Theses are the notes and errata for episode 1, “Boots Theory“, featuring guest Cal Wilson discussing the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms.
We did indeed have Cal back to discuss Sourcery – see #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. Cal also returned for our fiftieth episode, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, to discuss Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Tragically Cal passed away unexpectedly in 2023; but a person’s not dead while their name is still spoken. GNU Cal Wilson.
Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, and the second to feature the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Ben does now write these things down (and, indeed, has a very comprehensive spreadsheet).
What Ben meant about the copyright on “Discworld” is that this is the first book in which “Discworld” appears on the imprint page as a registered trademark. Intellectual property (or IP) law is a complex topic, and can differ greatly from region to region, but to cover the basics:
A trademark (denoted by ™️ or ®) is a “sign” that shows a product was made by a certain person or company. The sign can be almost anything: a word, a specific colour or style of packaging, a logo, a design, even a sound. It’s an old concept, similar to the “maker’s mark” used by artisans that is often mentioned in Antique Roadshow on silverware, jewellery, ceramics and so on. Anyone can start using the ™️ symbol, which suggests a common law trademark, but the ® denotes a registered trademark which is more easily enforceable by law. These are managed by government agencies (e.g. IP Australia). Also worthy of note is that if you have a trademark, you have to actively be using it, and you must defend it if someone else starts using it, or you will likely lose it.
It didn’t come up in this episode, but there are some complexities involved if a copyright belongs to a company and that company ceases to exist without its assets being transferred to another company or person. In the UK this can mean ownership of a work transfers half to the original creators, and half to the Crown, which has led to speculation that King Charles now owns half the rights to the Discworld videogames – though this has yet to be resolved…
You’ve probably heard of the Thames, but the Yarra is the common name for the river Birrarung or Biarrarung Marr, which flows through the heart of Melbourne, or Narrm. It runs for nearly 250 kilometres from the Yarra Ranges in inland Victoria to the ocean in Port Phillip Bay, though its course and nature has been changed extensively since European colonisation. It was previously nicknamed “the upside down river” due to the golden-brown muddy colouring it acquires by the time it flows through Melbourne. This is also the product of colonisation, as land clearing and mining have increased the erosion of surrounding fine clay into the water.
The negative reviewer of Pratchett’s work to which Ben refers was Northern Irish poet and literary critic Tom Paulin, who appeared on BBC2’s Late Review television program and derided Pratchett, writing him off as a populist: “… selling thousands of copies – a complete amateur – doesn’t even write in chapters – hasn’t a clue.” This seems to have been in around 1993 or 1994; Pratchett proudly reproduced the quote in the front many of his books, with the earliest example Ben can find being in the 1995 Corgi paperback of Interesting Times.
Terry Pratchett’s debut novel, The Carpet People, was first published in 1971, when Pratchett was 23 years old. However an earlier version of the story was serialised as some of his very first published fiction in the Bucks’ Free Press in 1965, when he was only 17! Most of the instalments of that version appear in the second collection of his early stories, Dragons at Crumbling Castle, published shortly after Pratchett’s death in 2015.
While the Vimes Boots Theory is articulated in the way of Pratchett, the idea behind it is of course not new. We’d like to thank Jeanette Hall on Twitter, who shared a link to an earlier version of the Boots Theory! In 1914, Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan wrote published the semi-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, “Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell.” (Tressell was the pen-name used by Noonan.) Based on his life working in Hastings between 1906 and 1910, the book contains a passage about the price of stockings and coal and how they are the means by which “the working classes are robbed.” We’ve included an excerpt below, but you can read the original text at the Union History website shared by Jeanette. You can also see the original manuscript! (This feels especially poignant because Ben’s own Great Great Grandfather was a painter in Belfast until his death in 1910 prompted the McKenzies to migrate to Australia.)
Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles. Everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish which is dear at any price.
Six weeks previously Owen bought a pair of second-hand boots for three shillings and they were now literally falling to pieces. Nora’s shoes were in much the same condition, but, as she said, it did not matter so much about hers because there was no need for her to go out if the weather were not fine.
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell, 1914
Also of note: the Vimes Boots Theory influenced the work of UK equality and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who in January 2022 created the Vimes Boots Poverty Index. The Index was intended to be a record of the prices of staple foods and other essentials over time, to demonstrate the disproportionate impact of rising prices on the poor. It was also specifically meant to show that government reports which only take inflation into account are inadequate, since they are not an accurate indicator of the way goods prices change. The Pratchett Estate – particularly Rhianna Pratchett – wholeheartedly endorsed this use of Vimes’ name. In the end, media and social media attention for the idea (using the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex) was enough to persuade the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) to change how they calculated cost of living expenses, largely making the compilation of the Index unnecessary. You can read more about it on the L-Space wiki.
Scooby-Doo is a children’s adventure show which began in 1969 with the Hanna-Barbera animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! It centres on a group of mystery-solving teenagers: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and Shaggy’s dog, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. Sometimes calling themselves “Mystery Inc.”, the group travel America in a mini-van called the Mystery Machine investigating supposedly supernatural occurrences. Famously most of their adventures end by revealing that the ghost, monster or other weirdness was a hoax all along, perpetrated by an old man in a costume. The show was hugely influential – not least because it helped fill the gap left after more violent superhero cartoons of the 60s like Space Ghost and The Herculoids were cancelled following protests from parent groups. There have been numerous animated series and films, and even live-action films, since 1969, and more are still being made. The characters are not usually explicitly romantically linked; Cal references a reboot that had genius Velma and dorky hippie Shaggy dating, and this has happened at least a couple of times. They are shown to try dating in both the 2010 animated series Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated and the 2011 live-action film Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster (a sequel to the 2009 reboot of the previous live-action films from 2002 and 2004). For the record, in both versions they quickly realise they don’t have a spark and remain “just friends”.
It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King in which a group of teenagers face a nameless evil creature, the titular “It”, which changes shape to evoke fear in its victims. It primarily appears in the shape of a clown named “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”. In a memorable sequence from early in the novel – replicated in both the 1990 TV mini-series adaptation and the first of the two-part film adaptations in 2017 – the Clown appears in the town sewer. In both versions Pennywise has primarily white-face makeup, not dissimilar to Paul Kidby’s version of Dr Whiteface. (“It” was portrayed by Tim Curry in 1990, and Bill Skarsgård in 2017.)
Clowns in our world can and do copyright their face makeup, and the egg gallery is based on the “Clown and Character Registry”, where many clowns actually did register to have their makeup painted on a goose egg and displayed. In the UK, the tradition can be traced back to Stan Built in the 1930s, though most of his original eggs were damaged or destroyed. In 1988 (or 1984 according to some sources), Clown Bluey, Chairman of Clowns International at the time, resurrected the tradition. This mini documentary from 2017 features Debbie Smith, the Clown Egg Gallery artist from 2010 to 2023. Clowns International still seems to run the egg gallery, with their website including a form to order a pair of eggs (one for the gallery and one for you), now painted by current artist Julie Proctor. So we’re sorry again, clowns. (Thanks to Maia in Michigan, who put us onto some sources via Twitter which helped us update this entry!)
Ben uses commedia dell’arte more-or-less correctly.
99% Invisible is a podcast all about design, hosted by Roman Mars. The episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben while discussing the Alchemist’s Guild is “The Post-Billiards Age” from May 2015. (This episode will get mentioned again in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.)
There are indeed ghosts on the Discworld, appearing in several of the novels. We’ll be meeting some of them fairly soon, as one plays a major role in Wyrd Sisters. (See #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”.)
The final Discworld book is actually The Shepherd’s Crown; I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth-last, and the second-last to feature young witch Tiffany Aching. (We try to keep our spreadsheet handy in future episodes to avoid such basic mistakes.)
“Shoot” is used for arrows, as the term predates guns by many centuries.
Not only are Lord Vetinari’s plans for the future unknown, but it has also never been revealed how he ascended to the position of Patrician in the first place. We do get a little of his backstory in Night Watch; see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”.
We are aware that despite being asked “which Guild would you join”, we decided we would be wizards, witches or members of the Watch, none of which have an official guild – at least at the time of Men at Arms. See #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, for the creation of at least a temporary guild of Watchmen in The Fifth Elephant.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 76, “Real Men Don’t Drink…Decaf”, discussing the 2003 standalone Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment with guest Freya Daly Sadgrove.
Iconographic Evidence
Here’s “how is prangent formed”, the most famous YouTube compilation of misspelled Yahoo Answers questions about being pregnant, from 21 October 2016. While it’s mostly a bit of fun, it’s important to remember these were all asked by real people who had real fears and worries, just no way to edit their hastily (and perhaps secretly) typed questions. The US has a lot to answer for when it comes to sex (and indeed general) education…
Here’s that Traffic Accident Commission ad we mentioned, but please be warned, it’s pretty intense (though not gory).
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a bit of a mash-up of two ideas: first, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, the 1982 book by Bruce Feirstein satirising American ideas of masculinity (and which we last mentioned in our episode about The Unadulterated Cat, “The Cat in the Prat”). The second is another riff on the classic vampire line “I don’t drink…wine”, originally from the 1931 film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi (though the original line was “I never drink…wine”). Just to be clear: we don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking decaf, or believe in the idea of a “real man”. You’re a man if you think you are; that’s how gender works.
“Let’s Get Down to Business” is the first line of the song “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. Mulan is an adaptation of a Chinese folk story from around the 4th to 6th centuries BCE about Hua Mulan, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fulfil her family’s conscription obligations, saving her father from being forced to join the army. She goes on to win great battles and achieve great fame. In the film, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is sung by Mulan’s Captain, Li Shang (played by BD Wong, but sung by Donny Osmond!), during a training montage for Mulan and her fellow fresh recruits.
Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011) was a British fantasy children’s author. As one of Liz’s other favourite authors, we’ve mentioned her a lot – and one of these days we’ll do an episode or more about her books. Her most famous works include the Chrestomanci series about magical parallel universes, and Howl’s Moving Castle. The titular Howl is a mighty wizard, but the protagonist of the story is Sophie, the eldest daughter of a hat shop owner, who is cursed with old age by the Witch of the Wastes. Sophie gets a job as a cleaner for the wizard Howl, and makes a bargain with his fire demon, Calcifer, that he will restore her youth if she can free him from his contract to the wizard. It was very succesfully (if very loosely) adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli in 2004.
You can read the full text of the Daily Express review of Monstrous Regiment on Colin Smythe’s web page for the book. It opens with: “Not so long ago in a pub far, far, away Terry Pratchett announced that he had discovered an interesting fact. In the American Civil War more than 300 women had enlisted in the army dressed as men. There may have been more. These were just one ones who told people about it afterwards.”
Questionable Content (QC for short) is a long-running webcomic written and illustrated by American-Canadian cartoonist Jeph Jacques. It started in 2003, and is a slice-of-life story about indie rock fan Martin Reed and friends, set in a slightly futuristic world where artificial intelligence and advanced cybernetics are commonplace. At the time of writing it’s had more than 5,200 instalments! Elliot is a character introduced in 2011, an employee at a bakery first visited by Martin in Comic 1,845. Like Paul Perks, he’s a big but gentle man.
We previously met the small-but-officious Nuggan in the “illustrated Discworld fable” The Last Hero, as discussed in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
For the curious, you can find a list of Abominations Unto Nuggan mentioned in this book (and elsewhere – mainly The Last Hero and The Compleat Discworld Atlas) at the L-Space Wiki.
For reference, the members of the Monstrous Regiment are:
Lieutenant Blouse (no first name given; later promoted to much higher rank)
Sergeant Jack Jackrum (no other name given; later promoted to Sergeant Major)
Corporal Strappi (later revealed to (probably?) be a Captain and a “political”)
Private Oliver “Ozzer” Perks (Polly; later promoted to Sergeant)
Private Maladicta (Maladict)
Private Carborundum (Jade)
Private Igor (Igorina)
Private “Tonker” Halter (Magda)
Private “Shufti” Manickle (Betty)
Private “Wazzer” Goom (Alice)
Private “Lofty” Tewt (Tilda)
Ben gives a short account of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women in the footnote, but if you want to read it, the full text is available via Project Goodmountain – er, Gutenberg.
We first heard about Terry Pratchett’s 2014 interview at the Wheeler Centre during the recording of #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“ – our guest, Michael Williams, was director of the Centre at the time, and was the interviewer for the event. His story about making a faux pas – and Terry’s reaction – are included in the third episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. The full discussion, titled “Imagination, Not Intelligence, Made Us Human”, is available via YouTube. There’s a lot of good stuff in it! Pratchett mentions 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”; this is around the 31:30 mark.
“Sweet Polly Oliver” (also known as “Pretty Polly Oliver”) is song #367 in the Roud folk song index. It comes from around 1840 or earlier, and the first lines are “As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed / A sudden strange fancy came into her head.” As Liz mentions, in the song Polly is following her lover, whom she eventually finds promoted to Captain and wounded; the doctors give up on him, but she nurses him back to health and they get married.
There are many other references to real protest and folk songs in the book; here are some of the folk songs:
“The World Turned Upside Down” – a British protest song from the 1640s, railing against restrictions placed on the celebration of Christmas by the British Parliament. A long-standing but unlikely story is that it was played by the British army band when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans after the Battle of Yorktown, hence the Hamilton song “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”. (Usually the band would play a song from the victor’s nation, but supposedly George Washington refused this tradition and told them to play a British song.)
“The Devil Shall Be My Sergeant” – a reference to “The Rogue’s March”, a song which was once traditionally played when drumming a disgraced solider out of the army. It had various sets of unofficial lyrics, many of which included the line “the Divil shall be me sergeant”. When it was no longer used officially by armies, it was played as “rough music” – yes, that was a thing on Roundworld, both in a similar sense as in I Shall Wear Midnight (see #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No Eyes is Back”), and more literally as a tune to shame followers of unpopular causes.
“Johnny Has Gone for a Solider” – an Irish folk song popular during the American Revolutionary War.
“The Girl I Left Behind Me” – Roud index #262, also known as “The Girl I Left Behind”. This is an English folk song from Elizabethan times, traditionally sung when soldiers marched off to war or a naval vessel set sail. It’s also the source of the lyric “Her golden hair in ringlets fair” which Igor quotes when coming up with excuses for Polly to have her old hair in her bag.
“Lisbon” or “William and Nancy” or “William and Polly” – #551 in the Roud index, this is possibly the song that Jackrum mentions when explaining the “Cheesemongers” nickname, which begins with the line “’Twas on a Monday morning, all in the month of May”. It’s sung by a sailor, William, who’s about to sail for Lisbon, and is leaving his pregnant lover, Nancy or Polly, behind. Nancy writes back to him saying she’ll disguise herself as a man so she can sail with him and save him from the terrors of the navy. The rest of the song doesn’t really match Jackrum’s description, which mashes up a whole lot of different bawdy folk tunes. There’s also “Dashing Away With the Smoothing Iron”, #869 in the Roud index, which begins with the first half of the line; it’s about a man repeatedly admiring a woman while she’s doing her ironing, and was the inspiration for Flanders and Swann’s “The Gas-Man Cometh”.
We read The Last Continent way back in 2020 in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”. The Last Continent is the twenty-second Discworld book, published in 1998, nine books and four years and four months before Monstrous Regiment. (Pratchett was still publishing two books a year at the time.)
Traditionally, tailors do indeed ask if gentlemen “dress to the left or right”, but stories conflict over whether this is because they intend to make said gentleman’s trousers more roomy on that side, or whether they just ask to avoid any awkward moments while taking inside leg measurements.
There have been many Roundworld equivalents of the Nugganite Working Girl Schools; some of the most infamous were the Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. These were filled with so-called “fallen women” – mostly, but not exclusively, sex workers and pregnant girls – who were forced to work for free and suffered abuse at the hands of the staff.
Indulgences are a practice of the Catholic church. Ben is referring to “full indulgence”, a complete forgiveness for all sins offered to Crusaders, but regular indulgences are the reason for the minor penances of saying a number of “Hail Mary”s in order to be forgiven for sins confessed. When they were introduced the idea was that previous Catholics had lived such perfect lives that there’s a “treasury of merit” within the church, allowing them to give out lesser penances than the older, much harsher ones.
Ogres having layers is a reference to the 2001 DreamWorks animated film Shrek, in which the titular ogre (played by Mike Myers with a Scottish accent) explains to a talking Donkey (played by Eddie Murphy) that he’s not just the awful smelly monster that everyone assumes: “Ogres are like onions. They have layers. You peel them back and you find something else.” The film is (very loosely) based on a 1990 picture book by William Steig.
Maladict’s hallucinations make many general references to the tropes of Vietnam War films, but the main specific one we could spot was from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In the film, the character Joker (played by Matthew Modine) writes “BORN TO KILL” on his hat, which matches the undead Maladict’s “BORN TO DIE”.
Matchbox Twenty are an American rock band from Orlando, Florida, fronted by singer and keyboard player Rob Thomas. Their debut 1996 post-grunge album Yourself or Somebody Like You was a massive hit, including the song “Push”, most recently seen being sung by various versions of Ken in the 2023 movie Barbie.
Blink-182 are a Californian rock band formed in 1992 whose third album, Enema of the State (1999), was probably their biggest success, with the singles “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” doing well in many English-speaking countries at the time.
We last spoke of Danger 5 in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”. Created for SBS in 2012, Danger 5 is an action-comedy from the Australian comedy team Dinosaur. The first season is a parody of old school “men’s adventure” magazines and TV shows, with the titular “Danger 5” team repeatedly thwarting (though failing to capture or kill) Adolf Hitler in an absurd 1960s version of World War II. The second season from 2015 moves the team, Hitler and the target of their parody into the 1980s. You might still find it on Blu-Ray or DVD if you’re lucky; it was released by Madman Entertainment, but isn’t widely available. It was on Netflix in several territories for a while, but not any more; you can at least find clips, cast commentaries and even the prequel episode “The Diamond Girls” on the Dinosaur YouTube channel. In 2020 there was a new “Only on Audible” podcast series, Danger 5: Stereo Adventures. Dinosaur, or at least some of their creative team, have since created the animated series Koala Man for Hulu (it’s on Disney+ in Australia).
A few 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 58, “The Barbarian Switch“, discussing the 1988 short story “Final Reward“.
Iconographic Evidence
We’ve so far been unable to find the Edwardian cartoon of the shocked boy reading the final Sherlock Holmes story, but we’ll add it here if we can!
In the meantime though, here’s the Czech short film of “Final Reward” – 2013’s Poslední odměna (The Final Reward), adapted by writer and director Lasidlav Plecitý, and starring Jarek Hyebrant as Kevin Dogger (aka Kevina Jareše), Lenka Zahradnická as Nicky (aka Nikola), Tomáš Matonoha as Dogger’s agent, and Marko Igonda as Erdan the Barbarian (aka Barbara Erdana). It’s in Czech, but there are English subtitles. It’s more of a student film – made with the resources of a film school and many supporters – than a fan film.
Notes and Errata
The episode title was inspired by Netflix’s 2018 Christmas movie The Princess Switch, a romantic comedy remix of The Prince and the Pauper which stars former pop star Vanessa Hudgens. If you like The Christmas Prince and films of that ilk, you’ll love this one. It was popular enough to spawn two sequels, though the first one is (in Ben’s opinion) the best.
The Edwardian era from which Penny’s favourite comfort fiction comes is quite short: it includes the years between 1901 and 1914, beginning with the reign of King Edward VII and concluding with the outbreak of World War I. The books Penny mentioned are:
Pollyanna was written in 1912 by American author Eleanor Porter. The titular orphan girl is sent to live with her wealthy but stern Aunt in Vermont. Throughout her misadventures she maintains “The Glad Game” – a persistent optimism she learned from her father as a coping mechanism. (It’s a bit mean we know use “Pollyanna” to mean “overly or annoyingly positive”.) It was the first of twelve “Glad Books” about the character, though Porter herself only wrote the first two. Pollyanna was hugely successful at the time, ranking in the top ten best-selling books in the US for three years between 1913 and 1915, peaking at number two in 1914.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was written in 1903 by American author Kate Douglas Wiggin. Rebecca is not an orphan, but is sent to live with two of her mother’s sisters in Riverboro, Maine to improve her prospects, as her family is large and poor. She also exhibits a joy for life that inspires her Aunts.
We’ve yet to identify the one with the violin-playing child who redeems a crusty old farmer; let us know if you recognise this one!
Little Lord Fauntleroy was written by English-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett, originally in serialised form from 1885 to 1886. That makes it Victorian rather than Edwardian, but it fits in here. Cedric Errol lives in “genteel poverty” in New York with his mother after the death of his English father; his grandfather, a wealthy Earl who was disappointed that his son married an American, offers them a house if they will come to England so Cedric can be raised and educated as an English aristocrat, but of course in the end it’s the Earl who is educated by the boy.
The Secret Garden was also written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, serialised from 1910 to 1911. The protagonist Mary Lennox has a pretty miserable start: her British parents live in India and do not want or care for her, and being doted on by their servants leaves her spoilt and ill-tempered. When her parents die in a cholera epidemic she is eventually sent to live with her uncle Archibald Craven, described as a “hunchback”, who lives in a country house on the Yorkshire Moors.
By Gutenberg Press, Penny is referring to Project Gutenberg – the oldest digital library in the world. It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael Hart, and is run by volunteers. It works to create and freely offer electronic versions of books which are out of copyright – including all of the above books!
Of note is a recent Twitter thread discussing Pratchett’s allusions to classic children’s fiction:
I really think Terry Pratchett would be a good point of focus for this. He is so very wise on stories and stories of childhood. Perhaps @20thcenturymarc @LegoAnkhMorpork may have some ideas.
We’ve previously discussed Tom Brown’s School Days in our episode about Pyramids (#Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“).
George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008) was a British author best known for The Flashman Papers, a series of eleven novels and one story story collection in which Harry Flashman, a bully from Tom Brown’s School Days who was expelled from Rugby School for being drunk, joins the army. It’s probably a bit of a stretch to call Flashman even an anti-hero, as he rarely does the right thing – he’s a drunkard, a rake and a cad. Usually through cowardice, Flashman survives and indeed influences (often badly) many historical battles, and pursues (with varying levels of success) many famous women from history. While he lives into the twentieth century – he is said to have died in 1915, making him around a century old, as Tom Brown’s School Days is set in the 1830s – the books only detail his military career between 1839 to 1894. The final book, Flashman and the Tiger, was published in 2005, but note that the books were not written or published in chronological order.
Cobra Kai is a 2018 streaming series, originally produced for YouTube but now owned by Netflix. It’s a sequel to the original Karate Kid films. In the 1984 original, new kid in town Danny LaRusso trains with his Japanese neighbour, Mr Miyagi, so he can defend himself from the local bullies of the Cobra Kai dojo – including Johnny Lawrence, who he defeats at a tournament at the end of the first film. The new series looks at the events of that time from Johnny’s perspective, but takes place in the present, when Johnny re-opens the Cobra Kai dojo – and his rivalry with Danny. Many other characters from the original films have appeared, most played by their original actors. The show has run for four seasons so far, with a fifth due for release in October 2022.
G.M. – The Independent Fantasy Roleplaying Magazine was published monthly by Croftward Publishing in the UK between September 1988 and March 1989. It lasted 19 issues in competition with the official Dungeons & Dragons magazines, Dragon and Dungeon, and White Dwarf magazine from Games Workshop, the company behind the popular Warhammer tabletop wargames. “Final Reward” appeared in the magazine’s second issue. Issue eleven features the short story “The Exam” – Pteppic’s Assassin’s Guild exam from Pyramids (see #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”), with the flashbacks to his life in the Guild edited out, plus the “Adventuring in Discworld” article, the bulk of which is an adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and Pratchett’s response to it. The adventure has some lovely touches, including a suspiciously familiar plot setup involving a tourist to Ankh-Morpork named “ThreeTree”, the first ever published map of Ankh-Morpork (as far as we can tell), and a section on additions to the AD&D rules which includes the non-weapon proficiencies “Alcohol Lore”, “Mix Cocktails”, “Smell Coins”, “Speak Utter Rubbish”, “Detect Utter Rubbish” and “Dramatic Entrance”. Also of note: this article describes the Discworld books as “classics” in 1988 – contemporary evidence that they really made a splash early, at least in nerd circles! You can find the entire issue 11 of GM in the Internet Archive here.
As it turns out, the G.M. article mentioned above was notthe first Discworld article in a roleplaying magazine. There were at least two earlier ones:
The first seems to have been issue 82 of White Dwarf magazine, from October 1986, which included an extract from The Light Fantastic – only a few months after the book was first published. The three pages include the sequence of Galder Weatherwax summoning Death, and Rincewind and Twoflower’s encounter with the gnome in the forest of Skund. It’s followed by a competition in which readers could win signed copies of the first two Discworld novels, plus a copy of the very first Discworld computer game – The Colour of Magic “graphic adventure” (the term used optimistically for text adventures with accompanying pictures at the time, rather than the later era of graphic adventures in the 1990s), published by Pirahna in 1986. The issue also includes “A Stroll Across the Discworld”, written by Ashley Shepherd, which adapts details from the first two novels for play using Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It includes notes on characters, magic, and creatures, plus a few plot ideas, over five pages, though the first one of those is a full-page reproduction of Josh Kirby’s cover of The Light Fantastic with the title of the article and some very hard to read red text over the top explaining the basic premise of the world.
Terry was also interviewed in the eleventh and final issue of Adventurer, “The Superior Fantasy & Science Fiction Games Magazine”, published in July 1987. It featured Josh Kirby’s artwork for Equal Rites on the cover, and a four-page interview with Terry in which he discusses his first three novels, as well as the one he’d just sent to the publishers (Mort) and the one he was currently writing (Sourcery). There’s no Discworld adventure, but Terry does also talk about his own experiences with Dungeons & Dragons, including the fun he had as a DM and laying claim to being “the first person to put a lavatory in a dungeon”. Adventurer #11 also on the Internet Archive, along with the ten previous issues. It sounds very much like a “Discworld roleplaying” episode lies in our future, doesn’t it?
Letters and Numbers is the Australian version of the very nerdy gameshow Countdown, itself the UK’s version of the original French gameshow Des chiffres et des lettres (“Numbers and Letters”), from which the Australian version gets its name. The show alternates between letters rounds, in which contestants request a mix of randomly drawn consonants and vowels and must make the longest word possible, and numbers rounds, in which contestants request a mix of random “large” and “small” numbers, which they must use in a series of equations to achieve a randomly assigned target result. Letters rounds were overseen by crossword compiler and previous Pratchat guest David Astle (#Pratchat6), and numbers rounds by mathematician Lily Serna. The Australian version, produced by SBS, ran from 2010 to 2012, and Ben was a contestant on one episode! (He didn’t win, but made a reasonable showing against the multiple-episode champion.) The original Letters and Numbers was hosted by former Australian newsreader Richard Morecroft. In 2021 SBS brought the show back as Celebrity Letters and Numbers, hosted by Michael Hing but with Astle and Serna in their prior roles. The celebrity version retains the original format, if with more time for banter between (and during) rounds. In the UK, there’s the similar Nine Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown, which takes the host and comedian guests from the panel show Nine Out of Ten Cats and has them play Countdown (though only very, very loosely).
Dungarees is a slang term in British English for “bib-and-brace” style overalls. The name comes from “dungaree”, the name of a tough calico-like cotton cloth similar to denim, and which was used to make overalls sold in the UK. Since dungarees were originally sold as safety gear for manual labourers, the “women in dungarees” stereotype is one of many that seeks to ridicule women who fulfil traditionally masculine roles.
Zen Buddhism is a meditative form of Buddhism that originated in China and later spread to Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Zen (禅) is the Japanese name; it comes from the original Chinese name, Chánzōng (禪宗), where chán is a short form of chánnà (禪那), itself a translation of the Sanskrit word for meditation, dhyāna (ध्यान). While sitting meditation is a common and importance practise in Zen Buddhism, receiving money for doing so isn’t really a thing. Yen, meanwhile, is the English name for the Japanese currency en (圓 or えん), represented by the symbol ¥. The “Y” comes from historical pronunciations in Japan which used a J sound, which was written down and interpreted by Portuguese missionaries as a “Y”, something which affected the way many Japanese words were written in English too.
Kring the talking sword appears in books two and three of The Colour of Magic, as discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”. Penny compares him to the magical sword possessed by Michael Moorcock’s anti-hero Elric of Melniboné, Stormbringer (not Stormbreaker as we mistakenly refer to it). Stormbringer gives the usually physically weak Elric great strength, but only by feeding on the souls of intelligent creatures.
“I am Groot” is the only phrase spoken by the character Groot, an alien who is essentially a humanoid, animate tree, in the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy comics and their film adaptations. Like most Pokémon who can only say their own names, Groot still manages to convey a variety of meanings. It’s even implied in the films that he’s speaking a complex language which his companions, Rocket Raccoon and later Thor, are able to understand – a bit like Chewbacca’s growls in the Star Wars films.
Cosplay – a portmanteau of “costume play” – is a Japanese term which dates back to 1984; the Japanese word is kosupure (コスプレ). This means it was around when Pratchett wrote “Final Reward”, but it didn’t become a common term – certainly not outside of Japan – until the 1990s, so he probably hadn’t heard it then. It can be traced back to an article written by Nobuyuki Takahashi, a Japanese television director, after his experience seeing the “Masquerade” at the 1984 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon for short) in L.A. “Masquerade” has connotations of “aristocratic” costumes in Japanese, so he coined a new compound word in the tradition of many Japanese terms. Such costume events had been a mainstay of science fiction and fantasy conventions since the 1960s, and indeed Pratchett had seen some himself in his early attendance of UK cons, including EasterCon.
The Northern Line is a route on the London Underground, coded black on standard underground maps. It runs from Morden in the south all the way to High Barnet in the north, and uniquely has two separate alternate routes. This makes it tricky to place Dogger’s residence, though as its one of the most underground lines (there are a lot of above-ground stations in the underground), and Dogger’s part of the line seems to be surface level, it’s likely he’s somewhere in north London, perhaps in the vicinity of Finchley. Fun stations on the Northern line include Tooting Bec, three of the English Monopoly board stations, and most importantly…Mornington Crescent! (That’s a slightly obscure now British radio comedy reference, so don’t worry if you didn’t get it.)
By 1988, Pratchett had in fact quit his day job to write full-time, and signed his first big publishing contract for a lot of money. Terry had given notice to his manager at the Central Electricity Generating Board in July 1987, in between the publication of Equal Rites and that of Mort, and told Colin Smythe, now his agent rather than his publisher. Smythe solicited a deal for Terry’s next six books, and after some competition between Gollancz and Transworld, Pratchett signed with the former in December 1987 for an advance of £51,000 per book – a total of £306,000 (around £740,000, or more than one and a quarter million Australian dollars, in today’s money). He was definitely doing very well, so it’s little wonder he could write about Dogger doing the same.
The TARDIS – the Doctor’s time and space travelling home in Doctor Who – is meant to blend in with its surroundings by changing shape using its “chameleon circuit”, but since the programme’s invention that circuit has malfunctioned and its been stuck as various designs of 1960s London Police Box. While this sometimes did cause some it to be noticed in the original series, as Liz remarks it’s still invisible to “most people” thanks to the concept of the “perception filter” – a presumably slightly psychic effect that causes those who notice it to treat it as commonplace, in a manner similar to Douglas Adams’ idea of the “Somebody Else’s Problem” field.
Neighbours was Australia’s longest-running and most internationally successful soap opera. Since 1985 it ran daily during the week for just over 8,900 episodes, initially produced for Channel Seven, but then moving over to Ten. It became hugely popular in the UK, where it aired on BBC One for 21 years until 2008, when it was picked up by Channel 5. In 2022 Channel 5 announced they would not be continuing to carry the show, cutting off its main source of funding, and Fremantle Productions were unable to find another broadcaster to pick up the deal. It thus ceased production and went out with a big double-episode finale on 28 July, 2022, featuring the return of many beloved characters from its long history – including big name actors and pop stars who got an early break on the show, like Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie. It’s left a huge gap in the Australian television landscape, as it provided jobs and professional experiences for thousands of production crew, directors, writers and actors.
Houris are mentioned just four times in the Quran, and are (at least in the majority opinion) not mortal women but supernatural creatures of Hannah, the Islamic Paradise. Houris are described as “companions” whose main features are that they have “wide and beautiful eyes” and are “untouched” (which probably means what you’re inferring, yes). The Quran does not promise any specific number of them to anyone, though hadiths – other accounts of the words and deeds of the prophet Mohammed, seen as more or less canonical depending on an individual’s beliefs – describe them in many ways, lots of them pretty weird.
On the subject of characters having a life of their own, the closest thing we could find Pratchett saying is that he often doesn’t know what he’s doing when starting to write a book – writing it is the way he finds out, and “often, one of the characters says something that tells me what the story is about.” This is from the acceptance speech he wrote (but did not personally give) for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, which he won for Nation in 2009. The speech is collected in A Slip of the Keyboard.
The Hero’s Journey (aka the “monomyth”) is Joseph Campbell’s famous condensation of the Western canon into a single structure, presented in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. While its not nearly as universal as Campbell presumed, it has become canonised and used repeatedly in the construction of modern fiction, most famously when George Lucas explicitly used it as a model for Star Wars. “The Refusal of the Call” is an early stage of the Journey, in which the hero initially refuses to leave their home behind and go on the quest to which they are being called. This is still really common in fantasy fiction, especially urban fantasy, where protagonists often deny that the fantastic world they’re being shown is even real.
“In the beginning was the Word” is that first line of the first chapter of the Book of John, one of the four canonical gospels in the New Testament of the Bible. It goes on to say “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, which has been a subject of debate among theologians for centuries. In this context, “the Word” is an English translation of the Greek logos (λόγος), which is usually interpreted to mean Jesus, and so the full verse is the genesis of many Christian beliefs, including the Trinity – that Jesus is God but also separate from God.
100 Story Building is the creative writing centre for children and young people where Ben has worked for the last seven years or so. In their workshops they try to deal with a number of barriers young people face when writing, including the intimidating feeling of staring at a blank page waiting to be filled.
The quote “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, and sometimes to another author, Gene Fowler. As is so often the case with these things, neither of those is likely to be true. Anecdotally at least a version close to the one attributed to Hemingway was attributed to Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, whose work was known to Hemingway, making it plausible he might have said it. That version was: “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” But it seems the earliest confirmed version was written by American sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico (of The Poseidon Adventure fame) in his 1946 book Confessions of a Story Writer, in which he says: “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.”
Bohemian writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) did write a letter to his best friend, Max Brod, in which he seemingly requested all his work to be burned. Brod found the letter – described as a “last will” – when going through his desk after Kafka had died of tuberculosis. “Everything I leave behind me…is to be burned unread”, he wrote, though there’s some thought that his applied only to his personal and unpublished writing. Brod did not comply, though its worth noting that Kafka’s most famous story, “The Metamorphosis”, had been published during his life, in 1915. Even that did not find widespread fame, though, until after his death.
Jules Verne’s posthumously published novel Paris in the Twentieth Century – discovered by his great grandson in a safe in 1989, and published in 1994 – thankfully does not seem to be disputed in its authenticity. Tolkien’s later published works are also seen as legit, including the twelve-volume A History of Middle-Earth, compiled by Christopher Tolkien (J.R.R.’s son, not his grandson as we mistakenly say). These books are a compilation of his notes, drafts and other writings, forming a history of Tolkien’s process of creating the world of Middle-Earth (and not, as the title might suggest, a history of the world itself).
Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) was an American horror and mystery writer, whose best known work includes the novel The Haunting of Hill House and the short story “The Lottery”. We previous discussed her in Penny’s last appearance, #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune”. The anthology Penny read is Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by two of Jackson’s four children and published in 2015. It contains more than forty unpublished (and very likely unfinished) pieces of writing.
“The High Meggas” (discussed in #Pratchat57West5), the short story precursor to Prachett’s Long Earth series, was first published in early editions of The Long Earth in 2012, and then again in the collection A Blink of the Screen later that year. It’s given a date of 1986 in the introduction used in both books, but accounts conflict between Pratchett and his publisher Colin Smythe as to when exactly it was written. See the notes to #Pratchat57West5 for more on this.
Of the collections of Pratchett’s early short stories, only the first two (2014’s Dragons at Crumbling Castle and 2015’s The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner) have introductions written by Terry, indicating that he had tweaked the stories within a little. They are, though, “mostly as they were first printed”.
English horror writer Ramsay Campbell started writing his first book when he was eleven, and it is this unpublished collection of fiction – titled Ghostly Stories – which contained the infamous sentence “The door banged open, and the afore-mentioned skeleton rushed in.” In an interview given in 2008, he cited it as evidence that he wasn’t yet at the height of his powers though he did submit it to publishers and got some encouragement, if not a contract.
Stephen King’s The Dark Half is a 1989 horror novel about alcoholic author Thad Beaumont, a writer of serious but unpopular “literary fiction” who finds success as “George Stark”, a pen name under which he writes violent crime thrillers about a sadistic serial killer. When Thad is outed as Stark, he and his wife stage a mock burial of the pseudonym…only for him to rise bodily from the grave and go on a killing spree of his own… This does seem to have been prompted by King’s own outing as Richard Bachmann, the name under which King wrote darker, more cynical books. Both pen names were inspired by “Richard Stark”, a pseudonym used by Donald E Westlake.
Subscriber Ian Banks identified a couple of other Stephen King stories relevant to this episode: “Word Processor Of The Gods”, published in Skeleton Crew, has a main character who is gifted a word processor that can reshape reality, while “Umney’s Last Case” (collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes) is quite similar to “Final Reward”, but told from the point of view of the fictional character.
Inkheart (Tintenherz) is a 2003 young adult fantasy novel by German author Cornelia Funke. It tells the story of Meggie, a young woman whose father, Mo, is a bookbinder who she discovers has a special gift: he is able to bring things out of the world of books, the Inkworld, into the real world – but only if something from the real world goes into Inkworld in return… Inkheart is the first in the Inkworld trilogy, followed by Inkwell (2005) and Inkdeath (2008). Funke announced in 2021 she will return to the series with The Colour of Revenge (Die Farbe der Rache), scheduled for publication in 2023. The first book was filmed in 2006 as Inkheart with a great cast including Brendan Fraser (as Mo), Eliza Bennett (as Meggie), Helen Mirren, Jim Broadbent, Paul Bettany and Andy Serkis.
As Penny alludes, Shirley Jackson’s marriage to college teacher and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman was likely unhappy; her biographers reckon Stanley frequently cheated on her – often with his college students – and eventually made her agree to an open relationship she didn’t really want, and also controlled her finances even though she earned most of the money in the household. Perhaps unsurprisingly he was the first person to publish some of her unfinished work, specifically Come Along with Me. This was an unfinished novel, bulked out with many of her best short stories, published three years after her death in 1968.
Stranger Things – the hit Netflix show drawing on many of the popular “kids on bikes” style horror fantasy films of the 1980s – released its fourth season in two parts in May and July 2022. A new character introduced is Eddie Munson, an older teenager who has failed to graduate from high school several times and is the head of the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club, “The Hellfire Club”. Despite his involvement with D&D, he exemplifies the “nerd jock” role: he bullies the younger members of the club, is disdainful and disrespectful to those who don’t share the hobby, and controls who can and can’t play with them. He also plays heavy rock music and is a known drug dealer at the school, fulfilling many of the negative stereotypes of Dungeons & Dragons players common at the time of the “Satanic panic”, though he does have a kinder side and genuinely seemed to want to help the character who came to him for help.
Tripod vs the Dragon is a musical written and performed by Australian musical comedy trio Tripod, with guest star Elana Stone. Originally titled Dungeons & Dragons: The Musical and renamed for legal reasons, the trio make themselves into adventurers and get caught up in a plot involving a tree from the dawn of time and its guardian, a dragon. Its first proper season was in 2010 for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, alongside two lesser known Dungeons & Dragons-inspired comedy shows, +1 Sword and Dungeon Crawl, starring some weird nerds named Ben and Richard McKenzie… The Tripod vs the Dragon album is available via Bandcamp, and the song Penny mentions is the final track, “Bard”. The show was filmed in 2012, and might still be available on DVD; we’ll find out where from and let you know! But if you can’t find one, there’s a watch party coming up just after this episode is published, on 14 August 2022; see this Tweet for details.
“The Adventure of the Final Problem” was first published in December 1893, and intended by Arthur Conan-Doyle to kill off Sherlock Holmes and be his final story. In it, Holmes tells Watson he has finally proven that many crimes he has investigated are part of the plans of one man: Professor Moriarty, a mastermind who aids other criminals. He avoids several attempts on his life before finally tracking Moriarty to the Reichenbach Falls, a real waterfall in Switzerland that Doyle had visited earlier that year, inspiring the story. Watson is lured away by a false emergency, and when he returns, Holmes has gone – seemingly to his death over the edge of the falls with Moriarty, leaving behind only a letter to Watson. To say this was unpopular with readers of The Strand magazine is a huge understatement; they cancelled their subscriptions in droves, and made their displeasure known in letters to the magazine and Doyle himself. The pressure eventually led him to write The Hound of the Baskervilles (a serialised novel, set before Holmes’ apparent death) in 1901, and later to write more stories – beginning with “The Adventure of the Empty House” in 1903 – which establishes that Holmes had in fact survived, luckily plausible since in the fiction no-one directly saw Holmes die or discovered his body.
Call of Duty is a long-running series of military first-person shooter videogames published by Actvision. They initially focussed on World War II, though later branched out to other fields of conflict. The 2008 game Call of Duty: World at War, and begins the “Black Ops” storyline that would continue through Call of Duty: Black Ops and its sequels. It also introduced the alternate “zombies” mode, an alternate history multiplayer mode in which players must kill hordes of Nazi zombies. This storyline would persist through multiple games as well, and introduces the character of Doctor Edward Richtofen, a Nazi scientist who creates many of the monsters battled in Zombies mode.
Amazingly, frozen mammoth meat was supposedly served at a banquet in 1901 at St. Petersburg, and also in around 1951 at the Explorer’s Club in New York. But in both cases, it seems the story was a lie, even if it is true that the indigenous Evenki people of Siberia did sometimes feed it to their dogs. For more on why it would be a) gross and b) impossible to serve up mammoth steak, see Sarah Zhang’s great article “What Happens to Meat When You Freeze It for 35,000 Years”, written for The Atlantic in December 2019.
Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen (1892 – 1918), aka The Baron von Richtofen or the Red Baron, was a notorious German World War I flying ace who shot down around eighty enemy planes, a huge number for the time. In Germany he was known as Der Rote Kampfflieger, “The Red Fighter Pilot”, and this was the title he used for his 1918 autobiography. The “Red” came from the bright colour of his aircraft; his squadron were known as the “Flying Circus”, both for their bright colour, and the fact that they moved around to different stages of the war using tents wherever they set up an airfield. (And yes, this was the inspiration for the title of the Monty Python television series.) He’s been played by many actors, notably Adrian Edmondson in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, where he is shot by rival fighter pilot, Rik Mayall’s Lord Flashheart.
We’d have to make a whole podcast to get through all the Sherlock Holmes stuff we mention this episode (not that Ben, as a Holmes fan, would mind that…), so we’ll instead just list our references here:
August Derleth’s Solar Ponds appeared in thirteen books’ worth of short stories between 1928 and 1971, and then some more written by Basil Copper.
Arsene Lupin was created by French author Maurice Leblanc, and is one of several “gentleman thief” type characters created in part as an answer to Holmes. He first crossed paths with Holmes in 1905 in “Sherlock Holmes arrive trop tard” (“Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late”), and he was indeed renamed “Herlock Sholmes” (or “Holmlock Shears”), and Watson “Wilson”, at the time (though modern reprints often revert their names, since copyright concerns are no longer as pressing). We note that in the medical mystery television series House, often also said to be inspired by Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House (who displays many Holmesian characteristics) also has a sidekick named Wilson.
Holmes doesn’t appear in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, but in its historical spin-off series, The Great Ace Attorney, set in the Meiji Restoration period of Japan, which coincides with the Victorian era of Holmes. In the original Japanese, Sherlock Holmes appears alongside ten-year-old Iris Watson, Watson’s daughter, after John is murdered. They are renamed Herlock Sholmes and Iris Wilson in international translations.
In 2020 the Conan-Doyle estate sued several authors for copyright infringement, including Nancy Springer for her books starring Holmes’ young sister, Enola Holmes. The estate claimed that the final ten stories (set after The Final Problem) were not yet in the public domain, and specifically citing the more emotional nature of Holmes in those stories as a comparison point. The suit was dismissed; of note, Holmes already passed into the public domain in the UK in 2000, seventy years after Conan-Doyle’s death, but copyright law varies in different places. In the US, where the Holmes stories were published at the same time as in The Strand, all of the original Holmes stories (and thus the characters themselves) will be out of copyright by 2023.
Mr Holmes is a 2015 film adaptation of the 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind by American author Mitch Cullin. It’s set in 1947, with a retired 93-year-old Holmes – played by Ian McKellen – trying to remember the details of the last case he took on before retiring 35 years earlier.
The chimera is a creature from Greek mythology, a fire-breathing hybrid monster most often depicted as a lion with a goat’s head growing from its back and a serpent’s tail (sometimes with a snake’s head at the end). It appears in The Iliad, among other accounts. Most famously, when the hero Bellerophon rejects the advances of King Proetus’s wife, Proetus (who is told Bellerophon approached the Queen) seeks revenge by sending Bellerophon to slay the Chimera, in the hopes he will die in the attempt. Advised by a seer, he captures Pegasus the winged horse and attacks the monster from above, using trickery to kill it. The word chimera is from the Greek Χίμαιρα, Chímaira, meaning “she-goat”. In English the word is now also used to mean any creature (or sometimes any thing) made up of different parts.
Upstart Crow is Ben Elton’s TV sitcom starring David Mitchell as William Shakespeare, which has run for three series since 2016. A stage play was also performed in 2019.
Ben touches on the idea of heteropessimism, the acceptance that heteronormative relationships must be awful by heterosexual couples. It’s explored in this article in The Conversation from July 2022.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 74, “Hogswitch”, an interview with the authors of Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent.
Iconographic Evidence
This is “Love is All”, the music video Ben talks about for a song from the 1974 concept album The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast. See below for the origins of the album, which was written by Roger Glover and featured lots of high profile rock stars, including here Ronnie James Dio as the frog.
Notes and Errata
The talk at the British Library mentioned by Rhianna is the book’s launch event at the British Library, organised by the Living Knowledge Network and held in conjunction with the “Fantasy: Realms of Imagination” exhibition. It was held on 27 October 2023, the day after the book’s original release date – the release was delayed by Typhoon Saola, which delayed shipping to the UK including the initial supplies of the book. You can watch the whole event on the Living Knowledge Network website.
The talk at Waterstones Picadilly is not available as a video or audio recording; you had to be there, folks! For those not in the know, Waterstones is one of the major book chains in the UK, and the Picadilly store is one of their flagship shops in London. Its hosted many Pratchett events in the past, including a midnight opening for The Shepherd’s Crown, an event for Crystal of Storms (see below), and many signings.
Travelling Man is a games, comics and fantasy books business with stores in Leeds, York, Newcastle and Manchester in the UK. They also run their own small press. You can find outmore about them at travellingman.com.
Crystal of Storms is Rhianna’s 2020 Fighting Fantasy book: a branching narrative told in the second person in which the reader chooses their path through the story, and also must occasionally roll dice to try and overcome obstacles and defeat monsters. The series was created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone of Games Workshop fame in 1982. Crystal of Storms was part of a revival of the Fighting Fantasy books by Scholastic Books that began in 2017, one of six new books published along side new editions of the classic ones.
Gabrielle’s previous seven books are:
The Alfie Bloom trilogy: Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle (2015), Alfie Bloom and the Talisman Thief (2016) and Alfie Bloom and the Witch of Demon Rock (2017)
The three Knights and Bikes books: Knights and Bikes (2018), Knights and Bikes: Rebel Bicycle Club (2019) and Knights and Bikes: Wheels of Legend (2020)
The first Rani Reports book, Rani Reports on the Missing Millions (2023)
The second Rani Reports book is due to be published on 5 September 2024, and currently available info lists the title as Rani Reports on the Copycat Crimes.
“Frou-frou” is term derived from French (originally the sound of a rustling bag), which has become British slang meaning overly ornamental or excessively fancy. (A famous example is the character Le Comte de Frou Frou from Blackadder the Third.) Frou-frou flavoured coffees might therefore include a pumpkin spice or salted caramel latte. We’ve no objection to any of this, by the way; enjoy your coffee any way you like! (Ben’s partner often has a bit of cardamom mixed into her coffee, and uses a spiced drinking chocolate on top of the frothed milk for a cappuccino.)
Yorkshire Biscuit Tea is indeed a frou-frou flavoured tea, manufactured by the Yorkshire Tea company and marketed as tasting like “tea and biscuits”. They also have a “Toast & Jam” flavour, and both were at least temporarily available in Australia in 2023.
There are several official Discworld and Terry Pratchett websites:
dunmanifestin.com – the site for Dunmanifestin, the company created by Terry and Lynne Pratchett to hold copyright for Pratchett’s work, and the official site for the Terry Pratchett estate. Dunmanifestin directly publishes deluxe editions of various Pratchett works, like the Ultimate Discworld Companion and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Good Omens.
narrativia.com – the production company that controls licensing rights for all Pratchett’s works since 2012.
discworld.com – an official Discworld shop, originally known as PJSM Prints, founded, owned and run by Sandra and Jo Kidby. They originally sold only Paul Kidby’s art prints, but have since expanded to many other Discworld items, notably special editions of the books. (Note that Paul Kidby also has his own website, paulkidby.com, and sells items based on his artwork there, too.)
discworldemporium.com – the Discworld Emporium is the other official Discworld merchandise shop, set up by Bernard and Isobel Pearson after they closed their first business, Clarecraft.
Geoffrey Swivel is, as mentioned, Tiffany’s apprentice in The Shepherd’s Crown. In the novel Geoffrey uses he/him pronouns, but also makes it clear he doesn’t think of himself as either traditional gender. This led Rhianna and Gabrielle to update Geoffrey’s pronouns to they/them for Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. We’ll leave any further discussion for our episode about The Shepherd’s Crown (and eventual return to Tiffany Aching’s Guide).
Spill words are a concept introduced in I Shall Wear Midnight. Mrs Proust, the city witch in Ankh-Morpork who runs Boffo’s Emporium, explains it to Tiffany: “A spill word is a word that somebody almost says, but doesn’t. For a moment they hover in the conversation but aren’t spoken”. We discussed them in #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No Eyes is Back”.
Annagramma is the conventionally attractive mean girl and presumptive leader of the coven of young witches introduced in A Hat Full of Sky. In Wintersmith she takes over the steading that belonged to Miss Treason; she is only mentioned in passing in I Shall Wear Midnight, and plays a very minor role in The Shepherd’s Crown.
You is the white kitten Tiffany gives to Granny Weatherwax in Wintersmith, described her as the daughter of “Pinky, the Widow Cable’s cat”. During research for Tiffany Aching’s Guide, Gabrielle connected this to Tiffany’s next book, I Shall Wear Midnight, where she tells her father about having to deal with a widow up near Slice who’d been dead two months, locked up alone in her house with her cats. The cats couldn’t escape the house and had started to eat her, including one who had a litter of white kittens in her bed…
Granny Whitlow is the witch who built the gingerbread house in the Forest of Skund, as depicted in The Light Fantastic. Rincewind and Twoflower are led there by the gnome Swires when they need food, and steal Whitlow’s broomstick, which has handlebars, to escape the wizards sent to capture them. According to Swires, Whitlow herself hasn’t been seen in a long time, rumoured to have been “done up good and proper by a couple of young tearways”. This is usually interpreted as a version of the story of Hansel and Gretel.
Marchessa is a young Krullian wizard who appears in The Colour of Magic, in the final book, “Close to the Edge”. She describes herself as a wizard of the fifth level, and wields Ajandurah’s Wand of Utter Negativity when taking Rincewind and Twoflower captive so they can be sacrificed. She is well informed about Rincewind’s history.
Mistress Pullunder and Old Mother Dismass are mentioned briefly as Tiffany’s previous mentors at the start of Wintersmith. Dismass also appears during the sabbat at the start of Witches Abroad with Granny, Nanny and Gammer Brevis, discussing the shortage of young witches in the wake of Desiderata Hollow’s death. Her oracular ability causes her attention to wander backwards and forwards from the present moment in a manner not dissimilar to Mrs Cake. We discussed Witches Abroad way back in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumkinmobiles”.
The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast is a 1974 concept album (and 1975 rock opera) written primarily by Welsh musician Roger Glover, best known as a bassist and member of Deep Purple. The album, credited to “Roger Glover & Guests”, features Ronnie James Dio (of Black Sabbath fame) and Micky Lee Soule, who was in the band Rainbow with both Dio and Glover. The album is based on the 1972 children’s book which Gabrielle mentions: The Butterfly’s Ball, and the Grasshopper’s Feast by Alan Aldridge and William Plomer. The book is itself based on an 1802 poem written by English banker, lawyer, abolitionist and Member of Parliament William Roscoe (1753-1831). The song Ben mentions is called “Love is All”, sung by Dio, and written by Glover, Dio and Eddie Hardin; it’s the nineteenth track, the second-last of the album. It was a number one hit in a few countries in Europe on release. Ben is probably incorrect about the music video being part of a larger animated film project, but it was definitely a hit on television: in Australia the song also made it into the top 10 in 1980 when the video was played on the music programme Countdown, and remained a frequently shown clip on the ABC for many years. It was also played regularly in France and some stations in the US, and featured in a 2021 trailer for French jeweller Cartier.
The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force is Star Wars book written by Daniel Wallace, and first published in 2010. Similarly to Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, it’s presented as an in-universe book – though in this case a specific copy of the third edition training guide for Jedi, which has been owned or used by several Jedi characters from the films who leave notes and other marks on the book. It survived the destruction of the Order, and was eventually being given to Luke Skywalker, it’s “owner” at the time it was published. The original edition was inside a “Vault”, but it has been re-published several times since with some additional material added and minor corrections. A similar volume also by Wallace, Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side, was first published in 2012 and later bundled with The Jedi Path and then also with two similar books, The Bounty Hunter Code: From the Files of Boba Fett (2013) and Imperial Handbook: A Commander’s Guide (2014). The most recent editions of all four were published by Chronicle Books in 2016.
Toggenburgs are a medium-sized purebred variety of goat originally from the Toggenburg region of the Canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland. They’re very popular and farmed all over the world, known for their high milk production, though the UK has it’s own local breed, the British Toggenburg, recognised in 1921. Compared to the Pure Toggenburg, British Toggenburgs are bigger, heavier, have shorter hair and longer faces, a greater variety of coat colours, and make even more milk. One source we found described Toggenburgs as having a “robust nature” which makes them “a hardy goat able to look after its best interests,” which seems clear inspiration for the way goats are described in the Discworld books.
Indira Varma is a British actor best known to nerds for her screen roles in Game of Thrones, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Torchwood, though she’s done plenty of other film and television – and will appear in the upcoming 2024 season of Doctor Who as a Duchess. She has narrated all the Witches and Tiffany Aching books for the new Penguin Audiobooks series, which also feature Peter Serafinowicz as Death, Bill Nighy as the voice of the author reading the footnotes, and Steven Cree as the Nac Mac Feegle. The illustration of Miss Level inspired by her appears on page 31 of Tiffany Aching’s Guide, as well as in the collection of portraits used in the endpapers.
Joan Hickson (1906-1998) played Agatha Christie’s sleuth Miss Marple in the BBC television films adapting all twelve Miss Marple novels made between 1984 and 1992. She is the most recognisable screen version of the character.
Big thanks to listener armcie, who managed to uncover Nanny’s scribbled-out note on page 22 via some ebook jiggery pokery. According to them, the note reads:
Brings back a memory. Mr Ogg had a similar party piece, and after narry two sips of scumble, he’d get out his party piece and wave it around, we did all laugh, though we’d all seen it plenty before.
Nanny Ogg, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch
Tiffany’s favourite word being susurration is another classic bit of Terry re-using something he’d already written – in this case, his own answer to the question which he wrote for The Word, a publication for London’s Festival of Literature in 2000, three years before the publication of The Wee Free Men. In his introduction to the piece, he says these sorts of questions are referred to as “My Fabourite Spoon” items.
Fecund means “very fertile”, and – like so many other English words – comes from the Latin (fecundus, “fertile”) by way of French.
Crepuscular is an adjective meaning “of or resembling twilight”, but is more often used in its zoological context, where it means “active and dawn and/or dusk”, describing animals which are not diurnal (active during the day) or nocturnal (active during the night), but which inhabit the edge in between. A fitting word for a writer of edge witches!
The Overlord series are videogames published by Codemasters and originally developed by Triumph Studios. In the games the player is “the Overlord”, the new incarnation of evil who resembles Sauron from Lord of the Rings, who must vanquish the heroes who defeated the previous incarnation to regain enough strength to again conquer the land. Initially too weak to fight on their own, the Overlord instead commands a small army of goblin-like “Minions” who come in various colours with different special abilities. The games are a dark comedy, and the first game particularly parodies Lord of the Rings, with the heroes who are the player’s enemies parodying various members of the Fellowship, but later games include other fantasy elements as well, notably . The games in the series are:
Overlord (2007) for the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
Overlord: Raising Hell (2008); an expansion for Overlord.
Overlord II (2009); a sequel to the original games for the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
Overlord: Dark Legend (2009); an Overlord II spin-off for the Nintendo Wii developed by Climax Action.
Overlord: Minions (2009); an Overlord II spin-off for the Nintendo DS, also developed by Climax Action.
Overlord: Fellowship of Evil (2015); a for the XBox One, PlayStation 4 and PC (developed in-house at Codemasters)
Gnarl is the older minion who advises the new Overlord, and also does most of the narration for the player, since the Overlord themselves is a non-speaking character. He is played by Marc Silk, a prolific English voice actor who you’ve probably heard in something. He’s been Bob the Builder and various Danger Mouse characters, and been in some other classic videogames including Black & White and the Two Point series of sim games.
Knights and Bikes is a 2019 videogame designed by indie company Foam Sword, which was formed by developers who had previously worked at Media Molecule on games like LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway. It was originally a PlayStation 4 exclusive but was later released on the XBox One and Nintendo Switch. The game is set on the small (and fictional) British island of Penfurzy in the 1980s, and one or two players control Nessa and Demelz, two young girls who explore the island on their bikes and have fantastic adventures inspired by films like Goonies.
Adventure games are traditionally ones in which the player must navigate a story by examining their environment, talking to other characters and collecting and using objects to solve puzzles. The original text adventure games used typed commands, but in the 1990s companies like Sierra On-Line and LucasArts transitioned the genre into graphic or point-and-click adventures. These used graphics, sound and more-and-more sophisticated mouse-based interfaces to place the emphasis on the puzzles and their narrative solution instead of how to tell the game what you wanted to do, though some – including the original Discworld adventure game – were still very difficult. Telltale Games was a games development company founded in 2004 by ex LucasArts employees who developed a serialised, episodic format for adventure games. They started out making new stories featuring characters from the old LucasArts games, then moved on to using licensed characters and worlds like Back to the Future, Game of Thrones, Batman, The Walking Dead and the comic book Fables, which produced one of their most critically acclaimed games, The Wolf Among Us. The company collapsed in 2018 after revelations of extreme “crunch” culture – punishing hours and conditions for staff under pressure to meet unrealistic deadlines, something common in the videogame industry but at an extreme at TellTale. The name is now owned by a different company, LCG Entertainment, who re-released the TellTale Batman games and is working to complete a sequel to The Wolf Among Us.
The Quarter Quell is an event in The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins and their film adaptations. In the future dystopia of Panem, the government responds to an attempted rebellion by instigating the “Hunger Games” – an annual lottery where a boy and a girl are selected from each of the twelve Districts as “tributes” who will fight to the death in a specially designed arena. The Games are televised, and each twenty-five years since the original they do a special “Quarter Quell” in which the usual rules are bent in some way; during the second novel, President Snow uses the 75th Hunger Games to bend the rules and make the protagonist Katniss fight again, something that is usually forbidden.
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 75, “…And That Spells Trouble”, discussing the 2012 revised edition of Guards! Guards! A Discworld Board Game, designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw, with guest Dr Melissa Rogerson.
Iconographic Evidence
Guards! Guards! has a lot more components than the other board games we’ve discussed so far. Here’s a gallery featuring the board and the playing pieces; and another with some of the specific cards we mentioned.
All the components set up and laid out for a game, plus the box, rules and player reference card. The Luggage piece in all its glory.A sample player board, in this case one for the Guild of Alchemists. The red cubes track your three player stats.The Sabotage markers, face up. (They are kept face down in play.)Detail of the board, showing spell spaces, various locations, and the path of the Luggage (the footprints).The dragons. Oh my!There are a lot of cards in the game.Ben’s view of the end of the game.Just the board from above. A functional representation of Ankh-Morpork.The eight-sided dice from the game, and the golden D8 from the Australian Discworld Convention.The rulebook has the same art as the box.Some of our favourite character illustrations from the cards, and others we mentioned in the episode.These are the most prominent characters who appear from the Watch books, along with a few other supporting characters we love, but the main cast of Guards! Guards! do not appear!Ben mentions that some of the characters who appear are a bit more obscure; here are a few examples.Two of our fave characters from Soul Music, who are also examples of quotes that didn’t quite hit the mark for Ben.
Notes and Errata
The episode title was more or less inspired by the song “You’ve Got Trouble” from the musical The Music Man. In the song, con man Harold Hill convinces the residents of River City that they’ve got trouble, inventing spurious dangers to their youth which he blames on the introduction of a pool table to the town’s billiard parlour.
Ben wonders how up-to-date the characters are in the game. At the time it was first published in September 2011, all but the last three Discworld novels (Snuff, Raising Steam and The Shepherd’s Crown) had been published. The game definitely includes characters from beyond the 31st novel, Monstrous Regiment, including Mrs Earwig (who didn’t appear in a novel until the 32nd book, A Hat Full of Sky); Moist von Lipwig and Gladys the golem (both introduced in the 33rd book, Going Postal); and Constable Brakenshield (a very minor charcater from Thud!, the 34th novel).
Ben several times mentions David Brashaw’s interview with The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret; we linked to it in the main episode description, but for completeness’ sake, it’s “Picture Books and Board Games with Pratchat and David Brashaw” from 20 November 2023. David’s interview starts at around the 1 hour, 8 minutes and 45 seconds mark. (If you’ve not listened to it already, don’t skip the start; as you may have guessed from the title, Liz and Ben are also guests!)
We’ve mentioned Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries many times before; it’s a television series about the high society lady Miss Phryne Fisher, who solves mysteries in 1920s Melbourne, adapted from the popular series of books by Kerry Greenwood. Liz mentions that it seems like the perfect setting for the Maquis of Fantailer, a minor character mentioned in The Fifth Elephant as the Disc’s equivalent of the Maquis of Queensberry – i.e. the nobleman who invented rules for boxing as a sport, which are entirely useless in a street fight.
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022, dir. Anthony Fabian) is a British film adaptation of the 1958 novel Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris. It tells the story of Ada Harris, a working class cleaner whose husband died in World War II; she never realised she was supposed to receive a war widow pension and when she is paid it in arrears, uses the windfall to visit Paris in the hopes of buying a Dior dress.
On BoardGameGeek, a game’s “weight” is described as a measure of how difficult it is to understand (though not everyone thinks of it that way). A heavier weight generally means more rules and/or components, and more complex interactions and strategies; the scores are Light (1), Medium Light (2), Medium (3), Medium Heavy (4) and Heavy (5). Guards! Guards! has a weight (averaged from votes by users of the site) of 2.61 out of 5, so between Medium and Medium Light. For comparison, Monopoly scores 1.65 (between Light and Medium Light), while Chess has a weight of 3.66. (In case you’re interested, the heaviest game in Ben’s collection is Oath: Chronicles of Empire & Exile, with a rating of 4.11; he also has a lot of party games with a weight at or near 1.0, but most of his favourite games are Medium or Light Medium.) We’ve listed the weight of the other games suggested below for contrast, but keep in mind it’s a subjective measure; most games fall in between two of the scores.
Shut Up & Sit Down (SUSD) was launched in 2011. Its major components are a YouTube channel, where they are best known for their funny but thoughtful board game reviews, and a website, where they have extensive forums and written reviews and features as well. They’ve also expanded to produce a podcast, and a games convention, SHUX, which is held in Vancouver, Canada. If you like their stuff, Ben reckons you’ll also like No Pun Included, who make similarly in-depth and funny board game review videos, and also have a website and podcast (now called Talk Cardboard).
Unsurprisingly, we mention a lot of board games in this episode. Here’s a full list; links are to the game’s entries on BoardGameGeek.
Talisman (weight 2.17, Medium Light) was first published in 1983, but hit it big with the second edition in 1985. Players take are one of many fantasy archetypes like wizard, barbarian, sorceress and thief, all racing around a slightly Monopoly-like board having weird encounters as they try to reach the centre space and claim the Crown of Command. The currently available revised fourth edition is substantially similar to the earlier versions, and was first released in 2007.
Dungeon! (weight 1.56, Light/Medium Light) was first published in 1975 by TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons at the time. Players choose a “class” (elf, hero, superhero or wizard) and then delve into the chambers of a board designed like a dungeon, hoping to fight monsters and steal their stuff. The most recent edition was first published in 2014 by D&D’s current owners, Wizards of the Coast, and hasn’t changed much except the art and production values.
The Witches (weight 1.66, Light/Medium Light) is the previous Discworld board game we covered on the podcast, in #Pratchat67, “The Three-Elf Problem”. Ben mentions it’s the “other Martin Wallace one”, the first one being Ankh-Morpork, which we have yet to discuss.
King of Tokyo (weight 1.49, Light/Medium Light) was first published in 2011, and has remained popular. There are a few spin-offs, including King of New York and King of Monster Island, which feature twists on the original; and plenty of expansions, mostly extra giant monsters. It also comes with a set of very satisfyingly big and heavy dice, which use symbols instead of numbers.
Survive: Escape from Atlantis! (weight 1.70, Medium Light) was first published in 1982, and sees players trying to get as many of their ten people to safety as possible as Atlantis sinks. The fun twist is they’re once the game starts, you can’t look at the bottom of your people tokens – and they’re each worth a different number of points. A 30th anniversary edition is still in print. The dolphin, giant squid and two other expansions were available combined in one box, but are a bit hard to find now.
Reign of Cthulhu (weight 2.16, Medium Light) is the 2016 game Liz mentions playing at a board game cafe in New Zealand. It is based on Pandemic by Matt Leacock, but is now marketed as a “Pandemic System Game” rather than having “Pandemic” in the title. Players work together to close magical gates to other dimensions before an ancient “Old One” – a cosmic entity with the power of a god – arrives to destroy the world.
Castles of Mad King Ludwig (weight 2.65, Medium Light/Medium) has players trying to build a castle that will please the randomly selected whims of the King. It’s (very) loosely based on the real King of Bavaria, Ludwig II, who spent his fortunes on building a number of lavish castles during the nineteenth century, earning him the nickname “the Fairytale King”. Ben also likes the spin-off game The Palace of Mad King Ludwig, in which all the players build the same castle.
Big Top (weight 1.03, Light) from GameWright is, as Melissa mentions, one of many versions of the game originally published as Barnyard Buddies in 1996. (The versions are pretty much identical aside from art and theme, so there’s just one entry for all of them on BGG.)
Kingdomino (weight 1.22, Light) is a 2016 game in which players build medieval kingdoms by playing domino-like tiles showing various kinds of land, like fields, lakes and mountains. It’s been a pretty big success and has spawned many spin-offs and similar games, including Queendomino, which can be combined with the original.
Daybreak (weight 2.96, Medium) is Matt Leacock’s 2023 game of fighting climate change. It’s really interesting and important, but also great fun to play. Has a great solo mode.
Paperback Adventures (weight 2.70, Medium) is a solo deckbuilding game where you make words out of letter cards to generate points used by your protagonist character to fight a series of six villains. It does have rules for two players, but they’re generally not considered that great; but you can play it with multiple players cooperating to work out the best word to play! Ben has all three of the available characters, and loves them all, but if he had to pick a favourite it’s a toss-up between assassin princess Damsel and undead pirate Plot Hook.
Liz mentioned the Quarter Quell, which she also referenced last episode; it’s a special version of the Hunger Games (from the book series of the same name by Suzanne Collins), a death match by lottery imposed by the fascist state, where they bend the usual rules to make it even more horrible.
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 73, “This Christmas Goes to Eleven”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.
Here’s the Instagram photo of Richard from Cracked and Spineless bookshop in Hobart, showing off his Ineffable Edition of The Definitive Good Omens in 2019!
We’ll be sure to add photos of some of the Christmas food we mentioned here when we can.
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a reference to the famous scene in the 1984 mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap. The film follows famous metal band Spinal Tap on a fairly disastrous tour; at one point guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) shows off his amplifiers which he has had custom made with dials that go to eleven rather than ten, which makes them “one louder”. When asked why he didn’t just “make ten louder”, he replies: “This one goes to eleven.” It seemed a perfect reference for the extreme Christmasness of Father Christmas’ Fake Beard, which also contains eleven stories.
The twelve days of Christmas are a Christian celebration of the Nativity of Jesus. Some traditions have it starting with Christmas Day, and some the day after, which is Boxing Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Australia, and also St Stephen’s Day (the “Feast of Stephen” referenced in the other song featured in this book, Good King Wenceslas). The season is also called Twelvetide, though “Christmastide” is technically a different thing that doesn’t exactly match up, depending on your church. The last night is “Twelfth Night”, as in the Shakespeare play.
Father Christmas is now synonymous with Santa Claus, but this wasn’t always the case. He was the folkloric personification of Christmas in Britain, going back a few hundred years, but by Victorian times began to more resemble the modern Santa Claus, especially after the American version was imported in the mid 1800s. As Ben mentions, Santa Claus’s origins lie with Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas (not German as Ben misremembers), but the modern version also incorporates bits of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas. Ben did once know this, but it’s as if he’s forgotten everything he learned for our Hogfather episode back in 2019! And Pratchett certainly dove deep on the folklore and history when he was writing the novel. But we’re still keen to know what modern sentiment is around the names, because there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between the traditions – Father Christmas has been fully Santa-fied.
The book is still in print as far as we can tell! But this isn’t as easy to determine as it once was…
Pratchett’s other collections of children’s stories also contain a few stories seen elsewhere. Dragons at Crumbling Castle and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner both had deluxe slipcase editions which contained a couple of additional stories, and those stories are included in all editions of the fourth volume The Time-travelling Caveman (though it too had a deluxe edition with a story so far not collected elsewhere). In addition, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner also includes “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, which also appears in Once More* *with Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
Some of these stories were originally published without any title, especially those from the Bucks Free Press. The titles were made up for the purposes of this book. But then again, according to the list in the book, that includes some of the stories which had been previously published in earlier collections under other titles, like “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas”.
Father Christmas’s Fake Beard includes the opening section of Truckers as bonus material. It’s in that book that “Arnold Bros (est 1905)” (not 1903) is revealed to be owned by Arnco Group, along with a great many other businesses, when Gurder, Masklin and Grimma travel to the Top of the Store to learn the truth about the Thing’s warnings of it being demolished. You can hear more about that in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
“Old man yells at cloud” is a meme derived from The Simpsons, specifically the 2002 episode “The Old Man and the Key”. In one scene Homer’s father Abe Simpson needs a photograph for a driver’s license, and uses a photo from a newspaper story about him; it shows him shaking his fist at a cloud in the sky, with the headline “OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD”. It’s been used as a meme since around 2008, usually to denote someone complaining about something for no good reason.
Clinkers are a lolly (or sweet or candy, depending on which flavour of English you speak) manufactured by the Australian confectionary brand Pascall (now owned by Cadbury, in turn owned by Mondelez International). They consist of brightly coloured oval-shaped hard nougat, much like the candy honeycomb you find in Violet Crumble or Crunchie chocolate bars, coated in Cadbury chocolate. We’re not actually sure what Liz’s Dad thinks “Clinker” means, but Ben is pretty close: it’s a generic name for industrial waste products formed by the burning of coal or working of metal, which usually forms small, brittle glassy round shapes – much like the candy.
Isembard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was an English engineer best known for his work during the Industrial Revolution, especially with steamships, railways, bridges and tunnels. There’s a lot to say about him – way more than we can fit in a note – but remember that “Great Man” histories are always over-simplified and leave out a lot of people who were vital to whatever the man in question did, even if he was very great.
It’s been a while since we mentioned the steamroller story, but the short version is that his hard drives containing his unfinished work were destroyed by a steamroller, according to his wishes, in 2017 – the same year Father Christmas’s Fake Beard was published! You can read about it in this Guardian article.
We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook back in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”. B S Johnson’s giant pie was also a disaster. Described informally as “the Great Fruit Pie” (it was made mostly of apples), and under the title “Bloody Stupid Johnson’s Individual Fruit Pie”, Ben remembers rightly that Johnson thought of making a giant pie whistle; however it wasn’t finished until a week after the explosion, and the 30-foot-high “whistling blackbird” is said to be a memorial to those lost to the pie, situated in Hide Park. (The dish created for the pie is now the roof of a house.)
While there is more detail to be found at colinsmythe.co.uk, Ben entirely missed that the book does include original titles and publications for each of the stories in it – they’re in small text on the imprint page, just before Rob Wilkin’s introduction.
More notes to come!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus Pratchat episode “We’re on a Road to Elsewhere“, in which Ben discusses recent Pratchett news, and interviews guest Danny Sag from the Australian Discworld Convention.
Iconographic Evidence
The opening sequence to Good Omens 2 – and handily, the still image for this video is the poster Ben also mentioned!
Here’s the official trailer for Good Omens 2!
Notes and Errata
The episode title is a riff on the chorus lyric from the Talking Heads son “Road to Nowhere”. It might have made a good title for the Strata episode, but Ben will have to think of another one now! (Elsewhere is the equivalent of hyperspace in Strata, traversed through the use of a “Matrix drive”.)
“Cute aggression”, originally “playful aggression”, was popularised around 2013 by the work of psychologists Rebecca Dyer and Aragón. Note that it refers to superficial aggression; folks who express their feelings about cute things this way are not actually violent or aggressive.
A Stroke of the Pen was announced on the 28th of February 2023. You can read about how the stories were rediscovered in this article at LoveReading. The blurb available on several bookstore listings has this to say about the stories within: “Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Council with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and travel millions of years back in time to The Old Red Sandstone Lion pub.”
You can find out more about Gabrielle Kent on her website, gabriellekent.com. The books about a boy who inherits a magic castle are the Alfie Bloom series, beginning with Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle, published in 2015. Rani Reports is the series about the young journalist, beginning with Rani Reports on the Missing Millions, which was published in May this year.
Knights and Bikes (2019) is the first videogame from indie UK developer Foam Sword Games. It was created by Rex Crowle and Moo Yu, who you might know from their work on games like Tearaway, Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank, Ring Fling and MonstrosCity. Crowle is also the brain behind the roleplaying game inspired to-do list app Epic Win. The game is available on most platforms.
There are several Discworld books specifically credited to the Discworld Emporium, but most of them do include Terry’s name in one way or another! The credit on The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas is “Terry Pratchett aided and abetted by the Discworld Emporium”. (The copyright has Terry Pratchett and the Emporium as a partnership as the officially credited authors, with Emporium identified as Isobel Pearson, Reb Voyce, Bernard Pearson and Ian Mitchell in that order.) Earlier books produced by the Emporium like The World of Poo and Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook are credited on the cover only as “Terry Pratchett presents”, with the Handbook “aided and abetted” credit on the inside, while for the earlier World of Poo fictional author Miss Felicity Beadle was “assisted by Bernard and Isobel Pearson”. Only The Nac Mac Feegles’ Big Wee Alphabet Book uses the credit “by the Discworld Emporium”, separately including the same “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” identifier seen on Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. (The description on the website says the Feegle book was “lovingly produced by Ian Mitchell”.) Earlier books worked on by Bernard Pearson, like the Discworld Almanack, have him as a co-author with Terry. So the new Tiffany book is not the first to identify specific people as the author without Terry being one of them, but it is the first to do so on the front cover. Ben is wrong, but it still feels like a big deal to him.
You can see Colleen Doran‘s impressive list of comic book credits, and some of her amazing artwork, at colleendoran.com. You can get notified about the crowdfunding campaign for the Good Omens graphic novelby signing up at Kickstarter.
You can see a list of the books published by Dunmanifestin on the company website. They don’t yet list the Good Omens Kickstarter, but “The Terry Pratchett Estate” is listed as the campaign owner, and their username is “dunmanifestin”, so that seems pretty clear. The campaign has been mentioned by the official Good Omens Twitter account, which is @GoodOmensHQ.
There are currently eight other active Pratchett podcasts by Ben’s count. He keeps track of them via the Pratchat side-project wiki, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ show starring Jason Sudeikis as the title character, a college football coach from Kansas who is hired to manage Richmond AFC by the ex-wife of its previous owner, who took it in her divorce. It’s a beautiful and heartwarming show that has just finished up its third and (supposedly) final season, and as so many people have said about Unseen Academicals, “the important thing about football is that it’s not about football.” Ben highly recommends the show.
As well as Nullus Anxietas, which you can find at ausdwcon.org, we mention lots of Discworld conventions this episode, but missed out a few. Here’s a run-down:
The original Discworld Convention, now known as the International Discworld Convention, started in the UK in 1996, as Danny mentions, and runs every two years. Thanks to Rachel Rowlands of Discworld Monthly for pointing out that it has missed two of those years: 2000 and 2020. The next one is in Birmingham in August 2024, and you can find out more at dwcon.org.
The Irish Discworld Convention began in 2009 and also runs every two years, though not in 2021. The next one is in Cork in October 2023; find out more at idwcon.org.
The North American Discworld Convention also started in 2009, and has run five times since then, most recently (as per Ben’s footnote) in 2019. Their website, nadwcon.org, is offline as of the publication of this episode, but Rachel Rowlands informs us that a team is working on putting together another convention in the US, so keep an eye out for information about it in the near future.
Die Scheibenwelt Convention, aka the German Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, most recently in May 2023 – and they hold it in a castle! (The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s Joanna Hagan went this year; keep on eye on their social media for her video diary if you want to know more about what that was like.) They’re planning the next one for 2025. Find out more at discworld-convention.de (the website is in German and English).
Cabbagecon, the Dutch Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, and most recently in 2022. The next one will be in October 2024; find out more at dutchdwcon.nl (they also have info available in English).
The Ineffable Con is not a Discworld convention, but as it’s name suggests a celebration of Good Omens, specifically the television series. It’s run three times in the UK since 2019, and a fourth online-only convention is coming in October 2023. Find out more at theineffablecon.org.uk.
The Llamedos Holiday Camp is the newest fan event, which has run in Wales since 2020. It’s organised by the folks behind Discworld Monthly (hello again Rachel – thanks for the reminder!), and rather than being a traditional convention, describes itself as an “Interactive Immersive Discworld Experience” – it’s presented as if the event is taking place in Llamedos as the Discworld equivalent of an old-school British holiday camp. It will next appear in 2024 with a “Scout Jamboree” theme, and you can find out more at llamedosholidaycamp.com.
The special convention episodes we’ve released in conjunction with Nullus Anxietas are:
#PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, recorded live at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.
#PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive”, recorded for The Lost Con online event in 2021.
A special Hogswatch video for the con’s 2021 Christmas event; it’s available to Pratchat subscribers on YouTube.
“A Tale of Two Carpets”, recorded for the Discworld Virtual Fun Day in June 2022; the title is from a special version released to Pratchat subscribers with extra footnotes, but you can see the original that played at the event at this link.
Blow Up is a 2023 Australian reality television show made by Channel 7 in which contestants compete to make the biggest and best balloon sculptures. It’s based on a Dutch show, also called Blow Up, from 2022. You can watch Blow Up via 7Plus, which is the channel’s catch-up streaming service, though it may not be available to viewers outside Australia. We won’t spoil the results in case you want to watch it for yourself, but don’t get your hopes up for a second season; Blow Up was moved from Channel 7 to one of their digital-only channels, 7flix, after two episodes, thanks to disappointing ratings.
Werewolf is a social deduction party game. Players are secretly assigned a role as a werewolf or villager, and play in alternating day and night turns. The werewolves, who know who each other are, eliminate one villager player each night turn, while during the day turns the villagers must debate who are the werewolves and vote to eliminate players they suspect. Either team wins if they eliminate all of the other players. The game was invented in Russia as Mafia by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986, but didn’t take off in America until it was re-themed to be about werewolves by Andy Plotkin in around 1997. It is often treated like a folk game, even though it’s origin can be traced, and there are many, many published and free versions available, many with large numbers of unique roles for the villagers which grant them various special abilities and win or lose conditions. Personally Ben considers it inferior to newer social deduction games that don’t rely so heavily on player elimination, but he’s developed a couple of variations of his own, including Spy Catcher and Smuggletown.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 72, “The Masked Dancer”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1989 short story “Turntables of the Night” with guest Andrew McClelland.
Iconographic Evidence
The cover art of the 1997 anthology The Flying Sorcerers is a Josh Kirby illustration of this story. The full jacket illustration also appears in A Blink of the Screen.
Notes and Errata
The quest for this month’s episode title was a long one, but we settled on this riff on The Masked Singer, a popular reality gameshow based on a format originating in Korea. In the show, celebrities perform songs in elaborate costumes that hide their identities and a judging panel and the audience try to guess who they are while also voting for their favourites, with the singer with the fewest votes being unmasked and eliminated each round. Appropriately enough, the Australian show’s most recent season which finished the day before this episode was published featured a singer dressed as the Grim Reaper, who turned out to be Darren Hayes of Savage Garden fame!
The Vengaboys are a Dutch Eurodance group who were huge in the late 1990s, best known for the songs “We Like to Party” and “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!”, the former of which includes the line “The Vengabus is coming”. Ben’s memory is sketchy but he thinks Liz is referring to a comedy bit Andy used to do about the nature of the Vengabus, painting it as something more ominous. (We’ll check up on this and update this note!)
Gilbert and Sullivan are dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), who wrote a series of comic light operas in the Victorian era which have since become world famous. Andy’s love for them was expressed through his most recent comedy show with Martine Wengrow: The Very Model of a Modern Major Musical, a two-person performance of his own full-cast opera in the distinctive Gilbert and Sullivan style which he wrote during the lockdowns of 2020.
Truckers, published in 1989 (the same year as “Turntables of the Night”), is the first book in Terry Pratchett’s trilogy about a band of tiny Nomes trying to survive in the human world. We discussed it way back in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
Good Omens is Pratchett’s famous 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman about an angel and demon who share an unlikely friendship and try to avert the impending apocalypse, a task made more difficulty when they mislay the Anti-Christ. We discussed it in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
The Long Earth is Pratchett’s collaboration with sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, a sci-fi series based on an idea he had around the time of The Colour of Magic about a string of infinite parallel Earths devoid of humans. We’ve discussed four out of the five books; for an overview of the plot of the first three, see #PratchatPreviously, “The Long Footnote”.
Actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz is probably best known for his film and television work in things like Look Around You, Black Books, Shaun of the Dead and The Tick. He has a distinctive deep voice (a feature of his guest role on Black Books), and was famously the speaking voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Maul was physically played by stunt performer Ray Park). He played the demon Crowley opposite Mark Heap’s Aziraphale in the 2014 BBC Radio adaptation of Good Omens before going on to perform the voice of Death in all forty recently released Penguin Discworld audiobooks (they didn’t do The Last Hero), which are otherwise read by a different narrator for each sub-series. (Bill Nighy also appears in every book, reading the footnotes.) Serafinowicz also voices Death in the animated feature film The Amazing Maurice.
Harry Harrison (1925-2012) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat, an interplanetary con man and rogue who starred in several short stories and novels beginning with “The Stainless Steel Rat” in 1957. The final book, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns, was published in 2010.
Harry Turtledove is an American speculative fiction author best known for his works of alternate history. Andy mentions Turtledove’s 1992 novel The Guns of the South, in which time-travellers from 2014 South Africa supply advanced arms to the Confedercy, allowing them to win the US civil war. He is also known for the similar Southern Victory series, in which the Confederacy wins thanks to one small difference in history (no time travel is involved), and the Worldwar series, in which aliens invade Earth in 1942 during World War II.
Hidden Turnings was published in February 1989 and included works by Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Roger Zelazny (best known for The Chronicles of Amber), Tanith Lee and many others. You can find all the details of the book and the stories within at its Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry.
We’ve talked many times of British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011), and especially of her Chrestomanci series about a connected series of parallel magical worlds; Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequel; and her parody of both travel guides and fantasy tropes, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
The panel Ben featuring Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones was “Whose Fantasy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. (Ben found it after we wondered if the two were friends in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”). The talk was indeed chaired by Neil Gaiman, and also featured John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. Ben was on the money when he said it was from around the time of “Turntables of the Night” – it’s from the same year, 1988!
The Flying Sorcerers is a 1997 (not 1996) anthology of comic fantasy stories, organised into three sections: “Hordes of the Things: Comic Fantasies”, “Deadly Nightshapes: Tales of the Supernatural” and “Vacant Space: Stories of Science Fiction”. As well as Pratchett’s story it features work from P. G. Wodehouse, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Michael Moorcock, Roald Dahl, Stanislaw Lem and Angela Carter and many others. You can see the full list of stories on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
Peter Haining has edited and written introductions for a long list of books, mostly compilations of previously published works. As well as The Flying Sorcerers he also published Pratchett works in Space Movies II, The Wizards of Odd and Vintage Science Fiction. He also compiled five major nonfiction books about Doctor Who in the 1980s, including the 25th anniversary book 25 Glorious Years in 1988. Haining’s full bibliography can also be found on the ISFDb.
The Wizards of Odd was published in 1996. It was also edited by Peter Haining, featured a previously published piece by Terry Pratchett as its first story, and used a Josh Kirby illustration for that story as its cover art. In this case it was “Theatre of Cruelty”, which we just discussed in #Pratchat70, “Punching Up”. The full contents are (you guessed it) on the ISFDb.
Hordes of the Things was a 1980 BBC radio series written by Andrew Marshall and John Lloyd (who had just written and produced The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams), under pseudonyms with three initials to emulate J R R Tolkien, and starring Simon Callow and Paul Eddington. A fairly broad parody of Lord of the Rings set in the kingdom of Albion as it faces an invasion of the “Dark One”, it was also loose political satire.
Small caps can be simulated by modern word processing and desktop publishing software, but this is usually unsatisfactory since scaled-down capital letters have a lighter weight (i.e. because they’re shrunk the lines are thinner), whereas proper small caps should have the same weight as full size lower case letters.
Death’s dialogue has varied a bit between editions; in some, like the Corgi paperback of The Colour of Magic and the collector’s library editions of many of the books, he speaks in all small caps – i.e. only small capital letters. In others, like the first hardcover edition of Hogfather, he speaks in mixed small caps, with regular capitalisation. It’s only in anthologies like The Flying Sorcerers where he seems to speak in all caps.
Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was an award-winning American science fiction writer. His Chronicles of Amber series, consisting of two sets of five novels published between 1970 and 1991, is about a group of immortals, the Princes and Princesses of Amber, who rule their one “true” world of Amber. They are able to walk between “shadows”, the infinite alternate realities given order and substance by the Pattern, a mystic labyrinth; the royals of Amber gain their shadow-walking ability by walking the Pattern. They organise into several factions and scheme amongst themselves to take the throne. A hugely popular roleplaying game of the 1990s, Amber Diceless Roleplaying, was based on these stories; player characters oppose each other, vying for power, and instead of using dice are simply ranked in order of who is best at what during an “auction” at the start of the game.
“Kalifriki of the Thread” is a short story about Kalifriki, more or less an assassin who can travel between dimensions (called shifting into the “side-by-side lands”) and whose signature method of killing is the Thread, an unusual and seemingly multidimensional weapon or force. In the story, Kalifriki is hunting the Kife, another shifter who inhabits the bodies of others. The character returns in the short story “Come Back to the Killing Ground Alice, My Love”, first published in Amazing Stories in 1992. Both stories were collected into one volume in 2022.
DJ Ian Bell was not only a DJ, he was also a photographer, a music historian, and a record store worker and owner. He died in May 2023. You can hear him talking about his history in this 2019 segment from ABC Radio in Adelaide, played again the week after his death.
Since 2021 Taylor Swift has been re-recording and releasing new versions of her first six studio albums, in part because she regretted signing away ownership of the master recordings as a teenager (she was 15!) in her original contract with the label Big Machine in 2005, and subsequently became responsible for something like 80% of their revenue. After a series of disagreements, including not being able to buy the masters rights, and Big Machine selling out to her former manager, Scooter Braun, she enacted the re-recording plan under her new and much more favourable contract with Republic Records. Because she wrote her own songs, she owns the composition rights, and so controls who can record new versions of the songs – including herself. The new releases are subtitled “(Taylor’s Version)” and so far have included Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989, and they’ve plummeted streams and sales of the originals as her loyal fans stick to her versions.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 71, “It Belongs in a University”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2013 collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, with guests Rev Dr Avril Hannah-Jones and Dr Charlotte Pezaro.
Iconographic Evidence
This is the video from the Waterstones event for the launch of the fourth book, with Terry talking about Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species.This is the Eye of Magnus, the magical Great Big Thing from the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which Ben immediately thought of while reading the descriptions of Ponder Stibbons’ “Challenger Project”.
Notes and Errata
The episode title echoes Indiana Jones’ famous (and very colonialist) line, “It belongs in a museum!” Thankfully the wizards didn’t steal Roundworld from anyone…but if you want to know how this sort of thinking affects people in the colonised countries, we’d recommend Marc Fennel’s podcast (and television series) Stuff the British Stole.
The term “philosopause” is referred to in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, where Jack and Ian describe it as when “elderly scientists … stop doing science and take up not very good philosophy instead”. They didn’t coin the term; it dates back to at least 1996, and probably earlier.
Gregory Benford (1941-) is both an influential science fiction author and a physicist, but not a qualified theologian or philosopher. The first source footnoted in the book is the one for Benford’s idea of human- and universe-centred thinking, and it’s “a creature of double vision”, from Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: Essays on Bridging the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, McFarland Publishers 2009, pages 228-236.
Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge: how do we know what we know, and what qualifies a belief as knowledge?
Liz has talked about “hounding the germ man to death” before; you can hear her talk about Semmelweis in #Pratchat48 (about Thief of Time) and #Pratchat54 (Night Watch). As on those occasions, we recommend this episode of NPR’s Shortwavepodcast to get a good short version of his struggle to just get doctors to wash their hands in a time when no-one believed in germs.
L-Space is originally described as a distortion of space into “poly-fractal L-Space”. While the Librarian frequently travels through L-Space, it’s not presented as a “space” where things exist, but a way to travel through space and time. Books create L-Space.
Narrativia as a Discworld goddess pre-dates this book by a couple of years, Pratchett having named her – and commissioned a statue of her – in 2011, as detailed in this Guardian article. This does seem to be her first appearance in fiction, though the production company Narrativia, which holds the media licensing rights to his works, was formed in 2012.
Charlotte recommended Bill Bryson’s 2003 book A Short History of Nearly Everything, as well as Pratchett’s own Nation. Avril recommended Marilynne Robinson’s 2016 collection The Givenness of Things: Essays.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 70, “Punching Up”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1993 Discworld short story, “Theatre of Cruelty”, with guest Caimh McDonnell.
Iconographic Evidence
Since it was available for free, there are lots of scans floating about on the internet, and it’s a shorter version than the one available for free on the L-Space web, we figure it should be okay for us to share the original two-page spread of the story from Bookcase magazine, including the original version of Josh Kirby’s illustration.
Notes and Errata
The episode title plays on Mr Punch, the concept of “punching up” in comedy (i.e. the idea that the targets of derision in comedy should be those with more power), and the other concept of “punching up” in writing (i.e. adding more jokes and/or pace to a script to improve it).
We’ve mentioned Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series of urban fantasy novels before. They follow the adventures of new police officer Peter Grant as he becomes apprentice to the last wizard in England, who also works for the London police. There are now nine novels, four novellas, a short story collection, nine graphic novels (originally published as separate issue comic books) and a tabletop roleplaying game. The best place to start is probably Rivers of London, the first novel from 2011, which was originally titled Midnight Riot in the US (but is now published there under its proper title). The first comic, Body Work, is also a good place to dip in, as are most of the novellas and short stories.
The Fortean Times is the magazine of the Fortean Society, an organisation founded by American researcher and writer Charles Fort. He collected and wrote about “anomalous phenomena” – unusual events and experiences which had gone unexplained by science, though apparently he did it to keep scientists on their toes rather than because he believed any of the theories put forth in his writing. The Fortean Times is still published in the US, UK and other countries today, and you can find them online at forteantimes.com (though you have to subscribe in print). Fort himself is mentioned in Good Omens.
We can’t find a good reference for the edition of Good Omens with two Thursdays in one week, if that is a real error and not a fevered imagining of Ben’s. But there have been other notable ones: in some recent editions, Anathema is referred to as Agnes in one sentence when showing her index cards to Newt, and a persistent one in earlier editions was Famine saying his name had seven letters when cryptically referring to himself with a crossword clue. Some white editions of the book had a cover misprint in which the text and Crowley’s glass of wine appear, but the demon himself does not!
On Roundworld, “theatre of cruelty” is an artistic concept created by Antonin Artaud, a French poet and theatre maker (among many other things) active in the 1920s and 30s. His theatre of cruelty wasn’t literally theatre, or literally cruel, but rather a reaction against realism. He wanted performance to be something more visceral: a spectacle, incorporating music, dance, lights and everything other than text, performed by “athletes of the heart” who would surround audiences to shock them out of complacency and wake them up to the horrors and violence of real life. While not embraced widely, it’s been an influence on many theatre makers, notably director Peter Brook in his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, including a famous 1966 production of the play Marat/Sade. This YouTube video from CrashCourse is a pretty good overview.
Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock Holmes stories are “A Study in Emerald”, from the 2003 anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, and “The Case of Death and Honey”, from the 2011 collection A Study in Sherlock. “A Study in Emerald” won both a Hugo and Locus Award in 2004, and has been adapted into a board game by Martin Wallace, of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork and The Witches fame.
Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was an American speculative fiction writer whose work encompassed novels, short stories, television (most famously the Star Trek episode “The Guardian on the Edge of Forever”), videogames and more. Angry Candy is his 1988 anthology about death, containing the award-winning short stories “Eidolons”, “Paladins of the Lost Hour” and “Soft Monkey”. Dangerous Visions was a 1967 collection of groundbreaking science fiction stories edited by Ellison and was hugely influential, not least for the way it included sex in the genre. It was followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and he announced a third, The Last Dangerous Visions, in 1973, but it was not published in his lifetime. His failure to publish the book became a controversy in speculative fiction circles, especially after several of the authors who sold him stories died before seeing them in print; British author Christopher Priest wrote about the book for his own fanzine, eventually expanding the piece into a short book titled The Book on the Edge of Forever in 1988. Ellison’s literary estate is now managed by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, who announced in 2022 that The Last Dangerous Visions would finally be published in September 2024, preceded by new editions of the first two books.
Regular listeners will be familiar with Liz’s love for Diana Wynn Jones, and we’ve previously mentioned her 1988 novelette “Carol O’Neir’s Hundredth Dream”. It’s part of her Chrestomanci series of stories and books, set in a magical universe where there are a specific number of alternate worlds.
We’ve also previously discussed American horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), most notably in #Pratchat58, “The Barbarian Switch”. Her famous story “The Lottery” appears in the many collections, including 1949’s The Lottery and Other Stories. Dark Tales is a more recent anthology, published by Penguin in 2016.
More notes to come soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
