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Elizabeth Flux

#Pratchat38 – Moisten to Steal

8 December 2020 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Writers, comedians, magicians and con-men experts Nicholas J Johnson and Lawrence Leung join us as we meet the distressingly named Moist von Lipwig in his 2004 debut, Terry Pratchett’s 33rd Discworld novel, Going Postal!

Con-man Moist von Lipwig (aka Albert Spangler) thinks he’s come to the end of the line when he’s hanged by order of Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. But while the world believes him hanged, the city’s tyrant has actually saved him for something bigger: he wants Moist to revitalise the city’s derelict post office. It seems like a hopeless task with no chance of success or escape, what with the mountains of mail, unsatisfactory staff, golem parole officer, and the communications monopoly of the Grand Trunk Sempahore Company, run by the piratical Reacher Gilt. But every con-man needs a challenge…

Pratchett’s first Moist book is a great in to the Discworld at large, with a gripping self-contained story of new technology vs old, capitalism vs the public good, and one man’s lifetime of criminal habits vs his better nature. As well as Moist himself, it introduces such memorable characters as Mr Pump, Stanley the pin collector, and the one and only Adorabelle Dearheart. (Everyone in this book has an amazing name.) It’s not a short book, and we struggle to cover all its themes, twists and turns. Do you love Moist von Lipwig? Could you get over his name? Could you operate a Clacks tower? And just how deep did Vetinari’s plan go, anyway? Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat38.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_38.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:24:42 — 66.7MB)

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Guest Nicholas J Johnson is an author, magician and expert in scams and swindles, earning himself the nickname “Australia’s Honest Con-Man”. His new children’s book, the “autobiographical” Tricky Nick, features magic and time travel and all sorts, and is available now from Pan Macmillan. Find out more about Nick’s live performances and workshops at conman.com.au, or follow him on Twitter at @countlustig.

Guest Lawrence Leung is a comedian, screenwriter and actor, known to Australian audiences from his roles in Offspring and Top of the Lake, and his own shows including Lawrence Leung’s Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and Maximum Choppage, and the feature film Sucker. Find out all the latest about Lawrence, including when you can catch his live-streamed comedy shows, at lawrenceleung.com, or you can follow him on Twitter at @Lawrence_Leung.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Our plan to cover Sir Terry’s short fiction was via live shows, but since that hasn’t worked out for us this year, in January we’re going to discuss 1998’s short witches story, The Sea and Little Fishes. We’ll also be welcoming our first international guest: Marc Burrows, author of the Pratchett biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett! Send us your questions via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat39.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Adorabelle Dearheart, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Moist von Lipwig, Mustrum Ridcully, Patrician, Sacharissa Cripslock

#Pratchat81 Notes and Errata

8 November 2024 by Ben 2 Comments

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 81, “Only Fowls and Horses”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1990 short story “Hollywood Chickens”, and 1972 short story “From the Horse’s Mouth”, with guest Dr Laura Jean McKay.

Iconographic Evidence

We’re hoping to find the illustration from the original version of “Hollywood Chickens” from More Tales From the Forbidden Planet; if you have access to a copy, please let us know!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on Only Fools and Horses, a popular BBC sitcom which originally ran between 1981 and 1991, and continued to show up in the form of Christmas specials until 2006. It starred David Jason (known to Discworld fans for playing Albert and later Rincewind in The Mob’s adaptations for Sky Television) and Nicholas Lyndhurst as “Del Boy” and Rodney Trotter, two half brothers living in south-east London. The show revolves around their various get rich schemes, mostly to do with buying and selling dodgy goods. It holds the record for the highest ratings for a UK sitcom, with 24 million people tuning in to watch the supposed last ever episode in 1996.
  • If The Animals in That Country sounds familiar it may be because it’s won many awards, including the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Fiction, being named a Slate and Sunday Times Book Of The Year, and the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The title might also be familiar – it’s named after a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood.
  • Thelma & Louise – the regular one, without a dingo – is a beloved 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott (yes, the Alien guy) and written by Callie Khouri. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the titular friends, whose holiday road trip goes horribly wrong…which isn’t a great description of the film, but it’s considered a modern feminist classic for good reason. David and Sarandon were both nominated for Academy Awards, and it was also nominated for several others, winning for Best Screenplay. A musical version is currently in development.
  • Pratchett’s most prolific year was, in fact, 1990 – the same year he wrote “Hollywood Chickens”. That year he published five novels: Diggers (#Pratchat13), Good Omens (#Pratchat15), Wings (#Pratchat20), Eric (#Pratchat7) and Moving Pictures (#Pratchat10).
  • Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-American writer best known for her prolific personal journals, which she started writing at the age of 11.
  • Pratchett actually says that “short stories cost me blood” twice – and in the same book! In A Blink of the Screen, he says this in the author’s note for “Turntables of the Night” (see #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”) and “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”).
  • Pratchett’s meeting with Arthur C. Clarke is detailed in Chapter 3 of A Life With Footnotes. It did indeed happen in the toilet.
  • The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award for the year’s best science fiction novel. It was established in 1987 via a grant from Clarke; the winner is chosen by a panel made up of members of three prominent British science fiction organisations. The Animals in That Country won in 2021; the most recent winner is Martin McInnes for his novel In Ascension.
  • Diane Duane is an American science fiction and fantasy author, best known for the Young Wizards series of fantasy novels, as well as decades of work on Star Trek as a novelist, screenwriter and more. But that’s just scratching the surface of her work. As Diane was kind enough to point out to us in a comment below (when this note was sadly left very unfinished), she was also a long-time friend of Pratchett’s. We’ve previously linked to Diane’s blog post about the Maggi soup ads incident, as well as this post about it on the Stuffed Crocodile blog; both of them have pictures of the affected books. The previous mention of the soup story was in Eeek Club 2023.
  • The Hollywood Freeway Chickens are absolutely real, though their origins are a mystery. The original colony lives near the exit to Vineland Avenue, and they seem to have been there since 1969 (so a bit earlier than Diane’s story). There’s also a second colony, the “New Freeway Chickens”, a couple of miles away. Several people have come forward over the years claiming to have put them there (via truck accident or otherwise), but none of these stories have been verified. Attempts to remove the chickens have never managed to catch them all, so while we couldn’t find definite confirmation of this, it seems likely that they’re still there now. Listener Natalie was kind enough to ask Diane Duane about it via Tumblr on our behalf; and Diane was a good sport and gave a lovely answer. You can read the original discussion on Tumblr, but in brief: Diane had seen the chickens “often”, and mentioned that “when the subject came up in some convention bar or other, (a) we were in Telling Another Writer About A Cool if Unlikely-Sounding Thing mode—at which time you do not “pull the long bow,” just lay out the facts as known to you—and (b) I knew quite well Terry’d later do his fact-checking and possibly find out more about the story than I knew: which would be fun. …Thus (eventually/accidentally) leaving me with one of the greatest blurb slugs ever seen. 😄”
  • The X-Files (1993-2002; 2016-2018) is a classic sci-fi crime drama. It follows two FBI agents, weirdo Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and skeptical Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned weird unsolved cases – the “X-Files” – which usually (but not always) have a supernatural explanation. We’ve previously mentioned the show in #Pratchat35, #Pratchat36, #Prachat42 and #Pratchat69.
  • The Ursula Le Guin story about ants Laura mentions is “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, first published in the 1974 anthology Fellowship of the Stars. The phrase being debated in the story is indeed “Up with the Queen!”
  • More notes coming soon.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: A Blink of the Screen, A Stroke of the Pen, Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, Short Fiction

#EeekClub2023 Notes and Errata

25 May 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2023“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

The “I’m not an actor” scene from My Favourite Year, starring not Laurence Olivier, but Peter O’Toole.

Notes and Errata

  • If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
  • This is our third Eeek Club special; the other two are (predictably) Eeek Club 2021 and Eeek Club 2022.
  • The Pratcats are the cat owners of your two human hosts. They are Asimov and Huxley, who live with Liz, and Kaos, who lives with Ben. Kaos lived up to his name this episode when he unplugged Ben’s microphone near the end of the recording; if you notice any decline in audio quality towards the end, that’d be why.
  • We mention a lot of actors and shows in our casting discussion:
    • Brian Blessed has been suggested as a Mustrum Ridcully by many, many fans, if you go looking, so it’s a little surprising Ben hasn’t seen anyone do it before. Ben lists many of his famous screen roles, but Blessed wasn’t in Excalibur; in Ben’s defence, as he says, everyone else was. One role Ben neglected to mention is that Blessed was in the 1995 television adaptation of Johnny and the Dead, playing William “Bill” Stickers. A dream come true for Pratchett if he did base Ridcully on him!
    • Elisabeth Moss is an American actor best known for her starring role as June (aka Offred) in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but has also been in the 2020 film version of The Invisible Man, the television adaptation of time travel horror Shining Girls, and the upcoming Taika Waititi film Next Goal Wins. Liz also mentions The Square, a 2017 Swedish satirical film directed by Ruben Östlund, in which Moss plays a journalist named Anne.
    • Richard Ayoade’s more recent screen roles have included voice acting in The Lego Movie 2, The Mandalorian, DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys and Pixar’s Soul, as well hosting the television shows Gadget Man and Question Team and frequently appearing as a guest on panel shows. He was also in the other The Watch, a terrible 2012 movie about a group of idiot neighbourhood watch members who stumble across an alien invasion. (It was discussed by our sibling podcast, Who Watches the Watch, in the episode “Who Watches ’The Watch’ (2012)”.)
    • Taika Waititi is now best known as a director of big Hollywood films, but we still fondly remember him as Viago in the original What We Do in the Shadows, which also features his Our Flag Means Death co-star Rhys Darby, the third member of Flight of the Conchords. If you’re not familiar with Our Flag Means Death, it’s a heartwarming, comic, queer retelling of the story of Stede Bonnet, a real merchant turned pirate from the golden age of piracy, who did indeed cross paths with Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.
    • Charles Dance is now most famous for playing Tywin Lannister, the scheming patriarch of House Lannister, in Game of Thrones, but his turn as Vetinari in Going Postal was just the year before! He’s also known for Alien3, The Crown and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, where he appears as Roderick Burgess, the man who summons and traps Dream and sets the plot of the series in motion.
    • Yeun Sang-yeop, or Steven Yuen as he’s usually credited, does indeed play Glenn in The Walking Dead; he played the character for a little over six seasons. You may also have seen him in Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix film Okja, Jordan Peele’s recent sci-fi spectacle Nope, or as the voice of the title character in the animated Amazon superhero adaptation Invincible. He’s also in Love Me, a sci-fi film scheduled for release in 2024 and apparently not related to the TV series.
    • Ivor Novello was a Welsh singer and actor, who gained fame not only in silent films but also on the stage. He was a successful composer and writer too, with many hit films and stage musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.
    • Melissa Jaffer has had a long career in Australian television, but you probably know her from the gloriously weird US/Australian sci-fi series Farscape, where she played Utu-Noranti Pralatong in the show’s final seasons. The ABC’s Swap Shop, which ran for a single season of 52 episodes in 1988 (and managed to so impress itself on a young Ben’s brain), featured Jaffer as Mimi, the proprietor of the tiitular shop where anyone could swap something new for something in the shop. It’s not related to the earlier BBC series The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a live Saturday morning show for kids hosted by Noel Edmonds, or the reboot of that Swap Shop with puppet fox Basil Brush, Basil’s Swap Shop, in 2008.
    • Bob Morley is an Australian actor best known, as Liz mentions, from teen sci-fi drama The 100, which she’s mentioned on the show before. As well as roles in both of the major Australian soaps, Home and Away and Neighbours, he’s recently appeared in episodes of Nathan Fillion’s police drama The Rookie and the Australian series Love Me for streaming service Binge, an adaptation of the Swedish series Älska mig.
  • In Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the television adaptation of the Phyne Fisher books written by Kerry Greenwood, the titular detective is played by Essie Davis, who was . Davis’ version of the character seems to be somewhere in her 30s or early 40s, but in the novels Phryne is 28.
  • Guest Andy Matthews joined us in #Pratchat64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, to discuss the short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”.
  • It is indeed Ponder who, with the help of Ridcully and the other wizards of the High Energy Magic Building, traps sound in a string in a box in Soul Music. More on the book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
  • The “Machete Order” for Star Wars is named after the blog on which it first appeared, “No Machete Juggling”, written by film fan Rob Hilton in 2011. The basic idea is to avoid spoiling the big reveal near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which comes as no surprise if you’ve already watched the prequel movies. The original recommendation is to watch Episodes IV, V, II, III and VI in that order, leaving out Episode I entirely. Others have gone deeper, suggested specific moments when you stop one of the films to watch others before returning to the film you paused, or including only specific scenes from certain films, and so on. You can read the original blog post on Rob Hilton’s current website, alongside an update which answers questions and adds the sequel films (the short answer is anything after Episode VI is just watched in chronological order).
  • As we’ve noted in our episodes about them, Tiffany ages 1-3 years between most of her books, whereas the gap between other Discworld novels usually seems shorter, but also is never stated as clearly. There are therefore two different attempts to assemble a timeline of the series just on the L-Space wiki; for the record, Ben prefers the original. In shorthand, though, most of the books take place in chronological order, with the notable exception of Small Gods (most of which happens about a century before everything else), and possibly Pyramids, though the discrepancy over this is happily waved aside in Thief of Time.
  • Catfishing refers to using a fake identity, including using photos of someone else, to interact with other people via social media. The term was coined by the 2010 documentary Catfish, which documents an online relationship begun by the brother of one of the filmmakers which turns out to be with a fictional person. There’s some controversy over how early the creators knew about the deception, and whether they pretended not to catch on in as part of making the film, but the false persona and the person behind it were real. The term comes from a story told by a person in the film about how catfish were sometimes shipped with cod to keep them alert and active, even though the cod were the marketable fish.
  • Byron Baes is a 2022 Netflix reality series set in the beach town of Byron Bay, New South Wales, following the lives of several social media stars. Byron is a hotbed of dubious wellness and hippie culture and has become hugely commercialised over the past few decades, so it’s no surprise influencers spend a lot of time there.
  • We’re sure we’ve linked to the British man who greeted his farm animals on social media before, but we’ve so far been unable to find him (it’s not easy searching through nearly seventy previous episodes’ worth of notes). If you know who he is, let us know!
  • For those who missed the Maggi Noodles reference, Pratchett famously cancelled his contract with his original German publisher Heyne Verlag when he discovered they were inserting ads into the middle of their sci-fi books – including ads for Maggi Soups (not noodles) in their translations of Pyramids, Sourcery and others. It wasn’t just an inserted extra page, either – they added text to the book to give context to the Maggi logo! This post on the Stuffed Crocodile blog has a good summary of the whole palaver, including a picture of an affected copy of Sourcery. Pratchett wasn’t singled out for this nonsense; author Diane Duane has also written about this, including some images of Heyne’s altered translations of her Star Trek novels, and the story of how Pratchett found out about it. Diane noticed this link and blogged about it briefly again on Tumblr. (Hello to Diane, and to any listeners who found us via that link!)
  • Liz’s short story about women transforming into mops is “Call Him Al”, published in Meanjin in 2017. You can read it online.
  • We discussed the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.
  • We discussed the concept of Ankh-Morpork elections in last year’s Eeek Club 2022, and it was indeed Karl’s question. (It’s right at the end.)
  • Thanks to subscribers Sally and Danny, who pointed out that we haven’t yet read the last important book which involves Nobby and Colon. Ben clearly doesn’t remember Snuff as well as he thought! (But no further spoilers, please.)
  • For more on Teppic, Ptraci, Djelybeybi and You Bastard the camel listen to our Pyramids episode, #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”.
  • Victor Tugelbend and Theda “Ginger” Withel are protagonists in Moving Pictures, which we discussed in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.
  • It’s not Laurence Olivier but Peter O’Toole who utters the line “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” It’s from the 1982 film My Favourite Year; see the iconographic evidence section above for the clip.
  • Liz mentioned the “AI Influencer” Lil Miquela, who is entirely artificial. You can find her as @lilmiquela on Instagram, where her bio reads “🤖 19-year-old robot living in LA 💖”. Be warned, she’s a bit uncanny valley.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times; he’s most famously the author of the Thursday Next series of novels in which the titular heroine lives in a world where fiction and reality are blurred, and investigates literary crimes. We are eagerly awaiting Red Side Story, the follow-up to his weird sci-fi novel Shades of Grey (subtitled The Road to High Saffron to differentiate it from that other book), about a world where humans have mostly lost the ability to see colour.
  • Ben mentions a “Yesterday-style scenario”, referring to the 2019 film Yesterday in which a man is struck by a bus and awakes to find himself in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed, and he’s the only one who can remember their music. The world is annoyingly otherwise exactly the same as the one with the Beatles in it.
  • Susannah Clarke is the British author of the enormous (and excellent) Regency fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the much shorter (and also excellent) Piranesi, as well as a number of short stories set in the Jonathan Strange universe.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat80 Notes and Errata

8 October 2024 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 80, “Always Believe in Your Golems”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s thirty-sixth Discworld novel, 2007’s Making Money, with returning guest Stephanie Convery.

Iconographic Evidence

The Count’s first appearance on Sesame Street, from the fourth season in 1972. He was created by long-time Sesame Street writer Norman Stiles, and was the longest running character performed by veteran muppet performer Jerry Nelson. Matt Vogel took over performing the Count in 2013, though he was made much less sinister fairly early on.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a riff on British pop group Spandau Ballet’s hit song “Gold”. It was released in 1983, the fourth single from their third studio album, True, and is probably their most famous song, though at the time the title track from the same album was more popular. ”Gold” was heavily inspired by the film music of John Barry, including his work on many James Bond themes; the original lyrics from the chorus are: “Gold! (Gold) / Always believe in your soul / You’ve got the power to know / You’re indestructible / Always believe in…” It’s been featuring in subsequent pop culture; Ben remembers it from the 1998 comedy Four Men in a Car where a CD gets stuck, looping the line “you’re indestructible” as the car’s occupants try and fail to destroy the car CD’s player.
  • Ben covers some Pratchett news at the end of this episode, but we’re putting the notes about them up front to make them easier to find. (Notes below continue in the usual chronological order.)
    • The newly recovered story in A Stroke of the Pen is “Arnold, the Bominable Snowman”. We’ve not yet found where it’s available online, but we can confirm that digital editions of the book have been updated to include it.
    • You can find the free Quickstart for the Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork roleplaying game on the Modiphius website. It’s also available via DriveThruRPG. The Kickstarter launched on 15 October and ended on 7 November.
    • The three upcoming Discworld plays in Australia are The Fifth Elephant from Brisbane Arts Theatre from 19 October; Maskerade by Sporadic Productions in Adelaide from 30 October; and Guards! Guards! from Roleystone Theatre in Perth from 22 November.
  • William Morris (1834 – 1896) was a British artist, poet and novelist. His “terrible utopian novels” include News from Nowhere (1890), in which a member of the Socialist League falls asleep after a meeting and wakes up in a future society built on socialist and Marxist ideals. Morris is also known for his fantasy novels, which were among the first such popular novels to include supernatural elements and were hugely influential, including on J. R. R. Tolkien. These books include The Roots of the Mountains, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, and The Water of the Wondrous Isles; many of these included socialist themes as well.
  • Making Money comes just three books after Going Postal. Moist doesn’t appear in any books in between, but he is mentioned briefly (though not by name) in Thud! He shows up again in the penultimate Discworld novel, Raising Steam, but doesn’t make any cameos in other books.
  • Robert E Howard’s Conan stories are set in the fictional “Hyborian Age” of Earth, estimated to be somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. It’s meant to represent prehistoric Europe and Northern Africa, and thus Cimmeria is the ancient home of Celtic peoples, but it’s based on ahistorical stereotypes and is functionally a collection of fantasy analogues for modern nations. The real Cimmeria was an ancient “micro continent” that was originally part of Gondwana, the southern supercontinent. It became detached around 250 million years ago and moved north as part of continental drift, eventually colliding with and becoming part of Eurasia around 150 million years ago. It now forms part of the Middle East and western and south-eastern Asia.
  • “WORDS IN THE HEART CANNOT BE TAKEN” is from a heartbreaking scene towards the end of Feet of Clay, and the words are from Dorfl.
  • Squashing bread does not make it sweeter, but chewing on it does. The missing ingredient is saliva, which begins the process of breaking down the complex carbohydrates in the bread into sugars.
  • The compulsive need to count is known as “arithmomania”, and is a feature of European vampire lore. It was usually other kinds of grains, rather than rice, though this may also be the reason for throwing salt over your shoulder to ward off the Devil – he would be compelled to stop and count every grain.
  • The jiāngshī (殭屍) or Chinese hopping vampire is a form of undead from Chinese folklore, similar in some ways to both vampires and zombies. There are many varied accounts of their powers, limitations and vulnerabilities, but they don’t seem to have to count grains of rice – instead, one method for stopping them is through a ball of sticky rice at them which will draw out the evil in their soul. They have inspired an entire genre of films, most famously the Mr Vampire comedy horror movies made in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. These popularised the hopping version of jiāngshī, gave them a standard look (traditional mandarin robes from the Qing dynasty), and established some common ways to deal with them (e.g. placing a spell written on a piece of paper on their forehead) in much the same way as early vampire films solidified European vampire lore.
  • Bram Stoker (1847-1912) drew on various bits of vampire folklore when creating Dracula, but he also incorporated real life science, beliefs about disease, recent events, and other unrelated supernatural stories. The most prominent vampire-adjacent belief at the time was that contagious diseases were caused by corpses which still contained blood in the heart. This led especially poor folk in rural areas to dig up corpses and destroy them to try and halt the spread of illness, a practice which seems to have directly inspired parts of the novel. Stoker wrote fifteen novels, the second most famous being his last, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), another horror story incorporating various elements from folklore.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: A Stroke of the Pen, Adorabelle Dearheart, Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Making Money, Moist von Lipwig, Short Fiction, Stephanie Convery, Vetinari

#Pratchat80 – Always Believe in Your Golems

8 October 2024 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

Inequality reporter Stephanie Convery returns on a trip with Liz and Ben into the world of banking, high finance and monetary theory in Terry Pratchett’s thirty-sixth Discworld novel, 2007’s Making Money.

The Ankh-Morpork Post Office is running very smoothly – which has left Moist von Lipwig, reformed con-man and Postmaster General, at a loose end. But he resists the Patrician’s offer of a new job revitalising the Royal Mint and Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork. The bank’s current owner is a Mark 1 Feisty Old Lady who knows her rich family are out to get her – and her little dog, too. But despite Moist’s best attempts to not get involved, both dog and bank wind up in his care – putting him in the sights of the Lavish family, and especially Vetinari-obsessed Cosmo Lavish. Meanwhile, manager of the Golem Trust (and Moist’s fiancée) Adora Belle Dearheart is digging up something ancient out on the desert. And Moist’s past is about to catch up with him…

Just a few novels after debuting in Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig is back! Making Money is about the nature of money, but also about the thrill of the chase, grappling with one’s inner nature, and obsession. Aside from Gladys the Golem, Moist and Adora Belle bring few of their previous supporting cast along for the ride; instead we meet a new cast including Mr Bent, the Lavishes, another Igor, the Post-Mortem Communications Department of Unseen University, and the very good boy Mr Fusspot.

Does this live up to the promise of Going Postal? Could Moist be in other Discworld books in disguise – and if so, as who? Did you guess Mr Bent’s secret? And if you had a Glooper, what would you use it to change in the world of money? No purchase necessary to join the conversation for this episode; just email us or use the hashtag #Pratchat80 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_80.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:39:14 — 73.5MB)

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Stephanie Convery (she/her) is is a writer and author. Previously the Deputy Culture Editor for The Guardian Australia, she’s now their dedicated inequality reporter. Stephanie’s first book, After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne, was published in March 2020 by Penguin Books. (We suspect it won’t be her last.) You can follow Stephanie on Twitter at @gingerandhoney, and find her work at Guardian Australia. Her previous appearances on Pratchat were for #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry” (about Mort), and #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press, and Every -ing” (about The Truth).

You’ll find full notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next episode we’re continuing our Moist streak (sorry) with the (so far) latest Discworld board game: Clacks! If you have questions about this game recreating the race between Moist and the Grand Trunk company, get them in to us by mid-October 2024 by tagging us or using the hashtag #Pratchat81 on social media, or emailing us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Adorabelle Dearheart, Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Gladys, Igor, Moist von Lipwig, Patrician, Sam Vimes

#Pratchat81 – Only Fowls and Horses

8 November 2024 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Author and poet* Dr Laura Jean McKay joins Liz and Ben for two of Terry Pratchett’s short stories about intelligent animals: “Hollywood Chickens” (1990) and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (1972).

In 1973 Hollywood, a truck full of chickens overturned on a busy highway, depositing a population of chickens on the verge. A decade and a half later, scientists try to piece together the story of how they developed and evolved in pursuit of a very specific goal…

In the town of Blackbury, rag and bone man Ron is amazed to discover that his carthorse, Johnno, can talk. Will their relationship be forever changed by the adventure they share together?

These stories don’t share too much in common beyond being about animals, but they are a nice sample of Pratchett’s writing from two interesting points in his career: towards the end of his early phase of children’s stories for newspapers, not long after his first novel was published; and at the height of his early fame – the year, in fact, that he published five novels. You can find “Hollywood Chickens” most readily in A Blink of the Screen, and “From the Horse’s Mouth” in A Stroke of the Pen.

Do you have a favourite Pratchett short story? What do you think of the way he writes animals? Should we have inserted an ad for Maggi noodles into this episode? What are your best horse pun names, and how would you get to the other side? We’d love to hear from you whether you’re a horse, chicken, human or have mutant powers: join the conversation for this episode via email, or by using the hashtag #Pratchat81 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_81.mp3

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Dr Laura Jean McKay (she/her) is an author, poet* and an Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University. Her novel The Animals in That Country – “like Thelma and Louise with a woman and a dingo” – has won multiple awards, including the Arthur C Clarke Award. Her latest book is the short fiction collection Gunflower, published in 2023. You can find Laura as @laurajeanmckay on Twitter and Instagram, and find out more about her books on her website, laurajeanmckay.com.au.

* Even if she doesn’t know it.

You’ll find full notes and errata for this episode on our website, and you can hopefully still get tickets for Guards! Guards! at the Roleystone Theatre in Perth, which opens on 22 November 2024.

Next episode we’re back on track to crack the Clacks in the most recent Discworld board game: Clacks! If you have questions about this game recreating the race between Moist and the Grand Trunk company, get them in to us ASAP by tagging us or using the hashtag #Pratchat82 on social media, or emailing us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: A Blink of the Screen, A Stroke of the Pen, animals, Ben McKenzie, Dr Laura Jean McKay, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, Short Fiction

#Pratchat79 Notes and Errata

8 August 2024 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 79, “Unalive from Überwald”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2002 short story “Death and What Comes Next”, with returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts and new guest Karen J Carlisle.

Iconographic Evidence

If you also took photos of us at the convention, please get in touch – we’d love to see them and add a few here!

You can also find photos of the convention at the official website.

A photo of Ben and Liz, in costume as Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig, attempting to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo.
Ben and Liz attempted to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo, with costume and iconographic assistance from Danny Sag.
A photo of a small piece of white paper on a green surface. Handwriting in black pen reads:
“dead and not dead”
Schrödinger’s cat
What if the cat is Greebo?
Next to the writing is drawn a small cartoon cat with prominent whiskers and an eye patch.
The audience question with the very cute illustration of Greebo!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme for Nullus Anxietas IX, “Come Alive in Überwald”, but since we were talking mostly about Death, “Live from Überwald” didn’t seem quite right.
  • Nullus Anxietas IX is, as you probably know, the ninth bi-annual Australian Discworld convention. As mentioned at the end of the episode, the next convention will be in Sydney in 2026, and you can already get a supporting membership for the next convention. For details, plus information on past conventions and Discworld fan clubs across Australia, head to ausdwcon.org.
  • Our previous live shows are:
    • #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World” from Nullus Anxietas 7
    • “Book Discussion: The Carpet People” from the Virtual Discworld Fun Day (on YouTube)
    • #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive” from Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con
  • Liz mentions two of her short stories:
    • The story about women turning into cleaning equipment is “Call Him Al”. You can read it in Meanjin, where it was published in 2020.
    • The story about an immigrant splitting into two people is “One’s Company”, originally published in the anthology Best Australian Stories 2017. It was published online at InterSastra in an Indonesian translation (“Cukup Sendiri”) by Nicolaus Gogor Seta Dewa; the original English version is also available there.
  • “Pantsers and Plotters” are widespread terms for “the two types” of writers, embraced to varying degrees by writing communities and individuals. The classification is based on whether a writer works out a plot in advance (a plotter), or writes by the seat of their pants (a pantser), making it up as they go along. It’s not entirely clear where these terms originated, but these days some writers refer to themselves as “plantsers” (a combination of the two), and other terms exist for roughly the same ideas. For example, in 2011 George R. R. Martin used the terms architect (similar to a plotter) and gardener (a variation on pantser in which the emphasis is on the weeding, i.e. editing).
  • Tansy’s stories that get mentioned include:
    • Musketeer Space, the gender-swapped Three Musketeers in space;
    • Teacup Magic, the Regency-inspired fantasy mystery series (we’ve linked to the collection);
    • We don’t think Tansy has written “Beauty and the Beast with cyborgs”, but she has written Curse of Bronze, a novella which riffs on Beauty and the Beast. It’s available for free as an ebook via BookFunnel (you’ll need to sign up to Tansy’s mailing list), or in audio form on her podcast Sheep Might Fly.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Death, Discworld, Discworld Convention, Elizabeth Flux, Karen J Carlisle, live episode, non-Discworld, Short Fiction, Tansy Rayner Roberts

#Pratchat79 – Unalive from Überwald

8 August 2024 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

Recorded live at the Australian Discworld Convention in Tarntanyangga (Adelaide), Karen J Carlisle and Tansy Rayner Roberts join us on stage to discuss short fiction, Death and the (sort of) last of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld short stories, 2004’s “Death and What Comes Next”.

Somewhere in time and space, a philosopher lies on his deathbed…and Death has come to collect. Only the philosopher isn’t convinced he’s real, or that any of this is even happening. Will “quantum” and cats in boxes be enough of an argument to dissuade Death from his job?

Created for the now defunct Time Hunt puzzle website, “Death and What Comes Next” was written somewhere between 2002 and 2004. At under 1,000 words it’s one of Pratchett’s shorter pieces of fiction, and contains several jokes he’d go on to re-use elsewhere, as well as a word puzzle which provided a code word for Time Hunt site. You can read the story for free at the L-Space Web, which also hosts fan translations in many languages.

Despite its placement in A Blink of the Screen, is this truly a Discworld story? Have you tried to solve the puzzle? How would you challenge Death to delay the time of your passing – and have you thought about what an encounter with the Discworld Death might be like for you? And is Death at his funniest here, or do you have other favourite Death moments? Join the conversation by using the hashtag #Pratchat79 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_79.mp3

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Guest Tansy Rayner Roberts (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy, cosy crime and much, much more. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men, “Men Who Respect Witches”, can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Her latest novel is a time travel comedy called Time of the Cat, and you can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media. Tansy was also a guest on our previous live episode, “A Troll New World”, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.

Guest Karen J Carlisle (she/her) is a writer and illustrator based in Adelaide whose work spans Victorian mystery, steampunk, fantasy and yes, even (mostly) cosy murders. She has some new writing in the works, but her recent “Jack the Ripper thing” is Blood Ties, which you can find via her website, karenjcarlisle.com. You can also find her on Instagram, Twitter and various other social platforms as @karenjcarlisle.

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

Next month it’s back to the books as we rejoin Moist von Lipwig for Making Money! Send us your questions about the book ASAP using the hashtag #Pratchat80.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Death, Death and What Comes Next, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Karen J Carlisle, live episode, non-Discworld, Short Fiction, Tansy Rayner Roberts

#Pratchat44 Notes and Errata

8 June 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2nd Discworld novel, 1986’s The Light Fantastic.

Iconographic Evidence

You can listen to the State Swim jingle right here:

The ridiculous fight between Xander and cheerleader-turned-vampire Harmony, occurs in Buffy: the Vampire Slayer‘s fourth season, in the seventh episode “The Initiative”. But you can see it on YouTube:

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is references Joel’s comments that this book is the “primordial soup” of the Discworld books yet to come, the analogy of the “cosmic ocean” put forward by Carl Sagan in his book and television series Cosmos, and of course Great A’Tuin the World Turtle himself.
  • The term “hat-trick” does indeed originate with cricket, where it means taking three wickets (i.e. getting the batter out) on three consecutive deliveries (i.e. a single bowl of the ball). It has since spread to other sports and to mean more generally three successful attempts in a row. (In football, it specifically refers to a player scoring three goals in one game.) The term dates back to 1858, when English cricketer Heathfield Harman Stephenson performed the first recorded hat-trick; fans collected up money for him and used it to buy a hat, which they presented to him to commemorate the achievement. While this story seems well-documented, if Helen Zaltzman (see below) has taught Ben anything, it’s to be suspicious of neat etymological explanations…
  • The custom of throwing hats in the air to celebrate a victory or achievement is said by multiple sources to be a military tradition: cadets graduating to officer status would be given new hats, or at least no longer need to wear their old cadet ones, and they would symbolically throw them away. At least one story says this started specifically at the US Naval Academy with the class of 1912.
  • Helen Zaltzman is a comedian, writer and podcaster best known for the long-running comedy podcast Answer Me This? with fellow comedian Olly Mann, and her more recent show, The Allusionist, which explores language in as many different ways as possible. The Allusionist started out as part of the Radiotopia Network, but went fully independent in 2020 as part of Helen putting her money where her mouth was in backing diversity and inclusion in podcasting. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting The Allusionist via Patreon. Oh, and we nearly forgot: Helen also makes a Veronica Mars recap podcast called Veronica Mars Investigations! Helen is the best.
  • “Commitment to the bit“, or “commit to the bit“, is a common phrase in comedy circles. It means to stick with a joke or comic premise all the way to the end, rather than shy away from it because it it doesn’t immediately work, or is impractical or uncomfortable. It’s obviously not always a good tactic, as seen recently during Eurovision 2021. Iceland employed actor Hannes Óli Ágústsson to relay their jury’s points in character as Olaf Yohansson from the comedy film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Olaf’s whole shtick is that he only likes one song, “Ja Ja Ding Dong”, which he awkwardly and angrily demands at every opportunity. At the contest, he tried to give Iceland’s 12 points to the song – twice. Few things are as hated at Eurovision as a country’s jury announcer talking too long before delivering the points, so this over-commitment to the bit did not go down well.
  • The Colour of Magic was first published on the 24th of November, 1983 (one day after the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who!), and so its 35th anniversary was two weeks before #Pratchat14, published on December 8, 2018. It originally had cover art of Great A’Tuin swimming through space painted by Alan Smith; the Josh Kirby art first appeared on the first UK paperback edition, published in March 1985. The Light Fantastic was first published on the 2nd of June, 1986, so we’re a bit closer to the anniversary this time around!
  • Liz’s “double book” is the combined edition of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic published in 2008, to tie in with The Mob’s two-part television adaptation The Colour of Magic, which also combined both books. They had previously been collected as a single volume in 1999 as The First Discworld Novels.
  • Liz’s annoyance with the “cosmic turtle business” at the start of many of the earlier Discworld books is well documented in many previous episodes.
  • In The Colour of Magic, Krull’s spaceship the Potent Voyager is only vaguely described as being made of bronze and looking “like a great flying fish”. The graphic novel depicts it as fish shaped, but without the wing-fins of a flying fish.
  • The Rocket Clock is one of the clocks used by the Australian version of Playschool to help tell the time in the 1980s. (The other famous one is the Flower Clock.) As you might expect, it resembles a space rocket, with a clock on the top section, and a bottom section which rotates to reveal a small diorama connected to a theme explored in that episode. The original version of the clock, used from 1966 to at least the 1980s, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.
  • Mr Squiggle was a long-running Australian children’s program starring puppet character Mr Squiggle, “the Man in the Moon”. It ran for forty years between 1959 and 1999. Mr Squiggle, who would arrive in “Rocket“, his smoke-belching impatient rocket ship, had a pencil for a nose. He would use it to turn “squiggles” – scribbles sent in by children – into pictures. Because he was a marionette, puppeteer Norman Heatherington was watching upside down from above, so a lot of his drawings were upside down. This led to him having to tell his assistant, who was holding the puppet’s hand to keep him still, that “Everything’s upside down, Miss Jane”. He would later inspire the title of #Pratchat55: “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
  • In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, players create characters whose power is measured in “levels”. As they accumulate experience, they gain levels of power and new abilities. In the current edition all characters can reach up to level 20, with wizards learning more and more powerful spells as they level up. Ben has mentioned Dungeons & Dragons many times, as far back as #Pratchat4; his article “What Even Is Dungeons & Dragons?” is a good primer for the novice, though note it’s a little sweary.
  • The Necrotelicomnicon is mentioned in several books, including The Colour of Magic, Sourcery and Moving Pictures. It’s a pun on the Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil magic written by the “Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” that appears in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.
  • “Vancian magic” is the sort used in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, in which a wizard must study their spell book and memorise a spell, fixing it in their mind, before they can cast it. Once cast, the spell leaves their mind entirely, and they must memorise it anew to cast it again. The name comes from the source that inspired this form of spellcasting, the “Dying Earth” books by American writer Jack Vance.
  • The comic with several different Joker origin stories is probably 2020’s Three Jokers, by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok, which reveals that three of the stories are correct – there have been more than one Joker all along. But he’s had many other origin stories; this article from Screen Rant runs through many of them.
  • In case the pun is lost on you, timber is wood that’s been prepared for building, usually by being sawn into planks. Timbre is the quality of tone of a sound, especially a voice or musical instrument. You can think of it as all the things that distinguish two sounds of the same frequency from each other.
  • The Tooth Fairy – well, one of them at least – plays a major part in Hogfather (#Pratchat24). Buggy Swires is a gnome exterminator living in Ankh-Morpork; he returns in several books, starting with Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24). The pictsies known as the Nac Mac Feegle first appear in Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36).
  • Toadstool houses are the traditional homes of Smurfs, small blue creatures invented in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”, about Pratchett’s second tiny people book, Truckers; and in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires”, about the book that introduced the Nac Mac Feegle, Carpe Jugulum. (There’s more detail about the Smurfs in the show notes for #Pratchat36.)
  • Lonely Planet is a prominent publisher of travel guides for tourists on a budget. In the pre-smartphone days every backpacker bought a Lonely Planet guide to the country where they were headed, but in recent years – especially since the global pandemic – their business has waned. The company was started in Australia by Maureen and Tony Wheeler in 1972, but was later sold to the BBC and is now owned by Red Media, the company behind CNET, Metacritic and GameSpot, among other prominent online media outlets.
  • Pratchett writes about tiny people many times, including in his first novel The Carpet People, the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), and the various tiny denizens of the Discworld, most prominently gnomes and pictsies.
  • While houses made of food or confectionary date back further, the gingerbread cottage appears in the fairytale of “Hansel and Gretel”, collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. “Hansel and Gretel” is the archetypal story of Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 327A. Pratchett returns to the idea in the witches books, especially Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4). The witches refer to Aliss Demurrage, aka “Black Aliss”, as a witch who worked some of the greatest magic, but also as a cautionary tale: she built a gingerbread cottage, a sure sign she’d gone to the bad, and by the end was making poisoned apples before she was pushed into her own oven by children she was trying to eat. (Her cottage is also said to be in Skund, leading some Pratchett fans to suggest that Granny Whitlow was an alias she used to lure children.)
  • The Rite of AshkEnte is performed here, and also in Mort (when it summons Mort as well as Death), Reaper Man, and Soul Music (where it summons Susan). Death tends to show up without needing to be asked in later books.
  • We have a play with the famous “you have my sword” sequence from the film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which doesn’t appear in the book. (Frodo does say “I will take the Ring to Mordor!” and then “Though I do not know the way” in the book, but Elrond decides who will accompany him after the council is over.) Here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Frodo: I will take it. I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though… I do not know the way.
Gandalf: I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins, as long as it is yours to bear.
Aragorn: If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. You have my sword.
Legolas: And you have my bow.
Gimli: And my axe!

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001, dir. Peter Jackson)
  • You can find Fury’s drawing of the Luggage as Trunkie from The Last Continent in the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
  • The Last Continent was published twelve years after The Light Fantastic, in 1998, so Liz was pretty close with her guess of ten years.
  • Liz suggests the Luggage might have “a chamber full of pigs?” in reference to the “having your enemies’ corpses eaten by pigs” method of getting away with murder. This features prominently in the television series Deadwood, and also Guy Richie’s film Snatch. You can find a list of uses as the “Fed to Pigs” trope on TV Tropes. Ben also mentions a bath full of (Hollywood style) acid, most famously used by Walter White in Breaking Bad.
  • Pratchett uses the Megalith pun in Lords and Ladies: “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” This is a pun on MegaHertz (MHz), the unit used to measure the clock speed or clock rate of computer processors – in simple terms, how many instructions they execute per second. In the 1980s, home computers used chips like Intel’s 386, which had speeds of between 16 and 40 MHz. While it was used heavily in marketing, clock speed was not a sure measure of computer performance.
  • Pratchett moved to Broad Chalke in Wiltshire in 1993, seven years after The Light Fantastic was published. Before that he lived in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, about 67 kilometres (or about 42 miles) to the northwest. He was never very far from many sites of ancient interest, but Broad Chalke was only a stone’s throw (sorry) from Stonehenge.
  • There are several stone circles better than Stonehenge, depending on who you ask and how you define “better”, but the one at Avebury is about 30km to the north and much, much bigger. Longtime British YouTuber Tom Scott made this video about it.
  • The Small Faint Group of Boring Stars is mentioned again in The Last Continent; the wizards travel quite far back in time, to an age when the stars were much closer and less faint (though possibly just as boring).  
  • The Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán is one of the 52 states of Mexico. There are several theories behind its name, and there are two versions of the “Your Finger You Fool” type: one involves the Mayan phrase Ma’anaatik ka t’ann, or “I do not understand you”, and the other uh yu ka t’ann, or “hear how they talk”. Another involves the casava plant, known locally as yuca (see #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl” for more on this plant) which was cultivated in the area, the name Yucatá meaning “land of yucas”. A third one suggests the name comes from the local Chontal Maya people, who call themselves the Yokot’anob or Yokot’an, meaning “the speakers of Yoko ochoco”.
  • Cohen is not in fact mentioned in The Colour of Magic; this is the first time we meet him.
  • The famous “What is best in life?” dialogue was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, based on the Conan stories of Robert E Howard. The lines in full are below; they don’t appear in Robert E Howard’s stories, but are instead inspired by words attributed to Genghis Khan himself…

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good but what is best in life?
Mongol Soldier: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Conan the Barbarian (1982, dir. John Milius)
  • The people around the breakfast table in The Truth are Mr Windling and the other lodgers at Mars Arcanum’s guest house, where William de Worde lives. He doesn’t tell them he’s the editor of The Ankh-Morpork Times. (We covered The Truth in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing”.
  • The cover art we’re talking about is the Josh Kirby art for the Corgi edition, still used for the Corgi edition (though the one currently in print uses a zoomed in subset of the image). You can find it on the official Josh Kirby website.
  • The “uncanny valley” describes the discomfort felt at seeing an artificial creature that is very like, but not mistakable for, the real thing. It can apply to anything living but is strongest – and most often used – to refer to the effect produced by androids and computer-generated representations of faces. There are many theories that try and account for why these things creep it out.
  • In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, a pair of creepy twins appear as ghosts. The “Grady twins” are not twins in the book, but sisters aged 8 and 10, and are only mentioned, rather than appearing as ghosts. In the film, they appear to the young psychic Danny Torrance, dressed identically and speaking to him in unison saying “Come and play with us” – now a famous classic line of horror cinema. Though Kubrick denied it was intentional, many have pointed out that the look of the twins in the film resembles the photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by American photographer Diane Arbus.
  • Mort was published in November 1987, so about seventeen months after The Light Fantastic. Liz’s guess of seven months is spot on for the third Discworld book, though – Equal Rites was published in January 1987!
  • It was announced on the 28th of April, 2020 that Narrativia had made an exclusive new deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content to produce “definitive” and “absolutely faithful” Discworld adaptations for the screen. So far no actual productions have been announced, but the Narrativia website now has sections for all of the major Discworld screen projects of the last decade or so. The page about the new Discworld deal still lists only the initial agreement.
  • The extra space in Death’s House is described near the start of Soul Music, when Death watches Albert flit from the edge of his impossibly large office to the edge of the carpet around his desk:

Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space…

Pratchett, Soul Music (1994)
  • By season three of The Good Place, the humans who are at the centre of the show have been exposed to a lot of the weirdness that exists beyond the mortal, material world. Near the end of the season, an accident in the “Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes” sends Chidi briefly to another realm, and when he returns he describes it like this:

Chidi Anagonye: I… I just saw a trillion different realities folding onto each other like thin sheets of metal forming… a single blade.

Michael: Yeah yeah, the Time-Knife. We’ve all seen it.

The Good Place, season 3 episode 12, “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife” (2019)
  • The Untempered Schism is “a gap in the fabric of reality from which can be seen the whole of the Vortex” of space and time. It’s introduced at the end of the third season of the revived Doctor Who in the penultimate episode, “The Sound of Drums”. The Doctor explains that it’s an initiation rite for young Gallifreyans, who at the age of eight must stare into it; according to him, “some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” He says he ran away; the Master instead went mad, constantly hearing “the drumming”, though this is later revealed to be more than it seems.
  • The Doctor Who universe influencer jokes refer to the city of New New York, as introduced in the episode “New Earth”; the “EarPods” used by alternate universe Cybermen to control and convert humans, as seen in the two-part season two story “Rise of the Cyberman”/”The Age of Steel”; and the Adipose, a species of creatures whose cute babies could be incubated in a human body by accumulating fat tissue, under the guise of a diet pill, as seen in the season four opening episode “Partners in Crime”. The idea of influencers in the Whoniverse isn’t a million miles away from the later BBC fiction podcast Doctor Who: Redacted, published in April 2022, which features a gang of podcasters who follow a conspiracy theory about a blue box associated with mysteries throughout human history.
  • Icelandic names are subject to some fairly strict conventions, overseen by the Icelandic Naming Committee. There’s a list of around 4,000 traditional Icelandic names which can be used freely, but new names must be approved by the committee. In addition, by convention Icelandic people take either their father’s or mother’s name as a surname, appended with -son, –dottir or (since 2019) –bur for son, daughter or child, respectively. Episode 87 of The Allusionist podcast, “Name v. Law”, covers some of this in detail, though note it was released in 2018, before the change allowing non-gendered suffixes. The Allusionist returned to Icelandic names in December 2021 for episode 147, the second of the two-part story, “Survival: Today, Tomorrow” about trying to change the Icelandic language.
  • “That bit in The Hobbit” is Chapter II, “Roast Mutton”, when Bilbo is scouting ahead of the company of dwarves and comes upon three trolls named William, Bert and Tom. Bilbo is caught picking a troll’s pocket (Tolkien trolls wear trousers!), and he and the dwarves are caught. Gandalf manages to keep all three trolls arguing with each other, distracting them until the sun comes up and turns them to stone.
  • 5G, short for fifth-generation, is the name given to the newest mobile communications network technology being rolled out around the world. 5G is capable of far greater data transfer speeds than its predecessor 4G, at least at short range. It has been the subject of many conspiracy theories that claim it causes health problems in humans, despite a lack of any evidence that this is true. These theories mutated during 2020 to suggest that 5G caused or spread COVID-19, and they were believed enough that 5G towers in several countries were vandalised.
  • Lackjaw does indeed describe himself as “of the dwarfish persuasion“.
  • The magic shop trope can be traced back as far as H. G. Wells’ stories The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903). TV Tropes lists it as “The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday” and has many other examples. Pratchett revisits it in a more traditional way in Soul Music (discussed by us in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got Rocks In”), where Buddy buys his guitar. It’s not the same shop, though – the proprietor is an old woman who seems quite happy with her lot, and she seems to sell only musical instruments.
  • We keep mentioning Howl’s Moving Castle, so it’s probably a good idea for us to do that Diana Wynne Jones episode we keep talking about. Previous episodes where this book have been mentioned include #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26, #Pratchat30 and #Pratchat43. In a nutshell: Howl is a wizard who lives as a recluse in a castle that not only can move from place to place, but has a magical front door that can open in one of several fixed locations.
  • Cane toads, Rhinella marina, are native to the Americas and were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 for purposes of pest control on sugar cane farms. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, where we recommended in the episode notes the documentaries Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and its sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010). You can indeed still get various souvenirs made from dead toads; you can see examples at the website Souvenirs Australia (though it’s not a pretty sight).
  • The “critical Black Mass” pun is not about wizards or gods, but rather books of magic. It comes up in a description of the library as Trymon heads there to bribe the Librarian while the wizards are still speaking to Death.
  • Bethan is not mentioned in Interesting Times. Rincewind does mention in Sourcery that he was a guest at Cohen’s wedding to “a girl of about Conina’s age”, but Bethan isn’t mentioned by name and Rincewind gives no indication that he knows how the marriage went.
  • We looked up Echidna penises for #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“.
  • Rincewind will return in The Last Hero, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgment Day. He’s also a minor character in Unseen Academicals, and mentioned briefly in Raising Steam.
  • Michael Moorcock’s “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy” is less an essay, and more of a book, first published in 1987. An expanded edition, now 206 pages long, was released in 2004.
  • Blades in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game written and designed by John Harper and published in 2015. It’s set in an “industrial-fantasy” world, and players form a company of criminals who try to stake a claim for themselves in the inescapable city of Duskvol, surrounded by horror and haunted by deadly ghosts. Among its distinctive features are a system of retroactively planning heists and packing gear, which gets you into the action quicker. If industrial-fantasy isn’t your thing the system has also been used to make several other games in other genres.
  • Campaign settings are the various fantasy worlds used for Dungeons & Dragons and other games which aren’t tied too much to a specific universe. D&D has a large number of these covering various sub-genres of fantasy, from the post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery of Dark Sun to the gothic horror of Ravenloft. There are too many to list them all, since aside from the dozens of official ones there are many more published independently. (Ben’s favourite is probably Planescape, which both ties together all the others in a weird multiverse, and introduces an interdimensional hub city on the inside of a ring in the theoretical centre of everything.)
  • Mage: The Ascension, first published in 1993, was the third game in the World of Darkness series of modern horror roleplaying games, following Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Mage is also effectively a sequel to the earlier game about medieval wizards, Ars Magicka, but in the modern world the rise of science and rational thought means magic doesn’t work like it used to.
  • Cavaliers of Mars by Rose Bailey is the latest in a fine tradition of games that seek to emulate the “planetary romance” genre of fiction. These were science fiction or fantasy stories from around the turn of the twentieth century in which the fantastic adventures take place on other worlds – either in our own solar system as in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (adapted as the hugely underrated film John Carter), or in other galaxies entirely – for example, James Herbert’s Dune is sometimes classified as a planetary romance.
  • The Old-School Renaissance or Revival – usually abbreviated to OSR – is a movement in roleplaying game communities which prefers the early versions of Dungeons & Dragons and similar games from the 1970s and 1980s. There are now many games that seek to recapture the feel of those games, either by re-implementing the original rules (a genre known as “retro-clones”) or writing games with more modern rules but the old-school philosophy in mind. Exactly what that philosophy is varies according to who you ask, but it usually means a smaller set of rules, and more reliance on both player skill (as opposed to rules which emulate the skill of the characters being played) and rulings by the Game Master (who OSR games often call the referee). Famous examples include Torchbearer, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) and Old-School Essentials. Dungeon World isn’t usually counted as an OSR game, but it has many similarities. (It’s a translation of D&D-like fantasy into the now super popular “Powered by the Apocalypse” framework, created by Meguey & Vincent Baker for their post-apocalyptic RPG Apocalypse World.)
  • The six flavours of quarks are up, down, charmed, strange, top and bottom. “Flavour” is the name given to unique combinations of other characteristics like spin and charge; it’s sometimes also called “species”. Quarks form other particles, like neutrons and protons, when three of them are combined in different flavour combinations.
  • The World War II realtime Twitter account is @RealTimeWWII. It tweets “on this day” war events from the years 1939 to 1945, and is currently up to 1943 on its second time around.
  • In Chinese numerology, four – 四 (Anglicised as sì or sei) – is inauspicious because it sounds like the word for “death”, 死 (sǐ or séi). This causes as serious an aversion as Europeans traditionally have to the number thirteen, and just as some might have triskaidekaphobia, in China and other parts of East Asia, tetraphobia is common enough that buildings do not number floors using the digit 4.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Death, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Joel Martin, Rincewind, The Luggage, Twoflower, Unseen University, Ysabell

#Pratchat78 – One Step Beyond

8 July 2024 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

It’s the final leg of the Long Journey as Joel Martin and Deanne Sheldon-Collins answer our Invitation! Both previous Long Earth guests return to discuss the fifth and final of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s collaborations, the 2016 novel The Long Cosmos.

It’s 2070, and a message has been received across the Long Earth: “JOIN US.” Joshua Valienté hears it and gets one of his headaches, but he’s still mourning the death of his ex-wife Helen, so he rejects the call to adventure. He goes off alone into the High Meggers, despite multiple warnings that he’s too old for this shit. Meanwhile Nelson Azikiwe finds and loses a new family, and goes in search of Lobsang for help. And the Next find that the Invitation is more than two words long, and put into action far-reaching plans to bring everyone together to follow its instructions…

The last of Pratchett’s novels to be published, The Long Cosmos brings the series to a close. (If you need a recap, see our “The Longer Footnote” bonus episode.) Like the previous book, The Long Utopia, this one also takes place on a relatively small number of Earths – but it has its gaze fairly firmly fixed on the stars above, and wears its influences (especially Carl Sagan’s Contact) on its sleeve.

Who got their epic first contact novel in our weird parallel worlds travelogue? Is this where you thought the story would go? What would your friends be able to predict about you if they kept a detailed spreadsheet? After five books, is this a satisfying conclusion? Join the conversation by using the hashtag #Pratchat78 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_78.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:46:38 — 76.8MB)

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Guest Joel Martin (he/him) is a writer, editor and podcaster now based in the UK. He previously hosted the writing podcast The Morning Bell, and produced The Dementia Podcast for Hammond Care. Joel’s previously been on the show to discuss The Long Earth, The Long Mars, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, making him our most frequent guest. He recommended the 1989 novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons, along with its sequel The Fall of Hyperion. (There are also two more novels in the Hyperion Cantos series.)

Guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins (she/her) is an editor and writer in Australia’s speculative fiction scene, working for Aurealis magazine, Writer’s Victoria, the National Young Writer’s Festival, and as co-director of the Speculate festival. Deanne previously joined us for The Long War and The Long Utopia. She once again recommended Pratchat listener favourite, Martha Wells’ series The Murderbot Diaries, which consists of seven novels and novellas. The first is 2017’s All Systems Red.

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

We’re off to Adelaide to be guests at the Australian Discworld Convention, where on Friday 12 July we’ll be recording a live episode with authors Tansy Rayner Roberts and Karen J Carlisle! We’ll be discussing Pratchett’s Discworld short fiction “Death and What Comes Next”, and probably more broadly how Pratchett writes about Death (and death). The story is available online at the L-Space Web. We’ll mostly be taking questions from the live audience, but you can also share yours via social media (if you’re quick!) using the hashtag #Pratchat79.

Want to help us get to the end of our six(ish) year mission and read every Pratchett book – and more? You can support us with a tip, or a subscription for as little as $2 a month, and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! See our Support Us page for details.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Deanne Sheldon-Collins, Elizabeth Flux, Joel Martin, Joshua Valienté, non-Discworld, Stephen Baxter, The Long Cosmos, The Long Earth
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