Discworld

#Pratchat56 Notes and Errata

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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:
  • “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.
  • 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.

#Pratchat14 – City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation

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In episode fourteen we celebrate 35 years of the Discworld by going all the way back to the beginning! Writer and podcaster Joel Martin joins us for a bumper A’Tuin-sized discussion of the very first Discworld story, adventure, chronicle, tale…The Colour of Magic, published in 1983!

Rincewind, a wizard unable to cast spells, makes a living of sorts in the mighty city of Ankh-Morpork through his gift for languages. But his gift gets him more than he bargains for when he becomes the guide to the Discworld’s first tourist. Fresh off the boat from the distant and obscenely wealthy Counterweight Continent, naïve Twoflower has come armed with a phrasebook, a demon-powered picture box and his magical Luggage full of enormous gold coins, determined to see the barbarians, brawls and beasts he’s read about in stories back home. But seeing them is the easy part – surviving to talk about them is another matter entirely…

Though we’ve often talked about the differences between the earliest books and those that came later, The Colour of Magic introduces Ankh-Morpork, Rincewind, Death and of course Great A’Tuin and the Disc itself with varying degrees of familiarity. Split into four sections – The Colour of Magic, The Sending of Eight, The Lure of the Wyrm and Close to the Edge – it manages to be both homage and parody of multiple beloved fantasy genres, while at the same time trying to establish its world – and author – as something new. Do you think it succeeds? Did you start at the start? Use the hashtag #Pratchat14 on social media to join the conversation and tell us! We’d also love to see some fan art of the Luggage based directly on the text, rather than Kirby’s ubiquitous, fleshy baby-legged version.

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Guest Joel Martin is a fantasy author whose several novellas and novels include his own take on classic sword-and-sorcery, The Broken World (whose protagonist is not Kane, but Karn). For more about him and his work, visit his web site, thepenofjoel.com, or follow him on Twitter at @thepenofjoel. He also hosts the writing discussion podcast The Morning Bell with Luke Manly and Ian Laking; find it at themorningbell.com.au.

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

This is our final episode for the Year of the Justifiably Defensive Lobster (aka 2018), but we’ll be back in January, when we’ll fire up Queen’s Greatest Hits and kick off proceedings with one of Pratchett’s most celebrated novels: Good Omens! Yes, we’re getting in to cover Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman before said co-author and Amazon Prime bring their version to subscribers’ screens in 2019. (Don’t worry, it’ll be on the BBC at some point too.) With twice the authors, we’re expecting twice the questions (though we’ll try and stick to our usual running time of under two hours), so send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat15.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.


#Pratchat5 – Ten Points to Viper House

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In episode five, comedian Richard McKenzie joins us to discuss that rare beast, a Discworld tale that stars no wizards, witches, watches or Death, and isn’t part of any of the ongoing storylines: Pyramids! The seventh Discworld novel, published in 1989, it’s chock-full of jokes, footnotes, gods and characters – but we’ll see almost none of them ever again…

Pteppicymon XXVIII – Teppic for short – is heir to the throne of the ancient river kingdom of Djelibeybi. But the kingdom is broke, having spent its money on pyramids, and in order to give him a profession, Teppic is sent to the best school on the Disc: the Assassin’s Guild in Ankh-Morpork. Seven years later he’s just taken his final exam when his father dies. Teppic is now King (and God) of Djelibeybi earlier than planned – and after so long away, he finds the ancient traditions of his homeland stifling. Can even the King challenge the authority of the kingdom’s high priest, Dios?

Though it features none of his most beloved characters, Pyramids is nonetheless a favourite among Discworld fans – not least because the first quarter of the book takes us into the classrooms of Ankh-Morpork’s most famous guild. What do you think of this tale of tradition, family and mathematics gone wrong? Let us know! Use the hashtag #Pratchat5 on social media.

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Guest Richard McKenzie is a comedian best known for his storytelling style. Though he rarely performs standup anymore, he hosts trivia twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays, at the Cornish Arms on Sydney Road in Brunswick, Melbourne. Make sure to use a Pratchett pun in your team name if you go!

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

Our next book, for our April 8th episode, takes us outside the Discworld – and indeed the fantasy genre – for 2012’s tale of Victorian London: Dodger! Joining us to talk about toshers, geezers and peelers is a man who’s no stranger to fancy words, and better known by his initials: crypto-cruciverbalist and former Letters & Numbers dictionary master, David Astle! We’ll be recording on March 24th, so get your questions in before then if you’d like us to answer them on the podcast. You can use the hashtag #Pratchat6 to ask them via social media. (And check out the Episodes page if you want to see a bit further into our future schedule!)

#Pratchat3 – You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind

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In episode three, comedian Cal Wilson is back to discuss the book that started her passion for Terry Pratchett – Sourcery! The fifth Discworld novel, published in 1989, it features the return of the inept wizard Rincewind.

Rincewind is very happy to have left his adventuring days behind him, working as assistant librarian at Unseen University in Ankh-Morpork, the Disc’s premiere college for wizards. But just as a new archchancellor is about to be named, the young boy Coin arrives. He is the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son – a Sourcerer, a source of raw magic, something not seen on the Disc since the ancient time of the Mage Wars. As he takes over the university and wizards across the world awaken 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.

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Guest Cal Wilson is a stand-up comedian and children’s author. She previously appeared in our first episode, “Boots Theory“, and is still on Twitter at @calbo. Her new live stand-up show, Hindsight, will be playing in multiple cities at festivals throughout 2018: this page at comedy.com.au lists a bunch of them. (You can also see the poster she mentions; it really is good!)

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

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat2 – Murdering a Curry

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In our second episode, writer and editor Stephanie Convery joins us as we discuss the runner-up in our poll for which book to read first – Mort! Published 30 years ago, it’s the fourth Discworld novel, and the first to put Death in a starring role.

Mort (short for Mortimer), a daydreaming farmer’s son, is offered an apprenticeship by Death himself. Travelling outside of space and time to Death’s home, he finds things aren’t what he expects: Death has an elderly manservant, an adopted daughter, and an unusual interest in fly fishing. Mort, left to do the job alone, tries to defy fate in a very human (and teenage) moment  – but can he possibly succeed? And why does an immortal anthropomorphic personification need an apprentice, anyway?

Mort is often cited (including by us) as the first book in the series that feels like the Discworld we know and love, so if you’re joining us for the first time this episode, this is a great place to start. (And don’t worry: we will go back and read the first three books at some point!)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:33:48 — 86.6MB)

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Guest Stephanie Convery is deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia, a writer and an author. Her first book, After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne, was published in March 2020 by Penguin Books. You can follow Stephanie on Twitter at @gingerandhoney, and find her work on Guardian Australia.

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

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat11 – At Bill’s Door

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For our eleventh episode we welcome Pratchett fan Sarah Pearson to the mic to discuss a Discworld novel of two halves: Reaper Man! The eleventh Discworld novel, published in 1991, Reaper Man is the second book to focus on Death and the newly stable faculty of Unseen University.

The faceless bureaucrats of the multiverse have decided Death is sentimental and inefficient, and he’s been fired! While he heads off to live among humans for his remaining time – until his replacement comes to claim him – his absence means those who die sort of…don’t. That includes Windle Poons, 130-year-old wizard of Unseen University, whose return as a zombie gives him a new lease on life – much to the horror of his fellow faculty members. But Death’s absence is having other weird consequences: objects spring to life, non-human species spawn their own Deaths, and strangest of all, a warehouse in Ankh-Morpork mysteriously fills with small glass orbs…

Reaper Man‘s two mostly separate plots – Death’s forced retirement, and the wizards’ investigation of the alien lifeforms – bring back not only Death but also Windle Poons and the faculty of Unseen University, both introduced in Moving Pictures, alongside cameos by familiar faces like CMOT Dibbler and Fred Colon. Plus we meet a bunch of new and memorable characters: the Death of Rats, the Auditors of Reality, Mrs Cake and her daughter Ludmilla, and undead activist Reg Shoe and his friends from the Fresh Start Club. It’s a big cast, but then with two separate plots there’s plenty for them to do! We’d love to hear what you thought of Reaper Man; use the hashtag #Pratchat11 on social media to join the conversation.

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Sarah Pearson appeared on the ABC quiz show Hard Quiz, and works as a captioner for television.

In our next episode we’ll be joined by editor Jackie Tang as we power on to the next Discworld novel and travel far from the lands we know in Witches Abroad! We’re recording only a week after this episode is released, so to have us answer them on the podcast, get your questions via social media before September 15, 2018 using the hashtag #Pratchat12.

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

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!

 

#EeekClub2022 Notes and Errata

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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.

#Pratchat56 – do { Podcast(); } while (unreadPratchetts > 0);

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We travel down a leg of a very 1990s pair of the trousers of time this month, as author and musican Sean Williams joins Liz and Ben to get stuck into the artificial reality of Pratchett’s 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world’/’enough’ + ‘time’“.

Darren Thompson is a repairman who specialises in Seagems: artificial reality consoles that can edit aspects of your everyday life, or plug you into a whole artificial world. His latest job is to inspect a machine in which the user has died. That’s not a first for Darren – but there’s something about this particular corpse in the machine that makes this job feel different…

Originally published in the anthology Digital Dreams alongside works by authors including Diana Wynn Jones, Neil Gaiman and Storm Constantine, “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world’/’enough’ + ‘time'” is a short story that packs a lot in – and potentially goes to a much darker place than most of Pratchett’s other work. It’s since been collected in A Blink of the Screen, Once More* *with Footnotes and the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys (in which it’s accompanied by an original illustration by Josh Kirby).

Was Pratchett right to think that the virtual reality angle dates this horribly – or would he have thought differently only a few years later, as VR comes round again? Is this a happy ending, a dystopian nightmare, or the fantasy ramblings of a self-important creep? Would you want to be a ghost in the machine? And just what is going on with that illustration in the German collection? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat56 on social media.

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Guest Dr Sean Williams is an award-winning author of science fiction novels and short stories, makes music under the name “the Adelaidean”, and teaches creative writing at Flinders University. His novels run the gamut of original sci-fi and best-selling work for the worlds of Star Wars and Doctor Who, and he’s also collaborated with other authors – including previous Pratchat guest Garth Nix (#Pratchat51). You can find out more about Sean via his (hopefully updated) website, seanwilliams.com, and listen to his music via his Bandcamp page. He’s also (sometimes) on Twitter at @adelaidesean.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next month we continue the sci-fi theme with the third Long Earth novel, The Long Mars, which we’ll be discussing with returning guest Joel Martin! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat57, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat44 – Cosmic Turtle Soup

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We’ve waited two and a half years for its 35th anniversary, but finally Joel Martin rejoins Liz and Ben to resolve the Discworld’s first (and most literal) cliffhanger in The Light Fantastic, the second Discworld novel, first published on the 2nd of June, 1986.

When we last saw them, failed wizard Rincewind, Twoflower the tourist and Twoflower’s magical Luggage – a living chest on legs – had fallen over the Rim of the Discworld. But instead of tumbling forever through space, they mysteriously find themselves in the Forest of Skund, surrounded by talking trees, gnomes and gingerbread cottages. The senior wizards of Unseen University – including Chancellor Galder Weatherwax, and the second of his Order, Ymper Trymon – soon discover what’s happened: the Octavo, the Creator’s book of spells, wants to keep Rincewind alive. One of its spells is inside his head, and all eight need to be read to avert an impending apocalypse heralded by an ominous red star…

While the usual story is that Pratchett only returned to the Discworld because The Colour of Magic proved popular, he did set himself up for a sequel by dropping his protagonists off the edge of the disc. Unlike its predecessor, The Light Fantastic has a pretty straightforward plot about averting the end of the world – but that doesn’t stop Pratchett from parodying everything from fairytales to druidic sacrifices and the conventions of fantasy writing. Plus this book introduces some concepts, and especially characters, who will come back later, including a certain no-longer-human Librarian, Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and octogenarian barbarian Genghiz Cohen. (The rest of the supporting cast are less fortunate…)

Does this feel like a “real” Discworld book yet? How do we reconcile these versions of Death and Ysabell with the ones we come to love later? Is it really a bad idea to start with the early books – or is it fun to begin with the early versions of ideas Pratchett would later develop more fully? And what on the Disc happens to Rincewind between this book and Sourcery? Use the hashtag #Pratchat44 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Joel Martin is a podcaster and writer who has joined us twice before: way back in #Pratchat14 to discuss The Colour of Magic, and then again in #Pratchat31 for The Long Earth. While his podcasts are currently on hiatus, there’s soon to be exciting news regarding his speculative fiction writers festival, Speculate! You can watch for Speculate news on Twitter at @SpecFicVic, and join the festival’s mailing list via specfic.com.au. Find Joel online at thepenofjoel.com or on Twitter at @thepenofjoel.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode we go back to another second book of a series, as we take a little break from the Discworld. Yes, it’s book two of Pratchett’s five novel collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Long War! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat45, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat55 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“, discussing the twenty-seventh Discworld novel, 2001’s illustrated “Discworld Fable”, The Last Hero with returning guest Georgina Chadderton (aka George Rex).

Iconographic Evidence

Here are George’s drawings that we mentioned in the podcast!

Georgina’s earliest surviving art – a self-portrait of her as Rincewind
A cartoon illustration of characters from the book The Last Hero, sitting at a long table in the style of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"
“The Last Hero’s Last Supper” by George Rex!

Notes and Errata

As a quick note, we’ve preferenced using page numbers from the 2002 and 2007 editions of the book, since they’re probably the one you have. We’ve included page numbers for the first edition (where relevant) in brackets.

  • The episode title is a reference to Australian children’s television icon Mr Squiggle, the “Man from the Moon” who visited Earth in his pet rocket (named Rocket) to turn children’s “squiggles” – scribbled drawings of random lines and shapes – into delightful pictures of birds, fish and koalas with yo-yos using the pencil he had for a nose. His show is an Australian institution, running for forty years between 1959 and 1999 on the public broadcaster, the ABC. We previously mentioned him in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“. (The episode was originally titled “Mr Leonard, the Man on the Moon”, but then Ben rediscovered that the nickname “Mr Doodle” was suggested for Leonard in Men at Arms, and it was too perfect a fit not to change it!)
  • Other guests who’ve returned after a few years include Cal Wilson (in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, and then #Pratchat50), Stephanie Convery (#Pratchat2 and #Pratchat42), Richard McKenzie (#Pratchat5 and #Pratchat40), and most recently Nadia Bailey (#Pratchat17, then #Oggswatch2021 #Pratchat54). Guests who’ve come back without such a big break include Will Kostakis, Fury and Joel Martin. (If there’s a guest you’d love us to get back on the show, let us know! We already have a few in mind…)
  • Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, and the smallest state capital on the mainland (Hobart in Tasmania is much smaller). Unlike the other British colonies in Australia, it was established by free settlers rather than convicts, but it still nearly destroyed the Kaurna people who lived there. Like Australia’s many smaller cities (basically everywhere that’s not Sydney or Melbourne), it has a reputation of being more like a big country town.
  • Earthquakes in Australia are usually too minor to be noticed by humans, but in March 2022 Adelaide experienced two big enough to rattle windows and give people a fright (and prompt the posting of images of garden chairs knocked over with captions like “We will rebuild”, a common sentiment when mild disasters occur). Adelaide is surrounded by fault lines, though, which explains why sometimes they get a few in a row; this ABC News article gets into the details (and gives an example of the meme we mentioned).
  • If you want to get a preview of George’s graphic novel, she released Oh, Brother, a teaser of the original version, which you can find in the shop on her website. (Ben’s read it, it’s really good.)
  • You can find out more about the Paper Cuts Comics Festival on their website, papercutscomicfestival.com.
  • Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a British comedy film directed by Anthony Fabian set to be released in July 2022. It’s based on the 1958 novel Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico, and stars Lesley Manville as the titular cleaner living in post-war London, who dreams of escaping her life and owning a fancy gown made by Christian Dior. The nearly three-minute long trailer does indeed reveal pretty much every plot beat of the film.
  • In Greek mythology, Prometheus is one of the younger Titans who helped the gods overthrow the other Titans. In many versions of his story, he subsequently tricked Zeus, including causing him to accept bones and fat rather than meat as a sacrifice from mortals, which is what angered Zeus into hiding fire from them. Prometheus then stole it back, but in some accounts also taught humans many other hallmarks of civilisation, and possibly saved them from obliteration at Zeus’ hand. For these transgressions he was, like Fingers-Mazda, chained to a rocks and had his liver eaten by an enormous eagle in the day, only to grow whole again overnight to repeat the torture for eternity. He is eventually freed by Heracles, in some versions with Zeus’ permission, though Heracles kills the eagle rather than letting Prometheus do it.
  • The Bayeux Tapestry is a famous artwork depicting the history of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It’s huge, almost 70 metres long, and was probably made in England not long after the events describes, perhaps in the 1070s. Traditionally it is thought to have been commissioned by Queen Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, but historians consider it more likely to have been commissioned by the Bishop Odo, William’s half-brother. It got its name in the 18th century when it came to the notice of scholars as it was displayed in a cathedral in Bayeux, Normandy. The seventy or so illustrations on it are not woven into the linen fabric, as in many tapestries, but are embroidered, using a form of wool yarn, leading some scholars to prefer the term “Bayeux Embroidery”, though many think this is splitting hairs as the term “tapestry” isn’t that precise.
  • Fan service means anything including in a work of fiction that’s specifically designed to please an existing fan base. The term originates with Japanese manga and anime, where it often more specifically means content which is titillating or sexual in nature.
  • If you’re interested in learning about the visual literacy in comics, and in general about how comics work, we highly recommend the now classic work by Scott McLeod, Understanding Comics.
  • A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 science fiction novel written by English author Anthony Burgess (1917-1993). It depicts a dystopian future in which teenagers speak in a slang called “Nadsat” (from the Russian suffix meaning “-teen”) and form gangs to engage in random acts of “ultra-violence”. The protagonist, Alex, recounts some of his exploits, including falling out with his gang and being abandoned by them after an assault and robbery to be arrested, imprisoned and eventually put through an experimental form of aversion therapy, the “Ludivico Technique”. Stanley Kubrick famously filmed the novel in 1971, with a young Malcolm McDowell in the role of Alex; the film was controversial for including the violence (including murder and rape) present in the book, and has been hugely influential, introducing some of the slang terms like “droogs” (friends) and “ultra-violence” into common parlance. The Kubrick film was based on the US edition of the novel, which omitted the final chapter, and Burgess did not like the result. Burgess himself wrote a musical stage adaptation in 1987, and there have been many other stage productions since.
  • bell hooks (1952-2021) was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, an academic, activist and writer who wrote many influential books about race, feminism and class. hooks used lowercase for her pen name (which was also the name of her Great Grandmother) in an attempt to emphasise the work over the person. Ben is mistaken when he says she doesn’t use much capitalisation or punctuation, though; while she does favour plain language and long sentences, she uses standard English grammar.
  • There have been four editions of The Last Hero in English:
    • The original 2001 hardcover (160 pages; UK – Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-06885-X; US – HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-104096-7) is the one all three of us have read. It has Cohen atop a mountain on the cover, and is roughly 24cm wide and 28.5cm tall. As far as we know is the only one to feature the full-colour illustration of Leonard on the Moon looking at the Disc, which appears on the back cover of the dust jacket. (A pencil drawing of this illustration appears in the background on page 121 (or page 133 in the later editions). There’s a German translation of this edition, but it seems most other translations are of the second edition.
    • 2,000 copies were made of a limited “Deluxe Edition” of the UK hardcover (ISBN 0-575-07370-5), though we’re not sure what exactly was different about it – all the photos we can find look just like the hardcover Ben has with the dust jacket taken off! (For the record: the cloth cover underneath is plain black, embossed with the title, authors’ names and just Cohen from the original cover in gold.) Some sources list it as a “slipcase” edition, so it might have been exactly the same except with a slipcase instead of a dust jacket. (It was only £25 compared to the standard edition’s price of £17.99, so this minor change seems about right.)
    • The 2002 paperback edition (176 pages; UK – Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-07977-2; US – Eos/HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-050777-2) has the same page dimensions as the original hardcover (though the cover is a little smaller). This one features the Rincewind “Scream” cover and includes text describing it as “The No. 1 Bestseller” and “Includes 16 pages of all-new illustrations”. That the new illustrations did not appear in the deluxe edition caused some fans to be disgruntled with the publishers…
    • The 2007 paperback edition (176 pages; Victor Gollancz, ISBN 978-0-575-08196-3) is pretty much exactly the same as the 2002 version, except with an illustration of the entire Silver Horde on the cover, and it’s smaller: about 17cm wide and 19.5cm tall. Thanks to the specific layout, the page numbers are identical. This version has stayed in print since it was introduced, and is also the version on which the ebook, published in 2015, is based.
    • There’s also an audiobook of The Last Hero, published in 2008 by Isis Books (ISBN 978-0-7531-4058-1 / 040202) – the company with the original license to produce unabridged audiobooks of Pratchett’s works. Its narrated by Stephen Briggs. Its unclear as yet if a new audiobook of The Last Hero will be released as part of the new Penguin Audiobooks…
  • The Scream – whose actual title is Skrik (Norwegian for “Shriek”) or Der Schrei der Natur (German for “The Scream of Nature”) – is an 1893 pre-expressionist artwork by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). It depicts a bald figure in the foreground, standing on a bridge or pier near the sea, under a red sky; the figure is clutching its head and has its mouth open in a scream. Munch painted four versions, two in oils and two in pastels, and a lithograph – a carved version from which several monochrome prints were made, some of which were then hand-coloured by Munch. The first version is on display in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, and bares a pencil inscription in Norwegian, written by Munch, that went unnoticed until 1903: “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!“, “Could only have been painted by a madman!”
  • Is Rincewind a “young person”? He’s certainly much younger than Cohen, but by the time of The Last Hero he would by some accounts be around 57, though he looks considerably younger in Kidby’s drawings. Perhaps wizards age more slowly than other folks – or his time in the Dungeon Dimensions put a temporary stop to his physical ageing.
  • Ben makes good on his promise to describe at least most of the new illustrations from the second and later editions, but for reference, here’s a list:
    • Pages 50-51 – a map of part of the Disc, showing the route of the fleet that set out from Ankh-Morpork towards Krull.
    • Pages 70-71 – a portrait-oriented image of Death, the Death of Rats and Albert (holding a kitten in a box) looking up at A’Tuin’s immense life timer.
    • Pages 90-91 – the view down to the Hub from the spire of Cori Celesti.
    • Pages 104-105 – the Kite flying towards the viewer off the edge of the Rimfall.
    • Pages 116-117 – a painting of the wizards, the Luggage and Vetinari in the darkened hold of the ship, looking at the glowing lines of the spell tracking the Kite‘s path. (This is the one Ben later thinks is based on an existing work; see below for the answer we’ve come up with, thanks to subscriber Fiona Margolotta!)
    • Pages 126-127 – a portrait-oriented image of Rincewind on the moon, with one of the elephants in the background, in “the Scream” pose. (This is the image used for the cover of the second edition.)
    • Pages 138-139 – Ridcully, Ponder and another member of the Faculty (possible the Lecturer in Recent Runes) in the bow of the ship, the Luggage in the prow. The wizards are looking up at the moon, where the Kite blasting off can be seen, resembling a shooting star. Ridcully is fishing over the side of the ship – there’s a pile of very weird fish on the deck, and a worried looking sea serpent in the ocean. (This scene doesn’t quite appear in the text, but it’s a great painting.)
    • Pages 154-155 – a parody of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”, depicting Cohen in Adam’s pose giving the finger to Blind Io, who takes the place of the Christian God, and is surrounded by the other gods. (This appears in sketch form in the background of the pages where Rincewind talks the heroes out of their plan, on pages 144-145 of the first edition and 160-161 of the later editions.)
  • Our episode about Interesting Times was #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“, a pun on the novel and film Memoirs of a Geisha. (See the episode notes for more.) The pun just about still works if you pronounce it “A-gatt-ee-ah”… Sadly the official source, The Discworld Companion, neglects to supply a pronunciation, but probably whatever Stephen Briggs says in the audiobooks is “correct”.
  • Old Vincent is noted as being 87 in Interesting Times, and having trouble with his memory. He is not actually the oldest of them; that would be Mad Hamish, who in Interesting Times is 105. Cohen himself estimated his own age as between ninety and ninety-five, while Caleb the Ripper was 85. Boy Willie is noted as being the only one under eighty.
  • How much time has passed since Interesting Times? As usual there’s no canonical answer, but clues and fan theories suggest it’s probably been about three or four years.
  • The Cabin in the Woods is a 2011 horror comedy, directed by Drew Goddard and written by Goddard with Joss Whedon, which parodies slasher films and serves up a critique of more modern “torture porn” style horror films. It has a great cast, including Chris Hemsworth (of Thor fame) and Bradley Whitford (of The West Wing), plus many actors familiar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel. It has a stereotypical collection of college student horror characters head for a weekend in cabin out in the woods, while a pair of scientists observe them and subject them to chemicals and other stimuli that force them to behave like horror movie characters, all leading to a mysterious ritual. The scientists receive messages from other labs around the world advising them that other experiments have failed, leaving the American team as the last hope…and we won’t spoil any more than that, because it’s a pretty great film.
  • The Agatean Empire does not appear in any subsequent novels, but there is a canonical answer to what happens next in The Compleat Discworld Atlas, so we’ll revisit this when we cover that book.
  • Leonard of Quirm – as he is more often called, though he is also referred to as Leonard da Quirm in the books – is first mentioned in Wyrd Sisters (see #Pratchat4), where he is responsible for designing the wave machine used for special ocean effects at The Dysk theatre in Ankh-Morpork. Notably he is still “at large” in that book, working primarily as a painter from the Street of Cunning Artificers, and doing engineering as a side hustle. He’s safely ensconced in the Patrician’s palace by the time of Men at Arms (#Pratchat1), having designed and built the gonne which – deemed more dangerous than the other things Leonard had actually constructed – was meant to be destroyed by the Assassin’s Guild. By the time of Jingo (#Pratchat27) he’s been in the palace for five years – and we realise he does get to go along on the submarine adventure in that book, but only under the Patrician’s strict supervision. He also appears in The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40), and is mentioned briefly in Soul Music (where one of his illustrations inspires the Librarian to build his motorcycle; see #Pratchat19) and The Truth (where Mr Tulip admires one of his artworks; see #Pratchat42), but will only return once more, in Monstrous Regiment.
  • Cohen doesn’t wear a loincloth – it’s always been described and illustrated as a “leather hold-all”, like the furry underpants worn by He-Man.
  • The exhibition of Terry’s life and work that Ben remembers was Terry Pratchett: HisWorld, which featured at the Salisbury Museum from September 2017 to January 2018. Two books were produced for the exhibition – one limited edition small hardcover available only at the exhibition, and another larger art book. and you can find it and details of the exhibition at pratchetthisworld.com. The Shed of Doom was not actually build for HisWorld, but the following year for the Chalke Valley History Festival, where the HisWorld recreation of Terry’s writing room was also exhibited again. We’ve included a Tweet from the official @Discworld_com account below with some great photos of the Shed, and the CVHF also have a time-lapse video of its construction on Vimeo.
  • In the Pokémon series of videogames, there are several goals: one is to fill out your “Pokédex”, an index of every Pokémon creature, by capturing at least one specimen of every species. But you are also on a quest to prove yourself as the greatest Pokémon trainer in the region, usually by defeating the gym leaders – the best trainer is each of the local “Pokémon gyms”, which are basically training camps for Pokémon trainers, usually specialising in Pokémon of a certain type. When you enter a gym you find a unique (or at least distinctive) challenge you must overcome to get to the gym leader, which always includes fighting Pokémon battles against their gym members. And that’s even before you get to the final part of each game, which involves battling against the champion trainers above the individual gyms! Which is all to say that Evil Harry Dread being one of those unnamed trainers in the gym before the leader is a pretty scathing review from Liz of his Evil Overlord status.
  • Crufts is a famous UK dog show. We previously talked about it briefly in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • The Nothingfjord Blue swamp dragon does indeed seem to be a clear reference to Monty Python’s famous “Dead Parrot Sketch”. In the sketch, Mr Praline (John Cleese with a silly voice) tries to return a large, blue and clearly dead parrot to a pet shop, the owner of which (played by Michael Palin) tries to argue that it is not dead. The parrot in the sketch is described as a “Norwegian Blue” (a nonexistent species) which has “beautiful plumage”; the shopkeeper at one point claims that it is “pining for the fjords”. NoThingfjord, meanwhile, was first mentioned in The Last Continent as the birthplace of Mad the dwarf. It’s also mentioned in The Last Hero – it was the Duke of NoThingfjord who employed Mad Hamish and other members of the Silver Horde as mercenaries, in the battle they were asked to repeatedly re-stage for the purposes of capturing it in a tapestry. Some more details are given in The Discworld Mapp, where it’s revealed that it’s home to the Discworld’s equivalent of vikings, who were great explorers but not very successful raiders since they always made appointments with their potential victims, giving advance warning of their arrival.
  • The barbarian heroine in The Light Fantastic is Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan, who also gets a passing mention in Eric. We should also give Conina, Cohen’s daughter from Sourcery, a shout-out too.
  • Open All Hours was one of two successful BBC sitcoms developed from Seven of One, a showcase of sitcom pilots starring Ronnie Barker, which was broadcast in 1973. (The other was the prison comedy Porridge.) Barker, in a false moustache and pronounced stutter, plays Arkwright, the owner of a corner store in Yorkshire, who longs for and lusts after Nurse Gladys, who lives across the road with her elderly mother. He also attempts to teach all his dirty tricks for selling to customers to his assistant, his orphaned nephew Granville, played by David Jason – known to Discworld fans as both Albert in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, and Rincewind in the live-action adaptation of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Open All Hours ran for four series between 1976 and 1985, and remained popular enough to spawn a sequel, Still Open All Hours, in which Granville (still played by David Jason) has taken over the store. Still Open All Hours has had six series between 2014 and 2019.
  • Liz has mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy novel The Homeward Bounders before, in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left”, and #EeekClub2021, our first special episode discussing topics chosen by subscribers. In the book, demonic entities known only as Them play a boardgame with the denizens of the many alternate universes that exist – in part by selecting mortals who will be thrown out of their own universe, and must then try to make it home.
  • The Mysterious Cities of Gold (in Japanese 太陽の子エステバン, “Esteban, Child of the Sun“, and in French Les Mystérieuses Cités d’Or) is a French-Japanese animated television series that ran for one season of 39 episodes in 1982 and 1983. Set in the sixteenth century, the show follows three children – Esteban, Mia and Tao – as they travel with (and sometimes run from) the roguish explorer Mendoza and his bumbling sidekicks, as they search for the legendary “Seven Cities of Gold”. Along the way it turns out all three of the children are connected to various ancient, technologically advanced civilisations, and they discover several technological marvels of the ancient world, including the “Golden Condor”, a bird-like flying machine roughly the size of the Kite, which is powered by the Sun. Aside from its super catchy theme song, one of the things that distinguished it from other cartoons was the live-action educational segment at the end of each episode, which aimed to teach viewers about the real-world history and cultures of South America (though let’s remember this was the early 1980s, so it probably wasn’t very culturally aware). It was broadcast in Australia on the ABC in the mid-80s, and again more recently on NITV. Three new seasons, continuing on from the original, were produced in France between 2012 and 2021. The new seasons also spawned two videogames.
  • In the 1970s and 80s there were several European-Japanese co-productions in animation, predominantly in France. The other well-known example is Ulysses 31 (also created by Jean Chapolin, of The Mysterious Cities of Gold and Inspector Gadget fame), which translated the story of Odysseus/Ulysses into a science-fiction context. There are others, but they’re not nearly as well known in English-speaking countries.
  • We haven’t been able to find any pictures of the Kite model made as a drawing reference, though we know that it exists from a quote from Pratchett himself, featured in the Annotated Pratchett Guide. We’d still love to see it, though, so if anyone knows of any photos that exist, please send us a link!
  • NASA did send an ape into space! There were many monkeys and apes involved in the early spaceflight program at NASA, used as passengers or even trained pilots in test flights made prior to sending a human. This was not, of course, very nice for the animals, many of whom did not survive; in fact before they returned from any mission, the chimpanzees at NASA were only given numbers, not names, to reduce the emotional impact of press stories about their deaths, which puts the whole thing into grim perspective. But the success story of the program was Ham, the chimp who became the first great ape in space when he successfully returned from a sub-orbital flight on January 31, 1961. He lived for another twenty-two years, mostly at a Zoo in Washington, D.C., and when he died he was buried at the International Space Hall of Fame – a much nicer end that the original plan to stuff him and put him on display in the museum, something Russia did with some of the dogs from its own early space program.
  • Goodby Bindle Featherstone of Quirm – better known as Errol – appears in Guards! Guards!, where he is first encountered by Vimes on his visit to Lady Ramkin to learn about dragons. He is later gifted to Vimes, who has already taken a liking to him, and gains his shorter name when Nobby comments that “he looks more like my brother Errol”. His ability to flame from the, er, other end is said in that book to be partly genetic and partly down to the swamp dragons’ ability to rearrange their internal plumbing to make use of whatever fuel they can find.
  • Leonard’s drawings of swamp and moon dragons appear on pages 77 and 129 (73 and 117 in the first edition).
  • The painting of Ridcully fishing near the Circumference while the Kite blasts off from the moon is on pages 138 and 139.
  • The painting of the wizards observing the spell (from pages 116-117 of the later editions) appears to be based very specifically on A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, painted in 1766 by Joseph Wright of Derby. Wright’s style (and Kirby’s excellent copy of it) probably seems familiar to you – he also painted An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which was the inspiration for Kidby’s cover painting for The Science of Discworld. (See #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, for more information.) Thanks to subscriber Fiona Margolotta for helping us solve this mystery!
  • The picture of Cohen holding his sword outside the background that frames him appears on page 136 (124 in the first edition). There doesn’t appear to be a general term for this in art, but in comics it’s known as a breakout panel, or panel breaking.
  • The Lady first appears in The Colour of Magic, where she appears to Rincewind and Twoflower, giving them a chance to escape their fate (and, er, Fate) in Krull. She also appears in Interesting Times, starting a new game against Fate. Her original description states that her eyes are “Not the pale green of ordinary eyes … the green of fresh emeralds and as iridescent as a dragonfly.” Interestingly they’re not described as being entirely green until Interesting Times, though the dryad Rincewind meets earlier in The Colour of Magic does have eyes like that.
  • Modern dice have their numbers arranged so that the ones on opposite faces add up to the number of faces plus one. This arrangement – called “sevens” for the sum on a six-sided dice – makes sure that if the dice gets flattened somehow, making the numbers on two opposite sides more likely to be rolled, the average result of the dice will stay the same. Ben has a novelty twenty-sided dice a bit bigger than a golf ball that’s like this; it mostly rolls a 3 or an 18, but this still evens out to good or bad luck. The sevens configuration goes back to ancient Roman times, though it fell out of fashion around the twelfth century, when dice became more standardised and switched to a “primes” configuration. Sevens came back into vogue from around 1450 – seemingly alongside an increasing understanding of mathematics and basic probability during the Renaissance – and was extended to other die sizes too. (As an aside, we’re using “dice” as both singular and plural here, which is accepted modern usage.)
  • The Scandanavian story of the dice is the story of Oláf Haraldsson from the Heimskringla saga, told by Snorri Sturluson – though even he thought it was a bit on the nose, and credited the story to another bard, Thorstein the Learned. Haraldsson was a Norwegian Viking who in 1015 proclaimed himself King Oláf II of Norway in a bid to reclaim his land from Danish and Swedish rule. He sorted out the Danes without much trouble – King Canute was not much interested in Norway at the time – and made peace with Sweden, in part by marrying King Oláf of Sweden’s daughter. (This is why history is never the great for stories – who gives their two protagonists the same name?) When the two kings met to finalise which kingdom would own what, they disagreed about the Island of Hísing, but rather than go back to war they played dice for it. In a story reminiscent of one of Arnold Rimmer’s Risk stories from Red Dwarf, the Swedish king threw double-sixes; then the Norwegian King threw double-sixes; then the Swedish King threw double-sixes…and then King Oláf II therew the dice, and one split in half, showing a six and a one, giving him a result of thirteen and breaking the ongoing tie. As Ben mentions, this story is mentioned in The Science of Discworld in Chapter 34, “Nine Times Out of Ten”, about probability. (It’s Chapter 32 in the original edition.) While the result is far-fetched, it’s far from the only time powerful people have gambled for something so valuable: Ben is reminded of the story of a Japanese businessman in “Anything For the Client“, a 2015 story from the Snap Judgment podcast.
  • “Are We the Baddies” refers to a series of sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look, a BBC Three sketch comedy series starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. In the sketches, the pair play nazi officers during World War II; Mitchell’s character begins to worry that the skulls on their caps and various other clues might mean they are not the good guys. You can watch a compilation of the sketches on YouTube.
  • The illustrations of Carrot facing up to the Horde appear on pages 158 and 159 (142 and 143 in the first edition).
  • Michael Williams was our guest in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“. His story of the time he interviewed Pratchett live on stage was cut for time from #Pratchat26, but appears in the third episode of our subscriber-only podcast, Ook Club. (Our Support Us page has info on how you can get access to that podcast.)
  • We discussed Johnny and the Dead back in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
  • Emperor Carelinus is the Discworld equivalent of Roundworld’s Alexander the Great, at least seen through the lens of mythologising and popular culture. His name might be a reference to the Roman emperor Charlemagne, also known as Carolus. Alexander famously cut the Gordian knot, whose Discworld equivalent the minstrel informs us was located in Tsort. The bit about him reaching the end of the world and weeping is based on Alexander’s life, but also seems to be specifically a reference to the movie Die Hard, where Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber supposedly quotes the ancient historian Plutarch’s book about his life: “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.” That phrase, however, doesn’t appear anywhere in Plutarch – it’s cobbled together from several passages and echoes similar things from other later sources, but was invented (or perhaps messed up artfully) for the film.
  • We mention the various editions of the Discworld books this episode, which is probably something to which we should devote an entire episode one of these days. But here’s a quick guide to the major ones, or at least the ones we get in the UK and Australia:
    • The original English editions, published in hardcover by Gollancz (up to Jingo; Doubleday afterwards) and paperback by Corgi, had the Josh Kirby covers up until Thief of Time. From Night Watch on, they have covers by Paul Kidby. Kidby also obviously illustrated The Last Hero, but didn’t do the original cover for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, which was by David Wyatt. Kidby did later do a cover for The Amazing Maurice, but the newest editions have covers by Mark Beech, who’s done covers (and sometimes internal illustrations) for all of Pratchett’s books for younger readers. No editions of the earlier Discworld books have been published with covers by Kidby, even though he has done illustrations for some of them. (Though see the note on the new 2022 editions below.)
    • In 2012, Corgi began reissuing slightly larger B-format editions of the Discworld novels, which replaced the earlier paperback editions. These re-use Kirby and Kidby’s artwork, but reworked the cover designs, giving them a more consistent look, usually by using a smaller piece of Kirby’s artwork for the cover.
    • The hardcover/cloth ones mentioned by George are the Collector’s Library editions, which we previously discussed in #Pratchat30. These were first published between 2014 and 2016 by Gollancz, Terry’s first publisher, but because they didn’t have hardcover rights to the books after Jingo, the set remained incomplete. In 2017, Terry’s later publisher Doubleday (owned by Penguin Random House) got on board and continued the series with matching editions of the later books, though the “younger readers books” – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and the Tiffany Aching books – weren’t published in this format until 2021. Of special note: Eric has been published in this format, as just the text, but The Last Hero has not, since the format doesn’t allow for the illustrated format.
    • As part of the “50 Years of Terry” celebration (marking fifty years since his first novel, The Carpet People, was originally published in 1971), new editions of “all 40 Discworld novels” will be published with a consistent cover design, coinciding with the release of the new unabridged audiobook versions (which use square versions of the same designs). Each sub-series is published together, with the standalone books distributed among the publication dates; the first batch, of the five witches books and Small Gods, were released in 2022 on Pratchett’s birthday, April 28. It seems likely The Last Hero will not be re-issued in this edition, explaining the “all 40” comment above.
  • Teflon and velcro are both often cited as having been originally created to solve problems for the space program, but in fact both were invented decades earlier. This is such a persistent “fact” that NASA still has an FAQ page answering the question “Are Tang, Teflon and Velcro NASA spin-offs?“
  • This is Spinal Tap is a 1984 improvised mockumenary film, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as the members of Spinäl Tap, a British rock band who are supposedly one of the biggest in the world. Parts of the film flash back to the band’s earlier days, including a sequence in black and white showing one of the earlier incarnations of the band, the Thamesmen, who had a Beatles-like hit titled “Gimme Some Money”. The song Ben references here, “Listen to the Flower People”, was recorded after the band changed their name to Spinäl Tap. The film is consistently named one of the funniest ever made, and established the largely improvised documentary format which Christopher Guest has returned to many times for films like Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind. Rob Reiner announced in 2022 that he is planning a sequel, reuniting the original cast.
  • The illustration of the Kite crew on the moon looking at the elephant and disc appears on pages 130-131 (118-119 in the first edition).
  • In James Cameron’s 1986 film Aliens, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) joins a group of marines to investigate the silence of a colony established on the planet where her crew picked up a vicious alien lifeform in 1979’s Alien. When they confirm that the aliens are still there and have killed most of the colonists, and most of the marines have been killed as well, Ripley says one of many famous lines from the film: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” The dog-Latin version appears in Leonard’s drawings on page
  • Discworld books with few footnotes from around the time of The Last Hero include Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment (each of which has only ten), The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (with just four) and Going Postal (which has none!). Thud! has closer to an average number, with twenty footnotes.
  • “Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning” are the directions given to Neverland by Peter Pan when Wendy asks his address in Peter Pan – or at least in the film adaptations. In the 1904 play Peter Pan and 1911 novel Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, Peter doesn’t specify he means a star; he only says “Second to the right and then straight on till morning”, leaving Wendy none the wiser.
  • At the end of the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the starship Enterprise is sent back to Earth to be decommissioned. Captain Kirk decides to take it on one last journey, and when asked for a heading by helm officer Chekhov, says “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.” It’s nearly the last line of he film.
  • Ben mentions several sources for annotations for the book:
  • You can find lots of Paul Kidby’s other artwork – including pictures of gnomes, dragons, unicorns, fairies and many more – on his website, paulkidby.com.
  • The painting of Dunmanifestin is on page 17.
  • The Moai – the famous statues of Easter Island – are more than 900 monolithic statues of ancestors, created by the Rapa Nui people between around 1250 and 1500. While they are often referred to as “heads”, they are complete bodies, though many of the famous photos are of Moai from the coast, which are often buried in the earth up to the shoulders. They are on average around four metres tall, but the biggest is nearly 10 metres high – and an unfinished one was more than twice that!
  • Chichen Itza is a Mayan city in the Mexican state of Yucatán. Probably the biggest city of the Mayan civilisation, it is now an archeological site and tourist destination, at the centre of which is the Temple of Kukulcán, a step-pyramid also known as El Castillo or La Pirámide, names given by European explorers. It was built in worship of Kukulcán, the Mayan incarnation of the a feathered serpent deity known to the Aztecs as Qetzacoatl. A very similar temple to a fairly similar god features in Eric.
  • We couldn’t identify the building out the back of Dunmanifestin on our own – but we reached out to Paul Kidby on Twitter, who told us it’s the home of the Great God Om (of Small Gods fame), as requested by Terry himself! You can see our question and his response below.
  • The Man in the Moone is a 1638 novel by Bishop Francis Godwin of Hereford, in which a Spaniard travels to the moon in a chariot which is, well done Ben, drawn by swans. (The illustration of Leonard in a chariot drawn by swamp dragons – what the Patrician imagines his plan to be – appears on pages 32-33.) Godwin’s book is one of the earliest published stories about space travel, and was famous enough to be parodied by the real life Cyrano de Bergerac twenty years later, as referenced in Rostand’s famous 1897 play about Bergerac. Godwin’s story, or Bergerac’s parody, may have influenced many other writers, including Rudolf Raspe in his tales of Baron Munchausen.
  • “Tribute” is the first single from American rock duo Tenacious D, comprised of Jack Black and Kyle Gass. It was originally written for their HBO television series, and was released on their first album, Tenacisou D, in 2002. In the song, the pair tell the story of how they meet a demon and beat him in a “rock off” by playing “the Greatest Song in the World”, in a manner similar to the fiddling competition from “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. Afterwards they cannot remember the song they played, and instead write this song as a “tribute” to that one. Apparently it wasn’t a huge hit in the US, but in Australia and New Zealand we loved it, rocketing it into the top ten; its certified platinum in AUstralia, New Zealand and the UK, and also did well in the Netherlands. A version of the “rock off” features in the Tenacious D feature film, The Pick of Destiny, where they compete against Satan after plotting to steal the titular guitar pick, which is made from a piece of his horn. (Ben, a big Tenacious D fan, recommends the soundtrack album for the film, but not the film itself.)
  • Ballads and sagas are different things, but only the former is usually a “story song“.
    • Traditional ballads can be songs or poems, but they usually tell a story in many short verses. (Ben wrote one himself, retelling the story of Frankenstein from the perspective of the often forgotten ship’s captain whose letters serve as a framing narrative.) They were particularly popular in Ireland and England for many centuries; the name seems to derive from the medieval Scottish ballares, which itself comes from the Latin ballare, meaning “to dance”, showing that they were also originally songs you danced to. (Both ballet and the different form of French poetry, the ballade – as practised by Cyrano de Bergerac in the famous poetic fight scene near the start of Rostand’s play – also get their name from the same Latin root.) Early ballads often have anonymous sources, but they are sources of stories about Robin Hood, Beowulf and many other figures. The ballad went on to have a rich history, in storytelling, political satire and popular music, until they fell out of fashion in the 19th century.
    • In historical terms, saga properly describes long prose stories from Iceland and other Scandinavian countries. The word saga (whose plural is sǫgur) is Old Norse, and evolved from meaning “what is said” to describing a story or history. (The modern words for all these things in Scandinavian languages are derived from saga.) The earliest sagas were mostly passed on orally, and were written down in the 13th century, but especially in Iceland – where the language has changed very little over a thousand or more years – they are still well understood. Probably the most famous author of sagas was Snorri Sturluson, a law speaker of the Althing in Iceland who lived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is credited with composing or compiling many sagas about Icelandic history and legend, including the Prose Edda – on which our modern understanding of Norse mythology is based – and the Heimskringla, a history of Scandanavian kings we’ve already mentioned in these notes. In modern English usage, a “saga” is any long story, especially if its told in parts; for example the main films of the Star Wars universe are usually referred to as “the Skywalker saga”.
  • “Bardcore” is, as Ben says, a musical genre in which modern songs are performed in a “medieval” style, to varying levels of authenticity. There are indeed several bardcore versions of Led Zeppelin’s classic track “Immigrant Song”, from heir 1970 album Led Zeppelin III on YouTube. Our picks include this instrumental one by Constantine Bard; this one with English vocals by Grace Sledd; and this one translated into Old Norse by the Miracle Aligner, which he suggests might be better termed “Skaldcore”. Thanks to subscriber Sven who suggested that last one! (And while we’re talking “Immigrant Song”, some of Ben’s other favourite covers of it include The Cybertronic Spree, Robyn Adele Anderson (in a 1940s swing style), Karen O with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (for the soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and The Foo Fighters, featuring Tenacious D and Slash!)
  • Sea shanties have enjoyed a few rounds of popularity on TikTok, where shared videos can be offered as a “duet”, allowing other users to record themselves singing along and post a new video of both singers side by side. (You can do this multiple times, adding many levels of voices or instruments, and its not limited to music – some very funny videos have been created this way!) Shanies are perfect for this since hey’re designed to be easy to sing, but also they are traditionally sung a cappella without harmonies, leaving lots of room for modern additions. The most well-known shanty to become TikTok famous is “The Wellerman”, particularly a performance by Nathan Evans. This YouTube compilation gives you a good idea of the form. (Evans recently did a filk song version about the 2022 Doctor Who special “Legend of the Sea Devils”.)
  • The black-figure style – as seen in the image of Blind Io and Fingers-Mazda on page 8 – was very popular in Greece and parts of what is now Italy from around the 7th to 5th centuries BCE, though it hung around for a few centuries after its height. This style of art was painted in black, white and usually shades of orange or red on vases, amphorae and other ceramic vessels.
  • Kidby’s parodies of Leonardo da Vinci’s work in The Last Hero include:
    • A version of his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, on page 30. This is known as the Mona Ogg, because as revealed in The Art of Discworld – another book it seems we need to cover! – she and Leonard were romantically involved in their youth. Leonard’s version is indeed a painting of a young Gytha Ogg. In fact the one in this book seems to be a new version, since the Mona Ogg has existed before the gonne affair in Men at Arms, so perhaps the original was painted in their youth?
    • A version of the Vitruvian Man on pages 86 and 87, showing Rincewind strapped into Leonard’s spaceflight training device, with the usual number of arms. (This appears on pages 82 and 83 in the first edition, and it also the end papers.) da Vinci’s original artwork was an ink drawing from around 1490 titled Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio, or “The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius”. It shows a man with his arms and legs draw in two different positions, describing both a circle and a square; Rincewind is drawn only in the circular position. Vitruvius was a Roman architect, and Leonardo’s notes that accompany the drawing – in mirror-writing, of course – refer to notes Vitruvius made about the proportions of the human body in his book De architectura (“On architecture”), written around 15-30 years BCE. It’s important to note that these proportions are of a typically masculine body, and so are not truly universal.
  • The story of the space pen vs the pencil is indeed mostly a myth. As Liz mentions, NASA had legitimate reasons for wanting to avoid pencils – highly flammable pencil shavings could present a hazard aboard a spacecraft, especially as graphite can conduct electricity and potentially cause a short-circuit if bits got into electronic components. The Fisher Space Pen ended up being the answer, but NASA didn’t spend billions of dollars creating it – the Fisher Pen Company was already working on a pressurised ink cartridge that enabled writing at various angles, and they perfected it after NASA reached out to them.
  • A mission patch – also known as a “space patch”, since they are mostly known from space exploration – is an emblem representing a particular mission which is worn as an embroidered cloth badge by astronauts and other mission personally. They date back to one of the early soviet space missions, Vostok 6, when the first one was worn by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Mission patches come from the military tradition of shoulder sleeve insignia (SSI) or shoulder patches – embroidered badges worn on the sleeves of military uniforms, especially in the US, to show the division to which a soldier belongs. (You can see them in Stargate SG-1, where the airforce personnel assigned to the Stargate program wear patches which seem part SSI, part NASA mission patch…and they’re attached by velcro, so they can remove them when operating on Earth and avoiding disclosing the classified Stargate program.)
  • The Lego Space theme is a classic theme for Lego sets introduced in 1978 and originally running until 1987. It’s logo, of a white space shuttle with a smaller red shuttle shown orbiting around it, deliberately resembles the NASA “meatball” logo. Sets using this theme were hugely popular, and it was revisited many times up until 2013. The character of Benny in The Lego Movie is a classic Lego Spaceman, with the Lego Space logo on his chest and the iconic oxygen tanks and helmet from that theme.
  • Rincewind’s motto “Morituri Nolumus Mori“ echoes the famous Latin phrase “Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant” – “Hail, Emperor; those who are about to die salute you”. While it is popularly believed to have been said by gladiators to watching emperors, there’s actually no evidence this ever happened. It is documented in contemporary histories only once, in the work De vita Caesarum (“The Life of the Caesars”) by Suetonius. There it is said by soldiers participating in a mock naval battle in 52 AD.
  • In Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo (“The Creation of Adam”), his famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, God is surrounded by a billowing cloak. This was famously described as a brain in an episode of the television series Westworld, but that theory is older than that – and contentious, as some think it’s more like a uterus! This article at The Verge goes into detail.
  • Several books contain references to Rincewind’s childhood:
    • In The Light Fantastic, upon meeting Cohen, he recalls his grandad telling him stories about the barbarian.
    • Rincewind claims in Sourcery that his mother “ran away before I was born”.
    • Interesting Times reveals that Rincewind “had no personal experience of either parent but felt that they were probably at least vaguely humanoid, if only briefly.”
    • In The Last Continent Rincewind recognises sheep, despite growing up in the city, in part because he’d had a stuffed toy lamb as a child.
  • The tradition of orphans in Ankh-Morpork being given to a Guild is mentioned not only in Thief of Time (see #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“), where Lobsang is apprenticed to the Thieve’s Guild and Jeremy to the Clockmakers’, but also The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, where we learn Keith the pipe player was left on the doorstep of the Musicians’ Guild.
  • Esk’s age does not seem to be a factor in Equal Rites, where many of the prospective wizards hoping to enter the university are young enough to be accompanied by their parents.
  • Jedi are trained very young: Yoda claims the 22-year-old Luke is “too old to begin the training” in The Empire Strikes Back. The Jedi Council considered that even 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker might be too old in The Phantom Menace, and in Attack of the Clones we see a group of four- to eight-year-olds learning to use lightsabers. (Ben notes that if he tried such a thing he would certainly lose his Working With Children Check.)
  • We previously mentioned Wallace and Gromit in our discussion of Thief of Time (#Pratchat48). In their first stop-motion animated short film, A Grand Day Out (1989), inventor Wallace and his long-suffering but faithful dog Gromit build a rocket and fly to the moon in search of cheese.
  • Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (From the Earth to the Moon, a direct route in 97 hours and 20 minutes) – better known as From the Earth to the Moon – was first published in serial and novel form in 1865. In the book, an American gun club build an enormous “space gun” and use it to fire a hollow projectile containing three men with the aims of landing them on the Moon. The novel only details the adventure up until the gun is fired; their adventures on – or rather near – the Moon are detailed in the 1870 sequel, Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon).
  • We previously mentioned Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books in #Pratchat7A. The dragons in question are alien lifeforms on the planet Pern, where human riders form a two-way psychic bond with their dragons at the time of hatching. There are 23 novels in the series, some written or co-written by McCaffrey’s son Tom, beginning with 1968’s Dragonflight. The third part of The Colour of Magic, “The Lure of the Wyrm”, is a parody and homage to dragon fiction, including the Pern books.
  • We previously mentioned the Room 101 radio show in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” It has also been a television show.
  • The Repair Shop is a BBC television series in which family heirlooms are repaired and restored by experts. It first began in 2017, and is currently in the midst of its ninth season. It’s filmed at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, which has a working smithy required to repair some of the items brought. An Australian version, The Repair Shop Australia, began on the Foxtel pay-TV channel LifeStyle on 3 May, 2022 – just before this episode came out!
  • Chris Hemsworth plays the hot-but-stupid receptionist Kevin in the 2016 Ghostbusters film, also known as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. We won’t say much more to avoid spoilers, but this scene of his job interview will give you a pretty good idea of what he’s about.
  • Imp y Celyn – aka “Buddy” – is one of the protagonists of Soul Music, which we discussed in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“. In that book it’s revealed that Mort and Ysabel died when the extra time granted them by Death ran out, and their carriage ran off the edge of a mountain road. We only get a few glimpses of their life between then and the end of Mort (discussed in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“), when the couple have become the new Duke and Duchess of Sto Helit, and Ysabel is pregnant with Susan.

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