Episode Notes

#Pratchat77 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 77, “How to Get Below in Advertising”, discussing the 1963 short story “The Hades Business” with guest Lucas Testro.

Iconographic Evidence

The specific Bob Newhart advertising sketch that Lucas was thinking of is this one about Abraham Lincoln. (See also the further note about Bob Newhart below.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the 1989 British black comedy film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard E Grant and written and directed by Bruce Robinson (both of Withnail and I fame).
  • You can find a digital copy of the August 1963 issue of Science Fantasy magazine at the Internet Archive here.
  • The Unfriendly Future was published in October 1965 by Four Square Books, edited by Tom Baordman, Jr. (As Ben guessed, Pratchett was indeed 17 at the time.) The book included the following stories, mostly previously published in John Carnell’s magazines:
    • Russkies Go Home!, a 1960 novelette by Mack Reynolds
    • “The Food Goes in the Top”, a 1961 short story by Will Mohler (as Will Worthington)
    • Danger: Religion!, a 1962 novella by Brian W. Aldiss
    • “Rescue Operation”, a 1964 short story by Harry Harrison
    • “The Hades Business”, a 1963 short story by Terry Pratchett
    • The Seed of Violence, a 1958 novelette by Jay Williams
  • Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is best known as the author of the fantasy novel Titus Groan and its sequels, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, usually referred to as the Gormenghast series. Peake intended to write many more books in this series, but only completed the three novels and a novella, Boy in Darkness, before he died from Parkinson’s Disease. Titus Alone was republished in 2007 in a new version reconstructed from his handwritten manuscript, the original version having errors produced from misreadings of the manuscript. Peake was also a poet, playwright and illustrator, and illustrated editions of many books including his own, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. If you want to know more, as of April 2025 our sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret are discussing the Gormenghast books during the first year of their post-Pratchett second season.
  • Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a prolific British science fiction writer best known for his Helliconia trilogy of novels (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter, published between 1982 and 1985) which chronicle the history of a civilisation on an otherwise Earth-like planet with incredibly long seasons. He also wrote the 1969 short story “Super Toys Last All Summer Long” which decades later inspired the Stanley Kubrick/Stephen Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like Pratchett, his first published story was published by John Carnell in Science Fantasy, 1958’s “Criminal Record”, though he was considerably older, having spent his younger years in the army and working as a bookseller and editor. He was was a long-time collaborator with Harry Harrison, and the two were part of the “British New Wave” of science fiction. As related in A Life With Footnotes, Terry and his mate Dave met Brian Aldiss (and Harrison) at the 1965 Eastercon in Birmingham.
  • We previously mentioned Harry Harrison (1925-2012) in #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”. Harrison was an American science fiction author best known for his character the “Stainless Steel Rat”, an interplanetary con man and rogue who first appeared in an eponymous novel in 1957. He also wrote the 1966 dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted (very loosely) into the film Soylent Green in 1973. (If you know one thing about the film, it’s not in the novel.) Pratchett is known to have been a fan of Harrison’s work, considering Bill, the Galactic Hero to be the funniest science fiction novel ever written over The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (which he also rated, to be clear), considering that the former novel wasn’t a big hit because not enough readers were familiar with the source material being parodied. He also met Harrison at science fiction conventions as a teenager.
  • “Stagger soup” doesn’t seem to be a Pratchett invention, but existing slang for whiskey – though most sources we could find say it’s from North America (some say it’s still in use in Canada), perhaps dating from the prohibition era. Our guess would be that Pratchett found it through American sci-fi writing. “Joy-juice” has similarly American origins, perhaps inspired by “Kickapoo Joy Juice”, a fictional beverage from the comic strip Li’l Abner, and which was later turned into a real life soft drink by the Monarch Beverage Company in 1965.
  • The Good Place is one of Ben’s favourite sictoms, following Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell), a terrible, selfish young woman from Arizona who dies and ends up in “The Good Place”, a heaven-like afterlife. Eleanor quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake, and convinces her supposed soul mate, ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), to help her learn to be a better person so she can belong there. Over it’s four short seasons the show evolves a lot and has many twists and turns it’s more fun to discover yourself, but it is a plot point in later episodes that there are many more people in The Bad Place than The Good Place.
  • Donald Cotton (1928-1999), the subject of Lucas’ documentary Myth Maker: The Legend of Donald Cotton, was a British writer for radio, television and stage. He is best known for the early Doctor Who stories he wrote which took the show in a more comedic direction: “The Myth Makers”, in which the Doctor travels to the Trojan war, and “The Gunfighters”, in which he gets mixed up in the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He’d likely have written more, but the new producers of the show decided not to do so many historical episodes. He also helped create the television program Adam Adamant Lives!, a later project of Doctor Who co-creators Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman.
  • Bedazzled is a 1967 film written by Peter Cook in which George Spiggot (played by Cook), a man claiming to be the Devil, offers meek and depressed cook Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) seven wishes. None of them, of course, go as planned – it’s more or less a parody of Faust. While there’s some very witty and clever stuff in there, it should also be said that the entire premise revolves around Moon wanting to date a waitress (played by Eleanor Bron) at the hamburger place where he works, and it has some very 1967 ideas which don’t really stand up today. A 2000 remake, also titled Bedazzled and directed and co-written by Ghostbusters’ Harold Ramis, starred Brendan Fraser as Elliott Richards, an equivalent to Stanley Moon who pines for a woman he works with at a computer company. Elizabeth Hurley played The Devil, who doesn’t go by an alias.
  • Bob Newhart (born 1929) is an American comedian who found fame in 1960 when his album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart became the first comedy album to reach number one in the American charts (it also reached number two in the UK). The advertising sketch mentioned by Lucas is “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” from that album, and in a 2005 interview Newhart claimed it was his own favourite. Newhart went on to a successful screen career, with his own sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and Newhart (1982-1990), and subsequent appearances in films and other shows, including the recurring role of “Professor Proton” in The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off Young Sheldon.
  • Bewitched (1964-1972) is an American fantasy sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, a witch who against the wishes and advice of her mother and community, marries a “mortal” man, Darrin Stephens (originally Dick York; he was replaced by Dick Sargent for the last three seasons due to illness). The series was created by comedy writer Sol Saks, based in part on the 1942 film I Married a Witch. Like the ad man in Newhart’s sketch, Darrin works on Madison Avenue for the fictional firm of McMann and Tate, his boss being one of the named partners, Larry Tate.
  • We get into a bit of business jargon familiar to Australian freelancers here, so let us explain. A sole trader – not a “soul trader”, though we considered that as a title for this episode – is a business classification used in Australia. It’s basically a one-person company, and costs very little to set up; the downside is that there’s no limited liability as there is in other structures. All Australian businesses require an Australian Business Number, or ABN, to identify them. GST is the Australian Goods and Services Tax, a 10% value-added tax introduced in 2000 on most goods and services sold in Australia. Companies (including sole traders) with revenue of more than $75,000 a year are required to register for GST, which means that they have to charge GST to their customers and pay that to the Australian Tax Office (ATO), but can also claim the GST they pay on good and services bought to run the business as a credit, reducing the GST payment they make to the ATO.
  • The story about Pratchett almost buying a DeLorean appears in chapter 15 of A Life With Footnotes.
  • Geryon was a giant in classical mythology said to have three heads. The name was later used by Dante in his Inferno as the name of greater demon, the Monster of Fraud, who is more like a dragon; Dante and Virgil ride on its back into the eighth circle, where those who committed fraud in life are found.
  • A “noodle incident” is a comedy fiction trope in which a past incident is referred to by characters but never explained. It takes its name from an example in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, in which the characters often refer to “the noodle incident” but writer Bill Watterson decided to never explain it since the readers’ imagination will always be better than than anything he could come up with. Pratchett is fond of them, the major Discworld example being what happened to Mr Hong’s restaurant, The Three Jolly Luck Takeaway Fish Bar, which seemingly disappeared from Ankh-Morpork after being build on an old Temple of Dagon.
  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British public intellectual best known as a philosopher and political activist. A lifelong pacifist, Russell opposed Britain’s participation in the First World War, leading to him being convicted under wartime censorship acts in 1916. He was fined £100 and when he refused to pay, hoping to be sent to prison to further attention for the cause, his books were siezed and sold at auction; most were bought by his friends and returned to him, some stamped as confiscated by the police. He was subsequently dismissed from his position at Trinity College London, though this was an unpopular decision and he was reinstated in 1919. He generally regarded religion as a form of superstition and an impediment to moral and social progress, describing himself as an agnostic or atheist, publishing an essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” in 1927. His most famous work is Principia Mathematica, a book laying out the principles of mathematical and symbolic logic, written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. It was a follow up to Russell’s earlier 1903 work The Principles of Mathematics. His other famous works include the essay “In Praise of Idleness”, and the books Power: A New Social Analysis and A History of Western Philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
  • Satan in the Suburbs was Bertrand Russell’s first work of fiction, published in 1953 – rather earlier than Ben remembered. It collected three novelettes, Satan in the Suburbs or Horrors Manufactured Here, The Corsican Ordeal of Miss X (which had been previously published anonymously) and The Infra-Redioscope, plus two short stories, “The Guardians of Parnassus” and “Benefit of Clergy”. The book was apparently well-received at the time, but modern readers aren’t so kind. The titular story is more or less a variant on “The Monkey’s Paw”, in which four ordinary people respond to a plaque on the suburban house of the mysterious Dr Mallako, and don’t get what they bargained for. Russell’s journey to fiction writing was sort of opposite to Pratchett’s, coming near the end of his life – he was 80 when he wrote these stories.
  • Hades is a hit videogame developed by Supergiant Games, previously best known for their breakout hit Bastion. It’s a rogue-like game, meaning the player enters a series of randomised levels of increasing difficulty and likely dies before reaching the end, which sends them back to the start; but they improve in skill each time, making them able to get further on subsequent attempts. The player character is Zagreus, a reasonably obscure figure from Greek mythology who in some stories is the sone of Zeus, and in others the son of Hades. In the game he is the latter, and journeys through the Underworld in an attempt to find out how and why his mother, Persephone, has left. In the game, Cerberus is seen having a rest next to the desk of Hades where he receives new souls; the player is able to speak to him and pat and scratch his heads. A sequel, Hades II, is in early access; the player is no longer Zagreus, but instead his sister Melinoë, another character who is said to have been fathered by Zeus.
  • Heck is a 2013 graphic novel by Eisner Award-nominated American comic creator Zander Cannon, published by Top Shelf Comix. It collects the original comic which first appeared in Top Shelf’s digital magazine Double Barrel. In the novel, protagonist Hector “Heck” Hammarskjöld inherits his estranged father’s house and discovers a portal to the Underworld in the basement. He initially uses it to settle disputes around wills by contacting the souls of the dead, but eventually gets drawn into a bigger adventure that sees him travel through the Circles of Hell. Cannon’s most recent series is Kaijumax for Oni Press, about a prison for giant monsters, published in six volumes between 2015 and 2022.
  • We discussed Faust Eric way back in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies”, with guest Georgina Chadderton.
  • We discussed Good Omens (the novel) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World (and I feel Nice and Accurate)”, with guests Jennifer Beckett and Amy Gray.
  • The traditional marketing mix was introduced by American marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. The original version, itself an evolution of earlier ideas, was “the Four Ps of Marketing”: product, price, place and promotion. It was extended in 1981 by Booms and Bitner into the “Seven Ps”, adding not just “people” but “process” and “physical evidence”. Modern usage seems to vary with anything between four and seven “P”s, depending on who you ask and what industry is involved.
  • Matt Damon’s 2021 crypto ad, “Fortune Favours the Brave”, featured the actor walking between exhibits of supposedly great human endeavour and exhorting the viewer to be bold…and invest in cryptocurrency using the exchange crypto.com. Damon later said he only did it to support the charity water.org, which tries to improve access to safe drinking water to communities worldwide. American actor (and ex-economist) Ben McKenzie, who wrote the book Easy Money about the crypto fad, gave his highly critical opinion about the ad (and what it was trying to sell) in many places, including a January 2022 episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD.
  • The “comma, for the use of” jokes are primarily seen in Men at Arms (as discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”) when Fred Colon is handing out equipment to the new recruits, though it returns as a callback once or twice.
  • Fallout: New Vegas is the sixth game in the satirical post-apocalyptic Fallout series. The games are set in the wastelands of a future America, decimated by a nuclear war with China in 2077, though the pre-War America of the games was a 1950s retro-futuristic vision of nuclear-powered cars and household robots. The first couple of games were made in the late 1990s by Black Isle Studios (originally under a different name), but following a couple of spin-off games, the license for the franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks, makers of the hugely successful Elder Scrolls series of fantasy roleplaying games. They made Fallout 3 in 2008, the first game to have a modern first person perspective, but some fans thought it lost too much of the satirical tone of the originals. Obsidian Entertainment, another studio which included developers who’d worked on earlier Fallout games, pitched an idea for another game using the Fallout engine set in a different part of the game’s America; it was accepted and released in 2010 as Fallout: New Vegas. In the game, the player is a Courier given the job of delivering a special poker chip to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas, but they are waylaid by a gangster working with the Great Khans, a local tribe of raiders, who steal the chip, shoot the character and leave them for dead. They survive and try to find the chip and complete the job, along the way altering the future of the entire Mojave Wasteland, which is being fought over by the Khans, the New California Republic, and the mysterious Mr House, who controls New Vegas itself.
  • Monty Python, as we’re sure you probably know, were a British comedy group formed in 1969, best known for their television sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus which ran from 1969 to 1974, and their films, which most relevantly here include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), in which God appears to King Arthur as a cut-out animation of bearded man in a cloud, created like all the Python animations by Terry Gilliam. Their next film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), follows the mis-adventures of a man born at the same time as Jesus and mistaken for a messiah; God does not appear, though Jesus is seen from a distance giving the Sermon on the Mount.
  • Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) is an overtly patriotic American action film about an alien invasion starring an ensemble cast including Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. When the immense alien saucers arrive in Earth’s atmosphere (launched from an even bigger mothership in high orbit), they create clouds to shield themselves from view.
  • Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999) is a fantasy film in which two exiled angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) plan to re-enter Heaven by exploiting an open offer of indulgence from an American Cardinal. Early on in the film, protagonist Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino) is visited by Metatron (Alan Rickman), a Seraphim who is the Voice of God. As he explains: ‘Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God’s true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that one out.’
  • Pandæmonium – not Pandæmomium, as Ben mis-speaks it here – is the name invented for the capital city of Hell by British poet John Milton in his famous 1667 epic Paradise Lost. It draws on Greek, and translates roughly as “place of all demons”.
  • The “sand ropes” stories can be found in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale index as type 1174, “Deceiving the Devil with a Rope of Sand”. Examples can be found in Scotland, England, Ireland and Germany. Some of the stories star Michael Scot, a thirteenth century mathematician and astrologer.
  • The issue of Science Fantasy in which the story first appeared was volume 20, number 60, published in August 1963. A digital version of the issue is available via the Internet Archive; the link will take you to the first page of “The Hades Business”.
  • Janet is one of the major characters of The Good Place, played by D’Arcy Carden. While she frequently has to remind the human characters that she is “not a robot” and “not a girl”, Janet is the afterlife equivalent of a computer interface, able to access all knowledge and providing the means for Architects of the afterlife to create the Neighbourhoods in which human souls live out existence. Carden also plays other versions of Janet, including Bad Janet (the Bad Place’s ruder equivalent), and Neutral Janet (the very bland version who works in the “Accounting Department” responsible for deciding who goes where after death).
  • Benidorm isn’t the kind of place Ben is thinking of – it’s not even in the UK! It’s a municipality on the southeastern coast of Spain. It became a major tourist destination in the 1980s, has three world-renowned beaches, and has a famous hotel which is one of the tallest buildings in Spain. There’s also a popular British sitcom set there, also called Benidorm, which ran on ITV from 2007 to 2018. It follows a large ensemble cast of British holidaymakers from various social classes who make repeat visits to an all-inclusive holiday resort in Benidorm, though the cast changed significantly over the ten series.
  • Skegness is more the kind of place Ben is talking about. Located on the Lincolnshire coast on the East of Britain, Skegness was formerly one of the most popular holiday resort towns in the UK, but went into decline from the 1970s as overseas holidays became cheaper. It’s the home of the original Butlin’s holiday camp, now known as Butlins Skegness, and one of only three still in operation, the rest having closed in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a bit fancier than our description makes it sound, with pools and activities and entertainment, and a range of different types of accomodation.
  • Better Than a Poke in the Eye is the British fantasy newsletter formerly known as Discworld Monthly. Its creators, Jason and Rachel, appeared in our special Discworld anniversary episode, “How Did Discworld Get to 40?” The Llamedos Holiday Camp now runs every two years, with the next one in 2026, themed as “The Llamedos Hogs Ball 2026”.
  • The Prisoner is a 1967 television series created by Irish actor Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009), best known at the time for starring as spy John Dake in the earlier spy series Danger Man. Danger Man initially only lasted one season in 1960, and afterwards McGoohan was offered the role of James Bond, and Simon Templar in The Saint; he turned both down on moral grounds, mostly because as a Catholic he objected to those characters’ promiscuity (he famously insisted on no kissing in Danger Man). The popularity of Bond led to a Danger Man revival in 1964 that made McGoohan the highest-paid television actor in the UK. The show was a hit in the UK and America, where it was re-titled Secret Agent and had the popular theme song “Secret Agent Man”. It inspired various copycats and spoofs, including the cartoon Danger Mouse. McGoohan’s star power also got him more control over the show, and when he was announced he was quitting, was able to negotiate to make a new series of his own devising: The Prisoner. The premise was that a spy angrily quits his job, but after leaving the agency’s office is abducted and taken to a weird, almost surreal holiday camp known as “The Village”, where everyone is referred to only by number – the protagonist is “Number Six”. The secret controllers of the camp use all kinds of bizarre gambits to try and find out why Number Six quit the agency, but he refuses to tell them, and makes repeated attempts to escape and discover who is in charge – the mysterious and never seen Number One. Each episode features a different Number Two, who acts on behalf of Number One. Though originally conceived as a mini-series of just seven episodes, The Prisoner was extended to seventeen episodes, broadcast in 1967 and 1968. It got behind schedule, though, and a final two colour episodes of Danger Man (shown in the US as a telemovie) were broadcast in the first two weeks of its timeslot, instead of after the finale as originally planned. The finale is…well, it’s a whole other discussion, but let’s just say opinion is fairly sharply divided on the ending. But the show itself is otherwise seen as something of a weird masterpiece, and Ben highly recommends you check out some of the best episodes.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat56 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 56, “do { Podcast(); } while ( unreadPratchetts > 0 );“, discussing the 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” with guest Sean Williams.

Iconographic Evidence

Conspicuously missing from this section is that illustration from the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys, but despite what much of the Internet is like it’s not actually okay to publicly share artwork without the artist’s permission.

However, it does appear in the picture section of A Blink of the Screen! There is presented the full, original artwork, which was painted for the cover of a 2001 German anthology of short stories, Retter der Ewigkeit, subtitled “Geschichten zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits” (roughly “Saviour of Eternity: Tales between this world and the afterlife“). This version shows the whole scene – unlike the versions used for either of the German collections – and answers a few of our questions, especially that the yellow leg is indeed that of Michael Dever in his AR chair. In the ebook edition it’s presented at quite a low resolution, and sideways (in the print edition it’s a double-page spread), which might be why Ben thought it was familiar but didn’t recognise where he’d seen it.

While it’s not amongst the images available on Josh Kirby’s official website, if we find it somewhere else public, we’ll point you to it. Sven and Ben have both shared the versions they have via the Pratchat Discord, so subscribers with access can see it there.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is valid C++ code, assuming that the function Podcast exists and updates the value of unreadPratchetts to avoid the podcast going on forever. Or is that what you all secretly want?
  • Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) – who’ll be mentioned quite a bit this episode – was an American science fiction author, many of whose novels and short stories have been famously adapted for the screen. These include The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (adapted twice as Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (more about that in another note) and A Scanner Darkly, among others.
  • You can hear Sean’s episode of Splendid Chaps, “Three/Family“, over at the Splendid Chaps website. It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 2013, at the pop-up Adelaide Fringe venue the Tuxedo Cat, and released on 23 March 2013.
  • Strata was Pratchett’s third novel, first published in June 1981, about two and a half years before The Colour of Magic. It’s features a science fiction version of the Discworld – a planet shaped like a flat disc, which seems to have been built by ancient aliens. It’s more-or-less a parody of Larry Niven’s popular Ringworld books, with many specific jokes and references. But we’ll say no more about it here, as we’ll definitely be covering it on the podcast in future.
  • The Ferals (1994-1995) was an Australian children’s television program on the ABC starring a mix of humans and puppet animals: Rattus, a rat; Modigliana, a feral cat; Mixy, a rabbit (her name is a pun on myxomatosis, a disease used to control wild pest rabbits in Australia); and a “dopey dog”, who it turns out is both not a dingo and not a Darren – his name is actually Derryn. While the original show only ran for two seasons, the puppet characters were very popular and continued to host and appear on other shows for several years. This included the five-minute Feral TV, in which the ferals ran a television station headed up by Kerry the Cane Toad (a clear parody of Kerry Packer, then owner of Australia’s Channel 9 TV network) and his assistant Rodney, a cockroach.
  • The story was written for the 1990 anthology Digital Dreams, edited by British writer, editor and sociologist specialising in religion, David V. Barrett. Barrett has a long history editing and writing for speculative fiction and similar magazines, including Vector and the Fortean Times. He also edited Tales From the Vatican Vaults, a collection of short fiction based on the premise of secret Vatican files being released to the public in an alternate history where Pope John Paul I reformed the Catholic Church. It was published in 2015, and features a few stories by authors who contributed to Digital Dreams. As we discussed, authors in the collection include Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynn Jones, Dave Langford, Storm Constantine, Ian McDonald, Keith Roberts and Andy Sawyer. You can see the cover and full list of authors at the book’s entry in the Speculative Fiction Database (SFDB).
  • The short story commentary in which Pratchett says “short stories cost me blood” and “I doubt I’ve done more than fifteen in my life” is “The Sea and Little Fishes”, which we discussed in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” The book in which this commentary appears, A Blink of the Screen, contains thirty-two short pieces of fiction. Admittedly, a few of those don’t really count as stories – see #Pratchat53 for three examples – but that’s not counting the four volumes of his early short stories for children, published separately.
  • Neil Gaiman’s short story about the troll under the bridge is titled, er… “The Troll Bridge” (or sometimes “Troll-Bridge”). It seems to have been first published in the short story collection Snow White, Blood Red in 1993, two years after the first publication of Pratchett’s story of the same name. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1994, and has appeared in a few other places, including Gaiman’s own anthologies Angels and Visitations (1993 – probably the collection Sean is thinking of), Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and M is for Magic (2007), and was adapted into the comic book Ben read in 2016 by Colleen Doran. While he was certainly better known as a comics writer at the time, Gaiman had written and published several short stories by 1990, though his most famous short fiction came after Digital Dreams. One of his notable earlier stories is 1984’s “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” – the title clearly riffing on Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – about a young man who finds an assassin in the phone book and discovers they do bulk discounts, a very Pratchetty idea.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s 1995 short story for the collection Camelot, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.
  • The “internal monologue” is the way many people think to themselves: in words. But while common, this is far from a universal experience – and most people assume others think in the same way as they do. Finding out otherwise often blows people’s minds, as with the cascade of articles and viral social media posts that cropped up in the way of this 2020 tweet:
  • “Atari” was never that widely-used as a synonym for game consoles, but “Nintendo” was – which is why some sources credit them with aggressively re-popularising the still fairly new generic term “game console” in the 1990s, so they could hang on to the trademark. It worked! And while some folks did (and do) use “Playstation”, “XBox” or even “Game Cube” as a stand-in for game console, those never became as widespread. (Earlier consoles were referred to as “game systems”, but by the time Nintendo massively dominated the market in the early 1990s, “console” – which differentiated a dedicated system for games from a more versatile personal computer, and from an arcade “cabinet” that could only play a single game – had become the preferred term.)
  • Genericisation can indeed make a product’s name ineligible as a trademark. This process is also known as “trademark erosion” or “genericide”, and in America – where most of the famous cases have occurred – it’s controlled by the Lanham (Trademark) Act. The Lanham Act allows a registered trade mark to be cancelled if it “becomes the generic name for the goods or services, or a portion thereof, for which it is registered”. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act 1995 has a similar clause: the mark can be cancelled if it “becomes generally accepted within the relevant trade as the sign that describes or is the name of an article, substance or service”. This has happened to some significant and surprising things: Aspirin and Heroin were both once trademark names used by the Bayer company! To protect against this modern drugs are often given a specific, non-proprietary name, with different company’s specific versions having trade names as well. Other famous examples include cellophane, dry ice, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, videotape and zipper! Examples like Hoover, Kleenex and Google (see below) have certainly become generic terms for a kind of thing, but not to the extent where a trademark has been revoked or expired. In Australia, the legal test seems to be whether the trade mark has become the only term used for a product or service.
  • The Google company went through a major restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc, a new company which owned Google (the Internet services company that runs the search engine, GMail, YouTube and various other online services) and several other companies that were previously subsidiaries of Google. The driver behind this wasn’t a worry about genericisation; rather Google stated that wanted to make the company more accountable and give subsidiaries more freedom. But Google is commonly used to mean “search the Internet”, including as a verb (“I googled it”), and this has come up in court as a reason to cancel the trademark, as per the Lanham Act mentioned above. In 2017, a case in Arizona set a new precedent that the test for genericisation was whether the “primary significance of the trade mark in the minds of the consuming public” had become the product, rather than the producer. They ruled that while people did use “google” as a verb, they also understood Google was a company and not the only way to search the Internet.
  • Amstrad was a British computer company created by English tycoon and politician Alan Sugar. It operated between 1968 and 2010, and was most famous for their personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These included later iterations of the ZX Spectrum, which Amstrad bought from its original creator Sinclair Research, and the Amstrad Mega PC, a Windows-PC which also had a built-in Sega Mega Drive game console (known as the Sega Genesis in the US).
  • Hitachi is a Japanese company founded in 1910, which has grown into a conglomerate best known for their technology products. They no longer make personal or mainframe computers, but do make everything from military vehicles to air conditioners and the Hitachi Magic Wand, a “vibrating massager” introduced in 1968 which experienced a huge swell in sales when it featured in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City.
  • The 1980s-style retro-VR cyberpunk videogame trailer Ben remembered was for the game Jazzpunk, released in 2014. You can watch the live action Jazzpunk trailer on YouTube.
  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the first and most influential cyberpunk novels, was first published in 1984, so around six years before Pratchett wrote “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”. Neuromancer popularised many terms and concepts which are now essential parts of the genre, and it’s also the only novel ever to have won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards.
  • “Carnie” is an American nickname for “carnival worker”; the traditional Australian equivalent is “showie”, short for “showman” or “showwoman”, since we call them “shows” rather than carnivals. We previously talked about this in #Pratchat51, where our previous research suggested the Australian term might even be a little older than the American one. (The surname in this story – and, most of the time, in real life – is spelled “Carney”.)
  • We dance around this a little in the episode, but clues in the story suggest that “Seagem” – the name for the artificial reality company that becomes a generic name for AR machines – comes from the acronym CGEM, which probably stands for “Computer Generated Environment Machines”.
  • The term AFOL, an acronym for “Adult Fan of Lego”, can be traced back to the newsgroup rec.toys.lego, where it was first coined by Matthew J. Verdier on the 14th of June, 1995 after another user, Jeff Thompson, was the first to use the phrase “adult fan of Lego”. It was a niche term for a decade or so, but in the 2010s not only had more people who grew up playing with Lego returned to it as adults, but the Lego company themselves realised there was a whole underserved market of adult Lego fans, and started making sets which would appeal to them. Unlike some other niche adult fandoms for things traditionally seen as “for kids”, the AFOL community often mingle with and involve young Lego fans too, and you’ll see whole families at Lego conventions, in stores and at events.
  • The word “paragorithm” appears in the context of Darren thinking you wouldn’t need something very complex to simulate most conversations with people, since they’re “just to reassure each other that they’re alive”. It might be a neologism Pratchett invented for “parallel algorithm”, a set of instructions for completing multiple tasks at once. These were relatively uncommon in computing at the time the story was written, since most computers weren’t capable of processing multiple instructions at once, but modern multi-threaded processors are specifically designed to do this and make extensive use of parallel processing.
  • “Technobabble” describes jargon-filled scientific-sounding nonsense, originally the sort used by technologists in the 1980s, but increasingly over time the sort used in science fiction to make it sound like the characters understand things we don’t. The term seems to have been derived from “psychobabble”, a term used to deride similar nonsense jargon used in popular psychology, coined in 1975 by writer R.D. Rosen and popularised by his 1977 book, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling. Rosen specifically used the term to mean “an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardised observations” – he was critical of the way psychology at the time sought to reduce the “infinite variety of problems” faced by people into a very small set of formal definitions.
  • “Handwavium” and “phlebotinum” are common fannish terms for substances, devices or phenomena in science fiction which behave in mysterious ways that nonetheless explain otherwise nonsensical events.
  • “Unobtainium” (or “unobtanium”) was originally engineering jargon, coined in the 1950s, for any theoretical substance that could solve a specific problem, if only it existed. It grew to also encompass substances that existed but were too expensive or rare for practical use, and by the 2000s had appeared in its traditional usage in several science fiction novels and films. In 2009, James Cameron used it as the seemingly actual name for the rare and highly valuable super-conducting mineral sought by the mining corporation his film Avatar, to much derision.
  • The book of Doctor Who memories mentioned by Ben is Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry. Pratchett, while clearly not a big fan, seems mostly to have been motivated to write the introduction because it was a fundraiser for Alzheimers research. There are far too many celebrities of interest to Pratchat listeners for us to make a full list, but we will mention that the authors Ben Aaronovitch, Michael Moorcock and Gideon Defoe all appear, as does the creator of the often-mentioned-in-this-episode Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker.
  • As Ben mentions in the footnote, Handwavium is also a delightful Doctor Who podcast hosted by friends of Pratchat, “a fan and her Da (no, a fan and his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to hear a daughter and father duo discussing Doctor Who, this is the best show for it! Find it at handwavium.net.
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. We won’t spoil any more about it than Liz has already said, but we will note that it has been optioned to be adapted as a film by none other than Australia’s own Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerly.
  • The terms “fridged” and “breeder” refer to pervasive harmful tropes in the way women are portrayed in fiction, in both cases having them contribute to someone else’s story without getting to be characters in their own right. A “breeder” is a woman who only matters to the story as a mother or potential mother, while “fridging” is when a woman is killed off or harmed primarily to provide motivation for a male protagonist. The latter term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as the phrase “women in refrigerators”, named for a specific example of the trope from the Green Lantern comic. We previously discussed fridging in our discussion of Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Space Invaders is a videogame developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, first released in 1978 as an arcade game by Taito Inc in Japan and Midway/Bally internationally. In case you’ve never seen it, the player controls a gun at the bottom of the screen that can move left and right, and fire straight upwards; the goal is to shoot increasingly fast and numerous waves of invading aliens before they reach the ground. Home console, computer and arcade machine versions of the game are still available today, largely unchanged except for nicer graphics and sound effects (though these often emulate the original designs). Elite is a videogame developed by British designers David Braben and Ian Bell, and first published by Acornsoft for personal computers in 1984. The player is a space pilot who operates as a freelance trader, buying and selling goods or turning to mercenary work or piracy to earn money and upgrade their ship. Its combination of space combat, wireframe 3D graphics and freedom to decide how you played made Elite a massive hit, and it spawned several sequels: Frontier: Elite II (1993), Frontier: First Encounters (1995) and more recently Elite Dangerous (2015), though these have become progressively more sophisticated. (Ben was probably thinking of Frontier: Elite II, the first one he encountered, which is why he thought there was a much bigger gap between Elite and Space Invaders.)
  • VR, Virtual Reality, is an entire simulated 3D world, while AR, Augmented Reality, is layering elements of a simulated world onto the real one. This has become a big deal over the last decade, with the launch of games like Pokemon GO that let you catch monsters at your local sightseeing spots, and hardware like the Google Glasses, that promise to deliver that Terminator-like heads up display without needing to surgically replace your eyeballs. So far, only the kind of AR that uses your mobile phone camera has really caught on, but there are new glasses and similar products touted every year…
  • It’s well-documented that Neil and Terry exchanged floppy disks via mail to write Good Omens. Here’s one of many sources for this info: Neil answering a fan’s question about the book on Tumblr in 2019.
  • Ben probably mentioned Pratchett’s interview with Bill Gates in one of our bonus episodes. It was for GQ Magazine in 1995, and unearthed by Marc Burrows during research for his biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, in May 2019. (You can see his viral tweet, which includes an excerpt, below.) The idea that Terry had predicted “fake news”, online misinformation and and the return of nazis twenty-four years earlier was written up in The Guardian, Gizmodo and many other news sites at the time, though as Marc notes in a follow up tweet, Gates was on the money later in the interview about the fate of physical media.
  • Grand Theft Auto, abbreviated GTA, is a series of videogames launched in 1997, originally developed by British company DMA Design. The first two games were modest successes, and featured a top-down 2D city in which the player could steal and sell cars, cause car crashes and commit other crimes as they tried to get to a goal number of points, expressed in dollars. Grand Theft Auto III translated the open world of the game to a 3D environment, and it and its sequels have been hugely successful: Grand Theft Auto V is still one of the biggest selling videogames nearly a decade after it was first published in 2013. This is partly because of its online mode, which regularly adds new content and lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar especially for the last few games produced by Rockstar, it has been a constant source of controversy. Some of it is deserved; for example, the games are pretty misogynistic, featuring no playable female characters (except for ones you create yourself in the online version), and relying on ageing tropes of crime fiction for its female NPCs, who are all wives, sex workers and family members. It’s also held up as evidence of videogames’ influence on young people, supposedly leading them to crime and violence, but the evidence of that is less certain. The culture of players around the game, however, is definitely a problem, as it is with the broader world of mainstream videogames.
  • “The Minority Report” was originally a novella by Philip K Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe magazine in January 1956. It imagines a future in which three mutant “precogs” have pre-cognitive abilities, and predict all crime, but the creator of the Precrime department is led to discover more about how it all works when they predict he’ll murder someone he’s never heard of. It was adapted as a film, Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise in 2002, and a sequel television series set a decade later. The film and TV show change many things about the original story, including the nature and abilities of the precogs, and the ending of the story. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Black Mirror, mentioned many times this episode, is a British speculative fiction anthology show, mainly focusing on the consequences of technology. It was created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in 2011, before being acquired by Netflix in 2015. As of this episode there have been five series of 3-6 episodes, plus a Christmas special featuring multiple related stories, and an interactive “choose your own adventure” style film, Bandersnatch. Some episodes do rely on a reveal for their full impact, so we’ll be careful about spoilers, but here are some that are especially relevant to our discussion:
    • People living on digitally after death – or as a copy of a living person – feature in “Be Right Back” from series two, “San Junipero” from season three, and “USS McCallister” and “Black Museum” from series four.
    • Augmented Reality technology editing your experience of the real world appears in the special “White Christmas” and the episodes “Men Against Fire” from series three, and “Playtest” and “Arkangel” from series four.
    • Full Virtual Realities appear in many episodes, but often as a surprise or twist, so the only one we’ll mention is season five’s “Striking Vipers”.
  • We previously discussed the true nature of the Emerald City in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, visitors to the City are made to wear green-tinted glasses, and only the external walls are actually green. This idea is dropped in later books (of which there are thirteen!), which describe the city as green and don’t mention the glasses. It’s one of many differences between L Frank Baum’s original Oz books and the popular film adaptation.
  • To look through rose-coloured (or rose-tinted) glasses is to see something in its most favourable light, ignoring its negative aspects. The phrase definitely pre-dates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as use of it dates back to at least 1838, when it appears in Slight Reminiscences of the Rhine, Switzerland, and a Corner of Italy by English writer and traveller Mary Boddington (1776-1840). The use of “rosy” or “rose-coloured” as euphemisms for things being generally happy or pleasant is much older, attested as early as the 1700s, and probably stems from the earlier idea that having a rose-coloured complexion was seen as a sign of good health in Europe by around 1590.
  • It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an accurate word count for books and stories; it’s not a commonly recorded statistic, and ebooks don’t tell you how long they are either (or let you copy and paste the text so your word processor can tell you.) We’re looking into a solution for this! Note that this work has already been done for many of the Discworld novels.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times before; his most famous series of books are the Thursday Next series, about a detective, Next, who enters the worlds of books to solves crimes.
  • As mentioned, the story’s title is a reference to the opening lines of the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by English author Andrew Marvell. It was first published after his death, in 1681. The opening lines of the poem are: “Had we but World enough, and Time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Other uses of “World Enough and Time” include the episode of Doctor Who mentioned by Ben (the penultimate episode of the tenth series, first broadcast in June 2017), and several books, including novels by Robert Penn Warren, James Kahn, and Joe Haldemann, the latter changing the title to Worlds Enough and Time.
  • Reception theory, or audience reception, is the idea that each individual reader (or listener, watcher, player etc) of a work receives, interprets and understands it through their own cultural frame of reference. Generally agreed ideas about what a work means emerge through consensus, usually amongst individuals who share a common cultural background. It stems from the work of German academic Hans-Robert Jauss (1921-1997) in the 1960s, and popularised and expanded by Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The “Hannibal” to which Sean refers is Hannibal Lecter, specifically the version of the character who appears in the television series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Lecter is a forensic psychiatrist assigned to observe FBI profiler Will Graham, who has a talent for imagining himself in the role of – and thus catching – serial killers. But Lecter is himself secretly a cannibalistic serial killer, and as well as considering himself far smarter than the police (who are far from catching him), also tries to tip Will over the edge into becoming a killer himself. Lecter is best known from Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs, in which another FBI agent visits the killer in prison to enlist his help catching another killer. The television series draws instead on the other novels in which he appears: Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006). The television series was widely acclaimed and ran for three seasons on NBC between 2013 and 2015.
  • “The Gernsback Continuum” is a 1981 short story written by William Gibson. In it, a photographer is tasked withtroversy as police acti taking pictureons of “futuristic” 1930s architecture. He begins to experience visions of the alternate future world imagined by the architects and the likes of Hugo Gernsback, the publisher who pioneered pulp science fiction in the 1920s when he created the magazine Amazing Stories. The story coined the term “Raygun Gothic” for the architectural style it describes; in the story, this name is given by Cohen Downes, an editor for the London-based publisher who hires the photographer. The story was adapted in 1993 as a short film, Tomorrow Calling, originally broadcast on Channel 4 television.
  • The meme “The World If” (aka “The World Without…”, “What Society Would Be If…” etc) depicts a futuristic, supposedly utopian cityscape, accompanied by text informing us this is what the world would be like, if only one thing were different. It dates back to 2018, with the earliest example referring to the jailing of rapper Bobby Shmurda, which drew controversy for a variety of reasons, including police acting on supposedly autobiographical rap lyrics, which supposedly listed his real crimes.
  • Upload (not Uploaded) is an Amazon Original streaming series created by Greg Daniels, best known for co-creating the US version of The Office and Parks and Recreation with Michael Shur. It’s set in 2033 in a future where humans can have their consciousness uploaded into a digital afterlife as they die. The protagonist, Nathan Brown (played by Robbie Amell), dies unexpectedly and is uploaded, but he’s not free of his even more possessive, still-living girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), which is one of the unfortunate tropes of the show. Meanwhile his “angel” Nora (Andy Allo) – the handler from the afterlife company who looks after him – starts to think his death was suspicious. It’s run for two seasons since 2020, with a third on the way.
  • Severance is an Apple TV+ streaming series created by first-time show runner Dan Erickson. It stars Adam Scott (also best known from Parks and Recreation) as Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries. Mark works on the “severed floor”, where he and the other workers have undergone a procedure which means they can’t access their memories of their regular lives while at work, and vice versa. Ben’s only seen the first episode so far but agrees with Sean that it’s great, though be aware it’s a thriller rather than a comedy.
  • The Usborne computer books were published in the 1980s for Usborne, a UK publisher of children’s educational books. They were phenomenally popular, not least because they were approachable introductions to everything from how computers worked to how to program them at a time when most computer books were full of jargon. As well as ghosts the books also featured monsters and robots. While the originals are hard to find in print, in 2015 Usborne made them available for download from their website. Ben is pretty sure he had The Usborne First Book of the Computer from 1984, which seems rarer than the others. This might be because as far as Ben can tell it was a compilation of content from the “First Computer Library” series: All About Computers, Computer Fun and Simple BASIC. (The last two of those appear at the bottom of the page linked above, and include the computer ghosts.)
  • Agent Smith is the primary antagonist of the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix. A computer program tasked with rooting out rogue humans connecting to the Matrix, he and his fellow Agents appear as Men in Black, with sunglasses, black suits and an earpiece. There’s something a bit off about him in the first film; he returns in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as a virus-like threat both to the free humans of Zion and the machines themselves, as he gains the ability to rewrite other programs and human consciousnesses into copies of himself. We previously talked about Smith in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • We previously talked about La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It’s an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the famous one you’re thinking of). Liz reviewed Opera Australia’s 2022 production of La Traviata for The Age.
  • We mention a few films and television series about living people this episode:
    • The Social Network is a 2010 film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, adapted from the 2009 non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It tells the – or at least a – story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in 2003, and the legal problems he faced over ownership of the idea and original website. It’s a fictionalised account, and its accuracy has been disputed; Zuckerberg was also not happy about it, saying at the time that “I wish no-one had made a movie about me while I was still alive”. Historical accuracy aside, it’s pretty great, and also stars Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, co-creator of the original “The Facebook”, and features a killer soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
    • Rocketman is a 2019 Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton as Elton John (though it was originally supposed to be Tom Hardy), and Jamie Bell as his writing partner Bernie Taupin. It was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who may be known to listeners from his role as a young man playing Spike in the UK series Press Gang. (Fletcher had previously stepped in to finish directing Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Queen biopic centred on Freddie Mercury, after Bryan Singer was fired from the project.) In contrast to The Social Network, Elton John had been trying to make a film about his life for decades, and is an executive producer on this film. (Reaction to Bohemian Rhapsody was decidedly more mixed, particularly regarding its handling of Mercury’s sexuality and family, amongst other things.)
    • Pam & Tommy is a 2022 Hulu streaming miniseries about the three-year marriage between actor Pamela Anderson (played by Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (played by Sebastian Stan), revolving mostly around the theft and public release of a sex tape they made on their honeymoon. It was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape“. While some aspects of the production were praised, many critics pointed out that it is a story of the exploitation of Pamela Anderson without her consent – made without her consent. (She was apparently contacted to be involved in some way, but did not want to be part of it; some sources say its production caused her some distress.)
  • Biopics – whether about the living or dead – don’t legally require the permission of the subject because they are, at least in theory, based on the facts of someone’s life – and facts are not considered intellectual property. This is the same principle that allows for unauthorised biographies (many of which become the basis of biopics). Generally the only legal recourse if someone doesn’t like how they’re portrayed is to sue via libel or defamation laws, but those put the burden of proof and money on the person mounting the claim, so even wealthy subjects don’t often consider it worth trying.
  • The simulation hypothesis – the idea that we’re all simulated people in a hyper-realistic simulation of the world – has been around for a while. It was made popular by the release of The Matrix in 1999, and then again by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In Bostrom’s version, the idea is that future humans will build computers so powerful that they will be able to run millions of incredibly detailed simulations of all of human history, including human minds as sophisticated as real ones. If that were to happen, then the vast majority of human-like minds to ever exist would be simulated ones, and so it’s plausible to suggest that’s what we are – artificial minds in a computer simulation of the world.
  • Ben’s Virtual Reality game is Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown by Tin Man Games. In the game, the player is bequeathed the magical “Table of Tales” by a deceased aunt, and it comes to life. A mechanical bird, Arbitrix, is the Table’s Game Master, and helps the player take control of a group of “scoundrels” who are at first dubbed heroes, then years later framed for a crime they didn’t commit, and must go on a high seas fantasy adventure to find out who’s behind it. It plays like a single-player tabletop roleplaying game, with cards and dice for powers, direct manipulation of the pieces, and a branching narrative with multiple possible endings. The game was originally released exclusively for PlayStation VR in 2019, and was a finalist for the “Excellence in Narrative” category at the 2019 Freeplay Awards. In the last year or so it’s been released on other platforms too: PC via Steam in 2021, and in July 2022, Nintendo Switch and the Meta Quest 2 standalone VR headset. The PlayStation VR and Quest versions are VR-only; the Switch version doesn’t support VR; and the Steam version can be played either way.
  • The other Dungeons & Dragons-like VR games Ben mentions are:
    • Demeo (Resolution Games, 2021) – a multiplayer VR game similar in many ways to Table of Tales – so much so that it’s frequently mentioned in Table of Tales reviews! It’s available on Steam, Steam VR, Meta Quest and Meta Rift.
    • TaleSpire (Bouncyrock Entertainment) – not actually VR, and not a game in itself… TaleSpire is a virtual 3D environment for use with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, letting you build and share a virtual map and miniatures with other players. As of writing (July 2022) it’s still in Early Access on Steam, meaning you can buy it early to access a working but incomplete version as its being finished.
  • Wii Fit (2008) was Nintendo’s fitness game for their popular Wii game console. As well as the “Wii-mote” motion controllers, it used a custom “balance board” that ould measure the player’s centre of balance and weight, using this to assess fitness based on the (often criticised) Body-Mass Index, or BMI. Fitness activities available in the game included yoga, aerobics and other exercises, and it was a huge hit for Nintendo. Combined with Wii Fit Plus, the updated version released in 2009, it’s estimated to have sold nearly 44,000,000 copies worldwide, putting it just outside the top ten biggest-selling console games of all time.
  • Zero Latency is a free-roam VR experience company which started up in Melbourne in 2015. The “free roam” part means that players are free to move around a play area, with their movement relative to the game world and each other tracked by cameras. This is in sharp contrast to most VR games, especially headsets available for use at home, where the player remains mostly stationary while the game world moves around them. Since its launch its grown considerably, with nine locations in Australia and nearly fifty more in twenty-five other countries around the world. While most of their games are in the first-person shooter style, and the game Ben remembers is no longer on offer, they do have Engineerium, a puzzle game which sounds like it’s in a similar vein.
  • Liz’s phrase “Too much time down at the Jasmine Allen” is a reference to the perpetually crime-ridden Jasmine Allen housing estate in long-running UK police drama The Bill.
  • Terry’s poem “An Ode to Multiple Universes” was first published in the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book in which it was collected is untitled but generally known as Terry Pratchett’s Folio or the MMXIV Green Folio, and was published for the 2014 Discworld Convention, where copies were given to attendees with a special bookmark labelling it a present from Terry. Fifty copies made it to the Australian Discworld Convention in 2015, and a few more were sold via discworld.com with proceeds going to charity.
  • Of Sean’s more than fifty novels, he suggests Pratchett fans might enjoy Her Perilous Mansion, his standalone middle grade fantasy novel first published in April 2020. The “sidequel” coming later this year (2022) is Honour Among Ghosts.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat84 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 84, “Eight Days an Opening”, discussing the compilations of Terry Pratchett’s and Stephen Briggs’ diaries, 2019’s The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I, 2020’s The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume II, plus his 2004 collaboration with Bernard Pearson, The Discworld Almanak.

Iconographic Evidence

Bojack Horseman, the animated sitcom about a fading TV star in a world shared by humans and anthropormorphic animals, has done the generic song gag several times – not just for the 1990s, but for the 1980s and specifically 2007 as well.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the Beatles song “Eight Days a Week”, and one standard way to describe diary layouts: the more standard “seven days to an opening” means that a two-page spread shows all seven days of the week. Other standard layouts include one, two or five days to an opening (for business diaries that don’t include weekends).
  • The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Volume I was first published on 14th November, 2019, and collects material from the following diaries:
    • Discworld’s Unseen University Diary 1998
    • Discworld Assassins’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2000
    • Discworld Thieves’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2002
    • Ankh-Morpork Post Office Handbook Diary 2007
  • The Celebrated Discworld Almanak (usually just referred to as The Discworld Almanak) was published in October 2004.
  • The Ankh-Mopork Archives, Volume II was first published on 15th September, 2020, and collects material from the following diaries:
    • Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary 1999
    • Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001
    • Discworld (Reformed) Vampyre’s Diary 2003
    • Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008
  • The 1995 Australian Fannish Diary (not 1996) was created by Kerri Valkova & Ian Gunn. While Ben mis-remembered the year it was produced, he did use its note section to write down what Douglas Adams was saying during his appearance at the Somerset Celebration of Literature, also in 1995, not 1996.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat85 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 85, “AT LAST, SIR TERRY”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, “Shaking Hands with Death”, with guest Myfanwy Coghill.

Iconographic Evidence

The full televised speech, as mostly read by Tony Robinson, is currently available on YouTube.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is taken from the first line of the tweets sent out by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett to publicly announce Pratchett’s death, which is still (as of March 2025) available:
  • Myf last appeared as a guest for #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, discussing Maskerade, in September 2019.
  • Avocation comes from the same Latin root as vocation, but rather than meaning “called to”, it means “called away”. It is used these days to refer to something which is not someone’s main occupation, but their true passion outside of work.
  • Mortuary work refers to work done on the body of a deceased person, including embalming and other forms of preservation or restoration to make the body suitable for viewing.
  • The 10th anniversary of Terry Pratchett’s death will be on the 12th of March, 2025. In the first published version of this episode, Ben incorrectly gives the date of his death as the 15th of March in a footnote; it turns out there’s a mistake in the proof copy of the official biography, A Life With Footnotes*, which he used to double check! (It might be a deliberate mistake, to help detect piracy – in the vein of trap-streets in street directories.) A corrected episode should be out by the time you read this, but apologies if you got the incorrect version.
  • Pratchett’s documentary about assisted dying was Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, produced in 2011 for BBC Scotland. It was broadcast in the UK on the 13 June 2011, and had its American premiere at the 2011 North American Discworld Convention in Madison, Wisconsin (yes, that Madison). The film won several television awards, including a Scottish BAFTA, a Royal Television Society award, and an Emmy for Best Documentary.
  • We’ve so far been unable to determine if “Shaking Hands with Death” or any of Pratchett’s documentaries were broadcast in Australia, though we have heard anecdotally that a couple of the BBC ones were. If you know, please let us know!
  • “Space Pilot 3000”, the first episode of Futurama which features a suicide booth, was first broadcast on 28 March, 1999 on Fox. The show follows Fry, a pizza delivery boy who is accidentally frozen in suspended animation for a thousand years on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and wakes in the year 3000, heavily inspired by retro-futuristic cartoons. Matt Groening says the inspiration for the suicide booth was a Donald Duck cartoon from 1937, Modern Inventions, in which Donald is nearly killed by a variety of devices in a “Museum of the Future”. They appear in a further ten Futurama episodes (and telemovies), an in-universe appear to have been around for a very long time – since at least 2008! In fiction, there are examples of similar devices dating back to the 1890s, including the 1895 short story “The Repairer of Reputations” by Robert W. Chambers. In his speech, Pratchett refers to Martin Amis’ facetious mention of suicide booths in a 2010 interview with The Times (no longer available online), in which an elderly user would also be given “a martini and a medal”. Neither side of the euthenasia were particularly pleased, but as Prachett points out, it did get people talking.
  • “That dog episode” of Futurama is “Jurassic Bark”, from the show’s fifth season, first broadcast on 17 November, 2002. In the episode, protagonist Fry finds that archaeologists have discovered the pizza parlour where he used to work as a delivery boy one thousand years earlier – including the remains of Fry’s now fossilised dog. Along with other artefacts is a fossilised dog – Fry’s own dog, Seymour, who Fry decides to clone, Jurassic Park style. It’s generally regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, and was nominated for an Emmy.
  • David Harewood OBE gave the 2023 Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the Battersea Arts Centre. It was titled “75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arriving in this country”. The HMT Empire Windrush was originally the MV Monte Rosa, a German passenger ship seized by the British after World War II. In 1948, the Empire Windrush brought more than one thousand passengers, most of them West Indian, to England, a voyage that became a famous symbol of post-war migration to the United Kingdom. This group of migrants are sometimes referred to as the “Windrush generation”, and among them were members of Harewood’s own family.
  • The Reith Lectures are a similar lecture series broadcast annually on BBC Radio, and which are also available as a podcast; you can find an archive of the lectures at the BBC. The lecture Myf mentions was given by forensic psychotherapist Gwen Adshead in 2024, and is titled “Four Questions About Violence”.
  • Rob Wilkins was indeed a “Stunt Pratchett” during a talk at the Sydney Opera House, but that was on 17 April, 2011 – more than a year after the Richard Dimbleby Lecture. So its understandable he may have been nervous about doing it for the first time for national television! We’ve previously mentioned this event in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer”, as the event was chaired by that episode’s guest, Garth Nix! You can still find it as a 2013 episode of the Ideas at the House podcast, currently available on Acast: “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix”.
  • Tony Robinson produced the documentary Tony Robinson: Me and My Mum in 2006, as part of Channel 4’s series The Trouble with Old People. It covered his difficulties in finding a care home for his mother, who also suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease, and includes her life and death in the home. Robinson is still an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society; last year he featured the Society’s Director of Research and Innovation, Fiona Carragher, on an episode of his podcast Cunningcast. The episode is titled “DEMENTIA Action Week: A Defining Year”, and was released on 16 May 2024.
  • The BBC Big Read was a survey conducted in 2003, with more than 750,000 responses. Pratchett’s entries in the final list of one hundred were, in order: Mort (#65); Good Omens (#68); Guards! Guards! (#69); Night Watch (#73); and The Colour of Magic (#93).
  • The line “I never saved anything for the swim back” is from the science fiction film Gattaca (1997, dir. Andrew Niccol), starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. We won’t say too much, since the line comes fairly close to the end, but it still holds up and is worth a watch.
  • Death’s scene with the swan is in Maskerade, as is the scene where Granny Weatherwax plays cards with Death for the life of a newborn baby. After Death lets her win, she notices he has a shoulder injury and pops his arm back into place for him. As he’s leaving, Death asks her what she would have done if she’d lost. Granny replies with a smile: ‘Well, for a start … I’d have broken your bloody arm.’
  • The Pitt is a 2025 American medical drama on HBO’s Max streaming service. It’s set in the emergency department of a fictional hospital in Pittsburgh. The show’s first season covers one 15-hour shift in the ED, which is nicknamed “The Pitt”. It stars Noah Wyle (best known for playing another doctor in ER) as a senior attending physician, alongside a cast of younger doctors, including students, interns and residents.
  • Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher probably best known for his idea of the “collective unconscious” – that humans have in common a set of instincts (basic desires) and archetypes (universal symbols). Despite much criticism and evolution of thought in psychology, Jung’s theories remain very popular.
  • Rumpelstiltskin is the German version of a folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Similar stories appear in many cultures; it’s known in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 500, “The Name of the Supernatural Helper”. The titular character, usually described as an imp, is not summoned by anything in particular except desperation on the part of the heroine, who has been given the impossible task of spinning straw into gold, as her father boasted she could. If she does not, she will be killed. Rumpelstiltskin completes the task but in return asks for her first born child. Some years later, the women has married the prince and become Queen, and the imp returns for his payment when the child is born. When she protests, he gives her a chance: he will give up the child if she can guess his name, but she has only three days to work it out. His own pride is eventually his undoing, since the King eventually discovers his name by coming across his house in the woods, and secretly watching him as he dances and sings a song to himself about how she will never guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. Therea re many variations, including some from Nordic countries, and the British Isles, some explicitly making the Rumpelstiltskin character a demon of some kind.
  • The Reddit carbon monoxide leak story is from 2015, posted on r/legaladvice as “[MA] Post-it notes left in apartment.” In 2018 the story was made into an episode of the podcast The Endless Thread, “Something Wicked”.
  • Dignity in Dying is a UK not-for-profit, membership supported campaigning organisation originally formed in 1935 as the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society. They also have a sister organisation, Compassion in Dying, formed in 2008. Compassion in Dying do not campaign for changes in the law, but are a registered charity that helps individuals to talk about and make decisions related to their own deaths, including legal and administrative assistance for things like living wills, Do Not Resusciatate orders and giving power of attorney to trusted loved ones.
  • Thomas Tallis (1505 – 1585) was a 16th-century English composer primarily of choral music. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth gave Tallis and his later contemporary William Byrd an exclusive letters patent for printing music and music paper in England, which made sure his music was perfomed across the British Isles and preserved into the modern day. Most of his works are religious, and the best known include Lamentations of Jeremiah, Miserere nostri, and Spem in alium.
  • Unity LeJean is an Auditor in Thief of Time who so well creates a human body that she develops human thoughts and sensibilities. We discussed Unity’s life and death in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”.
  • While we have not been able to find any documented cases of people being coerced into assisting dying, it is notable that reasons like “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers”, “isolation or loneliness” and financial issues are often cited as reasons by those accessing assisted dying in Canada and Oregon. Meanwhile in the UK, according to the Crown Prosecution Service, 187 assisted suicide cases were referred to them by police between April 2009 and March 2024. Only 24 of those proceded without being withdrawn, mostly because they failed the test of being in the public interest. Of those, eight became cases of other crimes, including homicide; one resulted in acquittal; four were successfully prosecuted; and six are still ongoing. They don’t say what happened to the other five, but we infer that most of those with were withdrawn by police or with which the CPS didn’t proceed failed a public interest test, which maybe suggests they are the sort of thing that would be legalised under assisted dying laws.
  • “The Appointment in Samarra” is an ancient Mesopotamian tale which dates back to the Babylonian Talmud. The best-known modern version derives from Sheppey, the last play written by English writer W. Somerset Maugham, in 1933. Towards the end of the play, the title character – an Irishman who has won the lottery, but decides to spent the winnings on charity – is visited by Death. When he muses that he should have bought a new home on the Isle of Sheppey, as he considered earlier in the play, death gives a brief monologue recounting the story of the Appointment in Samarra. It is definitely worth a google, though you may find the top result is the 1934 novel Appointment in Samarra by American writer John O’Hara, who included Somerset Maugham’s version in his book after he was shown it Dorothy Parker and was inspired to change the title of the novel.
  • The Google search engine was launched in 1998, the first search engine to use back-link data to algorithmically rank pages by importance in search results. Exactly when it became the most popular search engine is hard to guage, but the phrase “to google” meaning “to search on the Internet” had entered popular usage by 2002, so Google was certainly firmly entrenched by 2010.
  • Assisted dying laws in Australia are state legislation, like most other medical law. Ben isn’t quite correct; every state has an active assisted dying law, but the two Australian territories do not (yet). The laws have many similar restrictions, and are seen as quite strict compared to legislation in other countries: patients must be legal adults, have a terminal illness with a life expectany of twelve months or less, and be in severe pain. There are also administrative barriers in terms of how and when a patient can make the request. The laws differ in many other ways, including who is allowed to give life-ending medication, how doctors must behave if they object to such a treatment, and who is allowed to suggest voluntary assisted dying (complicated further by federal laws prohibiting the discussion of suicide over carriage services, which includes telehealth). As of March 2025, the situation in each state is:
    • The Northern Territory previously had the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, making it the first jurisdiction in Australia to legalise assisted dying. The conservative federal government of the time disagreed with the law, and introduced the Euthanasia Laws Act 1997, which made it illegal for territories to pass laws permitting assisted dying. This was repealed by the the Restoring Territory Rights Act 2022. A panel reported findings on possible new legislation for the Northern Territory in 2024, but no new law has yet been proposed.
    • Victoria was the first state to pass assisted dying legislation, with the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017. It came into effect on 19 June 2019. Amendments to the bill to get it passed also increased funding for palliative care in regional areas. It served as a model for legislation in most of the other states.
    • Western Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2019, which came into effect on 1 July 2021.
    • Tasmania has the End-of-Life Choices (Voluntary Assisted Dying) Act 2021, which came into effect on 23 October 2022.
    • Queensland has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 1 January 2023.
    • South Australia has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2021, active since 31 January 2023.
    • New South Wales has the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022, which came into effect on 28 November 2023.
    • The Australian Capital Territory passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2024 on 5 June 2024, which comes into effect on 3 November 2025.
  • When Ben mentions that the government has introduced and then taken away support for those with disabilities, he’s referring to changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), first introduced by the Gillard government near the end of their time in office, in 2013. This is a government scheme that supports those under the age of 65 with permanent disabilities, including medical costs, equipment and services. Successive conservative governments did not do the scheme any favours, capping the number of staff at its Agency well below projected need, and making changes to its leadership. In 2024 major reforms were passed in legislation by the Albanese Labor government, but while these were supposedly based on recommendations from an independent review of the scheme, they were criticised for effectively removing support from many disabled Australians, who are already underserved by the scheme.
  • The Victorian death pyramid – more properly known as the “Metropolitan Sepulchre” – was a pyramid-shaped necropolis proposed by the architect Thomas Willson in 1829. It was meant to address the shortage of burial space in London, and would have been built in Primrose Hill. The design was “nearly four times the height of St Paul’s” (about 90 stories), with external stairs and an obervatory at the top; it has a potential capacity of five million corpses. Even at the time, it was considered “extraordinary” and “absurd”. Surprisingly, and to Ben’s disappointment, 99% Invisible don’t appear to have done an episode (or even a mini-story) about this.
  • The infant mortality rate in Victorian London was very high, especially compared to the overall death rate, which had otherwise declined. Some sources place the infant mortality rate at over 300 in 1,000 births in 1800. One pamphlet from 1862 noted that in 1859, two in every five deaths was of an infant aged five or under, and half of those – one in five deaths – was of babies under a year in age. These observations led to activism around child health and safety, and reforms and initiatives including bottle feeding of babies.
  • Liz has previously mentioned the Melbourne General Cemetery in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”; the latter episode is no longer available.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat51 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer”, featuring guest Garth Nix, discussing the 2006 Discworld novel Wintersmith.

Iconographic Evidence

Here are some photos of Ben’s office of the time of this episode’s recording, to accompany the visual section about video meeting boffo.

The posters on the mirrored wardrobe behind Ben’s desk
The one-page RPGs on the bookshelf; you can also see the kakapo on the top shelf
The dragon made by Ben’s Mum – with bonus tortoise and Babel fish!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title references not only Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but more specifically Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a long-running Buffy recap and discussion podcast hosted by musician Jenny Owen Youngs and writer Kristin Russo. Each episode of the podcast covers a single episode, and includes an original song about the show; they have a whole album’s worth of new songs dedicated to the Buffy musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling”! (One of several things referenced in the title of #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future”.)
  • As mentioned in the footnote, “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix” was a public appearance by Terry at the Sydney Opera House on 17 April, 2011. As of March 2025, it’s still available as a 2013 episode of the Ideas at the House podcast; you can find it via Acast: “Terry Pratchett in Conversation with Garth Nix”
  • The Colour of Magic, Pratchett’s fourth novel, was first published in the UK by Colin Smythe on November the 24th, 1983. As we noted for Richard Watts, our guest in #Pratchat49, who also read it when it was first available, In Australia this was probably in 1985, the year of the first Corgi paperback edition.
  • Pratchett’s first novel, The Carpet People, was first published by Colin Smythe on November 16th, 1971. This was a fairly small print run of 3,000 copies, which is why any that come up for sale routinely go for huge prices. (Garth did well to get a hold of one when it came out!) The later version – rewritten and edited by the older Pratchett – was first published by Corgi on the 30th of June, 1992. The original short stories from 1965 can be found in the collection The Dragons of Crumbling Castle, first published on the 11th of September 2014.
  • The Good Wife and The Good Fight are CBS legal dramas set in Chicago. The Good Wife follows Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies), a woman who restarts her legal career as a junior lawyer when her husband, a State’s Attorney, is jailed in a corruption scandal. A major theme of the show is what women are expected to give up to be “good wives” to influential husbands. The Good Wife ran for seven seasons from 2009 to 2016, and was followed in 2017 by The Good Fight, a sequel and spin-off that follows the character of Diane Lockhart (played by Christine Baranski). A year after the end of the earlier show, Lockhart – a named partner at Alicia’s law firm – is forced out when her life savings are lost in a financial scam that dupes her protege and god-daughter. The pair move to another Chicago law firm, where another former employee of the original firm now works, and take on cases with political and social justice angles. The Good Fight was still running at the time of this episode, but finished after six seasons in 2022.
  • Tiffany is 9 years old in The Wee Free Men – not 6, 7 or 8, as guessed by Garth and Ben. Everyone was wrong! In A Hat Full of Sky she is 11, and as discussed she turns 13 during Wintersmith. By the next book, I Shall Wear Midnight, she is nearly 16 (see #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No-Eyes is Back”).
  • You’ll find most of Liz’s complaints about Wentworth in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”, discussing the first Tiffany book The Wee Free Men. There might also be one or two in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“, about A Hat Full of Sky.
  • “This is where you came in” is named “How We Got Here” by trope-listing websites. A famous example of Ben’s phrase for it is in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film noir mystery Sunset Boulevard.
  • We previously mentioned the film Mean Girls (2004, dir. Mark Waters) in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem”. Written by Tina Fey and based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, it follows new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who moves from an isolated life in Africa to the social jungle of of an American high school.
  • Bilbo Baggins’ age is a plot point in The Lord of the Rings, when he chooses the occasion of his eleventy-first birthday to literally disappear by using the magic ring he stole from Gollum during the events of The Hobbit. It is noted that Bilbo has not aged normally for a hobbit, who usually live for around 100 years – a bit longer than the humans of Middle Earth.
  • One Pratchett interview in which he discusses Tolkien’s influence is his 2006 chat on Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, a production of the Seattle Channel, a community cable channel run by the City of Seattle. Appropriately enough it was during the promotional tour for Wintersmith! You can find the main Tolkien quote in his answer at around the 3:30 mark, which also includes his classic story about how and when he first read the books. An earlier – possibly the original – version of the same thought appears in Pratchett’s 1999 essay “Magic Kingdoms” for the Sunday Times, prompted by the publication of the third Harry Potter novel. It’s collected in A Slip of the Keyboard, and this version has been circulated in image form recently, so we include it here as text:

J. R. R. Tolkien has become a sort of a mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way Mt Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt Fuji.

Terry Pratchett, “Magic Kingdoms”, 1999
  • Pratchett’s other Tolkien references include a lot of stuff about dwarfs (and indeed the use of the plural “dwarfs”), the Gollum sequence in Witches Abroad, Mustrum Ridcully, aka “Ridcully the Brown” (a very different take on a Brown wizard who is close to nature), and his deliberately non-Tolkienistic takes on elves, orcs and goblins. In several interviews – including the one linked above – he also describes Discworld “in the short form” as “Middle Earth 500 years on, when everyone’s actually got to settle down and deal with one another.” This idea is most explicit in his short story “Troll Bridge”, which we discussed in #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”.
  • Lady Justice is the modern incarnation of Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, introduced by Emperor Augustus. Justitia herself is likely inspired by Dike, the Greek goddess of moral order and fair judgement, who also held a pair of scales, possibly influenced by earlier Egyptian gods like Maat and Isis. (Dike’s mother, Themis, is also described as a goddess of justice.) Justicia was also depicted holding a sword, but the blindfold worn by the modern version of Lady Justice seems to have been introduced in the sixteenth century. The earliest depiction of Lady Justice with all three elements seems to be the statue on the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen (Fountain of Justice) in Bern, Switzerland, which was sculpted by Hans Gieng in 1543. Not all famous depictions of Lady Justice have the blindfold – for example the statue of her on the Old Bailey courthouse in London.
  • As Ben mentions, not everyone can or does visualise things in their imagination – in fact the ability to do so exists on a continuum, across all senses, not just sight. This kind of “blind” imagination is described as “aphantasia”, and around 3-5% of humans are estimated to think this way. This 2017 article from The Conversation does a pretty good job of explaining aphantasia, but there’s also a worldwide Aphantasia Network, established in 2020.
  • Not only are personifications of fate often depicted as weavers – see previous episodes #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires” and #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang” – but the moirai, the Greek fates, are the children of Themis, and sisters to Dike!
  • To be clear, we don’t hate any of the story teaching terms we groan about in this episode – Ben uses them in his teaching work a lot! – but they do take us back to school days we’re happy to have left behind us. In case you’re not familiar with any of them:
    • The “inciting incident” is modern writing jargon for the moment in a story where the protagonist’s regular world is disturbed. While it’s used etensively by those who write about writing (who often define it as having anywhere between three and seven defining characteristics), it can be fairly directly traced back to the work of story scholars like Gustav Freytag and Joseph Campbell.
    • A “story graph” or “story arc” is a curved line meant to show time progressing in the story from left to right, and tension, excitement or some other measure of the story’s intensity going up and down. It demonstrates the same basic principles as Freytag’s Pyramid, which is to say the most tension or excitement etc goes somewhere in the middle, at least in standard Western story structures. In primary school creative writing it is sometimes called the “story mountain”.
    • A “topic sentence” is a device taught in essay writing in which an early sentence in a paragraph – often the first one – gives the reader an expectation of what the paragraph will be about.
  • The Dark Morris is first mentioned – though not by name – at the very start of Reaper Man (see #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door”). Pratchett tells us that while all inhabited worlds of the multiverse have a Morris dance, only on the Discworld in one small village in the Ramtops is it danced it properly. Their secret is “the other dance”, which is described in more detail at the end of the book: that dance it’s danced without music, while dressed in black and wearing bells made of octiron, which make “the opposite of noise”. The award-winning Lancre Morris Men, led by Jason Ogg, appear in Lords and Ladies, but they don’t seem to be the ones who dance the Dark Morris; they mention that the Morris is “for every day”, whereas the dancers of the Dark Morris dance only once a year. This also correlates with the fact that Miss Treason’s steading is near, but not in, Lancre, which is well served by both Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax.
  • In Joe Dante’s 1984 horror comedy Gremlins, teenager Billy Peltzer (Zach Gallagher) is given a mysterious Christmas present bought by his travelling salesman/inventor father from a weird little shop (you know the sort). It’s a strange, intelligent and very cute creature called a mogwai (the name is derived from the Cantonese word for devil, 魔怪), and it comes with three rules: keep it away from bright light, especially sunlight, which will kill it; do not let it come into contact with water; and – most famously – “never, no matter how much he pleads, no matter how much he begs, never ever feed him after midnight”. By the end of the film, of course, all three rules are broken. We previously discussed the film’s 1990 sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind” (currently unavailable).
  • For more about the Scots language, see the episode notes for #Pratchat36, the afore-mentioned “Home Alone, But Vampires”. In short it’s a Germanic language which, like modern English, derives from a dialect of Middle English. If you’d like to hear some Scots spoken and learn a few words, we highly recommend following poet Len Pennie on Twitter (@Lenniesaurus) or TikTok (@misspunnypennie). Len posts a “Scots word of the day”, recites her own poyums, and is all around excellent.
  • A showie (a shortened – and happily gender neutral – form of “showman”) is a worker in a travelling show; it’s the Australian equivalent of the US term “carnie”, which is derived from the word carnival. Carnie dates back to the 1930s, but it’s possible “showie” might be a little older. In Australia, such workers operate rides, games and concessions at agricultural shows, open markets and cultural festivals, and many operate family businesses that have been around for three or four generations or more. Many showies do not like the term carnie.
  • On Roundworld, the word “boffo” dates back to at least the era of vaudeville, and was used in showbiz circles as a noun to mean a hit show, act or film. We’ve not had much luck in finding a more specific origin; if you have a lead, let us know!
  • For more on Hyancinth Bucket – the lead character in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, who insists her surname is pronounced “Bouquet” – see #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home” and #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”.
  • When Ben talks about “the heart and soul of witchcraft”, he means “the soul and centre”; as Granny Weatherwax would readily admit, there’s not always room for heart to enter into it. (For more on this, see #Pratchat43.)
  • As mentioned this episode, Pratchett’s short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” introduces many things important in the Tiffany novels, including Mrs Earwig, the Witch Trials and Zakzak Stronginthearm and his magic shop. We discussed it with Marc Burrows in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”.
  • Tir Nani Ogg is a pune, or play on words, referencing Tír na nÓg, the Irish “Otherworld” (or part of it) and home to the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. As discussed in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders”, Tír na nÓg was often said to be accessed via underground passages, much like the Long Man’s barrow in Lords and Ladies. Of note for the Tiffany stories: another name for the Otherworld – or perhaps a different part of it – is Tír fo Thuinn: “Land Under the Wave”! For more on how this relates to Pratchett’s version of elves, see the episode notes for #Pratchat17.
  • Anoia, Goddess of Things that get Stuck in Drawers, is introduced in chapter ten of Going Postal, as one of the gods to whom Moist prays for deliverance. (For more on this, see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”.) Moist prays to her again in Making Money, with surprising results. As discussed, in Wintersmith Anoia reveals she was once a volcano goddess, always smoking because the storm god rained on her lava. This is a clear callback to Going Postal, in which Anghammarad says that Adorable Dearheart reminds him of “Lela The Volcano Goddess, Who Smokes All The Time Because The God Of Rain Has Rained On Her Lava”.
  • The state of witchcraft has changed considerably over the course of the books. At the start of Witches Abroad, Granny and Nanny attend a sabbat of Ramtops witches at which only four witches are present – Nanny, Granny, Gammer Brevis and Old Mother Dismass. They bemoan the “increasing shortage of witches”, which is so bad there’s no-one available to take the place of Desiderata Hollow, and discuss “moving the boundaries” so they can cover her patch. They are scandalised that a nearby township has brought in a wizard, and Granny also rejects the idea that Desiderata might have named her own successor, since – as we see in Wintersmith – that’s not how they do things in the Ramtops. By the time of Lords and Ladies, the young coven led by Lucy “Diamanda” Tockley has revived interest among the younger Ramtops folk about witchcraft.
  • In Roundworld mythology, the Cornucopia – from the Latin for “Horn of Abundance”, and usually translated as the “Horn of Plenty” – is associated primarily with the Greek and Roman pantheons, and there are multiple accounts of its origin, though it is usually the broken horn of some kind of nature god or similar creature. In one account, infant Zeus, hidden in a cave so he wouldn’t be destroyed by his father Cronus, accidentally broke the horn off of the magical goat which fed him milk. Many gods and goddesses in both Greek and Roman pantheons have held the cornucopia, though few are associated with Summer – rather they are mostly gods of riches, prosperity, the harvest or even fate. It’s now also associated with Thanksgiving in North America, and via that becomes a major motif in Suzanne Collins’ dystopian series The Hunger Games.
  • The language on the cornucopia does seem to be ancient rather than modern Greek. The translation by the memory of Dr Bustle is accurate, as far as we can tell.
  • The universal translator pre-dates Star Trek by a little over twenty years, first appearing in the 1945 novella “First Contact” by American writer William Fitzgerald Jenkins (writing under the pseudonym Murray Leinster), which probably also coined the titular phrase. Versions of a universal translator are used in many science fiction programs to avoid having to deal with frequent language barriers in stories about meeting other cultures. Notable examples include the TARDIS telepathic circuits in Doctor Who (not explained until more than a decade into the show’s history), the “translator microbes” of Farscape and – perhaps most famously – Douglas Adams’ invention of the Babel Fish in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
  • Hivers are described in A Hat Full of Sky, where the writings of Dr Bustle explain that they are not demons, but a form of bodiless, mindless not-truly-alive consciousness which drifts through space, and which were formed in the first moments after the creation of the Universe. As the Hiver that inhabited Dr Bustle and Tiffany later admits, it seeks refuge in human minds in order to hide from “everything” – Hivers consciousness has no filter between itself and the entirety of existence, so they are constantly overwhelmed and afraid. Steeleye Span took this as inspiration for the song “Hiver” on the Wintersmith album (more on that below).
  • If like Liz you’re daunted by the amount of Star Trek available, Ben recommends Max Temkin’s articles: “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours“, and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in in 82.5 Hours“. They recommend the essential episodes you need to watch to follow and get the gist of those two beloved Star Trek shows from the 1990s.
  • Moist von Lipwig is an (ex?) con-man and the last major new protagonist introduced by Pratchett to the Discworld. Caught for his various crimes in Ankh-Morpork, the Patrician offers him an honest job revitalising the post office in Going Postal. (See #Pratchat38.) In the television adaptation, he is played by Richard Coyle, best known from Coupling and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Moist later becomes master of the Royal Bank and Royal Mint in Making Money, and in Raising Steam is made the city’s representative overseeing the creation of a new railway system. As for tax auditing, Pratchett had mentioned that he was considering a book starring Moist von Lipwig titled Raising Taxes, in which he would take over as Ankh-Morpork’s head auditor. It was expected to be the next book after I Shall Wear Midnight, but that was instead followed by Snuff and then the rather different Lipwig story, Raising Steam. (For more on other hints of Pratchett’s planned books that never saw the light of day, see the episode notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.)
  • Stories about a fish that has swallowed something thrown away go back a long way. The Greek historian Herodotus recounted a story about Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, who was advised by Egyptian king Amasis to rid himself of some of his many possessions in order that he know some hardship, or else expect a tragic end. He threw his prized emerald ring into the sea, and regretted it, but he was later brought a fish as tribute which, when gutted, contained the ring. The best-known fairytale with this motif is usually called something like “The Fish and the Ring”, and some sources say it is of Norwegian origin. It’s a story of ATU type 930, “The Prediction”, or more specifically 930D, “Fated Bride’s Ring in the Sea”. The story recounts a wealthy or noble man who learns he, or his son, is fated to marry the daughter of a peasant; he tries to dispose of her in several ways, but she is repeatedly saved by fate, eventually having a gold ring taken from her and thrown into the sea, being told by the nobleman not to come to him without the ring. It’s found inside a fish, and this is usually the point at which the nobleman accepts fate cannot be cheated. It can also be interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since without the prophecy and his intervention the man would never have even met the woman.
  • “Bluebeard’s Bride” – or just “Bluebeard” – is a French folktale about a notorious nobleman – often later described as a sea captain – whose many wives have mysteriously vanished. When he asks a neighbour to marry one of his daughters, they are frightened, but the youngest eventually agrees. Bluebeard gives his new bride the keys to his enormous house and tells her she may go anywhere except the basement. While he is away she invites her sisters for a party, but is overcome with curiosity and sneaks into the basement…to find the bloody corpses of Bluebeard’s previous brides. She drops the keys, which become stained with blood, and on his return Bluebeard discovers she has found his secret; however she is saved by her brothers, who kill him, and she inherits his wealth, which she uses to bury his other wives before moving on. The tale is ATU type 312, which is known as “The Bluebeard” or “The Maiden-Killer”.
  • The 2007 Doctor Who episode “Blink” by Steven Moffat introduces the Weeping Angels, creatures who (typically) appear to be statues of angels covering their eyes. But this part of their ultimate defence, in which they become “quantum locked” when observed, unable to move but also very difficult to be hurt, as they transform into stone. (They cover their eyes so as not to observe each other.) As soon as they are not observed – for example, if someone watching them blinks – they are able to move incredibly quickly and silently. Their touch while unobserved transports a victim back in time to before the time of their birth, and they feed off the energy created by this possibly paradoxical change to history.
  • We’ve talked before about the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and the Lovecraftian parody in Pratchett’s earlier work; see particularly #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, for discussion of Cthulhu and the other Lovecraftian entities who clearly inspired the Things. Pratchett most directly parodies the Lovecraftian style in “Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”, the non-Discworld short story we discussed in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“.
  • The “Phantom of the Opera book” is Maskerade, the penultimate book starring the original Discworld witches. We discussed it back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • Tolliver Groat was introduced in Going Postal (see #Pratchat38) as the oldest ever Junior Postman, but by the end of the book was promoted to Assistant Postmaster. During the events of Making Money, presumably set shortly after Wintersmith as it was published next, he will (at least briefly) rise to the position of Acting Postmaster. In the television adaptation of Going Postal, he is played by Andrew Sachs of Fawlty Towers fame.
  • Steeleye Span are one of the best known British folk rock bands, formed in 1969 at the height of the British folk revival by bass player Ashley Hutchings, who left the other big folk rock band of the time, Fairport Convention, following a car accident. The initial lineup also featured vocalist Maddy Prior, her duo partner Tim Hart on guitars and vocals, and husband and wife team, guitarist and vocalist Terry Woods (later a member of The Pogues) and vocalist and strings player Gay Woods. Their success and fame were secured by early hits: in 1973 they made it nearly to the top 10 with “Gaudete”, an a cappella recording of a traditional Latin Christmas carol from the 17th century, and in 1975 “All Around My Hat”, a traditional 19th century song about a sailor who goes to sea and returns to find their lover about to marry another man. sold like hotcakes and got them to number 5 in the charts. Their signature style is traditional folk songs set to modern instrumentation, with electric guitars and a rock beat, including popular songs like “Thomas the Rhymer”, “Black Jack Davey” and “Alison Gross”. They’ve also written many original songs – including the tracks on Wintersmith (see below). They are still performing, and released fiftieth anniversary greatest hits and live albums in 2019.
  • The album Wintersmith was released in October 2013, with a deluxe 2-disc version featuring four extra tracks and a live performance following in 2014 (this is the version Ben has). The story goes that Terry discovered folk music when a friend made him listen to the Steeleye Span track “Thomas the Rhymer”, and immediately wanted to find and listen to everything they’d ever done. Some sources name Maddy Prior as Terry’s favourite singer. Prior in turn is a big Pratchett fan. It’s not clear when they first met, but Steeleye Span played at Terry’s 60th birthday party in 2008, and a few years later Terry approached the band with the idea of making an album based on Wintersmith. Most of the sixteen songs are inspired directly by the novel, but there are also tracks drawing on The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky and I Shall Wear Midnight. Pratchett himself appears delivering a spoken word performance on the track “A Good Witch”, and was directly involved in the project, working with the band on the lyrics. Guitarist (and actor) Julian Littman, who joined the band in 2010 and wrote some of the songs for the album, noted that when appearing on stage with the band a year or so before his death Pratchett told the audience: “If I’d known it was going to be that good I’d have written a better book.” Ben loves it too, and as a fellow Steeleye Span fan, hopes to discuss it more fully on a future episode of the podcast, perhaps after we’ve covered I Shall Wear Midnight.
  • For more on Steeleye Span’s Wintersmith album, check out this 2024 article from Louder, “How a Terry Pratchett novel became a Steeleye Span album”.
  • When Ben says “What You Witch Is What You Get“, he is invoking the phrase WYSIWYG, an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”. It was used mostly in the 80s and 90s in computing, to describe interfaces which showed you on the screen what the computer would produce on the printed page (or other non-digital output) – something which seemed miraculous at the time. Ben probably should have said “Witch You See Is Witch You Get”, but you can’t have ’em all. Pratchett made fun of the phrase in The Science of Discworld (see #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“) when, at the end of chapter five, Ridcully invokes “the ancient principle of WYGIWYGAINGW”: “What You Get Is What You’re Given And It’s No Good Whining”.
  • You can hear Ben’s thoughts about Nanny Ogg being more powerful than she appears in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“, about Wyrd Sisters. He mentions that book being “the first one”, i.e. the first in the witches series; that title might more properly belong to Equal Rites, though as only Granny Weatherwax appears, it’s certainly not the first book about the Lancre coven.
  • Terry’s favoured hat was a black, wide-brimmed Louisiana, often mistaken for a fedora. He wrote about his love of hats – including the specific brands and types he’s bought over the years – in the 2001 article “A Word About Hats” for the Sunday Telegraph Reveiw, which is collected in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • The new Tooth Fairy is appointed in Hogfather. See #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, for more on that book, but we won’t spoil their identity here.
  • Both versions of the personification (or avatar) of Time appear in Thief of Time, discussed in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • Old Man Trouble is mentioned in Soul Music, Hogfather, Feet of Clay and Thief of Time. The Discworld Companion describes him as the personification of Murphy’s Law (i.e. “Whatever can go wrong, will.”) but he’s a reference to the Roundworld “Old Man Trouble”, a personification of problems or bad luck, thought by some to be a polite way of referring to the devil. He is best known from his appearance in American songs, especially the George and Ira Gershwin classic “I Got Rhythm” – the reason for Lord Downey thinking being able to carry a tune would keep him safe from Old Man Trouble – and the Fats Domino song “Old Man Trouble”.
  • Talisman: The Magical Quest Game is a board game originally designed by Robert Harris and published by UK games giant Games Workshop in 1983. In the game, players choose from a variety of fantasy hero characters, and roll dice to travel through a fantasy kingdom, encountering various dangers while attempting to find a Talisman which will allow them to travel into the centre of the board. If they can make it there and reach the Crown of Command, their character becomes ruler of the kingdom and they win the game. Apparently the original design wasn’t fantasy themed at all, but had the players take the roles of boys at a boarding school attempting to be prefects! The fourth edition, first released in 2008, is currently published by Pegasus Spiele. It’s one of those games most beloved by those with nostalgic memories of playing it as a teenager; Ben prefers games which aren’t quite so heavily reliant on the luck of the dice, but it continues to be be popular.
  • Honey Heist is one of Grant Howitt’s many one-page RPGs. It gained popularity in online RPG forums and then a bigger boost in fame when it was played by the cast of hugely popular roleplaying YouTube show Critical Role. You can get Honey Heist on the Rowan, Rook and Decard website, offered via a pay what you want (including nothing) model.
  • As depicted in the photo above, Ben’s handmade kakapo – the endangered ground parrot of New Zealand – was crafted by Sayraphim Lothian as part of their Journey project in 2014. You can find out more about the project on Sayraphim’s website.
  • We don’t have a photo of Garth’s Disreputable Dog and Mogett, but we can tell you these are animal characters from the Old Kingdom books, magical creatures who travel with their wizard masters. It is important that their collars remain “safely on”, but we won’t spoil the reasons why here.
  • A “Lazy Susan” is a turntable designed for use in the middle of a table to help serve food. Similar devices predate the name, which seems to first appear in the World War I period, though exactly where the name comes from is unclear.
  • Terciel and Elinor is, as Garth explains, a prequel to the Old Kingdom books; the titular characters are the parents of original protagonist Sabriel, who appears in the first novel Sabriel and its sequels Lirael and Abhorsen. Please note that when Garth says “this year”, we recorded this episode in December 2021.
  • Frogkisser is Garth’s funny 2017 novel aimed at a middle grade or young adult audience about the Princess Anya, who has the power to break curses with a kiss. She goes on the run when her evil step-parents want to take over the kingdom for good. On a Quest to save the kingdom, she is aided by “a loyal talking dog, a boy thief trapped in the body of a newt, and some extraordinarily mischievous wizards”…yes, I think we can see the Pratchett influence here.
  • Newt’s Emerald is Garth’s 2015 novel of Regency romance, spiced up with a bit of “fantasy of manners” – i.e. a magical take on the “comedy of manners” style of Restoration comedy novels. It follows the adventures of Lady “Newt” Truthful, who dresses as a man in order to recover the stolen jewel in her family’s collection: the Newington Emerald.
  • Who Watches The Watch is, in their own words, “A fun (but highly intellectual) podcast in which four pals read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, talk about left-wing politics and have a riotous good time while they’re about it.” It began in May 2020 and episodes are generally released every week or two. The original plan was to read the Watch books as a lead-in to discussing The Watch TV show, but after reading Guards! Guards! they decided to cover the Discworld more broadly. They also have a spin-off show, Immortal Incantations: Heartspell, in which the hosts – Chaz, Lucy, János and George – are writing their own fantasy novel. You can find out more about both shows on their Patreon page.

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat83 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel, Unseen Academicals, with guests Dr Tansy Rayner Roberts PhD (Classics).

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on the official song of the 2010 World Cup, Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”. The song also features South African band Freshlyground, and was a big hit in both Europe and Africa. But it wasn’t without controversy: there were claims of plagiarism, though these were dismissed by the supposed victims, and some criticism of having a Colombian artist perform the song for the first (and so far only) World Cup held in Africa.
  • Tansy was previously a guest for both of our live shows: “A Troll New World” from June 2019, and “Unalive from Überwald” from August 2024. Fun fact: you add both of those episodes together, they’re still shorter than this one! (But they’re both around an hour and a half long.)
  • “Likely lad” has a couple of meanings, but the most common is derived from Geordie slang, meaning “likely to succeed”. It seems to have originated from boxing, but has expanded to mean someone with potential. In some places, it’s also used to mean “likely to cause trouble”. The phrase was popularised by the BBC sitcom The Likely Lads in the 1960s. This featured the misadventures of two young men in the Northeast of England, Bob and Terry, who like football, beer and girls.
  • The new faculty member Ben couldn’t remember was the Professor of Recondite Phenomena. “Recondite” means obscure, or hidden, leading Ben to wonder if this is really a new character, or just a new and broader title for the Reader in Invisible Writings… But the Reader in Invisible Writings is Ponder Stibbons, who is present in the same scene, referred to by one of his more recently acquired titles, the Master of Traditions. So no; a new character, it would seem.
  • We have confirmed that there have been multiple Megapodes that attend Discworld conventions, carried by various fans. We’re currently hoping to contact the Australian fan we met doing it to find out more about her Megapode! We think it was either a custom job or a repurposed generic weird bird toy. We’ll let you know the score when we do!
  • Hunting the Megapode is almost certainly inspired by the “Mallard Song” (not to be confused with the Duck Song, or indeed the separate English folk song “The Mallard”) of Oxford’s All Souls College. All Souls is made up only of Fellows – there are no student members of the College, and recent graduates (usually in law or history) can apply to join via an examination and interview. The Mallard Song is the College’s official song, and it’s sung every year at the Bursar’s dinner, complete with a refrain of “Ho, the Bloud”. More importantly for this book, it’s also sung once a century during a ceremony that recreates a moment from the building of the college, when supposedly a large mallard flew out of the foundations. The last ceremony was in 2001, so unfortunately most of us won’t be around for the next one. But you can read the original lyrics of the song, and learn more about the ceremony – which includes carrying around a “Lord Mallard” in a sedan chair, following a wooden duck on a pole – at this 2018 blog post from The History Girls.
  • The University tradition of the Ceremony of the Keys appears near the start of The Last Continent, where it’s revealed that it happens around 2 AM every morning when a group of three bledlows present the Archchancellor’s Keys to the bledlow on gate duty. The whole business is very clearly a pisstake of the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London, which also happens every evening. We found this whole playlist on YouTube of the Ceremony over the years. It’s said to date back to the 14th century, though it’s current form is probably no more than a couple of centuries old.
  • We’ve previous discussed Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975), in #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune”. An English author best known for his humorous novels, especially Jeeves and Wooster, his name should actually be pronounced “Woodhouse”. He came to a bit of an ignominious end, effectively exiled from the UK, but his work is still seen as quintessentially British comedy. Wodehouse is very definitely one of Pratchett’s influences; both biographies mention him reading Wodehouse’s work at an early age, especially in the pages of Punch magazine.
  • Brazeneck College is first mentioned during a faculty meeting at the start of The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory”), published in May 2005. There it’s spelled “Braseneck”, but as it’s Unseen University’s rival in the building of Very Big Things, seems clearly to be a school of magic of some sort; it’s location is not mentioned. It becomes Brazeneck in it’s very next appearance, “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devlish Devices” (see #Pratchat63, “Decline by Committee”), published almost at the same time as The Science of Discworld III. In this short story, it’s held up as an example against which UU is being measured by A. E. Pessimal. Brazeneck College publishes papers, and attracts many new students, which is said to be “to the benefit of the city”. Many readers have assumed this means Brazeneck College is based in Ankh-Morpork, but we feel bound to mention that the text does not say which city. Pessimal could be arguing that UU needs to be a benefit to Ankh-Morpork in the same way Brazeneck is to its home town. In Unseen Academicals, Brazeneck is referred to as both a College and a University, and is explicitly located in Psuedopolis. It isn’t mentioned by name again; in The Science of Discworld IV (see #Pratchat71, “It Belongs in a University”) the Dean is said to be Archchancellor at Pseudopolis University, perhaps implying that Brazeneck College has changed names, or is now part of a bigger institution.
  • As mentioned, Ponder Stibbons is introduced as a student wizard in Moving Pictures, which you can hear more about in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”. His fear of exams there is somewhat at odds with his later presentation as an all-round genius.
  • Ponder’s memory of his first magic comes when Ridcully organises the first football game amongst the wizards and has two captains pick teams. The “fat kid” was off limits since his father owned a sweet shop, leaving Ponder the bullies’ main target: ‘which meant a chronic hell for Ponder until that wonderful day when sparks came out of Ponder’s fingers and Martin Sogger’s pants caught fire. He could smell them now. Best days of your life be buggered’.
  • British comedy in the 70s and 80s frequently featured sketches and gags about football. The most famous example is probably Monty Python’s “Philosophy Football” sketch, in which Ancient Greek philosophers play German ones. But Ben was most influenced by The Goodies. The 1975 episode “Wacky Wales” featured a Welsh minister (played by Jon Pertwee!) who turns out to be leading a coven of rugby-worshipping druids, resulting in an “ecclesiastical rugby sevens” tournament. But the big one for association football was the 1982 episode “Football Crazy” from their final season, in which the Goodies try to solve the problem of violence at football matches by first changing the game to make it less sexy, and then banning spectators, leading football fans to turn their attention to ballet instead. While the concepts of the jokes hold up well, we won’t link a clip here, mostly because they use the kind of homophobic language common for football hooligan taunts of the time. (And thankfully less common now.)
  • Fast & Furious is a long-running franchise of action films, beginning with The Fast and the Furious (2001; dir. Rob Cohen), about a tightly-knit crew of street racers and thieves who carry out their crimes in high-speed cars. In the first film, the Toretto family are hunted by the police; by the end of the film the undercover officer investigating them is well on the way to becoming part of the family. As Liz mentions, the cops never do anything to stop the street racing in the films, though they do turn up at the end of a race or two. As of this episode (January 2025), there have been ten films in the main series, a spin-off film, an animated TV series, and still more in the works. Each film has pushed the franchise more into fantasy: by the sixth film (Fast & Furious 6, 2013, dir Justin Lin) the street racing crew are being offered an amnesty to work with the police to take on mercenaries; in the seventh (Furious 7, 2015, dir. James Wan), they’re recruited by secret agents to take on terrorists. The spin-off Hobbs & Shaw (2019, dir. David Leitch) is a buddy cop film about a cop and mercenary from the series teaming up to take on a “cyber-genetically enhanced” terrorist threatening the world with a “programmable supervirus”. You get the gist.
  • Fever Pitch is Nick Hornby’s second book, first published in 1992, and now a Penguin Modern Classic. The memoir is split into chapters, each of which relates the experience of watching an Arsenal game and how it connected to Hornby’s life at the time, especially his romantic relationships, and his relationship with his Dad. It’s been fictionalised and turned into a romantic comedy film twice: 1997’s Fever Pitch starred Colin Firth and Ruth Gemmell, with a screenplay by Hornby. A 2005 American version, directed by the Farrelly Brothers, changed the story to be about baseball, and starred Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore. This version was retitled The Perfect Catch outside America.
  • Tansy mentions two sport-based comics by American comic artist and writer Ngozi Ukazu. Her webcomic Check, Please! ran from 2017 to 2020, and tells the story of a young queer figure skater who joins his college’s ice hockey team. It’s still available online, and has also been collected into two print volumes. The new graphic novel Bunt: Striking Out on Financial Aid, published in 2024, is the story of an arts college freshman who learns her scholarship is no longer valid – but if she can field a softball team and win at least one game, then all nine players will get an athletic scholarship. Classic stuff! Ukazu also published her first work for DC Comics in 2024: Barda, about the warrior Big Barda, raised on the hell-like world of Apokolips, ruled by one of the biggest villains in the entire DC Universe. It’s all about her finding love in adversity, and also sounds like a great read.
  • We’ve talked about Pratchett’s addiction to fat jokes many times, but our deepest discussion is in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, where we talk about Agnes with guest Myfanwy Coghill.
  • The acronym WAGs – “Wives and Girlfriends”, or “Wife and/or Girlfriend” in the singular – was popularised with the British tabloid press in the 1990s. They were then writing so much sexist drivel about the female partners of footballers – mostly those who were already celebrities in their own right – that they needed a shorthand. It really took off in the early 2000s with coverage of Victoria Beckham (more on her in a moment) and then Cheryl Cole, a singer with British pop group Girls Aloud who married footballer Ashley Cole in 2006. The term persisted into the mid 2010s, and spawned television series like the ITV drama Footballer’s Wives (2002-2006) and reality TV shows like WAGs Boutique (2007) and the Australian WAG Nation (2012). Despite being flagged as sexist by the Equalities and Rights Commission in 2010, it still pops up from time to time. A number of related acronyms have also been created; the best one is “Celebritity’s Husbands and Partners”, or CHAPs.
  • In 2023, country-pop crossover megastar Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce, a pro American Football player who’s been a “tight end” with the Kansas City Chiefs team since 2013. (”Tight end” is an offensive playing position – i.e. one that helps score. The innuendo would make Pepe proud.) Their relationship was highly publicised, but in a turnaround for this sort of interaction it was clear far more people knew who Swift was than Kelce. Taylor Swift fans began to take an interest in the game and the team, helping it to break all kinds of ticketing and merch records, but also sparking stupid social media exchanges complaining about the football coverage including shots of her in the stands. As of January 2025 they’re still together, and the two fandoms seem to have settled down – not that the Swift fans ever seemed bothered about her going to games, except for the fact that she would use a private jet to get to them while on her international Eras tour.
  • Posh and Becks is the nickname given to celebrity power-couple David and Victoria Beckham. Victoria “Posh” Beckham, née Adams, found fame when she was cast in the Spice Girls as “Posh Spice” in 1994. In 1997 she married David Beckham, then a star player for Manchester United. The tabloids went crazy for them. They remain celebrities; Posh has a solo musical career, reunited with the Spice Girls, worked as a model, and started her own fashion and beauty brands, though those have not been financially successful. Becks moved on from the Premier League to the World Cup, playing for Real Madrid, and then LA Galaxy for the American Major League, before retiring from the sport in 2013.
  • The Shove doesn’t have a modern Roundworld equivalent, but it is very similar to the way crowds would gather in the “mob football” played in medieval times. (Indeed the Audible audio drama adaptation of Unseen Academicals renames “foot the ball” to “mob ball”; more about that below.) Mob or medieval football seems to have had few rules and often didn’t involve kicking; but not much detail of the game (or games; there would have been many local versions) survives for us to know how it was played.
  • In modern times, the closest thing to the violence of the Shove have been the disastrous “crowd crushes” at football matches (and other gatherings) where fans are shoved against the barriers of the pitch, resulting in multiple injuries and deaths. The worst crush in British football was the Hillborough disaster in 1989, where 94 people died on the day and three more in the days and years after from injuries sustained in the crush. It resurfaced in 2016 when a second inquiry found that both the design of the stadium, and the negligence of police and ambulance officers, were responsible for the disaster, not the fans themselves. This resulted in charges against six people in 2017, though charges against one of them was dropped.
  • Elle McPherson is an Australian model and actress best known for magazine covers in the 1980s and 1990s – she holds the record for the most appearances on Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. In recent years she’s come under fire for her non-scientific views about medicine, especially after she recovered from breast cancer. She also dated notorious anti-vaccine activist and medical fraud Andrew Wakefield from 2017-2019. Appropriately for this episode, she also has a football connection (though the wrong kind of football): her father, Peter Gow, was a longtime President of Ben’s hometown rugby team, the Cronulla Sharks.
  • There are eleven foot-the-ball “sides” named in the book. The main ones we mention by name in the episode are Unseen Academicals, Ankh-Morpork United, Dimwell Old Pals and Dolly Sisters Football Club. The others are mostly named after locations in Ankh-Morpork: The Angels, Treacle Mine Tuesday (aka the Miners), the Cockbill Boars, Pigsty Hill Pork Packers, Naphill United, Whopping Street Wanderers (aka the Whoppers) and Lobbin Clout.
  • When discussing the team colours, we mix up the teams: Trev supports Dimwell Old Pals, who wear pink and green. Dolly Sisters wear black and white, so Ben was pretty close with blue and white.
  • We’ve been unable to find any examples of Dimwell hats (again, not Dolly Sisters), or other Discworld football memorabilia (aside from a set of football cards created to publicise the book, the text from which is collected in A Blink of the Screen.) Certainly it doesn’t seem there’s been any official apparel, so if you know of any fan-made scarves or hats etc, please let us know!
  • While a human named Igor works in Biers (as seen in various books, but especially Feet of Clay and Hogfather), the first proper Igor appeared in Carpe Jugulum, working for Count Magpyr. There have since been many throughout the later Discworld novels.
  • Liz mentions midi-chlorians in response to Ben’s suggestion that Mr. Nutt’s “Little Brother” might be microbes in his bloodstream. We’ve previously talked about them twice, way back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World” (Tansy’s first appearance). In brief, they’re microscopic organisms introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menance to provide a scientific explanation for why some Star Wars characters are stronger in the Force than others. Despite being an idea George Lucas had during the development of the original film, this more clinical reason for the Force was not popular with fans.
  • Ben notes a couple of other fantasy and sci-fi species with fantastic powers of recuperation. In Star Trek it’s established that Klingons have multiple redundancies built-in, including extra and more complicated organs, so they can survive grievous injuries. In the “grim dark future” of the Warhammer 40,000 universe, orks aren’t actually fungus themselves, but their symbiotic relationship with a species of fungus means that they feel little pain, and can regenerate from all but the most brutal injuries, requiring only fairly rudimentary surgical assistance. Warhammer Fantasy orcs, on the other hand, are pretty much the standard evil monsters of Tolkien-style high fantasy. (We’ve previously mentioned Warhammer 40,000 in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”)
  • The idea that under capitalism, the police serve as “protectors of capital”, is a simple overview of a more complex critique. While there are instances where this might be literally true, in most cases what it means is that the police force as an institution protects the interests of the capitalist class, not the workers. This includes not just capitalists and their property, but also the social relationships and structures that benefit capitalism – thus it is police who arrest protesters, but other bodies that shut down corrupt businesses.
  • We skip over this in the episode, but when Glenda discovers someone has eaten lots of her pies, she asks Trev “Who ate all the pies?” This is a reference to a popular (though body-shaming and fatphobic) British football chant thrown at players considered to have put on weight or otherwise be out of shape. There’s a spurious claim that the chant dates all the way back to the 1890s, but it’s most likely a more recent invention; it was certainly at the height of popularity in the 80s and 90s, when it was used against players like Paul Gascoigne and the phrase “who ate all the pies?” made its way into popular culture, even outside of the UK. The chant is usually sung to the tune of “Knees Up Mother Brown” (written in 1918), and the reworked lyrics include a refrain of “you fat bastard”, which has been adopted (ironically or otherwise) by various comedians and musicians (and may be the inspiration for the infamous Austin Powers character). The chant also been used by the Barmy Army – UK cricket supporters who travel abroad to cheer on their national team – against Australian cricket players, including Shane Warne. Thankfully it seems to have faded away since around the time Unseen Academicals was written. (Thanks to listener Metal Nurse on Bluesky for pointing out that not everyone would know this one.)
  • Glenda’s pie with the crispy onions is a “Ploughman’s Pie”, a variation on the “ploughman’s lunch”. This is a traditional pub meal, whose essential elements are bread, cheese and pickled onions, though modern variations add other things too. Glenda’s pie version has “cheese pastry” and a “hot pickle layer”, making it likely that it’s a meat pie with added ploughman’s ingredients, but it seems at least possible that Glenda’s genius could result in a vegetarian version.
  • Cyrano de Bergerac (1615-1695) was a real person, a French writer, libertine and duellist, but he’s better known as a fictionalised version from the play Cyrano de Bergerac. Written by Edmond Rostand in 1897, the play’s version of Cyrano is a nobleman and gifted poet, scholar and solder in the French Army. He loves his cousin Roxanne, his intellectual equal, but considers that she could never love him back because of his enormous nose, which makes him “ugly”. Just as he’s persuaded to tell her of his feelings anyway, she announces that she’s fallen in love with a handsome but dim soldier, Christian, who is being sent to join Cyrano’s regiment. Initially against his better judgement, Cyrano is persuaded to help Christian speak and write poetically to Roxanne to woo her. The original story ends badly: Roxanne and Christian are married, but another nobleman who wanted Roxanne for himself spitefully sends Cyrano’s regiment to a dangerous battle. Christian dies in battle, but not before he realises Cyrano has been writing letters to Roxanne on his behalf, and that he loves her. Cyrano returns home and says nothing to Roxanne, who goes into a long period of mourning and joins a convent. Years later, Cyrano is fatally wounded by his enemies while on one of his regular visits to Roxanne, but while concealing his injury he accidentally gives away that he wrote Christian’s letters and loved her all along. She says she loves him, too, and he gives one last delirious speech before he dies in her arms. Ben loves the original, but recognises it’s not a modern love story. It’s one of the great French classics, though, and has been adapted many times; Ben’s favourite versions are the 1990 film version starring Gerard Depardieu, and Steve Martin’s weird 1987 American happy ending version, Roxanne. There’s also a 2019 musical version, Cyrano, which starred Peter Dinklage, that was itself adapted into a film in 2021; Ben’s yet to see that one.
  • Lady Margolotta is introduced in The Fifth Elephant, so for more about her, see #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”. This is her first major appearance since then, and she’ll return once more, but she is also mentioned in several other novels, including The Truth, Going Postal and Making Money. While she doesn’t rule Überwald or any of the smaller countries nearby, she is clearly wields formidable influence. She’s a founding member of the Überwald League of Temperance, the “black ribboner” vampires who replace blood with another obsession; in Margolotta’s case, the obsession is not explicitly named, but the passage about her meeting of the League suggests it may be “control” – something rather less concrete than the other black ribboners we meet.
  • The book Tansy mentions about Churchill’s cook, Georgina Landemare, is Victory in the Kitchen by Annie Gray, first published by Profile Books in 2020.
  • The book Liz mentions about the fashion industry is le plus beau métier du monde by French anthropologist and ethnographer Giulia Mensitieri, translated into English by Natasha Lehrer as The Most Beautiful Job in the World for Melbourne University Press in 2020.
  • Scream 3 (2000; dir. Wes Craven) is, as the name suggests, the third film in the Scream franchise of slasher horror films. The series is famous for having characters who know and use the conventions of slasher films. Scream 3 is about the killer, nicknamed “Ghostface” because of the mask they wear, targeting the cast and crew of the film-within-a-film Stab 3, based on the Ghostface murders. A subplot involves the main character Sidney (who survived the first two films) discovering that her mother had worked as an actor in the 1970s and was sexually assaulted by the producer who is now making the Stab movies. The film has many references to real Hollywood, including the names of the actor characters (e.g. Jennifer Jolie, Angelina Tyler and Tom Prinze),
  • “The beautiful game” is one of many nicknames given to association football. It dates back to the 1950s, and was popularised by the Brazilian player Pelé, one of the most famous footballs of the 1960s and 70s, but its origins aren’t entirely clear. It now usually refers to the sport as a whole, though it used to also mean a specific style of play popular in Brazil, the jogo bonito; that style is now called art football (futebol-arte). The Beautiful Game is also the title of a 2000 West End musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton revolving around a local football team in 1969 Belfast; a 2012 film documentary about African football; and a 2024 Netflix drama starring Bill Nighy about the English team in the Homeless World Cup. Because there are many different kinds of football (or codes, as we call them in Australia), and most are just called “football” where they’re most popular, most end up with multiple nicknames. A similar name for association football in Australia was “the world game”, popularised by the SBS TV series of the same name (2002-2019) hosted by commentator Les Murray.
  • Diego Maradona (1960-2020) was an Argentine football player and later manager, often regarded as one of the best players in the history of the game. He rose to fame in the 1980s playing for Barcelona and Napoli, and set records for how much he was paid to transfer between teams. He is still revered in Argentina, especially for his performance in the 1986 world cup, where he scored two goals in the quarter-final against England and ultimately led the team to victory.
  • “Let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” is a reference to a famous comment given by eccentric Country Party MP Bob Katter from Queensland in response to a media question about his opinion on same-sex marriage in 2017. This was only days after the results were revealed of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, a non-binding postal vote held in Australia over whether to amend the marriage act to allow same-sex couples the right to marry. His answer takes an odd turn almost immediately; we won’t spoil it, because you can watch the whole 20 second clip on YouTube.
  • The furies in the book are the “Little Sisters of Perpetual Velocity”, and they come from Ephebe, the Discworld equivalent of Greece. The name is inspired by the names of orders of Catholic nuns, something Pratchett has played with before, most famously with “the Chattering Order of St. Beryl” in Good Omens.
  • Light Emitting Diodes – LEDs for short – are basically tiny light bulbs. Old-fashioned light globes produce light by passing current through a filament, a conducting material that heats up so that it glows, producing light and heat. LEDs produce light from the movement of electrons and positive charges (called “holes”) through the diode, which is a kind of semiconductor – a device that only conducts electricity in one direction. As the charges interact, they emit photons – the particle of light – in a specific wavelength. This process doesn’t produce (much) heat or significantly degrade the diode, and requires less energy than a traditional incandescent bulb. Red, green, amber and infrared LEDs were relatively cheap and easy to make, but the blue LED was the holy grail – blue could combine with amber, or with red and green, to make LEDs which were white, or any other colour! The different colours are produced by using different materials for the crystal, which is then “doped” by adding impurities of specific materials to add holes and turn the crystal into a semiconductor. This produces different “gaps” between the energy of the holes and electrons, and the size of the gap determines the wavelength of light emitted. Blue was theoretically possible by growing gallium nitride crystals, but this was difficult and expensive because it needed a much higher temperature than the materials used for existing LED colours. In 1993, engineer Shuji Nakamura cracked the problem by creating a new kind of reactor, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2014, alongside Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, who were the first to grow large gallium nitride crystals using similar techniques in the 1980s. The first blue LEDs were inefficient, producing heat and only a dim light. Nakamura also solved this problem, by adding a lot more dopant – in this case, magnesium – than usual. Why gallium nitride needed so much magnesium was only solved in 2015, when British researchers used quantum modelling techniques to discover the processes going on inside the crystal. In the early 2000s, LED production became much cheaper, and it wasn’t long before they were being used to produce full-colour displays, light globes and even programmable stage lights, though blue LEDs remained less efficient and more expensive to make for some time afterwards, though they’ve been improved in the last few years.
  • Nobby Nobbs’ relationship with erotic dancer Tawnee is portrayed in Thud!, which we discussed in #Pratchat61, “What Terry Wrote”.
  • Liz notes the line “My fare, lady?”, which is one of many references in the book to My Fair Lady, the 1956 Broadway musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. Both versions are the story of a Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, who’s taught to speak like an upper class lady by academic Henry Higgins, as an experiment to see if she can pass as a lady. The musical ends quite differently from the play… It’s best known today via the 1964 film version starring original Broadway star Rex Harrison as Higgins, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. We previously discussed it way back in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”.
  • A litter is a kind of vehicle without wheels, in which a platform or in an enclosed compartment is carried by human beings. Ancient Roman cities did indeed ban or at least restrict wheeled vehicles, then as now because they get stuck easily – you can’t turn them around quickly when a road is blocked, but a litter can easily move in any direction.
  • There have been four audio versions of Unseen Academicals:
    • Three are standard audiobooks: the abridged Corgi audiobook read by Tony Robinson; the unabridged Isis audiobook, read by Stephen Briggs (which is no longer available); and the most recent one, the Penguin unabridged audiobook, read by Colin Morgan and featuring Peter Serafinowicz as Death, and Bill Nighy as the “voice of the author” (he reads the footnotes). This is the one Tansy listened to, and Colin Morgan reads all of the Wizards books in this series – typecasting, perhaps, since he is best known for starring as the titular young wizard in the BBC television series Merlin between 2008 and 2012. Morgan also played Newton Pulsifer in Dirk Maggs’ 2014 radio version of Good Omens, which featured a cameo by Terry and Neil Gaiman as two policemen, recorded only a few months before Pratchett’s death.
    • Dirk Maggs also directed the fourth audio version of Unseen Academicals, mentioned by Ben: the Audible Original full-cast adaptation released in July 2018. This version is heavily abridged – split into ten chapters, it’s about four and a half hours long in total (compared with 14 hours for the unabridged audiobook). It’s also very much its own thing, and changes a lot to fit the shorter run time and reach a more general audience, including names, condensed plots and combined characters. For example, the University’s stakes are higher: the “Weatherwax bequest” (one of many overt references to the rest of Discworld) requires it to win a game of “mob ball” once a century, or lose 87% of its total budget and be forced to shut down. And the characters are less subtle – most notably Trev, who is more or less combined with Smeems and becomes much less likeable, and Mr Nutt, whose rage is barely under control compared to the Nutt of the book. David Jason, who played Albert and later Rincewind in the TV adaptations of Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, is the narrator, who provides a lot of context – including a cosmic turtle intro (sorry Liz). The rest of the cast includes the likes of Matthew Horne (Gavin from Gavin & Stacy) as Trev Likely, comedian Josie Lawrence (who was Agnes Nutter in the radio and television Good Omens adaptations) as Glenda Sugarbean, Jon Culshaw (of Dead Ringers and the Penguin City Watch audiobooks) as William de Worde, Stephen Briggs as Drumknott (aiding Ray Fearon as Vetinari), and, of note to Baldur’s Gate III fans, Samantha Béart (yes, Karlach herself) as Madame Sharn! Ben recommends not listening to it directly after reading the novel, and suggests it was not made with established Discworld fans in mind.
  • There’s no definitive account of the origins of orcs in The Lord of the Rings, but in Middle-Earth only the supreme god Ilúvatar could truly create life. Thus all the orc origins – and there are seven suggested in Tolkien’s letters and further writings, mostly in-universe speculation – involve the evil Valar Morgoth, once Ilúvatar’s second, corrupting existing beings one way or another. Tolkien’s later writings seem to favour the idea that orcs are corrupted men, rather than elves or other beings, and he even seems to have revised the timeline of Middle-Earth to make this possible (in earlier versions orcs appeared before men).
  • As for regretting making orcs irredeemable, Tolkien seems to have been torn on the subject. Here are three major examples, including from his letters. These have been catalogued, and many published in the 1981 collection The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
    • Letter 153 is an unsent draft reply to Peter Hastings from 1954, who had written with theological concerns about The Lord of the Rings, including the nature of evil in Middle-Earth. There Tolkien described the orcs as “creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad” but then adds in parentheses: “(I nearly wrote ’irredeemably bad’; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making – necessary to their actual existence – even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God’s and ultimately good.)”
    • Letter 269 is a reply to W. H. Auden in 1965, who had written to ask whether the idea of orcs being irredeemable was heretical; Tolkien wrote that he wasn’t sure about that, but also that he didn’t “feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”. This, he said, was backed up in “Book Five, page 190 where Frodo asserts that the orcs are not evil in origin. We believe that, I suppose, of all human kinds and sons and breeds, though some appear, both as individuals and groups to be, by us at any rate, unredeemable…..” (See Pratchett’s thoughts along similar lines below.) So characters in the books don’t think they are naturally evil, despite the fact that they are portrayed as so.
    • In Morgoth’s Ring, one of the later volumes of The History of Middle-Earth by J.R.R.’s son Christopher, there’s an essay by the elder Tolkien simply titled “Orcs” in which he says: “…the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law.” He goes on to say that this means orcs would be treated with the same dignity in capture as men or elves or dwarves, and also mentions in a footnote that orcs never ask for mercy because Melkor and Sauron had done such a good job convincing them that elves and men were vile, evil creatures, not to be trusted.
  • Pratchett’s thoughts on orcs are much easier to discern, because he wrote about them at the time Unseen Academicals was published. In an article for Guardian book club in December 2009, Pratchett wrote: “Ever since I first read Tolkien at the age of 13, I was worried about the orcs. They were totally and irrevocably bad. It was a flat given. No possibility of redemption for an orc, no chance of getting a job somewhere involving fluffy animals or flowers.
    This is no reflection on Tolkien. We are all prisoners in the aspic of our time. But now, I think, people have learned not to think that any race or culture is naturally or irredeemably bad. We have seen the world from space and it isn’t flat.”
  • More notes to come!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

#Pratchat28 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“, featuring guest Steve Lamattina, discussing the 1992 novel Only You Can Save Mankind.

  • This episode’s title is a play on the famous meme “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”. The phrase is from the intro sequence of Japanese shoot-’em-up game Zero Wing. The English version was produced for the Sega Megadrive in 1992, and the questionable translation was discovered and popularised as a meme, then celebrated in a song and accompanying music video posted on the web site NewGrounds in 2001. The video shows the phrase photoshopped into a variety of real world locations. You can watch the video on YouTube here.
  • The vampire series mentioned by Steve is Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire, also known as Thirst, consisting of nine books published between 1994 and 2013. It chronicles the life of Sita, a vampire born 5,000 years ago in India. Ben mentions The Last Werewolf (2011), the first in a trilogy of books by Glen Duncan. Neither series is appropriate for children.
  • The vampires of Middle-Earth are only mentioned briefly in Tolkien’s writings, but we never learn much about them. Barrow-wights are evil spirits that fear the sun and possess and animate human corpses. The origins of orcs are not entirely clear. Tolkien supplied several partial explanations, all the opinions of characters in the fiction, which are variations on them being corrupted versions of existing beings, because Morgorth could not create life – only Eru Ilúvatar, the ultimate god of Middle-Earth, could do that. In his later life Tolkien seems to have settled on the idea that orcs were corrupted from men, and even worked on changes to the history of Middle-Earth to make this make sense (originally orcs appeared before the first men did). This will all come up again in #Pratchat83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”.
  • There are many stories revolving around “games coming to life”, or in which people are trapped inside games, wittingly or not. We mention a few videogame ones: the Disney film TRON (and it’s sequel and some spin-offs); the novel Space Demons and its sequels Skymaze and Shinkei, by Gillian Rubenstein; and the Gamer’s Quest series of books by George Ivanoff. There’s also the films Jumanji and Zathura, about magical board games, which started as books by Chris Van Allsburg. You can find a list of other examples on the All the Tropes page for “the game come to life”.
  • As Ben mentions, The Last Starfighter (1984) blurs the line of the trope a bit – the video game isn’t real, but it is a training program for starfighters in a real space war.
  • In Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985), based on his 1977 short story and revised in 1991, Ender is one of many children trained to fight from a young age in an orbital Battle School, using a series of games. This is supposedly to prepare them for future conflicts with the alien Formics, and Ender turns out to be a tactical genius, eventually given more and more difficult mission simulations. The film version in 2013 starred Asa Butterfield as Ender and also features Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.
  • Rhianna Pratchett has worked on many games, including the humorous Lord of the Rings parody series Overlord, the modern iteration of Tomb Raider and its first sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Mirror’s Edge, among many others. She is also co-director of Narrativia, the company that holds and manages licensing rights to Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property. You can find out more at Rhianna’s website, rhiannapratchett.com, and you can follow her on social media, including Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. (We do!)
  • The Gulf War was a conflict between Iraq – who had invaded its neighbour Kuwait over land and oil disputes – and a coalition of forces primarily from the US, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Egypt, though many other allied countries (including Australia) also participated. The war lasted for six months, beginning on 2 August 1990, and ending on 28 February 1991 with the defeat of Iraq. The US military named the operation “Desert Shield”, then “Desert Storm”, and it was commanded by General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf. It was extraordinary at the time for the extensive news footage of front-line fighting; some journalists and political commentators nicknamed it “the videogame war”, no doubt part of Pratchett’s inspiration for the novel. Towards the end of the war, an uprising against Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein failed when promised US support was not delivered. Hussein remained the country’s ruler until his death during the later Iraq War (referenced in Pratchett’s later foreword to the novel), which began in 2003 over claims – later found to be false – that the country was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction”.
  • Wing Commander (1990; released in 1994) is probably the main inspiration for the game Only You Can Save Mankind. It contains many elements seen in the book, including the (then) graphically impressive image of the starfighter cockpit, a variety of weapons, and a higher degree of “realism” (for a given value of realism). The player is a pilot in the 27th Century Terran Confederation, fighting the aggressively expansionist lion-like species, the Kilrathi. It was a huge hit and spawned numerous expansion packs and multiple sequels. The series became famous for its use of cutscenes to advance the plot; from the third instalment these included full-motion video and many famous Hollywood actors including Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, Clive Owen and John Hurt. The Kilrathi were originally very one-dimensional villains, but were given a more complex and sometimes sympathetic portrayal in later games. There were also novels, an animated television series in 1996, and a (very unsuccessful) live action film in 1999 starring Freddie Prinze Junior, Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard, Tchéky Karyo, Jürgen Prochnow and David Warner.
  • Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters is a space adventure game created by developer Toys For Bob in 1992. The player captains a ship constructed from advanced alien technology and discovers the alien Ur-Quan have come to Earth’s part of the galaxy, destroying or enslaving every species they meet. The player is tasked with recruiting alien cultures to join the Earth in an alliance to defeat the Ur-Quan. The game is a cult classic remembered for its huge story, resource management, space battles, weird aliens and sense of humour, though its representation of women is problematic. There was one sequel, Star Control 3 (not by the original developers), and recently a prequel, Star Control: Origins (also not by the original developers). There’s an official free version of the Star Control II, originally as just The Ur-Quan Masters and later Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters for copyright reasons. It includes new music and the voice-acting files from a later console version of the game. In 2024, the original creators, through their new company Pistol Shrimp, crowdfunded a new sequel, Free Stars: Children of Infinity, expected to release in May 2025.
  • Text adventure games, also known as “interactive fiction” or “interactive novels”, were a popular game genre in which the player types commands to perform various actions, with feedback supplied as prose. One of the biggest publishers was Infocom, whose break-out hit was the fantasy spoof Zork and its many sequels – there are hints in his works that Pratchett was a fan. Another fan was Douglas Adams, who himself penned an interactive fiction version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for Infocom and loved the form so much he used a sophisticated version of it for his one original video game, Starship Titanic. You can play the Hitchhikers text adventure online: the BBC hosts fancy, updated 20th anniversary and 30th anniversary editions of it. Another significant text adventure was The Hobbit, written in large part by Dr. Veronika Megler for Australian publisher Melbourne House in 1982, but there are literally thousands of them – including all the far too difficult ones described by Steve.
  • The text adventure Twitter account Ben refers to is the bot “Frustrated Quests”, which you can find at @verbquests. It’s also on Mastodon at @verbquests@llull.club.
  • “The Hero with the Thousand Extra Lives” is a nod to “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Joseph Campbell’s book in which he describes the “mono-myth” – a story which can be found in thousands of variations across many cultures. Pratchett is clearly familiar with the work as he subverts and references its tropes many times throughout the Discworld books.
  • We talked with Amie Kaufman about Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • ICQ was an early live chat program created by the company Mirabilis in 1996, though it was soon bought by AOL and later the Russian internet company Mail.Ru. Its name is not an acronym, but a short version of “I Seek You”. As early 2020 ICQ is still available, including on smartphones, though its popularity has sharply declined since its heyday of over 100 million users every day.
  • IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, an early chat service in which users could log on to a server and then join channels to chat live with other users. It’s notable for being the birthplace of many of the text abbreviations now commonly used on mobile phones and across the Internet, including LOL, ROFL, IMHO, AFK and many others. It’s also where the convention of naming channels with a leading hash comes from (e.g. #general or #project-omega), now used by Slack and Discord.
  • Gmail (originally Google Mail) started with a testing phase in 2004, and you could only join by being invited by another user. This ended in 2009 – as did the ability to get a gmail address that resembled your actual name.
  • Mavis Beacon, of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing fame, is not a real person. She was a fictional character created to make the program feel more personable. In early versions of the software she was only represented by a photo of Renée L’Espérance, a perfume counter worker discovered by an employee of Software Toolworks.
  • The letters Steve’s Scottish teacher was reciting – properly ASDF, JKL; – are the “home row”, the keys on which a trained typist’s fingers are supposed to rest on a QWERTY keyboard. Most keyboards still have raised dots or bars on the F and J keys to allow typists to find the home row keys without looking.
  • The Typing of the Dead is a 1999 typing game based on The House of the Dead 2 (1998). The original was an arcade game “rail shooter” – the character’s movement was controlled by the game, and the player used a light gun (or mouse or other controller in home versions) to shoot zombies in each new area as they investigated a creepy house. Typing of the Dead – originally released as an arcade game as well! – swapped out the light gun for a keyboard; words appear over each zombie, and the player (or players – you could have two at once) had to quickly type the matching word before the zombies reached them. The player characters in the game are even altered to be wearing computers like backpacks, with a keyboard on wearable shelf at around torso height. The game was later released on home consoles and computers.
  • Johnny and the Dead was adapted in 1995 as a four-part television series by London Weekend Television for ITV, featuring George Baker and Brian Blessed as two of the prominent ghosts, with Johnny played by Andrew Falvey (whose best-known role is probably the voice of Fiver in the late 90s series of Watership Down). Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part series in 2006 by Child’s Play Television for CBBC, featuring Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon and starring a young George MacKay – recently seen in big budget war film 1917 – as Johnny. Neither are easy to get hold of now, as they only had limited release on VHS and DVD.
  • After a workshop season in 2000, the musical version of Only You Can Save Mankind debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, with music by Leighton James House a book and lyrics by Shaun McKenna, who also wrote the musical version of The Lord of the Rings and many other theatre, television and radio programs. You can find information about the 2009 album version of the show, featuring six songs (we don’t know if that’s all of them), at ifnotyouthenwho.com. The composer’s Twitter account suggests that the musical might return in the near future!
  • We should note that Johnny and the Bomb has also been adapted into a musical, available for schools to perform, as has The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Johnny and the Dead has also been adapted for the stage, though not as a musical.
  • Liz really loves The Shawshank Redemption. You can hear her speak about it in several previous episodes.
  • Naomi Alderman’s The Power is an award-winning science fiction novel which describes a future matriarchy, created after women all over the world develop the supernatural power to emit electricity from their hands to protect, attack and heal. It was adapted as a television series for Amazon Prime Video in 2023.
  • Alien Nation was a 1988 American sci-fi film set in the near future, a few years after a ship of alien refugees crash-lands in the American desert. The refugee occupants are a human-like species, the Tenctonese; they have been accepted as “Newcomers” in American society, but face prejudice from the humans they live with. The plot follows a human detective (James Caan in the film) and his Newcomer partner (Mandy Patinkin), the first to become a detective, as they solve crimes. The film was quite serious, but successful enough to be adapted into a television series in 1989. The series was also titled Alien Nation, but had a lighter tone and a new cast. It only lasted one full season, ending on a cliffhanger, but the story was concluded a few years later in five television movies featuring the same cast.
  • The original V was an American sci-fi television show which began as a two-part mini-series in 1983. This was followed by another mini-series in 1984 and a full season of episodes from 1984 to 1985. The plot involved a seemingly human-like species of aliens, known only as “Visitors”, who arrive on Earth seemingly in peace. The original series starred Jane Badler as Diana, glamorous deputy leader of the Visitors, who memorably unhinged her jaw to swallow a rat whole in a scene where a journalist discovers the truth: the Visitors are lizard-like creatures disguised as humans, and are working to conquer the planet. (The title “V” comes from the shorthand graffiti used by the resistance against the Visitors.) A remake television series ran for two seasons from 2009 to 2011, starring Morena Baccarin as Anna, leader of the Visitors. Jane Badler appears as Anna’s mother, named Diana after her character in the original series. In both series, some of the Visitors are shown to be sympathetic to the humans.
  • The Tomorrow People was an ITV sci-fi series about a group of teenagers who developed psychic powers, and sought each other out to protect themselves from governments and aliens. The original series ran from 1973 to 1979, but after reruns of the original proved popular in America, a remake was made in 1992 with a new cast and the same basic premise.
  • Pokémon is a series of videogames developed for Nintendo by developer Game Freak. In the game, the player is a budding trainer of Pokémon (a name derived from “Pocket Monster”). Pokémon are creatures with a variety of special powers which can be captured and trained for battle against other Pokémon. The goal of the game is to become the greatest trainer by defeating the leaders of various Pokémon gyms and the mysterious “Elite Four” trainers, and to capture an example of every different species of Pokémon – hence the catchphrase “Gotta catch ‘em all!” The first two games were Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green (Pokémon Blue in English speaking markets) for the Nintendo GameBoy in 1996. Between them the games featured 151 unique Pokemon species, but each version had some that were unique, requiring players to trade with each other to complete their collection. Professor Oak is a character in the game, a researcher who gives the player their first Pokémon, allowing them to choose one of three. He provides some guidance and information at various parts of the game, and also became a character in the popular anime series spawned from the games’ massive success. As of 2020 there have been seven more generations of the games, each one adding a new region to the game’s world (usually modelled on a real world location) filled with new species of Pokémon. There have also been card games, films, toys and many spin-off games, including the hugely popular mobile game Pokémon GO.
  • Pokémon Yeah and Pokémon Nah are spoof designs for a pair of Pokémon games set in a new “Straya” region, resembling Australia. Complete with several new Pokemon designs, the art is elaborate and amazing; it’s the work of artist Liz, aka @VivInkArt on Twitter, and you can find the designs in a thread starting with this tweet. The earlier collection of Australian Pokemon is a full Pokédex worth – 151 pixel-art designs by Australian artist Paul Robertson, aka Probzz. The easiest place to find them is probably on his Instagram; start with this post.
  • Braveheart (1995) is an historical war film directed by and starring Mel Gibson as William Wallace, a Scottish knight and major leader in the First War of Scottish Independence (1296-1328). While it was a tremendous box office success, it has been criticised for being highly inaccurate. A sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019 with Angus MacFayden reprising the role of Robert, another historical character and King of Scotland, whom many felt was misrepresented in the original film. (We’ll talk about Braveheart again in the context of the Nac Mac Feegle in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.)
  • The Illuminae Files are trilogy of YA sci-fi novels – Illuminae, Gemina and Obsidio – by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Set centuries in the future, mega-corporation Beitech Industries launches an attack on a corporate rival’s illegal mining operation on a backwater planet. The books follow the fleeing survivors, especially a small group of teenage protagonists, as they try to outrun their pursuers, who want no witnesses. The story is presented as a series of first-hand documents compiled by the mysterious “Illuminae Group”, delivered as evidence to a trial of senior BeiTech officials.
  • Gaston is the antagonist of Disney’s 1991 animated musical version of Beauty and the Beast (and its 2017 live-action remake). Presented as a traditionally brave, strong and handsome hero-type, Gaston is also vain, arrogant, anti-intellectual and blind to his own faults. When he learns Belle loves the Beast, he attempts to kill him. His sidekick Le Fou spurs him to sing his own praises in the song “Gaston”, which includes lines like “No-one’s slick as Gaston / No-one’s quick as Gaston / No-one’s neck’s as incredibly thick as Gaston”.
  • At the end of Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), protagonist Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) brings the girl Newt back to the rescue ship piloted by her android ally Bishop (Lance Henrikson)…only to find the Alien Queen has snuck on board, and announces her presence by impaling Bishop with her barbed tail. This leads some fans to shout “Queen takes Bishop!” when watching the scene.
  • Billy Elliot (2000) is a “dance drama” film set in the North of England during the 1985 miner’s strike. Billy, the youngest in a family of striking miners, discovers a love for ballet, but is forbidden from attending lessons by his traditionally masculine father. Kirsty’s comment when she invites Johnny into her bedroom is a tamer version of Debbie, Billy’s teacher’s daughter, who invites him into her bedroom and also offers to show him her fanny.
  • Wobbler’s game Journey to Alpha Centauri inspired a real game, Journey to Alpha Centauri (In Real Time), written by Julian Fleetwood in 1998 using the interactive fiction language Inform. It doesn’t currently seem to be available anywhere, but you probably don’t have a spare 3,000 years to finish it anyway.
  • Johnny’s nickname, “Rubber”, is surprisingly rude for a middle-grade book: it comes from “rubber johnnies”, a common slang term for condoms in the UK.
  • Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 computer-animated Disney film in which the title character grows tired of being a video game villain and tries to be a hero in other games, causing glitches which might get his arcade machine shut down permanently. It’s wonderful and you should definitely watch it. The 2019 sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, is also pretty good.
  • Cacodemons are one of the common demonic enemies in the Doom videogames, unleashed by human experiments in dimensional travel on Mars. They resemble a floating ball covered in spikes, with a single eye and a huge mouth full of sharp teeth – not dissimilar to the Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons (though with spikes instead of extra eyes on stalks). They appear as the mascot and icon for the first game in the series. The name comes from the Greek κακοδαίμων (kakodaimon), “evil spirit”, and is the original term from which the modern English meaning of “demon” is derived.
  • The shoot-‘em-up Ben mentioned was Xenon 2 Megablast, released for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1989, and later ported to other computers and consoles.
  • The old-school videogames mentioned by Steve are probably Dig Dug and Burger Time, both of which were originally arcade games.
  • The Witness is a 2016 exploration/puzzle game by Jonathan Blow, in which the player wanders an abandoned island complex solving a variety of puzzles with minimal instructions.
  • Goodnight Mister Tom is a 1981 novel by English author Michelle Magorian. The protagonist, Willie, is evacuated from 1939 London to the countryside, where he begins to bond with his elderly guardian Mister Tom and understand that his mother had been abusing him.
  • Who Killed Kennedy is long out of print, but you can download a twentieth anniversary edition – with a new ending and commentary from the author – from the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.
  • Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) is the first in a series of hugely successful novels by John Marsden which depict the invasion of Australia by a coalition of South Asian nations, and a small group of teenagers who escape initial capture and try to fight back. It was followed by six sequels. The first book has been adapted into a 2010 film and a 2016 television series for ABC3. Marsden died in 2024.

#Pratchat22 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 22, “The Cat in the Prat“, discussing Pratchett and cartoonist Gray Joliffe‘s non-fiction humour book, The Unadulterated Cat, with guest Asimov (an actual cat).

  • This episode’s title is a reference to the famous Dr Seuss children’s book The Cat in the Hat (but definitely not the 2003 film adaptation).
  • A new edition of The Unadulterated Cat was published by Orion in November 2022 to tie-in with the animated film The Amazing Maurice. This edition is styled The Unadulterated Maurice, and notably Joliffe’s name does not appear on the cover – his cartoons are replaced with illustrations of the film version of Maurice and other artwork by the artists who worked on the film. This edition also has a new introduction written by Rhianna Pratchett.
  • Best-selling humorous cat books include How to Tell if Your Cat is Planning to Kill You, several volumes dedicated to Internet sensations Grumpy Cat and the “LOLcats” of I Can Has Cheezburger?, and other books that draw on similar themes to The Unadulterated Cat, including Cats Are the Worst and Sorry I Barfed on Your Bed.
  • Eric Ernest Jolliffe – the wrong Jolliffe – was an Australian cartoonist and illustrator who led an adventurous life, including work all over Australia and serving as a camouflage officer with the RAAF in World War II. He is best remembered for his magazine and newspaper strips Saltbush Bill and Sandy Blight, and his own magazine, Jolliffe’s Outback.
  • Gray Jolliffe’s anthropomorphic penis character, Wicked Willie, was the star of both a series of comic books and also a straight-to-video series of animated shorts. These were directed by Australian Bob Godfrey, best remembered for his work on the children’s animated series Roobarb and Henry’s Cat.
  • Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche is a satire of masculinity, originally subtitled “A Guidebook to All That Is Traditionally Masculine”. It was written in 1982 by American humorist and screenwriter Bruce Feirstein and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. Localised adaptations were subsequently written for the UK and Australia, the latter by Australian playwright and author Alex Buzo. Solidifying Ben’s connection between the two books is his discovery in December 2021 (thanks to listener Sven) that the German translation of The Unadaulterated Cat was titled Echte Katzen tragen niemals Schleifen – “Real Cats Don’t Wear Ribbons”!
  • Nathan W. Pyle’s strange planet series of comics about aliens trying to understand life on Earth is available at his web site, nathanwpyle.art, and on his Instagram at @nathanwpyle. Pyle experienced some controversy in April 2019 over an old tweet, but his cartoons remain a delightful commentary on the absurdities of our world. Both the cat name cartoon and the vibrating cat cartoon are still on Instagram.
  • Operant conditioning is a form of learning where a behaviour becomes more or less frequent because of positive or negative consequences of the behaviour – a reward or punishment. This is different to classical or Pavlovian conditioning, where a seperate stimulus is associated with the behaviour – the classic ringing of a bell when feeding Pavlov’s dogs.
  • You can read all about the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) at their web site, camra.org.uk.
  • The UK cat documentary mentioned by Liz is “The Secret Life of the Cat: the Science of Tracking Our Cats”, an episode of the BBC series Horizon from 2013. Fifty “cat residents” from the village of Shamley in Surrey were fitted with GPS trackers and cameras over 24 hours.
  • My Fair Lady (1964, dir. George Cukor) is a film version of the 1956 musical, itself an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (though the ending of the musical is quite different). In the story, academic Henry Higgins teaches Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle to speak with an upper class accent to see if she can pass as a lady. The film stars Rex Harrison as Higgins, a role he originated on the West End, and Audrey Hepburn as Eliza, a controversial choice over Harrison’s stage partner Julie Andrews, who at the time had no film experience and was not thought famous enough to carry the film. The movie won eight Academy Awards. We’ll mention it again in #Pratchat83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”.
  • There are plenty of fainting goat videos on YouTube; here’s a National Geographic one to get you started.
  • Cats can’t spit like humans do, but they can spray saliva when hissing. One of the main things that triggers allergic reactions from cats is a protein present in their saliva.
  • The Famous Five are Enid Blyton’s team of four teenage crime fighters – Julian, Dick, Anne and George – and their dog, Timmy. They first featured in a series of novels published between 1942 and 1963. The books were also adapted into a popular television series in 1978 – and included friend of the Splendid Chaps, Gary Russell, as Dick. Blyton really did use the paper key-retrieval trick often in her books, and not only for The Famous Five. This sort of adventure is revisited in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents; see #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids”.
  • Ben’s explanation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is basically correct, but the main idea tested by it is quantum superposition. This is the concept that subatomic particles exist in all possible states until observed. There are plenty of good write-ups and videos explaining it in more detail online.
  • We previously mentioned Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall (2018) in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis”. There’s also a Seafurrers blog maintained by Bart the cat.
  • Summer Bay is the fictional New South Wales town where popular Australian soap opera Home & Away is set. Some of the beach houses inhabited by its characters have elaborate staircases.
  • The cane toad, Rhinella marina, is a species of toad native to Central and Southern America. It was introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 to control two species of native Australian beetle whose adults eat sugar cane leaves, and larvae eat sugar cane roots. The documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) – followed by a sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010) – is a great intro to the toad’s impact on Australian farming, wildlife and culture.
  • The original video of Fenton the labrador – titled “JESUS CHRIST IN RICHMOND PARK” – is pretty great. At the height of his fame in 2012, Fenton had merch including the book Find Fenton, a Where’s Wally? style work inviting you to do what it says in the title.
  • Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov had a famous rivalry which lasted for fifteen years of insults both public and private, though it seems likely this was mostly for their entertainment, and that they let go of any actual animosity in their later years. One famous story has it that Clarke learned a passenger who died in a plane crash was reading one of his own novels; he sent the news to Asimov, suggesting that the passenger would have been better off with one of Isaac’s books, since they would have died in their sleep. Asimov replied that the crash probably came as a “merciful release” from the pain of having to read one of Clarke’s novels.
  • The microrganism Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that reproduces in the bloodstream of cats, and exits their systems in their faeces. The parasite can infect any mammal, causing a disease known as Toxoplasmosis. It is often symptomless but can cause neurological problems in people with compromised immune systems. Some studies have suggested possible links between cat ownership as a child with adult schizophrenia, and one scientist thinks that it affects human behaviour, causing irrational attachment to cats, though this is far from a mainstream theory. You can read about Jaroslav Flegr’s theories about cat parasites affecting human brains in this 2012 article from The Atlantic.
  • Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is T S Eliot’s 1939 collection of cat poems in which he reveals many secrets about cat psychology and society, including how they name and organise themselves. As mentioned, you can find Eliot reading it on Spotify. It was rather improbably adapted into a hugely popular stage musical, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Weber in 1981. The musical itself was adapted as a Hollywood film in 2019, which despite director Tom Hooper’s previous success adapting Les Miserables, was universally panned – including by Lloyd Weber. In the book and early versions of the musical, Growltiger is a piratical cat who lives on a barge on the River Thames, and as Lachlan suggests, he’s definitely a real cat. He was played by Ray Winstone in the film. Be aware that the poem “Growltiger’s Last Stand” uses a slur to refer to the Chinese cats fought by Growltiger – not the only instance of racist sentiment in Eliot’s works. The poem was adapted as one of the original songs in the musical, including the slur, but it was later rewritten. After criticism of non-Asian actor’s portrayal of the enemy cats, the song was dropped altogether.
  • Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy is a series of young adult dystopian novels, later adapted into four popular films starring Jennifer Lawrence. The series is set in a future America which has devolved into a corrupt wealthy Capitol and twelve districts of poor, exploited workers. Each year two young “tributes” from each district are sent to take part in the “Hunger Games”: a battle royale style fight to the death meant to remind the population that they cannot fight the state. Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist and hero of District 12, has a hate-hate relationship with Buttercup, her sister’s “hideous-looking” ginger cat. Buttercup is described as a good mouser who enjoys eating entrails from the animals Katniss illegally hunts to help feed her family.
  • Jonesy is another ginger cat who belongs to Ellen Ripley, the main protagonist of the Alien films, and features most prominently in Ridley Scott’s original 1979 film Alien. He and Ripley were the only survivors of the Nostromo when the alien creature killed the rest of the crew; he was left behind on Earth when Ripley returned to the planet where the alien was found, 57 years later. In 2018 Jonesy became the subject of his own cute cat book, Jonesy: Nine Lives on the Nostromo, which tells the story of Alien from his point of view.
  • We previously talked about Horse and Footrot Flats way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”, with Elly Squire.
  • Garfield is the famous creation of cartoonist Jim Davis. A fat ginger cat, Garfield was originally the star of a newspaper comic strip that began in 1978 and is still syndicated in many papers today. He has since been become a star of television, film and millions of plush toys. Garfield is definitely not a real cat: he loves fancy human food (especially lasagna), hates Mondays for some reason, and has a beloved teddy bear named Pooky. Garfield’s popularity despite its bland, inoffensive content has led many third parties to produce alternate versions of the strip. Realfield replaced Garfield with a more realistic cat (this reddit post has plenty of examples), while Garfield Minus Garfield imagines a world in which Garfield doesn’t exist, and his owner Jon appears to be talking to himself. A similar take is De-Garfed, which leaves Garfield in but takes out all his dialogue, leaving Jon talking to a cat who doesn’t talk back. There’s also The Garfield Randomizer, which creates Garfield cartoons by combining individual panels from existing strips at random, and Garkov, which replaces the dialogue with new text generated by a Markov chain, a popular (pre-GPT) method for remixing existing text into new forms. (For a Pratchett-related Markov generator, check out Scrambled Pratchett (@ScramPratchett) on Twitter; it stopped posting in February 2023, but you can read some interesting analysis on the blog of the creator, Scrambled Oracle. The same person also created bots which scrambled Shakespeare and Douglas Adams.)
  • In the Doctor Who New Adventures novels published by Virgin in the 1990s, the Seventh Doctor is given a cat named Wolsey during the time he was temporarily transformed into a human. When the Doctor regenerated he gave Wolsey to his previous companion Benny Summerfield, an archaeologist from the 26th century. Wolsey stayed with her for many adventures, including one in which alien technology warped reality into something resembling a pantomime. In an echo of some of Greebo’s later adventures, this transformed Wolsey into a humanoid cat who referred to Benny as “servant woman” – definitely real cat behaviour! In the audio adventures created by Big Finish Productions, the Fifth Doctor’s companion Erimem from ancient Egypt brought aboard a stray cat named Antranak, who was also pretty real, though the Doctor didn’t like him much. Antranak eventually sacrificed himself to save the Doctor and his friends, though this may have been the influence of an alien intelligence which had been absorbed into his mind. Because Doctor Who.
  • Throgmorten is a cat (another ginger!) who appears in Diana Wynne Jones’ The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988), a book in her Chrestomanci series detailing the earliest adventures of magician protagonist Christopher Chant. Throgmorten is a magical cat stolen by Christopher from a temple for use in a magical experiment, but Christopher’s uncle proposes to kill and then sell bits of Throgmorten. Christopher instead takes the cat home and sets him free, earning a grudging respect which helps him in his later adventures.
  • Only Forward is the debut novel of Michael Marshall, written under his original pseudonym Michael Marshall Smith. He wrote many sci-fi and horror novels and short stories under that name before switching to Michael Marshall for crime fiction, and more recently Michael Rutger, under which name he writes paranormal thrillers.
  • The Maquis de Carabas in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is not based on Puss in Boots himself, but rather sprang from Gaiman asking himself “What kind of person would own a cat like that?” The folk tale is classified as type 545B in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther index, a specific subset of type 545, “Cat as Helper”. In the original, it’s a miller’s third son who inherits the cat, rather than the mill or his father’s money. The cat requests boots, then serves his master well, gaining him favour with the King and eventually a title, partly by claiming his master is the fictional “Maquis de Carabas”. The miller’s son himself is not especially bright or brave, so Gaiman’s Maquis certainly feels like he has some of the cat in him. Gaiman’s other cats include those of the Sandman comic story “A Dream of a Thousand Cats”, in which cats share a secret story about their history, and The Cat, Coraline’s ally in Coraline, who is able to walk between worlds and speak when in The Other Place.

#PratchatNA7 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for our bonus live episode “A Troll New World” featuring guest Tansy Rayner Roberts, discussing the 1991 Discworld short story Troll Bridge.

  • Troll Bridge was first published in the 1991 anthology After the King: Stories In Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, the most recent edition of which was released in 2012. Other authors in the collection include Stephen R. Donaldson, Jane Yolen, Gregory Benford, Emma Bull, Poul and Karen Anderson, Judith Tarr, Harry Turtledove, Karen Haber and Charles de Lint, among others. The story was reprinted in 2001’s The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (which also features stories by Neil Gaiman and Terry Jones) and A Blink of the Screen, the 2012 collection of Pterry’s short fiction.
  • For those of you listening in the future: a great accompaniment to this episode is the February 15, 2022 episode of LeVar Burton Reads, a podcast in which Star Trek: The Next Generation star LeVar Burton reads a piece of short fiction. In this episode, he reads “Troll Bridge” – and gives a lovely short introduction to Terry’s work, and the Discworld itself. If you’re confused as to why Burton would be doing this, before his run on Star Trek, Burton – at the time known for his role in the television series Roots – was the presenter and executive producer of the children’s story reading programme Reading Rainbow on PBS. Burton was the host and also read some of the picture books featured, but it also featured a raft of different celebrities and actors doing the reading. By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Burton was better known to US audiences than Patrick Stewart! It had a long run from 1983 through to 2006; in 2012, a Reading Rainbow iPad app created by Burton’s company RRKIDZ became the most-downloaded app in the App Store. In 2014, Burton launched a massively successful Kickstarter campaign to expand the reach of the app to Android and the web, but a legal dispute with WNED, the PBS station that owned the Reading Rainbow brand and had licensed it to Burton, ended with him no longer being able to use the name. Burton launched his weekly podcast – for which he primarily reads adult fiction – in 2017.
  • The short film Troll Bridge by Snowgum Films was adapted for the screen and directed by Daniel Knight, and stars Don Bridges as Cohen, Glenn van Oosterom as the horse and John Jenkins as Mica. It was a mammoth undertaking, especially considering it’s a fan film, albeit an extremely polished one: the cast and crew all worked without pay, with production costs paid for by a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It’s currently screening in film festivals and fan conventions around the world, but you can still pre-order a digital, DVD or Blu-Ray version ahead of its release in November. Head to www.trollbridge.film to see the trailer and find out more.
  • 1999’s The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah, is one of the greatest adventure films ever made. (We’re not so fussed about the sequels, though.) We’ve mentioned it in passing in the show notes before, in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat19. The character Liz describes is, coincidentally, named Captain Winston Havelock, and is played by the late Welsh character actor Bernard Fox. Depending on when you started watching television, you might remember him as the witch-doctor Dr. Bombay on the sitcom Bewitched.
  • English actor Jude Law famously took on the role of Albus Dumbledore in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, playing a younger version of the character originated on film by Richard Harris and Michael Gambon. He also plays Lenny Belardo, a young Archbishop of New York who becomes the first American Pope of the Catholic Church, in The Young Pope and its upcoming sequel The New Pope.
  • It was announced in early April 2019 that a prequel to the hit 1978 musical Grease was in development at Paramount Pictures, with a script to be written by John August (best known for his work with Tim Burton, as well as his podcast Scriptnotes). Provisionally titled Summer Lovin’, it will supposedly explore the fling that Sandy and Danny had, though as Tansy mentions, we really already know everything we need to thanks to the song “Summer Nights”. We previously mentioned Grease in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • The Clacks are a system of sophisticated semaphore-like signalling towers which allow the transmission of information very quickly across the Sto Plains to and from Ankh-Morpork. They’re first mentioned in The Fifth Elephant, play a prominent role in Going Postal, and are also important to the plot in Monstrous Regiment and Raising Steam.
  • The Silmarillion is a collection of five works originally pitched by Tolkien as a sequel to The Hobbit, but they were rejected by his publisher as being too obscure. Heavily influenced by Celtic mythology, they tell the story of the creation of the world in which his other books are set, including Middle-Earth, and of the conflicts between its various deities, and form a backstory which explains the history that led to The Lord of the Rings. It was published after his death, compiled from incomplete writings by his son, Christopher.
  • Technically Troll Bridge is the first time we meet a troll under a bridge on the Discworld, as it was published a year before Lords and Ladies, but it’s likely they were both being written around the same time.
  • You can hear all about Good Omens (the book at least) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Xena of Amphipolis, played by New Zealand legend Lucy Lawless, is the protagonist of Xena: Warrior Princess, the hugely popular fantasy adventure series filmed in New Zealand which began life as a spin-off from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Xena starts out as a ruthless warlord encountered by Hercules, but he convinces her to walk a more righteous path. In the series, which ran for six seasons from 1995 to 2001, Xena roams the world of Ancient Greece trying to help people, accompanied by Gabrielle, the Battling Bard of Poteidaia. In the opening episode of season three, “The Furies“, Xena claims that she is the daughter of Ares, god of war, a frequent antagonist (and a great visual for Greebo, as discussed in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“). While Xena indicates this was a lie to fool the Furies, it’s left ambiguous, so she could be a demi-god…but most of us prefer to think of her as an exceptionally skilled mortal warrior.
  • We explained the Star Wars concept of “midi-chlorians” in the show notes for #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, which was recorded the night before this live show. In brief: they’re an explanation for why some people can use the Force and some can’t. It didn’t please fans, who didn’t feel the need for such a pseudo-scientific explanation when it was introduced in the 1999 prequel film The Phantom Menace. They’ve rarely been mentioned since.
  • The trailer in question is the first full teaser for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the last of the sequel trilogy and the final film in the Skywalker saga, to be released in December 2019.
  • The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a Netflix sitcom created by Tina Fey. The titular Kimmy is a young woman who moves to New York to make a new life after spending 15 years in an underground bunker kidnapped by a cult leader. She ends up living in a tiny basement apartment in Queens with struggling musical performer Titus Andromedon. In the season four episode “Kimmy and the Beest!”, Titus gets a gig directing a school musical and takes it all way too seriously.
  • There is some evidence that “trolling” was a fishing term for dragging bait to attract fish, distinct from “trawling”, or dragging a net. That certainly could be the origin of the “Internet troll”, but there are other competing theories too. It probably dates back to the late 1980s, but it’s first documented use is from 1992 on the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, where it was more gently used to “troll for newbies” – posting well-debunked stories that existing posters would know were false, but to which new users would respond.
  • In February 2013 – so a little more than five years ago, Liz – authorities in the Czech Republic detected horse meat in frozen IKEA meatballs manufactured by IKEA’s main supplier in Sweden. IKEA temporarily stopped all sale of meatballs across Europe. This was part of a wider scandal that year in which it was revealed that many food supply companies in Europe had substituted cheaper meats like horse and pork for beef to increase their profit margins, with as much as 1% of beef products in Britain containing some horse DNA.
  • Guest Sarah Pearson revealed the existence of Library Captains in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • Dr Dan Golding discussed Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Asimov, resident Pratcat, can be heard in the afore-mentioned episode 10 and also #Pratchat18, episode 18.
  • We discussed Small Gods with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • We discussed Lords and Ladies with Nadia Bailey in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • Each Nullus Anxietas convention has a theme, and the theme for NA7 was Going Postal – hence Liz’s comment that she may have been playing to the audience by favouring the book. The next convention, to be held in Sydney in July 2021, has the theme “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousande Surprises”. We hope to see you there!
  • We discussed The Colour of Magic with Joel Martin in episode 14.
  • Lucy Lawless has indeed been filming a new television show in Melbourne: a new “comedy drama” titled My Life is Murder, starring Lawless as private investigator Alexa Crowe. It’ll screen on Network Ten in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand and Acorn TV in the US in mid-2019.
  • Zoë Bell is a New Zealand stuntwoman and actress. Aside from working on Xena: Warrior Princess, she has also been stunt double for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Cate Blanchett in Thor: Ragnarok. Her acting work includes the film Death Proof and the videogame Fallout: New Vegas. Liz’s interview with Zoë was printed in Metro magazine (and is not available online).
  • You can find out more about Night Terrace at nightterrace.com.
  • Cary Elwes is most famous for playing Westley, aka the Man in Black, in The Princess Bride, but is also beloved for his portrayal of the lead character in Mel Brooks’ spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights. You might also know him as Dr Lawrence Gordon in the horror film Saw and its sequel Saw 3D, and he’s joined the cast of Stranger Things for its third season on Netflix.

#Pratchat18 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” featuring guest Will Kostakis, discussing the 1976 novel The Dark Side of the Sun.

  • Since the 1990s many have claimed that if you play Pink Floyd’s hit 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon while watching MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), the songs supposedly sync up with the vision. Fans of “Dark Side of the Rainbow” (as it’s known) suggest hitting play when the lion roars for the second or third time, and claim the experience is profound, but the band and producers say any synchronicity between them is just a coincidence.
  • Terry Pratchett’s first published novel was The Carpet People in 1971, five years before The Dark Side of the Sun. He was 23 at the time, but had started work on the book considerably earlier; the revised 1992 edition is described as being “co-written by Terry Pratchett, aged seventeen, and master storyteller, Terry Pratchett, aged forty-three”.
  • “Galaxy Song” was written and performed by Eric Idle for the 1983 film Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. In a Python reunion live show which toured in 2015, Brian Cox appeared in a filmed insert nitpicking the song’s accuracy. It’s mostly close enough for rock and roll; in one of it’s most accurate lines, it actually says the galaxy is “100,000 light years side-to-side”, not 30,000. (Ben also made this mistake in an episode of re:Discovery.)
  • Gilpin’s Space is a 1986 novel by Russian-born American sci-fi author Reginald Bretnor. It paints a dystopian authoritarian future in which “eccentric genius” Saul Gilpin steals a submarine and uses it to successfully test his new hyperdrive engine. The novel follows a group of his friends who follow his instructions to steal another submarine and escape the oppressive regime at home for other worlds. It’s…probably not going to stand up to a second read.
  • The Dark Side of the Sun was first published (with a cover drawn by Terry!) in 1976 by Colin Smythe Ltd, who also published the original editions of The Carpet People and Strata. It was republished with cover art by prolific sci-fi artist Tim White, and then again by Pratchett’s later publisher Corgi in 1988, after the Discworld series had proven a hit. They used a new cover by Josh Kirby; Kirby also painted a second cover when another edition was printed by Doubleday in around 1993, which was also used for later Corgi editions.
  • The trope of the ancient, all-powerful “Precursors” crops up in just about everything, as Ben mentions, but he forgot that Star Wars does have them – just not in the films. The Knights of the Old Republic videogame introduced the Rakata, an ancient culture whose advanced technology is important to the game’s plot.
  • We previously covered the “E.T. is in Star Wars and Yoda is in E.T.” thing in our Guards! Guards! episode.
  • Emperor Ptarmigan is definitely not Emperor Parmigiana, but for the uninitiated: “parmigiana” is an Italian dish made with crumbed fried eggplant, tomato sauce and cheese. In Australia the original only became popular fairly recently, but for many years a “chicken parmigiana” – which replaces the eggplant with a chicken schnitzel – has been a pub food staple for decades. It’s known variously as a “parma”, “parmo” or “parmi”, depending on where you’re from.
  • The “Dom/Sub” joke that threatens to derail the podcast refers to dominance and submission – sexual play in which one or more parties are explicitly submissive to others. This can take many forms; we recommend you don’t learn about it through Fifty Shades of Grey, which many professionals say models an abusive relationship.
  • In the original Star Wars films it’s established that a mystical “Force” permeates the Universe, and that some people – Jedi and Sith, mostly – are able to use it to perform various physical and mental feats. In the 1999 prequel The Phantom Menance, George Lucas introduced the idea that a person’s ability to use the Force relies on the concentration of microscopic lifeforms called “Midi-chlorians” in their blood. Fans did not like it. In his defence, Lucas originally had the idea back when he made the first film, but it’s still made the magic feel more mundane and opened up a lot of stupid questions about how it works.
  • The “Bacta tank” is the big round jar Luke is in at the end of The Empire Strikes Back as he recovers from his injuries. “Bacta” is the name of the synthetic restorative liquid inside. Old Republic era stories establish that such tanks previously used Kolto, a naturally occurring liquid from the planet Manaan, but it was replaced by bacta a long time before the rise of the Galactic Empire.
  • Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine, is a prolific American children’s horror author, best known for the hugely popular Goosebumps series of more than sixty books. The series has been adapted for both television and film, the latter with Stine appearing as a character, played by Jack Black.
  • Plasmo is a shape-shifting alien “polybop” created by Australian animator Andrew Lawrence. Plasmo originally came to fame in the half-hour stop-motion animated film Happy Hatchday to Plasmo (1989), in which he is hunted by incompetent intergalactic mercenaries Coredor and Brucho. The film was screened repeatedly on the ABC for around five years in the early 1990s, and was eventually followed by Plasmo, a series of 13 5-minute episodes with higher production values. In the series, Coredor and Brucho have team up with Plasmo and his friends, and go on adventures together.
  • In case the jargon left you confused, “MVP” is short for “Most Valuable Player”, and to “stan” someone is to be an obsessive fan of them. The former is originally a sports term, but has been extended to many other areas. The latter is both a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan”, and a reference to the single “Stan”, about a murderously obsessive fan, from Eminem’s 2000 album The Marshall Mathers EP.
  • In the 1997 Luc Besson sci-fi film The Fifth Element, an ancient “divine being” named Leeloo (played by Mila Jovovich) is blown up, and future Earth scientists use a sophisticated device to reconstruct her from her severed arm.
  • The Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, originally published in short story form in the 1940s, introduce the idea of “psychohistory”: a mathematical science that can predict the future. Unlike p-math, it only works at the level of human society as a whole, and over very long periods of time. The fictional inventor of psychohistory, Harry Seldon, records messages for future generations of humans many centuries after his own death to help guide the titular Foundation.
  • It’s true: in the videogame Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Shelob the giant spider can turn into an attractive human woman. This supposedly explains how she was able to talk to Gollum.
  • In the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts films, Ezra Miller plays Credence Barebone, a young man with a dark secret. It’s…pretty grim.
  • The Ringworld books by Larry Niven, starting with 1970’s Ringworld, explore a vast, ring-shaped artefact created by – you guessed it – a mysterious and supposedly vanished unknown alien species.
  • 2008’s Quantum of Solace was the twenty-second James Bond film, and the second to star Daniel Craig. It’s a direct sequel to Casino Royale, with Bond seeking revenge for the death of a friend and thereby uncovering the Quantum Group, who plan to stage a coup for commercial gain. They communicate in secret by means of earpieces during an opera performance.
  • Monkey is a 1978 Japanese television series, adapting the Chinese folk novel Journey to the West. In the story, the priest Tripitaka is sent on a pilgrimage to India to fetch new Buddhist scriptures. As penance for past misdeeds, the immortal stone Monkey – along with the demons Pigsy and Sandy – is sent to be Tripitaka’s guardian. Monkey is forced to wear a golden headband, and Tripitaka is taught a special sutra which makes it constrict, causing Monkey considerable pain; this helps prevent him from fighting and killing everyone they meet. It’s a unique series in that it was dubbed by English actors who often did not have a complete script and improvised wildly based on synopses of each episode. It was fairly popular in Japan, but reached cult status in Australia and Canada. Some of the choices of accent and phrasing made by the (primarily white) voice cast we’d now consider problematic, at best.
  • I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a 1967 post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror story written by Harlan Ellison. Considering its super dark and fatalistic tone, it was rather surprising when Ellison adapted into an adventure videogame in 1995.
  • A Knight’s Tale was written, produced, and directed by Brian Helgeland in 2001. It stars Heath Ledger as a peasant who pretends to be a knight, and has basically nothing to do with the Chaucer tale from which it takes its name. (Paul Bettany does play Chaucer in the film, though.)
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 film written by Arthur C Clarke (who also wrote a novelisation) and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The plot involves human astronauts travelling to Jupiter to investigate a monolith left behind by – you guessed it – a race of mysterious all-powerful aliens, though the star of the show is really the sinister intelligent computer, HAL.
  • This note is for Sven: we’re sorry we forgot the second part of your question about which authors we think are most consistent in tone and quality of writing. We were really tired.
  • Go Set A Watchman is a novel written by Harper Lee, published in 2015, fifty-five years after her classic To Kill a Mockingbird. She died the following year. While it was promoted as a sequel to Mockingbird, it was actually written first, and is considered by many to actually be an inferior first draft of her beloved first novel.