, discussing the short story “Troll Bridge”.
Bush Heritage Australia is a non-profit organisation which was started as “The Australian Bush Heritage Fund” in 1991, with the purchase of forest land in Tasmania by environmentalist and former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown. The charity now owns millions of hectares of bushland across Australia, which it manages in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. You can find out more at bushheritage.org.au, or follow them (and their very funny social media manager) as @BushHeritageAus on Twitter or Instagram.
You can read what Pratchett had to say about the Disc in 1981on Colin Smythe’s website, where you’ll also find early reviews – including one by Neil Gaiman! Of the Discworld, Pratchett said: “I am also working on another ‘discworld’ theme, since I don’t think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in one book!”
Thanks to subscriber Craig, who shared a photo of the full blurb for the first edition of Strata, which we can also confirm was first published by Colin Smythe in hardcover. (See above for the original covers of both Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun.) Here’s the longer blurb:
A flat earth? Impossible. Kin Arad is the 210-year-old supervisor in charge of resurfacing the newly named planet, Kingdom. When she finds Jago Jalo, a man who has a cloak of invisibility and should have died a thousand years ago, in her office, she decides he must have an unusual tale. He has. He knows where such a world is. It is like the medieval earth…almost. Leiv Eiriksson is setting off for the New World, but he will never find it. Instead he sails to the edge of the world and its eternal waterfall. It is obvious that this ‘earth’ has been built by the Great Spindle Kings, makers of universes, inventors of the strata machine and the ultimate in claustrophobes, and Jalo lures the human Kin, the kung Marco Farfarer and the fiftv-six-syllable-named shand better known as Silver, to undertake a voyage of discovery with him: the rewards must be beyond their dreams…or nightmares. In Strata Terry Pratchett again shows the remarkably witty, imaginative and descriptive talents that have characterised his earlier works and show him to be one of the best s.f. writers of the younger generation.
Strata – blurb from the first hardcover edition (1981)
You can find many different covers for Strata at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. While many seem to use stock sci-fi or fantasy art, most use Josh Kirby’s cover (though some use his art for The Dark Side of the Sun!). The German cover by Katarzyna Oleska is Ben’s favourite, and is the only one to show Kin as a Black woman; we also like the French one by Marc Simonetti, though he inexplicably depicts Kin as a cyborg with red skin, though accurately makes her bald. The mass market US paperback has a cover by Darrell K. Sweet which gets special mention for the very retro image of Kin in a silver spacesuit holding a raygun while on a Viking ship menaced by a dragon, but it makes her white (and ginger) and leaves out Marco and Silver entirely.
Magrathea is the fabled planet manufacturing planet which features prominently in the plot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As well as many luxury planets built during a boom in the galactic economy, it also built the planet Earth; the fjords were designed by planetary architect Slartibartfast, who meets Arthur Dent during the final chapters of the first radio series/book/film etc.
Speaking of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ben is correct: the original radio series was broadcast betweem 1978 and 1980. The first novel was published in 1979, while the original BBC television series was made in 1980, but broadcast in 1981. There have been numerous other versions, including an LP (which differs from the radio series), a videogame, a feature film, several stage plays, a comic book and, supposedly, another television series currently in production at Hulu.
The film Liz mentions with Olivia Wilde where remaining lifetime is a currency is indeed In Time (2011, dir. Andrew Niccol), a sci-fi action film starring Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake. It’s similar to the earlier film Price of Life (1987, dir. Stephen Tolkin), and also the 1965 Harlan Ellison short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”. Ellison briefly sued Niccol (who is best known for Gattaca) and the producers of In Time, but dropped the suit after seeing the film.
Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by American author Larry Niven. In the book, 29th century human Louis Gridley Wu is recruited on his 200th birthday by an alien “Puppeteer” named Nessus to go on an expedition. He is to investigate the Ringworld, a massive construct surrounding a Sun which has an immense Earth-like inner surface. He travels there with Nessus, a cat-like Tzin named Speaker-to-Animals, and another human, Teela Brown. Their ship is damaged on arrival and crashes; its hyperdrive still functions but it cannot get back into space to use it safely. The crew head towards the edge of the Ring, hoping to find technology to help them repair their ship, encountering strange technologies and the remnants of the Ring’s civilisations along the way. As Terry Pratchett put it on alt.fan.pratchett, “I intended Strata to be as much a (pisstake/homage/satire) on Ringworld as, say, Bill the Galactic Hero was of Starship Troopers. All Niven’s heroes are competent and all his technology works for millions of years…but he’s a nice guy and says he enjoyed the book.” There are four sequels: The Ringworld Engineers (1979), The Ringworld Throne (1996), Ringworld’s Children (2004) and Fate of Worlds (2012), which is also the last book in Niven’s Fleet of Worlds series. All of these books are set in Niven’s broader “Known Space” universe.
EFTPOS systems, which allow a transfer of funds direct from a purchaser’s bank account to a merchant, first appeared in America in 1981. The system was slow to be adopted by consumers, and credit cards and cheques remained much more popular alternatives to cash. Australian banks were pretty quick to adopt a national EFTPOS system, in part because they had already had to cooperate to set up Bankcard, a domestic credit card implemented in the 1970s before the major card companies came to Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with these things, it appears one of the main reasons Australians call it EFTPOS is advertising: the major company making and selling the infrastructure equipment, and marketing it to the public during the 80s and 90s, was “eftpos Australia”. EFTPOS is also popular, and known by that term, in New Zealand and Singapore.
Budgie is the nickname for the budgerigar, a small species of parakeet with long tails. Like Liz, many Australians growing up in cities don’t realise they’re native birds, in part because they’re so commonly kept as pets – very unusual for native animals! In country areas they gather in huge flocks at water holes. Their popularity is largely due to their small size, colourful plumage (usually white and blue or yellow and green, but many other breeds exist), and their ability to “speak” and whistle. They’ve been exported – legally and otherwise – to many countries around the world. A common bit of Australian slang for men’s swimming costumes is “budgie smugglers”, referring to the fact that they don’t leave much to the imagination and the wearer’s genitals are often outlined, appearing around the same size as a budgie.
The Wayfarer series by American author Becky Chambers begins with her debut 2014 novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which she originally crowdfunded and self-published. It was nominated for several awards and republished by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015. The Wayfarer of the series title is a “tunnelling ship” – a spacecraft which builds wormholes between distant parts of space for other spaceships to use as shortcuts. The original novel follows the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer and their relationships during one long mission. It has so far been followed by three sequels: A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021), plus a short story, “A Good Heretic” (2019), though these follow different characters and stories in the same universe. The species who can communicate via coloured patches on their cheeks are the Aeluon, otherwise plain-coloured humanoids who are one of the more powerful species in the galaxy.
The Lying Bastard, the spaceship constructed by the Puppeteers for the mission to the Ringworld and named by Louis Wu, was sadly not shaped like a disc. In most depictions, including the ones sanctioned by Larry Niven himself, it looks more like a fighter jet.
Silver actually says her name is fifty-six syllables long – considerably more than Ben’s guess of twenty-three! The “unpronounceable name” trope is a common excuse to give aliens, demons and the like simple names, even when their origins suggest they should have a language and/or culture very different to human ones. Doctor Who has several examples, including the Doctor’s own name (in the modern series a secret, but hinted to be very long in some of the books) and that of fellow Time Lord Romanadvoratrelundar, more commonly known as Romana (though when they first meet, the Doctor also offers to call her “Fred”).
Slashie and multi-hyphenate are both terms for those who diversify into multiple disciplines, particularly in the arts. “Multi-hyphenate” is more common in the screen industry, where one might be a writer-director-producer on the same project; “slashie” is a more general arts term, for folks who (like Ben) have several different freelance careers to ensure enough work. (Ben is an actor/writer/game designer/educator, among other things.)
We’re still pretty sure that the whole “you might outnumber me, but how many of you will die before you get me?” thing does appear in a Discworld book somewhere, but we haven’t been able to find it. Do you know where it is? Let us know!
The turtle that burrows underground and comes up looking like A’Tuin (or Torterra, if you’re a Pokémon fan) is the common snapping turtle of North America, Chelydra serpentina. They migrate to muddy holes where they bury themselves to hibernate during Winter. In 2018, a photo of one such turtle was taken in Maryland by Timothy Roth, a psychology professor working with Task Force Turtle. The photo went viral on social media and is now posted to various Discworld forums at least a few times each year, though this turtle hadn’t just woken up from hibernation… You can see the image above, and read the story of how and why it was taken, and learn more about the turtles themselves, in the LiveScience article “How Butt Gas, Drugs and Amazing Memories Led to This Weird Turtle Photo”, from December 2018. As EJ mentions, its often linked to the “turtle island” stories of several North American peoples, including the Lenape and Haudenosaunee.
Stephen Briggs’ unabridged audiobooks of both Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun were released by Isis Audio Books as boxed sets of CDs in the early 2000s. The same recordings were re-released around 2007 on “mp3-CD” – yes, a CD-ROM with the tracks from the original CDs as mp3 files. This format was playable by some CD players produced in the 2000s (and may still be playable by some in-car CD players now), but quickly became obsolete as solid-state media (like USB drives) became cheaper, and then the audio industry shifted to download and streaming. When the Isis unabridged recordings of the Discworld novels and other books were licensed for digital distribution via Audible, Apple Books and so on, it seems Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun were not included, but then the Isis Discworld audiobooks – including the earlier ones narrated by Nigel Planer – don’t seem available digitally any more either. (We assume they were removed to avoid confusion, now the new Penguin audiobooks are out; Tony Robinson’s ones are still available, but under the series title “Discworld (abridged)” to make the distinction clear.) You can still find the physical media versions secondhand, though, if you’re keen.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 69, “Long Fall Sally”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s penultimate collaboration with Stephen Baxter, 2015’s The Long Utopia, with returning guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins.
Notes and Errata
The episode title puns on the song “Long Tall Sally”, written and originally recorded by Little Richard (with Robert “Bumps” Blackwell and Enotris Johnson) in 1956. Fittingly for The Long Earth, “Long Tall Sally” was famously covered by both The Kinks and The Beatles in 1964. Why call it that? Well…it’s a bit of a spoiler, but it’s obviously a reference to Long Earth supporting protagonist Sally Linsay, and you’ll understand if you’ve read the book (or when you get to the end of the episode).
A recap of the first three books in #PratchatPreviously, “The Long Footnote” (July 2023)
The Long Utopia adds a lot of new events to the Long Earth timeline; here’s a short(ish) reference to put them in context with some years from the previous books.
1848 – Luis Valienté is recruited by Oswald Hackett into the Knights of Discorporea.
1852 – Luis and the other Knights, including Fraser Burdon, assist the Underground Railroad in America, then get rich by plundering other Earths’ gold veins.
1871 – the Knights go on their final mission in Berlin before Mr Radcliffe tries to murder them. They go into hiding.
1895 – Hackett meets with Luis and Burdon and they form “the Fund” to set up marriages between stepping families and ensure more steppers are born.
1916 (or 1917) – Percy Blakeney accidentally steps to a nearby Earth in the prelude to The Long Earth.
2001 – Freddie Burdon is contacted by the Fund and given Maria Valienté’s details.
2002 – Maria, now 15, gives birth to Joshua in stepwise Madison.
2015 – “Step Day”, when humanity at large learns of the Long Earth. Joshua is thirteen.
2026 – 117 pioneers, including the Green family, arrive on Earth West 101,754 and found the town of Reboot.
2028 – Helen’s mother, Tilda Green, dies sometime between this year and 2030.
2030 – “The Journey”, Lobsang and Joshua’s trip from The Long Earth. Rod Green (Helen’s brother) blows up Datum Madison this year, around the same time as Joshua (aged 28) meets Helen Green (aged 17).
2031 – Joshua and Helen get married.
2036 – Cassie Poulson is the first human to encounter the “silver beetles” in New Springfield on Earth West 1,217,756.
2040 – Maggie’s mission captaining The Benjamin Franklin, Roberta’s trip with the Chinese East Twenty Million mission, and most of the rest of The Long War. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts. Stan Berg is born.
2045 – Maggie’s mission as captain of the Neil Armstrong II, and Sally’s trip to Mars with Willis and Frank. Lobsang dies in late fall this year, and his funeral is in December.
2052 – Joshua turns 50 and does his 100,000 steps walk. Nikos finds the Gallery and meets the silver beetles.
2054 – “George”, Agnes and Ben settle in New Springfield.
2056 – Agnes realises something is wrong with the world and discovers the beetles. Stan is approached by Roberta Golding to join the Next in the Grange and declines.
2058 – Lobsang and Joshua investigate Earth West 1,217,756 and uncover the beetles’ plans. Six months later in Fall, Joshua finds Sally and they retrieve the old Lobsang from Earth West 174,827,918, the home of the Traversers.
2059 – Early in the year, Stan, “George” and Sally “cauterise” Earth West 1,217,756 just before it is destroyed by the beetles.
The new English translation of Journey to the West, the Chinese folk novel by Wu Chen’en, is Julia Lovell’s from 2021, titled Monkey King. The titular Monkey is a trouble-making immortal recruited to aid a Buddhist monk in fetching scriptures from a monastery in India. This is meant to redeem Monkey for his previous misdeeds, including upsetting the order of Heaven, but he refuses to behave. The monk, Tripitaka, tricks Monkey into putting on a cap that conceals a metal band, which he is able to tighten around Monkey’s head with a secret spell (referred to as the “headache sutra” in the famous Japanese television version of the story). This doesn’t injure Monkey – he is made of stone, it’s a whole thing – but it does cause him intense headaches which Tripitaka uses to rein in his violent impulses.
Joshua was 13 on Step Day, not 14 as Ben guesses. He was born in 2002, not 2001.
While we’re working out how to pronounce Nikos, Liz mentions “Nikolaj”, Charles Boyle’s adopted son in the police sitcom Brooklyn-99. The precise pronunciation of Nikolaj’s name is a repeated gag and character moment between Boyle and his partner, best friend and idol, Jake Peralta.
As we’ll mention next episode, the Valhalla Belt references Strata as the main characters live in an alternate universe where Erik Leifsson made it to the Americas, united with its indigenous peoples and formed a nation called Valhalla, which dominated the world through superior technology.
Joshua is eleven years older than Helen, and first met her when she was 17. They got married in 2031, when he was 29 and she was 18. Freddie was 17 when he had sex with Maria, who was 14; she was actually 15 by the time she gives birth in May 2002, though this doesn’t change our opinions much.
The “10,000 steps” Ben mentions are actually the “Seven Thousand Steps”, a paved path that winds around the mountain known as The Throat of the World in the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Climbing the steps is an early part of the main quest; they lead to the monastery of High Hrothgar, where the Greybeards await the arrival of the player character, who is the Dragonborn – a prophesied hero with the power of the Voice, able to speak the magical language of dragons.
We put some of the dates in the timeline above, but Ben is correct about the history of the Green family, especially about her mother, Tilda, being the driving force behind their migration. They first tried settling in Madison West 2, but it wasn’t far enough away; they then invested heavily in the development of Madison West 5, but didn’t make enough money to leave their Datum jobs behind. Tilda wanted her own dream, not someone else’s, and convinced the family to head out into the further Long Earth, abandoning Rod and all their other ties to the Datum to join the group who founded Reboot in 2026. She died of cancer between 2028 and 2030, and no-one told Rod; he seemed to think she was still alive when he was captured by Monica, minutes before the bomb went off.
Liz compares Willis Linsay to Tom Wambsgans from Succession, a character in the popular HBO series about a wealthy family, headed by Logan Roy (Brian Cox), who owns the global media empire Waystar. As the title suggests, a large part of the drama revolves around who will succeed the ailing Logan as head of the company. Tom (Matthew Macfayden) is a Waystar executive who marries Logan’s youngest child, Shiv (Sarah Snook); he is thus close to, but not truly part of, the family’s inner circle. The series ran for four seasons between 2018 and 2023.
Ben makes a joke about “love languages”, which we’ve mentioned before; in brief they’re a highly reductive, heteronormative and traditional theory about the ways in which people like to show and be shown affection. In the original version, invented by an American pastor, there are five, but really the useful thing to take from the concept is that different folks like to show and receive love in different ways.
The short story “The High Meggas”, Pratchett’s original exploration of the ideas behind The Long Earth, was written in the 1980s; he gives the year 1986, though that conflicts with some accounts of what else he was working on at the time. Ben compares Sally Linsay to Larry Linsay, the protagonist of that story, who is more or less a combination of Sally and her father Willis: one of the inventors of the “moving belt” (the story’s equivalent of the Stepper Box) who ends up living far from other humans in the High Meggers (which are spelt with an “a” in the story). We discussed the short story in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon”.
As we’ve mentioned in our previous Long Earth episodes, complete drafts of the final three novels were finished in 2013, and were full collaborations up to that point. It is true that Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking after that, with only minimal involvement from Pratchett, who had moved on to Raising Steam and The Shepherd’s Crown. Relevant to this episode’s discussion, they did plan the series as a five-book arc right at the start, probably in 2010 or 2011. Thanks again to Marc Burrows, author of The Magic of Terry Pratchett, from which most of this information is drawn. (There’s surprisingly little about The Long Earth in A Life With Footnotes.)
Liz’s reference to Nelson Azikiwe’s “sex barge” is his trip with Lobsang to meet Second Person Singular, a Traverser off the coast of New Zealand somewhere around Earth West 700. The society of islanders there has some things in common with the community of the Next in the Grange, included them being quite relaxed about casual sex. His encounter with Cassie for “a little wiggle” is recounted (subtly) in Chapter 60 of The Long War.
The Knights of Discorporea use their own terms for stepping, since no global consensus has been reached. Luis Valienté doesn’t have a name for stepping, but uses “dexter” and “sinister” for the directions, Latin words for right and left respectively (a clue to Luis’ more educated early life). Hackett calls stepping “Waltzing”, and uses “widdershins” and “deiseal” for the directions. Pratchett fans will be well familiar with widdershins, which as discussed in the episode notes for #Pratchat30 is an old English word (not an Old English word) which means anti-clockwise, or to move around something by keeping it on your left. Deiseal comes from Irish and means movement “to the right”, or clockwise, making it a good if oddly chosen opposite to widdershins. (A variant word, deasil, just means clockwise.) We presume widdershins and sinister map to “West”, and deiseal and dexter to “East”, since that’s how those compass directions appear on a European map in the usual orientation.
X-Men: First Class is the 2011 prequel film showing the origins of the X-Men, a group of mutant superheroes recruited as teenagers by powerful mutant telepath Charles Xavier in his quest to appease the humans who hate and fear them. (That’s possibly a bit harsh, but we’ve been thinking about the superhero as upholder of the status quo recently.) The film was originally intended as a reboot of the X-Men film franchise, but the next film, X-Men: Days of Future Past linked it to the existing X-Men films and established it as a prequel.
The Chartists were a working class movement for political reform in the UK, founded in 1838. They demanded a number of changes to improve British democracy, including an expansion of suffrage (though not to women), secret ballots, and less restrictive requirements for who could stand for the House of Commons. The reforms were supported by millions of working class folks, who presented petitions to parliament, but they didn’t see any of their desired changes adopted until after the movement died out in 1857. The “uprising” of April 1848 was part of a renewed interest in Chartism following the French Revolution, and was really a peaceful meeting when a new petition was intended to be brought to parliament by a procession of Chartists. But the government, who strongly opposed the reforms, enacted old and new laws to make the procession illegal, and had huge numbers of police in attendance (including 100,000 special constables!). In the end the meeting ended without the planned procession, though it is true that many were moved to violently oppose the oppression of the government, and presumably those would have been the “agents” removed by the Knights. They are still working for the government agains the common folk, though.
When Liz says that “in Doctor Who, Queen Victoria is a werewolf”, she is referring to the episode “Tooth and Claw” from season two of the revived series, when the Tenth Doctor and Rose encounter a recently bereaved Queen Victoria on a trip across the Scottish highlands where she is attacked by an alien werewolf. It is suggested that she may have been bitten by the wolf, and as Rose and the Doctor depart they wonder if this means the Royal Family are indeed all werewolves.
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, German Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, was a noted small-L liberal with great influence over the Queen. He had an interest in many progressive ideas and social reforms, including support of emancipation (as seen in The Long Utopia), technology, education, science and the welfare of the working class, including raising the working age. While this makes him sound pretty great, it’s important to remember this was all from a fairly paternalistic “we must care for those less fortunate than us” perspective, and he had no desire to lessen his own power or position, but his heart does seem to have been in the right place. His European ambitions seem to stem at least in part from a fear for his royal relatives, especially in the mid 19th century in the wake of the many revolutions in continental Europe. He’s perhaps best remembered for championing the Royal Exhibition of 1851, for which the Crystal Palace was built, and which probably wouldn’t have happened without his campaigning.
Queen Charlotte is the monarch in the alternate reality “Regency”-era of the Bridgerton television series, based on the series of romance novels by Julia Quinn. The story of her marriage to King George III is told in the spin-off mini-series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, released in May 2023. Ben edits a Bridgerton podcast, What Would Danbury Do?, who covered Queen Charlotte in episode 40, “Sorrows, Prayers and Enduring Love”, with guest Maxine Beneba Clarke.
There’s no directly Biblical evidence for Mary’s age at the time of Jesus’s birth, but based on marriage customs many historians have said she was likely to be a teenager. Sources we’ve found have suggested she was maybe 14 when Gabriel appeared to her to give her the news, but 15 or even 16 when Jesus was actually born. But there’s no official answer, and she is most often depicted as an adult woman, as she would have been in any case at the time of Jesus’ crucifiction.
Liz mentions Joshua’s Tree, a reference to U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree, which itself is named after an actual species of tree native to the Mojave Desert in America. It was named by Mormon settlers, who thought it looked like Joshua raising his hands in prayer. It’s first three tracks are three of U2’s biggest hits: “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You”.
Bill Chambers’ story about the Cueball is, in fact, word for word the same in The Long War chapter 58, and The Long Utopia chapter 1, save that in this book there are a couple of asides to remind us about the history of the Long Earth. The Cueball was first mentioned, very briefly, in chapter 28 of The Long Earth.
The Southern Vampire series – not to be confused with the Vampire Chronicles, which is a whole other thing – are a series of books written by American author Charlaine Harris. Also known as the Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, they follow protagonist Sookie, a telepathic waitress living in the town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, in a world where vampires have made themselves public knowledge following the development of a blood substitute called “Tru Blood”. (Oh yes – it’s the series that spawned the TV show True Blood, though it’s a loose adaptation.)
The Book of Matthew pretty unambigiously states that Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’s twelve close disciples, did betray Jesus, identifying him to soldiers with a kiss in exchange for a bribe of thirty pieces of silver. Other Biblical writings say Judas was influenced by the Devil to do this, rather than the money being his motivation, and some say Jesus foresaw his betrayal and allowed it since it was part of God’s plan. This has led to something of a contradiction; was he following God’s plan, controlled by Satan, or exercising free will? Bertrand Russell and other philosophers have written about this.
Thomas Moore’s Utopia was first published in 1516, originally in Latin. The title is derived from Greek and literally translates to “nowhere” or “no place”.
The band that would become The Beatles first formed in 1956 as The Quarrymen, named after their school, Quarry Bank High School, and specifically the start of the school song, “Quarry men old before our birth”. Throughout their early career that went through several names, including in 1960 the Beatals, The Silver Beetles, and for the first time, The Beatles. They were also known for a brief time in 1961 as The Savage Young Beatles, hence Ben’s mash-up of “The Savage Silver Beatles”.
Ben mentions Star Trek being set “150 years in the future”, which would place it in the mid-23rd century. That’s about right for the original series of Star Trek, in which James Kirk becomes captain of the USS Enterprise from around the year 2265. However Ben is more thinking of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes place 100 years later in the 24th century: Jean-Luc Picard takes command of the newly launched USS Enterprise D in 2364.
The Cavern Club was a jazz club in Liverpool which opened in 1957, inspired by jazz clubs in Paris. As rock and roll began to take off in London, it became one of the central venues, and the Beatles played many of their early important gigs there as early as 1958, when they were still called The Quarrymen. The club is still open, though it closed for a time in the 1970s and 80s during the construction of an underground train route. There may well have been clubs called The Gallery or The Observatory, but they don’t seem to have played a big part in rock and roll history if so.
We mention a few other von Neumann replicators in fiction include:
The alien Replicators in Stargate: SG-1, who initially appear as insect-like robots made of multiple identical pieces. They first appear in the season 3 episode “Nemesis”, where they are the great enemy being fought in a war by the advanced alien Asgardians. They return many times in multiple forms in both SG1 and its spin-off Stargate: Atlantis. As Liz mentions, their origins are later explored, most notably in the fifth season episode of Stargate: SG-1, “Menace”.
The Slylandro Probes appear in the 1992 videogame Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, recently re-released as Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters. The probes seem to be working for someone, though exactly who – and why they are so hostile – is one of many mysteries the player can choose to solve in the game.
Another example we didn’t mention comes from the weird 1990s sci-fi series Lexx, in which drones resembling flying robotic arms also act like von Neumann replicators.
Freeman Dyson (1923-2020; no relation to the dude who invents vacuum cleaners) was a British-American physicist who contributed a lot of enduring ideas to science and science fiction. (One of them, thankfully, was not his skepticism of climate change.) The two here are:
The Dyson Sphere was a thought experiment about how a super-advanced species might efficiently capture all the energy it could need from its own sun. The basic idea – a huge spherical construction around a star – pre-dates Dyson, first appearing in the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton, and also J. D. Bernal’s 1929 nonfiction book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry Into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Both of these were inspirations for Dyson, who wrote about the idea of a sphere in his paper ‘Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation’ for Science in 1959. He didn’t call it a Dyson sphere himself, and indeed didn’t imagine an actual sphere, but instead a spherical group of independent solar collectors. The idea took many sci-fi writers imaginations, with variations appearing in novels like Ringworld throughout the 1970s and beyond. Dyson thought the popular sci-fi depiction – of a literal solid sphere, as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Relics’ – impossible.
The Dyson planetary spin motor seems to come from Dyson’s 1966 essay ‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology’, published in Perspectives in Modern Physics. The beetles use exactly his method, including how to accelerate the planet’s rotation.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg Collective are faction of cybernetic organisms first encountered in the second season episode ‘Q Who’. The possess (more or less) a group consciousness and superior technology, and seek to “assimilate” all other forms of life into the Collective, mostly by infecting other humanoids with nanites which transform them into more Borg. Like the Silver Beetles, they generally ignore beings they do not consider a threat, prioritising their current tasks. The Cybermen in Doctor Who are a similar concept, though they are not often written as well.
Taskmaster is a British comedy gameshow in which guest comedians compete to complete ridiculous “tasks” set by the hosts, Greg Davies, the taskmaster who judges the winner, and show creator Alex Horne, who acts as a meeker referee to make sure contestants follow the rules of each task. It debuted in 2015 on UK digital channel Dave, moving to Channel 4 in 2020, and has run so far (as of mid-2024) for 17 series and more than 150 episodes. Local versions have been created in many countries, including one for Australia and New Zealand on Channel 10 in 2023, hosted by taskmaster Tom Gleeson and referee Tom Cashman.
The trope of someone being eaten alive by tiny creatures – often until there’s nothing left, except maybe bones – appears in lots of places:
The X-Files episode Liz remembers with the glowing green bugs is “Darkness Falls” from the show’s first season in 1994.
The tiny dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are “compys”, short for Procompsognathus; they appear in the first novel, and then become one of several unused elements from that novel used in the sequels, in this case Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
In the 1999 film The Mummy (a guilty favourite of this podcast), one of the terrors in the Mummy’s tomb is a hoard of scarabs that can devour you in seconds.
Defying Doomsday is a 2016 anthology from Australian publisher Twelfth Planet Press. It’s a collection of post-apocalyptic fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, and won a Ditmar Award for Best Anthology; it includes the story “Did We Break the End of the World?” by friend of the show Tansy Rayner-Roberts, which also won a Ditmar for best novelette or novella. It was followed in 2020 by Rebuilding Tomorrow, a similar anthology with a more hopeful theme, which won an Aurealis Award for Best Anthology in 2021. (It’s not clear if these are still in print.)
Deanne recommended the The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, a series beginning with All Systems Red.
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus Pratchat episode “We’re on a Road to Elsewhere“, in which Ben discusses recent Pratchett news, and interviews guest Danny Sag from the Australian Discworld Convention.
Iconographic Evidence
The opening sequence to Good Omens 2 – and handily, the still image for this video is the poster Ben also mentioned!
Here’s the official trailer for Good Omens 2!
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a riff on the chorus lyric from the Talking Heads son “Road to Nowhere”. It might have made a good title for the Strata episode, but Ben will have to think of another one now! (Elsewhere is the equivalent of hyperspace in Strata, traversed through the use of a “Matrix drive”.)
“Cute aggression”, originally “playful aggression”, was popularised around 2013 by the work of psychologists Rebecca Dyer and Aragón. Note that it refers to superficial aggression; folks who express their feelings about cute things this way are not actually violent or aggressive.
A Stroke of the Pen was announced on the 28th of February 2023. You can read about how the stories were rediscovered in this article at LoveReading. The blurb available on several bookstore listings has this to say about the stories within: “Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Council with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and travel millions of years back in time to The Old Red Sandstone Lion pub.”
You can find out more about Gabrielle Kent on her website, gabriellekent.com. The books about a boy who inherits a magic castle are the Alfie Bloom series, beginning with Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle, published in 2015. Rani Reports is the series about the young journalist, beginning with Rani Reports on the Missing Millions, which was published in May this year.
Knights and Bikes (2019) is the first videogame from indie UK developer Foam Sword Games. It was created by Rex Crowle and Moo Yu, who you might know from their work on games like Tearaway, Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank, Ring Fling and MonstrosCity. Crowle is also the brain behind the roleplaying game inspired to-do list app Epic Win. The game is available on most platforms.
There are several Discworld books specifically credited to the Discworld Emporium, but most of them do include Terry’s name in one way or another! The credit on The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas is “Terry Pratchett aided and abetted by the Discworld Emporium”. (The copyright has Terry Pratchett and the Emporium as a partnership as the officially credited authors, with Emporium identified as Isobel Pearson, Reb Voyce, Bernard Pearson and Ian Mitchell in that order.) Earlier books produced by the Emporium like The World of Poo and Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook are credited on the cover only as “Terry Pratchett presents”, with the Handbook “aided and abetted” credit on the inside, while for the earlier World of Poo fictional author Miss Felicity Beadle was “assisted by Bernard and Isobel Pearson”. Only The Nac Mac Feegles’ Big Wee Alphabet Book uses the credit “by the Discworld Emporium”, separately including the same “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” identifier seen on Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. (The description on the website says the Feegle book was “lovingly produced by Ian Mitchell”.) Earlier books worked on by Bernard Pearson, like the Discworld Almanack, have him as a co-author with Terry. So the new Tiffany book is not the first to identify specific people as the author without Terry being one of them, but it is the first to do so on the front cover. Ben is wrong, but it still feels like a big deal to him.
You can see Colleen Doran‘s impressive list of comic book credits, and some of her amazing artwork, at colleendoran.com. You can get notified about the crowdfunding campaign for the Good Omens graphic novelby signing up at Kickstarter.
You can see a list of the books published by Dunmanifestin on the company website. They don’t yet list the Good Omens Kickstarter, but “The Terry Pratchett Estate” is listed as the campaign owner, and their username is “dunmanifestin”, so that seems pretty clear. The campaign has been mentioned by the official Good Omens Twitter account, which is @GoodOmensHQ.
There are currently eight other active Pratchett podcasts by Ben’s count. He keeps track of them via the Pratchat side-project wiki, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ show starring Jason Sudeikis as the title character, a college football coach from Kansas who is hired to manage Richmond AFC by the ex-wife of its previous owner, who took it in her divorce. It’s a beautiful and heartwarming show that has just finished up its third and (supposedly) final season, and as so many people have said about Unseen Academicals, “the important thing about football is that it’s not about football.” Ben highly recommends the show.
As well as Nullus Anxietas, which you can find at ausdwcon.org, we mention lots of Discworld conventions this episode, but missed out a few. Here’s a run-down:
The original Discworld Convention, now known as the International Discworld Convention, started in the UK in 1996, as Danny mentions, and runs every two years. Thanks to Rachel Rowlands of Discworld Monthly for pointing out that it has missed two of those years: 2000 and 2020. The next one is in Birmingham in August 2024, and you can find out more at dwcon.org.
The Irish Discworld Convention began in 2009 and also runs every two years, though not in 2021. The next one is in Cork in October 2023; find out more at idwcon.org.
The North American Discworld Convention also started in 2009, and has run five times since then, most recently (as per Ben’s footnote) in 2019. Their website, nadwcon.org, is offline as of the publication of this episode, but Rachel Rowlands informs us that a team is working on putting together another convention in the US, so keep an eye out for information about it in the near future.
Die Scheibenwelt Convention, aka the German Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, most recently in May 2023 – and they hold it in a castle! (The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s Joanna Hagan went this year; keep on eye on their social media for her video diary if you want to know more about what that was like.) They’re planning the next one for 2025. Find out more at discworld-convention.de (the website is in German and English).
Cabbagecon, the Dutch Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, and most recently in 2022. The next one will be in October 2024; find out more at dutchdwcon.nl (they also have info available in English).
The Ineffable Con is not a Discworld convention, but as it’s name suggests a celebration of Good Omens, specifically the television series. It’s run three times in the UK since 2019, and a fourth online-only convention is coming in October 2023. Find out more at theineffablecon.org.uk.
The Llamedos Holiday Camp is the newest fan event, which has run in Wales since 2020. It’s organised by the folks behind Discworld Monthly (hello again Rachel – thanks for the reminder!), and rather than being a traditional convention, describes itself as an “Interactive Immersive Discworld Experience” – it’s presented as if the event is taking place in Llamedos as the Discworld equivalent of an old-school British holiday camp. It will next appear in 2024 with a “Scout Jamboree” theme, and you can find out more at llamedosholidaycamp.com.
The special convention episodes we’ve released in conjunction with Nullus Anxietas are:
#PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, recorded live at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.
#PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive”, recorded for The Lost Con online event in 2021.
A special Hogswatch video for the con’s 2021 Christmas event; it’s available to Pratchat subscribers on YouTube.
“A Tale of Two Carpets”, recorded for the Discworld Virtual Fun Day in June 2022; the title is from a special version released to Pratchat subscribers with extra footnotes, but you can see the original that played at the event at this link.
Blow Up is a 2023 Australian reality television show made by Channel 7 in which contestants compete to make the biggest and best balloon sculptures. It’s based on a Dutch show, also called Blow Up, from 2022. You can watch Blow Up via 7Plus, which is the channel’s catch-up streaming service, though it may not be available to viewers outside Australia. We won’t spoil the results in case you want to watch it for yourself, but don’t get your hopes up for a second season; Blow Up was moved from Channel 7 to one of their digital-only channels, 7flix, after two episodes, thanks to disappointing ratings.
Werewolf is a social deduction party game. Players are secretly assigned a role as a werewolf or villager, and play in alternating day and night turns. The werewolves, who know who each other are, eliminate one villager player each night turn, while during the day turns the villagers must debate who are the werewolves and vote to eliminate players they suspect. Either team wins if they eliminate all of the other players. The game was invented in Russia as Mafia by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986, but didn’t take off in America until it was re-themed to be about werewolves by Andy Plotkin in around 1997. It is often treated like a folk game, even though it’s origin can be traced, and there are many, many published and free versions available, many with large numbers of unique roles for the villagers which grant them various special abilities and win or lose conditions. Personally Ben considers it inferior to newer social deduction games that don’t rely so heavily on player elimination, but he’s developed a couple of variations of his own, including Spy Catcher and Smuggletown.
These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2023“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.
Iconographic Evidence
The “I’m not an actor” scene from My Favourite Year, starring not Laurence Olivier, but Peter O’Toole.
Notes and Errata
If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
The Pratcats are the cat owners of your two human hosts. They are Asimov and Huxley, who live with Liz, and Kaos, who lives with Ben. Kaos lived up to his name this episode when he unplugged Ben’s microphone near the end of the recording; if you notice any decline in audio quality towards the end, that’d be why.
We mention a lot of actors and shows in our casting discussion:
Brian Blessed has been suggested as a Mustrum Ridcully by many, many fans, if you go looking, so it’s a little surprising Ben hasn’t seen anyone do it before. Ben lists many of his famous screen roles, but Blessed wasn’t in Excalibur; in Ben’s defence, as he says, everyone else was. One role Ben neglected to mention is that Blessed was in the 1995 television adaptation of Johnny and the Dead, playing William “Bill” Stickers. A dream come true for Pratchett if he did base Ridcully on him!
Elisabeth Moss is an American actor best known for her starring role as June (aka Offred) in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but has also been in the 2020 film version of The Invisible Man, the television adaptation of time travel horror Shining Girls, and the upcoming Taika Waititi film Next Goal Wins. Liz also mentions The Square, a 2017 Swedish satirical film directed by Ruben Östlund, in which Moss plays a journalist named Anne.
Richard Ayoade’s more recent screen roles have included voice acting in The Lego Movie 2, The Mandalorian, DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys and Pixar’s Soul, as well hosting the television shows Gadget Man and Question Team and frequently appearing as a guest on panel shows. He was also in the other The Watch, a terrible 2012 movie about a group of idiot neighbourhood watch members who stumble across an alien invasion. (It was discussed by our sibling podcast, Who Watches the Watch, in the episode “Who Watches ’The Watch’ (2012)”.)
Taika Waititi is now best known as a director of big Hollywood films, but we still fondly remember him as Viago in the original What We Do in the Shadows, which also features his Our Flag Means Death co-star Rhys Darby, the third member of Flight of the Conchords. If you’re not familiar with Our Flag Means Death, it’s a heartwarming, comic, queer retelling of the story of Stede Bonnet, a real merchant turned pirate from the golden age of piracy, who did indeed cross paths with Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.
Charles Dance is now most famous for playing Tywin Lannister, the scheming patriarch of House Lannister, in Game of Thrones, but his turn as Vetinari in Going Postal was just the year before! He’s also known for Alien3, The Crown and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, where he appears as Roderick Burgess, the man who summons and traps Dream and sets the plot of the series in motion.
Yeun Sang-yeop, or Steven Yuen as he’s usually credited, does indeed play Glenn in The Walking Dead; he played the character for a little over six seasons. You may also have seen him in Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix film Okja, Jordan Peele’s recent sci-fi spectacle Nope, or as the voice of the title character in the animated Amazon superhero adaptation Invincible. He’s also in Love Me, a sci-fi film scheduled for release in 2024 and apparently not related to the TV series.
Ivor Novello was a Welsh singer and actor, who gained fame not only in silent films but also on the stage. He was a successful composer and writer too, with many hit films and stage musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Melissa Jaffer has had a long career in Australian television, but you probably know her from the gloriously weird US/Australian sci-fi series Farscape, where she played Utu-Noranti Pralatong in the show’s final seasons. The ABC’s Swap Shop, which ran for a single season of 52 episodes in 1988 (and managed to so impress itself on a young Ben’s brain), featured Jaffer as Mimi, the proprietor of the tiitular shop where anyone could swap something new for something in the shop. It’s not related to the earlier BBC series The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a live Saturday morning show for kids hosted by Noel Edmonds, or the reboot of that Swap Shop with puppet fox Basil Brush, Basil’s Swap Shop, in 2008.
Bob Morley is an Australian actor best known, as Liz mentions, from teen sci-fi drama The 100, which she’s mentioned on the show before. As well as roles in both of the major Australian soaps, Home and Away and Neighbours, he’s recently appeared in episodes of Nathan Fillion’s police drama The Rookie and the Australian series Love Me for streaming service Binge, an adaptation of the Swedish series Älska mig.
In Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the television adaptation of the Phyne Fisher books written by Kerry Greenwood, the titular detective is played by Essie Davis, who was . Davis’ version of the character seems to be somewhere in her 30s or early 40s, but in the novels Phryne is 28.
Guest Andy Matthews joined us in #Pratchat64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, to discuss the short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”.
It is indeed Ponder who, with the help of Ridcully and the other wizards of the High Energy Magic Building, traps sound in a string in a box in Soul Music. More on the book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
The “Machete Order” for Star Wars is named after the blog on which it first appeared, “No Machete Juggling”, written by film fan Rob Hilton in 2011. The basic idea is to avoid spoiling the big reveal near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which comes as no surprise if you’ve already watched the prequel movies. The original recommendation is to watch Episodes IV, V, II, III and VI in that order, leaving out Episode I entirely. Others have gone deeper, suggested specific moments when you stop one of the films to watch others before returning to the film you paused, or including only specific scenes from certain films, and so on. You can read the original blog post on Rob Hilton’s current website, alongside an update which answers questions and adds the sequel films (the short answer is anything after Episode VI is just watched in chronological order).
As we’ve noted in our episodes about them, Tiffany ages 1-3 years between most of her books, whereas the gap between other Discworld novels usually seems shorter, but also is never stated as clearly. There are therefore two different attempts to assemble a timeline of the series just on the L-Space wiki; for the record, Ben prefers the original. In shorthand, though, most of the books take place in chronological order, with the notable exception of Small Gods (most of which happens about a century before everything else), and possibly Pyramids, though the discrepancy over this is happily waved aside in Thief of Time.
Catfishing refers to using a fake identity, including using photos of someone else, to interact with other people via social media. The term was coined by the 2010 documentary Catfish, which documents an online relationship begun by the brother of one of the filmmakers which turns out to be with a fictional person. There’s some controversy over how early the creators knew about the deception, and whether they pretended not to catch on in as part of making the film, but the false persona and the person behind it were real. The term comes from a story told by a person in the film about how catfish were sometimes shipped with cod to keep them alert and active, even though the cod were the marketable fish.
Byron Baes is a 2022 Netflix reality series set in the beach town of Byron Bay, New South Wales, following the lives of several social media stars. Byron is a hotbed of dubious wellness and hippie culture and has become hugely commercialised over the past few decades, so it’s no surprise influencers spend a lot of time there.
We’re sure we’ve linked to the British man who greeted his farm animals on social media before, but we’ve so far been unable to find him (it’s not easy searching through nearly seventy previous episodes’ worth of notes). If you know who he is, let us know!
For those who missed the Maggi Noodles reference, Pratchett famously cancelled his contract with his original German publisher Heyne Verlag when he discovered they were cutting costs by inserting ads into the middle of their children’s books – including one for Maggi Soups (not actually noodles) in their translation of Pyramids, Sourcery and and possibly others. It wasn’t just an inserted extra page, either – they added text to the book to give context to the Maggi logo! This post on the Stuffed Crocodile blog has a good summary of the whole palaver, including a picture of an affected copy of Sourcery. Pratchett wasn’t singled out for this nonsense; author Diane Duane has also written about this, including some images of Heyne’s altered translations of her Star Trek novels, and the story of how Pratchett found out about it.
Liz’s short story about women transforming into mops is “Call Him Al”, published in Meanjin in 2017. You can read it online.
We discussed the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.
We discussed the concept of Ankh-Morpork elections in last year’s Eeek Club 2022, and it was indeed Karl’s question. (It’s right at the end.)
Thanks to subscribers Sally and Danny, who pointed out that we haven’t yet read the last important book which involves Nobby and Colon. Ben clearly doesn’t remember Snuff as well as he thought! (But no further spoilers, please.)
For more on Teppic, Ptraci, Djelybeybi and You Bastard the camel listen to our Pyramids episode, #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”.
Victor Tugelbend and Theda “Ginger” Withel are protagonists in Moving Pictures, which we discussed in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.
It’s not Laurence Olivier but Peter O’Toole who utters the line “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” It’s from the 1982 film My Favourite Year; see the iconographic evidence section above for the clip.
Liz mentioned the “AI Influencer” Lil Miquela, who is entirely artificial. You can find her as @lilmiquela on Instagram, where her bio reads “🤖 19-year-old robot living in LA 💖”. Be warned, she’s a bit uncanny valley.
We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times; he’s most famously the author of the Thursday Next series of novels in which the titular heroine lives in a world where fiction and reality are blurred, and investigates literary crimes. We are eagerly awaiting Red Side Story, the follow-up to his weird sci-fi novel Shades of Grey (subtitled The Road to High Saffron to differentiate it from that other book), about a world where humans have mostly lost the ability to see colour.
Ben mentions a “Yesterday-style scenario”, referring to the 2019 film Yesterday in which a man is struck by a bus and awakes to find himself in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed, and he’s the only one who can remember their music. The world is annoyingly otherwise exactly the same as the one with the Beatles in it.
Susannah Clarke is the British author of the enormous (and excellent) Regency fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the much shorter (and also excellent) Piranesi, as well as a number of short stories set in the Jonathan Strange universe.
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 67, “The Three-Elf Problem“, discussing Martin Wallace’s 2013 Discworld board game, The Witches, with returning guest Steve Lamattina.
Iconographic Evidence
As promised, here are some photos of the game.
The board, components and the box.Which witch is which? Get your answers here!A pile of components. The pink tokens featuring townsfolk are Crisis tokens; the yellow ones featuring a witch with crazy eyes are Cackle tokens; and the larger square ones are Black Aliss tokens. The green square tiles are Easy Problems, and the purple ones are Hard Problems.Ben’s hand during his first, four-player game of The Witches.Some of our favourite cards, as discussed in the questions section near the end.
Notes and Errata
The episode title takes inspiration from the 2008 science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The novel in turn takes it’s title from the three-body problem of physics, which refers to the difficulty of calculating the relative motion of three bodies whose masses will interact thanks to gravitational force. In the game, three elves are a problem because they cause everyone to immediately lose.
Steve last appeared on Pratchat for Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”, discussing Only You Can Save Mankind, back in February 2020 – the second-last time we recorded regularly in person.
The last in-person episode was #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”, with Fury. We moved to remote recording from episode 30 (“Looking Widdershins”), though Ben did record in person for “The Troll’s Gambit” with Melissa Rogerson, in November 2022.
Dimity Hubbub is not actually known for being talkative, but rather being clumsy; in her first appearance she has set fire to her own hat, and steps on a piece of Annagramma’s occult jewellery. Dimity appears in A Hat Full of Sky (where she appears in two scenes), Wintersmith (in which she gets a whole two lines of dialogue) and The Shepherd’s Crown (again, only very briefly).
Lancre Gorge features fairly prominently in Wyrd Sisters, and is where Lord Felmet eventually ends up. In Lords and Ladies, its described like this: “Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River.” (A footnote admits that “Lancrastians did not consider geography to be a very original science.”)
Garth Nix, who was our guest for #Pratchat51 a bit over a year ago, is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Old Kingdom series of young adult fantasy novels. In the books, the “Old Kingdom” is a place of sorcery and monsters, separated from its neighbour Ancelstierre by a wall which keeps the magic out. The first book is 1995’s Sabriel, while the latest is the prequel Terciel and Elinor, published in late 2021.
The Treefrog Games’ Collector’s Edition, published in an edition of 2,000 copies, featuring the pewter miniatures and a cloth bag to keep them in, an A1 poster of artwork from the game, different artwork on the box cover, a different shaped box, and a larger map. (We presume this just means physically larger, not that there are any additional locations.) While you can’t buyt the minatures separately, you did used to be able to buy a set of coloured plastic miniatures for the game from Micro Art Studio in Poland, who still produce a line of Discworld miniatures – though the young witches are no longer available.
The Mayfair Games Standard Edition, the one we played. It has wooden witch’s hat pieces for the players.
The game has also been published in several other languages: German, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Czech and Spanish. These all appear to use the same art, with only the text translated.
Mayfair Games was
Martin Wallace is an English game designer who now lives in Australia. After getting his start in wargames in the 1990s, he became a very well-known game designer. His games include the heavy train games Brass: Lancashire (originally just Brass) and it’s successor Brass: Birmingham; two quite different editions of A Study in Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft mash-up based on the short story by Neil Gaiman; and most recently the fantasy war game Bloodstones. (Ben is mistaken, however, about Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which were designed by the entirely different (if similarly named) James Wallis. Sorry James!) Martin’s company Treefrog Games was active until 2016, when he closed it down to focus on working as a designer. Bloodstones was his first new venture in self-publishing since then, this time under the name “Wallace Designs”.
The very brief Martin Wallace interview about The Witches can be found in the BoardGameGeek forums for The Witches. Read the interview here.
When Nanny visits the Long Man in Lords and Ladies, she takes Casanunda along with her. His mind is boggled both by the Long Man, and the resemblance of the King of the Elves within to “his picture”.
The Felmets appear in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”), and they do indeed both die by the end of the book. Lord Felmet plunges to his death in Lancre Gorge, while Lady Felmet is cast into the woods, where the woodland creatures, acting as the soul of the country itself, er…take care of her.
Ben hasn’t been able to think of any other games that split a dice roll in half, though there are many that use a “push-your-luck” mechanic. This is usually achieved by allowing a player to re-roll one or more of their dice with an escalating level of risk and reward.
Melbourne’s public transport network, created by the “Octopus Act” in the late eighteenth century, has a large number of train and tram lines radiating out from the Central Business District. While there used to be two “circle lines” that connected stations on these lines to each other, nowadays to change from one to the other you generally have to travel into the city and back out again. Only buses travel in alternate directions, but they are generally less frequent and less reliable, thanks to traffic.
Agnes Nitt and Perdita X Dream appear briefly in Lords and Ladies, but are best known from Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”).
Ben’s favourite board game Pandemic was designed by Matt Leacock and first published in 2008. It’s a fully co-operative game (see below) in which players are members of the Centre for Disease Control, trying to keep four global pandemics in check while they find cures for them all. The current edition of the game is published by Z-Man Games.
Fully cooperative games are ones in which players do not compete, but instead win or lose (and sometimes score) together. Board game examples include Pandemic, Flash Point: Fire Rescue and Spirit Island. Semi-cooperative games feature some cooperation, but the players also compete against each other in some way. In Ben’s experience, most such games feature strong player cooperation, usual through a high chance of everyone losing, but add in secret personal goals that might put them into conflict. This is a feature of “hidden traitor” and social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica and Dead of Winter, though these might also be considered team games. The Witches is different in that the competitive side of the game dominates; the cooperative element is relatively light, with the threat of losing fairly slight.
The Discworld Emporium is the most famous officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise which grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who started doing Discworld miniatures in the early 1990s. We most recently talked about them in #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner”. They are credited as the author of many of the more recent spin-off books, like The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Nac Mac Feegle Big Wee Alphabet Book, so you’ll no doubt here some more about them before we’re done.
The fans whose likenesses were used for the box art witches were Kate Oldroyd (Tiffany Aching), Victoria Lear (Petulia Gristle) and Pam Gower (Granny Weatherwax). As we mentioned, Pam sadly passed away in January 2023. She wasn’t just the inspiration for this box art, but also Paul Kidby’s bust of Granny Weatherwax. You can read Bernard Pearson’s thoughts about Pam in his Cunning Artificer blog in 2015, including an anecdote about her meeting with Terry which also appears in the biography.
Rowlf the Dog was one of the original muppet characters, originally performed by Jim Henson. He notably achieved solo fame in the early 1960s as a regular on the Jimmy Dean Show, before becoming the piano player in The Muppet Show and subsequent movies. His big number in The Muppet Movie is a duet with Kermit, “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along”.
Wilfred is the title character of a short film and two television series, all created by Australian comic actors Adam Zwar and Jason Gann, and starring Gann (in a costume) as “Wilfred”, an anthropomorphic dog, who is suspicious and jealous of his owner’s new partner. The original short won awards at Tropfest, Australia’s biggest short film festival, in 2007, and became a series on SBS which ran for two seasons in 2010. It was then adapted for the US market, starring Gann as Wilfred and Elijah Wood as Ryan, a depressed man who befriends Wilfred when his neighbour asks him to look after the dog. In this version the question of whether Wilfred can truly speak, or even really exists, is much more present. The American Wilfred ran for four seasons on FX between 2011 and 2014. There was also a Russian adaptation, retitled Charlie.
