Elizabeth Flux – Page 18

#Pratchat32 Notes and Errata

8 June 2020 by Ben 1 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 indeed a real and 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 underbelly 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. (Thanks to listener Vlad, who let us know of a similar practice in the US for catching catfish known as “noodling”!)
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 both 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”, by Peter Fray from 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 the album sleeve reproduction made no impression on him – it only struck him when he saw the original. (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 it 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 Lincolnshire. 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 primary (if not quite only) purpose is to fertilise the queen.
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 used 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; it does what it says on the tin.
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- and Ben-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 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 supposedly 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” – i.e. not very, except perhaps to the strictest conservative Christians. 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.

#Pratchat28 Notes and Errata

8 February 2020 by Ben 2 Comments

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“, featuring guest Steve Lamattina, discussing the 1992 novel Only You Can Save Mankind.

This episode’s title is a play on the famous meme “All Your Base Are Belong to Us“. The phrase is from the intro sequence of shoot-’em-up game Zero Wing. The English version was produced for the Sega Megadrive in 1992, and the translation was discovered and popularised as a meme in a song and accompanying music video in which the phrase was Photoshopped into a variety of real world locations and images, posted on the web site NewGrounds in 2001. You can watch that video on YouTube here.
The vampire series mentioned by Steve is Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire, also known as Thirst, consisting of nine books published between 1994 and 2013. It chronicles the life of Sita, a vampire born 5,000 years ago in India. Ben mentions The Last Werewolf (2011), the first in a trilogy of books by Glen Duncan. Neither series is appropriate for children.
The vampires of Middle-Earth are only mentioned briefly in Tolkien’s writings, but we never learn much about them. Barrow-wights are evil spirits that fear the sun and possess and animate human corpses. The origins of orcs are not entirely clear, but they seem to have been created through the corruption of captured elves.
There are many stories revolving around “games coming to life“, or in which people are trapped inside games, wittingly or not. We mention a few: the Disney film TRON (and it’s sequel and some spin-offs); the novel Space Demons, and its sequels Skymaze and Shinkei, by Gillian Rubenstein; and the Gamer’s Quest series of books by George Ivanoff. There’s also Jumanji and Zathura, about magical boardgames, which started as books by Chris Van Allsburg. You can find a list of other examples on the All the Tropes page for “the game come to life“.
As Ben mentions, The Last Starfighter (1984) blurs the line of the trope a bit – the video game isn’t real, but it is a training program for starfighters in a real space war.
In Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985), based on his 1977 short story and revised in 1991, Ender is one of many children trained to fight from a young age in an orbital Battle School, using a series of games. This is supposedly to prepare them for future conflicts with the alien Formics, and Ender turns out to be a tactical genius, eventually given more and more difficult mission simulations. The film version in 2013 starred Asa Butterfield as Ender and also features Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.
Rhianna Pratchett has worked on many games, including the humorous Lord of the Rings parody series Overlord, the modern iteration of Tomb Raider and its first sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Mirror’s Edge, among many others. She is also co-director of Narrativia, the company that holds and manages licensing rights to Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property. Rhianna’s web site rhiannapratchett.com is a bit out of date, but you can follow her on Twitter at @rhipratchett. (We do!)
The Gulf War was a conflict between Iraq – who had invaded its neighbour Kuwait over land and oil disputes – and a coalition of forces primarily from the US, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Egypt, though many other allied countries (including Australia) also participated. The war lasted for six months from August 2nd, 1990 until February 28th, 1991, with the defeat of Iraq. The US military named the operation “Desert Shield” and then “Desert Storm”, and it was commanded by General “Stormin'” Norman Schwarzkopf. It was extraordinary at the time for the extensive news footage of front-line fighting; some journalists and political commentators nicknamed it “the videogame war”, no doubt part of Pratchett’s inspiration for the novel. Towards the end of the war, an uprising against Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein failed when promised US support was not delivered. Hussein remained the country’s ruler until his death during the later Iraq War (referenced in Pratchett’s later foreword to the novel), which began in 2003 over claims – later found to be false – that the country was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction”.
Wing Commander (1990; released in 1994) is probably the main inspiration for the game Only You Can Save Mankind. It contains many elements seen in the game in the book, including the (then) graphically impressive image of the starfighter cockpit, a variety of weapons, and a higher degree of “realism” (for a given value of realism). The player is a pilot in the 27th Century Terran Confederation, fighting the aggressively expansionist lion-like species, the Kilrathi. It was a huge hit and spawned numerous expansion packs and multiple sequels. The series became famous for its use of cutscenes to advance the plot; from the third instalment these included full-motion video and many famous Hollywood actors including Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, Clive Owen and John Hurt. The Kilrathi were originally very one-dimensional villains, but were given a more complex and sometimes sympathetic portrayal in later games. There were also novels, an animated television series in 1996, and a (very unsuccessful) live action film in 1999 starring Freddie Prinze Junior, Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard, Tchéky Karyo, Jürgen Prochnow, and David Warner.
Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters is a space adventure game created by developer Toys For Bob in 1992. The player captains a ship constructed from advanced alien technology and discovers the alien Ur-Quan have come to Earth’s part of the galaxy, destroying or enslaving every species they meet. The player is tasked with recruiting alien cultures to join the Earth in an alliance to defeat the Ur-Quan. The game is a cult classic remembered for its huge story, resource management, space battles, weird aliens and sense of humour, though its representation of women is problematic. There was one sequel, Star Control 3 (not by the original developers), and recently a prequel, Star Control: Origins. There’s an official free version of the game available, titled The Ur-Quan Masters for copyright reasons, which includes new music and the voice-acting files from a later console version of the game.
Text adventure games, also known as “interactive fiction” or “interactive novels”, were a popular game genre in which the player types commands to perform various actions, with feedback supplied in prose. One of the biggest publishers was Infocom, whose break-out hit was the fantasy spoof Zork and its many sequels – there are hints in his works that Pratchett was a fan. Another fan was Douglas Adams, who himself penned an interactive fiction version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for Infocom and loved the form so much he used it for his one original video game, Starship Titanic. You can play the Hitchhikers game for free online, as the BBC host fancy, updated 20th anniversary and 30th anniversary editions of the game. Another significant text adventure was The Hobbit, written in large part by Dr. Veronika Megler for Australian publisher Melbourne House in 1982, but there are literally thousands of them – including all the far too difficult ones described by Steve.
The text adventure Twitter account Ben refers to is the bot “Frustrated Quests”, which you can find at @verbquests.
“The Hero with the Thousand Extra Lives” is a nod to “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Joseph Campbell’s book in which he describes the “mono-myth” – a story which can be found in thousands of variations across many cultures. Pratchett is clearly familiar with the work as he subverts and references its tropes many times throughout the Discworld books.
We talked with Amie Kaufman about Truckers in episode nine, Upscalator to Heaven.
ICQ was an early live chat program created by the company Mirabilis in 1996, though it was soon bought by AOL and later the Russian internet company Mail.Ru. It’s name is not an acronym, but a short version of “I Seek You”. It’s still available, including on SmartPhones, though it’s popularity has sharply declined since its heyday of over 100 million users every day.
IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, an early chat service in which users could log on to a server and then join channels to chat live with other users. It’s notable for being the birthplace of many of the text abbreviations now commonly used on mobile phones and across the Internet, including LOL, ROFL, IMHO, AFK and many others.
Gmail (or Google Mail) started with a testing phase in 2004, and you could only join by being invited by another user. This ended in 2009 – as did the ability to get a gmail address that resembled your actual name.
Mavis Beacon, of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing fame, is not a real person – she is a fictional character created to make the program feel more personable. In early versions of the software she was only represented by a photo of Renée L’Espérance, a perfume counter worker discovered by an employee of Software Toolworks.
The letters Steve’s Scottish teacher was reciting – properly ASDF, JKL; – are the “home row”, the keys on which a trained typist’s fingers are supposed to rest on a QWERTY keyboard. Most keyboards still have raised dots or bars on the F and J keys to allow typists to find the home row keys without looking.
The Typing of the Dead is a 1999 typing game based on The House of the Dead 2 (1998). The original was an arcade game “rail shooter” – the character’s movement was controlled by the game, and the player used a light gun to shoot zombies in each new area as they investigated a creepy house. Typing of the Dead – originally released as an arcade game as well! – swapped out the light gun for a keyboard; words appears over each zombie, and the player (or players – you could have two at once) had to quickly type the matching word before the zombies reached them. It was later released on home consoles and computers.
Johnny and the Dead was adapted in 1995 as a four-part television series by London Weekend Television for ITV, featuring George Baker and Brian Blessed as two of the prominent ghosts, with Johnny played by Andrew Falvey (whose best-known role is probably the voice of Fiver in the late 90s series of Watership Down). Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part series in 2006 by Child’s Play Television for CBBC, featuring Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon and starring a young George MacKay – recently seen in big budget war film 1917 – as Johnny.
After a workshop season in 2000, the musical version of Only You Can Save Mankind debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, with music by Leighton James House a book and lyrics by Shaun McKenna, who also wrote the Lord of the Rings musical and many other theatre, television and radio programs. You can find information about the 2009 album version of the show, featuring six songs (we don’t know if that’s all of them), at ifnotyouthenwho.com. The composer’s Twitter account suggests that the musical might return in the near future!
We should note that Johnny and the Bomb has also been adapted into a musical, available for schools to perform, as has The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Johnny and the Dead has also been adapted for the stage, though not as a musical.
Liz really loves The Shawshank Redemption. You can hear her speak about it in several previous episodes.
Naomi Alderman’s The Power is an award-winning science fiction novel which describes a future matriarchy, created after women all over the world develop the supernatural power to emit electricity from their hands to protect, attack and heal. There are plans for a television adaptation.
Alien Nation was a 1988 American sci-fi film, later adapted into a 1989 television series. It’s set in the near future, a few years after a ship of alien refugees crashlanded in the American desert. The refugee occupants are a human-like species, the Tenctonese; they have been accepted as “Newcomers” in American society, but face prejudice from the humans they live with. The plot follows a human detective (James Caan) and his new partner (Mandy Patinkin), the first Newcomer to become a detective, as they solve crimes. The film was quite serious, but was adapted into a 1989 television series, also called Alien Nation, with a lighter tone and a new cast. It only lasted one full season, ending on a cliffhanger, but the story was concluded a few years later in five television movies featuring the same cast.
The original V was an American sci-fi television show which began as a two-part mini-series in 1983. This was followed by another mini-series in 1984 and a full season of episodes from 1984 to 1985. The plot involved a seemingly human-like species of aliens, known only as “Visitors”, who arrive on Earth seemingly in peace. The original series starred Jane Badler as Diana, glamorous deputy leader of the Visitors, who memorably unhinged her jaw to swallow a rat whole in a scene where a journalist discovers the truth: the Visitors are lizard-like creatures disguised as humans, and are working to conquer the planet. A remake television series ran for two seasons from 2009 to 2011, starring Morena Baccarin as Anna, leader of the Visitors. Jane Badler appears as Anna’s mother, named Diana after her character in the original series. In both series, some of the Visitors are shown to be sympathetic to the humans.
The Tomorrow People was an ITV sci-fi series about a group of teenagers who developed psychic powers, and sought each other out to protect themselves from governments and aliens. The original series ran from 1973 to 1979, but after reruns of the original proved popular in America, a remake was made in 1992 with a new cast and the same basic premise.
Pokémon is a series of videogames developed for Nintendo by developer Game Freak. In the game, the player is a budding trainer of Pokémon (a name derived from “Pocket Monster”). Pokémon are creatures with a variety of special powers which can be captured and trained for battle against other Pokémon. The goal of the game is to become the greatest trainer by defeating the leaders of various Pokémon gyms and the mysterious “Elite Four” trainers, and to capture an example of every different species of Pokémon – hence the catchphrase “Gotta catch ’em all!” The first two games were Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green (Pokémon Blue in English speaking markets) for the Nintendo GameBoy in 1996. Between them the games featured 151 unique Pokemon species, but each version had some that were unique, requiring players to trade with each other to complete their collection. Professor Oak is a character in the game, a researcher who gives the player their first Pokémon, allowing them to choose one of three. He provides some guidance and information at various parts of the game, and also became a character in the popular anime series spawned from the games’ massive success. There have since been seven more generations of the games, each one adding a new region to the game’s world (usually modelled on a real world location) and more species of Pokémon. There have also been card games, films, toys and many spin-off games, including the hugely popular mobile game Pokémon GO.
Pokémon Yeah and Pokémon Nah are spoof designs for a pair of Pokémon games set in a new “Straya” region, resembling Australia. Complete with several new Pokemon designs, the art is elaborate and amazing; it’s the work of @VivInkArt on Twitter, and you can find the designs in a thread starting with this tweet. The earlier collection of Australian Pokemon is a full Pokédex worth – 151 pixel-art designs by Australian artist Paul Robertson, aka Probzz. The easiest place to find them is probably on his Instagram; start with this post.
Braveheart (1995) is an historical war film directed by and starring Mel Gibson as William Wallace, a Scottish knight and major leader in the First War of Scottish Independence (1296-1328). While it was a tremendous box office success, it has been soundly criticised for being highly inaccurate. A sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019 with Angus MacFayden reprising the role of Robert, another historical character and King of Scotland, whom many felt was misrepresented in the original film. (We’ll talk about Braveheart again in the context of the Mac Nac Feegle in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.)
The Illuminae Files are trilogy of YA sci-fi novels – Illuminae, Gemina and Obsidio – by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Set centuries in the future, mega-corporation Beitech Industries launches an attack on a corporate rival’s illegal mining operation on a backwater planet. The books follow the fleeing survivors, especially a small group of teenage protagonists, as they fight to survive. The story is presented as a series of first-hand documents, compiled by the mysterious “Illuminae Group”, delivered as evidence to a trial of senior BeiTech officials.
Gaston is the antagonist of Disney’s 1991 animated musical version of Beauty and the Beast (and its 2017 live-action remake). Presented as a traditionally brave, strong and handsome hero-type, Gaston is vain, arrogant, anti-intellectual and blind to his own faults. When he learns Belle loves the Beast, he attempts to kill him. His sidekick Le Fou spurs him to sing his own praises in the song “Gaston”, which includes lines like “No-one’s slick as Gaston / No-one’s quick as Gaston / No-one’s neck’s as incredibly thick as Gaston”.
At the end of Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), protagonist Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) brings the girl Newt back to the rescue ship piloted by her android ally Bishop (Lance Henrikson)…only to find the Alien Queen has snuck on board, and announces her presence by impaling Bishop with her barbed tail. This leads some fans to shout “Queen takes Bishop!” when watching the scene.
Billy Elliot (2000) is a “dance drama” film set in the North of England during the 1985 miner’s strike. Billy, the son and brother of striking miners, discovers a love for ballet, but is forbidden from attending lessons by his traditionally masculine father. Kirsty’s comment when she invites Johnny into her bedroom is a tamer version of Debbie, Billy’s teacher’s daughter, who invites him into her bedroom and also offers to show him her fanny.
Wobbler’s game Journey to Alpha Centauri inspired a real game, Journey to Alpha Centauri (In Real Time), written by Julian Fleetwood in 1998 using the interactive fiction language Inform. It doesn’t currently seem to be available anywhere, but you probably don’t have a spare 3,000 years to finish it anyway.
Johnny’s nickname, “Rubber”, is surprisingly rude for a middle-grade book: it comes from “rubber johnnies”, a common slang term for condoms in the UK.
Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 computer-animated Disney film in which the title character grows tired of being a video game villain and tries to be a hero in other games, causing glitches which might get his arcade machine shut down permanently. It’s wonderful and you should definitely watch it. We can’t comment on the 2019 sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet.
Cacodemons are one of the common demonic enemies in the Doom videogames, unleashed by human experiments in dimensional travel on Mars. They resemble a floating ball of flesh covered in spikes, with a single eye and a huge mouth full of sharp teeth. They appear as the mascot and icon for the first game in the series. The name comes from the Greek κακοδαίμων (kakodaimon), “evil spirit”, and is the original term from which the modern English meaning of “demon” is derived.
The shoot-’em-up Ben mentioned was Xenon 2 Megablast, released for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1989, and later ported to other computers and consoles.
The old-school videogames mentioned by Steve are probably Dig Dug and Burger Time, both of which were originally arcade games.
The Witness is a 2016 exploration/puzzle game by Jonathan Blow, in which the player wanders an abandoned island complex solving a variety of puzzles with minimal instructions.
Goodnight Mister Tom is a 1981 novel by English author Michelle Magorian. The protagonist, Willie, is evacuated from 1939 London to the countryside, where he begins to bond with his elderly guardian Mister Tom and understadn that his mother had been abusing him.
Who Killed Kennedy is long out of print, but you can download a twentieth anniversary edition – with a new ending and commentary from the author – from the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.
Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) is the first in a series of hugely successful novels by John Marsden which depict the invasion of Australia by a coalition of South Asian nations, and a small group of teenagers who escape initial capture and try to fight back. It was followed by six sequels. The first book has been adapted into a 2010 film and a 2016 television series for ABC3.

#Pratchat18 Notes and Errata

8 April 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” featuring guest Will Kostakis, discussing the 1976 novel The Dark Side of the Sun.

Since the 1990s many have claimed that if you play Pink Floyd’s hit 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon while watching MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), the songs supposedly sync up with the vision. Fans of “Dark Side of the Rainbow” (as it’s known) suggest hitting play when the lion roars for the second or third time, and claim the experience is profound, but the band and producers say any synchronicity between them is just a coincidence.
Terry Pratchett’s first published novel was The Carpet People in 1971, five years before The Dark Side of the Sun. He was 23 at the time, but had started work on the book considerably earlier; the revised 1992 edition is described as being “co-written by Terry Pratchett, aged seventeen, and master storyteller, Terry Pratchett, aged forty-three”.
“Galaxy Song” was written and performed by Eric Idle for the 1983 film Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. In a Python reunion live show which toured in 2015, Brian Cox appeared in a filmed insert nitpicking the song’s accuracy. It’s mostly close enough for rock and roll; in one of it’s most accurate lines, it actually says the galaxy is “100,000 light years side-to-side”, not 30,000. (Ben also made this mistake in an episode of re:Discovery.)
Gilpin’s Space is a 1986 novel by Russian-born American sci-fi author Reginald Bretnor. It paints a dystopian authoritarian future in which “eccentric genius” Saul Gilpin steals a submarine and uses it to successfully test his new hyperdrive engine. The novel follows a group of his friends who follow his instructions to steal another submarine and escape the oppressive regime at home for other worlds. It’s…probably not going to stand up to a second read.
The Dark Side of the Sun was first published (with a cover drawn by Terry!) in 1976 by Colin Smythe Ltd, who also published the original editions of The Carpet People and Strata. It was republished with cover art by prolific sci-fi artist Tim White, and then again by Pratchett’s later publisher Corgi in 1988, after the Discworld series had proven a hit. They used a new cover by Josh Kirby; Kirby also painted a second cover when another edition was printed by Doubleday in around 1993, which was also used for later Corgi editions.
The trope of the ancient, all-powerful “Precursors” crops up in just about everything, as Ben mentions, but he forgot that Star Wars does have them – just not in the films. The Knights of the Old Republic videogame introduced the Rakata, an ancient culture whose advanced technology is important to the game’s plot.
We previously covered the “E.T. is in Star Wars and Yoda is in E.T.” thing in our Guards! Guards! episode.
Emperor Ptarmigan is definitely not Emperor Parmigiana, but for the uninitiated: “parmigiana” is an Italian dish made with crumbed fried eggplant, tomato sauce and cheese. In Australia the original only became popular fairly recently, but for many years a “chicken parmigiana” – which replaces the eggplant with a chicken schnitzel – has been a pub food staple for decades. It’s known variously as a “parma”, “parmo” or “parmi”, depending on where you’re from.
The “Dom/Sub” joke that threatens to derail the podcast refers to dominance and submission – sexual play in which one or more parties are explicitly submissive to others. This can take many forms; we recommend you don’t learn about it through Fifty Shades of Grey, which many professionals say models an abusive relationship.
In the original Star Wars films it’s established that a mystical “Force” permeates the Universe, and that some people – Jedi and Sith, mostly – are able to use it to perform various physical and mental feats. In the 1999 prequel The Phantom Menance, George Lucas introduced the idea that a person’s ability to use the Force relies on the concentration of microscopic lifeforms called “Midi-chlorians” in their blood. Fans did not like it. In his defence, Lucas originally had the idea back when he made the first film, but it’s still made the magic feel more mundane and opened up a lot of stupid questions about how it works.
The “Bacta tank” is the big round jar Luke is in at the end of The Empire Strikes Back as he recovers from his injuries. “Bacta” is the name of the synthetic restorative liquid inside. Old Republic era stories establish that such tanks previously used Kolto, a naturally occurring liquid from the planet Manaan, but it was replaced by bacta a long time before the rise of the Galactic Empire.
Robert Lawrence Stine, aka R. L. Stine, is a prolific American children’s horror author, best known for the hugely popular Goosebumps series of more than sixty books. The series has been adapted for both television and film, the latter with Stine appearing as a character, played by Jack Black.
Plasmo is a shape-shifting alien “polybop” created by Australian animator Andrew Lawrence. Plasmo originally came to fame in the half-hour stop-motion animated film Happy Hatchday to Plasmo (1989), in which he is hunted by incompetent intergalactic mercenaries Coredor and Brucho. The film was screened repeatedly on the ABC for around five years in the early 1990s, and was eventually followed by Plasmo, a series of 13 5-minute episodes with higher production values. In the series, Coredor and Brucho have team up with Plasmo and his friends, and go on adventures together.
In case the jargon left you confused, “MVP” is short for “Most Valuable Player”, and to “stan” someone is to be an obsessive fan of them. The former is originally a sports term, but has been extended to many other areas. The latter is both a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan”, and a reference to the single “Stan”, about a murderously obsessive fan, from Eminem’s 2000 album The Marshall Mathers EP.
In the 1997 Luc Besson sci-fi film The Fifth Element, an ancient “divine being” named Leeloo (played by Mila Jovovich) is blown up, and future Earth scientists use a sophisticated device to reconstruct her from her severed arm.
The Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, originally published in short story form in the 1940s, introduce the idea of “psychohistory”: a mathematical science that can predict the future. Unlike p-math, it only works at the level of human society as a whole, and over very long periods of time. The fictional inventor of psychohistory, Harry Seldon, records messages for future generations of humans many centuries after his own death to help guide the titular Foundation.
It’s true: in the videogame Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, Shelob the giant spider can turn into an attractive human woman. This supposedly explains how she was able to talk to Gollum.
In the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts films, Ezra Miller plays Credence Barebone, a young man with a dark secret. It’s…pretty grim.
The Ringworld books by Larry Niven, starting with 1970’s Ringworld, explore a vast, ring-shaped artefact created by – you guessed it – a mysterious and supposedly vanished unknown alien species.
2008’s Quantum of Solace was the twenty-second James Bond film, and the second to star Daniel Craig. It’s a direct sequel to Casino Royale, with Bond seeking revenge for the death of a friend and thereby uncovering the Quantum Group, who plan to stage a coup for commercial gain. They communicate in secret by means of earpieces during an opera performance.
Monkey is a 1978 Japanese television series, adapting the Chinese folk novel Journey to the West. In the story, the priest Tripitaka is sent on a pilgrimage to India to fetch new Buddhist scriptures. As penance for past misdeeds, the immortal stone Monkey – along with the demons Pigsy and Sandy – is sent to be Tripitaka’s guardian. Monkey is forced to wear a golden headband, and Tripitaka is taught a special sutra which makes it constrict, causing Monkey considerable pain; this helps prevent him from fighting and killing everyone they meet. It’s a unique series in that it was dubbed by English actors who often did not have a complete script and improvised wildly based on synopses of each episode. It was fairly popular in Japan, but reached cult status in Australia and Canada. Some of the choices of accent and phrasing made by the (primarily white) voice cast we’d now consider problematic, at best.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a 1967 post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror story written by Harlan Ellison. Considering its super dark and fatalistic tone, it was rather surprising when Ellison adapted into an adventure videogame in 1995.
A Knight’s Tale was written, produced, and directed by Brian Helgeland in 2001. It stars Heath Ledger as a peasant who pretends to be a knight, and has basically nothing to do with the Chaucer tale from which it takes its name. (Paul Bettany does play Chaucer in the film, though.)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 film written by Arthur C Clarke (who also wrote a novelisation) and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The plot involves human astronauts travelling to Jupiter to investigate a monolith left behind by – you guessed it – a race of mysterious all-powerful aliens, though the star of the show is really the sinister intelligent computer, HAL.
This note is for Sven: we’re sorry we forgot the second part of your question about which authors we think are most consistent in tone and quality of writing. We were really tired.
Go Set A Watchman is a novel written by Harper Lee, published in 2015, fifty-five years after her classic To Kill a Mockingbird. She died the following year. While it was promoted as a sequel to Mockingbird, it was actually written first, and is considered by many to actually be an inferior first draft of her beloved first novel.

#Pratchat31 Notes and Errata

8 May 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.

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

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

Kicking off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk

31 January 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

The next few months are a busy time for your friendly neighbourhood Pratchatters – and you can catch us at some great events coming up in March and April!

Ben has had a busy start to the year: in January he launched a new weekly Star Trek podcast, re:Discovery, with co-host Carla Donnelly, and in February he’s running a crowdfunding campaign as part of Kickstarter’s Zine Quest collection to publish his roleplaying game Amateur Hour Apocalypse. Watch out for more on that one on Twitter when it launches!

In March, Liz and Ben will be appearing (separately) at Speculate, the Victorian speculative fiction writers’ festival! The festival happens over two days in Melbourne at the Gasworks Arts Park on March 15 and 16. You can find the full program and tickets at specfic.com.au – note that earlybird ticket prices are only available until February 11, so get in quick if you want a discount! The con is also on Twitter at @SpecFicVic.

Liz and Ben will also be appearing as special guests at this year’s Australian Discworld Convention, Nullus Anxietas 7, over the weekend of April 13 and 14! As well as appearing on several panels and events, they’ll be recording a live episode of Pratchat which we’ll release as a bonus in the regular podcast feed. You can find out more about the convention and get yourself a membership at ausdwcon.org, or follow them on Twitter at @ausdwcon. We’ll post full details of the Pratchat appearances when they’re finalised!

April is also Melbourne International Comedy Festival time! You can catch Ben in his new show, You Chose Poorly, with Alanta Colley from April 1 to 7 at Campari House. We’ll post more details, and a roundup of Pratchat guests also appearing at the festival, in March.