#Pratchat80 Notes and Errata
These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 80, “Always Believe in Your Golems”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s thirty-sixth Discworld novel, 2007’s Making Money, with returning guest Stephanie Convery.
Iconographic Evidence
Notes and Errata
- The episode title is a riff on British pop group Spandau Ballet’s hit song “Gold”. It was released in 1983, the fourth single from their third studio album, True, and is probably their most famous song, though at the time the title track from the same album was more popular. ”Gold” was heavily inspired by the film music of John Barry, including his work on many James Bond themes; the original lyrics from the chorus are: “Gold! (Gold) / Always believe in your soul / You’ve got the power to know / You’re indestructible / Always believe in…” It’s been featuring in subsequent pop culture; Ben remembers it from the 1998 comedy Four Men in a Car where a CD gets stuck, looping the line “you’re indestructible” as the car’s occupants try and fail to destroy the car CD’s player.
- William Morris (1834 – 1896) was a British artist, poet and novelist. His “terrible utopian novels” include News from Nowhere (1890), in which a member of the Socialist League falls asleep after a meeting and wakes up in a future society built on socialist and Marxist ideals. Morris is also known for his fantasy novels, which were among the first such popular novels to include supernatural elements and were hugely influential, including on J. R. R. Tolkien. These books include The Roots of the Mountains, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, and The Water of the Wondrous Isles; many of these included socialist themes as well.
- Making Money comes just three books after Going Postal. Moist doesn’t appear in any books in between, but he is mentioned briefly (though not by name) in Thud! He shows up again in the penultimate Discworld novel, Raising Steam, but doesn’t make any cameos in other books.
- Robert E Howard’s Conan stories are set in the fictional “Hyborian Age” of Earth, estimated to be somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. It’s meant to represent prehistoric Europe and Northern Africa, and thus Cimmeria is the ancient home of Celtic peoples, but it’s based on ahistorical stereotypes and is functionally a collection of fantasy analogues for modern nations. The real Cimmeria was an ancient “micro continent” that was originally part of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. It became detached around 250 million years ago and moved north as part of continental drift, eventually colliding with and becoming part of Eurasia around 150 million years ago. It now forms part of the Middle East and western and south-eastern Asia.
- “WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN” is from a heartbreaking scene towards the end of Feet of Clay, and the words are from Dorfl.
- Squashing bread does not make it sweeter, but chewing on it does. The missing ingredient is salivia, which begins the process of breaking down the complex carbohydrates in the bread into sugars.
- The compulsive need to count is known as “arithmomania”, and is a feature of European vampire lore. It was usually other kinds of grains, rather than rice, though this may also be the reason for throwing salt over your shoulder to ward off the Devil – he would be compelled to stop and count every grain.
- The jiāngshī (殭屍) or Chinese hopping vampire is a form of undead from Chinese folklore, similar in some ways to both vampires and zombies. There are many varied accounts of their powers, limitations and vulnerabilities, but they don’t seem to have to count grains of rice – instead, one method for stopping them is through a ball of sticky rice at them which will draw out the evil in their soul. They have inspired an entire genre of films, most famously the Mr Vampire comedy horror movies made in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. These popularised the hopping version of jiāngshī, gave them a standard look (traditional mandarin robes from the Qing dynasty), and established some common ways to deal with them (e.g. placing a spell written on a piece of paper on their forehead) in much the same way as early vampire films solidified European vampire lore.
- Bram Stoker (1847-1912) drew on various bits of vampire folklore when creating Dracula, but he also incorporated real life science, beliefs about disease, recent events, and other unrelated supernatural stories. The most prominent vampire belief active at the time of the novel was that contagious disease was caused by a corpse which still contained blood in its heart, and one practice to try and halt a disease was to dig up the corpse and destroy it. He wrote fifteen novels, the second most famous being his last, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), another horror story incorporating various elements from folklore.
- More notes coming soon.
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