Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”, featuring guest Cal Wilson, discussing the fifth Discworld novel, 1989’s Sourcery.
Iconographic Evidence
The photo used as publicity for Cal’s 2018 show Hindsight.
Notes and Errata
The episode title riffs on Hagrid’s famous words to an unbelieving Harry Potter in the first novel (and film), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: “Your’s a wizard, Harry!”
Freddie Mercury was a first son of a son of undetermined order, so his magical powers clearly came from somewhere else.
Ben talks a lot about Dungeons & Dragons this episode; if you’ve no idea what it’s all about, his article “What Even Is Dungeons & Dragons?” will get you up to speed. (Content note: the article is a little sweary.)
Some of Terry’s thoughts on J K Rowling can be found online in his interview with The Age here: “Mystery lord of the Discworld”, Peter Fray, November 6, 2004.
A person who doesn’t realise they’re no good at what they do might have a form of cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for a 1999 psychological study.
Hook turns might not be widely used by cars outside of Melbourne, but they’re a common way for bicycles to turn across traffic at cross intersections in many parts of the world.
These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2023“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.
Iconographic Evidence
The “I’m not an actor” scene from My Favourite Year, starring not Laurence Olivier, but Peter O’Toole.
Notes and Errata
If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
The Pratcats are the cat owners of your two human hosts. They are Asimov and Huxley, who live with Liz, and Kaos, who lives with Ben. Kaos lived up to his name this episode when he unplugged Ben’s microphone near the end of the recording; if you notice any decline in audio quality towards the end, that’d be why.
We mention a lot of actors and shows in our casting discussion:
Brian Blessed has been suggested as a Mustrum Ridcully by many, many fans, if you go looking, so it’s a little surprising Ben hasn’t seen anyone do it before. Ben lists many of his famous screen roles, but Blessed wasn’t in Excalibur; in Ben’s defence, as he says, everyone else was. One role Ben neglected to mention is that Blessed was in the 1995 television adaptation of Johnny and the Dead, playing William “Bill” Stickers. A dream come true for Pratchett if he did base Ridcully on him!
Elisabeth Moss is an American actor best known for her starring role as June (aka Offred) in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but has also been in the 2020 film version of The Invisible Man, the television adaptation of time travel horror Shining Girls, and the upcoming Taika Waititi film Next Goal Wins. Liz also mentions The Square, a 2017 Swedish satirical film directed by Ruben Östlund, in which Moss plays a journalist named Anne.
Richard Ayoade’s more recent screen roles have included voice acting in The Lego Movie 2, The Mandalorian, DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys and Pixar’s Soul, as well hosting the television shows Gadget Man and Question Team and frequently appearing as a guest on panel shows. He was also in the other The Watch, a terrible 2012 movie about a group of idiot neighbourhood watch members who stumble across an alien invasion. (It was discussed by our sibling podcast, Who Watches the Watch, in the episode “Who Watches ’The Watch’ (2012)”.)
Taika Waititi is now best known as a director of big Hollywood films, but we still fondly remember him as Viago in the original What We Do in the Shadows, which also features his Our Flag Means Death co-star Rhys Darby, the third member of Flight of the Conchords. If you’re not familiar with Our Flag Means Death, it’s a heartwarming, comic, queer retelling of the story of Stede Bonnet, a real merchant turned pirate from the golden age of piracy, who did indeed cross paths with Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.
Charles Dance is now most famous for playing Tywin Lannister, the scheming patriarch of House Lannister, in Game of Thrones, but his turn as Vetinari in Going Postal was just the year before! He’s also known for Alien3, The Crown and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, where he appears as Roderick Burgess, the man who summons and traps Dream and sets the plot of the series in motion.
Yeun Sang-yeop, or Steven Yuen as he’s usually credited, does indeed play Glenn in The Walking Dead; he played the character for a little over six seasons. You may also have seen him in Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix film Okja, Jordan Peele’s recent sci-fi spectacle Nope, or as the voice of the title character in the animated Amazon superhero adaptation Invincible. He’s also in Love Me, a sci-fi film scheduled for release in 2024 and apparently not related to the TV series.
Ivor Novello was a Welsh singer and actor, who gained fame not only in silent films but also on the stage. He was a successful composer and writer too, with many hit films and stage musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Melissa Jaffer has had a long career in Australian television, but you probably know her from the gloriously weird US/Australian sci-fi series Farscape, where she played Utu-Noranti Pralatong in the show’s final seasons. The ABC’s Swap Shop, which ran for a single season of 52 episodes in 1988 (and managed to so impress itself on a young Ben’s brain), featured Jaffer as Mimi, the proprietor of the tiitular shop where anyone could swap something new for something in the shop. It’s not related to the earlier BBC series The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a live Saturday morning show for kids hosted by Noel Edmonds, or the reboot of that Swap Shop with puppet fox Basil Brush, Basil’s Swap Shop, in 2008.
Bob Morley is an Australian actor best known, as Liz mentions, from teen sci-fi drama The 100, which she’s mentioned on the show before. As well as roles in both of the major Australian soaps, Home and Away and Neighbours, he’s recently appeared in episodes of Nathan Fillion’s police drama The Rookie and the Australian series Love Me for streaming service Binge, an adaptation of the Swedish series Älska mig.
In Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the television adaptation of the Phyne Fisher books written by Kerry Greenwood, the titular detective is played by Essie Davis, who was . Davis’ version of the character seems to be somewhere in her 30s or early 40s, but in the novels Phryne is 28.
Guest Andy Matthews joined us in #Pratchat64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, to discuss the short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”.
It is indeed Ponder who, with the help of Ridcully and the other wizards of the High Energy Magic Building, traps sound in a string in a box in Soul Music. More on the book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
The “Machete Order” for Star Wars is named after the blog on which it first appeared, “No Machete Juggling”, written by film fan Rob Hilton in 2011. The basic idea is to avoid spoiling the big reveal near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which comes as no surprise if you’ve already watched the prequel movies. The original recommendation is to watch Episodes IV, V, II, III and VI in that order, leaving out Episode I entirely. Others have gone deeper, suggested specific moments when you stop one of the films to watch others before returning to the film you paused, or including only specific scenes from certain films, and so on. You can read the original blog post on Rob Hilton’s current website, alongside an update which answers questions and adds the sequel films (the short answer is anything after Episode VI is just watched in chronological order).
As we’ve noted in our episodes about them, Tiffany ages 1-3 years between most of her books, whereas the gap between other Discworld novels usually seems shorter, but also is never stated as clearly. There are therefore two different attempts to assemble a timeline of the series just on the L-Space wiki; for the record, Ben prefers the original. In shorthand, though, most of the books take place in chronological order, with the notable exception of Small Gods (most of which happens about a century before everything else), and possibly Pyramids, though the discrepancy over this is happily waved aside in Thief of Time.
Catfishing refers to using a fake identity, including using photos of someone else, to interact with other people via social media. The term was coined by the 2010 documentary Catfish, which documents an online relationship begun by the brother of one of the filmmakers which turns out to be with a fictional person. There’s some controversy over how early the creators knew about the deception, and whether they pretended not to catch on in as part of making the film, but the false persona and the person behind it were real. The term comes from a story told by a person in the film about how catfish were sometimes shipped with cod to keep them alert and active, even though the cod were the marketable fish.
Byron Baes is a 2022 Netflix reality series set in the beach town of Byron Bay, New South Wales, following the lives of several social media stars. Byron is a hotbed of dubious wellness and hippie culture and has become hugely commercialised over the past few decades, so it’s no surprise influencers spend a lot of time there.
We’re sure we’ve linked to the British man who greeted his farm animals on social media before, but we’ve so far been unable to find him (it’s not easy searching through nearly seventy previous episodes’ worth of notes). If you know who he is, let us know!
For those who missed the Maggi Noodles reference, Pratchett famously cancelled his contract with his original German publisher Heyne Verlag when he discovered they were cutting costs by inserting ads into the middle of their children’s books – including one for Maggi Soups (not actually noodles) in their translation of Pyramids, Sourcery and and possibly others. It wasn’t just an inserted extra page, either – they added text to the book to give context to the Maggi logo! This post on the Stuffed Crocodile blog has a good summary of the whole palaver, including a picture of an affected copy of Sourcery. Pratchett wasn’t singled out for this nonsense; author Diane Duane has also written about this, including some images of Heyne’s altered translations of her Star Trek novels, and the story of how Pratchett found out about it.
Liz’s short story about women transforming into mops is “Call Him Al”, published in Meanjin in 2017. You can read it online.
We discussed the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.
We discussed the concept of Ankh-Morpork elections in last year’s Eeek Club 2022, and it was indeed Karl’s question. (It’s right at the end.)
Thanks to subscribers Sally and Danny, who pointed out that we haven’t yet read the last important book which involves Nobby and Colon. Ben clearly doesn’t remember Snuff as well as he thought! (But no further spoilers, please.)
For more on Teppic, Ptraci, Djelybeybi and You Bastard the camel listen to our Pyramids episode, #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”.
Victor Tugelbend and Theda “Ginger” Withel are protagonists in Moving Pictures, which we discussed in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.
It’s not Laurence Olivier but Peter O’Toole who utters the line “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” It’s from the 1982 film My Favourite Year; see the iconographic evidence section above for the clip.
Liz mentioned the “AI Influencer” Lil Miquela, who is entirely artificial. You can find her as @lilmiquela on Instagram, where her bio reads “🤖 19-year-old robot living in LA 💖”. Be warned, she’s a bit uncanny valley.
We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times; he’s most famously the author of the Thursday Next series of novels in which the titular heroine lives in a world where fiction and reality are blurred, and investigates literary crimes. We are eagerly awaiting Red Side Story, the follow-up to his weird sci-fi novel Shades of Grey (subtitled The Road to High Saffron to differentiate it from that other book), about a world where humans have mostly lost the ability to see colour.
Ben mentions a “Yesterday-style scenario”, referring to the 2019 film Yesterday in which a man is struck by a bus and awakes to find himself in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed, and he’s the only one who can remember their music. The world is annoyingly otherwise exactly the same as the one with the Beatles in it.
Susannah Clarke is the British author of the enormous (and excellent) Regency fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the much shorter (and also excellent) Piranesi, as well as a number of short stories set in the Jonathan Strange universe.
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!“, discussing the third book in the Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Long Earth series, The Long Mars, with guest Joel Martin.
Iconographic Evidence
(This is the section where we add pictures, where appropriate! Watch this space…)
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a reference to famous Mars sci-fi flick Total Recall – the 1990 original version, that is, directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone, and featuring the memorable line “Get your ass to Mars!” The film is (fairly loosely) based on the Philip K Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”. A slightly straighter film adaptation of the story was released in 2012, starring starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel was directed by Len Wiseman of Underworld fame. We talked a lot about Dick in #Pratchat56.
Joel was most recently a guest of the podcast in June 2021 for #Pratchat44, when we discussed the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic – three and a half years after he first appeared to discuss the first one, The Colour of Magic, in #Pratchat14.
You can find out more about The Dementia Centre at their website, dementiacentre.com, or you can find The Dementia Podcast at dementiapodcast.com. You can also just search for “The Dementia Podcast” in your podcast app or directory of choice.
We previously complained about the lack of war in The Long War in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”, with guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins.
Warhammer 40,000 – or “40k” for short – is the franchise of science fiction war and roleplaying games made by Games Workshop. A futuristic reimagining of their medieval high fantasy Warhammer setting, it has space alien versions of elves (Aeldari), undead (Necrons), orcs (er…Orks) and more. But the most famous factions are humans – specifically the genetically modified super-soldiers of the various chapters of Imperial Marines. These Space Marines are technologically enhanced stormtroopers fanatically loyal to their undying emperor, and full of more testosterone than strictly necessary. The franchise is still going strong with many tabletop and digital games currently available, despite its “Imperium of Man” being a fascist regime, and most of the other factions aren’t much better. In the “grim darkness of the 41st millennium,” there aren’t really any “good guy” factions, though the alien T’au Empire might come close. (Ben has seldom played, but his favourite faction – back in the second edition at least – were the weird Space Orks.)
Terry Pratchett died on the 12th of March, 2015. The last Discworld novel to be published before his death, Raising Steam, was released in November 2013, while The Long Mars was published on the 19th of June, 2014. His last three novels were the last two Long Earth books, The Long Utopia (18 June 2015) and The Long Cosmos (14 June 2016), and the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown (2 June 2016).
A quick guide to the timeline of the Long Earth so far:
2015 – “Step Day”, when Willis Linsay releases the plans for the stepper box on the Internet, giving the masses the ability to visit the Long Earth.
2030 – “The Journey”, Lobsang and Joshua’s trip into the Long Earth which makes up the bulk of The Long Earth. The nuclear bomb in Madison goes off in this year.
2040 – most of the events of The Long War occur in this year, including Maggie’s mission as captain of The Benjamin Franklin, the titular “war”, and the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano.
2045 – the main events of The Long Mars are spread across this whole year.
The Long Mars was indeed originally titled The Long Childhood, but The Long Cosmos did not have an alternate title.
“Stoke Me a Clipper” requires a little bit of backstory: in the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, one of the characters is uptight Arnold Rimmer, a lowly technician aboard the eponymous mining starship who died in an accident with the rest of the crew. Three million years later the Red Dwarf’s only survivor – David Lister, the only technician ranked lower than Rimmer – is awakened from cryogenic suspension by the ship’s computer Holly, who supplies him with company: a computer simulation based on a scan of Rimmer’s brain and projected as a hologram. Their rivalry gives Lister a reason to go on, despite the likelihood of every other human being being dead. In “Dimension Jump”, an episode of the fourth series first broadcast in 1991, the Red Dwarf crew meet “Ace” Rimmer, a version of Arnold from an alternate dimension who is a brave, sexy and successful hero; his catchphrase before embarking on a dangerous mission is “Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.” Many years later they encounter him again, only this time he shares his secret: there isn’t just one Ace Rimmer, it’s a mantle passed from one alternate version of the Arnold to another, and now the hologram Arnold’s time has come. When he puts on the wig and outfit, he has to act brave, but managed to mangle the catchphrase as “Stoke me a clipper”. This happens in series seven, in the episode also titled “Stoke Me A Clipper”, first broadcast in 1997. (T-shirts featuring both versions of catchphrase were among many designs released at the height of the show’s popularity in the 1990s.)
The “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” – usually shortened to “the Outer Space Treaty” – was created in 1967 by the United Nations. All the major spacefaring countries then and now have agreed to it, and among its most important clauses is one stating that countries cannot claim sovereignty over any extra-terrestrial body. So while Frank would definitely have planted a flag, surely there’s no way he’d have tried to claim Mars for America – unless, of course, it’s been determined that the Mars of other universes doesn’t count? He’s also not acting on behalf of his country, and there’s been much debate in recent years about what the treaty means for private exploration of space. It does, however, make it clear that States are responsible for any activities conducted in space by their citizens, whether privately or otherwise, and says that outer space shall be “free for exploration and use by all States”, so we’ll have to see if that holds up.
Michael Fenton Stevens is an English actor and comedian. He started out in the Oxford Revue, where his cohort – which included Angus Deayton, Helen Atkinson-Wood and Geoffrey Perkins – followed the time-honoured British comedy pathway of doing an Edinburgh Fringe show which spawned a radio programme (Radio Active) and then became a television series (KYTV). He has since been a fixture around the 1980s guard of comedians, appearing in plenty of sitcoms and radio series, including the later instalments of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy based on the books. His most famous role, though, was probably as a voice artist for satirical puppet program Spitting Image, because he sang “The Chicken Song”. Released in 1986, this was an infamous parody of holiday disco dance pop songs like “Agadoo”, and was written by Red Dwarf scribes Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. It was #1 in the UK for three weeks and was performed live by the Spitting Image puppets on Top of the Pops. As well as reading The Long War series, he also reads the science chapters of the Science of Discworld books (as we’ll mention in #Pratchat59), and played the roles of Spider and one of the Ratcatchers in the 2004 BBC Radio 7 adaptation of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, alongside David Tennant as Dangerous Beans.
The Expanse is a series of hard sci-fi novels written by “James S. A. Corey”, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. They are set in the 24th century, imagining a future in which humans have colonised Mars and the asteroid belt, but in which “belters” who are born and live in low or zero gravity have become an exploited underclass, and Mars has declared independence from Earth, now ruled by a United Nations world government. The series begins with 2011’s Leviathan Wakes, and concludes with the ninth book, Leviathan Falls, published in 2021. Ben is mostly familiar with the popular television adaptation, also titled The Expanse, in which the characters are noticeably more argumentative. The long debates about what to do while in space are a result of the setting’s very realistic spaceflight; while the ships of its future have advanced engines capable of producing massive thrust, there’s no “artificial gravity” or “inertial dampening” technology. Changes in course while travelling involve “multiple G burns” which put enormous stress on the bodies of a ship’s crew, who have to be strapped into special chairs and have fluids injected into their bodies to protect them from injury or death.
We’ve discussed space elevators before in our episodes about The Science of Discworld (#Pratchat35) and The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (#Pratchat47), and we’ll see them again in The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch (#Pratchat59) and Strata (#Pratchat68). The origins of the concept go back to the late nineteenth century, with ideas of building towers tall enough to reach space, but the modern version – where a cable under tension is built down to Earth from a counterweight in geosynchronous orbit – was first described in the late 1950s. Despite this pedigree, they didn’t start appearing in science fiction until two decades later, with the earliest novels to feature space elevators being Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise and Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds, published almost simultaneously in 1979. The elevator in Clarke’s novel is eventually built on Mars, and many novels set on Mars have featured space elevators too. Notable examples include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars – a collection of short stories which started life as a collaboration with Terry Pratchett! (For more about Larry Niven, see our Strata episode, #Pratchat68.)
Ben and Joel are both big fans of Disney’s 2012 science fantasy film John Carter, which previously came up in #Pratchat44. The film is an adaptation of 1912’s A Princess of Mars, the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series, but it incorporates elements from later books as well. The novel is a classic of early space fiction, birthing the genre of “planetary romance”. Both the book and film feature American Civil War veteran and Confederate solider John Carter, who is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to its local population as “Barsoom”. Mars’ lower gravity gives him enhanced strength, and after becoming friendly with the local “green Martians”, Carter reluctantly gets involved in the conflict between the forces of two warring city-states of the “red Martians”. It’s pretty great fun, with very watchable performances from Taylor Kitsch as John Carter and Lynn Collins (who should be in way more things) as the Princess of the book’s title, Dejah Thoris. The script is a thoughtful and modern adaptation written in part by novelist Michael Chabon. It’s clearly set up as the first in a series of films, but it was hugely expensive, and was not commercially successful. Fans of the film often credit this to Disney’s failure to adequately market the film, which ironically seems to have been fuelled by their fears it wouldn’t succeed. (Ben often refers to it affectionately as Riggs Takes His Shirt Off on Mars – a reference to Taylor’s previous leading role in the television drama Friday Night Lights as teenage footballer Tim Riggins, and the number of films in which he takes his shirt off, including the infamously bad Battleship film, aka Riggs Takes His Shirt Off at Sea.)
The “Space Jockey” is the giant humanoid pilot of the crashed spaceship encountered in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, which is where the crew of the human space truck Nostromo encounter the titular alien. The name “space jockey” was a nickname given by the crew, but it’s also the title of an unrelated 1947 science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein, about a human space pilot dealing with the everyday humdrum problems of ferrying stuff and people between Earth and the Moon. The space jockey itself remained entirely mysterious until the more recent (and much worse) Alien films, beginning with Prometheus, which reveal it was an Engineer – the species who created both life on Earth and the aliens themselves.
The ad where Martians use photorealistic printouts to fool a Mars rover was “Mars Mission”, made for Hewlett-Packard (not Canon, as we thought), and broadcast (we think) in 1996 and/or 1997. You can watch it on YouTube here.
Twelve humans have set foot on the Moon, all of them NASA astronauts. While Eugene “Gene” Cernan was the last person to stand on the Moon, he was also the eleventh, not twelfth, person to set foot there. This apparent contradiction is because he got out of the lunar module first, but got back in last, after his Apollo 17 crewmate, Harrison Schmitt. Cernan and Schmitt also spent the longest time on the Moon: over 12 days, they spent 22 hours and 2 minutes outside the module. Cernan died in 2017 (we wonder if anyone told him about the twain in The Long Mars?), but Schmitt is still alive at the time of this episode’s release.
We previously mentioned the 1986 My Little Pony: The Movie in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea”. The “purple slime” was the “Smooze”, created by villain Hydia (played by Cloris Leachman!) to destroy the ponies’ home. It’s defeated by a magical wind created by the flying Flutter Ponies.
In Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, American Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper becomes delusional and goes rogue. He uses a code known only to him to order a nuclear bombing run on Russia because he believes they put fluoride in the water to corrupt the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans. His aide, Colonel Mandrake (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers), eventually deduces Ripper’s code from the paranoid ramblings in his notes, which repeat “purity of essence”. The film is a classic, and was based (if loosely) on the more serious novel Red Alert.
Ben says “less babies”, and yes, as “baby” is a countable noun, it should be “fewer babies”. He’s sorry about that.
When Ben’s talking about “older Star Trek”, he really means anything made before the new batch of shows that started with Star Trek: Discovery in 2017. Prior to this, the most recent Star Trek show was Enterprise, which finished in 2005. All of those older shows are set in the 22nd to 24th centuries, and yet include conventions of gender, sexuality and relationships which make them feel old-fashioned by today’s standards, making a little difficult to imagine they’re really set in the future. The exceptions often occur in alien cultures, rather than in the future humans – for example the Next Generation episode “The Outcast” tries to deal with the idea of stepping outside gender roles with a character who, like Cheery Littlebottom, comes from a culture which recognises only one gender, but who wishes to be female.
The thinking beagle in The Long War was not Snowy, but Brian – possibly named after the talking dog from American animated sitcom Family Guy. His speech about being weird for a beagle appears near the end of chapter 51.
Sam Allen appears in chapters 18 and 19 of The Long War; he’s in command of the squad who get stranded in Reboot when their gear is mistakenly delivered to the Earth next door, and none of them have brought steppers. He has a confrontation with Helen’s father, Jack Green, nearly starting a fight. Following the incident, Maggie puts him off her ship the first chance she gets.
Page counts and estimates tell us that The Long Earth is the shortest book in the series, at probably around 105,000 words, while The Long War is the longest by a fair margin (approx. 131,000 words). The Long Mars is the second shortest (approx. 110,000 words), with the final two books pretty close to the same length (each is somewhere between 116,000 and 118,000 words), with The Long Utopia the slightly shorter of the two.
Shangri-La is a Tibetan monastery nestled in a valley beneath the mountain of Karakal – both fictional locations drawn from the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by English novelist James Hilton. In the book, a party of four English and American folks crash their plane in the Kunlun mountains (which are not fictional) and find they way to Shangri-La, which is an idyllic paradise. The people living there age very slowly, living as long as 250 years, but if they leave the valley they age and die quickly. Looked at through modern eyes, the story has plenty of problems, not least of which that this supposedly Tibetan “lamasery” is revealed to have been founded by a Catholic monk, who as he is about to die, wishes one of the English visitors to take over as leader. (“Lamasery” itself is an erroneous term used in English for Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, based on the misunderstanding that “lama” means “monk”. Lama is actually a highly revered title, only given to very few Buddhists.) The book gained attention after Hilton’s next novel, Goodbye, Mr Chips (about the life of a schoolteacher) was a big hit. The concept of Shangri-La as a distant, utopian place has been a part of popular culture every since, and has inspired many stories – notably that of The Immortal Iron Fist, a white Marvel superhero who learns his supernatural martial arts after surviving a plane crash in the mountains of Tibet as a child and being brought up by the monks of the hidden mystical city of Kunlun.
Don’t Look Up is a satirical 2021 Netflix film in which a pair of astronomers (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet which will destroy all life on Earth, but struggle to get anyone to take the threat seriously. Its mix of dark humour and unsubtle climate change metaphors split audiences, many of whom thought it was clumsy. But there are plenty of things to like about it – including Mark Rylance’s role of Peter Isherwell, a tech billionaire who wants to mine the comet for rare minerals instead of destroying it.
The Pink Panther series of comedy films began with 1963’s The Pink Panther, directed by Blake Edwards, which focussed on the Phantom, a jewel thief played by David Niven. But Peter Sellers stole the show in his role as a bumbling French detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau, so he became the main character for four increasingly oddball sequels between 1964 and 1978. A recurring gag that begins in the second film, 1964’s A Shot in the Dark, is that the Inspector has tasked his manservant Cato (Burt Kwouk) to attack him by surprise, to keep him in top fighting condition. Clouseau often survives these attempts on his life only because Cato stops to answer the Inspector’s phone when it rings… While Sellers is the best-known version of the character, there have been others. Blake Edwards went on to make three more Pink Panther films after Sellers’ death with new lead characters, though none succeeded. Earlier, in 1968, the company who owned the rights made their own separate Inspector Clouseau film without any of the original creative team, starring Alan Arkin. Most recently, a reboot of the series starring Steve Martin as Clouseau lasted for two films: The Pink Panther (2006) and The Pink Panther 2 (2009). A new film was in development in 2020, but there’s been little news of it since.
Professor Charles Xavier – known as Professor X – is a Marvel comics character, a powerfully psychic mutant who founds a school, ostensibly to help young mutants master their extraordinary powers. He does do that…but also recruits his young students to reform the image of mutants in the public eye by acting as a team of superheroes, known as The X-Men. This is necessary in part because Xavier’s fellow powerful mutant, Erik Lensherr – aka Magneto, Master of Magnetism – has decided to deal with prejudice against mutants more directly. He creates The Brotherhood of Mutants, more-or-less a terrorist organisation whose aim is to either force humanity to treat mutants as equals, or bow before them as their servants. (In early comics Magneto’s group were named “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, just in case you were wondering if they know they’re being nasty.)
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel that imagines a future where humans are grown in artificial wombs, sorted into distinct castes based on physical and mental ability, and controlled through the use of drugs. Most castes are encouraged to be promiscuous to keep them happy, and the use of contraception is mandatory; they are also subjected to various forms of conditioning to get them to behave in the way the state approves, including encouraging children to engage in sexual play from a young age.
We mention a few classic sci-fi novels during our discussion of the Next:
The Chrysalids is John Wyndham’s 1955 post-apocalyptic novel in which a society practices eugenics to keep itself pure of mutations, and a group of children with telepathic abilities try to keep their abilities secret;
The Stepford Wives is Ira Levin’s 1972 “feminist horror” novel, in which a female photographer moves to a small town and is increasingly disturbed at the way all the women there are uniformly beautiful and subservient to their husbands;
The Midwich Cuckoos is another Wyndham novel from 1957, in which an English village suffers an unusual visitation in which all its residents are made unconscious, after which all the women of the village discover they are pregnant and later give birth to unusual and similar children;
A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’ 1967 dystopian novel, which we mentioned in #Pratchat55; it depicts a future where gangs of teens speak their own slang language and engage in random acts of “ultra-violence”, and the state tries a new form of aversion therapy on the protagonist;
The Sound of Music (which was not “the one with the children” Ben was thinking of) is the stage musical and subsequent film adaptation based on the 1949 book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta von Trapp.
When Liz says “a parasite like a Yeerk” she is referring to the alien foes of the shape-changing Animorphs, teenage protagonists of the Animorph books by K. A. Applegate published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001. We’ve previously mentioned them in #Pratchat19, #Pratchat25, #Pratchat35 and #Pratchat43…though when we say “we”, we really mean Liz. Ben has never read an Animorph in his life.
In the various Stargate television series, the Goa’uld are a parasitic species who take humans for hosts, granting the body great strength and regenerative properties, and able to live for hundreds of years, changing hosts if necessary over time. Their true form is a snake-like aquatic creature, which wraps itself around the spinal cord of the host to gain access to their brain and motor functions. While the antagonistic Goa’uld System Lords believed they were superior to other lifeforms, using their advanced technology to pose as gods to the humans they sought to enslave, a breakaway faction called the Tok’ra lives in harmony with their hosts, and opposes the ways of the System Lords.
We mention a couple of hologram meetings from films that are similar to the one in the book. The first takes place in the 2014 film Captain America: The Winter Soldier (not The Avengers, though similar technology is later used in Avengers: Endgame), when Nick Fury meets with the World Security Council. The Star Wars one is the meeting of the Jedi Council in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).
It was indeed Mac talking about war being fun in The Long War, in the middle of Chapter 67.
George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) was an officer for the United States in the American Civil War, though became most famously known for the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana, in which he led American army forces against Native Americans and lost, dying along with his entire regiment. This has been romanticised as “Custer’s Last Stand”, and he is sometimes held up as an example of an officer whose decisions caused the death of those under his command. Whatever it’s called it remains an act of colonial aggression, and just one of many examples of Custer’s participation in violence against the First Nations peoples of America, including many incidents we would today regard as warcrimes.
There aren’t any other Cutlers who immediately come to mind, but it is a very common name; like many English surnames, it’s based on an occupation, in this case a maker of cutlery.
When Liz says it’s “just like Lord of the Rings” in reference to Joel’s use of the phrase “just to carry a nuke there and back again”, it’s a double reference – both to the Ring as an allegory for nuclear weaponry, and its prequel The Hobbit, whose full title is The Hobbit, or There And Back Again.
Foundation is Isaac Asimov’s series depicting a future history of a spacefaring human empire. The Foundation of the title is an organisation created by genius Hari Seldon to collect and preserve human knowledge, and prevent the coming of an extended dark age. Seldon does this thanks to his invention of “psychohistory” – an accurate mathematical modelling of society able to predict its future – which allows him to leave instructions for the Foundation on how to alter history’s course. Originally written as a series of short stories, collected into three novel-length books, Asimov later added four more novels, the last of which was published after his death. Foundation covers a vast span of time – about a thousand years – and so necessarily leaves many human characters behind after they die. It was hugely influential, both on science fiction and science, and is clearly one of the influences on The Long Earth series.
A Hohmann transfer orbit can be used to transfer a spacecraft between any two orbits around the same central body, so its not just for travelling between Earth and Mars. You could use this method to travel between any two planets in the solar system, or between a low-Earth orbit and the Moon.
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 67, “The Three-Elf Problem“, discussing Martin Wallace’s 2013 Discworld board game, The Witches, with returning guest Steve Lamattina.
Iconographic Evidence
As promised, here are some photos of the game.
The board, components and the box.Which witch is which? Get your answers here!A pile of components. The pink tokens featuring townsfolk are Crisis tokens; the yellow ones featuring a witch with crazy eyes are Cackle tokens; and the larger square ones are Black Aliss tokens. The green square tiles are Easy Problems, and the purple ones are Hard Problems.Ben’s hand during his first, four-player game of The Witches.Some of our favourite cards, as discussed in the questions section near the end.
Notes and Errata
The episode title takes inspiration from the 2008 science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The novel in turn takes it’s title from the three-body problem of physics, which refers to the difficulty of calculating the relative motion of three bodies whose masses will interact thanks to gravitational force. In the game, three elves are a problem because they cause everyone to immediately lose.
Steve last appeared on Pratchat for Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”, discussing Only You Can Save Mankind, back in February 2020 – the second-last time we recorded regularly in person.
The last in-person episode was #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”, with Fury. We moved to remote recording from episode 30 (“Looking Widdershins”), though Ben did record in person for “The Troll’s Gambit” with Melissa Rogerson, in November 2022.
Dimity Hubbub is not actually known for being talkative, but rather being clumsy; in her first appearance she has set fire to her own hat, and steps on a piece of Annagramma’s occult jewellery. Dimity appears in A Hat Full of Sky (where she appears in two scenes), Wintersmith (in which she gets a whole two lines of dialogue) and The Shepherd’s Crown (again, only very briefly).
Lancre Gorge features fairly prominently in Wyrd Sisters, and is where Lord Felmet eventually ends up. In Lords and Ladies, its described like this: “Lancre is cut off from the rest of the lands of mankind by a bridge over Lancre Gorge, above the shallow but poisonously fast and treacherous Lancre River.” (A footnote admits that “Lancrastians did not consider geography to be a very original science.”)
Garth Nix, who was our guest for #Pratchat51 a bit over a year ago, is an Australian science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Old Kingdom series of young adult fantasy novels. In the books, the “Old Kingdom” is a place of sorcery and monsters, separated from its neighbour Ancelstierre by a wall which keeps the magic out. The first book is 1995’s Sabriel, while the latest is the prequel Terciel and Elinor, published in late 2021.
The Treefrog Games’ Collector’s Edition, published in an edition of 2,000 copies, featuring the pewter miniatures and a cloth bag to keep them in, an A1 poster of artwork from the game, different artwork on the box cover, a different shaped box, and a larger map. (We presume this just means physically larger, not that there are any additional locations.) While you can’t buyt the minatures separately, you did used to be able to buy a set of coloured plastic miniatures for the game from Micro Art Studio in Poland, who still produce a line of Discworld miniatures – though the young witches are no longer available.
The Mayfair Games Standard Edition, the one we played. It has wooden witch’s hat pieces for the players.
The game has also been published in several other languages: German, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Czech and Spanish. These all appear to use the same art, with only the text translated.
Mayfair Games was
Martin Wallace is an English game designer who now lives in Australia. After getting his start in wargames in the 1990s, he became a very well-known game designer. His games include the heavy train games Brass: Lancashire (originally just Brass) and it’s successor Brass: Birmingham; two quite different editions of A Study in Emerald, a Sherlock Holmes/H.P. Lovecraft mash-up based on the short story by Neil Gaiman; and most recently the fantasy war game Bloodstones. (Ben is mistaken, however, about Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which were designed by the entirely different (if similarly named) James Wallis. Sorry James!) Martin’s company Treefrog Games was active until 2016, when he closed it down to focus on working as a designer. Bloodstones was his first new venture in self-publishing since then, this time under the name “Wallace Designs”.
The very brief Martin Wallace interview about The Witches can be found in the BoardGameGeek forums for The Witches. Read the interview here.
When Nanny visits the Long Man in Lords and Ladies, she takes Casanunda along with her. His mind is boggled both by the Long Man, and the resemblance of the King of the Elves within to “his picture”.
The Felmets appear in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”), and they do indeed both die by the end of the book. Lord Felmet plunges to his death in Lancre Gorge, while Lady Felmet is cast into the woods, where the woodland creatures, acting as the soul of the country itself, er…take care of her.
Ben hasn’t been able to think of any other games that split a dice roll in half, though there are many that use a “push-your-luck” mechanic. This is usually achieved by allowing a player to re-roll one or more of their dice with an escalating level of risk and reward.
Melbourne’s public transport network, created by the “Octopus Act” in the late eighteenth century, has a large number of train and tram lines radiating out from the Central Business District. While there used to be two “circle lines” that connected stations on these lines to each other, nowadays to change from one to the other you generally have to travel into the city and back out again. Only buses travel in alternate directions, but they are generally less frequent and less reliable, thanks to traffic.
Agnes Nitt and Perdita X Dream appear briefly in Lords and Ladies, but are best known from Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”).
Ben’s favourite board game Pandemic was designed by Matt Leacock and first published in 2008. It’s a fully co-operative game (see below) in which players are members of the Centre for Disease Control, trying to keep four global pandemics in check while they find cures for them all. The current edition of the game is published by Z-Man Games.
Fully cooperative games are ones in which players do not compete, but instead win or lose (and sometimes score) together. Board game examples include Pandemic, Flash Point: Fire Rescue and Spirit Island. Semi-cooperative games feature some cooperation, but the players also compete against each other in some way. In Ben’s experience, most such games feature strong player cooperation, usual through a high chance of everyone losing, but add in secret personal goals that might put them into conflict. This is a feature of “hidden traitor” and social deduction games like Battlestar Galactica and Dead of Winter, though these might also be considered team games. The Witches is different in that the competitive side of the game dominates; the cooperative element is relatively light, with the threat of losing fairly slight.
The Discworld Emporium is the most famous officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise which grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who started doing Discworld miniatures in the early 1990s. We most recently talked about them in #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner”. They are credited as the author of many of the more recent spin-off books, like The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Nac Mac Feegle Big Wee Alphabet Book, so you’ll no doubt here some more about them before we’re done.
The fans whose likenesses were used for the box art witches were Kate Oldroyd (Tiffany Aching), Victoria Lear (Petulia Gristle) and Pam Gower (Granny Weatherwax). As we mentioned, Pam sadly passed away in January 2023. She wasn’t just the inspiration for this box art, but also Paul Kidby’s bust of Granny Weatherwax. You can read Bernard Pearson’s thoughts about Pam in his Cunning Artificer blog in 2015, including an anecdote about her meeting with Terry which also appears in the biography.
Rowlf the Dog was one of the original muppet characters, originally performed by Jim Henson. He notably achieved solo fame in the early 1960s as a regular on the Jimmy Dean Show, before becoming the piano player in The Muppet Show and subsequent movies. His big number in The Muppet Movie is a duet with Kermit, “I Hope That Somethin’ Better Comes Along”.
Wilfred is the title character of a short film and two television series, all created by Australian comic actors Adam Zwar and Jason Gann, and starring Gann (in a costume) as “Wilfred”, an anthropomorphic dog, who is suspicious and jealous of his owner’s new partner. The original short won awards at Tropfest, Australia’s biggest short film festival, in 2007, and became a series on SBS which ran for two seasons in 2010. It was then adapted for the US market, starring Gann as Wilfred and Elijah Wood as Ryan, a depressed man who befriends Wilfred when his neighbour asks him to look after the dog. In this version the question of whether Wilfred can truly speak, or even really exists, is much more present. The American Wilfred ran for four seasons on FX between 2011 and 2014. There was also a Russian adaptation, retitled Charlie.
Theses are the show notes and errata for our special questions-only thirtieth episode, “Looking Widdershins”.
Iconographic Evidence
The licensing agreement for the fan production Troll Bridge imposed fairly tight restrictions on how and where it can be sold or screened, so it seemed at the time of recording there was no way left to see it if you hadn’t already got on board. But that’s no longer the case! You can watch Troll Bridge on YouTube.
Notes and Errata
Widdershins is an old English word (not, to be clear, an Old English word) which means anti-clockwise, or to move around something by keeping it on your left. On the Discworld, it is one of the four cardinal directions, along with hubwards (towards the centre or hub of the Disc), rimwards (towards the edge or rim) and turnwise (in the direction of the Disc’s spin; the opposite direction to widdershins). Knowing this in year twelve really impressed Ben’s English teacher, who had never read any Pratchett.
We’ve listed a few solid options here for Discworld books to start with:
Wyrd Sisters – Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, three witches from the country kingdom of Lancre, are forced to meddle in politics when their king is murdered by a Duke who cares nothing for the kingdom. If you like the idea of the Witches, this is probably the best book to start with. We discussed it in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”. As discussed, Equal Rites precedes it, but only features Granny. We covered Equal Rites in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes”.
Mort – the anthropomorphic personification of Death takes a gormless country lad as his apprentice. This is the first book to feature Death as a protagonist, though he’s more or less the B plot to Mort himself. Introduces many ideas, places and themes of the Discworld, and is arguably the first to have the familiar Discworld tone. We discussed it in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry”.
Men at Arms – the Ankh-Morpork City Watch has its work cut out for it as racial tensions simmer between dwarfs and trolls, at the same time as a mysterious series of murders takes place. The second of the Watch books, we (and our future listeners) thought it a great enough introduction to the Discworld to pick it as the first one we discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” (and we later return to it, sort of, in a special live recorded show, #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive”). The Watch books start with Guards! Guards! It’s not essential to read it first, but it is a great read, even if the characters themselves are still finding their feet a little. We read it for #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
The Colour of Magic – failed “wizzard” Rincewind is forced to look after the Discworld’s first tourist, Twoflower, on a series of misadventures across the Disc. Still brilliantly funny, but much more a parody of sword and sorcery and high fantasy than establishing itself as its own thing, and with a definite different tone. Ends on a cliffhanger, making the second book, The Light Fantastic, the only direct sequel in the series. We discussed it for its 35th anniversary in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.
Going Postal – con-man Moist von Lipwig is forced to revive the flagging fortunes of the Ankh-Morpork post office. A particular favourite of Liz’s, and a great intro as Moist is a new protagonist and not originally from Ankh-Morpork. It happens much later in the overall series than the other suggestions, but Moist returns in two later books, Making Money and Raising Steam. We will discuss it in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”.
The three live-action Discworld telemovies, all very faithful to the books, were produced by The Mob, a UK production company previously best known for their advertising work. Each was originally broadcast on Sky1 in the UK in two parts, and are usually available in two parts wherever you can find them. At the time of this episode, they’re currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Terry Pratchett appears in a cameo role in all three productions, and many cast members appear in at least two of the films, though rarely in the same role.
Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006) – Death has taken the place of the Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas; his granddaughter Susan tries to get to the bottom of it. Starring Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey), Marc Warren (Hustle) and Ian Richardson (House of Cards) as the voice of Death, plus a great supporting cast including David Jason, Nigel Planer and David Warner. It was first broadcast a week or so before Christmas, and is very faithful to the novel. We discussed the book in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul”.
Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – adapts both The Colour of Magic (see above) and its sequel The Light Fantastic, though it streamlines the plot and takes a few liberties. First broadcast over Easter, it stars David Jason as Rincewind, despite the fact that he’s a great deal older than the character of the books. Twoflower is played by Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings). The supporting cast includes David Bradley (Harry Potter,Doctor Who), Tim Curry, Jeremy Irons and Christopher Lee as the voice of Death.
Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010) – an adaptation of the first Moist von Lipwig novel. Stars Richard Foyle (Coupling, Sabrina) as Moist, with David Suchet (Poirot) and Clare Foy (The Crown), plus a supporting cast including Charles Dance and Tamsin Grieg.
Cosgrove Hall actually made three animated Discworld adaptations, if you include the short Welcome to the Discworld, starring Christopher Lee as Death – a part he plays in all three animations – in a sequence based on the novel Reaper Man. They’re quite hard to find now, though we hear that if you search a certain popular video platform you might find them… They were sort of one series, originally broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 as 23-minute episodes and titled Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, with a subtitle for each series specifying the book being adapted.
Soul Music (1994, 7 episodes) – young bard Imp wants to be the greatest musician the Disc has ever known, but he should be careful what he wishes for… As “Music With Rocks In” sweeps the world, Death feels moved to intervene, and his granddaughter Susan is drawn in as well. As Ben mentions, the soundtrack is something special, especially fans of the Beatles or the history of rock and roll; it’s not on Spotify, but it is still available on Apple Music. We covered the book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
Wyrd Sisters (1997, 6 episodes) is a faithful adaptation of the novel (see above) over six episodes, with the witches played wonderfully by Annette Crosbie (One Foot in the Grave), June Whitfield and Jane Horrocks (the latter two both probably best known to modern audiences from their supporting roles in Absolutely Fabulous). One of Ben’s comedy heroes, Eleanor Bron, plays the Duchess, and there’s some other great cast too.
There are definitely other Pratchett adaptations; the most notable would be Cosgrove Hall’s stop-motion adaptation of Truckers, Amazon Prime’s BBC co-production of Good Omens, and the upcoming BBC America series The Watch, though that seems more a loose interpretation than a direct adaptation. There have also been low-budget TV versions of Johnny and the Dead (for ITV) and Johnny and the Bomb (for the BBC). An animated feature of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is in production in Europe, though whether it will retain its Discworld setting is unknown. (It was released in December 2022, though as of this update in April 2023, we’ve not seen it yet.) An adaptation of Discworld novel The Wee Free Men has been in pre-production with the Jim Henson Workshop, though there’s been little news of it since it was announced in 2016.
As Ben mentions in the footnote, Troll Bridge is an epic short film based on the short story about ageing Discworld hero Cohen the Barbarian. (We discussed the short story it’s based on in our first live episode, “A Troll New World”.) See the Iconographic Evidence section above if you want to watch it!
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The Discworld Collector’s Library editions were first published from 2014 to 2016 by Gollancz, Terry’s first publisher, who only had rights to the books up to Jingo, which explains why initially only the first 21 books were available in this format. Penguin Random House have since continued the imprint for the later books, and now all of them are available except for the younger readers books – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and all the Tiffany Aching books, though the latter have had their own series of fancy new editions (which include dust jackets, much to Liz’s dismay). They retail for about £13 in the UK, and $27 AUD in Australia. The early ones weren’t available in the US or Canada for licensing reasons; we’re not sure what the situation is now. We could list an affiliate link, but instead we’d like to recommend you contact your local independent bookshop – they can order in anything you want, and they could really use your business right now. If you’re in Melbourne, this Broadsheet article lists some bookshops which were providing free local delivery (though it wouldn’t hurt to double-check if that’s still the case).
The Folio Society have been publishing deluxe, illustrated editions of books since 1947, including some extra special limited editions. Ben and Liz remembered correctly that they have published editions of both Mort and Small Gods, and they also have an edition of Good Omens.
Howl’s Moving Castle is a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones. It tells the story of Sophie, the oldest of three sisters in a magical kingdom, who expects her life will be boring as it is always the youngest sister who has romantic adventures. Instead she ends up cursed by a Witch and working for the Wizard Howl, hoping to free his fire demon Calcifer so he will break her curse. The book was brilliantly (if fairly loosely) adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli in 2004. Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s famous 1932 dystopian novel which depicts a future society genetically engineered into castes and kept compliant and docile with drugs and sex.
The year of five books was 1990, during which Pratchett published Eric, Moving Pictures, Good Omens, Diggers and Wings. He was no slouch in 1989 either, publishing four books: Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Truckers and The Unadulterated Cat. We’ve covered all nine of those books on Pratchat.
We’d like to apologise to listener Neil Webber (@RugbySkeptic on Twitter), who was actually the asker of the question about which books we thought were most politically on point! This was entirely an error at our end when collating questions from the various social media platforms.
Agnes Nitt does indeed appear again in Carpe Jugulum, as well as another later book, but we won’t say which because of slight spoiler possibilities. (You can find out by listening to our episode about it, #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”.)
We discussed Dodger way back in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh”, with guest David Astle.
Rhianna Pratchett was given official permission by her father to continue writing for the Discworld, but announced back in June 2015: “I don’t intend on writing more Discworld novels, or giving anyone else permission to do so”, and neither would Terry’s assistant Rob Wilkins. She also ruled out the possibility of publishing any of his unfinished works; they were later destroyed by crushing Pratchett’s hard drives under a steam roller, as per the stipulations of his will.
And Another Thing… is a sixth book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”, written by Eoin Colfer with permission from Adams’ widow, Jane Belson. It was published in 2009 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first novel, and met with mixed reviews. It was adapted for radio as The Hexagonal Phase, incorporating some of Adams’ unused material.
The Rivers of London series of novels by Ben Aaronovitch follow the adventures of Constable Peter Grant, a police officer whose dreams of making detective are complicated when he meets a ghost and becomes apprenticed to Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale – the last official wizard in England. The series encompasses eight novels, two novellas and at least seven volumes of comics. Most of the novels contain at least one Pratchett reference, so Aaronovitch is clearly a fan.
Since there’s no significant Discworld character named Vincent, we are pretty sure that when Liz says “Vincent and Moist” she meant Leonard of Quirm and Moist.
The Dysk Theatre features in Wyrd Sisters, and rates a mention in Lords and Ladies and Thief of Time. The chief characters there are Olwyn Vitoller, proprietor; his adopted son Tomjon, a gifted actor; and the genius and constantly writing dwarf playwright Hwel.
Johnny Maxwell is the protagonist of three of Pratchett’s books for middle grade readers. An ordinary thirteen year old boy with no wish for supernatural adventure, he nevertheless becomes the Chosen One destined to save a fleet of computer game aliens, speaks to the dead, and travels back in time. We’re covering these books this year, starting with Only You Can Save Mankind in episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”.
The Watch, as mentioned briefly above, is a new BBC America series currently in production in South Africa and expected to be released later this year. It is loosely based on the Discworld books about the City Watch, and stars Richard Armitage as Commander Sam Vimes. The wider casting, and the initial on-set photos so far released, suggest a very different interpretation of the characters and stories, with a more modern (though still fantastical) setting. We’re keen to see how it all works out. (You’ll find out what we think when we later discuss The Watch in both #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”, and Eeek Club 2022.)
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a Netflix original series very loosely based on the novel of the same name by Douglas Adams. It takes the core concept of a “holistic detective” devoted to the idea of the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” and then runs in a very different direction. Despite this, Ben rather loved it for being its own thing. It ran for two seasons, each telling a different long story, with some plot elements carrying over between the two.
The Borrowers is a 1952 children’s fantasy novel written by English author Mary Norton, about a family of tiny people who secretively live in a house of normal-sized humans, “borrowing” what they need to survive. It was followed by four sequels between 1955 and 1982, and adapted into several television series and films.
Land of the Giants was a 1960s science fiction series produced by Irwin Allen (of Lost in Space fame), in which the passengers and crew of the sub-orbital commercial spacecraft Spindrift are sucked through a dimensional tear and crash on a planet of human-like aliens who are twelve times larger than humans.
You can find Nanny Ogg’s hand washing songin this video from the Australian Discworld Convention. It’s not her most offensive song, but probably strays into NSFW territory.
There have been several officially licensed Discworld board games (links are to entries on BoardGameGeek.com, aka BGG):
Thud (2002) was the first official Discworld boardgame, and is based on the game Thud played by dwarfs and trolls in the novel, er…Thud. It plays like a modernised version of the Viking game Hnefnatafl: it uses a Chess-like symmetrical board (though this one is octagonal) and asymmetrical player pieces – one player controls 32 dwarfs, and the other eight trolls. Thud was designed by Trevor Truan with “liner notes” by Pratchett and pieces designed by “the Cunning Artificer” Bernard Pearson (now proprietor of the Discworld Emporium). After an initial limited release it had two big box editions, both now out of print. A third major edition, first released in 2009, comes in a cloth bag with a cloth board, and is available from the Discworld Emporium.
Watch Out: Discworld Board Game (2004) was designed by Trevor Truan with pieces again by the Cunning Artificer, but was never published. Like Thud, it was an asymmetrical game with chess-like pieces, but the board was made of square cards representing Ankh-Morpork locations, and one player controlled eight thieves while the other controlled eight Watchmen.
Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (2011) has the players secretly take on the roles of various Ankh-Morpork characters as factions vy for control of the city in the wake of Lord Vetinari’s disappearance. Designed by Martin Wallace for his company Treefrog Games, it’s the highest rated of the Discworld games on BGG. It’s now out of print, but Wallace’s 2019 game Nanty Narking is a new and slightly improved version of the same game with a new theme of Victorian London, replacing the famous Discworld characters with characters from the works of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and more.
Guards! Guards! A Discworld Boardgame (2011) was designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are new recruits in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, sent to infiltrate one of the city’s guilds to retrieve the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo, which have been stolen from Unseen University.
In The Witches: A Discworld Game (2013), also by Martin Wallace, players are trainee witches in Lancre dealing with the more everyday problems of the local folk. Notably it had rules for solo and cooperative play, as well as the competitive version. (Ben found multiple references suggesting Martin Wallace designed a third Discworld game, but it seems it was never finished, or at least never published. We’ve heard on the grapevine that it would have involved the gods of the Discworld.)
Clacks: A Discworld Boardgame (2015) is also from Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are Clacks operators for the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, trying to win the race against Moist von Lipwig’s newly revitalised postal service. Includes rules for competitive and cooperative play. Still in print, so it might be available via your local game store (who needs your support right now); otherwise it’s also at the Discworld Emporium.
Though no version has ever been commercially released, BGG does list Cripple Mr Onion in its database – specifically the 1993 rules devised by Andrew Millard and Terry Tao, and originally posted online at alt.fan.pratchett. These rules are reproduced in later editions of The Discworld Companion, including the one titled Turtle Recall, and suggest players combine a deck of regular playing cards with a deck of Spanish cards (which use Tarot suits) to get the eight suits required. An alternative is “The Fat Pack” deck of cards from The Fat Pack Playing Card Company, designed in part to support play of Cripple Mr Onion. Its eight suits are Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Roses, Axes, Tridents and Doves. The company still has a web site, so we’re ordering some cards and will let you know how we go.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – one of Ben’s favourite books – is the Hugo Award winning 2004 debut novel from English author Susannah Clarke. Set in an 1800s England with a lost history of wizardry, it tells the story of two modern magicians destined to revive English magic: the bookish recluse Mr Norrell, and the idle gentleman Jonathan Strange. It was adapted by the BBC into a largely faithful seven part mini-series in 2015. A collection of short stories set in the same world, The Ladies of Grace-Adieu and Other Stories, was published in 2006.
You can find the famous Discworld reading guide diagram in high resolution on imgur here; the makers also have a Facebook page. HarperCollins also released a very similar official one on their Epic Reads blog. These don’t really tell you where to start, but they represent the various sub-series in clear visual style.
We talked about Interesting Times in our previous episode, “Great Rimward Land”.
The Victorian Discworld Klatch is the local Discworld fan group, who hold occasional meetings in Melbourne, Australia. You can find out more at their Facebook group. If you’re looking for fan groups in other parts of Australia, you can find a list on the Australian Discworld Convention site.
Stargates are the ancient technology in the film and various television series of the same name, which form stable wormholes between planets allowing for instantaneous travel. Jump by Sean Williams is the first in a trilogy of novels imagining a future Earth where an unlimited energy source has enabled a worldwide network of matter transporters, which has transformed human culture.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard’s first officer Will Riker discovers that when he was transported to safety from a dangerous situation eight years earlier, the transporter beam split and two Rikers were created – him on the rescue ship, and another one back on the planet. The philosophical implications of this are covered in Richard Hanley’s book The Metaphysics of Star Trek. The one trapped on the planet is rescued, and after a brief time spent with his transporter twin, decides to go by his middle name, Thomas, and start a new life. It…doesn’t end well.
The lemming-like animal Ben is thinking of is the vermine, which appears in footnotes and asides in several of the earlier Discworld novels.
The Casanova TV series starring David Tennant was written by Russell T Davies of Queer as Folk and Doctor Who fame, and produced for the BBC in 2005. Several actors from it also later appeared in Doctor Who.
Hail and Well Met is a podcast production team based in Perth, Western Australia, who make several audio drama shows.
The “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” can be summarised in this sentence from Men at Arms: “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
These are the episode notes and errata for episode 48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang”, featuring guest Benjamin Riley, discussing the 26th Discworld novel: 2001’s Thief of Time.
(To avoid any confusion, in these notes we’ve referred to our guest this episode as “Guest Ben”, and our co-host as “our Ben”, which has the delightful side effect of making it sound like he’s part of the Ogg clan.)
The episode title is a riff on the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, featured on their 1967 concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While long rumoured to be about hallucinations brought on by the use of psychotropic drugs – in large part because the title coincidentally includes the acronym LSD – it was actually inspired by an illustration made by John’s young son, Julian Lennon, which he described using the phrase.
Guest Ben and Liz used to have “Time Travel Wednesdays” when they worked together, but our Ben’s brain immediately time travels to Tuesdays, presumably for the sake of alliteration. We apologise for any confusion caused.
Craig Hildebrand-Burke was indeed our guest when we discussed Jingo back in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“. (This is one we’d like to revisit with a bit more sensitivity to some things in our blindspot last time.)
Guest Ben’s favourite Discworld period (which he points out is the same as previous guest Craig’s) runs from Jingo (the twenty-first Discworld novel, published in November 1997; see #Pratchat27) to Thud (the thirty-fourth, published in September 2005; probably coming in 2022). This period also includes the first three Science of Discworld books, the first three younger readers books (The Amazing Maurice and the first two Tiffany Aching books), and the introduction of Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal. It’s also notable that Pratchett didn’t publish any non-Discworld books during this period. (Our Ben feels that thematically and tonally this run begins slightly earlier, with either Maskerade or Feet of Clay, meaning it also includes Hogfather.)
Cigars are most associated with His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Watch and Duke of Ankh, though in Guards! Guards!, when he was still just the low-paid Captain of the disregarded Night Watch, he rolls his own cigarettes. By Men at Arms he has moved on to “cheap” cigars, and in Feet of Clay “thin” ones which he carries in a case (or at least he did until Nobby stole the case). He sometimes lights them using swamp dragons, a habit which annoys Sybil. He’s not the only cigar smoker; Nobby is plied with cigars in Feet of Clay, and Nanny Ogg also indulges, though this is only seen briefly in Wyrd Sisters when she’s also drinking in the pub.
“That X-Men movie that fixes that crap X-Men movie” is X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014; dir. Bryan Singer), a film adaptation of the epic comic book time travel story which turned the intended reboot film X-Men: First Class (2011; dir. Matthew Vaughn) into a prequel of the original X-Men movie trilogy. The film opens in a future in which mutants have been hunted nearly to extinction, so Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is psychically sent back in time to prevent the murder which sent history down that leg of the trousers of time. He is successful, and when he returns to the present, the timeline resembles that of the original trilogy – except that the events of the near-universally hated X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, dir. Brett Ratner) haven’t happened, as quickly established by the inclusion of characters either only appearing or killed off in that film.
The idea of the white face and the red nose – named after two styles of clown makeup, and expounded upon in Eric Idle’s sci-fi novel The Road to Mars – is a characterisation of comedic duos in which one, the “white face”, is serious and has (or assumes) a higher level or importance than the other, the buffoon or “red nose”. As well as the obvious surface level, comedy is often derived from the red nose puncturing the white face’s pompous attitude. Colon and Nobby are in some ways the archetypal Discworld example, but there are many others. In theatre terms, the white face is said to be a “high status” character, while the red nose is “low status”.
There are two kinds of big wheel that circus performers roll around in, but the one our Ben is thinking of is a German wheel: two big metal hoops connected by metal struts with stirrups and handholds. They were invented for – and are still used in – gymnastics. (The other kind of circus wheel is a single metal hoop called a Cyr wheel.)
Wallace and Gromit are the stop-motion animated stars several short and feature films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Wallace (voiced primarily by Peter Sallis) is a well-meaning, eccentric and talented inventor with a passion for cheese, while Gromit is his supremely competent and loyal dog. The success of their first film, 1989’s A Grand Day Out, led to several sequels and spin-offs, including the television and film series Shaun the Sheep.
We’re afraid you’ll have to get used to the term “timey-wimey” during this episode, since it just feels so apt for a book with little in the way of actual time travel, but much in the way of time-related weirdness. Its origin is Doctor Who, specifically the Tenth Doctor’s explanation of causality in the third season episode “Blink”. We gave the full quote in our notes for #Pratchat35, but here we’ll add that in the fiftieth anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, when the Eleventh Doctor uses the phrase and the War Doctor (an earlier, grumpier incarnation) finds it preposterous, the Tenth Doctor pretends he’s never heard it.
Jeremy Clarkson started out as a journalist, but is best known now as a television personality. He was one of many hosts of the original version of Top Gear, the BBC Two motoring show which ran from 1977 to 2001, and after it was cancelled devised a new format for the show which debuted in 2002 – the year after Thief of Time was published, so he was considerably less famous then (though still pretty well-known in the UK). He was one of the new version’s original hosts, alongside Richard Hammond; they were joined by James May from the second series and remained the main hosting team for over a decade. Even before the new Top Gear, Clarkson attracted criticism for making bigoted remarks, but these only increased in frequency as he grew more famous, with a series of controversies over comments on- and off-air that ran the gamut of anti-environmentalism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and racism. (There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to controversies on Top Gear, most of them involving Clarkson.) Clarkson generally dismisses these criticisms, but also seems to court controversy deliberately to increase his fame, stating on multiple occasions that he may not believe all the things he says. By 2014, however, he was on a “final warning” from the BBC, and in 2015, after he verbally abused and then physically assaulted one of the show’s producers while on location (ostensibly because he wasn’t served the meal he wanted), the BBC cut the show’s season short and declined to renew Clarkson’s contract, despite a petition from fans with a million signatures. Hammond and May left the show with him, which continued with various new presenters, including Friends and Episodes star Matt leBlanc. Clarkson’s new show with Hammond and May, The Grand Tour, was basically Top Gear in all but name, and began on Amazon Prime in 2016, where he now also hosts Clarkson’s Farm, a show about the farm he owns in the Cotswolds, not far from Pratchett’s home in Wiltshire. He’s still very famous in the UK, where he has hosted their version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? since 2018 and makes various other television appearances – though not on the BBC.
Lobsang is a favourite name of Pratchett’s, used most prominently here and as the name of a major character in The Long Earth books, though it crops up many times in the novels. The earliest Lobsang is the Abbott Mort deals with on his first solo round as Death in Mort, though his name is only mentioned once – the rest of the time he’s just “the Abbott” – so don’t feel bad if you missed it. Another early appearance is near the end of Guards! Guards! (See also the note below about knowledge coming from a long way away.) The name is a fairly specific reference to “Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa”, author of several books about the spiritual and paranormal, most famously The Third Eye in 1956. He was later revealed to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber from Devon. For more on his weird story, listen to our discussion of The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, or look him up yourself; you’ll be amazed.
The tick of the Universe more or less exists in the real world in the concept of Planck time, the “briefest physically meaningful span of time”, which is about 5.39×10−44 seconds. According to an article from 2020, the briefest time so far measured is 247 zeptoseconds (or 10-21 seconds), so even the most accurate atomic clocks can’t duplicate Jeremy’s feat. (Assuming the same length of tick in Discworld space is dubious, but if true, the glass clock is approximately 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more accurate than the best atomic clock.)
Susan Sto-Helit is the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sto-Helit – Death’s one-time apprentice Mort and adopted daughter Ysabell. Their story is told in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort (see #Pratchat2), while Susan first appeared as a teenager in Soul Music (#Pratchat19) before returning at more-or-less the same age she is here in Hogfather (#Pratchat26). In the animated Soul Music she was voiced by Debra J Gillet (who also provided the voice of Grimma in the stop-motion version of Truckers), and in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, she was played by Michelle Dockery (now best known for her starring role as Lady Mary Crawley in Downton Abbey).
Montessori and Steiner schools are two different alternative models for educating children and young people.
Montessori education, developed by Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952) around the turn of the twentieth century, focuses on self-directed learning based on natural human development. Its basis is that children naturally want to learn, but formal education prevents them from doing so in the way that’s best for them; Montessori schools are usually primary schools and allow students to pursue the activities and subjects they find most interesting, usually through playful means. Many aspects of Montessori’s work have been adopted into mainstream teaching as well.
Steiner education, also known as Waldorf education, is based on the work of Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher (among many other things). Steiner’s “anthroposophy” teaches that humans can better understand the spiritual world through personal development, though the spiritual aspects of the philosophy are not always emphasised in Steiner education. Its main focus is holistic teaching, believing that students will do best if they develop their intellectual skills alongside artistic and practical ones. Steiner schools use a developmental model that runs from infancy through to secondary education, and have become increasingly popular; they are now the largest independent educational movement in the world, and have forty-five schools across Australia.
Professor Valerie Felicity Frizzle, PhD, originally known as Ms Frizzle or “the Frizz”, is the teacher in The Magic School Bus books by Joanna Cole, later developed into television series and videogames. The titular bus could travel safely to just about anywhere in time and space, allowing Ms Frizzle to teach her students about various scientific concepts. Cole died in 2020, the year a Netflix continuation, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, debuted. In the sequel, the original Ms Frizzle gets her doctorate and passes the school bus on to her younger sister, Miss Fiona Felicity Frizzle. In both the television and Netflix series, Valerie Frizzle is played by Lily Tomlin; Fiona was played by Kate McKinnon (of Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters fame).
Lu-Tze and the History Monks first appear in 1992’s Small Gods (discussed in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“). They are described as the caretakers of history, keepers of the “the books from which history is derived”. Lu-Tze is sent by the 493rd Abbot – the same one recently reincarnated in this book – to Omnia, where “things must be…carefully observed“. Lu-Tze mentions in Small Gods that he hasn’t been to Omnia in seven hundred years, which almost agrees with his age of eight hundred in this book, set about a century later. By the end of that book he has “patched up” history such that Brutha does not die, avoiding a century of terrible warfare; Brutha instead lives for most of the intervening century and reforms Omnianism. This suggests Lu-Tze’s mission to Omnia was one of the things that needed fixing as a result of the first glass clock; Igors are long-lived enough that this Igor’s grandfather could certainly have built the previous clock a century earlier, though it also seems that the History Monks are able to leave their valley at just about any point in history they choose. Lu-Tze will return in Night Watch.
Lu-Tze’s name is derived from Loazi (老子), author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism, who lived in the 6th century BCE. Loazi – also romanised as Lao Tze or Loa Tzu – is actually an honorific title meaning “venerable master”, and there is some debate about who he was, or even if such a single person truly existed, or was just a pen name for multiple authors of the Tao Te Ching. Listener Felix let us known that Lu-Tze might be an intentional bilingual pun, as Lǔ is a Mandarin word meaning “foolish” or “crude”, making Lu-Tze a “Foolish/Crude Master”.
While we may not have been able to spot many references to specific kung fu movies, there’s at least one clear reference to the 1972 American TV series Kung Fu. When Lu-Tze takes on Lobsang as an apprentice, he tells him: ‘Word One is, you don’t call me “master” and I don’t name you after some damn insect.’ In Kung Fu, the main character Caine – played by white American actor David Carradine, who was cast over a host of potential Asian American actors, including Bruce Lee – is a Shaolin monk wandering the Old West looking for his brother. In flashbacks to his training, he refers to he teacher as “Master”, who calls Caine “Grasshopper”.
We previously talked about The Karate Kid (1984, dir. John G Avildsen) in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Mr Miyagi is the elderly Japanese neighbour of Danny LaRusso, who asks him to teach him karate so he can protect himself from the bullies at his new school. Miyagi sets Danny chores which are revealed to have taught him some basic movements essential to karate.
We’ve not yet nailed down which kung fu movie with the famous moving shot Liz is thinking about; suffice to say it’s not called The Tenth Dojo. If you know the one, please get in touch!
Speaking of kung fu cinema, one of the many things that inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars was the Master-Apprentice relationship in such films. Thus Jedi ideally begin training at a young age, and when they reach the rank of “Padawan” they are apprenticed to a Jedi Master, travelling with them and learning from them until the Jedi Council deems them worthy of the rank of Jedi Knight, at which point they have finished their apprenticeship.
The previous joke about people thinking wisdom has to come from far away appears in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12), where Magrat is reading The Path of the Scorpion, a book of which she is suspicious partly because the author – “Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler” – has an address in Ankh-Morpork. (The author is clearly CMOT Dibbler, leading us to wonder why the name “Lobsang” is apparently well-known on the Disc – and why Newgate Ludd ends up with it…) The full quote of the joke appears below (though see also the following note):
It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.*
Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)
Mrs Marietta Cosmopolite appears in Moving Pictures, where she is a “little old lady” seamstress in Ankh-Morpork who becomes a costume designer in Holy Wood for Century of the Fruitbat Moving Pictures. She is also mentioned in the footnote to the quote above from Witches Abroad, which contains the first appearance of The Way of Mrs Cosmopolite, in which monks travel from the Hub mountains to hear her wisdom, though they can’t understand her. It would seem Lu-Tze was the first of these monks, since by the time others come to visit her she is hitting them with a broom and telling them to push off, rather than taking them in as lodgers. Her address is consistently given in all the books as 3 Quirm Street, an unusually specific bit of continuity that leads us to wonder if she is an obscure reference of some sort? (Despite that attention to detail, her surname is spelt “Cosmopolite” in all the books except Thief of Time, where its spelt “Cosmopilite”; the reasons for this are a mystery.)
Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time”, and thus experiences his life somewhat out of order. We previously discussed it in #Pratchat26. A film adaptation was made in 1972; Vonnegut was very happy with it.
Monstrous Regiment is the thirty-first Discworld novel, published in 2003. We’ll cover it in a future episode, but listener Steavie urged Guest Ben (and the rest of us) to listen to Pratchett’s interview for the Wheeler Centre in 2014 (now available only YouTube), which we previously linked to in #Pratchat26 when the interviewer, Michael Williams, was our guest. Pratchett talks (from around the 31:30 mark) about researching the history of women fighting and living as men at “a nice little place in London run by ladies who like other ladies very much indeed”. (In The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Marc Burrows identifies this research as taking place in “queer-focussed bookshops”, though no specific ones are named.) This seems a pretty good indication that he knew what he was writing, at least on some level.
The gay character in Unseen Academicals, Pepe the dwarf fashion designer, was quite definitely intended by Pratchett to be gay; in the same 2014 interview linked above, Pratchett describes Pepe being “as gay as a tree full of monkeys”. (The question and answer where he says this starts at around 16m30s.)
Of course there’s no way for us to know if Pratchett had many out gay friends, but he certainly met a great number of queer and trans fans, many of whom have shared stories via social media that show him to have been kind and empathetic towards them.
Many of the stories from the note above were reported in response to the “gender critical” incident, which we won’t give too much oxygen. (If you need some background on what “trans” means, guest Fury gives a little 101 in #Pratchat29.) The short version is that a couple of vocal anti-trans commentators, angry that Maragret Atwood had identified herself as a trans ally, got fed up with Neil Gaiman also being clearly pro-trans. So they suggested on Twitter that Terry Pratchett was more “acquainted with reality” than Gaiman and that the Witches books showed Pratchett knew “what female is and means in the world”. Twitter’s considerable number of Terry fans – including his daughter Rhianna – of course found this absurd, given the way he writes about gender roles in books like Equal Rites, Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant and Monstrous Regiment. That didn’t stop commentators claiming that we “couldn’t know” what he thinks as he wasn’t around to ask…though we reckon his closest friends and family might have a pretty good idea?
The idea of consensual reality is that the universe conforms to people’s beliefs. Wikiality is sort of the opposite idea – that people have a common idea of what’s true that might not align with objective reality. The word was coined by Stephen Colbert on the July 6, 2006 episode of his satirical show The Colbert Report; his right-wing persona, in his “The Wørd” segment, praised Wikipedia for being editable, meaning that it could be changed to reflect “truthiness”, Colbert’s parody of terms used by conservative politicians to deny facts they found inconvenient. He defined the word “wikiality” to mean “truth by consensus”, and encouraged his viewers to edit Wikipedia to change “facts”, making people believe things that weren’t true. This resulted in a whole thing where people edited multiple articles on Wikipedia to suggest the world’s elephant population had tripled…
We’ve previously mentioned alt.fan.pratchett, the newsgroup from the 1990s where Pratchett occasionally answered fan questions; see the notes for #Pratchat42 for more information.
Listener Vlad pointed out to us that there is indeed an aviator on the Discworld – Hamish, of the Nac Mac Feegle, is referred to as “Hamish the aviator” by Tiffany in Chapter 7 of The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32). While Tiffany presumably learned the word from her cover-to-cover read of the dictionary, in our Ben’s defence, it’s a bit weird that it’s in the dictionary if it’s a term invented by or for the Feegles – though as it comes from the same root word as “Avian”, it certainly makes sense for Hamish to use it, since he does his flying on birds! (We’ve since realised that this also applies to Corporal Buggy Swires, gnome recruit in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, who rides a heron in Night Watch.) All that said, in the same chapter Tiffany tells Hamish about a paratrooper toy she had as a younger child, so perhaps we just have to accept that things which were singular oddities before powered flight on Roundworld have somehow gained enough notice to become talked of frequently and affect language on the Disc…
Despite it being generally believed that he did, Terry did not cover nuclear reactors as a journalist; a case of wikiality in action! As Marc Burrows clarifies in his biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Terry quit journalism in 1979 (before he sold his first big novel) and took a job – mostly for the money – in public relations, specifically for the South-West office of the Central Electricity Generating Board (or CEGB). The job wasn’t meant to revolve around nuclear power, but the infamous partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US – causing the evacuation of 140,000 people – happened three weeks before he started, and the region covered by his office of the CEGB included three of Britain’s nuclear power plants. So of course he spent most of his time responding to public and media fears of meltdowns.
Lifetimers, mentioned only in passing in this book, are the hourglass-like devices which Death uses to determine when people on the Disc will die. Everyone has one, even the gods and – in Reaper Man at least – Death himself. While Death doesn’t always seem to need one – they’re not often referred to in his cameos to collect souls – Mort is taught to take with him the lifetimers of those he needs to visit in Mort, so our speculation that they’re required might be correct. (Death clearly has somewhere in his robe where he can hide them…)
Q – with the help of his department, Q Branch – is the boffin responsible for James Bond’s famous gadgets, like the car that could turn into a submarine, various watches with electromagnets, lasers and knockout gas, and a tiny rocket launcher disguised as a cigarette (no really) – plus of course dozens of different things that could explode. The character’s codename is short for “Quartermaster”, a military term which in the army refers to a senior soldier in charge of equipment and supplies. Q is mentioned but never appears in the original novels; the closest equivalent is Major Boothroyd, an armourer who appears in Dr. No, the sixth novel. Desmond Llewellyn appeared as Boothroyd in the film version of Dr. No, and the producers decided to keep him on as Q in subsequent films, merging the two characters together (or at least making audiences think they’re the same person). Llewellyn’s Q appears in seventeen of the Bond films, in scenes where he would show off gadgets to Bond and often have to remark “Oh do pay attention, 007”. He announced his plans to retire in 1999’s The World is Not Enough, which also introduced his assistant “R”, played by John Cleese, who took over as Q in the following film, 2002’s Die Another Day. The Daniel Craig Bond films feature a new younger Q, played by Ben Wishaw, who appears in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die.
Desmond Llewellyn died in a car accident in December 1999, a few weeks after the release of The World is Not Enough, while on his way to a book signing. Thief of Time was published about eighteen months later, in May 2001, so Pratchett may have started writing it while Llewellyn was still alive. Terry’s quote on the matter from the Annotated Pratchett File is: “As I wrote it I could [hear Llewellyn’s voice], too. Qu will be back — unlike, alas, Desmond Llewellyn.” (Qu did come back, in Night Watch.)
The boffin with the exploding gadgets in Night Terrace – the time travel radio comedy co-produced, co-written and co-starring Ben – is Horatio Gray (played by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen). He appears primarily in the second season episode “The Retirement of Horatio Gray”, and is the creation of Night Terrace co-creator Lee Zachariah. (You can find out more about the show at nightterrace.com.)
Guest Ben’s summary of the theory of relativity is pretty much spot on: special relativity was Einstein’s explanation for the speed of light, which had been observed in experiments to always be the same, even under conditions where you’d expect it to be different. The theory tells us that time and distance are not fixed, but are relative, in the same way we already though of motion as being relative. “History” – in this case, our personal perception of time – has to “give” to keep the speed of light constant in those circumstances. (General relativity, which came later, explained how special relativity interacted with gravity by combining space and time into a single set of dimensions we now know as “spacetime”. It describes gravity as a curving of spacetime near massive objects.) Of note is that the idea of time and distance being relative had already been worked out mathematically by Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, ten years before Einstein, but he thought this was an abstract mathematical model, not a description of the way the physical universe worked. (This is why the equations involved in translating time and location information between frames of reference – between you on the surface of the Earth and a satellite in orbit, for example – are called Lorentz transformations.)
We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s love of videogames in #Pratchat28 (about Only You Can Save Mankind) and #Pratchat36 (about Carpe Jugulum, which includes a pretty blatant reference to Tomb Raider). Of note: he was a big fan of roleplaying games too; his special favourite for a long time was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, largely because of the modding community of fans who create “mods” (modifications) that add in extra stuff, like being able to make a living from crafting, more realistic weather, even rainbows. You can read an out-take from a radio interview where he talked about this stuff on The Author Hour in 2009.
“Man not of woman born” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Lord Macbeth is given a prophecy by three witches that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth”. It later turns out that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” – i.e. born via Caesarean section – which apparently doesn’t count as being “of woman born”. Bit of a long bow, if you ask us. Probably a closer analogue to what we were talking about was the prophecy in The Lord of the Rings, in which it is said of the mighty Witch-king, the Lord of the Nazgūl (the Ring-wraiths who serve Sauron), that “not by the hand of man shall he fall”. He ends up being killed instead by Merry (a hobbit) and Éowyn (a woman) at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. (This is the big fight between orcs and men at the city of Minas Tirith; it appears in the third book and film, The Return of the King.)
Reservoir Dogs (1992) was the first feature film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. In the film, six men participating in a bank heist refer to each other only by the pseudonyms Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink. In the scene where they get their aliases, they argue about the allocation of names, which are given out by the organiser. (Content warning for the clip: it’s not gentle language, and the crims are casually homophobic.)
Guest Ben talks about Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, likening the incarnated Auditors to monsters from his era (perhaps the Whispermen from The Name of the Doctor), and the time in the museum to the the end of Matt Smith’s first season – The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang.
Was Pratchett a Doctor Who fan? Not really…though he did enjoy the show. Writing for SFX magazine in 2010, he complained that it “breaks most of the laws of narrative”, and he derided the modern show as being powered by “makeitupasyougoalongeum”, a sentiment he repeated when writing the introduction to Behind the Sofa, a 2012 collection of celebrity reminiscences about the program published to raise money for Alzheimers research. (It was updated and expanded in 2013.) He did confess, in the SFX article, that despite his misgivings he continued to watch: “After all, when you’ve had your moan you have to admit that it is very, very entertaining, with its heart in the right place, even if its head is often in orbit around Jupiter.” (You can find some excerpts from the SFX article in this piece at The Guardian; Behind the Sofa is still available as an eBook.)
Both Death and the Doctor having a granddaughter named Susan is likely a deliberate decision on Pratchett’s part, given that in the introduction to Behind the Sofa (see above) he starts by saying “I was there in the beginning,” and refers to “that strange grandchild and rare teachers who took everything in their stride”. This is Susan, and her teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the first humans to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS.
The Horsemen of Good Omens are much more closely based on the Biblical account, inasmuch as that’s possible – Revelations doesn’t actually have that much to say about them, beyond the signature items that identify each of them, and the colours of their horses. Notably in these global pandemic times, the Pestilence of Good Omens quit the position in 1936, “muttering about penicillin”, though in the same paragraph his successor Pollution seems to think that was premature: “If only the old boy had known what opportunities the future had held…” (For more on all this, see #Pratchat15.)
The Horsemen of the Apocralypse previously rode out – or at least tried to – in Sourcery, when the magic unleashed by Coin, the Disc’s first sourcerer in millennia, released the ice giants from their prison and they rode towards Dunmanifestin to end the world, in a cataclysm more inspired by Norse mythology than the Bible. On that occasion, a certain amateur hairdresser, her barbarian sidekick, and the Seriph of Al Khali stole War, Pestilence and Famine’s horses, rather putting the kibosh on the whole thing. (See #Pratchat3 for more on Sourcery.)
There are still many thousands of deaths in hospitals caused by lack of hand washing. As recently as 2018 the World Health Organisation put the figure at up to 30,000 women and 400,000 babies every year from preventable infections, such as puerperal sepsis, though those numbers also include deaths due to lack of sanitation or clean water. It’s easy to forget that in the majority world (i.e. most of it outside the relatively affluent nations in places like North America, Western Europe and Oceania), those things aren’t guaranteed even in hospital facilities, and even health workers without consistent access to clean water and soap need to work at getting into the habit. Cleanliness in general was championed by many before the germ model of disease was accepted, including Florence Nightingale, though she apparently fudged her stats to push her case. The generally accepted pioneer of hand-washing in particular, though, was Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 briefly convinced doctors working with pregnant women to wash their hands after conducting autopsies. It didn’t last…and his story has a sad ending. But you can learn more about the history of hand washing via this episode of NPR’s Short Wave podcast.
When our Ben mentions Dirk Gently, he is referring to the protagonist of Douglas Adams’ novels Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Dirk claims to solve mysteries via the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, one manifestation of which is that when he doesn’t know where to go, he follows someone who looks like they know where they’re going. Through this method he claims that, while he might not end up where he wanted to go, he frequently ended up somewhere he needed to be.
100 Story Building is a creative writing centre for young people based in Footscray in Melbourne. Ben has been one of their workshop facilitators since 2016. They primarily work with schools; you can find out more at 100storybuilding.org.au.
The Matrix: Resurrections is the upcoming 2021 sequel to the original Matrix trilogy, written and directed by half of the original Matrix creative duo, Lana Wachowski, with Lily’s blessing. In the first teaser trailer, there’s a shot of Keanu Reeves in the bath with a rubber duck on his head – and dedicated listener A’Tuin Sneezed beat our Ben to the punch with this tweet:
When Liz says “For Star Wars reasons we’re sending you to different places”, she’s referring to the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, in which twins Luke and Leia are sent into “hiding” from their father, Darth Vader. We used scare quotes there because they send Luke to Tattooine (his father’s home planet) to be cared for by his Uncle and Aunt through marriage (on his mother’s side), and Leia to Alderaan, where she’s adopted by Bail Organa, a galactic Senator (and secret Rebellion leader) well-known to Vader’s master, the Emperor. I mean…where else would you send them? Somewhere with no connection to the people trying to protect them, or their actual parents?
There are several “fifth Beatles”, but the best known is drummer Pete Best. He was indeed the fifth member of the band then called “The Silver Beatles” (though there had been others in John’s previous band, The Quarrymen). Pete joined John, Paul, George and Stuart (Sutcliffe), four guitarists in need of a drummer, in 1960. After Sutcliffe left, Best remained with the group until he was fired and replaced by Ringo Starr (whom, we’d like to point out, is never referred to as “the sixth Beatle”, which seems a little unfair). We previously talked about Pete in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind”. Ronnie Soak, having left under his own steam over “creative differences”, seems to have had the better treatment.
The fifth horseman doesn’t appear in a previous footnote, but there are a number of other groups of “four horsemen” of lesser disasters listed in Interesting Times, and Good Omens features “the Other Horsemen” – a bunch of bikies who ride out with the real four, arguing with each other over what their names should be.
There are many angels in the book of Revelations of the Christian Bible, though the one most resembling the angel mentioned in Thief of Time is probably the one from chapter 10, in an interlude between the sixth and seventh trumpets. This angel appears to John of Patmos carrying “a little scroll”, and cries out with a lion’s roar; in response, seven thunders utter mysteries to John which he is not allowed to write down (and given what he is allowed to write down, must be pretty wild). The angel then gives the scroll to John and has him eat it, leading to a further vision in chapter 11 before the final trumpet sounds. Note that this is well after the four horsemen, who are introduced upon the opening of the first four of the seven seals, which is before the first trumpet. Revelations is a lot.
We’ve previously talked about the cosmic battle of Law versus Chaos in the work of Michael Moorcock in #Pratchat14, #Pratchat29, #Pratchat44 and #Pratchat45. While we don’t know if Pratchett ever corresponded with Moorcock, Moorcock was the editor who published Pratchett’s first professionally published story. See the notes for #Pratchat45 for more info.
In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, alignment is a declaration of where a character stands in the opposition of the forces of good and evil, and law and chaos. It was much more significant and restrictive in older editions, where it was expected to dictate (or at least match) your character’s behaviour, and where magic could detect what your alignment was: Paladins – holy warriors who had to be on the side of lawful good to be granted their powers – could cast detect evil and determine straight up if someone was evil or not. In modern editions, it’s been described more as a guideline for actions, and the ability to detect alignments has been removed from the game; for example the equivalent spell is now detect evil and good, and it detects only beings that are intrinsically linked to forces of positive and negative energy, like angels, demons and the undead.
The Thunderdome – clear inspiration for the Iron Dome dojo in Oi Dong – is the gladiatorial arena featured in the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985, dir. George Miller). It is used in the post-apocalyptic settlement of Bartertown to settle disagreements via a battle to the death – “two men enter, one man leaves”, as the crowd chants.
Albert is Death’s manservant, a major character in Mort and Hogfather, and a supporting character in Reaper Man and Soul Music, but who is mentioned exactly once in this book. Following the events of Soul Music, Albert has very little real life left to him, so while it’s not surprising he doesn’t take part in Thief of Time, it’s weird not to at least see him briefly in the opening scenes set in Death’s Domain.
Ysabell is Susan’s mother, a sixteen-year-old girl rescued and adopted by Death for reasons that are never fully explained. She appears in Mort, and briefly – during scenes set in the past – Soul Music.
The other characters we mention towards the end of the podcast are:
Angua von Überwald, werewolf member of the watch introduced in Men at Arms (#Pratchat1) and a major supporting character in most subsequent Watch books, especially The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40);
Agnes Nitt, a younger witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (#Pratchat17) but is a major character in Maskerade (#Pratchat23) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36); and
Adorabelle Dearheart, who runs the Golem Trust in Ankh-Morpork, a major character in the Moist von Lipwig books starting with Going Postal (#Pratchat38).
The concept of “substition” also appears in Jingo (see #Pratchat27). Pratchett writes of 71-Hour Ahmed: “He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless were untrue. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed.” Rather appropriately for Thief of Time, among the examples of substitions he gives in Jingo is “It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it”.
The Doctor’s “pull the trigger, end my life” speech to the sniper occurs in part 2 of the 1988 story The Happiness Patrol. You can find the scene on YouTube.
In The Matrix films, “the machines” have enslaved humanity in a simulated reality – a 1999 megacity which forms the titular Matrix. Agents are the machines’ troubleshooting programs which hunt down humans who are resisting the Matrix program; they look like men in black and are stronger and faster than humans. Agent Smith is the main antagonist of the first film; during the sequels he becomes a virus-like entity who threatens to destroy the Matrix itself, something neither machines or humans want. The films also feature other “rogue programs”, intelligent bits of software who escape the machines’ mainframe and live in the Matrix, where they take on the forms of humans or human-like creatures.
You can find out more about the OverLondon Project (not to be confused with London Above, London Below or Fallen London) at overlondon.net.
The software toy Mountain was developed by Irish artist David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions, the games company founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Monkey Island fame. Originally released in 2014, it received a major 2.0 update in 2018 (at no additional cost). It’s still available on Steam (for Windows and Mac) and for smartphones and tablets. (This discussion has prompted our Ben to reinstall it and have another play with it; while working on these notes, a brain and a bomb embedded themselves in the side of his mountain! Let us know if you check it out too.) The 2017 follow up was Everything, which simulates an entire universe – a bit like Roundworld Project!
The main staff of The Ankh-Morpork Times are William de Word, Sacharissa Cripslock and Otto von Schriek, all introduced in The Truth (#Pratchat42). Sacharissa and Otto especially appear in cameo roles in several later books.
Pteppic is the protagonist of Pyramids (see #Pratchat5).
The 2019 TV show Pennyworth tells the story of how ex-British special forces officer Alfred Pennyworth ends up working for the wealthy Wayne family in America, and is set in an alternate universe in which the Nazis won World War II. (Sigh…there are other alternate universes, right?) Two seasons have been made for the US cable channel ePix, and there’s talk of a third, perhaps for HBO Max. Reports are that it’s…okay, actually?
The fates of Greek mythology are the Moirai, last mentioned in #Pratchat36. The version in which they number three is best known; those three are Clotho (spinner in ancient Greek), who spins new threads; Lachesis (alotter), who measures the threads; and Atropos (inevitable), who cuts the threads. Our Ben’s idea of a recycler might be named Nostos, which is Ancient Greek for “returner”.
While the cat doesn’t appear in the Chinese “zodiac”, it does appear as the fourth sign in the Vietnamese equivalent, replacing the Chinese rabbit. There are multiple versions of the story Liz mentions; several involve Cat being tricked by Rat, or even Rat just not waking Cat up as requested, explaining their modern day relationship.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 66, “Ol’ No Eyes Is Back“, discussing the 2010 Discworld novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, with returning guest Amie Kaufman.
Iconographic Evidence
We refer a few times to Pratchett’s 2010 Richard Dimbleby lecture, “Shaking Hands With Death”. It was published in 2012, and then collected in A Slip of the Keyboard in 2014, and we’ll have an episode on it in due course. You can watch the whole thing below, as the lecture is televised on BBC One, though the YouTube clip is not an official upload. Pratchett was unable to read it himself on the night, and gave the gig to Tony Robinson.
Notes and Errata
The episode title riffs on the classic 1973 Frank Sinatra album Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back. It’s also, because we’re big nerds, a reference to Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, the 1991 album by Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Brent Spiner, whose android character Data has golden eyes. Ben was delighted to discover another riff on the title while looking up these details: Old Brown Ears Is Back, a 1993 album by noted muppet pianist and singer, Rowlf the Dog!
Guest Amie Kaufman was last on way back in July 2018 for #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”, discussing Truckers. Her most recent books at the time were Ice Wolves, the first in the Elementals trilogy, and Obsidio, the final book in the Illuminae Files trilogy with Jay Kristoff. Since then she’s published the two other Elementals books, Scorch Dragons and Battle Born; another YA sci-fi trilogy with Kristoff, the Aurora Cycle; the Illuminae Files novella Memento (a hard to get publisher exclusive); two duologies with Meagan Spooner, The Other Side of the Sky and Beyond the End of the World, and Unearthed and Undying; and two books with Ryan Graudin, The World Between Blinks and Rebellion of the Lost. So by our count, that’s actually eleven novels and one novella!
The blurb Amie reads seems to be from an American edition of the book, but we’re not sure which one. If you know, please tell us! A new edition is on the way in June, with a new cover matching the other recent paperback editions, and it uses a blurb very similar to, though shorter than, the one Amie reads. The old blurb was: A man with no eyes. No eyes at all. Two tunnels in his head… It’s not easy being a witch, and it’s certainly not all whizzing about on broomsticks, but Tiffany Aching – teen witch – is doing her best. Until something evil wakes up, something that stirs up all the old stories about nasty old witches, so that just wearing a pointy hat suddenly seems a very bad idea. Worse still, this evil ghost from the past is hunting down one witch in particular. He’s hunting for Tiffany. And he’s found her…
Pratchett doesn’t say in his Richard Dimbleby Lecture that he gives the death he describes for his father to the Baron, but the Guardian piece mentioned above draws the same conclusion.
On the subject of Boffo, Wintersmith pretty directly tells us it isn’t a common practice for witches to buy stuff from there, at least not in the Ramtops. In chapter 3, “The Secret of Boffo”, Tiffany asks Miss Treason directly:
‘Do all witches buy from Boffo?’ said TIffany. ‘Only me, at least around here. Oh, and I believe Old Mistress Breathless over in Two Falls used to buy warts from there.’
Granny previously visited Ankh-Morpork in Equal Rites (see #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes”), and again with Nanny Ogg in Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”).
In Equal Rites there’s exactly one mention of city witches: they’ve left “witch marks” on the outside of the rear doors of Unseen University, advising any witches who visit that they are welcome and that the housekeeper Mrs Whitlow is “gullible and foolish”; Granny notes that “city witches didn’t seem that bright themselves”, though she doesn’t meet any or mention that any live in Ankh-Morpork. After spending some time with Mrs Whitlow, who at the time considered herself a psychic medium and put on posh airs, Granny wonders if she isn’t a “born witch who somehow missed her training”. She also does some witchery for folks while staying in the city, including brewing potions with the excitingly cheap glassware available.
In Maskerade, when she arranges lodgings in the Shades, Granny describes Mrs Palm as “an old friend. Practic’ly a witch.” But there’s no mention of any actual city witches.
More notes coming soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 65, “Let There Be Gaimans“, discussing several pieces from the “Scribbling Intruder” section of Pratchett’s 2014 nonfiction anthology, A Slip of the Keyboard, with special guest Peter M Ball.
Iconographic Evidence
We’ve mentioned it before a few times, but here again is Michael Williams’ interview with Terry Pratchett from 2013, during his tour to promote Snuff, titled “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.” (It used to be available as an audio recording, but now it’s only available via YouTube.)
Notes and Errata
The episode title is probably not Ben’s best work, but it was there…
GenreCon is a writing conference in Meanjin (aka Brisbane) specifically for genre writers that tries to cover as many genres as possible: science fiction, romance, crime, fantasy, horror, and more. It just ran its eighth conference from 17-19 February 2023, with this year’s guests including friends of this podcast Garth Nix (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“) and Will Kostakis (#Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“).
The Queensland Writers Centre is a not-for-profit membership organisation supporting local writers of all kinds. It was established in January 1990, and as well as GenreCon runs workshops and other events, and provides various services including consulting, mentorship and manuscript assessment and editing.
The Author is the quarterly journal of The Society of Authors, established in 1884, and is the UK’s union for writers, illustrators and literary translators – not just for authors any more! Terry was Chair of their Management Committee from 1994 to 1995, helping to shape their policy and strategy. His time in those meetings inspired the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices”, which we discussed in #Pratchat63. He was also elected as a member of the Society’s Council. Philip Pullman was President of the Society from 2013 until early 2022, when he resigned following some controversy around a memoir. The current Chair is Joanne Harris, best known for her novel Chocolat. Notably both Harris and Pullman were some of the more level-headed voices speaking up about the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy (see below), with Harris in favour of the changes, and Pullman advocating letting Dahl’s books fade away without being republished.
Ben is wrong about one thing in his FAQ footnote: the Pratchett newsgroups (see below) did have an FAQ! You can still find it at lspace.org here. We think this was the last version, updated in 2005; like the Annotated Pratchett File (also see below), it was maintained by Leo Breebaart, who also created the L-Space web.
We’ve previously talked about newsgroups in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat42, but for context: the Usenet system was created in 1980 as an Internet-based alternative to local Bulletin Board Systems. Setting standards that would later be used by web-based internet forums, they organised posts by users into conversation-like “threads” of messages, which were themselves organised into “newsgroups” under hierarchical categories, similar to (but distinct from) domain names. There were three newsgroups of primary interest to Pratchett fans: alt.books.pratchett for discussion of the books themselves; alt.fan.pratchett (the big one) for general fan chit-chat (though this often included the books); and alt.fan.pratchett.announce, a moderated group for announcements of signings and other events of interest to fans. Pratchett was active on the first two.
Peter says Pratchett started publishing Discworld in about ’88, but we suspect he meant that the Discworld really took off around then, with the publication of the fourth and fifth books, Sourcery and his first really big hit, Wyrd Sisters. The Colour of Magic was first published in November 1983.
Pratchett’s fifth and tenth books (including the three pre-Discworld ones) were The Light Fantastic in 1985, and Pyramids in 1989. The gap in between contained the first big growth spurts of the Internet, but to put them in perspective, Tim Berners Lee only created the first version of the World Wide Web in 1989, and the first widely available web browser, Mosaic, didn’t launch until 1993 – by which time Pratchett was onto his twenty-fourth book, Johnny and the Dead! If you wanted to chat to people on the internet, newsgroups and mailing lists were the go in the 1990s…
In Benjamin Partridge’s monthly comedy podcast, The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, Partridge plays the unnamed host of the fictional industry body’s podcast. Through mostly unscripted interviews with characters played by various guest actors and comedians, Partridge slowly builds up a bizarre alternate reality over many years. One of the recurring characters is disgraced “Bovine Poet Laureate” Michael Banyan (played by comedian Henry Paker), author of a book of cow poetry titled Crab of the Land, who often tells outrageous stories about partying with Jonathan Franzen.
ChatGPT is an “AI chatbot” created by the company OpenAI and publicly launched in a prototype state in November 2022. It’s capable of producing sophisticated text responses to prompts using the GPT 3 large language model previously created by OpenAI, and as a result has become hugely popular and controversial. It’s not actually intelligent; rather it uses statistical models based on a huge corpus of text (i.e. large parts of the internet up to 2021) to assemble sentences, poems or lines of code which are drawn from that corpus. We’ll probably talk about it some more in the next episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club.
Pratchett told alt.fan.pratchett he was leaving for the reasons outlined in “this piece”Wyrd Ideas” on the 3rd February 1999, after a user speculated about Sam and Sybil having children (he was writing The Fifth Elephant at the time). This was despite other users in the group (and possibly the version of the FAQ available at the time) asking people not to do this sort of thing. You can see his post here – and thanks to Jo and Francine of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, who saved Ben the trouble of searching for this by linking to it from their own episode notes! Pratchett didn’t leave newsgroups altogether; he continues to “lurk” (i.e. read without posting much) on alt.books.pratchett and other newsgroups (mostly about videogames) until around 2008.
We mention several famous writers who published their works in serial form, usually in magazines. But we could have mentioned many more! As well as French authors Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, there’s also Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson and many, many more.
Speaking of Alexandre Dumas, his surname is pronounced “Doo-ma”. He was indeed paid by the line by some of the newspapers who published his stories, though others paid him by episode, leading to very long books rather than very short dialogue. According to some accounts, his publishers eventually caught on to his writing style, and insisted that a line had to fill half a newspaper column to count, supposedly forcing him to kill off a monosyllabic character he’d invented to extend his dialogue. Charles Dickens, by contrast, is said to have written verbosely as he was paid by the word, but in fact he was paid for instalments which had a very specific page count (32 pages in some accounts). Like a first year arts student, he may have used more words to fill the pages faster…a style emulated by Pratchett in Dodger (discussed in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“).
Watch this space for a brief history of fanfic, but in the meantime you can check out Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) for yourself – and yes, there’s an extensive Discworld collection there!
The Nanny (not Nanny Ogg) was a hugely popular American sitcom which ran from 1993 to 1999 – coincidentally the period between “Kevins” and “Wyrd Ideas” – on the CBS network. It starred co-creator Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, a down on her luck Jewish woman from Queens who tries selling makeup door-to-door. She’s hired by high class English Broadway producer and widower Maxwell Sheffield to be the new nanny to his three children, and the two have a will-they or won’t-they relationship aided by Sheffield’s butler Niles and opposed by Sheffield’s business partner C.C. Babcock.
The Neil Gaiman Masterclass on “The Art of Storytelling” is offered as part of the Masterclass streaming video service, which features hundreds of tutorials from famous leaders in their fields covering everything from acting to philosphy, personal style and astronomy. The BBC has a similar series of videos, BBC Maestro, with a class on Storytelling hosted by Alan Moore.
Pratchett used the term “figgin” for the kind of joke Peter describes because he used the word for exactly that kind of joke in Guards! Guards! In that novel, figgin is used by the Supreme Grand Master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night in one of the order’s oaths, secure in the knowledge that none of his flock knows what it means. (In this instance Pratchett doesn’t make us wait until the very end to discover the truth for ourselves; it’s defined in a footnote. In fact he only uses the word eight times in the novel, and three of those are callbacks made after the footnote.)
To avoid confusion, Ben would like to explain that the “sherbert lemon” kind of joke is not an example of shelving, which is when a comedian mentions a concept seemingly in passing so that they can come back to it later in a new context once the audience has forgotten about it and helping the comedy work through surprising recognition. (There’s a reason explaining how comedy works is described as “dissecting the frog”.)
Pratchett is on record (in the APF, of course) that there’s no pun in Twoflower: “[…] there’s no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up ‘foreign’ names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.).”
Andrew Harman is the English author of eleven pun-filled comic fantasy novels, published between 1993 and 2000. Most of them are set in the medieval fantasy kingdom of Rhyngill and surrounds, and five, beginning with The Sorcerer’s Appendix and ending with One Hundred and One Damnations, form a loose series following the adventures of the peasant Firkin and his friends. Harman went on to find more creative success as a game designer, founding his own publisher, YAY Games, which specialises in “gateway games” – ones that work well for introducing new people to hobby boardgames.
Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s classic sitcom farce about long-suffering but obnoxious hotel manager Basil Fawlty, ran for two series in 1975 and 1979 on BBC Two. It is often cited amongst the greatest sitcoms ever made, though its characters and many of the episodes’ premises rely heavily on ethnic and gender stereotypes. The titular hotel is located in the resort town of Torquay in the coastal “English Rivieria” region of Devon. Cleese was inspired to create the setting and main character for the show after an experience with the manager of a real Torquay hotel where the Monty Python crew stayed while filming on location in 1971.
For some perspective on the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy, you could do worse than these pieces from The Conversation:
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 61, “What Terry Wrote“, discussing the 24th Discworld novel, 2005‘s Thud! with guest Matt Roden.
Notes and Errata
The episode title plays with “What Tak wrote”, the creation myth of the dwarfs, as featured at the start of Thud!
For those interested, here’s the Pratchat intro script as it appears in our episode notes template. Ben updates it when creating the notes for a new episode, inserting the book’s title and the details for the guest.
LIZ: I’m Elizabeth Flux.
BEN: I’m Ben McKenzie.
LIZ: Welcome to Pratchat, the monthly Terry Pratchett book club podcast.
BEN: Each month we discuss one of Terry Pratchett’s books with a special guest.
LIZ: This month we’re reading Book Title, [pun/joke about the book].
BEN: And our [returning] guest is [descriptors], [guest name] - welcome [guest]!
100 Story Building and Story Factory are not-for-profit creative writing centres for children and young people which run workshops centred around storytelling, literacy and writing, mostly in schools. Both were inspired in large part by 826 Valencia, a creative writing centre for established in San Francisco in 2002 by educator Ninive Caligari and novelist Dave Eggers (of McSweeney’s fame). Other similar organisations exist in many countries, including The Ministry of Stories in London (with which Matt was involved) and Fighting Words in Dublin.
A geode is a hollow, rounded sedimentary or igneous rock (and we’ll come back to that term) which has minerals on the inside of the hard outer shell. Those minerals often include crystals, like quartz or amethyst. Igneous geodes are often formed when there is a bubble of gas inside a flow of magma or lava. They’re very popular as jewellery and ornaments, and are often cut in half for display, with the flat edge of the shell polished to show off its formations too. They’re not to be confused with thunder eggs, which are similar but distinct spherical structures also formed in lava.
Octarine – the eighth colour, the colour of magic – is last definitely mentioned before Thud! in The Last Continent, back in 1998. (It might also be mentioned in The Last Hero, though this is harder to verify without re-reading the whole book.) It does get a passing mention in The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch, but only in a non-fiction chapter.
Detritus and Cuddy, the Watch’s first troll and dwarf recruits, argue – and become fast friends – in Men at Arms. We discussed the book all the way back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, and revisited in the live special #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“.
The “dwarf and the troll in the rock band together” are hornblower Glod Glodsson and percussionist Lias Bluestone who form a band with Imp y Celyn’s in Soul Music. We discussed the novel in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
Rush Hour is a 1998 action comedy directed by Brett Ratner and starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as Detective Inspector Lee from Hong Kong and Detective James Carter of the LAPD. Lee is summoned to Los Angeles to help rescue the kidnapped daughter of his former boss, and Carter is assigned to “babysit” him as punishment, making him determined to solve the case. It was a big hit, spawning two sequels: Rush Hour 2 in 2001, which moved the action to Hong Kong, and Rush Hour 3 in 2007, which took both officers away from home to Paris. There have been rumours of a fourth film for years, and in this era of legacy sequels who knows – it could still happen.
The Wire is an American crime television series created for HBO by David Simon, an American author and former crime reporter. It’s set in the city of Baltimore, in the US state of Maryland, and each season explores a different group connected to crime and law enforcement, though drug gangs and the police appear in all five seasons, which were first broadcast between 2002 and 2008. Season four, the one specifically mentioned by Matt, deals with the education system and the mayor’s office. The Wire notably stars Wendell Pierce as William “The Bunk” Moreland, a homicide detective who features in all five seasons; you might know him as the voice of Death in BBC America’s The Watch. (See #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.)
We’ll mention the earlier Watch novel, The Fifth Elephant, quite a few times this episode. It introduced the idea of the Deep Downers and is the origin of a lot of Discworld dwarf culture, previous books having mostly stuck to a parody of Tolkien’s dwarfs. It also announced the impending arrival of Young Sam We discussed it in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, back in February 2021.
Fizz, the political cartoonist for The Ankh-Morpork Times, is named for Phiz, the pen name of popular Huguenot illustrator Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882). His inclusion here (and in Monstrous Regiment) reflects that he contributed cartoons for the British satricial magazine Punch in very much the same style, but Browne was also known for illustrating novels and serialised stories in more reputable publications, most notably for Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers, which started with the pseudonym Nemo before changing it to Phiz. “Phiz”, by the way, is short for “Phizzog”, an English slang term for face which is derived from the word “physiognomy”, which means “a person’s facial features or expression”. (We’re not sure which came first, the cartoonist’s tag or the slang term, but its a fun word all the same.)
The Good Wife is a CBS legal drama set in Chicago, which ran for seven seasons between 2009 and 2016. It stars Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick, a woman who restarts her legal career as a junior lawyer when her State’s Attorney husband is jailed for corruption. It was followed in 2017 by The Good Fight, a spin-off starring Christine Baranski as her The Good Wife character Diane Lockhart, a senior lawyer at Florrick’s firm who has to start over at a new one after her daughter is scammed, resulting in financial disaster. It ran for six seasons between 2017 and 2022. We previously mentioned both shows in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“. The Good Dwarf could deal with similar themes of what women are expected to give up for men, but adding in the unique species and gender angles of Discworld dwarfs. Don’t forget to tell us which characters you think should be in it!
Code-switching is originally a linguistic term for when a multi-lingual speaker changes between languages (or varieties of the same language) in the same conversation. This usage dates back to 1951 with the book Language of the Sierra Miwok by Lucy Shepard Freeland, when she notes it in the context of Californian First Nations people. Code-switching involves a great deal of mental energy as different languages have very different structures, idioms and modes of speech, and multilingual speakers often have to switch for their own needs as well those of the people they’re speaking to. The term has seen expanded use to mean switching between any two different modes of speaking (or thinking), especially when it comes to different levels of privilege, expected gender roles, and neurodiversity.
The Da Vinci Code was Dan Brown’s smash hit novel from 2003 (two years before Thud!), the second to star Robert Langdon, a university professor who specialises in religious iconography and “symbology”. Langdon, who was introduced in Brown’s 2000 novel Angels & Demons, would appear in four more books. The Da Vinci Code‘s plot uses ideas from earlier writings about the Holy Grail and the Templars, and kicks off when professor is murdered to protect a secret about Christ which was uncovered by Leonardo da Vinci, who left clues in his paintings – most notably The Last Supper. It was controversial for its portrayal of the Catholic Church (who employ assassins in the book) and Christianity in general, as well as for its cavalier attitude to religion, history and art – Brown claimed in interviews that the background history he used for the book was “all” or “99%” true, including the existence of secret societies generally considered fictitious. In 2005, the same year as Thud!, Tony Robinson – comic actor, Discworld audiobook narrator and presenter of Time Team – produced The Real Da Vinci Code for Channel 4, in which he debunked many of the supposed historical facts mentioned in the book. This didn’t hamper the book’s immense popularity, though, and in 2006 it was adapted for film by Ron Howard, with a script by Akiva Goldman and starring Tom Hanks as Langdon. The film was followed by adaptations of Angels & Demons and the fourth Langdon novel, Inferno.
A cyclorama (not “cyclodrama” as Matt says, though we’re all for drama in the round) is the Roundworld equivalent of Ransom’s painting in the book: a panoramic painting intended to be displayed on the inside of a cylindrical platform, surrounding the viewer. The term is also used for the building or room designed to hold such a painting. They were apparently very popular in the late 19th century. These days “cyclorama” is more commonly used to refer to the all-white backdrops used on stages, or in photography studios, where they are curved to give the illusion of there being no background at all.
Mr Sheen is an Australian brand of cleaning products – specifically an aerosol-based surface polish – created in the 1950s. They were popular well into the 1990s, remembered for their mascot, a small Mr Magoo-like cartoon figure with a large shiny forehead and glasses, and his catchy advertising jingle. He found success in other markets, too, notably the UK, where the Australian mascot was replaced by a moustached flying ace who flew around the house on a can of the product. “Mr Shine” has also been used as a name by many cleaning companies and products, though none of them seem famous enough to be a direct reference.
The city of Dis appears in Inferno, the first part of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, where it encompasses Lower or Nether Hell – which are the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth circles, housing those souls whose sins were willing or “obdurate” (i.e. unrepentant) – in order, those of heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. The city’s outer walls are surrounded by the River Styx, which forms a moat. Its name is derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, which refers to the Underworld as “the realms of Dis”, and mentions its “mighty walls”. “Dis Pater”, Latin for “Father of Dis”, was also the ruler of the Underworld in Roman mythology.
The Gooseberry is most obviously a pun on the Blackberry, the early smartphone which was a little ahead of its time, but nonetheless popular with high-powered business folks in the 1990s and 2000s, before the advent of touch-screen smartphones with the iPhone and its competitors. It might also be a reference to UK slang, in which a “gooseberry” is like a “third wheel” – someone who feels a bit unnecessary or left out in company, usually a couple.
“Unrelenting standards” is a psychological term for internal pressure to perform well, manifesting as perfectionism, difficulty in gauging one’s own performance compared to what’s generally considered acceptable, a desire to avoid criticism or mistakes, and an obsession with productivity and efficiency. It’s often said to be a product of growing up being valued primarily for your achievements, or in an atmosphere of frequent criticism and little praise.
We’ve previously mentioned the Love Languages in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“. They originate in the 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, which was written by Gary Chapman, a Baptist pastor and radio host. The book was phenomenally successful, selling more than 11 million copies and spawning many sequels and imitators. Ben is not a fan because the idea is very reductive; psychologists and counsellors have criticised Chapman’s work for over-simplifying and homogenising human experiences of love and communication, even where they appreciate the metaphor and have tried to expand it. Other critics note that Chapman is not professionally trained in psychology or counselling, holds some deeply conservative and homophobic views, and based his book on his experience with a fairly narrow sample of his parishioners. He also rejects any expansion of the idea. perhaps because its made him a great deal of money… For the record, his original five love languages are “Acts of Service”, “Words of Affirmation”, “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch” – which you can probably see already leaves out a lot.
Stephen King’s “Tak” appears in his 1996 novels Desperation and The Regulators, the latter of which was published under King’s outed pen name Richard Bachman, claiming to be a novel Bachman had written years earlier. Instead, it’s intentionally a story set in a parallel universe to Desperation, with alternate versions of many of the same characters – including the author!. Like the Summoning Dark, King’s Tak comes out of a deep mine in the desert and inhabits a human host – in Desperation it is a police officer who becomes a sort of berserker. We won’t say too much more, but as Ben mentions in the episode, the similarities don’t go much further than that, but it might be a deliberate reference.
The HBO miniseries starring Ben Mendelsohn is the 2020 adaptation of another Stephen King book, 2018’s The Outsider, which does indeed have a similar plot.
“And then the car ate a person I guess?” is a reference to Stephen King’s Christine, a 1983 novel about a seemingly possessed, jealous and violent classic car named “Christine”. It was adapted the same year into a film by John Carpenter, with some details – notably the source of the car’s demonic presence – changed considerably. Carpenter directed it as a career-saving move after his previous labour-of-love film, The Thing, didn’t do well at the box office, but both films are now cult classics. A remake of Christine is rumoured to be in production.
A “cryptex” is a small container with a secure, complex lock, intended to carry secret messages. The term – a portmanteau of “cryptic” and “codex” – was invented by Dan Brown for The Da Vinci Code, though there’s nothing about the device itself that requires the use of cryptology to use. The original version in the novel is a hollow cylinder made of stone and brass with five rotating sections, each containing every letter of the alphabet (though whether it’s the Latin or modern English alphabet is unclear). This makes it basically a letter-based combination lock with between 280,000 and 11 million possible combinations, depending on some details not given in the novel. Physical reproductions of the cryptex have become widely available since the release of the Da Vinci Code film; Ben has even used one as part of an escape room experience he designed.
We mention that on the Discworld, werewolves are classified as undead, something which dates back to Angua’s first appearance in Men at Arms. We’ve never really agreed; see above for our episodes about the book, where we decide they are, if anything, “twice as alive”.
“A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” is the fifth and final Discworld short story, first published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in May 2005, just four months before Thud! We’ll be discussing it in #Pratchat63, coming in January 2023.
“Fracas“, along with “rumpus”, are both used by William de Worde during a meeting with Lord Vetinari in The Truth. A footnote describes them as the word equivalent of rare fish, claiming that they are “found only in certain kinds of newspapers” and “never used in normal conversation.” For more on this, see #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
Liz mentions “Incepting The Wire“; she’s invoking the concept of “inception” from Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film Inception. The film is about a crew of criminals who use technology to enter the dreams of others, stealing important secrets from their subconscious. The plot of the film involves the crew being hired for the more difficult crime of “inception”: inserting an idea into the mind of the target.
We Own This City is a 2022 television mini-seres created by David Simon for HBO. Like The Wire, it’s set in Baltimore and is about law enforcement – in this case, corrupt members of the Gun Trace Task Force, based on real-life events which occurred between 2015 and 2019.
The Descent is a 2005 British horror film written and directed by Neil Marshall. Ben doesn’t necessarily recommend it, especially if, like him, you’re not really a horror fan – it’s pretty full on. Ben prefers the director’s previous film, the 2002 black werewolf comedy Dog Soldiers, but The Descent was pretty successful. A sequel, The Descent Part 2, was released in 2009, though it was directed by Jon Harris, who edited the original. It’s considered to be…not as good.
When Detritus is in the desert of Klatch in Jingo, he initially has a lot of trouble in the heat, especially as his helmet conks out. Later, at night when the desert is very cold, his brain cools and becomes more efficient, as he puts it. Sadly he doesn’t say anything about the apparent demise of his helmet; the relevant passage is quoted below, and the helmet isn’t mentioned again. See also our discussion of the novel in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, and our next episode, #Pratchat62, “There’s a Cow in There“, when we mention the helmet again.
The troll was standing with his knuckles on the ground. The motor of his cooling helmet sounded harsh for a moment in the dry air, and then stopped as the sand got into the mechanism.
Jingo – Terry Pratchett, 1997
Matt mentions Brick’s stream-of-consciousness passages read like “an excerpt from an Irvine Welsh novel“. Welsh is a Scottish author, most famously of Trainspotting, the 1993 novel about a group of addicts – of heroin or other things – that was adapted into film by Danny Boyle in 1996. Both book and film are considered classics.
Matt’s “dribbling dragon” is an allusion to “Chekhov’s gun” (originally “Чеховское ружьё”, or “Chekhov’s rifle” in Russian), advice given by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov in several letters to younger writers in the early twentieth century. It’s basically the idea that you should only include necessary details in your story – the usual example being that if you include a gun in the first act of your story, it should be used to shoot someone before the end of the play or else taken out of the story entirely.
Reg Shoe, revolutionary-turned-zombie-turned-activist-turned-police detective, is not at all mentioned in Thud!, despite having a prominent supporting role in the two preceding Watch novels, The Fifth Elephant and Night Watch. Angua does mention in passing to Sally that “no-one cares if you’re a troll or a gnome or a zombie or a vampire”, but that’s as close as it comes. Vimes doesn’t even think of Reg during the flashback to his meeting with the Patrician about Sally, when he mentally lists the weirder members of the Watch: he thinks only of trolls, dwarfs, golems, a werewolf, an Igor and Nobby.
We’ve mentioned the British drama Downton Abbey a few times before on the podcast, most notably in #Pratchat36. The series was created and co-written by English actor, writer, director and actual aristocrat and member of the House of Lords, Julian Fellowes. It follows the inhabitants of the titular manor house: the aristocratic Crawley family, led by Lord Grantham, and their servants. It’s set between 1912 and 1925 and features many significant historical events, including the sinking of the Titanic, the Great War, and the Spanish Flu epidemic. (Of note: Mary Crawley, eldest daughter of Lord Grantham, is played by Susan Dockery, known to Discworld fans as Susan in the television adaptation of Hogfather.) It ran for six series on ITV between 2010 and 2015, and became a worldwide phenomenon, especially after it was added to the streaming service Netflix. The story has since been continued in two films: Downton Abbey in 2019, set during a visit by the royal family to Downton in 1927, and Downton Abbey: A New Era in 2022, set in 1928 and involving a film crew hiring the Abbey as a location, and the family going on a trip to France to visit a villa the Dowager Countess (played by Maggie Smith) is bequeathing to one of her great granddaughters. Fellowes also created the HBO series The Gilded Age, set in 1880s America, and there’s been talk of potentially featuring a younger version of Smith’s character in that show.
When Ben mentions “the witch in that Tiffany Aching book“, he’s referring to Miss Level, the witch with two bodies – kind of the opposite of Miss Pickles and Miss Pointer – who mentors Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky. For more on that, listen to #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
The Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme is an image of the actor character Rick Dalton pointing at a movie screen when he sees himself, taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino). It’s often used in conjunction with a quote, retweet or another image to show the poster self-identifies with it. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, and #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
Ben hasn’t yet confirmed whether its Mr Shine or Grag Bashfulsson who warns Vimes he might have to rein in his anger more than usual, but he’ll keep looking.
Vetinari worries he’s pushed Vimes too far in Men at Arms, though Ben has the reasoning backwards – he’s worried because, as he mentions to Leonard da Quirm, Vimes didn’t punch the wall.
Tracey Emin is a British artist known for her personal, confessional works in a variety of media, and was considered an enfant terrible of the Young British Artists (or YBAs) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her most famous piece is probably Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a tent appliquéd with the names of all her sexual partners, which was destroyed in a fire in a storage facility in 2004. The “modern” artworks mentioned in the book are by Daniella Pouter, and include Don’t Talk to Me About Mondays, described as a pile of rags, which might be a reference to Emin’s famous 1998 work My Bed, literally the artist’s bed piled with items from her bedroom in disarray.
“The Peaky Blinders thing” is a reference to the flat caps with sharpened pennies sewn into the brim, used as concealed weapons by Willikins street gang. The real “Peaky Blinders” were a street gang in Birmingham in the 1880s through to the 1910s; there’s a story that they used caps with razor blades sewn into them as weapons, leading to the gang’s name, but the name pre-dates disposable razor blades so this is probably apocryphal. A more sound theory is it referred to their sartorial style: they did wear flat caps, but also dressed rather well for a street gang, so the name probably referred to the hats and that they were fancy, as “blinder” is Birmingham slang for “dapper”. Another possibility is their technique of grabbing a robbery victim’s hat from behind and pulling it down over their eyes, so they wouldn’t be seen and couldn’t be identified. The term has become popular again since the BBC series Peaky Blinders gained popularity, though it’s a heavily fictionalised version of the real gang. It ran for six series between 2013 and 2022.
If you’re interested in a full count of who dies in the Discworld books, you’re in luck: The L-Space Web fan site has just such a record! Like a lot of things on L-Space, “The Death Lists” wasn’t maintained all the way to the end of the series, but peters out around the time newsgroups and static websites were being replaced by social media and wikis. But, in this case, it only goes up to Thud!so happily (if that’s the right word) it covers most of the books we’ve discussed on the podcast up to this point. Though you might want to take it with a grain of salt – we note the Thud! entry doesn’t seem to include the four mining dwarfs left to die under Ankh-Morpork after hearing what the Cube had to say…
Ben would like to apologise for being needlessly pedantic about the two Discworld books which don’t feature Death, and his roasting at Matt’s hands is well deserved. Despite that, we can confirm he remembered correctly that they are The Wee Free Men (which we covered in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”) and Snuff. The Reaper Man thing is absolutely not true, do not go back and check or listen to #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door”.
The Thing appears in the Bromeliad, mostly the first and final books Truckers (see #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”) and Wings (see #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings”). In those books the Thing is a small, seemingly indestructible black cube passed down through generations of Nomes to Old Torrit and then Masklin, which used to occasionally speak and provide advice. When Masklin brings it to Arnold Bros, it recharges itself using the Store’s electricity and reveals that it is “Flight Recorder and Navigation Computer of the Starship Swan”, helping Masklin with a lot of his plans to get the Nomes out of the Store and eventually back to their home planet. Cube-shaped computers and recording devices also appear in other media, most notably in Star Wars, where both the Jedi and the Sith store holographic recordings on “holocrons” which are commonly cube-shaped.
The main mentions of school projects in Pratchett’s work occur in the Johnny books. In Chapter 5 of Johnny and the Dead, Johnny uses the excuse of a school project to ask about the surviving member of the Blackbury Pals, claiming that “You could get away with anything if you said you were doing a project.” He uses this trick again in Johnny and the Dead in order to speak to Mrs Tachyon when she’s in hospital, and his legit history project comes in handy when the kids have to disguise themselves for a trip back in time to the 1940s.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) is a Disney musical blending live-action and animation, much like Mary Poppins. Also like Mary Poppins, its based on novels for children by an English author, in this case Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1944) and Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The protagonist, Ms Eglantine Price (played by Angela Lansbury in the film, in her screen musical debut), is a single woman living in a coastal village in Dorset during World War II who is, against her will, saddled with some children evacuated from London. They discover Ms Price is learning witchcraft by correspondence, and end up joining her on an adventure to complete her education and locate a powerful spell she believes can aid in the war effort. It’s not specifically included in the list of Pratchett Family Movies (or PFMs) mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 9 of A Life With Footnotes, but it wouldn’t look out of place next to the likes of Time Bandits, The Princess Bride and Ladyhawke.
Irish, British and American actor Angela Lansbury (1925-2022) had a long and distinguished career on stage and screen. She is best remembered as Jessica Fletcher, the crime writer protagonist of the popular American cosy mystery TV series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons between 1984 and 1996, followed by four TV movies up until 2003. But she was also an accomplished singer, and played many famous roles in stage musicals including being the original Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Potts in the Disney film Beauty and the Beast. Her last role being a cameo appearance as herself in Ryan Johnson’s Glass Onion in 2022, and she died on 11 October, 2022, not long before we recorded this episode.
In Thud!, while complaining to Cheery about the announcement in the Times that the post office is issuing memorial Koom Valley stamps, Vimes says “Remember the cabbage-scented stamp last month?” This is an unusually direct reference to the events of the immediately previous Discworld novel, Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal”). In Chapter 12, once stamp collecting has started to take off, Junior Postman Stanley Howler presents his own design to Moist for a stamp depicting a cabbage, printed with cabbage ink and using gum made from broccoli: “A Salute to the Cabbage Industry of the Sto Plains”. This directly links the two books as being closer in time than the gap between their publication, and reinforces the basic idea that the Discworld books more or less happen in the order in which they’re published, with a couple of notable exceptions.
Ridcully certainly has a busy month. The above link suggests that there is less than a month between Ridcully overseeing Moist’s race against the Clacks in Going Postal and tricking out Vimes’ coaches in Thud! Ridcully also appears at an important meeting near the end of Making Money, and also has his head printed on the fee-dollar note when Moist introduces paper money in the final chapter. Of note: The Science of Discworld III (see #Pratchat59) and the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices” (see #Pratchat63) were also published the same year as Thud!, so Ridcully may also be dealing with A. E. Pessimal’s inspection and an invasion of Auditors into Roundworld at around the same time. A busy month indeed!
Brian Blessed (b. 1936) is an English actor from Yorkshire who is known for his booming voice. His best-known roles include King Richard IV in the first series of Blackadder, Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen in the 1981 film version of Flash Gordon, and the voice of Boss Nass in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But he’s been a fixture of British television, stage and film for years, popping up in memorable guest roles in Space: 1999, Blake’s 7, Doctor Who and many more. As well as many cult films of the 1980s, he’s been in Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare films Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993) and Hamlet (1996). Of note to Terry Pratchett fans, he appears as William “Bill” Stickers, deceased communist, in ITV’s 1995 adaptation of Johnny and the Dead.
Lord Melchett, played by Stephen Fry, is another character from the British sitcom Blackadder. He appears in the second series, Blackadder II, as an obsequious member of the royal court and Lord Edmund Blackadder’s rival for the favour of Queen Elizabeth I. In this instance, though, Ben is really thinking more of Lord Melchett’s descendent, the Blackadder Goes Forth character General Melchett (also played by Fry), who is more over-the-top eccentric and dangerously in charge of British soldiers on the front line during World War I.
We’ve mentioned Back to the Future before, most recently in #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our discussion of Night Watch. In the film, eccentric scientist Doc Brown creates a time machine using a DeLorean sports car. Its time travel device, the “flux capacitor”, requires the vehicle to travel at 88 miles per hour (about 142 kilometres per hour); when it hits that speed the car and its occupants are instantly transported to the destination point in time, leaving behind flaming tyre tracks. At the end of the first film, Doc returns from a trip to the future to take his young friend Marty “back to the future”; Marty worries they don’t have enough road to get up to 88mph, to which Doc famously replies “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” The DeLorean then begins to fly… Pratchett was a fan of the film – the biography A Life With Footnotes recounts the story of the time he almost bought a replica of the DeLorean time machine – and he previously referenced it in Soul Music, in which Binky leaves flaming hoof prints behind when he travels time-bendingly fast.
George R. R. Martin is the bestselling author of the A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series of books that begins with A Game of Thrones. The series was famously adapted for television by HBO as Game of Thrones. The novels are very long, but don’t all cover the same amount of time; by some estimates, the narrative time that passes varies between as little as a few months to more than a year. And then you have to factor in that the seasons of the world of the book are also irregular, for undisclosed fantastical reasons…
Listener Graeme Kay sent us in his tip that he thinks Koom Valley might be based on a place in Far North Queensland, not least because Pratchett is known to have spent plenty of time on holiday in that part of Australia. The specific place Graeme was thinking of is at Babinda Boulders on the land of the Yidindji people south of Cairns. Graeme mentioned “The Devil’s Pool”, but it’s one of several specific spots at Babinda which are connected by rushing water (the others are “The Chute” and “The Washing Machine”). Despite warning signs and local oral traditions about Siren-like dangers, younger tourists continue to visit those parts of the Boulders. More than twenty people have died there in the last century or so, largely because of underwater hazards that make it very difficult to survive being dragged under by the current. Those hazards do sound very similar to the ones encountered by Vimes in Koom Valley, and which would have surely killed him if not for the influence of the Summoning Dark. Sadly this is not a phenomenon of the past; the latest death occurred in December 2021, and a recent safety review completed in January 2023 recommended better signage to try and prevent more deaths. You can read about that, and see pictures of the location and diagrams of the hazards there, in this ABC news article.
We discussed Carpe Jugulum, the last of the witches books, in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”.
Granny Weatherwax battles with her sister Lily in Witches Abroad. It’s never stated clearly, but it’s suggested that Lily is older than Granny, though her use of magic makes her look younger. She’s never described as her twin.
Granny doesn’t say anything about it, but in Carpe Jugulum when she is fighting the influence of Count de Magpyr, she has to choose between the darkness and the light to escape the lands of Death. In the end, she faces the light…and steps backwards. A very Granny Weatherwax solution, and reminiscent of her dilemma in the mirror dimension in Witches Abroad.
Liz says “Revved up like a deuce”, which is a lyric from “Blinded by the Light”, a song by Bruce Springsteen released on first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. It was famously covered by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on the 1976 album The Roaring Silence, and that version was a top ten hit in several countries.
We’ve previously mentioned Sophie’s Choice, the 1979 final novel by American author William Styron, which was adapted into a film in 1981 starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. While it’s meant to be a surprise revelation in the story, it’s now famous for Sophie – a Polish immigrant who escaped Nazi Germany – having to choose which of her two children would be killed when she was sent to Auschwitz, with both of them being killed if she refused to choose. It’s since entered popular culture as a shorthand for an impossible (or at least very difficult) choice.
We mention a few famous fictional butlers this episode, including Alfred Pennyworth (Batman), Mr Butler (Miss FIsher’s Murder Mysteries), Alfred Pennyworth (not to be confused with Pennywise the Clown), and Jeeves (of Jeeves and Wooster fame). We previously talked about Willikins and the “battle butler” trope in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés”, when discussing Jingo.
The line about a god of policemen does not actually appear in Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24), and Vimes doesn’t say it – though it is attributed to him. In The Last Hero (#Pratchat55), when Carrot arrives in Dunmanifestin, chief god of the Disc Blind Io asks Carrot if there’s a god of policemen. ‘No, sir,’ Carrot replies. ‘Coppers would be far too suspicious of anyone calling themselves a god of policemen to believe in one.’ There’s also this line from near the start of Night Watch (#Pratchat54), which explains why most Watch members are buried in the Cemetery of Small Gods: “Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.”
Despite his self-doubt, Ben is right: igneous rock is indeed formed by volcanoes. Specifically, igneous rock is formed from cooled magma or lava, forms of molten rock that naturally occur beneath the Earth’s crust but come nearer the surface in volcanos (magma) or are released during an eruption (lava).
Liz and Ben are both sort of right about the difference between concrete and cement. Cement is the binding agent used to make concrete, mortar, stucco and grout. It’s a combination of limestone, clay, shells and silica sand, which is mixed with water and then sets hard when it dries out. It’s not often used on its own, but instead combined with aggregate (a mixture of gravel and sand) to make concrete, which is the hard substance used for footpaths, driveways and structures. Most cement today is “Portland cement”, a fine grey powder developed in the 19th century by father and son Joseph and William Aspdin, who named it for its resemblance to Portland stone from the island of Portland in Dorset in the south of England. It mostly replaced the use of hydraulic lime, or “quicklime”. Cement is also combined with sand to make mortar, the “glue” that holds bricks together, and stucco, also known as render, used as a wall covering and to fashion ornamentations; and grout, used to fill the gaps between tiles. While all three use the same basic ingredients, they use different recipes, techniques and additives to achieve different consistencies suited to each use.
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, discussing the 1973 short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, with special guest Andy Matthews.
Iconographic Evidence
Here’s the Two Ronnies sketch mentioned by Andy in which they use letters (and numbers) instead of words. It’s framed as “Swedish Made Simple”, a “Swedish lesson in Norwegian”, in which the subtitles use only single letters and numbers to represent words. It seems to be from the second episode of the fourth series of the show, broadcast on BBC Two in January 1975 – and please be warned that the sensibility of the sketch reflects the state of comedy in that era, especially in the way it’s ended.
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a play on the “GNU Terry Pratchett”, which many websites – including this one, if our plugin is working correctly – add to a special “Clacks overhead” bit of information. This is a reference to Going Postal, in which a message prefixed GNU is sent up and down the Clacks system forever. John Dearheart’s name is preserved this way, in accordance with the idea in Pratchett’s writing that “a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”. GNU is also a reference to the Roundworld GNU Project, a cornerstone of the free software movement which set out to create a free Unix-like operating system. In this context, GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”
We mention a lot of Terry’s other books this episode; here’s a list with our episodes:
In the 1999 film The Matrix, future humanity is enslaved by sentient machines, who use the humans as living batteries after environmental disaster prevents traditional methods of power generation. They keep the humans subjugated by plugging them into an artificial reality known as “The Matrix”, but there are some free humans who present the imprisoned ones with the truth. Famously one of them – Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne – does so by offering a prospective recruit two pills. The red one will allow them to see the truth of their situation, exiting the Matrix, never to return. The Wachowskis, who wrote and directed the film, turned it into a trilogy by making two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, in 2003. A fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, was released in 2021.
Owls are indeed mentioned in the Bromeliad – Granny Morkie describes them in Diggers while attempting to “cheer up” the Nomes who’ve gone outside at night to try and rescue Dorcas. In her words: “Cunning’ devils, owls. You never hear ‘em till they’re almost on top of you.” The Nomes who grew up in the Store are terrified.
The four books collecting Pratchett’s early stories are Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (which contains this story), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard and The Time-traveling Caveman. Most of the stories are from the Bucks Free Press, but Father Christmas’s Fake Beard also contains a number of Christmas-themed stories from other points in Pratchett’s career.
The origins of the name Rincewind are actually known: it comes fromthe long-running humour column “By the Way” in the Daily Express newspaper. Written by various writers under the pen name “Beachcomber”, “By the Way” was a broad spoof of society news, with short snippets of nonsense about various fictional characters. One group of frequently recurring characters were “twelve red-bearded dwarfs” who were highly litigious, and who were at one point given individual names – one of which was “Churm Rincewind”. As mentioned in the Annotated Pratchett File entry for The Colour of Magic, Terry read a lot of the columns in published collections when he was 13, but didn’t realise that’s where he’d picked up the name until his friend Dave Langford pointed it out many years later. So Ben’s dramatic recreation wasn’t too far off the mark…
“Fishing from the same stream” is mentioned in the L-Space wiki, though the specific quote about it is not sourced. Pratchett is said to have invoked this when saying its ridiculous that anyone would suggest a certain famous author had plagiarised him just because they both had schools of magic in their books, since it was an old concept that both had drawn on. “That’s how genres work,” he says, and indeed sites like TV Tropes and All the Tropes would agree.
In the film Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant and his young friends escape a Tyrannosaurus rex in part because Grant advises them its vision is “based on movement” – much as Rincemangle advises his fellow gnomes. But Rincemangle is partially correct – cats are ambush predators and while they have excellent night vision are relatively short-sighted. While it’s not true that stationary objects or mice are invisible to them, they are instinctively drawn to movement and use it to identify prey when laying in wait. To see why this is probably a silly assumption to make about T. rex, try to imagine the dinosaur as it appears in the film hiding in the grass and waiting to ambush its prey… Modern thought is that T. rex probably had great eyesight, just like many modern predatory birds, making it able to see prey from quite a long distance and chase it down. The assumption also appears in Crighton’s original 1990 novel, though in that case Grant makes the observation after seeing the live dinosaurs, though this is backtracked in the sequel, The Lost World.
Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer, and one of the most influential Spanish-language writers in the world. While he’s most famous for his short stories, which came to the attention of English-language readers in the 1970s, he also wrote novels, poetry and nonfiction, and perpetrated a great number of literary hoaxes. His most famous stories were mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, and include “The Library of Babel”, about a library that contains every possible book that could ever exist, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which Borges discovers that a secret society invented a country and the world of its legends, and by doing so conjured them into being.
More notes coming soon!
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