Elizabeth Flux

#Pratchat74 – Hogswitch

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In this very special Hogswatch-adjacent episode of Pratchat, Liz and Ben don’t discuss a Terry Pratchett book! Instead, they interview Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent, authors of Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch.

Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch is a new lavishly illustrated guidebook to witchcraft, compiled by the famous young witch of the Chalk – with a little help from her friends, of course. Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Miss Tick, Mrs Letice Earwig and more have all annotated the manuscript – as have Tiffany’s fairy allies and protectors, the Nac Mac Feegle.

We’ll return to the book for a regular discussion in a future episode, but for now, please enjoy our chat with Rhianna and Gabrielle – though note that as Tiffany Aching’s Guide is set after The Shepherd’s Crown, you might catch a couple of brief spoilers for the final Discworld novel in this interview. The same is true for their previous appearances on our spiritual sibling podcasts, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and The Compleat Discography, which you will probably also enjoy.

You can send us comments and questions about this episode using the hashtag #Pratchat74. And as usual you can find errata and other notes for this episode on our website.

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Guest Rhianna Pratchett is a writer best known for her work in videogames, most famously the 2013 reboot of Tomb Raider, and most recently Lost Words: Beyond the Page with Sketchbook Games. Rhianna also works in film and television production, and since 2012 has co-run Narrativia, the company which manages Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property. Rhianna recently made her first podcast series, Mythical Creatures, for BBC Radio 4; find it via your favourite podcast app, or on the BBC Sounds website. You can also follow Rhianna on social media at @rhipratchett on Twitter and Mastodon, and as @rhi.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Guest Gabrielle Kent is now best known as a children’s author, but worked in videogames as an artist and lecturer for many years. Her books include the Knights and Bikes series based on the videogame of the same name; the Alfie Bloom series about a boy who inherits a magical castle; and most recently Rani Reports, a series about a young aspiring journalist, co-written with her husband Satish Shewhorak. You can find out more about Gabrielle via her website, gabriellekent.com. Gabrielle is also on social media as @gabriellekent on Twitter and Bluesky.

Next month we get our game one again as we play and discuss the second published Discworld board game, Guards! Guards!, designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw of BackSpindle Games. Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat75, or send us an email 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.

#Pratchat73 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 73, “This Christmas Goes to Eleven”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the Instagram photo of Richard from Cracked and Spineless bookshop in Hobart, showing off his Ineffable Edition of The Definitive Good Omens in 2019!

We’ll be sure to add photos of some of the Christmas food we mentioned here when we can.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a reference to the famous scene in the 1984 mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap. The film follows famous metal band Spinal Tap on a fairly disastrous tour; at one point guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) shows off his amplifiers which he has had custom made with dials that go to eleven rather than ten, which makes them “one louder”. When asked why he didn’t just “make ten louder”, he replies: “This one goes to eleven.” It seemed a perfect reference for the extreme Christmasness of Father Christmas’ Fake Beard, which also contains eleven stories.
  • The twelve days of Christmas are a Christian celebration of the Nativity of Jesus. Some traditions have it starting with Christmas Day, and some the day after, which is Boxing Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Australia, and also St Stephen’s Day (the “Feast of Stephen” referenced in the other song featured in this book, Good King Wenceslas). The season is also called Twelvetide, though “Christmastide” is technically a different thing that doesn’t exactly match up, depending on your church. The last night is “Twelfth Night”, as in the Shakespeare play.
  • Father Christmas is now synonymous with Santa Claus, but this wasn’t always the case. He was the folkloric personification of Christmas in Britain, going back a few hundred years, but by Victorian times began to more resemble the modern Santa Claus, especially after the American version was imported in the mid 1800s. As Ben mentions, Santa Claus’s origins lie with Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas (not German as Ben misremembers), but the modern version also incorporates bits of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas. Ben did once know this, but it’s as if he’s forgotten everything he learned for our Hogfather episode back in 2019! And Pratchett certainly dove deep on the folklore and history when he was writing the novel. But we’re still keen to know what modern sentiment is around the names, because there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between the traditions – Father Christmas has been fully Santa-fied.
  • The book is still in print as far as we can tell! But this isn’t as easy to determine as it once was…
  • Pratchett’s other collections of children’s stories also contain a few stories seen elsewhere. Dragons at Crumbling Castle and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner both had deluxe slipcase editions which contained a couple of additional stories, and those stories are included in all editions of the fourth volume The Time-travelling Caveman (though it too had a deluxe edition with a story so far not collected elsewhere). In addition, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner also includes “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, which also appears in Once More* *with Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
  • Some of these stories were originally published without any title, especially those from the Bucks Free Press. The titles were made up for the purposes of this book. But then again, according to the list in the book, that includes some of the stories which had been previously published in earlier collections under other titles, like “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas”.
  • Father Christmas’s Fake Beard includes the opening section of Truckers as bonus material. It’s in that book that “Arnold Bros (est 1905)” (not 1903) is revealed to be owned by Arnco Group, along with a great many other businesses, when Gurder, Masklin and Grimma travel to the Top of the Store to learn the truth about the Thing’s warnings of it being demolished. You can hear more about that in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • “Old man yells at cloud” is a meme derived from The Simpsons, specifically the 2002 episode “The Old Man and the Key”. In one scene Homer’s father Abe Simpson needs a photograph for a driver’s license, and uses a photo from a newspaper story about him; it shows him shaking his fist at a cloud in the sky, with the headline “OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD”. It’s been used as a meme since around 2008, usually to denote someone complaining about something for no good reason.
  • Clinkers are a lolly (or sweet or candy, depending on which flavour of English you speak) manufactured by the Australian confectionary brand Pascall (now owned by Cadbury, in turn owned by Mondelez International). They consist of brightly coloured oval-shaped hard nougat, much like the candy honeycomb you find in Violet Crumble or Crunchie chocolate bars, coated in Cadbury chocolate. We’re not actually sure what Liz’s Dad thinks “Clinker” means, but Ben is pretty close: it’s a generic name for industrial waste products formed by the burning of coal or working of metal, which usually forms small, brittle glassy round shapes – much like the candy.
  • Isembard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was an English engineer best known for his work during the Industrial Revolution, especially with steamships, railways, bridges and tunnels. There’s a lot to say about him – way more than we can fit in a note – but remember that “Great Man” histories are always over-simplified and leave out a lot of people who were vital to whatever the man in question did, even if he was very great.
  • It’s been a while since we mentioned the steamroller story, but the short version is that his hard drives containing his unfinished work were destroyed by a steamroller, according to his wishes, in 2017 – the same year Father Christmas’s Fake Beard was published! You can read about it in this Guardian article.
  • We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook back in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”. B S Johnson’s giant pie was also a disaster. Described informally as “the Great Fruit Pie” (it was made mostly of apples), and under the title “Bloody Stupid Johnson’s Individual Fruit Pie”, Ben remembers rightly that Johnson thought of making a giant pie whistle; however it wasn’t finished until a week after the explosion, and the 30-foot-high “whistling blackbird” is said to be a memorial to those lost to the pie, situated in Hide Park. (The dish created for the pie is now the roof of a house.)
  • While there is more detail to be found at colinsmythe.co.uk, Ben entirely missed that the book does include original titles and publications for each of the stories in it – they’re in small text on the imprint page, just before Rob Wilkin’s introduction.

More notes to come!

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

#Pratchat73 – This Christmas Goes to Eleven

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In this very special Christmas episode, Liz and Ben fly without a guest as they turn the seasonal silliness up to maximum and discuss all eleven stories in Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short Christmas stories, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.

It’s not always easy being Father Christmas. You might be forced out of home by a rogue submarine or the harsh reality of a job where you only work one day a year; you might be sent fifty thousand identical letters by a computer or put on trial for three thousand counts of breaking and entering. But at least you don’t live in Blackbury, where giant pies explode, the snow falls so thick you have to dig tunnels to see your granny, and where weird creatures show up every other day. And you won’t believe the true stories behind some of your favourite Christmas songs…

While he later claimed short stories “cost me blood”, Pratchett wrote scores of stories every year while working in his first newspaper jobs between 1965 and 1979, and continued to sell them to his old papers even after he went to work for the Central Electricity Governing Board. These included plenty of Christmas stories – and eleven of them (well…eight plus three wintery ring-ins) from between 1967 and 1992 are collected in this third volume of his early work for children.

Have you read Father Christmas’s Fake Beard? Is “Father Christmas” more British than Santa Claus? Do you prefer these (close to) original versions of the stories, or some of the later re-written versions unearthed for A Stroke of the Pen? Have you ever seen one of these stories in their original habitat, the Southwestern British Newspaper? And what should we name our Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh team? Join in the conversation on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat73!

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“Guest” Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor, and also currently Arts Editor for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. You can find out where Liz’s short fiction has been published via her website, elizabethflux.com.

“Guest” Ben McKenzie is a writer, game designer and educator who doesn’t usually work in short fiction. But you can find a few short Twine games on his website, benmckenzie.com.au.

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

Next episode we have two actual very special guests: Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent! They’re joining us for a chat about their new book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. This will be more an interview than an in-depth discussion about the book (which, we feel we should warn you, include spoilers for some key events and characters for The Shepherd’s Crown, but we’ll try to keep those spoilers to a minimum). As well as asking our own questions, we want to ask them yours! So send them in using the hashtag #Pratchat74 or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, but be quick: we’ll be recording on the 15th of December!

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.

#PratchatRuby – How Did Discworld Get to 40?

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24 November 2023 marks forty years since Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic was first published. That’s right – it’s Discworld’s fortieth birthday! To celebrate, join Pratchat producer and co-host Ben McKenzie as he – and a bunch of special guests – try to figure out why that book, and moreso the Discworld series it started, have endured for so long.

This episode is something of an experiment for Pratchat, and as Ben says during the episode, this can’t possibly cover all the reasons why the series is so beloved. We want to hear about your favourite Discworld books, and what the Discworld means to you. And we’d love to know what you thought of this episode, and whether you’d like to hear more like it in the future! Tell us via the hashtag #PratchatRuby on social media, or get in touch via email or our subscriber Discord.

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Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this episode:

Our original discussion of The Colour of Magic can be found in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation”, from December 2018.

Our December episode will be #Pratchat73, discussing the stories of Father Christmas’s Fake Beard. But we are hoping to bring you one more little extra before the year is out.

Want to help us get to every Pratchett book? You can subscribe for as little as $2 a month – and that’s cuttin’ our own throats! (Sorry.) Check out our Support Us page for details.

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.

#Pratchat72 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 72, “The Masked Dancer”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1989 short story “Turntables of the Night” with guest Andrew McClelland.

Iconographic Evidence

The cover art of the 1997 anthology The Flying Sorcerers is a Josh Kirby illustration of this story. The full jacket illustration also appears in A Blink of the Screen.

Notes and Errata

  • The quest for this month’s episode title was a long one, but we settled on this riff on The Masked Singer, a popular reality gameshow based on a format originating in Korea. In the show, celebrities perform songs in elaborate costumes that hide their identities and a judging panel and the audience try to guess who they are while also voting for their favourites, with the singer with the fewest votes being unmasked and eliminated each round. Appropriately enough, the Australian show’s most recent season which finished the day before this episode was published featured a singer dressed as the Grim Reaper, who turned out to be Darren Hayes of Savage Garden fame!
  • The Vengaboys are a Dutch Eurodance group who were huge in the late 1990s, best known for the songs “We Like to Party” and “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!”, the former of which includes the line “The Vengabus is coming”. Ben’s memory is sketchy but he thinks Liz is referring to a comedy bit Andy used to do about the nature of the Vengabus, painting it as something more ominous. (We’ll check up on this and update this note!)
  • Gilbert and Sullivan are dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), who wrote a series of comic light operas in the Victorian era which have since become world famous. Andy’s love for them was expressed through his most recent comedy show with Martine Wengrow: The Very Model of a Modern Major Musical, a two-person performance of his own full-cast opera in the distinctive Gilbert and Sullivan style which he wrote during the lockdowns of 2020.
  • Truckers, published in 1989 (the same year as “Turntables of the Night”), is the first book in Terry Pratchett’s trilogy about a band of tiny Nomes trying to survive in the human world. We discussed it way back in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • Good Omens is Pratchett’s famous 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman about an angel and demon who share an unlikely friendship and try to avert the impending apocalypse, a task made more difficulty when they mislay the Anti-Christ. We discussed it in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
  • The Long Earth is Pratchett’s collaboration with sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, a sci-fi series based on an idea he had around the time of The Colour of Magic about a string of infinite parallel Earths devoid of humans. We’ve discussed four out of the five books; for an overview of the plot of the first three, see #PratchatPreviously, “The Long Footnote”.
  • Actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz is probably best known for his film and television work in things like Look Around You, Black Books, Shaun of the Dead and The Tick. He has a distinctive deep voice (a feature of his guest role on Black Books), and was famously the speaking voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Maul was physically played by stunt performer Ray Park). He played the demon Crowley opposite Mark Heap’s Aziraphale in the 2014 BBC Radio adaptation of Good Omens before going on to perform the voice of Death in all forty recently released Penguin Discworld audiobooks (they didn’t do The Last Hero), which are otherwise read by a different narrator for each sub-series. (Bill Nighy also appears in every book, reading the footnotes.) Serafinowicz also voices Death in the animated feature film The Amazing Maurice.
  • Harry Harrison (1925-2012) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat, an interplanetary con man and rogue who starred in several short stories and novels beginning with “The Stainless Steel Rat” in 1957. The final book, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns, was published in 2010.
  • Harry Turtledove is an American speculative fiction author best known for his works of alternate history. Andy mentions Turtledove’s 1992 novel The Guns of the South, in which time-travellers from 2014 South Africa supply advanced arms to the Confedercy, allowing them to win the US civil war. He is also known for the similar Southern Victory series, in which the Confederacy wins thanks to one small difference in history (no time travel is involved), and the Worldwar series, in which aliens invade Earth in 1942 during World War II.
  • Hidden Turnings was published in February 1989 and included works by Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Roger Zelazny (best known for The Chronicles of Amber), Tanith Lee and many others. You can find all the details of the book and the stories within at its Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry.
  • We’ve talked many times of British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011), and especially of her Chrestomanci series about a connected series of parallel magical worlds; Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequel; and her parody of both travel guides and fantasy tropes, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
  • The panel Ben featuring Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones was “Whose Fantasy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. (Ben found it after we wondered if the two were friends in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”). The talk was indeed chaired by Neil Gaiman, and also featured John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. Ben was on the money when he said it was from around the time of “Turntables of the Night” – it’s from the same year, 1988!
  • The Flying Sorcerers is a 1997 (not 1996) anthology of comic fantasy stories, organised into three sections: “Hordes of the Things: Comic Fantasies”, “Deadly Nightshapes: Tales of the Supernatural” and “Vacant Space: Stories of Science Fiction”. As well as Pratchett’s story it features work from P. G. Wodehouse, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Michael Moorcock, Roald Dahl, Stanislaw Lem and Angela Carter and many others. You can see the full list of stories on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
  • Peter Haining has edited and written introductions for a long list of books, mostly compilations of previously published works. As well as The Flying Sorcerers he also published Pratchett works in Space Movies II, The Wizards of Odd and Vintage Science Fiction. He also compiled five major nonfiction books about Doctor Who in the 1980s, including the 25th anniversary book 25 Glorious Years in 1988. Haining’s full bibliography can also be found on the ISFDb.
  • The Wizards of Odd was published in 1996. It was also edited by Peter Haining, featured a previously published piece by Terry Pratchett as its first story, and used a Josh Kirby illustration for that story as its cover art. In this case it was “Theatre of Cruelty”, which we just discussed in #Pratchat70, “Punching Up”. The full contents are (you guessed it) on the ISFDb.
  • Hordes of the Things was a 1980 BBC radio series written by Andrew Marshall and John Lloyd (who had just written and produced The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams), under pseudonyms with three initials to emulate J R R Tolkien, and starring Simon Callow and Paul Eddington. A fairly broad parody of Lord of the Rings set in the kingdom of Albion as it faces an invasion of the “Dark One”, it was also loose political satire.
  • Small caps can be simulated by modern word processing and desktop publishing software, but this is usually unsatisfactory since scaled-down capital letters have a lighter weight (i.e. because they’re shrunk the lines are thinner), whereas proper small caps should have the same weight as full size lower case letters.
  • Death’s dialogue has varied a bit between editions; in some, like the Corgi paperback of The Colour of Magic and the collector’s library editions of many of the books, he speaks in all small caps – i.e. only small capital letters. In others, like the first hardcover edition of Hogfather, he speaks in mixed small caps, with regular capitalisation. It’s only in anthologies like The Flying Sorcerers where he seems to speak in all caps.
  • Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was an award-winning American science fiction writer. His Chronicles of Amber series, consisting of two sets of five novels published between 1970 and 1991, is about a group of immortals, the Princes and Princesses of Amber, who rule their one “true” world of Amber. They are able to walk between “shadows”, the infinite alternate realities given order and substance by the Pattern, a mystic labyrinth; the royals of Amber gain their shadow-walking ability by walking the Pattern. They organise into several factions and scheme amongst themselves to take the throne. A hugely popular roleplaying game of the 1990s, Amber Diceless Roleplaying, was based on these stories; player characters oppose each other, vying for power, and instead of using dice are simply ranked in order of who is best at what during an “auction” at the start of the game.
  • “Kalifriki of the Thread” is a short story about Kalifriki, more or less an assassin who can travel between dimensions (called shifting into the “side-by-side lands”) and whose signature method of killing is the Thread, an unusual and seemingly multidimensional weapon or force. In the story, Kalifriki is hunting the Kife, another shifter who inhabits the bodies of others. The character returns in the short story “Come Back to the Killing Ground Alice, My Love”, first published in Amazing Stories in 1992. Both stories were collected into one volume in 2022.
  • DJ Ian Bell was not only a DJ, he was also a photographer, a music historian, and a record store worker and owner. He died in May 2023. You can hear him talking about his history in this 2019 segment from ABC Radio in Adelaide, played again the week after his death.
  • Since 2021 Taylor Swift has been re-recording and releasing new versions of her first six studio albums, in part because she regretted signing away ownership of the master recordings as a teenager (she was 15!) in her original contract with the label Big Machine in 2005, and subsequently became responsible for something like 80% of their revenue. After a series of disagreements, including not being able to buy the masters rights, and Big Machine selling out to her former manager, Scooter Braun, she enacted the re-recording plan under her new and much more favourable contract with Republic Records. Because she wrote her own songs, she owns the composition rights, and so controls who can record new versions of the songs – including herself. The new releases are subtitled “(Taylor’s Version)” and so far have included Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989, and they’ve plummeted streams and sales of the originals as her loyal fans stick to her versions.

More notes to come soon!

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

#Pratchat72 – The Masked Dancer

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Unlike some DJs, Liz and Ben do take requests – like this month’s short story! They’re joined by comedian and DJ Andrew McClelland to spin discs with the soul collector, as they discuss Terry Pratchett’s 1989 short story “Turntables of the Night”.

John, one half of the “Hellfire Disco” mobile DJ business, is helping the police with their enquiries. His latest gig, a fairly sedate Halloween party, did not go smoothly – and it all revolves around a mysterious visitor to the dancefloor, who had an unusual request for DJ Wayne…

Written for Diana Wynne Jones’ 1989 collection of original fiction Hidden Turnings, “Turntables of the Night” came to Pratchett title first. It’s a spooky tale of obsession, records, music and death – or rather Death, appearing outside the Discworld for perhaps the first time in Pratchett’s writing.

Is this fantasy or horror? Did Pratchett really know who Ian Curtis was? Who did he call up to get insight into the DJ trade? What would Death ask you to curate for him? Who would be the crown jewel in his collection now? And which of Pratchett’s other short stories do you want us to devote an entire episode to? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat72 on social media.

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Guest Andrew McClelland (he/him) is a writer, comedian and DJ who has often mixed in his other loves, like history, music, DJing and Gilbert & Sullivan, to create the “niche” nerdy and gentlemanly comedy for which he’s known. Andy has also frequently collaborated with #Pratchat38 guest Lawrence Leung. As a DJ, Andy works constantly in Melbourne and did indeed open for Cher during her 2018 Australia and New Zealand tour. His club night Andrew McClelland’s Finishing School doesn’t run as regularly as it used to, but as of this episode it has a 15th anniversary night on 10 November, and an annual 90s night on 24 November. Find Andy on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (if you must) or at his website djandrewmcclelland.com. Finishing School is on Facebook.

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

Next episode we get into the Hogswatch spirit by opening an entire book of season stories, as we discuss the 2017 collection of Pratchett’s children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard. You can send us questions about any of the stories (which we’ll list on our website for reference), or about the book in general, using the hashtag #Pratchat72 on social media. Or send them in via email to 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.

#Pratchat71 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 71, “It Belongs in a University”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2013 collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day, with guests Rev Dr Avril Hannah-Jones and Dr Charlotte Pezaro.

Iconographic Evidence

This is the video from the Waterstones event for the launch of the fourth book, with Terry talking about Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species.
This is the Eye of Magnus, the magical Great Big Thing from the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which Ben immediately thought of while reading the descriptions of Ponder Stibbons’ “Challenger Project”.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title echoes Indiana Jones’ famous (and very colonialist) line, “It belongs in a museum!” Thankfully the wizards didn’t steal Roundworld from anyone…but if you want to know how this sort of thinking affects people in the colonised countries, we’d recommend Marc Fennel’s podcast (and television series) Stuff the British Stole.
  • The term “philosopause” is referred to in The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, where Jack and Ian describe it as when “elderly scientists … stop doing science and take up not very good philosophy instead”. They didn’t coin the term; it dates back to at least 1996, and probably earlier.
  • Gregory Benford (1941-) is both an influential science fiction author and a physicist, but not a qualified theologian or philosopher. The first source footnoted in the book is the one for Benford’s idea of human- and universe-centred thinking, and it’s “a creature of double vision”, from Science Fiction and the Two Cultures: Essays on Bridging the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, McFarland Publishers 2009, pages 228-236.
  • The book review referred to by Liz is Timothy Snyder’s “Is the Human Impulse to Tell Stories Dangerous?”, a review of The Story Paradox by Jonathan Gottschall. The tweet that stuck in Liz’s mind was by Michael Chinigo.
  • Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge: how do we know what we know, and what qualifies a belief as knowledge?
  • Liz has talked about “hounding the germ man to death” before; you can hear her talk about Semmelweis in #Pratchat48 (about Thief of Time) and #Pratchat54 (Night Watch). As on those occasions, we recommend this episode of NPR’s Shortwavepodcast to get a good short version of his struggle to just get doctors to wash their hands in a time when no-one believed in germs.
  • L-Space is originally described as a distortion of space into “poly-fractal L-Space”. While the Librarian frequently travels through L-Space, it’s not presented as a “space” where things exist, but a way to travel through space and time. Books create L-Space.
  • Narrativia as a Discworld goddess pre-dates this book by a couple of years, Pratchett having named her – and commissioned a statue of her – in 2011, as detailed in this Guardian article. This does seem to be her first appearance in fiction, though the production company Narrativia, which holds the media licensing rights to his works, was formed in 2012.
  • Charlotte recommended Bill Bryson’s 2003 book A Short History of Nearly Everything, as well as Pratchett’s own Nation. Avril recommended Marilynne Robinson’s 2016 collection The Givenness of Things: Essays.

More notes to come soon!

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

#Pratchat71 – It Belongs in a University

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Liz and Ben are blessed by two returning guests, the Rev Dr Avril Hannah-Jones and Dr Charlotte Pezaro, as they go on one last visit to Roundworld – this time as clerics, wizards and librarians clash over who should take ownership. It’s Terry Pratchett’s fourth and final collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, 2013’s The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day.

Ponder Stibbons has just activated Unseen University’s latest “Great Big Thing”, the culmination of six years’ research (and spending) into the frontiers of magical knowledge. It summons a side effect: improbably-named librarian Marjorie Daw, from the even less probable universe in a bottle, Roundworld. Marjorie decides to stick around when she discovers her entire universe is under threat: the Church of the Latter-Day Omnians, who believe the Disc is round, think Roundworld should be theirs. After surviving elves and Auditors, will it be lawyers and priests who decide Roundworld’s fate?

This time in the (really short!) fiction chapters, the wizards barely visit Roundworld at all; Ridcully spends most of his time talking to Marjorie, before the last few chapters detail the trial – sorry, hearing – of the century. In the non-fiction chapters, Jack and Ian do talk about science…but mostly about religion. Their big idea this time revolves around Gregory Benford’s ideas of human- and universe-centred thinking. As the fiction pits priests against wizards, you can probably see where this is going. We certainly could, and we’ll be blunt: we didn’t like it.

Is this really a book about science? How do the authors’ ideas of “religion” gel with yours – or even Pratchett’s previous books and writing on the subject? What did you think of Marjorie Daw? Do you want us to do a special episode with Avril about Scott Morrison’s book? And were we too harsh on this book? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat71 on social media.

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Guest Rev Dr Avril Hannh-Jones (she/her) is a Minister in the Uniting Church. While she should be known for her tireless activism for marginalised communities, most people know her for the Church of the Latter Day Geek: an occasional service where science fiction and fantasy stories serve as parables, and cosplay is allowed in the pews. Avril previously appeared on Pratchat back in 2019 to discuss Small Gods in #Pratchat16. Avril posts weekly Reflections on her blog, Rev Doc Geek, tweets as @DocAvvers, and would love to see you at a Sunday service at North Balwyn Uniting Church.

Guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro (she/her) is an educator with a PhD in pedagogy and years of experience communicating science and technology, and shaping how it is taught in Australian schools. She last joined us in 2021 for #Pratchat41 to discuss Nation, which is both Charlotte’s and Pratchett’s favourite Pratchett book. You can find out more about Charlotte at charlottepezaro.com, or her education work at dialogic.com.au.

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

Next episode it’s time for another short story: this time a young adult one Pratchett wrote for Diana Wynn Jones in 1989, “Turntables of the Night”. It was originally published in the anthology Hidden Turnings, but you’ll most easily find it in Pratchett’s short fiction collection A Blink of the Screen. We’ll be discussing this tale of record collectors and DJs with superstar DJ and comedian, Andrew McClelland! Have a read and send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat72, or via email to 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.

#Pratchat70 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 70, “Punching Up”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1993 Discworld short story, “Theatre of Cruelty”, with guest Caimh McDonnell.

Iconographic Evidence

Since it was available for free, there are lots of scans floating about on the internet, and it’s a shorter version than the one available for free on the L-Space web, we figure it should be okay for us to share the original two-page spread of the story from Bookcase magazine, including the original version of Josh Kirby’s illustration.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on Mr Punch, the concept of “punching up” in comedy (i.e. the idea that the targets of derision in comedy should be those with more power), and the other concept of “punching up” in writing (i.e. adding more jokes and/or pace to a script to improve it).
  • We’ve mentioned Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series of urban fantasy novels before. They follow the adventures of new police officer Peter Grant as he becomes apprentice to the last wizard in England, who also works for the London police. There are now nine novels, four novellas, a short story collection, nine graphic novels (originally published as separate issue comic books) and a tabletop roleplaying game. The best place to start is probably Rivers of London, the first novel from 2011, which was originally titled Midnight Riot in the US (but is now published there under its proper title). The first comic, Body Work, is also a good place to dip in, as are most of the novellas and short stories.
  • The Fortean Times is the magazine of the Fortean Society, an organisation founded by American researcher and writer Charles Fort. He collected and wrote about “anomalous phenomena” – unusual events and experiences which had gone unexplained by science, though apparently he did it to keep scientists on their toes rather than because he believed any of the theories put forth in his writing. The Fortean Times is still published in the US, UK and other countries today, and you can find them online at forteantimes.com (though you have to subscribe in print). Fort himself is mentioned in Good Omens.
  • We can’t find a good reference for the edition of Good Omens with two Thursdays in one week, if that is a real error and not a fevered imagining of Ben’s. But there have been other notable ones: in some recent editions, Anathema is referred to as Agnes in one sentence when showing her index cards to Newt, and a persistent one in earlier editions was Famine saying his name had seven letters when cryptically referring to himself with a crossword clue. Some white editions of the book had a cover misprint in which the text and Crowley’s glass of wine appear, but the demon himself does not!
  • On Roundworld, “theatre of cruelty” is an artistic concept created by Antonin Artaud, a French poet and theatre maker (among many other things) active in the 1920s and 30s. His theatre of cruelty wasn’t literally theatre, or literally cruel, but rather a reaction against realism. He wanted performance to be something more visceral: a spectacle, incorporating music, dance, lights and everything other than text, performed by “athletes of the heart” who would surround audiences to shock them out of complacency and wake them up to the horrors and violence of real life. While not embraced widely, it’s been an influence on many theatre makers, notably director Peter Brook in his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, including a famous 1966 production of the play Marat/Sade. This YouTube video from CrashCourse is a pretty good overview.
  • Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock Holmes stories are “A Study in Emerald”, from the 2003 anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, and “The Case of Death and Honey”, from the 2011 collection A Study in Sherlock. “A Study in Emerald” won both a Hugo and Locus Award in 2004, and has been adapted into a board game by Martin Wallace, of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork and The Witches fame.
  • Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was an American speculative fiction writer whose work encompassed novels, short stories, television (most famously the Star Trek episode “The Guardian on the Edge of Forever”), videogames and more. Angry Candy is his 1988 anthology about death, containing the award-winning short stories “Eidolons”, “Paladins of the Lost Hour” and “Soft Monkey”. Dangerous Visions was a 1967 collection of groundbreaking science fiction stories edited by Ellison and was hugely influential, not least for the way it included sex in the genre. It was followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and he announced a third, The Last Dangerous Visions, in 1973, but it was not published in his lifetime. His failure to publish the book became a controversy in speculative fiction circles, especially after several of the authors who sold him stories died before seeing them in print; British author Christopher Priest wrote about the book for his own fanzine, eventually expanding the piece into a short book titled The Book on the Edge of Forever in 1988. Ellison’s literary estate is now managed by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, who announced in 2022 that The Last Dangerous Visions would finally be published in September 2024, preceded by new editions of the first two books.
  • Regular listeners will be familiar with Liz’s love for Diana Wynn Jones, and we’ve previously mentioned her 1988 novelette “Carol O’Neir’s Hundredth Dream”. It’s part of her Chrestomanci series of stories and books, set in a magical universe where there are a specific number of alternate worlds.
  • We’ve also previously discussed American horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), most notably in #Pratchat58, “The Barbarian Switch”. Her famous story “The Lottery” appears in the many collections, including 1949’s The Lottery and Other Stories. Dark Tales is a more recent anthology, published by Penguin in 2016.

More notes to come soon!

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

#Pratchat70 – Punching Up

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Liz and Ben are joined by guest author Caimh “C. K.” McDonnell as they read a very early and very short chapter in the history of the Watch: Terry Pratchett’s 1993 short Discworld story, “Theatre of Cruelty”.

When the Watch discover a murdered entertainer with pockets full of change, a string of sausages round his neck, and no witnesses to the crime, the Clues are very unhelpful. But Corporal Carrot is on the case – and when it comes to solving the crime, he knows the way to do it…

Written for W H Smith’s free Bookcase magazine – a pristine copy of which now fetches a few hundred dollars – “Theatre of Cruelty” was published not long before the second Watch novel, Men at Arms. It packs more jokes into 1,000 words than most people write in a lifetime, and is also a delightful extra outing with the original officers of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. But don’t take our word for it: you can read it yourself at the L-Space web.

Is it a satisfying murder mystery? Why does Pratchett seem to have a thing for Punch and Judy? And how on Earth did we talk for nearly two hours about such a short piece of writing? Join the conversation – and send us your favourite short stories and cruel bits of theatre – using the hashtag #Pratchat70.

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Guest Caimh McDonnell is a comedian, writer and author best known for two series of books. The first is the “Dublin Trilogy” comic thrillers, starring Bunny McGarry and a cast of loveable rogues, beginning with A Man With One of Those Faces in 2016 (though see the reading order on his website). The other – as C. K. McDonnell – is the comic urban fantasy series The Stranger Times, about a weird newspaper called The Stranger Times, and beginning with the novel titled…er…The Stranger Times in 2021. Aside from his books you can hear his writing on two podcasts: The Bunnycast for further crime stories, and The Stranger Times Podcast for more Stranger Times. You might also catch him live this Halloween via his Facebook or YouTube accounts! Caimh is on Twitter at @caimh, and his website is whitehairedirishman.com. The Stranger Times series has its own site at thestrangertimes.co.uk.

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

For our October episode, we’re going on one last trip to Roundworld as we read and discuss The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day with two special guests, including our old friend and Uniting Church minister, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones. We’re recording around the 25th of September, so don’t delay – get your questions about the book (or the Science series as a whole!) in ASAP via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, or on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat71.

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.