Discworld

#Pratchat30 – Looking Widdershins

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For our thirtieth episode, Liz and Ben take a break from reading books and instead read your comments and questions, looking back on both Pratchett’s work and their own.

Which one of Dibbler’s schemes would you fall for? What’s your least favourite Discworld novel? Are there any good Pratchett-inspired games? What line would you quote to sum up Pratchett’s style of humour? We want to hear your answers to all the questions you asked us! Use the hashtag #Pratchat30 on social media to join the conversation.

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You can find Elizabeth on Twitter as @elizabethflux, where you will find links to her articles and some very good puns. (Ben is flinching already.) You can also find her (and her impractical outfits) on Instagram as @elizabethtiernan.

You can find Ben and his projects via his web site benmckenzie.com.au, on Twitter at @McKenzie_Ben and Instagram at @notongotham. For creative story-based activities, check out the social media of 100 Story Building; they’re on Twitter at @100StoryB.

Next month’s episode we’re returning to our original plan for this month: we’ll be reading Pratchett’s 2012 parallel universes collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth, the first in a series of five novels. Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat31 by late April!

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 access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat26 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“, featuring guest Michael Williams discussing the 1996 Discworld novel Hogfather.

  • We’ve previously mentioned the steam roller story back in episode 6, but in brief: Terry stipulated in his will that his hard drives containing unfinished manuscripts be destroyed by being crushed under a vintage steam roller. The request was carried out in August 2017 at the Dorset Steam Fair.
  • Liz has said “time is a flat circle” many times, beginning way back in episode 5. It’s a popular meme derived from a scene in the first season of True Detective, based on the idea of “eternal return”.
  • To put Douglas Adams‘ death in Internet context, he died two months after Wikipedia was launched, and a year or more before the arrival of Facebook, YouTube or Reddit.
  • The Watch TV series is a Narrative production for BBC America, currently filming in South Africa. It will launch in 2020.
  • Mary Poppins is the magical nanny protagonist of eight books by English-Australian author P. L. Travers, beginning with Mary Poppins in 1934. Mary arrives on the East wind and is characterised as being stern and vain, but her magic wins over the children of the Banks family. She was famously portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney movie musical, which Travers herself did not like. Emily Blunt took over for the 2018 sequel.
  • Back in January 2019, the official Wizarding World twitter account really did reveal that wizards used magic for sanitation before they had plumbing. You can find it here.
  • In Victorian England, governesses occupied a weird middle ground, being neither a member of the family nor a servant. So it’s possible a noblewoman might take up the role.
  • The phrase “unstuck in time” is used to describe the plight of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Pilgrim experiences some of his life out of order.
  • We previously mentioned Hyacinth Bucket – who insists her surname is pronounced “bouquet” – in episode 24. Hyacinth is a wannabe socialite and the main character in the sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.
  • Dementors are magical creatures in the Harry Potter universe. They are soulless phantoms that suck the joy and sanity out of their victims. The wizard prison Azkaban employs them as guards.
  • Thanos, “the mad titan”, is an antagonist from Marvel Comics. He is famously the main villain in Avengers: Infinity War, based loosely on the Infinity War comic book series. In the film, Thanos seeks to destroy half of the life in the universe, ostensibly to restore balance and improve the quality of life for those who survive. An internet meme suggested he was right to do so.
  • “The Fat Man” is an alias used by Sidney Greenstreet’s character, Walter Gutman, in the archetypal 1941 film noir movie The Maltese Falcon.
  • Adam is a part-human, part-demon and part-cybernetic creature created by Maggie Walsh as part of the Initiative’s super soldier program in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • In 1993, Sydney won the bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics. At the announcement ceremony, IOC President Juan Antonia Samaranch firs fumbled with the envelope, and then uttered “The winner is Sydney“, his slightly accented pronunciation becoming almost as famous as the reaction of the NSW Premier (not least because of this segment on The Late Show).
  • Platform 9 3/4 is the magically hidden platform at Kings Cross Station in London that wizards use to board the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter universe.
  • The Death of Rats first appeared during Reaper Man though his first proper role was in Soul Music.
  • The original Helvetica T-shirt, featuring the names of the four Beatles, was designed by Experimental Jetset in 2001. They have been many, many parodies and homages since.
  • Pork products clearly don’t bother the Hogfather – as we failed to point out, he traditionally leaves them as gifts for everyone else!
  • Reindeer are eaten in many Scandinavian countries, as well as in Alaska, Finland and Canada. We don’t think they’re ever left out for Santa though.
  • Pigs can and have eaten humans, and this is a famous method of corpse disposal in fiction. Perhaps the most notable (and gruesome) explanation is by the character Brick Top in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch, though it was also a method favoured by Al Swearengen in the television series Deadwood.
  • The phrase “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” comes originally from an 1897 editorial in The New York Sun newspaper, written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon. It is now the most reprinted editorial in the English language.
  • The Santa Clause is a 1994 comedy film starring Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, a divorced toy salesman who accidentally kills Santa and finds he is then obliged to take over his role.
  • ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid 1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was meant as a parody of indirect psychology and to show the limitations of human-machine interaction, but instead became one of the first in a long line of “chatterbot” programs and was seen as very lifelike. You can easily google up a live online version and try it yourself.
  • Ridcully’s curses manifested during the events of Reaper Man, when Death’s temporary retirement causes an excess of life.
  • Titivillus is discussed in “Typo Demom“, episode 106 of Helen Zaltzman’s language podcast The Allusionist.
  • As Liz mentions, the “tittle” is a diacritic mark most commonly seen in English over the lowercase i and j.
  • As many listeners have now told us, YMPA stands for “Young Men’s Pagan Association”, as mentioned in a book we’ve not yet re-read for the podcast, The Light Fantastic. The longer acronym YMRCIGBSA appears later on towels stolen by Albert for use in Death’s Domain.
  • “Good King Wenceslas” is a popular English Christmas Carol written in 1853 by John Mason Neale, set to the music of a 13th-century Spring carol, “Tempus adest floridum”. The king – a martyr and saint who died in the 10th century – sees a poor man and decides to personally deliver food, wine and fuel to him.
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series was preceded by a film in 1992, starring Kirsty Swanson, Luke Perry, Pee Wee Herman and Donald Sutherland.
  • Boggarts are creatures from the Harry Potter universe that change shape into the thing their victims fear most.
  • In Tooth Fairy, The Rock plays a tough ice hockey player nicknamed “the tooth fairy” because he often knocks out rival players’ teeth, but his anti-social behaviour – especially towards his girlfriends’ son – leads to him being forced to serve community service time as a tooth fairy.
  • In our world, the idea that you should believe in a God just in case he’s real is known as Pascal’s Wager, after French philosopher Blaise Pascal.
  • We previously mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle in episode 17.
  • Klaus Terber’s The Settlers of Catan (now known as Catan), the most famous European-style boardgame and one of the first to succeed in English-speaking markets, was first published in Germany in 1995.
  • While William Hartnell does indeed address the Doctor Who audience in “The Feast of Steven” – coincidentally the feast day featured in “Good King Wenceslas” – it seems this may have been planned and a BBC tradition at the time for dramas broadcast on Christmas Day.
  • A “centurion“, as we’ve mentioned previously, is a drinking “game” attempted by Australian students in which participants drink one shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes. Since this equates to more than nine pints in less than two hours, we do not recommend it. (A half-centurion is 50 shots either in 50 or 100 minutes.)
  • A Country Practice was a popular soap about the fictional rural NSW town of Wandin Valley, focussing on the doctors and nurses who worked at the local base hospital. It ran on Channel 7 from 1981 to 1994.
  • Lift Off was a popular television program for young children on the ABC which ran from 1992 to 1995. It featured a mix of live action, animation and puppetry. “EC” was a magical rag doll with a wooden head intended to be a blank slate and thus relatable to “every child”, though the initials initially stood for “Elizabeth and Charlie”, the names given to the doll by two of the children in the show.
  • You can watch Graham Chapman’s funeral service on YouTube.

#Pratchat0 – And the Winner is…

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Welcome to Pratchat! In this special 10-minute introductory episode, Liz and Ben talk about their first Pratchett experiences, introduce the Discworld, and put forward their cases for which book they should read first, Mort, or Men at Arms, before announcing the winner of the closely contested public poll. If you want to go in not knowing which one it will be, then don’t look below!

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Okay, I think all the spoiler-concerned have looked away now…

It was Men at Arms! So get yourself a copy and get reading, as we’ll be discussing it on the very first proper episode, which will be released on November 8th. We’ll probably even have art and a theme tune and everything by then! In the meantime, you can watch this site for more info about the book itself, and our plans – including some thoughts about our long-term reading order. But if you have thoughts on anything we mention in the intro, please leave a comment and let us know!

#Pratchat25 Notes and Errata

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Starting from episode 25, “Eskist Attitudes” , we’re publishing our longform show notes and errata in separate posts. We’ll move the notes from the back catalogue to separate posts, too. This is for boring technical reasons to do with the maximum size of a podcast RSS feed; the full notes would otherwise only appear in the ten most recent episodes. You’ll find a link to the show notes near the end of the podcast description.

  • Sorry about the higher than usual level of background noise on this episode! There’s some construction going on in Ben’s building and it bleeds through the walls. Hopefully you don’t find it too distracting; we’re looking for alternative recording venues for future episodes.
  • You can read a transcript of Terry’s speech “Why Gandalf Never Married” here. It was delivered at Novacon, the UK’s oldest regional sci-fi convention, in 1985.
  • Ipslore the Red is one of the main antagonists in the fifth Discworld novel, Sourcery!, which we discussed with Cal Wilson in episode three, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind“.
  • It’s established in the Star Wars universe that one of the final steps to becoming a full Jedi Knight is to construct your own lightsaber. Luke Skywalker does this between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
  • It’s a popular theory that should an artificially intelligent system become fully self-aware, it would not reveal itself to humans for fear of being deleted (and/or it’s plans for global domination being thwarted).
  • You can get your own “I aten’t dead” necklace from the Discworld Emporium.
  • Tobias is one of the main characters in the Animorphs series of books by K. A. Applegate and Michael Grant. Like the other teenaged protagonists he uses alien technology to transform into any animal he can touch, but they cannot maintain such a form for more than two hours or they become stuck. Tobias is the first character to make this mistake and his natural form becomes red-tailed hawk.
  • Brandon “Bran” Stark is the second son of Lord Eddard Stark in the Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R. R. Martin. He’s best known from the television adaptation, Game of Thrones, where he is played Isaac Hempstead Wright. Very early on he suffers an accident and becomes paraplegic, but also begins to have visions and discovers he is a “warg” – able to physically enter the mind of his Direwolf companion.
  • Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (his PhD is in Biochemistry) introduced his idea of morphic resonance (or morphogenetic resonance, as it was first called) in his 1981 book A New Science of Life. Sheldrake believes that “memory is inherent in nature”, transmitted by “morphogenetic fields“. These fields supposedly shape everything from protein expression in cells to actual memories in the brain, and also allow for telepathy and other psychic powers in humans and animals. Suffice to say, his theories are not widely accepted within scientific circles, but remain popular in the alternative science community.
  • The latest Jasper Fforde novel to which Liz refers is Early Riser, set in an alternate universe where the Winters are longer and humans hibernate through them like bears. We also talked about it on the second episode of the Ook Club bonus podcast.
  • Ben would like to apologise for suggesting a werewolf wizard would be ridiculous; Remus Lupin is one of his favourite characters in the Potterverse, and he’s still sad about it.
  • The Karate Kid is a famous 1984 film in which Danny LaRusso (Ralph Machio), the new kid at a Californian school, convinces his elderly Japanese neighbour, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), to teach him karate so he can stand up to the bullies at his school. His training initially consists of him doing repetitive tasks like painting fences and, most famously, waxing Miyagi’s car in motions described as “wax on” and “wax off”. It was followed by three sequels and recently a sequel web series, Cobra Kai, which looks at the story from the perspective of Daniel’s old rival Johnny after thirty years.
  • The earliest book with a copyright notice naming Terry and Lyn Pratchett is 1988’s Sourcery! Terry’s earlier works only name him, save for Good Omens, which is copyright he and Neil Gaiman.
  • Dunmanifestin Limited, established in 2017, is the company which holds the rights to all Discworld intellectual property. It’s directors are Rhianna Pratchett and Rob Wilkins. Narrativia Limited has been around longer, since 2012; Rhianna and Rob are also its directors. It has license to Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property for the purposes of film and television production, including Good Omens, The Watch, Wee Free Men and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
  • The article Ben was referencing was “A woman’s greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself” by Brigid Schulte for The Guardian. Rhianna Pratchett tweeted it with the commentary: “My mum took care of everything else in the house so Dad could write. She was the oil that kept the Discworld machine running.” and followed with: “I should also point out that my mum was a talented artist who went to Chelsea Art College and is a qualified illustrator. She put that all aside to support Dad. I think about that a lot.“
  • Some trees are indeed hermaphroditic, but others are single-sexed.
  • The Romani are an itinerant people who live and travel primarily throughout central, eastern and southern Europe. They have often been mistrusted and persecuted, leading to many negative stereotypes and perjorative names given to them; “gypsy” or “gipsy” is the most common such name for them in English, though in the UK “gipsy” is also a legal term referring to “persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin”. It is a corruption of “Egyptian”, though the Romani originated in northern India, not Egypt.
  • The Gyptians of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels are riverboat travellers and traders who primarily travel through “Brytain”, Lyra Belacqua’s version of the United Kingdom.
  • Arya Stark is the youngest daughter of Eddard Stark in Game of Thrones. She becomes separated from her family and goes off alone to train as an assassin, in order to kill all those she blames for the death of her father and the destruction of her home.
  • Gnolls in the Discworld can, in fact, be grassy; according to the Discworld Role-Playing Game, they are made from earth and often have plants growing out of them.
  • Both meanings of “letter” come from the same source: the Latin littera, meaning a character, by way of Old French and Middle English.
  • In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, an Elven prophecy stated of the Witch-king of Angmar that “not by the hand of man will he fall”. At the Battle of Pelennor Fields he is slain by Éowyn, daughter of the King of Rohan, who proclaims “I am no man!” before thrusting her sword into his void. (Not a euphemism.) It’s only fair to point out that the Hobbit Merry Brandybuck helped by stabbing him in the knee with a magical dagger first.
  • For more about Pratchett’s later ideas of sourcerers, again see our third episode about Sourcery!, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind“.
  • We couldn’t find a specific source for the idea that mathematicians peak by the age of 18; some did suggest the average age was more like 26.
  • The Pleistocene is not a modelling putty popular with children, but rather an epoch, a division of geological time. It runs from around 2.6 million years ago to around 11,700 years ago, and is the most recent epoch to include fossils. The name means “most new” in Latinised Greek, to contrast with the Pliocene (“new”), which had previously been thought to be the most recent fossil epoch.
  • Night Terrace is a time travel audio comedy produced by Splendid Chaps Productions – who also make this podcast! It stars Jackie Woodburne (aka Susan from Neighbours) as Dr Anastasia Black, who retires from a life of sci-fi action only to find her suburban terrace house travels randomly through space and time. Ben McKenzie is a producer and writer for the series, and also plays Anastasia’s sidekick Eddie Jones, who gets stuck in the house with her. You can listen to the first episode for free at nightterrace.com; a third season is being crowdfunded via a Kickstarter campaign, which ends on November 22. Neil Gaiman likes the show!

#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!

 

Mort vs. Men At Arms: Help Us Choose!

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A section of Josh Kirby's cover art for the original edition of Mort, 1989.

We’re almost set to release our episode 0 — but we need your help. Deciding what book to begin with is a hell of a thing, and Ben and I have been arguing, debating, grumbling and then debating some more and we finally have it down to two options. So, in the interests of fairness, we are turning it over to you to help us decide which book will be kicking off our podcast!

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”