Ben McKenzie

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. It’s not on Josh Kirby’s official website, but if we find it somewhere else public, we’ll point you to it. Sven shared it with us on the Pratchat Discord, so subscribers with access can see it there; we may also share it privately with other subscribers via Ko-Fi.

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 stories, 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 – seems to come 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. 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 & her Da (no, a fan & his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to her 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.

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. 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, in part because of its online mode, which lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, 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“.
• 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.
• 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 sequel, coming later this year (2022), is Honour Among Ghosts.

More notes coming soon!

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

These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2022“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add a photo of the enormous Senate ballot paper from the 2013 election as soon as we can find one!

Notes and Errata

• We’ll find the “buckle up as I teach you about something I just learned myself!” tweet at some point, but it’s eluded us for the moment. (Let us know if you find it!)
• You can find the biggest Democracy Sausage project at democracysausage.org or on Twitter at @DemSausage. Note that this project is not, In any meaningful way “official”, but it’s an impressive effort nonetheless. We’d also make the comment that while the democracy sausage is a fun tradition, it ought not to be so universally necessary for public schools to fundraise for themselves in this way every election…
• We did indeed talk about the confluence of the Glorious 25th of May and Towel Day in last year’s Eeek Club episode.
• Our previous T-shirt ideas have been a “Sausage Inna Bunnings” design, from #Pratchat50, and the “Sausorobos” design – a sausage in a circle eating it’s “tail” – in #Pratchat53. We also considered a Helvetica names T-shirt of the Hogfather’s four boars in #Pratchat26.
• Listen Sven told us about the early, cheaply-made German editions of the Discworld books, from publisher Heyne, who inserted an ad for Maggi cup-a-soup into their version of Sorcery (and possibly other books). These were discontinued not long after Terry found out. They “wouldn’t promise not to do it again” in Terry’s words, and so they took the German publication rights to Goldmann instead.
• Our previous reflective episode, with also served to give us some breathing room at the start of the pandemic lockdowns, was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, in April 2020.
• Our single episode overview of The Watch is #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.
• We mention three recent screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes this episode:
  • Sherlock (2010-2017) – the BBC “prestige” series, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as a modern-day Holmes and Watson.
  • Elementary (2012-2019) – the CBS procedural crime drama, born out of a failed attempt to make a US adaptation of the BBC show. It stars Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock who, after becoming addicted to heroin, relocates to New York to start over. Lucy Liu plays Joan Watson, an ex-doctor and Sherlock’s assigned “sober companion” as he recovers from his addiction.
  • Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) – Guy Ritchie’s film versions, set in the same time as the original stories, but with dashes of action, steampunk and occultism. Both star Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock, and Jude Law as Watson.
• The 100 (2014-2020) is an American dystopian science fiction TV series. The series is set in a future where the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war, but humans have survived in an orbiting space station, the Ark. A century after the war, one hundred “juvenile delinquents” are sentenced to a form of community service in which they are sent back to Earth to determine if it’s safe for the rest to return.
• Liz has previously written about adapting the work of one of her other favourite authors, Philip K Dick, in this piece for Kill Your Darlings magazine.
• The Hunger Games was originally a series of three novels – The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay – by American author Suzanne Collins, published between 2008 and 2010, with a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, published in 2020. The original trilogy was adapted into four films – the last book in two parts – and Collins co-wrote the adaptations for all of them except Catching Fire. She has also adapted the screenplay for the prequel, which is set to be released as a film in 2023.
• We’ve mentioned Diana Wynne Jones loads of times on the podcast. As well as the 2004 Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle – which as Liz says, is fairly loosely based on the book – another of her books, Archer’s Goon (1985), was adapted for television by the BBC in 1992. The book features an ordinary family who find a “goon” on their doorstep, who says he has come to collect the two thousand words which thirteen-year-old Howard supposedly owes to someone named Archer. (Which is an amazing concept for a story in any medium!) Wynne Jones was quite closely involved in the adaptation, as the producer, Richard Callanan, wanted to make the series faithful to the book; Wynne Jones described her job as sitting with the producer around a table with scriptwriter Jenny McDade, persuading her to make it more like the book. While she didn’t think McDade enjoyed this process, Jones seems to have been happy with the result. The author also commented that she sees the two modes of writing as very different ways to tell a story, and scriptwriting did not appeal to her.
• To clarify, the “one million dollars per hour” figure for drama television refers to how much it costs to make an hour of finished television, not how much it costs to work on a show for an hour. This number is based on analysis done by Screen Australia, but Ben’s fudged an overall average here he got from someone else because the cost of television varies a lot. For long-running series or serials, costs are spread out over dozens of episodes, bringing that cost down to about $350,000 per hour. That average is probably quite a bit lower than most shows cost, though, due to the effect of long-running soaps like Home and Away and Neighbours, which produce hundreds of hours every year on very tight budgets. (Now Neighbours has closed down, the average will probably shoot up considerably!) Compare that to a mini-series, which costs much more than Ben’s average – over $1.7m per hour. And then children’s drama, treated as a separate category, costs quite a lot too: about $1.25m per hour! Possibly because it’s more often fantastical, whereas we make hardly any adult sci-fi or fantasy in Australia these days?
• Firefly (2002) was a fan favourite space western infamously cancelled by the Fox network half-way through its first season. Set in the 26th century, it imagines a future where the wealthiest cultures on Earth – implied to be the US and China, though elements of some other cultures also remain – terraform the numerous planets and moons of a trinary star system and establish a new life there after the Earth is “used up”. It was followed by the film Serenity in 2005, produced by Universal, which continued and wrapped up the main story arc from the series. The story has continued though, mainly in comic books. The rights to the show passed to Disney when they bought Fox, and as recently as February 2022, rumours circulated that Disney might reboot the show for Disney+ – though the fan base is much keener on a continuation of the old one.
• Troll Bridge, based on the first Discworld short story (see #PratchatNA7), was produced in Australia by Snowgum Films, starring Don Bridges as Cohen the Barbarian. The original crowdfunding campaign ran on Kickstarter in 2011, though work on the film started as early as 2004. The film was released in 2019, and is now available for free on YouTube.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished at a perfectly acceptable point after seven seasons, but it was continued in several comics both during and after its run – including an official continuation of the series from IDW Publishing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, produced by original series creator Joss Whedon from 2007 to 2011. It was a big success for IDW and led to a follow up, Season Nine, from 2011 to 2013, and also a similar continuation of Buffy’s spin-off series Angel, and a connected series based on the popular character of Spike.
• The Mob’s Discworld adaptations for the UK pay television channel Sky1 are Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006), Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – which combined The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic – and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010). All three are presented as two-part telemovies.
• The Doctor Who novelisations were most famously produced by Target Books, an imprint of Universal-Tandem publishing and later W H Allen, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Aimed at middle grade readers (mostly), each book adapted one of the original show’s serialised adventures, which usually ran for four to six episodes, and included a few internal illustrations as well as exciting covers. Where possible the original scriptwriter was hired to adapt their own stories, sometimes resulting in very interesting choices and a chance to restore things cut or changed during editing, or adding additional background or motivation to characters. A huge number of these were written by former Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks, who is affectionately known as Uncle Terry by many fans who grew up reading the books. Target no longer truly exists – W H Allen was bought by Virgin (who produced original Doctor Who novels in the 1990s), who was in turn bought by Random House and folded into their imprint Ebury Books. The Doctor Who license reverted to the BBC, and since 2018 they’ve published both novelisations of the stories never originally covered by Target, and new novelisations of stories from the 2005 incarnation of the show, published in a paperback format which deliberately mimics the old Target books style. You can still find the Target books in secondhand book shops all over Australia, which is where Ben collected nearly all of them as a boy.
• The cynicism/stoicism/epicurean quote is, in fact, from Terry himself! It appears in Small Gods as a summation of the philosophy of Didactylos, who combines the thinking of all three schools (or at least their modern popular interpretations). Here’s the relevant section:

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn’t philosopher material. He didn’t bath often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophised about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of thing. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: Is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous conundrum: ‘Yes, But What’s It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!’

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools – the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans – and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink. Mine’s a double if you’re buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!’

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1990)

• Ben mentions our episode about Guards! Guards!, which sis #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, from June 2018.
• A quick primer to the various philosophies that crop up in this discussion:
  • Cynicism dates back to around 400 BC, and the philosophers Antisthenes (a student of Socrates) and Diogenes (who it’s said lived in a clay jar in the streets of Athens). The core belief of cynicism is that being virtuous is the only important goal of life, and thus they rejected societal morés as a distraction. They were big on rejecting most things, actually, including hierarchy, shame and pomposity. They distrusted earnestness and anyone who claimed superiority, and thought it hypocritical to claim that humans are anything other than another kind of animal. This way of thinking led to the original Cynics giving away their wealth and possessions and trying to live “naturally”, or at least simply. They were not popular at the time; the name “Cynics” was a derogatory one, meaning “of a dog” in Ancient Greek, but they adopted it wholeheartedly. (Thanks to subscriber Felix for supplying some of this info!)
  • Stoicism is also an Ancient Greek philosophy, founded by Zeno in around 300 BC. It also asserts that being virtuous is the only important goal in life, but they considered everything else – wealth, pleasure etc – to be neither good nor bad in themselves. They were also keen on living in harmony with nature, and emphasised the importance of action over speaking when it comes to evaluating virtue. The modern meaning of stoicism – of someone who resists strong emotional responses – comes from the original Stoic philosophy that “virtue is sufficient for happiness”, meaning that they considered that as long as you acted in a virtuous way, you could be happy no matter what misfortune you suffered.
  • Epicureanism is named after its founder, Epicurus, another Greek philosopher, and is also from around 300 BC, originally as a challenge to the philosophy of Plato. It’s more or less a form of hedonism: its main tenet is that pleasure (rather than virtue) is the greatest good in life, and that one should live as pleasurably as possible (though in moderation, to avoid the suffering that comes from overindulgence). Epicureanism is about pleasures of the mind rather than physical ones, though, and also concentrates on “natural” desires, though Epicurus didn’t think much of sex or passion. He instead focussed on the desires of minimising negative experiences like pain, suffering and anxiety, which he saw in part stemming from belief in the gods.
  • Utilitarianism is an ethical framework which judges whether an action is right or wrong based on its outcomes, with the goal of maximising happiness or wellbeing for the largest number of people. Thus it considers that it is okay for one or a small number of people to suffer, if it means much much larger number of people are made safe or happy. It has ancient roots, but was popularised as a distinct position in the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
  • Paternalism is less an ethical stance and more a derisive term for those who seek to limit the freedoms of others supposedly in their own good. It’s been applied to a wide range of things from parenting styles to government interventions; in Australia the term “Nanny State” has been used to criticise everything from the introduction of seatbelt laws to the restriction of sales of alcohol and tobacco.
• Vetinari reads sheet music for pleasure in Soul Music, not Feet of Clay, as Ben guessed. We discussed Soul Music in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
• The article Frank sent us about Pratchett’s philosophy is “Terry Pratchett rethought as a philosopher in new study“, from The Guardian in 2014. It refers to the book Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, which we don’t currently have on our list for the podcast – let us know if you’d like us to cover it! (We have a few other similar books in the collection – we can talk about those too, though as they generally contain essays about a wide breadth of Pratchett’s work, episodes like that would necessarily contain some spoilers for books we’ve not yet discussed, and we’d probably leave them until near the end of the show’s run.)
• Here’s Patrick Alexander’s classic Australian election comic “You Can’t Waste Your Vote!”, starring Dennis the Election Koala and Ken the Voting Dingo (please disregard whatever names Ben misremembered). If you find it useful, please consider throwing a tip Patrick’s way; he isn’t otherwise paid for doing this!
• You can find the list of weird Australian Capital Territory political parties in the Wikipedia article about the 1989 ACT election. Thanks again Karl!
• More notes to come!

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