Elizabeth Flux – Pratchat

#Pratchat34 Notes and Errata

08/08/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“, featuring guest Oliver Phommavanh, discussing the 1993 Johnny Maxwell novel Johnny and the Dead.

The episode title is a cheeky reference to the first Johnny Maxwell book, Only You Can Save Mankind, in which Johnny similarly finds he is the only one who can save a group of otherworldly beings. We discussed it in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
Oliver’s Quentin Blake-style cover for this book was illustrated by Mark Beech, who we mentioned in our Only You Can Save Mankind episode. He has illustrated the covers for the newest editions of all Terry’s non-Discworld children’s books, as well as the recent collections of his very early stories – including the upcoming The Time-Travelling Caveman, due out in September this year. David Walliams’ books are rather less like Blake-like, and are illustrated inside and out by Tony Ross.
You can find Liz’s essay “Grave Concerns“ from February 2020 online at Kill Your Darlings.
Johnny Maxwell’s other adventures include saving the alien Scree-Wee fleet (Only You Can Save Mankind; see #Pratchat28), seeing “a Loch Ness Monster” in his goldfish pond, finding a lost city of the Incas behind Tesco’s, meeting the dead (all of those mentioned from this book) and the not-spoiled-here adventures of Johnny and the Bomb.
We previous talked about the hidden nature of supernatural things, particularly in British fantasy, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“. The TARDIS perception filter is a modern application from Doctor Who, explaining why people don’t notice the TARDIS even when a 1960s British Police Box doesn’t exactly fit in with its surroundings. (It looks like that because it’s chameleon circuit changes its outward form to blend in, but malfunctioned upon landing in 1963, causing it to become stuck. Now the Doctor likes it that way.)
Beetlejuice is a 1988 comedy horror film directed by Tim Burton. It stars Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as a young couple who die in a car accident and subsequently haunt their own house, forced to deal with the annoying new owners and a highly bureaucratic afterlife. The Handbook for the Recently Deceased is supposed to help them adjust but raises as many questions as it answers. Michael Keaton also stars at the titular Betelgeuse, a crude, wise-cracking “bio-exorcist” ghost who is an expert on scaring the living, while Winona Ryder plays goth girl Lydia, who befriends the nice dead people.
“Doorbelling” is the practice of ringing someone’s doorbell and then running away before they answer, as a prank. The Pratchat team have never done such a thing, of course.
“Thriller” was the title track from Michael Jackson’s sixth studio album, released in 1982. The single, released in late 1983 in the UK (early 1984 in the US), featured an extended music video directed by John Landis (of An American Werewolf in London fame) that featured Jackson becoming undead and dancing with a horde of Romero-esque zombies. The song also famously features a spoken-word section voiced by classic horror film star Vincent Price.
The Satanic panic was an outbreak of moral panic over supposed Satanistic abuse. It began in America, inspired in part by the publication Michelle Remembers, a biography based on “recovered memories” of child abuse linked to Satanic rituals. The book’s claims could not be verified by multiple journalists and investigators. It was followed a few years later by some highly publicised trials, Senate hearings and conspiracy theories that resemble McCarthy-era communist witch hunts. The panic particularly targeted Dungeons & Dragons and, later, heavy metal music, and by the 1990s had spread to other countries.
The West Memphis Three were three teenagers convicted in 1994 of the killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Tennessee in 1993. The investigation, trial and conviction were all highly controversial, including the claim that the teenagers were engaged in Satanic rituals. In 2011, after even some of the victims’ families protested that the men were innocent, they were released from prison, using the unusual “Alford plea” (in brief, they pled guilty to lesser charges but were still allowed to profess their innocence). To answer Liz’s question: the first edition of Johnny and the Dead was published on May 27, 1993, only three weeks after the crime was committed, so Pratchett couldn’t have heard of it while writing it.
The Beatle who left before they got famous is drummer Pete Best. He joined them in 1960 (when they were still “The Silver Beatles”) for their Hamburg tour, and was fired in 1962 by producer Brian Epstein at the request of John, Paul and George, who later regretted the way they handled it. He failed to find another successful band and left the music industry for twenty years, before an interest in the early history of the band finally made him famous and he formed his own band. He’s active on Twitter, and recently replied to a tweet from the official Beatles account asking “Do you remember the first time you ever heard a Beatles song?” with: “Yeah, I was playing on it.”
As Liz mentions, the Queen Victoria Market was built on top of the site of the Old Melbourne Cemetery. The bodies buried underneath still cause problems with modern plans for the expansion or development of the markets. There’s plenty been written about the cemetery; you could start with the cemetery’s official page on the City of Melbourne web site.
Public housing in Melbourne was in the news around the time of our recording this episode, as three prominent public housing estates were locked down with police presence and little notice after major outbreaks of COVID-19 were traced there. Much criticism was levelled at the Victorian state government for their police-first response, and the fact that they had ignored previous requests for assistance from residents, who had already realised that the cramped conditions and inadequate cleaning of common areas were exposing them to much greater risk of infection. As in the UK, public housing in Australia is an essential service that has suffered from neglect.
“Ryan from the O.C.ing” refers to Ryan Atwood, the main protagonist of 2000s teen drama The O.C., played by the other Ben McKenzie. Ryan is a rough kid from Chino, who steals a car and is abandoned by his mother after being arrested. He’s adopted by the lawyer representing him, and moves to Orange County, where he slowly reforms and adapts to his new surroundings.
Harry Houdini (1874-1926), born Erik Weisz, is probably the most famous stage magician in history. He performed many escapes that resemble Mr Vicenti’s final trick, though he died of peritonitis. Will Alma (1904-1993), born Oswald George William Bishop, was not only a magician, but also a maker of magical apparatus and a magical historian. The name doesn’t appear to have any direct connection to Houdini, but the WG Alma Conjuring Collection, held by Melbourne Museum, is famous and has occasionally been displayed. Pratchett could perhaps have seen it during one of his many trips to Melbourne.
Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian Bombshell”, was a singer, dancer and movie star from the 1930s through to the 1950s. After finding fame in Rio, she moved to Broadway and then to Hollywood. In 1943 she starred in the Busby Berkely film The Gang’s All Here, wearing a costume that included a number of fruit hats, which became her trademark.
Suffragettes were women devoted to the cause of women’s suffrage, i.e. the right and ability of women to vote in democratic elections. While the term became widespread and used across the world, it originally applied to the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU was founded in the UK in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, ten years after New Zealand became the first country to extend voting rights to women. They had to fight hard, going beyond loud public protests to chaining themselves to railings inside the houses of parliament and, when imprisoned, staging hunger strikes. Mrs Liberty is clearly inspired by Emily Davidson, who in 1913 ran onto the course at the Epsom Derby to gain publicity for the movement, and tried to grab the reins of the King’s horse. She was struck by the horse and died from her injuries. The suffragette movement paused at the start of the war in 1914, and in the UK partial suffrage was gained for women over 30 in 1918; it wasn’t until 1928 that women in the UK won the same voting rights as men.
Edward VIII, aka “Edward the Abdictator“, was indeed a famous womaniser. In January 1936, his father died and he became King. He was already the source of scandal as he was in a relationship with Wallis Simpson, a divorced American still married to her second husband, and his behaviour as King caused further controversy. When he revealed his plans to marry Simpson in November, the Church of England and the governments of the UK and Commonwealth nations were outraged at what this would mean for the succession. Edward abdicated to avoid constitutional crisis, having been King for less than a year, and married Simpson, becoming Duke of Windsor. While he should be afforded some sympathy, it is also worth remembering that he harboured pro-Nazi or at least pro-fascist sentiments, and was friendly with Adolf Hitler in the lead up to World War II. History does not seem to record him as being “particularly large”, lending weight to Liz’s later comment.
Ben remembers correctly that Edward VIII is played by Guy Pearce in the 2010 film The King’s Speech, in which George VI (Colin Firth) seeks help from Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) to overcome a stammer and deliver a live radio announcement of the declaration of World War II. Other actors who have played Edward VIII include Oliver Dimsdale (Downton Abbey), Alex Jennings (The Crown seasons 1 and 2) and non less a personage than Derek Jacobi (The Crown season 3).
For more on gravestones and their epitaphs as the only evidence of someone’s life, Ben recommends episode 110 of The Allusionist podcast, “Engraving part 1: Epitaph“.
Pals battalions were indeed a real thing during World War I. One of the most famous examples was the “Gimsby Chums”, a group of nearly one thousand young men from Grimsby, Lincolnshire and its surrounding towns. 810 of them died during the war.
Royal protocol does seem to dictate that two potential heirs to the throne may not fly together, to avoid a succession crisis should the plane be lost. In a similar fashion, the President and Vice-President of the United States never fly together on Airforce One.
Nominative determinism is the idea that a person’s name subtly influences their interests and decisions in life, explaining why some people have names appropriate to their occupations or achievements. This is the opposite of how things worked prior to the 14th century, when European names were only hereditary for nobility. Common folk instead took a name from a parent (e.g. Williamson, Sigridsdottir) – a tradition that persists in some Scandinavian countries – or their profession (e.g. Smith, Cooper, Fletcher or Carpenter).
Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative neurological disease responsible for around two thirds of dementia cases. It usually occurs in those over the age of 65, and proceeds faster as it progresses, affecting memory, causing death in less than a decade. It is still relatively poorly understood; the causes are uncertain and there is no effective treatment. Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with a variant of Alzheimer’s, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), unusually early, with the disease affecting him from the age of 56. PCA attacks the posterior part of the brain first, causing primarily physical and vision-related symptoms while leaving cognitive ability and memory intact. He called the condition the “embuggerance”, and was able to continue working until not long before his death in March 2015.
The Onion article about George R R Martin referenced by Liz is from their spin-off site, the clickbait parody Clickhole: “When I Started Writing ‘Game of Thrones’, I Didn’t Know What Horse Looked Like“.
Rod Serling was the creator and host of the science fantasy anthology TV show The Twilight Zone. The original series ran from 1959 to 1964, and each episode had an intro and outro narrated by Serling, who also wrote many of the scripts. There was a Hollywood movie based on four of the TV episodes in 1983, and revived series in 1985, 2002 and 2019, none of which were hosted by Serling. It may have been repeated on television in the early 1990s in the UK, as many 50s and 60s series were; otherwise it’s a bit weird that Johnny knows who Serling is…
Roald Dahl was a prolific and beloved children’s author from the UK, whose most famous works include Charlie and Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda and The Witches. His books were illustrated by Quentin Blake. In The Fantastic Mr Fox, the titular chicken thief is hunted by three farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean.
The Returned and Services League – not “Returned Servicemen’s League” – is an Australian organisation formed in 1916 dedicated to the welfare of current and retired military personnel. They’re best known to many Australians for the licensed RSL Clubs which are social hubs in many rural and regional towns. Mr Atterbury belongs to the similar Royal British Legion, or British Legion for short, founded in 1921.
David Attenborough is the famous wildlife presenter and international treasure. Ben can’t find the English actor he imagined when thinking of Mr Atterbury, but he looks a bit like John Hillerman, the Texan actor who played the British Army Sergeant Major Jonathan Higgins in Magnum, P.I. (If you have any suggestions, please send them in!)
Cobbers is clearly a spoof of popular Australian soap opera Neighbours and/or Home and Away. It’s also mentioned in Only You Can Save Mankind.
“The Village Green Preservation Society” was the leading and title track on The Kinks‘ sixth studio album, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. A great cover by English folk singer Kate Rusby was recorded in 2006 as the theme song for the BBC sit-com Jam & Jerusalem. It was a bonus track on her 2007 album Awkward Annie.
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) is Jules Verne’s 1872 adventure novel in which precise and reserved English gentleman Phileas Fogg attempts to win a bet by circumnavigating the globe in 80 days, assisted by his newly hired French valet Passepartout. Neither of them are ghosts, so they travel via train and steamship. (Despite what you might think, they don’t travel in a balloon; that was added for the 1956 film starring David Niven, and has become a fixture of later adaptations, including the 2004 Disney version starring Steve Coogan as Fogg, and Jackie Chan as Passepartout. The award-winning 2014 interactive fiction game 80 Days, available on mobile phones, is great.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch is Joe Dante’s 1990 sequel to his classic 1984 horror comedy Gremlins. The sequel is much more cartoony – in one sequence, quite literally – and makes heavy use of parody, including poking fun at its predecessor. Notably, the film is set inside “Clamp Tower”, a skyscraper in New York owned by Donald Clamp (John Glover), a parody of both Donald Trump and Ted Turner.
In October 2016, developers demolished the Corkman Irish Pub in Carlton without seeking building or planning permission. The pub was originally the Carlton Inn, and was one of the oldest buildings in Carlton, built in 1856, and while not heritage listed, it was protected by heritage rules. The developers were fined more than $1.3 million in 2019 after failing to rebuild the pub as promised. They later appealed these fines, which were reduced, and the Victorian Planning Minister dropped the requirement for them to rebuild the pub, allowing them to seek permission to build a 12-storey apartment building (easily worth far more than the fines). There were calls in 2019 for the government to compulsorily acquire the site, but no more recent update.
Skinhead subculture first emerged in the UK in the 60s, and went through a revival in the 1980s, initially as part of punk. By the 90s, skinhead culture became associated with far-right, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi ideals, and spread across Europe, though there’s also an anarchist strain which is usually anti-fascist and anti-racist. neo-Fascist skinheads are famously depicted in the films American History X (1998) and Romper Stomper (1992), among many others.
Boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson famously bit off part of rival Evander Holyfield’s ear in their re-match fight in 1997. Tyson actually bit both of Holyfield’s ears during the fight, and claimed it was in retaliation for Holyfield headbutting him in the first round. Tyson was fined $3 million (US) and had his boxing license revoked, but got it back the next year.
In case you’re listening to this in the far future, this episode was recorded during the second six-week lockdown of Melbourne due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. It followed a second major outbreak of community transmissions in the state, contrasted with relatively low case numbers in the rest of the country. Not long after the recording, Melbourne moved from stage 3 to a new stage 4 level of restrictions, which included mandatory mask wearing in public, the closure of a broader range of businesses, and a curfew.
By “special alphabet“, Liz means a spelling alphabet, sometimes called a phonetic alphabet: a list of distinctive words, one for each letter, used in aviation, military and other radio communications to avoid confusion when spelling out vital information verbally. The current English spelling alphabet was standardised in 1969.
The famous flying cars Liz mentions are the hover-converted DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future (and the sequel), Greased Lightnin’, the Ford convertible from Grease which flies at the end, and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the magical car created by Ian Flemying for the book (and later film, adapted by Roald Dahl) of the same name.
Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian children’s author whose books have often tackled serious topics. His second novel, 1990’s Two Weeks with the Queen, was about Colin, a twelve-year-old who visits London, and tries to break into Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to help find a good doctor for his brother, who is being treated for cancer back home. The only sympathetic adult he meets is Ted, a gay Welshman whose partner is dying of AIDS. The book was controversial at the time.
The term “political correctness” began in the 70s and 80s as a way to satirise overly cautious language, but it is now often used as a pejorative to describe any language designed to avoid offensive or be more inclusive.
Oliver mentioned A. F. Harrold, an English poet, performer and children’s author. The first of his so far twelve novels for children, Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away from the Circus (and Joined the Library), was published in 2012.
The practice of adding reversed sounds to audio recordings is called backmasking. Pioneered by The Beatles, who used reversed musical instruments to create unique sounds on their album Revolver, the 1980s Satanic panic claimed that rock bands were using backmasking to hide Satanic messages, and that they could be understood subconsciously. These claims may have been inspired by the film The Exorcist (1973), in which a girl possessed by a demon speaks gibberish which, when reversed, reveals a message from Satan.
Johnny and the Dead was published in 1993, the same year as Men at Arms (see #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”), and the year before Soul Music (#Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“), Interesting Times (#Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“) and Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“).
We talked a lot more about Neil Gaiman in our episode about Good Omens, the book he co-authored with Pratchett; that was #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)“. American Gods, published in 2001, is one of his most popular novels, and now also a television series. It tells the story of ex-convict Shadow Moon, who is caught up in a war between old and new gods over America. The Graveyard Book (2008) is a young adult novel about Nobody, a toddler wanders into a graveyard following the murder of his family, and is subsequently raised by ghosts.
We previously talked about Steven King’s famous 1983 novel Pet Semetary in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“. It’s been filmed twice – once in 1989, and again in 2019.
Gogglebox is a UK reality TV show which films the reactions of families and other groups as they watch television. It debuted in 2013, and has been replicated in many other countries – first of all Australia, where it is soon to return for its twelfth season since 2015. The title comes from a British and Australian slang term for television.
The Mary Celeste was an American merchant ship – a brigantine, if we want to get specific – discovered deserted in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores Islands in 1872. It was bound for Genoa in Italy, but when it was found all the crew were missing, their belongings and the ship’s cargo left behind, the sails still rigged, and the ship’s log empty for ten days. The crew were never seen again, and no-one has been able to discover their fate. As listener Steve Leahy remarked on Twitter, the 1966 Doctor Who serial The Chase explained the mystery by claiming the Doctor’s TARDIS briefly landed on board while being chased by Daleks in their own time machine; the crew leapt overboard to escape the aliens.
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, about 25km North of Terry Pratchett’s home in Broad Chalke. It dates back over 5,000 years, though the famous standing stones are not quite as old as that. The site itself is a burial mound and was clearly significant for many thousands of years, but the standing stones are a long-standing mystery. How and why the ancient Britons built it is uncertain, as the larger stones would have taken incredible effort and ingenuity to carve and move, and the smaller stones seemed to come from 200km away in Wales. A recent paper, publicised between this episode being recorded and released, has revealed that the larger stones come from 25km North of Stonehenge and must have been moved on purpose.
The Loch Ness Monster is a famous cryptid, sometimes claimed to be a marine reptile like a Plesiosaur, supposed to live in Loch Ness, a large lake in the Scottish Highlands. While some earlier sources have been cited, it first came to the world’s attention when a sighting was reported in July 1933. You’ve probably seen the famous “surgeon’s photograph” of 1934, but while it was touted as proof until the 1990s, it is now known to have been a hoax.
Oliver recommended his books Con-Nerd and Super Con-Nerd for fans of Johnny Maxwell.
Ben mentioned the other Pratchett and Discworld podcasts out there; the oldest active one is Radio Morpork, which launched in August 2015. Like most of the others it’s a read-through of the Discworld books in order, and at the time of writing has done up to Thud! (That puts them about a year ahead of us, if such a thing can be measured easily.) There are several other newer ones, including The Truth Shall Make You Fret and The Compleat Discography. Ben maintains a list of Discworld read-throughs on Podchaser, and this list of all Pratchett-related podcasts on the L-Space wiki. Let us know what you think of them if you listen – we deliberately limit our listening of other commentaries, so we can go into our discussions fresh.

A bonus note: Ben was sure he used the phrase “life is wasted on the living” in this episode, but didn’t spot it during the editing process. In any case, it originates with Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (it appears in the second radio series and also in the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). Like many things he wrote that people see as deep, it’s a joke. Said by one of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s dead ancestors during a seance in disappointment with Zaphod, it satirises the cliche “youth is wasted on the young”. The original phrase is usually (though possibly not accurately) attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who supposedly said “Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world—and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!”

#Pratchat34 – Only You Can Save Deadkind

08/08/2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Liz and Ben (who suffered from microphone issues this episode) introduce children’s author Oliver Phommavanh to the world of Pratchett with Johnny Maxwell’s return, in 1993’s Johnny and the Dead.

Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell is enduring Phase Three of the Trying Times between his parents, which involves living with his Mum at his Grandad’s place. His shortcut home from school takes him through an old rundown cemetery, where he knocks on a tomb door – and discovers he can see dead people. As Johnny gets to know them, the dead discover the Council has sold their cemetery for development – and they want Johnny to put a stop to it. While the gang delve into the history of Blackbury and discover a whole new side to their boring hometown, the dead begin to wonder if there might be more to life after life – earning the disapproving scowl of Mr Eric Grimm…

Content note: this episode contains discussion of (fictional) suicide, from around 1:34:00 to 1:40:00. If you or anyone you know needs help, use the Wikipedia list of crisis lines to find one local to you.

Johnny Maxwell and (most of) his friends are back, this time dealing with the mundane as well as the fantastical. Touching on themes of history, tradition, belief and capitalism, Pratchett makes a very different kind of “boy sees dead people” story as Johnny tries to save the local cemetery. There’s lots of Pratchett philosophy in here, like his well-known positive attitude towards death as a part of life. It’s also full of his trademark little jokes and asides, some of which feel very, well…early nineties.

So what do you think? Has this aged well since 1993? Do the lessons about the past and present, living and dead still ring true? Do the trials and tribulations of a small English town translate to 2020 and wherever you live? Use the hashtag #Pratchat34 on social media to join the conversation!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:06:27 — 58.3MB)

Guest Oliver Phommavanh is a children’s author, teacher and stand-up comedian based in Sydney. He’s written ten books, including the semi-autobiographical Thai-riffic and Con-Nerd, both of which have sequels. His next book the short story collection Brain Freeze, due out in September 2020. (Please consider supporting your local bookshop by ordering his books from them!) You can find out more about Oliver at his web site, oliverwriter.com, and find him on Instagram and Twitter as @oliverwinfree.

Next month we’re celebrating National Science Week in Australia by reading Pratchett’s collaboration with science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld! We’ll be joined by science communicator and chemist Anna Ahveninen of the Australian Academy of Science! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat35 by science week, which starts August 15, 2020.

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

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#Pratchat33 Notes and Errata

08/07/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“, featuring guest Michelle Dew, discussing the 2001 Discworld novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

The episode title references both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Guy Ritchie’s first feature film from 1998, and the common refrain of unmasked villains in the cartoon series Scooby Doo – a show Malicia would probably have mixed feelings about.
Überwald is located about 1,500 miles Hubwards and Widdershins of Ankh-Morpork, according to The Discworld Mappe. The name “Überwald” is a pretty direct German translation of “Transylvania”, both meaning “beyond (or over) the forest”.
Hermione is an ancient Greek name meaning “Princess of Hermes”; in classical mythology, Hermione is the daughter of Menelaus, King of Sparta, and is a child at the start of the Trojan War. Hermione Granger is the most notable contemporary character to bear the name, but others appear in the works of P G Wodehouse, D H Lawrence and Pee-wee Herman.
This book was the first standard Discworld novel with cover art not by Josh Kirby. (The Last Hero, published earlier the same year, was a large-format illustrated book with a cover and internal illustrations by Paul Kidby, who would take over the Discworld covers from the next book, Night Watch.) It was published only a month or so after Kirby’s death, so we’d speculate the change was mostly due to it being a children’s book – while Kirby did covers for the re-issue of The Carpet People and the original Truckers trilogy, the Johnny Maxwell books each had art by a different artist, though Kirby illustrations were used for some foreign language editions. The original cover was by David Wyatt; Ben’s edition has a cover by Paul Kidby; and Michelle’s edition of the audiobook has a cover by Bill Mayer. The newest edition has cover art by Laura Ellen Anderson. You can see all of these on the L-Space wiki entry for the book.
“Crazy Old Maurice” is the nickname of Belle’s father, an “eccentric inventor”, in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast. Gaston calls him by this derogatory nickname in song. The inventor angle is a departure from the original fairytale, in which Belle’s father is a failed businessman who has lost all his money. While there are certainly a few Beauty and the Beast references in The Simpsons, we couldn’t find any evidence of this one.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin – or Hameln, as the real German town’s name is properly spelled (thank you Sven) – is a folk tale with origins that go back to around 1300 CE. The basic story is that the town is plagued with rats and hires a piper with magical powers to get rid of them. (The “pied” part refers to the fact that he was dressed in multicoloured clothing.) Once the job is done, the town refuses to pay the piper; in retaliation he uses his music to lead all the children of the town into a crack in a nearby mountain, which seals shut – leaving only one young boy, with a lame leg, behind. In the Aarne-Thomspson-Uther index, which categorises folk tales, it is classified as ATU 570, “The Rat-Catcher”.
The Netflix show Liz remembers is 2019’s The Society; it’s a weird modern twist, loosely inspired by the legend. A second season is due late this year.
Robert Browning’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” is probably the most famous English language version of the story, and is still popular thanks to it’s dynamic rhythm and catchy rhymes. It was first published as the last poem in his 1842 book Dramatic Lyrics. (Ben is wrong that Pratchett quotes it directly; he closely paraphrases it.)
Pet rats are usually domesticated Norway Rats (Rattus norvegicus), aka laboratory rats or “Fancy Rats”. Michelle is spot on about their lifespans: they live on average for 2-3 years, but can live up to 4-5 years if well cared for (and lucky). The oldest known pet rat we could find was Rodney, who lived in Japan and died at the age of seven years and four months in 1990. (We couldn’t verify this for sure but it seems legit.)
Überwald is first mentioned by name as the home country of both Angua and Cheery Littlebottom in Feet of Clay (discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays”), and plays a major part in both Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant (both published shortly before The Amazing Maurice in the series). But Granny Weatherwax and her Lancre coven visit a small town in the shadow of a castle on their way to Genua in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“), and while neither the town nor country are named, it’s clearly the same place.
Scrote is a small town in the Sto Plains, and like most places there makes most of its money from cabbage farming. It features briefly (but memorably) in Soul Music, when The Band With Rocks In stops there for the night while on tour at the Jolly Cabbage. Death also visits Scrote during the events of Hogfather.
“Rathaus” – pronounced “RART-house” – is indeed the German term for Town Hall. It comes from the words “rat” meaning “council”, and “haus” meaning…er…well you can probably figure that one out.
The Rat Name Game is the invention of Pratchat supporter Joel Molin. (We mention him later in the questions section, but felt it was remiss of us not to mention his name at the time when we played it.) Send us yours using the hashtag #Pratchat33!
We’ve mentioned The Good Place before; the short version is that it’s a sit-com in which Eleanor (Kristen Bell) dies, ends up in a heavenly afterlife, and quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake. Her supposed soul mate, an ethics professor (William Jackson Harper), agrees to help her learn to be a better person.
The film adaptation of the book, titled The Amazing Maurice, is a co-production between German studio Ulysses Filmproduktion and the Irish Cantilever Group. It was announced in June 2019, with the more recent news in October 2019 that it had scored a global distribution deal. What we know so far is that it has an “unexpected” script by Terry Rossio, who wrote Shrek and has worked with Disney; character designs by Carter Goodrich, best known for Ratatouille and Despicable Me; and the directors will be Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, whose previous work is not well-known outside of Germany. Ulysses Filmproduktion list it as “in production” on their web site, and the announcements gave an expected release date of 2022. There’s no word on how COVID-19 delays or the exclusive Narrativia/Motive Pictures deal have affected the production, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
The “if a dog wore pants” meme stormed the Internet in 2015 and spawned many imitators and extrapolations.
The theatre cat in the Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical Cats is Gus, invented by T. S. Eliot in the poem “Gus, the Theatre Cat”. His full name is “Asparagus”; he was played by Stephen Tate in the original West End cast in 1981, and by Ian McKellan in the 2019 film.
The musical version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is available only as a package for schools that includes photocopiable scripts, limited performance rights and supporting materials. It was written by Matthew Holmes, who also created a similar adaptation of Johnny and the Bomb. We’re informed that the musical sacrifices a lot of the humour, though – perhaps they thought kids dressed as rats would be funny enough? – and that the Stephen Briggs adaptation is superior.
In the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek, Lord Farquaad is the ruler of Duloc, a city-state where he has outlawed fairytale creatures and the citizens live in austerity. (The Pied Piper appears in the fourth film in the series, Shrek Forever After.)
We’ve previously talked about Enid Blyton in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven” and #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat”. Her Famous Five and Secret Seven books are the most obvious inspiration for Malicia’s adventurous notions.
We last mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”. Many of his worlds break down the walls between reality and fiction, but this is especially true of his Thursday Next series, beginning with The Eyre Affair.
We’ve talked about Neil Gaiman many times. A fantasy writer who started as a journalist and first made his name in comics, he was a long-time friend of Terry Pratchett.
Goosebumps is a series of horror novels for middle grade readers, all written by Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine. We previously mentioned them in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire”.
Rllk is clearly the pre-Clan rat sound for “fuck”.
Hieroglyphics are the characters of the ancient Egyptians form of writing, though the term is sometimes applied to other cultures’ similar forms. While each character was an image, and could represent the object they resembled – making them pictograms – they also represented sounds, making up the syllables of longer words, and clarified the meanings of other adjacent heiroglyphs. The Clan’s written language is not quite the same.
A guru, from pan-Indian tradition, is a spiritual guide and teacher. The term applies to teachers and mentors in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism.
We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s obsession with Lobsang in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West”.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written by American professor of literature Joseph Campbell in 1949; in it he argues that there is a common mythological hero story across many cultures. The book is hugely influential on modern fiction – it’s effect on Pratchett is perhaps felt most in Only You Can Save Mankind – but has been applied in a very reductive way, and its popularity has led many to view the stories of other cultures through a very classical, Western lens.
Pratchett’s love for the lone wagon wheel rolling out of an explosion appears most prominently in Soul Music, but also in several other books as an aside.
Secret Valley was an Australian kids’ adventure show, co-produced with Spanish and French companies, first aired in 1980. It was about the kids who worked and played at the fictitious holiday camp, Secret Valley, and their ongoing rivalry with a gang of bullies led by Spider McGlurk (no really). Spider – who despite Ben’s insistence off-air was not played by a young Russell Crowe – was paid by developer William Whopper to ruin the camp so he could buy up the land. The series was repeated often on the ABC throughout the 1980s, and was created by Roger Mirams, who went on to create the spin-off Professor Poopsnagle’s Steam Zeppelin. Ben never saw the latter show – it ran on Channel Nine, before his country town had more than two television stations – but it apparently has quite a cult following in the UK, even today. The Secret Valley theme was indeed sung to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”.
The Doctor Who serial with the giant rats and overt racism is 1977’s Victorian-era adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang, starring Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson as Leela, and introducing two fan favourite guest characters, theatre proprietor Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin) and pathologist Professor George Litefoot (Trevor Baxter). The other one, with the character screeching “Ratkin!”, is 1989’s Ghost Light, from the show’s final season before being cancelled in 1989.
Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy Neverwhere was originally a television series, produced for the BBC in 1996. It introduces the idea of “London Below”, an alternate city invisible to those who live in “London Above” and where various aspects of London take on supernatural forms. In London Below, rats are revered as intelligent beings, and the Rat Speakers are an entire sect who serve them. Neverwhere was turned into a book, and followed by the short story How the Marquis Got His Coat Back. Gaiman is currently working on a full sequel.
The film in which Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson leaps off a tower is 2018’s Scryscaper, in which he plays a war veteran and former FBI agent who takes on a security job in the new tallest building in the world, being built in Hong Kong. It’s attacked and set on fire by terrorists while his family are inside, which is what instigates the jumping.
Eight (it’s okay, it’s safe to say on Roundworld) is established in the very first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as the number of occult significance on the Discworld. Wizards avoid saying it out loud, using euphemisms like “7A” and “twice four”, as in the wrong time or place it can summon evil creatures, notably Bel-Shamharoth, aka the Soul Eater or the Sender of Eight.
Cranium Rats first appeared as part of the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons’s second edition in 1994. They are not natural creatures, but are created from regular rats by the evil psychic beings known as Mind Flayers. You can find details of Cranium Rats for the game’s current, fifth edition in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, published in 2016.
“Deus ex machina” is a narrative cliche in which the plot is resolved suddenly by an unlikely or overtly supernatural occurrence. It comes from an ancient Greek theatre, and means “God out of the machine”; the playwright Aeschylus invented it as a way of ending plays, and they literally brought Greek Gods onto stage using machines – namely a trapdoor or a crane – to end the story.
For an explanation of the Gonnigal, and the origins of the name, see our previous episode, “Meet the Feegles”.
Truckers is the first in Pratchett’s “Bromeliad” trilogy about a society of Nomes, tiny creatures who live in the cracks of the human world. We’ve previously covered all three books in the trilogy: Truckers, Diggers and Wings.
Phillip Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy that began with Northern Lights in 1998 (which won that year’s Carnegie Medal). After a moderately successful film adaptation of the first novel (under it’s American title The Golden Compass), the trilogy is now being adapted for television by the BBC and HBO, beginning with a season covering the events of the first book in 2019. Pullman is currently working on finishing The Book of Dust, a sequel trilogy to His Dark Materials. His other work includes the Sally Lockhart novels, beginning with The Ruby in the Smoke, which was also adapted by the BBC starring Billie Piper.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth in the Harry Potter series, is the first after the proper return of “wizard Hitler” Voldemort. It features the horrendously cruel teacher Dolores Umbridge and the death of a major, beloved character. So…you know, pretty heavy for a 7-year-old.
There have been a lot of adaptations of Oliver Twist, but not that many cartoon versions: the two most recent straight versions are a 1974 American production, and a 1982 Australian one. The 1989 Disney film Oliver & Company loosely adapts the story to be about lost kitten who joins a gang of street dogs, though Sally doesn’t die (or indeed appear) in that one.
Animal Farm is George Orwell’s 1945 novel which serves as an allegory for the communist revolution in Russia. In the book, the animals of Manor Farm depose the human farmers and take over, creating a fairer society before falling prey to greed and corruption. The “glue factory scene” also involves the death of a beloved character.
Burgo’s Catch Phrase was a popular Australian version of the US/UK gameshow Catch Phrase that ran from 1997 to 2003 on the Nine Network. Contestants viewed animated picture puzzles, not unlike a rebus, and had to determine the phrase they represented. It was renamed to include “Burgo” in the title in 1999, to capitalise on the popularity of host John Burgess, a media personality known as “Burgo” or “Baby John”, who was previously famous as the Australian host of Wheel of Fortune.
The “dab” is a dance move in which a person ducks their head into one bent elbow while stretching out and raising their other arm. Exactly where it originated is hard to pin down – similar moves appear in Japanese anime – but it seems pretty clear the worldwide fad, especially amongst teenagers, was inspired by American footballer Cam Newton, who dabbed after a goal, though he was taught the move by his teenage brother. It’s popularity was pretty long-lived for a fad, only having waned in the last couple of years; it was partly kept alive by inclusion in the immensely popular videogame Fornite: Battle Royale.
Graeme Base is an English-Australian children’s author and illustrator, most famous for his picture books Animalia and The Eleventh Hour. Animalia has an illustration for each letter of the English alphabet, and “M” features “meticulous mice monitoring mysterious mathematical messages” on computers while monocles and headsets. It’s glorious.
“He protec, he attac” – originally “he protec, but he also attac” – is a meme that started in 2016. It’s been used for all sorts of things but the earliest origin seems to be two images of a nude man wielding a lightsaber. The more you know…
Zoom is a popular videoconferencing application which has grown in popularity in the last year, especially since the start of mandated isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zoom’s popularity has largely come from it’s easy to use design, but this approach has been criticised for causing multiple security problems, leading some major corporations and governments to ban its use. Many of the major security concerns have been addressed in updates since May 2020.
Lord Vetinari befriends the intelligent (but not talking) rats – not mice – in Guards! Guards!, communicating with their leader Skrp in their own language and using them as spies when he is temporarily deposed and imprisoned. We loved Skrp, as you’ll hear in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
Magneto is a character in the X-Men books from Marvel Comics. Usually a villain, he is the leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (they leave the “Evil” out in later versions), and one of the most powerful mutants in the world, able to create and manipulate power magnetic fields, primarily to move metal objects. He is played in the films by Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender.
“Yeet” is a modern slang word meaning to throw something with a lot of force, though it can also be used as an exclamation, something that seemingly started with basketballers who were sure they would score when shooting, and briefly as a dance, which seems to have been where it spread most widely. Like a lot of such fads, it originated with African Americans before quickly becoming appropriated into general “youth culture”, a pattern that has repeated many times.
Jurassic Park III (2001) features Alan Grant returning to the abandoned secondary site where the Jurassic Park dinosaurs were created, where he meets a Spinosaurus, a huge predatory dinosaur. Michelle may also be thinking of the Indominus rex from Jurassic World (2015), a hybrid dinosaur created by combining DNA from multiple species.
Margo Lanagan is a multiple award-winning Australian author. Her 2008 YA fantasy novel Tender Morsels draws inspiration from the Grimm fairytale “Snow-White and Rose-Red”, though note it deals with themes of family violence, sexual assault and miscarriage. 2012’s Sea Hearts (published outside Australia as The Brides of Rollrock Island) explores the consequences of a witch selling seals transformed into women as brides.
Jeremy Lachlan is an Australian author. His Jane Doe series for older children (13+) begins with Jane Doe and the Cradle of Worlds, and continues with 2020’s Jane Doe and the Key of All Souls.
The Call is a 2016 horror-fantasy YA novel by Irish author Peadar Ó Guilín, in which people are abducted to another world, where they hear the call of a hunting horn… It has one sequel so far, 2018’s The Invasion.

#Pratchat33 – Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids

08/07/2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Liz, Ben and writer Michelle Law go on a surprisingly dark ride in Pratchett’s skewed take on the “Pied Piper”, 2001’s Discworld for Younger Readers book, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

Everyone knows that the best way to get rid of a plague of rats is to pay the Piper. Even Maurice, and he’s a talking cat. So when he met a Clan of similarly smart talking rats, all he needed was a stupid-looking kid who could play, and he had the makings of the perfect con. But the rats (and the kid) are smart enough to decide that what they’re doing is unethical. Maurice convinces them to pull one last scam in a tiny Überwald town. But all is not well in Bad Blintz: the mayor’s daughter immediately sees there’s something odd about Maurice and the kid, and the town is convinced they already have a plague of rats – but the Clan can’t find a single one…

After two trilogies of children’s books set in our own world, and before he invented Tiffany Aching, Pratchett tried getting kids into the Discworld with a story of talking animals, plucky kids…and unspeakable evil. The Amazing Maurice explores some weighty ethics, punctures the safety of Enid Blyton, questions the lessons taught by the Brothers Grim, and goes to some very dark places, metaphorically and literally. All born out of a jokey footnote he wrote for Reaper Man a decade before!

Is this really a children’s book? Would you let your kids read it? Is it a terrible mistake, or is it maybe the greatest book Pratchett ever wrote? And most importantly: what’s your rat name? Use the hashtag #Pratchat33 on social media to join the conversation!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:54:56 — 53.0MB)

Guest Michelle Law is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and actor based in Sydney. Her work includes the 2017 smash hit play Single Asian Female, the SBS TV series Homecoming Queens and contributed to numerous magazines and books. Michelle’s next play will be Miss Peony for Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, and she has a story in the anthology After Australia from Affirm Press. You can find out more about Michelle at her web site, michelle-law.com, and follow her on Twitter at @ms_michellelaw.

Next month we complete our hat-trick of Pratchetts for younger readers by returning to the English town of Blackbury to catch up with Johnny Maxwell in 1993’s Johnny and the Dead! We’ll be joined by children’s author Oliver Phommovanh! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat34 by July 21st 2020.

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

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#Pratchat32 Notes and Errata

08/06/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 32, “Meet the Feegles“, featuring guest Meaghan Dew, discussing the 2003 Discworld novel The Wee Free Men.

The episode title puns Meet the Feebles, an early film from the career of Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. It is an extremely inappropriate parody of the Muppets in which animal puppet characters engage in fightin’, thievin’, drinkin’ and many other things that even a Mac Nac Feegle might thing twice about… You’ve been warned!
Aimee Nichols was our other librarian guest; she joined us for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
The weird time contraption in Doctor Who is the “time flow analog”, which was indeed featured in the television series; the Third Doctor built one to disrupt the time experiments of the Master in the 1971 serial The Time Monster.
A Rube Goldberg Machine is a device which is far too complicated for its simple function; traditionally they involve a lot of balls, levers, ramps and so on. It is named for Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970), a cartoonist and engineer who drew cartoons of contraptions that gave rise to the name. By contrast, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg (aka “The Notorious R.B.G.”) is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, well known as an outspoken liberal voice on the court. (That’s liberal with a small l, for Australian readers.)
Trout tickling is a real an indeed very old method for catching trout, often associated with poachers and the poor, as it’s quiet and requires no equipment. Basically if you rub a trout lightly with your fingers on its underbellies it becomes docile, and you can fairly easily pull it out of the water. In Scotland the practice is known as “guddling”, though it is apparently illegal in the UK.
Ben discussed Animal Crossing – specifically the latest game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch – in episode 30, “Looking Widdershins”.
The Wentworth Detention Centre is an entirely fictional women’s prison located in the equally fictional Melbourne suburb of Wentworth. It was created by Reg Watson for his surprise hit Australian television show Prisoner – known in the UK as Prisoner: Cell Block H – which ran on Channel Ten from 1979 to 1986. A modern reimagining, titled Wentworth, premiered on the pay TV channel SoHo in 2012 and has proved equally popular, with more series planned into 2021. Both versions explore political themes including feminism, LGBTIAQ+ rights and the efficacy of prisons.
Susurrus is pronounced “SUSS-ur-us”, so Ben was pretty much right. It’s a straight up loan word from Latin. Terry’s piece about it for The Word, a promotional collection for the 2000 London’s Festival of Literature, was reprinted as “The Choice Word” in A Slip of the Keyboard, the 2014 collection of his non-fiction writing.
“The Tinderbox” is a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, apparently inspired by a Scandanavian folk tale, though it’s a bit like the start of versions of Aladdin that include the magic ring.. If you want to find other similar stories, check out the Aarne-Thompson tale index; The Tinderbox is type 562, “The Spirit in the Blue Light”.
Aldi is a German budget supermarket chain now found in many countries across the world. They are famous for two things: mainly selling their own products, which are imitations of more famous brands like “Bran & Sultanas” cereal, “Cheezy Twists” snacks, and “Hedanol” paracetamol; and for the “Aisle of Wonder” (not a name they use), which features their weekly collection of “Special Buys” which can include anything from inflatable beds to fire extinguishers and Blu-Ray players.
We’ve not found any historical accounts of itinerant teachers roaming the countryside and gathering in fairs like the one depicted in the book, so as far as we can tell it’s an invention of Terry’s – probably drawing on other traditions of itinerant workers. If you know differently, please get in touch!
“Neville would have got it done in four books” is now such a ubiquitous meme that it’s hard to find its origin, but to summarise: Neville Longbottom is a minor wizard character who goes to Hogwarts with Harry Potter, and often the butt of jokes about his incompetence. Then you find out his tragic backstory and in the final novel he rises up as a hero. All this combined with the actor who played him in the films growing up much more handsome and buff than anyone could have expected, winning him a huge number of devoted fans.
We mentioned Pratchett’s opinion of J K Rowling back in #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. You can read about it in this interview from The Age: “Mystery lord of the Discworld”, Peter Fray, November 6, 2004.
Carpe Jugulum introduces the Nac Mac Feegle in its first few pages, though they are not named until much later. (We’ll link our episode covering that book when we get up to it.)
“The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is, as described by Terry in his author’s note, a painting by English artist Richard Dadd completed in 1864 while he was incarcerated in the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam. (See our episode on Dodger, “A Load of Old Tosh”, for more on that place.) As Terry points out, it’s unfair to reduce Dadd’s life to the fact that he painted this and killed his own father, so we’d encourage you to read more about him. You can also listen to episode 65 of Dr Janina Ramirez’s Art Detective podcast, featuring guest Neil Gaiman, as they talk about the painting – thanks listener Amy Keller Kaufman for the suggestion! The painting talk starts at around the 20 minute mark, and while this book only gets a passing mention, Neil does talk about Terry and their shared love of the painting, and shares a touching story about one of the last times they spoke.
The Queen song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is featured on Queen II, which you have probably correctly guessed is the band’s second studio album. Freddie Mercury was inspired by the painting, and while we can’t be sure if Terry discovered the artwork via Queen, Neil Gaiman certainly did, though he says seeing it reproduced in the album sleeve it made no impression on him until he saw it in person. (See the Art Detective episode linked above for more on that.)
As mentioned in our Good Omens episode, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”, in that novel Pratchett and Gaiman claim that any album left in a car’s glove box will transform over time into Queen’s Greatest Hits.
The Headless Horseman is nowadays best known from the 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, written by American author Washington Irving. Many older versions of such characters exist, including the Irish fairy known as the dúlachán, a Scottish ghost (whose horse, Liz will be glad to hear, is also said to be headless), and the Green Knight who cuts off his own head in the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight. The Irving story has been animated by Disney and made into the film Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton.
In Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and its 1972 film adaptation, one of the most infamous scenes has movie producer Jack Woltz waking up covered in blood from the severed head of his prize-winning racehorse – left in his bed as a message from the Corleone crime family that he should do what they ask and make the Godson of the family’s Don the star of his next film. Horrifyingly they used a real horse’s head for the film, sourced from a slaughterhouse.
The Star Wars Anthology films are movies in the Star Wars franchise which are not part of the main “Skywalker Saga”. So far they include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story, both closely connected to the original 1977 film Star Wars.
Braveheart is the 1995 film depicting the life of 13th-century Scottish leader William Wallace, directed by and starring Mel Gibson. Despite being written by a Wallace – unrelated American Randall Wallace – the film has been heavily criticised for its historical inaccuracies, and especially its treatment of Scottish King Robert the Bruce. A spin-off sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019. The original’s most famous scene is of Wallace rousing Scottish warriors before a battle, in which he shouts “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” This is echoed by the Feegles’ “They can tak’ oour lives but they cannae tak’ oour trousers!” – which might explain why the Feegles don’t have trousers.
The Wee Free Church, or “Wee Frees”, was the nickname of the smaller Free Kirk branch of the Scottish Prebyterian Church, distinguishing from the much larger United Free Kirk branch. (“Kirk” is the Scottish word for church.) It came about in protest against the 1900 union of the original Free Kirk church with the United Presbyterian Church, which was much more liberal. Like a lot of church history it’s intertwined with politics, but the term “Wee Free” has stuck around and is still used to refer to various smaller denominations of Scottish churches. The modern ancestor of the Wee Free is the Free Church of Scotland, now one of the larger Presbyterian churches in the country. Pratchett denies any connection between the Feegles and the Wee Free, but then he also likes to remind us all that there’s no Scotland on the Discworld either…
Woad is a natural blue dye made from the leaves of the plant Isatis tinctoria, also commonly known as woad. It’s been known since Ancient Egyptian times, and the Romans noted that celts would paint their bodies blue. The term “pict”, for the ancient peoples of northern and eastern Scotland, comes from this practice, and that of tattooing; in Latin it means “painted ones”.
The really mediocre Keira Knightley movie to which Liz is referring is probably Princess of Thieves, a 2001 Disney telemovie in which Knightley plays the daughter of Robin Hood.
Zebras do indeed have black skin, with the stripes caused by selective pigmentation of their fur. There are many reasons posited for the stripes’ evolutionary benefit; a 2014 study showed that flies have a hard time landing on and biting stripey zebras, perhaps confused by the high contrast or an optical illusion. There are many other competing ideas, and indeed many of them may be correct.
Yan Tan Tethera counting systems come from Northern England, and are derived from an early Celtic language, similar to Welsh. There are many variations, most of which fell out of use a century ago; “yan tan tethera” most closely matches the ones found in the Derbyshire Dales and Licolnshire. Neither of those use “jiggit”, though it – or some variation of it – is indeed the number 20 in most versions.
The Kelda refers to herself as a queen bee as an analogy, but while she has hundreds of sons who form her army and workforce, it’s worth remembering that in a beehive, all the workers and warriors are also female bees. The only males are drones, whose purpose is solely for reproduction.
The idea of the “perception filter” – a device or effect that causes people to see something unusual as something they can more readily accept – is an explanation from the revived Doctor Who series to explain why no-one seems to notice the TARDIS, even though a 1960s London police box is hardly inconspicuous. It’s also to explain other things in the series, including the entrance to Torchwood HQ in Cardiff. The Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field is a similar concept introduced by Douglas Adams in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel, 1982’s Life, the Universe and Everything, as a far simpler way to get people to think a mountain had become invisible.
William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902) was likely born in Ireland, moving to Scotland with his family and later pretending to have always been Scottish. He wrote his first poem in 1877, claiming a moment of firey inspiration to create, and was consistently deluded about his own talent. He would perform his poems in a variety of contexts, including polemics against drinking read in pubs, and reading his poetry as a circus act in which the crowd were allowed to throw eggs and food at him. His poems were collected in Poetic Gems and several sequels, published with assistance from friends to help him out of financial difficulties. But while he had an extraordinary life it ended quite sadly, as he died penniless and ill. We’d encourage you to read about him – if not his actual poetry.
The story of the bird wearing down a mountain with its beak is an old, old one, but modern versions are mostly descended from Grim’s Household Tales Volume 2, specifically the very short story “The Shepherd Boy”. The boy is posed three seemingly impossible questions by a King, and answers the third one – “How many seconds are in eternity?” – with: “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.” This story is recalled by the Doctor in the ninth season of the modern series, in the critically acclaimed episode “Heaven Sent”.
In the legend of the Titan Prometheus, he is punished for stealing the secret of fire and giving it to humanity by being chained to a stone, and every day having an eagle tear out and eat his liver. Being an immortal, Prometheus’ liver grows back overnight and the torture is repeated. He is eventually freed from his torment by Heracles.
In C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four children find their way to the magical land of Narnia, which has been under the rule of the White Witch for centuries – resulting in an endless Winter where Christmas never comes. She famously tempts one of the children, Edmund, with his favourite sweet, Turkish delight. The Witch’s backstory is revealed in the later prequel book, The Magician’s Nephew.
Christopher Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi thriller Inception is about a group of professional thieves who steal information by entering the subconscious of their targets. In the film, they are tasked to do the opposite – to “incept” an idea into someone’s subconscious – and they go several “layers” deep in dreams within dreams.
Roland is, of course, the Baron’s lost son – there’s no Duke of the Chalk! Pratchett denies the name Roland has anything to do with the fairytale Childe Rowland, which dates back to at least 1814. The story includes many tropes common to legends of Elfland, including a kidnapped younger sibling, chopping off the heads of fairies, and not eating fairy food lest you be trapped in their world forever.
“Ohnoetry” is a popular term for terrible poetry; it’s impossible to track its origin, as it likely has many more than one. The cartoon Liz refers to might be this one from “Toothpaste for Dinner?”
The “Marshmallow Test” is a famous psychological experiment devised by American Walter Mischel in the 1960s. A 4-year-old child is given a marshmallow (or other favourite lolly) and told that they can eat it now, but also if they wait for 5 minutes without eating it, they’ll get another one and can eat both. It’s been replicated by hundreds of parents on YouTube, none of whom had to deal with ethics committees. It supposedly showed that children who could delay gratification did much better in life, but the findings were questioned and – as is so often the case with psychological experiments – the situation is likely much more complex. The 2014 “Let Them Eat Marshmallows” episode of The Indicator podcast does a great job of summarising the updated findings.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple is an elderly amateur sleuth from the village of St Mary Meade. The 1932 short story collection The Thirteen Problems includes her first ever appearance, “The Tuesday Night Club”.
The 1997 John Woo film Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicholas Cage as an FBI agent and a terrorist who swap faces using experimental transplant technology. It’s about as terrible/great as that makes it sound.
A “tidal wave” is any wave that’s created by tidal forces – the gravitational effect of the Moon on sea level. A tsunami is a wave created by a seismic disturbance, usually an earthquake or volcanic eruption, and mostly occur out to sea. It’s true that the water recedes from the shore before a tsunami hits – this is known as “drawback” – but it usually only happens very shortly before the wave hits.
“Super Opera Man” was our tongue-in-cheek description of Walter Plinge in his guise as the Opera Ghost in our discussion of Maskerade, in the episode “The Music of the Nitt”.
There is a millennia-long history of the “Scotch Irish”, Scottish peoples who migrated to Ireland. The Ulster Scots are a particular group of Presbyterians who migrated to escape religious persecution. As a result there are many Irish families with Scottish surnames (like, say, “McKenzie”) and who thus have tartans and can trace their history back through both countries.
The most famous type of bagpipes are the Great Highland bagpipes seen in military bands in many English-speaking countries. Bagpipes are found in various forms across the world, however, and may have been around for as long as three thousand years. The most common kind of Irish bagpipes are called the “Uilleann” pipes, and are distinguished by an elbow-operated bellows used to inflate the bag, and a chanter – the pipe fingered by the player – with an unusually broad range.
The Tay Bridge Disaster occurred on December 28, 1879. A severe storm hit the rail bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between Dundee and Fife, just as a train was crossing; the bridge collapsed and the train fell into the Firth, killing all 70 passengers and crew aboard.
There’s no shortage of comedy Irish folk songs, usually about a disaster or some other gruesome subject. Ben’s favourites include Tom Lehrer’s “The Irish Ballad”, The Scared Weird Little Guys’ “Miners”, and – from the film A Mighty Wind – The Folksmen’s “Blood on the Coal”, which combines a train crash with a mining disaster.
William McGonagall was most famously lampooned by British radio comedy group The Goons, with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers both playing the character “McGoonagall” in The Goon Show. The Monty Python sketch Ben mentioned is “The Poet McTeagle”, from the sixteenth episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Vogons appear in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a species of horrible officious bureaucrats tasked with demolishing the Earth to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. One of the most famous entries from the Guide specifies that Vogons are the third-worst poets in the Universe, behind the Azgoths of Kria and “Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings” of Greenbridge, Essex. (This was an alteration from earlier versions which named real poet and friend of Adams, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, as the worst poet in the Universe. He requested his name be disguised.)
Liz remembers correctly that in traditional Chinese massage, it is said that the ears are the sensory organ related to the kidneys. Several sources recommend massaging the ears to promote good kidney health, while the kidneys themselves store “pre-natal Qi” inherited from your parents. So now you know!
New Zealand-Canadian actor Anna Paquin was just eleven years old when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1993 for her role as Flora in Jane Campion’s film The Piano.
In Game of Thrones, the television adaptation of George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the Wildling who really likes Brienne of Tarth is Tormund Giantsbane, played by Norwegian actor Kristofer Hivju. He might not be Scottish, but he is the very image of a human-sized Feegle.
“Crivens” is an archaic exclamation that comes from Scots, where it was originally spelt “crivvens”. It’s derived from the earlier “criffens”, which like many archaic swearwords was a form of blasphemy; it’s a contraction of “Christ fend us”. In terms of how strenuous a swear it is, think of it much like other stand-in terms for “Christ”, including “cripes” and “crikey” – not considered very strong these days. It hasn’t entirely vanished from use, but is mostly used for mock surprise; it is sometimes survived via the phrase “well jings crivens and help ma boab” (approximately, “Jesus Christ, help my Robert!”), which was popularised in books and comic strips in the 1920s and 30s.
Red hair in humans is influenced by genes on chromosomes 4 and 16. The more prominent gene is MC1R on chromosome 16; red hair is caused by one of a number of recessive alleles (an allele is one of the possible variations of a specific gene) – i.e. a person needs to have two copies of it for it to express itself. Ben mentions partial or incomplete dominance, which is where a gene will express partly even if a dominant allele is also present. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the most prominent red hair gene, but might be explained by other alleles on chromosome 4. As is usual with biology…it’s not as simple as you might think.
Fraggle Rock is Jim Henson’s 1983 Muppet series for children about the Fraggles, small furry creatures that love radishes and live below the human world in a huge cave complex from which the series takes its name. The young Fraggle protagonists deal with a variety of social, emotional and philosophical issues, and occasionally travelled to “Outer Space” – the world above Fraggle Rock, populated by “Silly Creatures” (humans). Fraggle Rock was also home to the Doozers – tiny green humanoids who spent all their time making constructions out of “doozer sticks”, which the Fraggles would eat, forcing the Doozers to rebuild. There was also a third world, the Land of the Gorgs, enormous creatures who consider themselves rulers of the Universe; they have a large radish garden, and also a sentient Trash Heap who the Fraggles often visited for advice. A reboot is apparently coming soon from Apple TV+.
He-Man is the absurdly hyper-masculine protagonist (in name at least) of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a 1983 sword and sorcery cartoon series with science fiction elements based on a toy line created by Mattel. He often rode into battle on his giant green tiger-like companion, Battle Cat. Both gain their magical strength after being transformed by He-Man’s magic sword, and until then have alter egos – the feckless Prince Adam, and cowardly Cringer.
Tartans – cloth woven in distinctive patterns of criss-crossing colours – were originally associated with places, much like other patterns (Argyle, for example). The idea of clan tartans came into vogue during a visit to Scotland by King George IV, thanks mostly to Walter Scott. They’ve since become quite a fad, and it’s possible to request your own family tartan and have it officially recorded. The podcast 99% Invisible have a mini-series about fashion, Articles of Interest, and the episode “Plaid” (which is not synonymous with tartan, by the way) has a great summary of the history of tartan. In any case, Ben’s objection to the multi-tartan wearing Feegles doesn’t have much historical backing, though as they’re all from the same place you’d still expect a bit more uniformity.
The Narrativia web site now only lists the exclusive deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content for screen adaptations. It’s unclear what this means, if anything, for the films that were in production, namely the Henson adaptation of The Wee Free Men and the animated version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
The association between certain sounds and physical shapes is the “Bouba/kiki effect”. The excellent puzzle videogame Baba Is You, in which you manipulate the rules of the game world in order to progress, is named for this effect.
Ben still can’t find the earlier Pratchett book which talked about “gl” words and the equivalent of visual onomatopoeia; it’s not The Colour of Magic, Sourcery!, Moving Pictures or Soul Music. If you know which one it is, please let us know!
Magrat’s mentor was the research witch Goodie Whemper, based in the Lancre town of Mad Stoat.
We covered all three books in the Bromeliad trilogy in the previous episodes “Upscalator to Heaven”, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and “The Thing Beneath My Wings”.
By Young Sam, Ben means Sam Vimes Jr, not Sam Vimes Sr when he was younger, as in Night Watch.
The other Pratchett books for younger readers that Ben hasn’t read yet are Nation, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (though we’re covering this next episode), and the rest of the books in the Tiffany Aching series: A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown.
Listener Bethany wondered on Twitter if “Fairy Nettle” was one of the aliases used by the witches in Witches Abroad, but while they did claim to be “flower fairies”, Magrat called herself “Fairy Tulip” and Granny “Fairy Daisy”, while Nanny called herself “Fairy Hedgehog”.
We didn’t end up talking about this in the episode, but Ben had a question he felt wasn’t answered clearly in the book: is the Queen of Fairyland the Queen of the Elves we met in Lords and Ladies? They have many similarities, including missing husbands, but she has no other elves, only smaller fairies. What do you think?
In Harry Potter, the Grindylow is depicted as a small green squid-like creature with a more humanoid face, small horns and two arms ending in tentacled fingers, though the prose descriptions note that their physical forms can vary considerably. They are featured most prominently in the third and fourth books.
Drop Bears are ~~mythical~~ very real and dangerous Australian creatures. Their Discworld equivalent appears in The Last Continent, as discussed in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
Eisteddfods in Australia are traditional performance competitions with common sections or events including poetry recital, public speaking, dramatic performance and readings of various kinds. Their origins lie in Wales. (We’ve previously mentioned them on the podcast in a footnote; we’ll add a link to that episode when we remember which one it is!)
Kasabian are an English rock band, formed in 1997. Bien is French for “good”.
The Dungeons & Dragons reference web site Ben refers to D&D Beyond.
You can find the Kill Your Darlings podcast here. The magazine takes its name from the advice given to writers: you must be prepared to give up your favourite ideas – to “kill your darlings” – when they don’t work.

#Pratchat32 – Meet the Feegles

08/06/2020 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

Liz, Ben and librarian Meaghan Dew come down from the mountains to a land of sheep, chalk and tiny blue warriors, and meet the youngest witch ever, in Pratchett’s 2003 Discworld for Younger Readers book, The Wee Free Men.

Nine-year-old farm girl Tiffany Aching lives on The Chalk, a lowland area famous for its sheep and…er…sheep products. It’s not famous for attacks from mythical river monsters, so when one turns up she lures it with her brother as bait and hits it over the head with a frying pan. Searching for answers, she meets the very real witch Miss Tick, and realises that’s what she wants to be. In her first truly witchy move, she disobeys Miss Tick’s advice and tries to take on the Queen of the Fairies, who has kidnapped her baby brother. Luckily she’s already met and impressed the Nac Mac Feegle – a clan of tiny blue “pictsies” with a love for fightin’, stealin’ and drinkin’…

After the end of the Witches series in Carpe Jugulum*, Pratchett launched a new protagonist destined to become one of his most beloved characters. Tiffany Aching is practical, serious, thoughtful and wilful, with a steely gaze and a mind so sharp she might cut someone else (she certainly knows which bit to hold onto). Pratchett weaves the story of a young girl stepping into some big – and tiny – shoes with themes of grief, family, community, belief and the stories we tell…oh, and a tiny blue and red whirlwind of swearing, violence and other Scottish stereotypes known as the Nac Mac Feegle.

Do these two things mesh well for you? Is this Tiffany’s finest hour, or just a taste of what’s to come for her? And was Granny Aching a witch, a shepherd, or something else entirely by the end? Use the hashtag #Pratchat32 on social media to join the conversation!

* Carpe Jugulum is coming soon(ish) to a Pratchat episode near you!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:19:47 — 64.4MB)

Guest Meaghan Dew is a librarian and podcaster. For around seven years, Meaghan hosted and produced the podcast for Australian arts and culture magazine Kill Your Darlings. Meaghan currently works as a librarian in Melbourne, and produces her library’s podcast program.

Ben was reading the The Illustrated Wee Free Men, the 2008 hardcover edition of the book with full-colour illustrations by artist Stephen Player – and a few extras from Terry. Player advises that the colours are off in the book, but you can see many of the original illustrations on his web site.

Next month we travel to an entirely different rural area of the Disc for more younger readers adventure, in 2000’s The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. We’ll be joined by writer and screenwriter Michelle Law! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat33 by June 20th 2020.

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!

#Pratchat31 Notes and Errata

08/05/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2012 Long Earth novel The Long Earth.

The episode title is a play on “It’s just a jump to the left”, the first instruction from dance anthem The Time Warp from the musical The Rocky Horror Show. It follows a young couple who are on their way to visit their old science lecturer to tell him they’re engaged, but on the way – actually, no, we can’t explain it. It makes no sense. You just have to experience for yourself.
“Hard” science fiction is science fiction that attempts to be scientifically accurate, or at least scientifically plausible. Notable authors in this style include Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson and Stephen Baxter. (Yes, it’s a bit of a boy’s club; please let us know your favourite hard sci-fi authors of other genders!)
Joel previously appeared on episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“, discussing The Colour of Magic on the 35th anniversary of its publication. We still hope to have him back for our episode covering The Light Fantastic on its 35th anniversary in June 2021.
Stephen Baxter is an English science fiction author with degrees in Engineering and Mathematics who has written nearly sixty novels, giving Terry a run for his money! His most famous book is probably the award-winning 1995 novel The Time Ships, an official sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. His Xelee series encompasses thirteen books, beginning with Raft, a novel that evolved out of the short story Joel mentions here. (Not to be confused with the Steven King short story “The Raft”, which is…very different.)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is, unfortunately, the very real fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise. Released in 2008, and directed by Steven Spielberg, its set in 1957 and stars Harrison Ford as whip-cracking, two-fisted adventure archaeologist Indiana Jones, who alongside old flame Marion (Karen Allen) and her son Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) battles Soviet agent Cate Blanchett for control of an alien crystal skull which can unlock psychic powers. You can probably see why we weren’t into it. A fifth Indiana Jones film is in pre-production and scheduled for release in 2022.
1917 is a 2019 World War I film directed by Sam Mendes, and made to look like it happens in two long, continuous shots. It follows two young British soldiers sent across France to deliver orders calling off a doomed offensive.
Mink Car is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band They Might Be Giants, released on September 11, 2001. Pratchett appears to have been a fan of the band, as references to their work appear in a few of his books, including the spoof band “We’re Definitely Dwarves” in Soul Music.
The mulefa are peaceful intelligent creatures from a parallel Earth featured in The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the original His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. They have a superficial resemblance to elephants, but have a diamond-shaped skeleton with no spine, and a sophisticated culture, language and tools – including the use of special seed pods as wheels.
Jasper Fforde is an English author best known for his novels about Thursday Next, beginning with 2001’s The Eyre Affair. Next is a “literary detective” from a not-entirely-serious parallel world, and her investigations sometimes take her inside great works of fiction. She is from her reality’s version of 1985, and many of Fforde’s books are set in worlds which feel like the recent past.
As one of Liz’s faves, we’ve mentioned English author Diana Wynne Jones many times in previous episodes. Her works include the Chrestomanci series, Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequels, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Jones has been cited as an inspiration by many British writers, including Pratchett.
The term Datum Earth refers to the concept of a datum reference (or just datum) – an important part of an object nominated as a reference point for measurements. Hence the Datum Earth is the reference point for all travel East and West. The concept of datums – and yes, that’s the correct plural in this sense – sees use in many disciplines, including charting, mapping, engineering and many crafts. Big thanks to listener Nathan J. Phillips for explaining this one over Twitter!
The North American Discworld Convention is a bi-annual convention which began in 2009, running opposite the UK convention which operates bi-annually in even years. The convention moves around the US; in 2011 it was held in Madison, Wisconsin, hence that city’s prominence in The Long Earth, while the 2019 convention was held in Los Angeles, with a theme of “Hooray for Holy Wood”. (We were very kindly invited, but unable to attend – maybe in 2021!) You can find out more at the official web site, nadwcon.com.
We have mentioned the film Stargate and its television successor, Stargate SG-1, many times. Both follow an archaeologist and military commander who travel through a “stargate”, an ancient alien device that allows near-instantaneous travel to other worlds with stargates across the galaxy. The television series has often made a plot point out of the possibility of knowledge of the stargate – and the US military’s stargate programme – becoming public.
Prometheus is Ridley Scott’s 2012 film set in the Alien universe, a prequel in which humans discover an extinct alien civilisation on a distant planet. Oh, and some horrible monsters, of course. It features Michael Fassbender as android David 8 (more on him below) and Noomi Rapace as archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw. It’s not good; maybe archaeologists and aliens just don’t mix?
Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French science fiction writer in the 19th century whose books were adventures based on scientific ideas. His most famous books are Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), all of which involve fantastic journeys either to extraordinary places or via extraordinary means. Maître du monde, or Master of the World, was his penultimate novel, published a year before his death. It’s a sequel to the earlier book Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer), and serves as a warning of totalitarianism. In the novel, science tyrant Robur uses his mastery of technology to create an extraordinary craft that can travel on land, sea and through the air so fast it is invisible, and uses it to terrorise the United States.
Stonehenge is the most famous monument consisting of standing stones, first constructed around 5,000 years ago for purposes which remain mysterious. It’s in Wiltshire, the part of England in which Terry and his family lived much of their lives. The Singing Stones are an invention for the book, but there are stones that resonate when struck in much the same way. These “lithophones” occur naturally, like the “ringing rocks” found in Pennsylvania and New South Wales, and can be made into instruments called lithophones. A famous example are the Musical Stones of Skiddaw, constructed in the 18th century and now on display at the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in northern England.
Neal Stephenson is an American speculative fiction author who has written sixteen novels, the most famous probably Snow Crash (1992). Stephenson mixes themes of history, technology, religion and politics with a wry sense of humour – the main character in Snow Crash is named “Hiro Protagonist” – and the comparison to the combined Pratchett/Baxter style is apt. As well as books set in not too distant cyberpunk-ish futures, he has also written historical novels, but most also involve themes of technology and computers.
“The High Meggas” was written in 1986, but not actually published until 2012, when it was included in Pratchett’s 2012 collection of short fiction, A Blink of the Screen – the same year as The Long Earth! In the short story, reclusive stepper Larry Linsay is minding his own business on an Earth in the High Meggas, avoiding the local “super baboons” and their leader, which he calls Big Yin. He detects the arrive of two security guards from the “gumment”: Joshua Valienté and Anna Shea. He captures them both, and each claims the other poisoned the water supply at Forward Base, the nearest government facility, killing fifty people. He has to decide who to trust, while still pondering the mysteries of the High Meggas… The term “High Meggers” (note different spelling) appears in chapter two of the novel with the same meaning as in the original short story: those earths more than a million steps away from Earth (not just in the high thousands, as Ben mentions). Both the story and chapter two of the book also use the term “Low Earths” to describe worlds only a few steps away from the original. The terms “Datum Earth”, “Long Earth” and even “step” do not appear in the original story, which uses “move” to describe the act of stepping – a term echoed in The Long Earth when Joshua refers to a “Knight’s Move”.
The names Joshua and Jesus are close to each other in both English and the original Hebrew. In Hebrew, ישוע or “Yeshua” was a common alternative form of יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (“Yehoshua”). While they’re distinct in the source, Greek texts translate them both as Iesous (Ἰησοῦς), which became the Latin Iesus, and then in English, Jesus. In Greek Bibles Joshua is thus also named Jesus, though he is referred to as “Jesus, son of Naue” to differentiate him from Jesus, son of God. There are some English Bibles in which Joshua is referred to as Jesus, as well. The confusion doesn’t usually go back the same way, and some ancient texts seem to make it clear that Jesus only ever used the shorter version of the name, though it’s worth pointing out that Jesus was a pretty common name back then.
We’ve not been able to find any record of gunmetal covered Bibles being used during the First World War, but there are certainly plenty of stories of Bibles in pockets stopping bullets – most of them probably apocryphal. The stories had an effect, though; metal-covered “heart shield Bibles” were common artefacts carried by American soldiers during World War II.
The Biblical Joshua (aka Hoshea, Jehoshua or Jesus; see the note above) was Moses’ assistant, as documented in the Books of Exodus and Numbers in the Torah and Old Testament. He was born in Egypt before the exodus, and was present for many of Moses’ famous deeds. Later he spied on Canaan for Moses and after Moses’ death was chosen by God to lead the Israelites, and blessed with invincibility. He led the conquest of Canaan and lived a long life, dying aged 110. His later life is chronicled in the Book of Joshua.
The toaster episode of The Simpsons is Treehouse of Terror V from the show’s sixth season in 1994, one of the annual Halloween anthologies. In the second segment, “Time and Punishment”, Homer accidentally turns a broken toaster into a time machine and travels to the past, altering history multiple times. As well as the no donuts world, he also creates a dystopia ruled by a despotic Ned Flanders.
In the fourth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Quidditch World Cup stadium is hidden from non-wizards through the use of a “Muggle-Repelling Charm“. Muggles who came too near would suddenly remember an appointment for which they were late and hurry away.
Celtic mythology is the source of most modern ideas of “the fae” in Western cultures, and belief in the “fair folk” (who go by many epithets) is still common in Ireland, as briefly discussed in episode 15 (and further in an outtake featured in episode three of our subscribers-only bonus podcast, Ook Club). The Otherworld as a concept is older and broader, and present in many religions and belief systems, but the Celtic version – known as Tír na nÓg, Annwn or Avalon in various traditions – matches up pretty well with the way the Trolls and Elves of the Long Earth use stepping to occasionally visit Datum Earth.
In August 2019, an American musician tweeted about the need to ban assault weapons; in response, another Twitter used asked “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?” The hypothetical was widely mocked and quickly became a widespread meme, though it didn’t last long. It resurfaced briefly in September that year after a news report of feral hogs in Canada potentially crossing the border into Montana. It’s worth noting that feral hogs – or feral pigs as we call them in Australia – are definitely real and can be quite destructive to wildlife, especially in countries like the US and Australia where they are not a native species. While they are indeed dangerous, attacks are rare.
In X-Men comics, Nightcrawler is the alias of the German mutant, circus performer and superhero, Kurt Wagner. His mutation gives him a demonic appearance, with blue skin, red eyes, a prehensile tail, pointed ears and three-fingered hands and two-toed feet. He also has the ability to teleport short distances, disappearing and reappearing in a puff of smoke, with the smell of brimstone. He first appeared in 1975, and has featured in many adaptations of the comics. Nightcrawler is a major character in the 2003 feature film X2, where he is played by Scottish actor Alan Cumming. In the opening scene he attempts to kill the American President, leaping and teleporting to avoid the President’s security. He is often depicted fighting in the same way in various X-Men videogames.
Sliders is an American science fiction series that ran for five seasons from 1995 to 2000. It starred Jerry O’Connell as Quinn Mallory, a genius physics student who invents a device that creates temporary wormholes into parallel universes. He accidentally traps himself and three others – his physics professor (John Rhys-Davies), his friend Wade (Sabrina Lloyd) and passing soul singer Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) – on the other side of a wormhole. Each episode Quinn’s “timer” randomly resets, counting down the time until a new wormhole opens to another alternate reality. The episode Ben describes about a population controlled alternate Earth is “Luck of the Draw”, the first season finale. While there are no Trolls or Elves, Sliders does have the Kromaggs, an intelligent species of apes from a parallel Earth who can also travel between universes, stripping other versions of Earth for resources. (Ben recommends the first two seasons, but it gets a bit rocky after that, with three of the four main cast leaving )
The Gap is an American clothing company founded in 1969. It grew to prominence in the 1990s, and now has thousands of stores in more than forty countries. The company owns several famous clothing brands, including Banana Republic and Old Navy. It has been involved in controversy over conditions in its factories and those of its suppliers in Saipan, Jordan and India.
Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence spans nine novels and more than fifty short stories. It touches on many hard sci-fi ideas drawing on quantum physics, and follows humanity’s expansion into the wider universe and their conflict with the Xeelee, an ancient species of aliens in the “so technologically advanced they are almost gods” mould.
The song “Step in Time” was written by the Sherman Brothers for the Walt Disney’s 1964 feature film adaptation of Mary Poppins. It’s sung by Mary’s friend Bert (American actor Dick Van Dyke, doing an infamously dodgy Cockney accent) and his fellow chimney sweeps as they dance on the rooftops of London. It’s a lot like “Knees Up Mother Brown”, with each verse identical except for a different repeated dance instruction, like “Kick your knees up”, “Flap like a birdie” and “Link your elbows”. (Later verses change these up for other phrases – including “Votes for women”!) In the 2004 Broadway musical, the song is introduced with the idea that chimney sweeps are like guardian angels who “step in, just in time” when someone is in trouble.
A potato battery is created by sticking a piece of zinc and a piece of copper into a potato and connecting their exposed ends to an electrical circuit. The acidic potato juice reacts with the metals, resulting in a build up of free electrons in the zinc, and a loss of electrons from the copper. This creates an imbalance in electrical charge, causing electrons to travel from the zinc through the electrical circuit to the copper, producing an electrical current of about 0.5 Volts. (Lemons, the more popular vegetable battery choice, generate a higher voltage because they have more acidic juice.)
In the 2007 videogame Portal, the player character, Chell, is forced to navigate a series of “test chambers” that can only be escaped through the use of a “portal gun”, which creates pairs of portals that link two locations. The test facility is run by a sinister artificial intelligence named GlaDOS. In the sequel, 2011’s Portal 2, GlaDOS is deposed by another AI and has her “personality core” attached to a potato battery, forcing her to team up with Chell. Neither of them is happy about it.
Most laptops do contain metallic iron, since most of them still use magnetic hard drives. This form of storage, while susceptible to damage from physical knocks, is still a lot cheaper than hardier solid-state technology, so many laptops – especially ones with large storage capacities – still use it. Modern magnetic drives use iron and cobalt layered over aluminium, but a solid state drive largely depends on silicon, so it wouldn’t be too hard to make laptops that could travel between Earths.
British glam rock star David Bowie appears on the cover of his 1973 album Aladdin Sane in character as Aladdin Sane, with a stylised red and blue lightning bolt painted across his face.
Michael Fassbender plays two android characters – David 8 and Walter – in the films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Like the androids in the earlier films – particularly Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien, and Lance Henrikson’s Bishop in Aliens and Alien 3 – he is portrayed as an advanced synthetic organism, rather than a metal robot.
We discussed Thomas and Will Riker, the transporter twins from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in our previous episode, “Looking Widdershins“. See that episode’s show notes for an explanation.
In the X-Men comics and adaptations, mutants like Nightcrawler are humans who possess a specific genetic mutation, known as the X-gene, which causes them to develop superpowers, usually around puberty. Despite the prevalence of superheroes in the Marvel universe, mutants as a group are subject to mistrust, prejudice and bigotry. Their stories have served as allegories for the struggles of queer folks, people of colour and other marginalised communities. Anti-mutant sentiment is often shown to be political or religious in origin, or at least justified that way. There are many examples of charismatic leaders stirring up hatred against mutants for their own ends, including the Reverend William Stryker in the 1982 graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, and recurring character Senator Robert Kelly, both of whom appear in the film adaptations.
For any younger listeners, September 11 refers to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which members of the group Al-Quaida highjacked four passenger aircraft and flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people.
A “pilot episode” is the initial episode produced of a television series, especially in the United States, where pilots are ordered by networks to determine if a series will be produced. As a result they are often double the normal length and spend as much time setting up the characters and premise of the show as exploring any particular plot. Many pilots are re-shot after a series has been given the green light to produce more episodes, or are repurposed as flashback material or a later episode.
The 1999 film Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot, is about the cast of a 1980s sci-fi show, Galaxy Quest, who now spend most of their time attending conventions. They are contacted for help by the alien Thermians, who believe the TV show was a documentary. The all-star cast includes Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, Enrico Colantoni, Tony Shalhoub and Justin Long. It’s a loving parody of science fiction television and its fans, but with a heavy emphasis on the “loving”. It’s lasting popularity, especially among Star Trek fans, led to the production of Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary, released for the film’s twentieth anniversary in 2019.
In the world of Harry Potter, a squib is the child of magical parents who is not magical themselves – or at least, not able to do magic, for example the casting of spells. The canonical example is Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch. We’ve previously talked about squibs, including way back in episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“.
Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind is not the first sequel to The War of the Worlds, but it is the only official one, authorised by the Wells estate. Baxter – who also wrote an official sequel to The Time Machine, The Time Ships – is a vice president of the H. G. Wells Society, a position he has held since 2006. The book is set in 1920 – 13 years after the events of the original book – and follows Julie Elphinstone’s journey through a second Martian invasion. Like many sequels it is also an alternate history, showing how the original invasion changed Europe and the rest of the world.
Baxter collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on the Time Odyssey trilogy, which is related to Clarke’s Space Odyssey series (Clarke coined the term “orthequel” for them, which is…unhelpful). They deal with a species of godlike aliens who – in an opposite move to Space Odyssey’s monolith building aliens – seek to remove other intelligent species, but wish to preserve a record of their cultures in an alternate universe. Baxter also wrote the 2000 novel The Light of Other Days, based on a synopsis by Clarke, which explores the consequences of technology allowing instantaneous viewing of events from anywhere in space and time.
We discussed Good Omens, Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman, in episode 15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and We Feel Nice and Accurate)“. Both Pratchett and Gaiman acknowledged that Pratchett was the dominant voice in that book, not least because Gaiman was not an experienced novelist at the time and was busy making the release schedule for his hit comic Sandman. Despite that, elements of Gaiman’s style, and his influence on the plot, are definitely noticeable.
The short story version of Raft, which Baxter expanded into the first novel of the Xeelee Sequence, was first published in the magazine Interzone in 1989. Finding out if it’s been collected anywhere has proven difficult, but you can find it online here, thanks to UK sci-fi ebook publishers infinity plus. You can also find a lot of short works by Baxter on his official web site, including many excerpts from and additions to the Long Earth series (most of them from later in the series, so beware of spoilers). We’ll add some more recommendations for works by Baxter here when we get them.
We also mentioned the Moa in episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“. It was a large flightless bird native to New Zealand, now extinct. They were not carnivorous but could certainly kill a human being.
Logan Paul is an American YouTube star, actor, podcaster and boxer. He became infamous in 2018 after visiting Aokigahara forest near Mount Fuji in Japan and posting footage of a man who had died by suicide there on his YouTube channel. While this was his worst stunt, he has done a lot of other awful stuff, including being cruel to animals, making disparaging remarks about homosexuality, and participating in dangerous trending fads. He was suspended by YouTube for a “pattern of behaviour”, though he claims brain damage sustained playing high school football has impaired his ability to have empathy for others. He’s also a Flat Earther.
Depending on who you ask there are between four and five thousand varieties of potato. Let that sink in for a second. If you want to find out more, a great place to start is the European Cultivated Potato Database, maintained by SASA, a division of the Scottish Agriculture and Rural Delivery Directorate. The database very happily has all kinds of data, including “Utilisation Characteristics”; Ben’s favourites are “Crisp suitability” and “French fry suitability” (covering both possible meanings of “chips”).
We’ve mentioned the Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones before, in episode 22, “The Cat in the Prat“. It consists of six novels and one collection of four novellas, all published between 1977 and 2006. In the books, the “Chrestomanci” is an enchanter – a powerful magician – employed by the government of World 12B to police the user of magic. The current Chrestomanci in nearly all the books is Christopher Chant.
In Verne’s Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet), first published in 1877, 36 humans are swept away on the surface of comet that briefly collides with Earth near Gibraltar. The title character, a Captain in the French Algerian army, must contend with the English and Spanish solders and other people with whom he is marooned, while experiencing many strange phenomena on a two year orbit away from and then back towards Earth. The original has an anti-Semitic tone concerning one character which drew criticism even at the time, leading to low sales by Verne’s standards. Ben first experienced the story via the Australian animated adaptation made in 1979, which leaves out the offending character. (It’s here on YouTube, though with subtitles and misattributed to a 1976 US cartoon series.)
There are twelve “series” of alternate worlds in the Chrestomanci series, each one a collection of worlds which are all similar to each other. Christopher Chant is from world 12A, where magic is common; world 12B is the “real world”, i.e. where we live. The worlds were first explored and numbered by the “Great Mages” who live on the worlds of series one.
In the 2001 film The One, directed by James Wong, Jet Li plays Gabriel Yulaw, an agent of the MultiVerse Authority, who goes rogue and starts killing the alternate versions of himself in other universes, as this makes the remaining versions stronger. Li also plays Gabe Law, the las remaining alternate of Gabriel, who is a police officer in Los Angeles on our world. It’s a cool concept but critics pretty universally panned the film.
In Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders, demonic entities known only as Them play boardgames with the many alternate universes – not unlike the gods of Dunmanifestin. When twelve-year-old Jamie discovers a group of them playing with his world, they make him a “Homeward Bounder” – forced to “bound” between the worlds, unable to influence Their game, but also virtually unaging and immortal as he searches for his home universe.
“Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa“, aka Cyril Henry Hoskin, wrote and published The Third Eye in 1956. In it he claimed to have awakened his powers of clairvoyance through “the third eye” ritual, in which fellow Lamas drilled a hole in his forehead and implanted a sliver of wood “treated by fire and herbs” in his brain. Afterwards, one of the Lamas told him that for the rest of your life he would “see people as they are and not as they pretend to be”. When Hoskin was uncovered as a potential fraud by private investigators working for a Tibetologist, he did not deny his origins, but claimed that his body was now inhabited by Lobsang Rama. The story only gets weirder and we recommend you read up on it.
Susan Calvin is a brilliant but emotionless “robopsychologist” who features in a dozen of Isaac Asimov’s short stories about robots. Marvin, the “Paranoid Android”, is a genius robot with a “genuine people personality” that means he is always depressed; he appears in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in all its incarnations. We discussed the horse from The Dark Side of the Sun in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content is a web comic launched in 2003. It’s set in Northampton, Massatuchetts, in either a near future or alternate reality setting, and revolves around the day to day life of indie rock fan Marten Reed and his extended circle of friends, who include several artificial intelligences with robotic bodies. In 2019 it passed 4,000 strips and is still going, with instalments released three times a week. Liz and Ben are fans.
Jack&Ian is the compound name for biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart, co-authors of the four Science of Discworld books, as well as What Would a Martian Look Like? and several other fiction and non-fiction books. Jack passed away in 2019.
The Kardashev scale, created by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, is a way of classifying intelligent civilisations based on the amount of energy they are able to use. Type I civilisations harness the energy naturally available on their own planet (as humans currently do); Type II civilisations harness all the power available from their home star; and Type III civilisations harness the power output of an entire galaxy. Extensions to the scale have since added Type IV (the power of an entire universe) and Type V (the power of multiple universes).
Andre Norton was an American speculative fiction writer, and the first woman to hold many of science fiction’s highest honours. Her novels The Crossroads of Time (1956) and Star Gate (1958) are among the earliest alternate worlds stories to reference the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, and blend science ficiton with sword and sorcery.
InterWorld is a 2007 standalone novel written by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, in which high school student Joey discovers he is a Walker, one of a number of people who can step between alternate realities, and is recruited by InterWorld, an organisation working to keep the forces of magic and science in balance.
Nine Princes in Amber by American fantasy writer Roger Zelazny is the first in the Chronicles of Amber series. In the series, “Amber” is one of two true worlds; all others, including the regular Earth that we know, are merely shadows caused by the tensions between these two worlds. Nobles of those true worlds are able to gain the power to “walk through Shadow”, travelling to any permutation of reality they can imagine.
Feels like a while since we referenced 99% Invisible! The episode “Ten Thousand Years” from December 2014 is one of Ben’s favourites, and discusses the difficulty of creating adequate warnings for nuclear waste, which might need to be understood many thousands of years in the future. Stick with it right to the end, it’s amazing.
The Long Earth audiobook is narrated by English actor and comedian Michael Fenton Stevens, who also narrated the other books in the series, as well as the non-fiction parts of The Science of Discworld books, The Folklore of Discworld, and some of the stories in the collection A Blink of the Screen.

#Pratchat31 – It’s Just a Step to the West

08/05/2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

In episode 31, Liz, Ben and returning guest Joel Martin step sideways into the infinite earths of Pratchett’s 2012 collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth.

In 2015, plans for a strange but simple box-shaped device called a “Stepper”, powered by a potato, are posted online. Kids all over the world build them and discover that the boxes let them step “East” or “West” into other Earths. There are thousands of such worlds – perhaps millions – all subtly different. But they do have one thing in common: there are no humans on any of them. Fifteen years after “Step Day”, human society is irrevocably altered, and experienced far-stepper Joshua Valienté is offered a new job: to step further from Earth than even he has ever been, and explore the mysteries of the Long Earth in the company of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated as a supercomputer…

Based on ideas from Pratchett’s 1986 short story “The High Meggas”, written before the popularity of The Colour of Magic led him down a particular leg of the trousers of time, The Long Earth is the first in a series of five novels set in a near future world forever changed by the existence of limitless worlds next door. An epic journey across millions of worlds, Pratchett chose to work with his friend Stephen Baxter, a prolific science fiction author whose work encompasses hard future sci-fi, speculative evolution, alternate history and sequels to classic novels by the likes of H. G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. That all seems quite a distance from comic fantasy – but the pairing just works. So – it’s five years since Step Day. Would you visit another Earth? Could you pick which bits were Pratchett, and which Baxter? And what kind of potato is in your stepper box? Use the hashtag #Pratchat31 on social media to join the conversation!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:17:33 — 63.3MB)

Guest Joel Martin is a writer, editor and podcaster who previously appeared on Pratchat in episode 14, discussing the book that derailed the Long Earth back in 1986, The Colour of Magic. Joel is also the director of the Speculate speculative fiction festival (specfic.com.au). His latest work is the short story Hunting Time in Strange Stories Vol. 1, scheduled to be published this month by 42books. Joel’s writing podcast, The Morning Bell, is currently on hiatus, but you can find the full back catalogue at themorningbell.com.au. Find out more about him at thepenofjoel.com.

Next month we’re stepping back onto the Disc to meet adventurous nine-year-old Tiffany Aching, in 2003’s The Wee Free Men! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat32 by around May 23rd.

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

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#Pratchat30 Notes and Errata

08/04/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for our special questions-only thirtieth episode, “Looking Widdershins“.

Widdershins is an old English word (not to be confused with an Old English word) which means anti-clockwise, or to move around something by keeping it on your left. On the Discworld, it is one of the four cardinal directions, along with hubwards (towards the centre or hub of the Disc), rimwards (towards the edge or rim) and turnwise (in the direction of the Disc’s spin; the opposite direction to widdershins). Knowing this in year twelve really impressed Ben’s English teacher, who had never read any Pratchett.
We’ve listed a few solid options here for Discworld books to start with:
- Wyrd Sisters – Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick, three witches from the country kingdom of Lancre, are forced to meddle in politics when their king is murdered by a Duke who cares nothing for the kingdom. If you like the idea of the Witches, this is probably the best book to start with. We discussed it in episode 4, “Enter Three Wytches“. As discussed, Equal Rites precedes it, but only features Granny. We covered Equal Rites in episode 25, “Eskist Attitudes“.
- Mort – the anthropomorphic personification of Death takes a gormless country lad as his apprentice. This is the first book to feature Death as a protagonist, though he’s more or less the B plot to Mort himself. Introduces many ideas, places and themes of the Discworld, and is arguably the first to have the familiar Discworld tone. We discussed it in episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“.
- Men at Arms – the Ankh-Morpork City Watch has its work cut out for it as racial tensions simmer between dwarfs and trolls, at the same time as a mysterious series of murders takes place. The second of the Watch books, we (and our future listeners) thought it a great enough introduction to the Discworld to pick it as the first one we discussed on Pratchat in episode 1, “Boots Theory“. The first Watch book is Guards! Guards!; it’s not essential to read it first, but it is a great read, even if the characters themselves are still finding their feet a little. We read it for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
- The Colour of Magic – failed “wizzard” Rincewind is forced to look after the Discworld’s first tourist, Twoflower, on a series of misadventures across the Disc. Still brilliantly funny, but much more a parody of sword and sorcery and high fantasy than establishing itself as its own thing, and with a definite different tone. Ends on a cliffhanger, making the second book, The Light Fantastic, the only direct sequel in the series. We discussed it for its 35th anniversary in episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“.
- Going Postal – con-man Moist von Lipwig is forced to revive the flagging fortunes of the Ankh-Morpork post office. A particular favourite of Liz’s, and a great intro as Moist is a new protagonist and not originally from Ankh-Morpork. It happens much later in the overall series than the other suggestions, but Moist returns in two later books, Making Money and Raising Steam.
The three live-action Discworld adaptations, all very faithful to the books, were produced by The Mob, a UK production company best known for its advertising work. They were originally broadcast on Sky1 in the UK in two parts, and are usually available in two parts wherever you can find them. They are currently available to stream via Amazon Prime Video. Terry Pratchett appears in a cameo role in all three productions, and many cast members reappear, though rarely in the same role.
- Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006) – Death has taken the place of the Discworld equivalent of Father Christmas; his granddaughter Susan tries to get to the bottom of it. Starring Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey), Marc Warren (Hustle) and Ian Richardson as the voice of Death, plus a great supporting cast including David Jason, Nigel Planer and David Warner. It was first broadcast a week or so before Christmas, and is very faithful to the novel. We discussed the novel in episode 26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.
- Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – adapts both The Colour of Magic (see above) and its sequel The Light Fantastic, though it streamlines the plot and takes a few liberties. First broadcast over Easter, it stars David Jason as Rincewind, despite the fact that he’s a great deal older than the character of the books. Twoflower is played by Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings). The supporting cast includes David Bradley (Harry Potter, Doctor Who), Tim Curry, Jeremy Irons and Christopher Lee as the voice of Death.
- Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010) – an adaptation of the first Moist von Lipwig novel. Stars Richard Foyle (Coupling, Sabrina) as Moist, with David Suchet (Poirot) and Clare Foy (The Crown), plus a supporting cast including Charles Dance and Tamsin Grieg.
Cosgrove Hall actually made three animated Discworld adaptations, if you include the short Welcome to the Discworld, starring Christopher Lee as Death – a part he plays in all three animations – in a sequence based on the novel Reaper Man. They’re quite hard to find now, though we hear that if you search a certain popular video platform you might find them… They were sort of one show, originally broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4 as 23-minute episodes and titled Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, with a subtitle for each series specifying the book being adapted.
- Soul Music (1994, 7 episodes) – young bard Imp wants to be the greatest musician the Disc has ever known, but he should be careful what he wishes for… As “Music With Rocks In” sweeps the world, Death feels moved to intervene, and his granddaughter Susan is drawn in as well. As Ben mentions, the soundtrack is something special, especially fans of the Beatles or the history of rock and roll; it’s not on Spotify, but it is still available on Apple Music. We covered the book in episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
- Wyrd Sisters (1997, 6 episodes) is a faithful adaptation of the novel (see above) over six episodes, with the witches played wonderfully by Annette Crosbie (One Foot in the Grave), June Whitfield and Jane Horrocks (the latter two both probably best known to modern audiences from their supporting roles in Absolutely Fabulous). One of Ben’s comedy heroes, Eleanor Bron, plays the Duchess, and there’s some other great cast too.
There are definitely other Pratchett adaptations; the most notable would be Cosgrove Hall’s stop-motion adaptation of Truckers, Amazon Prime’s BBC co-production of Good Omens, and the upcoming BBC America series The Watch, though that seems more a loose interpretation than a direct adaptation. There have also been low-budget TV versions of Johnny and the Dead (for ITV) and Johnny and the Bomb (for the BBC). An animated feature of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is in production in Europe, though whether it will retain its Discworld setting is unknown. An adaptation of Discworld novel The Wee Free Men has been in pre-production with the Jim Henson Workshop, though there’s been little news of it since it was announced in 2016.
As Ben mentions in the footnote, Troll Bridge is an epic short film based on the short story about ageing Discworld hero Cohen the Barbarian. (We discussed the short story its based on in our first live episode, “A Troll New World“.) The licensing agreement for this fan production means there are pretty tight restrictions on how and where it can be sold or screened, so it seemed there was no way left to see it if you hadn’t already got on board. But it’s not so! At the time of writing, you can still become a member of the “Streaming Arena” and access the film – plus hours of bonus material – by visiting the Troll Bridge BackerKit page and following the instructions. (Do note that there’s a manual approval process, so access won’t be instant and might take a week or so.)
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The Discworld Collector’s Library editions were first published from 2014 to 2016 by Gollancz, Terry’s first publisher, who only had rights to the books up to Jingo, which explains why initially only the first 21 books were available in this format. Penguin Random House have since continued the imprint for the later books, and now all of them are available except for the younger readers books – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, and all the Tiffany Aching books, though the latter have had their own series of fancy new editions (which include dust jackets, much to Liz’s dismay). They retail for about £13 in the UK, and $27 AUD in Australia. The early ones weren’t available in the US or Canada for licensing reasons; we’re not sure what the situation is now. We could list an affiliate link, but instead we’d like to recommend you contact your local independent bookshop – they can order in anything you want, and they could really use your business right now. If you’re in Melbourne, this Broadsheet article lists some bookshops which were providing free local delivery (though it wouldn’t hurt to double-check if that’s still the case).
The Folio Society have been publishing deluxe, illustrated editions of books since 1947, including some extra special limited editions. Ben and Liz remembered correctly that they have published editions of both Mort and Small Gods, and they also have an edition of Good Omens.
Howl’s Moving Castle is a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones. It tells the story of Sophie, the oldest of three sisters in a magical kingdom, who expects her life will be boring as it is always the youngest sister who has romantic adventures. Instead she ends up cursed by a Witch and working for the Wizard Howl, hoping to free his fire demon Calcifer so he will break her curse. The book was brilliantly (if fairly loosely) adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli in 2004. Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s famous 1932 dystopian novel which depicts a future society genetically engineered into castes and kept compliant and docile with drugs and sex.
The year of five books was 1990, during which Pratchett published Eric, Moving Pictures, Good Omens, Diggers and Wings. He was no slouch in 1989 either, publishing four books: Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Truckers and The Unadulterated Cat. We’ve covered all nine of those books on Pratchat.
We’d like to apologise to listener Neil Webber (@RugbySkeptic on Twitter), who was actually the asker of the question about which books we thought were most politically on point! This was entirely an error at our end when collating questions from the various social media platforms.
We’ve covered many of the books mentioned in this middle section, including Jingo (“Leshp Miserablés”), Small Gods (“He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis”), Feet of Clay (“Arsenic and Old Clays”), Lords and Ladies (“Midsummer (Elf) Murders”) and Maskerade (“The Music of the Nitt”).
Agnes Nitt does indeed appear again in Carpe Jugulum, as well as another later book, but we won’t say which because of slight spoiler possibilities.
We discussed Dodger way back in episode 6, “A Load of Old Tosh”, with guest David Astle.
We covered Moving Pictures in episode 10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”, and Soul Music in episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
Rhianna Pratchett was given official permission by her father to continue writing for the Discworld, but announced back in June 2015: “I don’t intend on writing more Discworld novels, or giving anyone else permission to do so”, and neither would Terry’s assistant Rob Wilkins. She also ruled out the possibility of publishing any of his unfinished works; they were later destroyed by crushing Pratchett’s hard drives under a steam roller, as per the stipulations of his will.
And Another Thing… is a sixth book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”, written by Eoin Colfer with permission from Adams’ widow, Jane Belson. It was published in 2009 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first novel, and met with mixed reviews. It was adapted for radio as The Hexagonal Phase, incorporating some of Adams’ unused material.
The Rivers of London series of novels by Ben Aaronovitch follow the adventures of Constable Peter Grant, a police officer whose dreams of making detective are complicated when he meets a ghost and becomes apprenticed to Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale – the last official wizard in England. The series encompasses eight novels, two novellas and at least seven volumes of comics. Most of the novels contain at least one Pratchett reference, so Aaronovitch is clearly a fan.
Since there’s no significant Discworld character named Vincent, we are pretty sure that when Liz says “Vincent and Moist” she meant Leonard of Quirm and Moist.
The Dysk Theatre features in Wyrd Sisters, and rates a mention in Lords and Ladies and Thief of Time. The chief characters there are Olwyn Vitoller, proprietor; his adopted son Tomjon, a gifted actor; and the genius and always working dwarf playwright Hwel.
Johnny Maxwell is the protagonist of three of Pratchett’s books for middle grade readers. An ordinary thirteen year old boy with no wish for supernatural adventure, he nevertheless becomes the Chosen One destined to save a fleet of computer game aliens, speaks to the dead, and travels back in time. We’re covering these books this year, starting with Only You Can Save Mankind in episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You”.
The Watch, as mentioned briefly above, is a new BBC America series currently in production in South Africa and expected to be released later this year. It is loosely based on the Discworld books about the City Watch, and stars Richard Armitage as Commander Sam Vimes. The wider casting, and the initial on-set photos so far released, suggest a very different interpretation of the characters and stories, with a more modern (though still fantastical) setting. We’re keen to see how it all works out.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a Netflix original series very loosely based on the novel of the same name by Douglas Adams. It takes the core concept of a “holistic detective” devoted to the idea of the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” and then runs in a very different direction. Despite this, Ben rather loved it for being its own thing. It ran for two seasons, each telling a different long story, with some plot elements carrying over between the two.
The Borrowers is a 1952 children’s fantasy novel written by English author Mary Norton, about a family of tiny people who secretively live in a house of normal-sized humans, “borrowing” what they need to survive. It was followed by four sequels between 1955 and 1982, and adapted into several television series and films.
Land of the Giants was a 1960s science fiction series produced by Irwin Allen (of Lost in Space fame), in which the passengers and crew of the sub-orbital commercial spacecraft Spindrift are sucked through a dimensional tear and crash on a planet of human-like aliens who are twelve times larger than humans.
You can find Nanny Ogg’s hand washing song in this video from the Australian Discworld Convention. It’s not her most offensive song, but probably strays into NSFW territory.
There have been several officially licensed Discworld board games (links are to entries on BoardGameGeek.com, aka BGG):
- Thud (2002) was the first official Discworld boardgame, and is based on the game Thud played by dwarfs and trolls in the novel, er…Thud. It plays like a modernised version of the Viking game Hnefnatafl: it uses a Chess-like symmetrical board (though this one is octagonal) and asymmetrical player pieces – one player controls 32 dwarfs, and the other eight trolls. Thud was designed by Trevor Truan with “liner notes” by Pratchett and pieces designed by “the Cunning Artificer” Bernard Pearson (now proprietor of the Discworld Emporium). After an initial limited release it had two big box editions, both now out of print. A third major edition, first released in 2009, comes in a cloth bag with a cloth board, and is available from the Discworld Emporium.
- Watch Out: Discworld Board Game (2004) was designed by Trevor Truan and published by the Cunning Artificer. Like Thud, it was an asymmetrical game with chess-like pieces, but the board was made of square cards representing Ankh-Morpork locations, and one player controlled eight thieves while the other controlled eight Watchmen.
- Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (2011) has the players secretly take on the roles of various Ankh-Morpork characters as factions vy for control of the city in the wake of Lord Vetinari’s disappearance. Designed by Martin Wallace for his company Treefrog Games, it’s the highest rated of the Discworld games on BGG. It’s now out of print, but Wallace’s 2019 game Nanty Narking is a new and slightly improved version of the same game with a new theme of Victorian London, replacing the famous Discworld characters with characters from the works of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and more.
- Guards! Guards! A Discworld Boardgame (2011) was designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are new recruits in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, sent to infiltrate one of the city’s guilds to retrieve the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo, which have been stolen from Unseen University.
- In The Witches: A Discworld Game (2012), also by Martin Wallace, players are trainee witches in Lancre dealing with the more everyday problems of the local folk. Notably it had rules for solo and cooperative play, as well as the competitive version. (I found multiple references suggesting Martin Wallace designed a third Discworld game, but without any details; if he was working on one it seems it was never finished, or at least never published.)
- Clacks: A Discworld Boardgame (2015) is also from Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are Clacks operators for the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, trying to win the race against Moist von Lipwig’s newly revitalised postal service. Includes rules for competitive and cooperative play. Still in print, so it might be available via your local game store (who needs your support right now); otherwise it’s also at the Discworld Emporium.
Though no version has ever been commercially released, BGG does list Cripple Mr Onion in its database – specifically the 1993 rules devised by Andrew Millard and Terry Tao, and originally posted online at alt.fan.pratchett. These rules are reproduced in later editions of The Discworld Companion, including the one titled Turtle Recall, and suggest players combine a deck of regular playing cards with a deck of Spanish cards (which use Tarot suits) to get the eight suits required. An alternative is “The Fat Pack” deck of cards from The Fat Pack Playing Card Company, designed in part to support play of Cripple Mr Onion. Its eight suits are Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs, Roses, Axes, Tridents and Doves. The company still has a web site, so we’re ordering some cards and will let you know how we go.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – one of Ben’s favourite books – is the Hugo Award winning 2004 debut novel from English author Susannah Clarke. Set in an 1800s England with a lost history of wizardry, it tells the story of two modern magicians destined to revive English magic: the bookish recluse Mr Norrell, and the idle gentleman Jonathan Strange. It was adapted by the BBC into a largely faithful seven part mini-series in 2015. A collection of short stories set in the same world, The Ladies of Grace-Adieu and Other Stories, was published in 2006.
You can find the famous Discworld reading guide diagram in high resolution on imgur here; the makers also have a Facebook page. HarperCollins also released a very similar official one on their Epic Reads blog. These don’t really tell you where to start, but they represent the various sub-series in clear visual style.
We talked about Interesting Times in our previous episode, “Great Rimward Land“.
The Victorian Discworld Klatch is the local Discworld fan group, who hold occasional meetings in Melbourne, Australia. You can find out more at their Facebook group. If you’re looking for fan groups in other parts of Australia, you can find a list on the Australian Discworld Convention site.
Stargates are the ancient technology in the film and various television series of the same name, which form stable wormholes between planets allowing for instantaneous travel. Jump by Sean Williams is the first in a trilogy of novels imagining a future Earth where an unlimited energy source has enabled a worldwide network of matter transporters, which has transformed human culture.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard’s first officer Will Riker discovers that when he was transported to safety from a dangerous situation eight years earlier, the transporter beam split and two Rikers were created – him on the rescue ship, and another one back on the planet. The philosophical implications of this are covered in Richard Hanley’s book The Metaphysics of Star Trek. The one trapped on the planet is rescued, and after a brief time spent with his transporter twin, decides to go by his middle name, Thomas, and start a new life. It…doesn’t end well.
The lemming-like animal Ben is thinking of is the vermine, which appears in footnotes and asides in several of the earlier Discworld novels.
The Casanova TV series starring David Tennant was written by Russell T Davies of Queer as Folk and Doctor Who fame, and produced for the BBC in 2005. Several actors from it also later appeared in Doctor Who.
Hail and Well Met is a podcast production team based in Perth, Western Australia, who make several audio drama shows.
The “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” can be summarised in this sentence from Men at Arms:
“A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

#Pratchat30 – Looking Widdershins

08/04/2020 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:59:12 — 54.9MB)

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 subscriber bonuses, like the exclusive bonus podcast Ook Club!