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Ben McKenzie

#Pratchat86 Notes and Errata

8 June 2025 by Ben 2 Comments

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 86, “Of the Watch the Last”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s thirty-ninth Discworld novel, 2011’s Snuff, with guest Freyja Stokes.

Iconographic Evidence

Watch this space!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title adapts one of the common formats for goblin names to describe Snuff in bittersweet terms. The book is the eighth and last in the Watch sub-series, though characters from the Watch books do appear in the final two Discworld novels. (No spoilers about who, though.)
  • There are several publicly available theses and academic articles about Terry Pratchett and/or Discworld from Australian scholars, most (but not all) the result of the Pratchett Scholarship at UniSA. Here are are a few we’ve found; references are in Australian Government (author-date) style.
    • Arasu P (2019), All the Disc’s a Stage: Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters as Metafiction, Monash University, Melbourne, accessed 8 June 2025.
    • Stokes F (2023), The turtle moves : how Terry Pratchett’s Discworld does vernacular theory, UniSA, Adelaide, accessed 8 June 2025.
    • Wyld J (2024), Pebbles and the great ocean of truth : artificial & unauthorised paratexts of the Discworld, UniSA, Adelaide, accessed 8 June 2025.
  • There are several published collections of Pratchett-related academic writing, including:
    • Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works (Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell (eds), 2014)
    • Philosophy and Terry Pratchett (Jacob Heald and James B South (eds), 2014)
    • Terry Pratchett’s Narrative Worlds: From Giant Turtles to Small Gods – Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature (Marion Rana (ed), 2018)
    • Terry Pratchett’s Ethical Worlds: Essays on Identity and Narrative in Discworld and Beyond (Kristin Noone and Emily Lavin (eds), 2020)
    • Powers and Society in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Building a Fantasy Civilization (Justine Breton (ed), 2025)
  • How Christie wrote her mysteries – going back and putting the clues in afterwards
  • Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries was a series of historical crime novels starring glamorous sleuth Phryne Fisher (played by Essie Davis in the television adaptation, which was produced from 2012 to 2015; there was a film too, but forget that, just watch the show). Mostly set in Melbourne, the books were written by Australian author Kerry Greenwood, who sadly passed away on 26 March 2025, aged 70. Greenwood was, by all accounts, a delightful person. GNU Kerry Greenwood. We’ve previously mentioned Phryne in #Pratchat37 (about Johnny and the Bomb) and #Pratchat75 (about the Guards! Guards! boad game), as well as the bonus episode #EeekClub2023.
  • Downton Abbey was a hit British television series about fictional aristocratic family the Granthams and their servants, set in their eponymous country estate in the early twentieth century. It ran for six series on ITV between 2010 and 2015, and two feature films in 2019 and 2022. We’ve previously talked about it, most notably in #Pratchat36 (about Carpe Jugulum), #Pratchat48 (about Thief of Time) and #Pratchat61 (about the previous Watch book, Thud!).
  • The children’s authors we mentioned who scratch the itch of “gross stuff for kids” were:
    • Roald Dahl, specifically books like The Twits and The Witches; we’ve previously mentioned Dahl and his work in #Pratchat4, #Pratchat9, #Pratchat59, #Pratchat65 and #Pratchat72.
    • R L Stine, author of the Goosebumps books, who we’ve previously mentioned in #Pratchat18 and #Pratchat33.
    • Paul Jennings, Australian author of many books of weird and gross short stories, which were adapted into the iconic 1990s television series Round the Twist. We’ve mentioned him before in #Pratchat15, #Pratchat32, #Pratchat38 and #Pratchat43.
  • We had to cut Freyja’s explanation of spontaneous human combustion for time, but the short version is that it happened to people sitting in armchairs which, at that time, were stuffed with and covered in extremely flammable materials. Even a small spark or ember would cause them to go up instantly in a fire so hot, it rendered a human body quickly into ash. Only the sitter’s outstretched foot would escape. Charles Dickens did indeed believe in it; a character dies from spontaneous human combustion in Bleak House.
  • The book series Freyja mentions with the harp-playing subjugated alien is Sheri S. Tepper’s Marjorie Westriding trilogy, set on the planet of Hobbs Land, hence the alternate name “Hobbs Land Gods”. We think the specific book is probably the second one, Raising the Stones.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, CMOT Dibbler, Discworld, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Glenda Sugarbean, goblins, Igor, Juliet Stollop, Mr Nutt, Mustrum Ridcully, Pepe, Ponder Stibbons, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trevor Likely, Vetinari, William de Worde, Wizards

#Pratchat86 – Of the Watch the Last

8 June 2025 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Liz and Ben are joined by Pratchett academic and cosplayer Freyja Stokes as they head out to the Discworld countryside for a bit of peace, quiet and definitely no murders, in Terry Pratchett’s final City Watch book, 2011’s Snuff.

Sam Vimes is facing his ultimate ordeal: a holiday. But no sooner has he made a mess of meeting the staff at Crundles, the Ramkin country estate, than he smells something rotten in the Shires. When the local blacksmith offers to meet him at midnight, he and his trusty valet Willikins instead find a puddle of blood and the ire of the local magistrates. A lot more’s afoot than a simple murder – and it seems to have something to do with goblins, tobacco, and Fred Colon taking a funny turn…

One of the last of the Discworld novels, and the final one starring Sam Vimes and (in their by now customary secondary roles) the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, Snuff also introduces a new species of fantasy creature to the Disc: goblins. Not so much hated as barely considered by other peoples, they eke out a wretched existence in the corners of the world that can hide them, a remnant of the Old Days of Dark Lords and magical war. But for Pratchett, of course, goblins aren’t just tiny evil filthy things – and their story is much more about the evils of humans than any other monster.

Have you read as far as Snuff, and do you think it feels different to the books that come before it? Were you expecting more of a mix of Pride & Prejudice and Midsomer Murders, and how do you feel about it being more of “howcatchem”? Was it a weird choice to take Vimes so far out of his element in his final book, or does it do us all a favour by showing us what his retirement might possibly look like? What’s the weirdest rule in crocket? How great are goblins???* And what’s your goblin name? Don’t get distracted by the new Clacks tower – join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat86.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_86.mp3

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Guest Freyja Stokes (he/she) was one of the first recipients of UniSA’s Pratchett Scholarship, and finished her Masters thesis in 2023. It’s titled ‘The turtle moves : how Terry Pratchett’s Discworld does vernacular theory’, and it’s available via the UniSA library. Freyja is also a keen cosplayer and crafty person, and you find her and her creations on Facebook and other social media.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month we take a break from the few remaining Pratchett novels to play a game that we promise is simpler than crocket: Discworld: Ankh-Morpork, the fan favourite of the board games! Get your questions in via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat87.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

* This one is rhetorical. They’re really great.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, goblins, Sybil, The Shires, The Watch, Willikins, Young Sam

#Pratchat3 – You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind

8 January 2018 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

In episode three, comedian Cal Wilson is back to discuss the book that started her passion for Terry Pratchett – Sourcery! It’s the fifth Discworld novel, published in 1989, and both revisits locations and characters from the first two books and takes us to new parts of the Disc.

Happy to have left his adventuring days behind him, inept “wizzard” Rincewind now works as assistant librarian at Unseen University, the Disc’s premiere college for wizards. But just as a new archchancellor is about to be named, a young boy arrives. Coin is the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son: a Sourcerer, a source of raw magic not seen on the Disc since the ancient time of the Mage Wars. As Coin takes over the university and wizards across the world awaken to power they’ve never known, the end of the world draws nigh…and Rincewind just can’t seem to avoid getting involved.

Rincewind was Pratchett’s first protagonist, and this novel exemplifies all the things that make us love him: genre-awareness, unrepentant cowardice, reluctant heroism, lack of any skill at wizardry and fierce self-identification as a wizard. It also sees the return of the Luggage, a living chest which follows Rincewind wherever he goes. It was a delight for us all to see these characters again, and we have grand plans to go back to their beginnings in the very first Discworld novels…

In the meantime, when you’ve finished listening to this episode, get ready for the next one by reading Wyrd Sisters! We’ll be recording on January 14th, so get your questions in ASAP if you’d like us to answer them on the podcast.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_03.mp3

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Guest Cal Wilson (she/her) was one of Australia and New Zealand’s most beloved comedians. She previously appeared in our first episode, “Boots Theory“, and would return for our fiftieth episode, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”. At the time of publishing Cal was about to tour a new live stand-up show, Hindsight, in multiple cities at festivals throughout 2018. (You can see the poster she mentions in our episode notes.) Cal passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness in October 2023; she is sorely missed. GNU Cal Wilson.

You can find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Conina, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Nijel, Rincewind, Sourcery, The Luggage, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat1 – Boots Theory

8 November 2017 by Pratchat Imps 7 Comments

In our first full-length episode, Elizabeth and Ben are joined by comedian Cal Wilson to discuss the winner of our poll – Terry Pratchett’s 1993 novel Men at Arms! The fifteenth Discworld novel, Men at Arms is the second to focus on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, following Guards! Guards!

Samuel Vimes, Captain of the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch, is only a week away from marriage and retirement. So of course “ethnic tensions” between dwarfs and trolls are at boiling point, something explodes in the Assassin’s Guild, and there’s a murderer on the loose – a murderer who uses a mysterious and uniquely deadly weapon… Luckily the Watch has expanded, taking on three unorthodox new recruits. But will they be enough to stop war in the streets, and catch a murderer who can kill from a distance?

Men at Arms is a real smorgasbord of Discworld stuff, and a great introduction to the world – especially the quintessential Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork. It’s also a fun howdunit (i.e. we know who, just not how they’ll be identified and caught), has one of the best (and most tragic) friendships in the series, introduces (if clumsily) one of Pratchett’s favourite romances, and carries a message about the dangers of killing machines which sadly hasn’t got any less relevant in the last quarter of a century.

Do you agree this is great place to start? Is it the best Watch book, or at least up there? Was Pratchett ahead of his time in how he handled the issues in the book, and would he have done it differently if he’d been writing now? We want to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat1 on social media if you want to comment on our discussion here.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_01.mp3

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Guest Cal Wilson (she/her) was a Melbourne-based New Zealand stand-up comedian and author. The children’s book she couldn’t name at the time is George and the Great Bum Stampede, illustrated by Sarah Davis and published by Scholastic. It’s the first in a series about George’s family, the Peppertons. Cal passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness in October 2023; she is sorely missed. GNU Cal Wilson.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Gaspode the Wonder Dog, Men at Arms, Patrician, The Watch, Vimes

#Pratchat50 – Salt Rat Arsenic Heat

8 December 2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Happy fiftieth episode to us! We’re celebrating with the return of our very first guest, comedian and author Cal Wilson! Cal joins Liz and Ben in the kitchen to brave the recipes within the 1999 Discworld side project Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, co-authored by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, with illustrations by Paul Kidby.

After his latest books are forcibly withdrawn from sale, J H C Goatberger reluctantly decides to publish another manuscript sent to him by Nanny Ogg. He hires a few editors to “put in the spelling, grammar and punctuation” and has his wife vet it for anything objectionable enough to get the book banned. The result is Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, a collection of Nanny’s own recipes, others she’s collected from around the Disc, and some of her wit, wisdom and advice – in particular when it comes to etiquette.

Published alongside The Fifth Elephant (see #Pratchat40), Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is one of several “in-universe artefact” books for the Discworld. It collects around fifty or so recipes – minus a dozen or so joke ones – devised by Hannan. Pratchett and Briggs round out the book with Nanny’s advice on matters of life, death, flowers and everything in between. Paul Kidby provides some great illustrations of various characters, dishes and other glimpses of Discworld life.

What do you think of books like this, that bring a bit of a fictional world into the real one? Which of Nanny’s recipes would you try? How do her observations match up with your own experiences of life, love and…um..toilet seats? Do you want a sausage-inna-Bunnings T-shirt? And are you ready to see pictures of our efforts? (Probably not…) Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat50 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_50.mp3

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Guest Cal Wilson (she/her) was one of Australia and New Zealand’s most beloved comedians. She passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness in October 2023, and is sorely missed. GNU Cal Wilson.

Cal previously guested in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, talking about Men at Arms and Sourcery, respectively. In between she published two children’s books – George and the Great Bum Stampede and George and the Great Brain Swappery. Cal was also no stranger to podcasts; she guested on dozens, including StoryKids reading a young listener’s story, “The Gloomy Mist”. She was also co-host of Money Power Freedom with journalist Santilla Chingaipe for the Victorian Women’s Trust.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site – including some photos of our culinary efforts! (Viewer discretion is advised.) And you can also find some more recipes from this book in our special “Oggswatch Feast” episode for 2021! (We might even do this again some day.)

December is a busy time for us! To further celebrate reaching fifty episodes, we’ve invited a bunch of great folks, including past guests, fellow Pratchett podcasters and more to cook a few more recipes for a special Hogswatch Feast episode! Watch out for it on Hogswatch day (i.e. December 25, Australian time).

We’re also recording our next episode very soon – December 17 in fact – and we’ll be discussing the next adventure for Tiffany Aching, 2006’s Wintersmith, with Australian fantasy author Garth Nix! So if you have questions, get them in “toot sweet”, as Nanny might say, using the hashtag #Pratchat51, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nanny Ogg, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Patrician, Paul Kidby, Rincewind, Stephen Briggs

#Pratchat77 Notes and Errata

8 June 2024 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Lucas Testro, non-Discworld, Short Fiction, The Hades Business

#Pratchat56 Notes and Errata

8 June 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

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

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

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is valid C++ code, assuming that the function Podcast exists and updates the value of unreadPratchetts to avoid the podcast going on forever. Or is that what you all secretly want?
  • Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) – who’ll be mentioned quite a bit this episode – was an American science fiction author, many of whose novels and short stories have been famously adapted for the screen. These include The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (adapted twice as Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (more about that in another note) and A Scanner Darkly, among others.
  • You can hear Sean’s episode of Splendid Chaps, “Three/Family“, over at the Splendid Chaps website. It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 2013, at the pop-up Adelaide Fringe venue the Tuxedo Cat, and released on 23 March 2013.
  • Strata was Pratchett’s third novel, first published in June 1981, about two and a half years before The Colour of Magic. It’s features a science fiction version of the Discworld – a planet shaped like a flat disc, which seems to have been built by ancient aliens. It’s more-or-less a parody of Larry Niven’s popular Ringworld books, with many specific jokes and references. But we’ll say no more about it here, as we’ll definitely be covering it on the podcast in future.
  • The Ferals (1994-1995) was an Australian children’s television program on the ABC starring a mix of humans and puppet animals: Rattus, a rat; Modigliana, a feral cat; Mixy, a rabbit (her name is a pun on myxomatosis, a disease used to control wild pest rabbits in Australia); and a “dopey dog”, who it turns out is both not a dingo and not a Darren – his name is actually Derryn. While the original show only ran for two seasons, the puppet characters were very popular and continued to host and appear on other shows for several years. This included the five-minute Feral TV, in which the ferals ran a television station headed up by Kerry the Cane Toad (a clear parody of Kerry Packer, then owner of Australia’s Channel 9 TV network) and his assistant Rodney, a cockroach.
  • The story was written for the 1990 anthology Digital Dreams, edited by British writer, editor and sociologist specialising in religion, David V. Barrett. Barrett has a long history editing and writing for speculative fiction and similar magazines, including Vector and the Fortean Times. He also edited Tales From the Vatican Vaults, a collection of short fiction based on the premise of secret Vatican files being released to the public in an alternate history where Pope John Paul I reformed the Catholic Church. It was published in 2015, and features a few stories by authors who contributed to Digital Dreams. As we discussed, authors in the collection include Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynn Jones, Dave Langford, Storm Constantine, Ian McDonald, Keith Roberts and Andy Sawyer. You can see the cover and full list of authors at the book’s entry in the Speculative Fiction Database (SFDB).
  • The short story commentary in which Pratchett says “short stories cost me blood” and “I doubt I’ve done more than fifteen in my life” is “The Sea and Little Fishes”, which we discussed in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” The book in which this commentary appears, A Blink of the Screen, contains thirty-two short pieces of fiction. Admittedly, a few of those don’t really count as stories – see #Pratchat53 for three examples – but that’s not counting the four volumes of his early short stories for children, published separately.
  • Neil Gaiman’s short story about the troll under the bridge is titled, er… “The Troll Bridge” (or sometimes “Troll-Bridge”). It seems to have been first published in the short story collection Snow White, Blood Red in 1993, two years after the first publication of Pratchett’s story of the same name. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1994, and has appeared in a few other places, including Gaiman’s own anthologies Angels and Visitations (1993 – probably the collection Sean is thinking of), Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and M is for Magic (2007), and was adapted into the comic book Ben read in 2016 by Colleen Doran. While he was certainly better known as a comics writer at the time, Gaiman had written and published several short stories by 1990, though his most famous short fiction came after Digital Dreams. One of his notable earlier stories is 1984’s “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” – the title clearly riffing on Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – about a young man who finds an assassin in the phone book and discovers they do bulk discounts, a very Pratchetty idea.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s 1995 short story for the collection Camelot, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.
  • The “internal monologue” is the way many people think to themselves: in words. But while common, this is far from a universal experience – and most people assume others think in the same way as they do. Finding out otherwise often blows people’s minds, as with the cascade of articles and viral social media posts that cropped up in the way of this 2020 tweet:

Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don't

As in, some people's thoughts are like sentences they "hear", and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them

And most people aren't aware of the other type of person

— Kyle 🌱 (@KylePlantEmoji) January 27, 2020
  • “Atari” was never that widely-used as a synonym for game consoles, but “Nintendo” was – which is why some sources credit them with aggressively re-popularising the still fairly new generic term “game console” in the 1990s, so they could hang on to the trademark. It worked! And while some folks did (and do) use “Playstation”, “XBox” or even “Game Cube” as a stand-in for game console, those never became as widespread. (Earlier consoles were referred to as “game systems”, but by the time Nintendo massively dominated the market in the early 1990s, “console” – which differentiated a dedicated system for games from a more versatile personal computer, and from an arcade “cabinet” that could only play a single game – had become the preferred term.)
  • Genericisation can indeed make a product’s name ineligible as a trademark. This process is also known as “trademark erosion” or “genericide”, and in America – where most of the famous cases have occurred – it’s controlled by the Lanham (Trademark) Act. The Lanham Act allows a registered trade mark to be cancelled if it “becomes the generic name for the goods or services, or a portion thereof, for which it is registered”. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act 1995 has a similar clause: the mark can be cancelled if it “becomes generally accepted within the relevant trade as the sign that describes or is the name of an article, substance or service”. This has happened to some significant and surprising things: Aspirin and Heroin were both once trademark names used by the Bayer company! To protect against this modern drugs are often given a specific, non-proprietary name, with different company’s specific versions having trade names as well. Other famous examples include cellophane, dry ice, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, videotape and zipper! Examples like Hoover, Kleenex and Google (see below) have certainly become generic terms for a kind of thing, but not to the extent where a trademark has been revoked or expired. In Australia, the legal test seems to be whether the trade mark has become the only term used for a product or service.
  • The Google company went through a major restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc, a new company which owned Google (the Internet services company that runs the search engine, GMail, YouTube and various other online services) and several other companies that were previously subsidiaries of Google. The driver behind this wasn’t a worry about genericisation; rather Google stated that wanted to make the company more accountable and give subsidiaries more freedom. But Google is commonly used to mean “search the Internet”, including as a verb (“I googled it”), and this has come up in court as a reason to cancel the trademark, as per the Lanham Act mentioned above. In 2017, a case in Arizona set a new precedent that the test for genericisation was whether the “primary significance of the trade mark in the minds of the consuming public” had become the product, rather than the producer. They ruled that while people did use “google” as a verb, they also understood Google was a company and not the only way to search the Internet.
  • Amstrad was a British computer company created by English tycoon and politician Alan Sugar. It operated between 1968 and 2010, and was most famous for their personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These included later iterations of the ZX Spectrum, which Amstrad bought from its original creator Sinclair Research, and the Amstrad Mega PC, a Windows-PC which also had a built-in Sega Mega Drive game console (known as the Sega Genesis in the US).
  • Hitachi is a Japanese company founded in 1910, which has grown into a conglomerate best known for their technology products. They no longer make personal or mainframe computers, but do make everything from military vehicles to air conditioners and the Hitachi Magic Wand, a “vibrating massager” introduced in 1968 which experienced a huge swell in sales when it featured in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City.
  • The 1980s-style retro-VR cyberpunk videogame trailer Ben remembered was for the game Jazzpunk, released in 2014. You can watch the live action Jazzpunk trailer on YouTube.
  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the first and most influential cyberpunk novels, was first published in 1984, so around six years before Pratchett wrote “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”. Neuromancer popularised many terms and concepts which are now essential parts of the genre, and it’s also the only novel ever to have won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards.
  • “Carnie” is an American nickname for “carnival worker”; the traditional Australian equivalent is “showie”, short for “showman” or “showwoman”, since we call them “shows” rather than carnivals. We previously talked about this in #Pratchat51, where our previous research suggested the Australian term might even be a little older than the American one. (The surname in this story – and, most of the time, in real life – is spelled “Carney”.)
  • We dance around this a little in the episode, but clues in the story suggest that “Seagem” – the name for the artificial reality company that becomes a generic name for AR machines – comes from the acronym CGEM, which probably stands for “Computer Generated Environment Machines”.
  • The term AFOL, an acronym for “Adult Fan of Lego”, can be traced back to the newsgroup rec.toys.lego, where it was first coined by Matthew J. Verdier on the 14th of June, 1995 after another user, Jeff Thompson, was the first to use the phrase “adult fan of Lego”. It was a niche term for a decade or so, but in the 2010s not only had more people who grew up playing with Lego returned to it as adults, but the Lego company themselves realised there was a whole underserved market of adult Lego fans, and started making sets which would appeal to them. Unlike some other niche adult fandoms for things traditionally seen as “for kids”, the AFOL community often mingle with and involve young Lego fans too, and you’ll see whole families at Lego conventions, in stores and at events.
  • The word “paragorithm” appears in the context of Darren thinking you wouldn’t need something very complex to simulate most conversations with people, since they’re “just to reassure each other that they’re alive”. It might be a neologism Pratchett invented for “parallel algorithm”, a set of instructions for completing multiple tasks at once. These were relatively uncommon in computing at the time the story was written, since most computers weren’t capable of processing multiple instructions at once, but modern multi-threaded processors are specifically designed to do this and make extensive use of parallel processing.
  • “Technobabble” describes jargon-filled scientific-sounding nonsense, originally the sort used by technologists in the 1980s, but increasingly over time the sort used in science fiction to make it sound like the characters understand things we don’t. The term seems to have been derived from “psychobabble”, a term used to deride similar nonsense jargon used in popular psychology, coined in 1975 by writer R.D. Rosen and popularised by his 1977 book, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling. Rosen specifically used the term to mean “an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardised observations” – he was critical of the way psychology at the time sought to reduce the “infinite variety of problems” faced by people into a very small set of formal definitions.
  • “Handwavium” and “phlebotinum” are common fannish terms for substances, devices or phenomena in science fiction which behave in mysterious ways that nonetheless explain otherwise nonsensical events.
  • “Unobtainium” (or “unobtanium”) was originally engineering jargon, coined in the 1950s, for any theoretical substance that could solve a specific problem, if only it existed. It grew to also encompass substances that existed but were too expensive or rare for practical use, and by the 2000s had appeared in its traditional usage in several science fiction novels and films. In 2009, James Cameron used it as the seemingly actual name for the rare and highly valuable super-conducting mineral sought by the mining corporation his film Avatar, to much derision.
  • The book of Doctor Who memories mentioned by Ben is Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry. Pratchett, while clearly not a big fan, seems mostly to have been motivated to write the introduction because it was a fundraiser for Alzheimers research. There are far too many celebrities of interest to Pratchat listeners for us to make a full list, but we will mention that the authors Ben Aaronovitch, Michael Moorcock and Gideon Defoe all appear, as does the creator of the often-mentioned-in-this-episode Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker.
  • As Ben mentions in the footnote, Handwavium is also a delightful Doctor Who podcast hosted by friends of Pratchat, “a fan and her Da (no, a fan and his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to hear a daughter and father duo discussing Doctor Who, this is the best show for it! Find it at handwavium.net.
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. We won’t spoil any more about it than Liz has already said, but we will note that it has been optioned to be adapted as a film by none other than Australia’s own Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerly.
  • The terms “fridged” and “breeder” refer to pervasive harmful tropes in the way women are portrayed in fiction, in both cases having them contribute to someone else’s story without getting to be characters in their own right. A “breeder” is a woman who only matters to the story as a mother or potential mother, while “fridging” is when a woman is killed off or harmed primarily to provide motivation for a male protagonist. The latter term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as the phrase “women in refrigerators”, named for a specific example of the trope from the Green Lantern comic. We previously discussed fridging in our discussion of Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Space Invaders is a videogame developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, first released in 1978 as an arcade game by Taito Inc in Japan and Midway/Bally internationally. In case you’ve never seen it, the player controls a gun at the bottom of the screen that can move left and right, and fire straight upwards; the goal is to shoot increasingly fast and numerous waves of invading aliens before they reach the ground. Home console, computer and arcade machine versions of the game are still available today, largely unchanged except for nicer graphics and sound effects (though these often emulate the original designs). Elite is a videogame developed by British designers David Braben and Ian Bell, and first published by Acornsoft for personal computers in 1984. The player is a space pilot who operates as a freelance trader, buying and selling goods or turning to mercenary work or piracy to earn money and upgrade their ship. Its combination of space combat, wireframe 3D graphics and freedom to decide how you played made Elite a massive hit, and it spawned several sequels: Frontier: Elite II (1993), Frontier: First Encounters (1995) and more recently Elite Dangerous (2015), though these have become progressively more sophisticated. (Ben was probably thinking of Frontier: Elite II, the first one he encountered, which is why he thought there was a much bigger gap between Elite and Space Invaders.)
  • VR, Virtual Reality, is an entire simulated 3D world, while AR, Augmented Reality, is layering elements of a simulated world onto the real one. This has become a big deal over the last decade, with the launch of games like Pokemon GO that let you catch monsters at your local sightseeing spots, and hardware like the Google Glasses, that promise to deliver that Terminator-like heads up display without needing to surgically replace your eyeballs. So far, only the kind of AR that uses your mobile phone camera has really caught on, but there are new glasses and similar products touted every year…
  • It’s well-documented that Neil and Terry exchanged floppy disks via mail to write Good Omens. Here’s one of many sources for this info: Neil answering a fan’s question about the book on Tumblr in 2019.
  • Ben probably mentioned Pratchett’s interview with Bill Gates in one of our bonus episodes. It was for GQ Magazine in 1995, and unearthed by Marc Burrows during research for his biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, in May 2019. (You can see his viral tweet, which includes an excerpt, below.) The idea that Terry had predicted “fake news”, online misinformation and and the return of nazis twenty-four years earlier was written up in The Guardian, Gizmodo and many other news sites at the time, though as Marc notes in a follow up tweet, Gates was on the money later in the interview about the fate of physical media.

In 1996 Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ and accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news. Gates didn’t believe him. pic.twitter.com/MqjawT4NVV

— Marc Burrows  (@20thcenturymarc) May 28, 2019
  • Grand Theft Auto, abbreviated GTA, is a series of videogames launched in 1997, originally developed by British company DMA Design. The first two games were modest successes, and featured a top-down 2D city in which the player could steal and sell cars, cause car crashes and commit other crimes as they tried to get to a goal number of points, expressed in dollars. Grand Theft Auto III translated the open world of the game to a 3D environment, and it and its sequels have been hugely successful: Grand Theft Auto V is still one of the biggest selling videogames nearly a decade after it was first published in 2013. This is partly because of its online mode, which regularly adds new content and lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar especially for the last few games produced by Rockstar, it has been a constant source of controversy. Some of it is deserved; for example, the games are pretty misogynistic, featuring no playable female characters (except for ones you create yourself in the online version), and relying on ageing tropes of crime fiction for its female NPCs, who are all wives, sex workers and family members. It’s also held up as evidence of videogames’ influence on young people, supposedly leading them to crime and violence, but the evidence of that is less certain. The culture of players around the game, however, is definitely a problem, as it is with the broader world of mainstream videogames.
  • “The Minority Report” was originally a novella by Philip K Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe magazine in January 1956. It imagines a future in which three mutant “precogs” have pre-cognitive abilities, and predict all crime, but the creator of the Precrime department is led to discover more about how it all works when they predict he’ll murder someone he’s never heard of. It was adapted as a film, Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise in 2002, and a sequel television series set a decade later. The film and TV show change many things about the original story, including the nature and abilities of the precogs, and the ending of the story. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Black Mirror, mentioned many times this episode, is a British speculative fiction anthology show, mainly focusing on the consequences of technology. It was created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in 2011, before being acquired by Netflix in 2015. As of this episode there have been five series of 3-6 episodes, plus a Christmas special featuring multiple related stories, and an interactive “choose your own adventure” style film, Bandersnatch. Some episodes do rely on a reveal for their full impact, so we’ll be careful about spoilers, but here are some that are especially relevant to our discussion:
    • People living on digitally after death – or as a copy of a living person – feature in “Be Right Back” from series two, “San Junipero” from season three, and “USS McCallister” and “Black Museum” from series four.
    • Augmented Reality technology editing your experience of the real world appears in the special “White Christmas” and the episodes “Men Against Fire” from series three, and “Playtest” and “Arkangel” from series four.
    • Full Virtual Realities appear in many episodes, but often as a surprise or twist, so the only one we’ll mention is season five’s “Striking Vipers”.
  • We previously discussed the true nature of the Emerald City in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, visitors to the City are made to wear green-tinted glasses, and only the external walls are actually green. This idea is dropped in later books (of which there are thirteen!), which describe the city as green and don’t mention the glasses. It’s one of many differences between L Frank Baum’s original Oz books and the popular film adaptation.
  • To look through rose-coloured (or rose-tinted) glasses is to see something in its most favourable light, ignoring its negative aspects. The phrase definitely pre-dates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as use of it dates back to at least 1838, when it appears in Slight Reminiscences of the Rhine, Switzerland, and a Corner of Italy by English writer and traveller Mary Boddington (1776-1840). The use of “rosy” or “rose-coloured” as euphemisms for things being generally happy or pleasant is much older, attested as early as the 1700s, and probably stems from the earlier idea that having a rose-coloured complexion was seen as a sign of good health in Europe by around 1590.
  • It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an accurate word count for books and stories; it’s not a commonly recorded statistic, and ebooks don’t tell you how long they are either (or let you copy and paste the text so your word processor can tell you.) We’re looking into a solution for this! Note that this work has already been done for many of the Discworld novels.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times before; his most famous series of books are the Thursday Next series, about a detective, Next, who enters the worlds of books to solves crimes.
  • As mentioned, the story’s title is a reference to the opening lines of the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by English author Andrew Marvell. It was first published after his death, in 1681. The opening lines of the poem are: “Had we but World enough, and Time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Other uses of “World Enough and Time” include the episode of Doctor Who mentioned by Ben (the penultimate episode of the tenth series, first broadcast in June 2017), and several books, including novels by Robert Penn Warren, James Kahn, and Joe Haldemann, the latter changing the title to Worlds Enough and Time.
  • Reception theory, or audience reception, is the idea that each individual reader (or listener, watcher, player etc) of a work receives, interprets and understands it through their own cultural frame of reference. Generally agreed ideas about what a work means emerge through consensus, usually amongst individuals who share a common cultural background. It stems from the work of German academic Hans-Robert Jauss (1921-1997) in the 1960s, and popularised and expanded by Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The “Hannibal” to which Sean refers is Hannibal Lecter, specifically the version of the character who appears in the television series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Lecter is a forensic psychiatrist assigned to observe FBI profiler Will Graham, who has a talent for imagining himself in the role of – and thus catching – serial killers. But Lecter is himself secretly a cannibalistic serial killer, and as well as considering himself far smarter than the police (who are far from catching him), also tries to tip Will over the edge into becoming a killer himself. Lecter is best known from Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs, in which another FBI agent visits the killer in prison to enlist his help catching another killer. The television series draws instead on the other novels in which he appears: Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006). The television series was widely acclaimed and ran for three seasons on NBC between 2013 and 2015.
  • “The Gernsback Continuum” is a 1981 short story written by William Gibson. In it, a photographer is tasked withtroversy as police acti taking pictureons of “futuristic” 1930s architecture. He begins to experience visions of the alternate future world imagined by the architects and the likes of Hugo Gernsback, the publisher who pioneered pulp science fiction in the 1920s when he created the magazine Amazing Stories. The story coined the term “Raygun Gothic” for the architectural style it describes; in the story, this name is given by Cohen Downes, an editor for the London-based publisher who hires the photographer. The story was adapted in 1993 as a short film, Tomorrow Calling, originally broadcast on Channel 4 television.
  • The meme “The World If” (aka “The World Without…”, “What Society Would Be If…” etc) depicts a futuristic, supposedly utopian cityscape, accompanied by text informing us this is what the world would be like, if only one thing were different. It dates back to 2018, with the earliest example referring to the jailing of rapper Bobby Shmurda, which drew controversy for a variety of reasons, including police acting on supposedly autobiographical rap lyrics, which supposedly listed his real crimes.
  • Upload (not Uploaded) is an Amazon Original streaming series created by Greg Daniels, best known for co-creating the US version of The Office and Parks and Recreation with Michael Shur. It’s set in 2033 in a future where humans can have their consciousness uploaded into a digital afterlife as they die. The protagonist, Nathan Brown (played by Robbie Amell), dies unexpectedly and is uploaded, but he’s not free of his even more possessive, still-living girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), which is one of the unfortunate tropes of the show. Meanwhile his “angel” Nora (Andy Allo) – the handler from the afterlife company who looks after him – starts to think his death was suspicious. It’s run for two seasons since 2020, with a third on the way.
  • Severance is an Apple TV+ streaming series created by first-time show runner Dan Erickson. It stars Adam Scott (also best known from Parks and Recreation) as Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries. Mark works on the “severed floor”, where he and the other workers have undergone a procedure which means they can’t access their memories of their regular lives while at work, and vice versa. Ben’s only seen the first episode so far but agrees with Sean that it’s great, though be aware it’s a thriller rather than a comedy.
  • The Usborne computer books were published in the 1980s for Usborne, a UK publisher of children’s educational books. They were phenomenally popular, not least because they were approachable introductions to everything from how computers worked to how to program them at a time when most computer books were full of jargon. As well as ghosts the books also featured monsters and robots. While the originals are hard to find in print, in 2015 Usborne made them available for download from their website. Ben is pretty sure he had The Usborne First Book of the Computer from 1984, which seems rarer than the others. This might be because as far as Ben can tell it was a compilation of content from the “First Computer Library” series: All About Computers, Computer Fun and Simple BASIC. (The last two of those appear at the bottom of the page linked above, and include the computer ghosts.)
  • Agent Smith is the primary antagonist of the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix. A computer program tasked with rooting out rogue humans connecting to the Matrix, he and his fellow Agents appear as Men in Black, with sunglasses, black suits and an earpiece. There’s something a bit off about him in the first film; he returns in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as a virus-like threat both to the free humans of Zion and the machines themselves, as he gains the ability to rewrite other programs and human consciousnesses into copies of himself. We previously talked about Smith in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • We previously talked about La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It’s an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the famous one you’re thinking of). Liz reviewed Opera Australia’s 2022 production of La Traviata for The Age.
  • We mention a few films and television series about living people this episode:
    • The Social Network is a 2010 film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, adapted from the 2009 non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It tells the – or at least a – story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in 2003, and the legal problems he faced over ownership of the idea and original website. It’s a fictionalised account, and its accuracy has been disputed; Zuckerberg was also not happy about it, saying at the time that “I wish no-one had made a movie about me while I was still alive”. Historical accuracy aside, it’s pretty great, and also stars Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, co-creator of the original “The Facebook”, and features a killer soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
    • Rocketman is a 2019 Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton as Elton John (though it was originally supposed to be Tom Hardy), and Jamie Bell as his writing partner Bernie Taupin. It was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who may be known to listeners from his role as a young man playing Spike in the UK series Press Gang. (Fletcher had previously stepped in to finish directing Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Queen biopic centred on Freddie Mercury, after Bryan Singer was fired from the project.) In contrast to The Social Network, Elton John had been trying to make a film about his life for decades, and is an executive producer on this film. (Reaction to Bohemian Rhapsody was decidedly more mixed, particularly regarding its handling of Mercury’s sexuality and family, amongst other things.)
    • Pam & Tommy is a 2022 Hulu streaming miniseries about the three-year marriage between actor Pamela Anderson (played by Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (played by Sebastian Stan), revolving mostly around the theft and public release of a sex tape they made on their honeymoon. It was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape“. While some aspects of the production were praised, many critics pointed out that it is a story of the exploitation of Pamela Anderson without her consent – made without her consent. (She was apparently contacted to be involved in some way, but did not want to be part of it; some sources say its production caused her some distress.)
  • Biopics – whether about the living or dead – don’t legally require the permission of the subject because they are, at least in theory, based on the facts of someone’s life – and facts are not considered intellectual property. This is the same principle that allows for unauthorised biographies (many of which become the basis of biopics). Generally the only legal recourse if someone doesn’t like how they’re portrayed is to sue via libel or defamation laws, but those put the burden of proof and money on the person mounting the claim, so even wealthy subjects don’t often consider it worth trying.
  • The simulation hypothesis – the idea that we’re all simulated people in a hyper-realistic simulation of the world – has been around for a while. It was made popular by the release of The Matrix in 1999, and then again by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In Bostrom’s version, the idea is that future humans will build computers so powerful that they will be able to run millions of incredibly detailed simulations of all of human history, including human minds as sophisticated as real ones. If that were to happen, then the vast majority of human-like minds to ever exist would be simulated ones, and so it’s plausible to suggest that’s what we are – artificial minds in a computer simulation of the world.
  • Ben’s Virtual Reality game is Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown by Tin Man Games. In the game, the player is bequeathed the magical “Table of Tales” by a deceased aunt, and it comes to life. A mechanical bird, Arbitrix, is the Table’s Game Master, and helps the player take control of a group of “scoundrels” who are at first dubbed heroes, then years later framed for a crime they didn’t commit, and must go on a high seas fantasy adventure to find out who’s behind it. It plays like a single-player tabletop roleplaying game, with cards and dice for powers, direct manipulation of the pieces, and a branching narrative with multiple possible endings. The game was originally released exclusively for PlayStation VR in 2019, and was a finalist for the “Excellence in Narrative” category at the 2019 Freeplay Awards. In the last year or so it’s been released on other platforms too: PC via Steam in 2021, and in July 2022, Nintendo Switch and the Meta Quest 2 standalone VR headset. The PlayStation VR and Quest versions are VR-only; the Switch version doesn’t support VR; and the Steam version can be played either way.
  • The other Dungeons & Dragons-like VR games Ben mentions are:
    • Demeo (Resolution Games, 2021) – a multiplayer VR game similar in many ways to Table of Tales – so much so that it’s frequently mentioned in Table of Tales reviews! It’s available on Steam, Steam VR, Meta Quest and Meta Rift.
    • TaleSpire (Bouncyrock Entertainment) – not actually VR, and not a game in itself… TaleSpire is a virtual 3D environment for use with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, letting you build and share a virtual map and miniatures with other players. As of writing (July 2022) it’s still in Early Access on Steam, meaning you can buy it early to access a working but incomplete version as its being finished.
  • Wii Fit (2008) was Nintendo’s fitness game for their popular Wii game console. As well as the “Wii-mote” motion controllers, it used a custom “balance board” that ould measure the player’s centre of balance and weight, using this to assess fitness based on the (often criticised) Body-Mass Index, or BMI. Fitness activities available in the game included yoga, aerobics and other exercises, and it was a huge hit for Nintendo. Combined with Wii Fit Plus, the updated version released in 2009, it’s estimated to have sold nearly 44,000,000 copies worldwide, putting it just outside the top ten biggest-selling console games of all time.
  • Zero Latency is a free-roam VR experience company which started up in Melbourne in 2015. The “free roam” part means that players are free to move around a play area, with their movement relative to the game world and each other tracked by cameras. This is in sharp contrast to most VR games, especially headsets available for use at home, where the player remains mostly stationary while the game world moves around them. Since its launch its grown considerably, with nine locations in Australia and nearly fifty more in twenty-five other countries around the world. While most of their games are in the first-person shooter style, and the game Ben remembers is no longer on offer, they do have Engineerium, a puzzle game which sounds like it’s in a similar vein.
  • Liz’s phrase “Too much time down at the Jasmine Allen” is a reference to the perpetually crime-ridden Jasmine Allen housing estate in long-running UK police drama The Bill.
  • Terry’s poem “An Ode to Multiple Universes” was first published in the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book in which it was collected is untitled but generally known as Terry Pratchett’s Folio or the MMXIV Green Folio, and was published for the 2014 Discworld Convention, where copies were given to attendees with a special bookmark labelling it a present from Terry. Fifty copies made it to the Australian Discworld Convention in 2015, and a few more were sold via discworld.com with proceeds going to charity.
  • Of Sean’s more than fifty novels, he suggests Pratchett fans might enjoy Her Perilous Mansion, his standalone middle grade fantasy novel first published in April 2020. The “sidequel” coming later this year (2022) is Honour Among Ghosts.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat84 Notes and Errata

8 April 2025 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, CMOT Dibbler, Discworld, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Glenda Sugarbean, goblins, Igor, Juliet Stollop, Mr Nutt, Mustrum Ridcully, Pepe, Ponder Stibbons, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Trevor Likely, Vetinari, William de Worde, Wizards

#Pratchat84 – Eight Days an Opening

8 April 2025 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Liz and Ben delve deep into the archives and come back with some highlights from the collected Discworld Diaries from Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs’ The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volumes I (2019) and II (2020), plus Terry’s 2004 collaboration with Bernard Pearson, The Discworld Alamak.

Between 1998 and 2003, Discworld fans got an extra little treat: an in-universe diary themed around one of the Guilds or other major institutions of the Disc, full of new Discworld history and gags penned by Pratchett with the assistance of Stephen Briggs, and illustrations by Paul Kidby. In 2004, they got something a little different: a Roundworld version of the Celebrated Discworld Almanak, a publication famed for its wisdom, length and absorbency, co-authored by Pratchett and Bernard Pearson. After a brief break, two more diaries with new gags and Discworld lore appeared in 2007 and 2008, but any subsequent diaries or journals were just compilations of quotes and existing material. Like all diaries, these were smaller print runs and never reprinted, so for most fans these extra tidbits were lost to time.

But then, in 2019 and 2020, Stephen Briggs and Paul Kidby brought all that weirdness back in two new books: The Ankh-Morpork Archives Volume I, and Volume II, each collecting the original content from four of those diaries and presenting them in a coffee-table style larger format, with new layout, updated or new art, and all the charm of the originals.

Did you ever have one of the diaries? Did you write in it? What do you think of the new presentation of all these gags? Do the more unusual diaries have the same charm, or does it feel a bit like the best themes had already been used? And if you were to see new books based on any of this stuff, what would you want to see? Note your answer in your diary, then send it to us using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_84.mp3

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You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month we knock off one of our few remaining Discworld novels: Sam Vimes’ detective’s holiday in the country, Snuff! Get your questions in via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat86. (Our numbering got a bit messed up due to the delay of this episode, but trust us: the next one is 86!)

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Assassin's Guild, Ben McKenzie, Bernard Pearson, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Fool's Guild, Stephen Briggs, The Ankh-Morpork Archives, The Discworld Almanak, The Watch, Thieves Guild, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat85 – AT LAST, SIR TERRY

8 March 2025 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

To mark ten years since Terry Pratchett’s death, Liz, Ben and guest Myfanwy Coghill discuss his 2010 Richard Dimbleby lecture, “Shaking Hands with Death”. Please note that this episode includes discussions of death, terminal illness, assisted dying and suicide.

Pratchett was the first novelist to give the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, an annual talk broadcast on the BBC in memory of Dimbleby, a BBC broadcaster who died in 1965. His subject was a turning point in his activism: from raising awareness (and money) for Alzheimer’s Disease, to talking openly about the inevitability of death, and the importance of being able to choose a good one, safely and legally. The speech was collected in A Slip of the Keyboard in 2014, and published in a standalone volume with an introduction by Rob Wilkins in 2015. The televised version is also (currently) on YouTube.

We hope we’ve done Pratchett justice in carrying on this discussion. We are lucky to live in Australia, where citizens in most states have access to assisted dying – even if under more narrow circumstances than Pratchett might have liked. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill provides similar access, and was introduced in the UK parliament by backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater in November 2024. It’s currently at the committee stage. (See our episode notes for more details.)

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_85.mp3

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Guest Myfanwy Coghill (she/her) has been many things, including an opera singer, a teacher, a funeral director, and a Dungeon Master (of the Dungeons & Dragons variety). She previously appeared to discuss Maskerade in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, in September 2019.

GNU Elspeth Sutherland; Kat Muscat; Stella Young; Cal Wilson; DJ Ian; and Terry Pratchett. We’d love you to consider supporting the Kat Muscat Fellowship, which provides support and development for a young Australian writer or editor each year; or helping to fund a new documentary about Stella Young, I Am Not Your Inspiration (which coincidentally launched in between us recording and publishing this episode). Pratchett’s favoured charities are well known: the Orang Utan Foundation, and the Alzheimer’s Society. The local Australian equivalent is Dementia Australia.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month is our rescheduled discussion about both volumes of the Ankh-Morpork Archives, which collect material from the Discworld diaries, and their sibling publication The Discworld Almanack! There’s still time for a few more questions; send them in via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Death, Elizabeth Flux, Myf Coghill, non-Discworld, non-fiction, Shaking Hands with Death
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