Elizabeth Flux

#Pratchat78 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 78, “One Step Beyond”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s final collaboration with Stephen Baxter, 2016’s The Long Cosmos, with returning guests Joel Martin and Deanne Sheldon-Collins.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is from the song “One Step Beyond”, originally by Jamaican artist Prince Buster, who released it as a B-side on his single “Al Capone” in 1964. Coincidentally the version of the original we could find on YouTube features footage of exactly the kind of exoticised “Egyptian” dancing we imagined Fred and Nobby doing in our episode about Jingo. (We don’t necessarily recommend listening to all Prince Buster’s back catalogue; the music is great, but some of the lyrics are misogynist at best.) In the UK and Australia, ”One Step Beyond” is much better known via the cover by Madness, a ska band from Camden who also took their name and other early covers from Prince Buster. The song was the title track on Madness’ first studio album, One Step Beyond (1979), and their second hit single.
  • We’ve previously discussed the The Long Earth:
  • The Long Earth timeline only gets a bit longer in this book; here’s an updated (and simplified) list of major events to help you keep it all straight:
    • 1848-1895 – the adventures of Joshua’s ancestor, natural stepper Luis Valienté, culminating in “the Fund”, an organisation that bribes steppers to interbreed. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2001 – Freddie Burdon is given Maria Valienté’s details by The Fund. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2002 – Maria, now 15, gives birth to Joshua, leaving him briefly alone on a stepwise Earth. (The Long Earth)
    • 2015 – “Step Day” – humanity at large learns of the Long Earth. (The Long Earth)
    • 2026 – The Green family and others establish Reboot on Earth West 101,754. (The Long Earth)
    • 2029 – Monica Jansson investigates Bettany Diamond, the “Damaged Woman” who sees into stepwise Earths. (The Long Cosmos)
    • 2030 – Lobsang and Joshua go on “The Journey” and meet Sally Linsay; they also find the Cueball Earth. Lobsang’s “ambulant unit” is left behind with First Person Singular on the far side of The Gap. Joshua (M28) meets Helen (F17). Rod Green delivers the suitcase nuke to Datum Madison. (The Long Earth)
    • 2031 – Joshua and Helen get married. (before The Long War)
    • 2036 – Cassie Poulson is the first human to encounter the “silver beetles” in New Springfield on Earth West 1,217,756. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2038 – After three years of distributing copies of the Complete Works to Long Earth communities, Johnny Shakespeare’s matter printer makes a mutant copy of itself on Earth West 31,415 which multiplies until the world has to be evacuated. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2040 – Maggie’s mission captaining The Benjamin Franklin. Roberta’s trip with the Chinese East Twenty Million mission. War is avoided between the United States and Valhalla. Joshua loses his hand after being captured by the Beagles. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts. Monica Jansson dies. (The Long War) Stan Berg is born. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2045 – Maggie’s mission as captain of the Neil Armstrong II, and Sally’s trip to Mars with her father Willis and Frank Wood. Frank dies on Mars. Joshua and Sally help the Next escape from military prison, and Joshua successfully talks Maggie out of blowing them up; they leave to establish the Grange, and Lobsang destroys Happy Landings with a meteorite. (The Long Mars) Lobsang “dies” in late fall; his funeral is in December. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2052 – Nikos is the first confirmed human to step “North” when he finds the Gallery and the silver beetles on New Springfield. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2054 – “George”, Agnes and their adopted son Ben settle in New Springfield. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2056 – Agnes realises something is wrong with the world and discovers the beetles. Stan is approached by Roberta Golding to join the Next in the Grange and declines. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2058 – Lobsang and Joshua investigate Earth West 1,217,756 and uncover the beetles’ plans. Six months later in Fall, Joshua finds Sally and they retrieve the old Lobsang from Earth West 174,827,918, the home of the Traversers. (The Long Utopia)
    • 2059 – Early in the year, Stan, “George” and Sally “cauterise” Earth West 1,217,756 just before it is destroyed by the beetles.
    • 2067 – Helen Green dies and is buried in Datum Madison. (The Long Cosmos)
    • 2070 – The Invitation is heard by humans, the Next, the trolls and many others. Joshua goes on his ill-fated sabbatical, is rescued by Sancho, and the pair rescue Rod from the Yggdrasil world. Meanwhile Nelson meets his son and grandson, who is lost when Second Person Singular steps away. The Next start the project to build the Thinker. (The Long Cosmos)
    • 2071 – The Thinker nears completion and Maggie, Joshua, the new Lobsang, Sancho and friends take three big steps North. (The Long Cosmos)
  • Stella Welch is not a new character; she appears briefly in The Long Utopia, held up as one of the brightest “pre-Emergence” Next in the Grange. She is also one of the Next who answers Lobsang’s call for help about New Springfield, and reveals the plan to recruit Stan to seal off that Earth.
  • Ben refers to “Martin” from the Humble; this is due to a typo in his notes. The character is actually Marvin Lovelace, who (as Liz rightly remembered in a bit cut for time) is one of the Next who appeared in The Long Utopia. In that book he’s a gambler, an undercover agent for the Next who found Stan Berg, and later answers Lobsang’s call for help alongside Stella. He seems briefly conflicted about Stan’s fate.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat69 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 69, “Long Fall Sally”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s penultimate collaboration with Stephen Baxter, 2015’s The Long Utopia, with returning guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title puns on the song “Long Tall Sally”, written and originally recorded by Little Richard (with Robert “Bumps” Blackwell and Enotris Johnson) in 1956. Fittingly for The Long Earth, “Long Tall Sally” was famously covered by both The Kinks and The Beatles in 1964. Why call it that? Well…it’s a bit of a spoiler, but it’s obviously a reference to Long Earth supporting protagonist Sally Linsay, and you’ll understand if you’ve read the book (or when you get to the end of the episode).
  • We’ve previously discussed the The Long Earth:
  • The Long Utopia adds a lot of new events to the Long Earth timeline; here’s a short(ish) reference to put them in context with some years from the previous books.
    • 1848 – Luis Valienté is recruited by Oswald Hackett into the Knights of Discorporea.
    • 1852 – Luis and the other Knights, including Fraser Burdon, assist the Underground Railroad in America, then get rich by plundering other Earths’ gold veins.
    • 1871 – the Knights go on their final mission in Berlin before Mr Radcliffe tries to murder them. They go into hiding.
    • 1895 – Hackett meets with Luis and Burdon and they form “the Fund” to set up marriages between stepping families and ensure more steppers are born.
    • 1916 (or 1917) – Percy Blakeney accidentally steps to a nearby Earth in the prelude to The Long Earth.
    • 2001 – Freddie Burdon is contacted by the Fund and given Maria Valienté’s details.
    • 2002 – Maria, now 15, gives birth to Joshua in stepwise Madison.
    • 2015 – “Step Day”, when humanity at large learns of the Long Earth. Joshua is thirteen.
    • 2026 – 117 pioneers, including the Green family, arrive on Earth West 101,754 and found the town of Reboot.
    • 2028 – Helen’s mother, Tilda Green, dies sometime between this year and 2030.
    • 2030 – “The Journey”, Lobsang and Joshua’s trip from The Long Earth. Rod Green (Helen’s brother) blows up Datum Madison this year, around the same time as Joshua (aged 28) meets Helen Green (aged 17).
    • 2031 – Joshua and Helen get married.
    • 2036 – Cassie Poulson is the first human to encounter the “silver beetles” in New Springfield on Earth West 1,217,756.
    • 2040 – Maggie’s mission captaining The Benjamin Franklin, Roberta’s trip with the Chinese East Twenty Million mission, and most of the rest of The Long War. The Yellowstone supervolcano erupts. Stan Berg is born.
    • 2045 – Maggie’s mission as captain of the Neil Armstrong II, and Sally’s trip to Mars with Willis and Frank. Lobsang dies in late fall this year, and his funeral is in December.
    • 2052 – Joshua turns 50 and does his 100,000 steps walk. Nikos finds the Gallery and meets the silver beetles.
    • 2054 – “George”, Agnes and Ben settle in New Springfield.
    • 2056 – Agnes realises something is wrong with the world and discovers the beetles. Stan is approached by Roberta Golding to join the Next in the Grange and declines.
    • 2058 – Lobsang and Joshua investigate Earth West 1,217,756 and uncover the beetles’ plans. Six months later in Fall, Joshua finds Sally and they retrieve the old Lobsang from Earth West 174,827,918, the home of the Traversers.
    • 2059 – Early in the year, Stan, “George” and Sally “cauterise” Earth West 1,217,756 just before it is destroyed by the beetles.
  • The new English translation of Journey to the West, the Chinese folk novel by Wu Chen’en, is Julia Lovell’s from 2021, titled Monkey King. The titular Monkey is a trouble-making immortal recruited to aid a Buddhist monk in fetching scriptures from a monastery in India. This is meant to redeem Monkey for his previous misdeeds, including upsetting the order of Heaven, but he refuses to behave. The monk, Tripitaka, tricks Monkey into putting on a cap that conceals a metal band, which he is able to tighten around Monkey’s head with a secret spell (referred to as the “headache sutra” in the famous Japanese television version of the story). This doesn’t injure Monkey – he is made of stone, it’s a whole thing – but it does cause him intense headaches which Tripitaka uses to rein in his violent impulses.
  • Joshua was 13 on Step Day, not 14 as Ben guesses. He was born in 2002, not 2001.
  • While we’re working out how to pronounce Nikos, Liz mentions “Nikolaj”, Charles Boyle’s adopted son in the police sitcom Brooklyn-99. The precise pronunciation of Nikolaj’s name is a repeated gag and character moment between Boyle and his partner, best friend and idol, Jake Peralta.
  • As we’ll mention next episode, the Valhalla Belt references Strata as the main characters live in an alternate universe where Erik Leifsson made it to the Americas, united with its indigenous peoples and formed a nation called Valhalla, which dominated the world through superior technology.
  • Joshua is eleven years older than Helen, and first met her when she was 17. They got married in 2031, when he was 29 and she was 18. Freddie was 17 when he had sex with Maria, who was 14; she was actually 15 by the time she gives birth in May 2002, though this doesn’t change our opinions much.
  • The “10,000 steps” Ben mentions are actually the “Seven Thousand Steps”, a paved path that winds around the mountain known as The Throat of the World in the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Climbing the steps is an early part of the main quest; they lead to the monastery of High Hrothgar, where the Greybeards await the arrival of the player character, who is the Dragonborn – a prophesied hero with the power of the Voice, able to speak the magical language of dragons.
  • We put some of the dates in the timeline above, but Ben is correct about the history of the Green family, especially about her mother, Tilda, being the driving force behind their migration. They first tried settling in Madison West 2, but it wasn’t far enough away; they then invested heavily in the development of Madison West 5, but didn’t make enough money to leave their Datum jobs behind. Tilda wanted her own dream, not someone else’s, and convinced the family to head out into the further Long Earth, abandoning Rod and all their other ties to the Datum to join the group who founded Reboot in 2026. She died of cancer between 2028 and 2030, and no-one told Rod; he seemed to think she was still alive when he was captured by Monica, minutes before the bomb went off.
  • Liz compares Willis Linsay to Tom Wambsgans from Succession, a character in the popular HBO series about a wealthy family, headed by Logan Roy (Brian Cox), who owns the global media empire Waystar. As the title suggests, a large part of the drama revolves around who will succeed the ailing Logan as head of the company. Tom (Matthew Macfayden) is a Waystar executive who marries Logan’s youngest child, Shiv (Sarah Snook); he is thus close to, but not truly part of, the family’s inner circle. The series ran for four seasons between 2018 and 2023.
  • Ben makes a joke about “love languages”, which we’ve mentioned before; in brief they’re a highly reductive, heteronormative and traditional theory about the ways in which people like to show and be shown affection. In the original version, invented by an American pastor, there are five, but really the useful thing to take from the concept is that different folks like to show and receive love in different ways.
  • The short story “The High Meggas”, Pratchett’s original exploration of the ideas behind The Long Earth, was written in the 1980s; he gives the year 1986, though that conflicts with some accounts of what else he was working on at the time. Ben compares Sally Linsay to Larry Linsay, the protagonist of that story, who is more or less a combination of Sally and her father Willis: one of the inventors of the “moving belt” (the story’s equivalent of the Stepper Box) who ends up living far from other humans in the High Meggers (which are spelt with an “a” in the story). We discussed the short story in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon”.
  • As we’ve mentioned in our previous Long Earth episodes, complete drafts of the final three novels were finished in 2013, and were full collaborations up to that point. It is true that Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking after that, with only minimal involvement from Pratchett, who had moved on to Raising Steam and The Shepherd’s Crown. Relevant to this episode’s discussion, they did plan the series as a five-book arc right at the start, probably in 2010 or 2011. Thanks again to Marc Burrows, author of The Magic of Terry Pratchett, from which most of this information is drawn. (There’s surprisingly little about The Long Earth in A Life With Footnotes.)
  • Liz’s reference to Nelson Azikiwe’s “sex barge” is his trip with Lobsang to meet Second Person Singular, a Traverser off the coast of New Zealand somewhere around Earth West 700. The society of islanders there has some things in common with the community of the Next in the Grange, included them being quite relaxed about casual sex. His encounter with Cassie for “a little wiggle” is recounted (subtly) in Chapter 60 of The Long War.
  • The Knights of Discorporea use their own terms for stepping, since no global consensus has been reached. Luis Valienté doesn’t have a name for stepping, but uses “dexter” and “sinister” for the directions, Latin words for right and left respectively (a clue to Luis’ more educated early life). Hackett calls stepping “Waltzing”, and uses “widdershins” and “deiseal” for the directions. Pratchett fans will be well familiar with widdershins, which as discussed in the episode notes for #Pratchat30 is an old English word (not an Old English word) which means anti-clockwise, or to move around something by keeping it on your left. Deiseal comes from Irish and means movement “to the right”, or clockwise, making it a good if oddly chosen opposite to widdershins. (A variant word, deasil, just means clockwise.) We presume widdershins and sinister map to “West”, and deiseal and dexter to “East”, since that’s how those compass directions appear on a European map in the usual orientation.
  • X-Men: First Class is the 2011 prequel film showing the origins of the X-Men, a group of mutant superheroes recruited as teenagers by powerful mutant telepath Charles Xavier in his quest to appease the humans who hate and fear them. (That’s possibly a bit harsh, but we’ve been thinking about the superhero as upholder of the status quo recently.) The film was originally intended as a reboot of the X-Men film franchise, but the next film, X-Men: Days of Future Past linked it to the existing X-Men films and established it as a prequel.
  • The Chartists were a working class movement for political reform in the UK, founded in 1838. They demanded a number of changes to improve British democracy, including an expansion of suffrage (though not to women), secret ballots, and less restrictive requirements for who could stand for the House of Commons. The reforms were supported by millions of working class folks, who presented petitions to parliament, but they didn’t see any of their desired changes adopted until after the movement died out in 1857. The “uprising” of April 1848 was part of a renewed interest in Chartism following the French Revolution, and was really a peaceful meeting when a new petition was intended to be brought to parliament by a procession of Chartists. But the government, who strongly opposed the reforms, enacted old and new laws to make the procession illegal, and had huge numbers of police in attendance (including 100,000 special constables!). In the end the meeting ended without the planned procession, though it is true that many were moved to violently oppose the oppression of the government, and presumably those would have been the “agents” removed by the Knights. They are still working for the government agains the common folk, though.
  • When Liz says that “in Doctor Who, Queen Victoria is a werewolf”, she is referring to the episode “Tooth and Claw” from season two of the revived series, when the Tenth Doctor and Rose encounter a recently bereaved Queen Victoria on a trip across the Scottish highlands where she is attacked by an alien werewolf. It is suggested that she may have been bitten by the wolf, and as Rose and the Doctor depart they wonder if this means the Royal Family are indeed all werewolves.
  • Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, German Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, was a noted small-L liberal with great influence over the Queen. He had an interest in many progressive ideas and social reforms, including support of emancipation (as seen in The Long Utopia), technology, education, science and the welfare of the working class, including raising the working age. While this makes him sound pretty great, it’s important to remember this was all from a fairly paternalistic “we must care for those less fortunate than us” perspective, and he had no desire to lessen his own power or position, but his heart does seem to have been in the right place. His European ambitions seem to stem at least in part from a fear for his royal relatives, especially in the mid 19th century in the wake of the many revolutions in continental Europe. He’s perhaps best remembered for championing the Royal Exhibition of 1851, for which the Crystal Palace was built, and which probably wouldn’t have happened without his campaigning.
  • Queen Charlotte is the monarch in the alternate reality “Regency”-era of the Bridgerton television series, based on the series of romance novels by Julia Quinn. The story of her marriage to King George III is told in the spin-off mini-series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, released in May 2023. Ben edits a Bridgerton podcast, What Would Danbury Do?, who covered Queen Charlotte in episode 40, “Sorrows, Prayers and Enduring Love”, with guest Maxine Beneba Clarke.
  • There’s no directly Biblical evidence for Mary’s age at the time of Jesus’s birth, but based on marriage customs many historians have said she was likely to be a teenager. Sources we’ve found have suggested she was maybe 14 when Gabriel appeared to her to give her the news, but 15 or even 16 when Jesus was actually born. But there’s no official answer, and she is most often depicted as an adult woman, as she would have been in any case at the time of Jesus’ crucifiction.
  • Liz mentions Joshua’s Tree, a reference to U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree, which itself is named after an actual species of tree native to the Mojave Desert in America. It was named by Mormon settlers, who thought it looked like Joshua raising his hands in prayer. It’s first three tracks are three of U2’s biggest hits: “Where the Streets Have No Name”, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “With or Without You”.
  • Bill Chambers’ story about the Cueball is, in fact, word for word the same in The Long War chapter 58, and The Long Utopia chapter 1, save that in this book there are a couple of asides to remind us about the history of the Long Earth. The Cueball was first mentioned, very briefly, in chapter 28 of The Long Earth.
  • The Southern Vampire series – not to be confused with the Vampire Chronicles, which is a whole other thing – are a series of books written by American author Charlaine Harris. Also known as the Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, they follow protagonist Sookie, a telepathic waitress living in the town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, in a world where vampires have made themselves public knowledge following the development of a blood substitute called “Tru Blood”. (Oh yes – it’s the series that spawned the TV show True Blood, though it’s a loose adaptation.)
  • The Book of Matthew pretty unambigiously states that Judas Iscariot, one of Jesus’s twelve close disciples, did betray Jesus, identifying him to soldiers with a kiss in exchange for a bribe of thirty pieces of silver. Other Biblical writings say Judas was influenced by the Devil to do this, rather than the money being his motivation, and some say Jesus foresaw his betrayal and allowed it since it was part of God’s plan. This has led to something of a contradiction; was he following God’s plan, controlled by Satan, or exercising free will? Bertrand Russell and other philosophers have written about this.
  • Thomas Moore’s Utopia was first published in 1516, originally in Latin. The title is derived from Greek and literally translates to “nowhere” or “no place”.
  • The band that would become The Beatles first formed in 1956 as The Quarrymen, named after their school, Quarry Bank High School, and specifically the start of the school song, “Quarry men old before our birth”. Throughout their early career that went through several names, including in 1960 the Beatals, The Silver Beetles, and for the first time, The Beatles. They were also known for a brief time in 1961 as The Savage Young Beatles, hence Ben’s mash-up of “The Savage Silver Beatles”.
  • Ben mentions Star Trek being set “150 years in the future”, which would place it in the mid-23rd century. That’s about right for the original series of Star Trek, in which James Kirk becomes captain of the USS Enterprise from around the year 2265. However Ben is more thinking of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which takes place 100 years later in the 24th century: Jean-Luc Picard takes command of the newly launched USS Enterprise D in 2364.
  • The Cavern Club was a jazz club in Liverpool which opened in 1957, inspired by jazz clubs in Paris. As rock and roll began to take off in London, it became one of the central venues, and the Beatles played many of their early important gigs there as early as 1958, when they were still called The Quarrymen. The club is still open, though it closed for a time in the 1970s and 80s during the construction of an underground train route. There may well have been clubs called The Gallery or The Observatory, but they don’t seem to have played a big part in rock and roll history if so.
  • We mention a few other von Neumann replicators in fiction include:
    • The alien Replicators in Stargate: SG-1, who initially appear as insect-like robots made of multiple identical pieces. They first appear in the season 3 episode “Nemesis”, where they are the great enemy being fought in a war by the advanced alien Asgardians. They return many times in multiple forms in both SG1 and its spin-off Stargate: Atlantis. As Liz mentions, their origins are later explored, most notably in the fifth season episode of Stargate: SG-1, “Menace”.
    • The Slylandro Probes appear in the 1992 videogame Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters, recently re-released as Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters. The probes seem to be working for someone, though exactly who – and why they are so hostile – is one of many mysteries the player can choose to solve in the game.
    • Another example we didn’t mention comes from the weird 1990s sci-fi series Lexx, in which drones resembling flying robotic arms also act like von Neumann replicators.
  • Freeman Dyson (1923-2020; no relation to the dude who invents vacuum cleaners) was a British-American physicist who contributed a lot of enduring ideas to science and science fiction. (One of them, thankfully, was not his skepticism of climate change.) The two here are:
    • The Dyson Sphere was a thought experiment about how a super-advanced species might efficiently capture all the energy it could need from its own sun. The basic idea – a huge spherical construction around a star – pre-dates Dyson, first appearing in the 1937 novel Star Maker by Olaf Stapleton, and also J. D. Bernal’s 1929 nonfiction book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry Into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul. Both of these were inspirations for Dyson, who wrote about the idea of a sphere in his paper ‘Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation’ for Science in 1959. He didn’t call it a Dyson sphere himself, and indeed didn’t imagine an actual sphere, but instead a spherical group of independent solar collectors. The idea took many sci-fi writers imaginations, with variations appearing in novels like Ringworld throughout the 1970s and beyond. Dyson thought the popular sci-fi depiction – of a literal solid sphere, as in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Relics’ – impossible.
    • The Dyson planetary spin motor seems to come from Dyson’s 1966 essay ‘The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology’, published in Perspectives in Modern Physics. The beetles use exactly his method, including how to accelerate the planet’s rotation.
  • In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg Collective are faction of cybernetic organisms first encountered in the second season episode ‘Q Who’. The possess (more or less) a group consciousness and superior technology, and seek to “assimilate” all other forms of life into the Collective, mostly by infecting other humanoids with nanites which transform them into more Borg. Like the Silver Beetles, they generally ignore beings they do not consider a threat, prioritising their current tasks. The Cybermen in Doctor Who are a similar concept, though they are not often written as well.
  • Taskmaster is a British comedy gameshow in which guest comedians compete to complete ridiculous “tasks” set by the hosts, Greg Davies, the taskmaster who judges the winner, and show creator Alex Horne, who acts as a meeker referee to make sure contestants follow the rules of each task. It debuted in 2015 on UK digital channel Dave, moving to Channel 4 in 2020, and has run so far (as of mid-2024) for 17 series and more than 150 episodes. Local versions have been created in many countries, including one for Australia and New Zealand on Channel 10 in 2023, hosted by taskmaster Tom Gleeson and referee Tom Cashman.
  • The trope of someone being eaten alive by tiny creatures – often until there’s nothing left, except maybe bones – appears in lots of places:
    • The X-Files episode Liz remembers with the glowing green bugs is “Darkness Falls” from the show’s first season in 1994.
    • The tiny dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are “compys”, short for Procompsognathus; they appear in the first novel, and then become one of several unused elements from that novel used in the sequels, in this case Jurassic Park: The Lost World.
    • In the 1999 film The Mummy (a guilty favourite of this podcast), one of the terrors in the Mummy’s tomb is a hoard of scarabs that can devour you in seconds.
  • Defying Doomsday is a 2016 anthology from Australian publisher Twelfth Planet Press. It’s a collection of post-apocalyptic fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, and won a Ditmar Award for Best Anthology; it includes the story “Did We Break the End of the World?” by friend of the show Tansy Rayner-Roberts, which also won a Ditmar for best novelette or novella. It was followed in 2020 by Rebuilding Tomorrow, a similar anthology with a more hopeful theme, which won an Aurealis Award for Best Anthology in 2021. (It’s not clear if these are still in print.)
  • Deanne recommended the The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, a series beginning with All Systems Red.

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

#Pratchat77 – How to Get Below in Advertising

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Writer, filmmaker and creative director Lucas Testro joins Liz and Ben on a trip down under to the Other Place as we discuss Terry Pratchett’s first ever published short story, 1963’s “The Hades Business”.

Shady advertising man Crucible arrives home to find none other than old Nicholas Lucifer waiting for him in his study. But he hasn’t come to take him to eternal damnation. Instead, the Devil has a business proposition for Crucible: he want to make the public conscious, Hell-wise…

At age thirteen (actually fourteen), the young Pratchett scored full marks for this story as a school assignment, encouraging him to try his luck with the editor of his three favourite spec fic magazines. And it worked! As the legend goes, he used the whopping £14 he was paid for the story to buy his first typewriter, and the rest is history…with a few bumps and detours along the way, of course.

Was the young Pratchett a genius? Do you know any fourteen-year-olds who’ve been published alongside Michael Moorcock and Harry Harrison? Are we way too harsh on a story written by a teenager, or is it fair game as an exercise in working where the author of Night Watch and Nation got his start? And what afterlife would you sell – and with what slogan? Get down with this episode’s conversation using the infernal hashtag #Pratchat77.

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Lucas Testro (he/him) is writer, filmmaker and creative director based in Melbourne. He’s worked in theatre, television and short film, including the time travel farce I’m You, Dickhead and superhero comedy Capes. He’s worked in a variety of capacities with youth creative writing centre 100 Story Building. In 2022 he founded Social Storylab, a media production house that seeks to use persuasive marketing techniques for social good. (He’s kind of the anti-Crucible.) You can find Lucas online at manwithajetpack.com, and his excellent three-part audio documentary about mysterious Doctor Who writer Donald Cotton is available via donaldcotton.com or to stream on Soundcloud.

As usual you’ll find comprehensive notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Next episode we finish a long-term goal: the end of the Long Earth series, with the fifth and final novel, The Long Cosmos! We’ll be joined by previous Steppers Joel Martin and Deanne Sheldon-Collins. Get your questions in by ASAP using the hashtag #Pratchat78 on social media, or email 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.

#Pratchat41 – The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl

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Educator Dr Charlotte Pezaro joins Liz and Ben on a trip to the South Pelagic, where they find tsunamis, gods and science in Nation, Terry Pratchett’s standalone young adult novel from 2008.

Mau is returning from his rite of passage when a huge wave washes over his island Nation, killing everyone he has ever known. He is all alone, stuck without a soul between the states of boy and man. Lost in his despair and anger at the gods he now isn’t sure he believes in, he’s ready to give in to the dark water until he meets Daphne, the only survivor from a “trouserman” ship flung into the Nation by the wave. As they learn each others’ customs and languages, and other survivors gradually begin to arrive, Mau and Daphne must both reckon with the gods and ghosts of the Nation’s past – and work hard to ensure it has a future…

Pratchett’s own proudest achievement, and winner of multiple awards, Nation presents an alternate universe where things are a little bit different in some ways…and considerably different in others. Pratchett examines his favourite themes of belief, death, imperialism and science through a new lens, in a tale of loss, growing up, and asking big questions.

Is this Pratchett’s magnum opus? Does inventing an entire universe next door make it okay for a white Englishman to tell a story about South Pacific Islanders with the serial numbers filed off? Why did he split Australia in half ? Tell us by using the hashtag #Pratchat41 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro is an educator with a PhD in pedagogy and years of science and technology communication experience. Charlotte is also a qualified primary school teacher, and works with other teachers to help them improve their skills. You can find out more about Charlotte at charlottepezaro.com, or follow her on Twitter at @dialogicedu.

Next time we’re heading back to Ankh-Morpork for a tale of journalism, vampirism and authoritarianism, the 25th Discworld novel: 2000’s The Truth! We’ll be joined by returning guest, writer and deputy culture editor for Guardian Australia, Stephanie Convery. Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat42, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

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

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.

#EeekClub2024 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2024“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

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 fourth Eeek Club special; the previous ones are Eeek Club 2021, Eeek Club 2022 and Eeek Club 2023.
  • “Ramen hacks” are things you can add into your bowl of traditional Japanese noodle soup to make it even more delicious. (Not a lot of them are vegetarian, so Ben has given them a miss.) If you want to find some, you could look up the hashtag #ramenhacks on TikTok or Instagram, search YouTube, or do a web search, which will find a fair number of listicles.
  • Find out all the details about the Australian Discworld Convention (12-14 July 2024 in Adelaide) at their website, ausdwcon.org.
  • “Mad March” is the name given in Adelaide to the period of the year usually starting in late February and running through March when nearly all of their big cultural events occur: the Adelaide Fringe Festival (the second largest fringe arts festival in the world!), the Adelaide Festival, Womadelaide, the Clipsal 500 car race, and in some years even South Australia’s major horse race and a state election. It used to be not much else of note would happen there during the rest of the year, but as Liz mentions that’s no longer the case.
  • Maid Marian and Her Merry Men was a sitcom pitched at kids created by Tony Robinson. It spoofed the Robin Hood myth by having Robin be a cowardly tailor mistaken for a rebel leader, when actually Marian is the brains behind the outfit. We’ve mentioned it before, though not for a long time – it was way back in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”, and #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders”. The episode Ben is thinking of here is “They Came From Outer Space” from the show’s third series in 1993. (Fun fact: Ben wrote the first – and for a long time only – website dedicated to the show way back in around 1994, and even corresponded with a couple of the writers and actors on the show. A lot of the information on modern Marian sites is plag- well, copied from his site, which no longer exists except in the Internet Archive.)
  • The “Keep your secrets, Gandalf” meme is from the scene where Frodo meets Gandalf as he arrives in the Shire at the start of The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.
  • We mention a few TV shows:
    • The Worst Witch was originally a series of children’s books written and illustrated by Jill Murphy, the first of which was published in 1974. It chronicles the adventures of Mildred Hubble, a student at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Young Witches; Mildred’s clumsiness gets her into all sorts of trouble and earns her the titular epithet. It’s actually been two different television series, one fairly low budget one in 1998 which was so popular it had two spin-offs, and a newer one in 2017. There was also a stage musical in 2018!
    • Dead Boy Detectives is on Netflix, and is based on characters created by Neil Gaiman for the Sandman comics, who later went on to star in more adventures in comics and appear briefly in the Doom Patrol television series before getting their own show. The titular dead boys are a pair of ghosts who solve supernatural crimes while hiding out from Death so they can stay together. The first season was released ion 25 April 2024.
    • Wednesday is also on Netflix. Created by Tim Burton, it’s a new version of The Addams Family focussed on Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega. After being expelled from a regular high school, Wednesday is sent to the much creepier Nevermore Academy. A second season is coming, probably in 2025.
    • The White Lotus is a black comedy anthology series on HBO. Each season takes place at a different hotel run by the fictional White Lotus chain. The third season is coming in 2025.

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

Eeek Club 2024

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It’s the 25th of May, which can only mean one thing: Geek Pride Day! Or Towel Day. Or the Glorious 25th of May and the Battle of Treacle Mine Road…okay, that’s three things. Why not add one more? This is the Pratchat Eeek Club: a bonus episode discussing Terry Pratchett-related topics selected by our “Eeek” tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • So it’s been a few years of the Podcast. How are you guys holding up?
  • How could one Discworld character use their skills and influence to change the patriarchal nature of the Disc?
  • What is an unwritten Discworld story for you, e.g. maybe a head canon of a specific character, or a general arc of how things came into being or changed on the Disc?
  • Why no gays? (On the Discworld.)
  • Like learning how to not use magic is the whole point of magic, what have you had to learn not to do to make your life easier/better?
  • What other storylines – other than The Watch – would you like to see turned into a television show?

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to this year’s Eeek Club contributors: Graham, Karl, Jing, the Caths, Jess and Ellie, Stephanie, Nathan and those we didn’t hear from.

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

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat1 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the notes and errata for episode 1, “Boots Theory“, featuring guest Cal Wilson discussing the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms.

  • We did indeed have Cal back to discuss Sourcery – see #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. Cal also returned for our fiftieth episode, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, to discuss Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Tragically Cal passed away unexpectedly in 2023; but a person’s not dead while their name is still spoken. GNU Cal Wilson.
  • For more on our decision to start with Men at Arms, see #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and also Liz’s post, “Let’s Start From the Very Beginning (but not actually)”.
  • Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, and the second to feature the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Ben does now write these things down (and, indeed, has a very comprehensive spreadsheet).
  • What Ben meant about the copyright on “Discworld” is that this is the first book in which “Discworld” appears on the imprint page as a registered trademark. Intellectual property (or IP) law is a complex topic, and can differ greatly from region to region, but to cover the basics:
    • Copyright (denoted by ©) is the protection of original works from being copied or otherwise used without the creator’s permission. This mostly applies to literary, dramatic, musical or other artistic work (including visual art), often lasts for a fixed period (the creators’ life plus 70 years in Australia), and is automatically applied without a creator having to do anything. A creator can extend it to others, as Terry later did by assigning copyright to he and his wife Lyn, and then their company, Dunmanifestin Limited. Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, only the specific expression of ideas, which is where some of the complexity comes in.
    • A trademark (denoted by ™️ or ®) is a “sign” that shows a product was made by a certain person or company. The sign can be almost anything: a word, a specific colour or style of packaging, a logo, a design, even a sound. It’s an old concept, similar to the “maker’s mark” used by artisans that is often mentioned in Antique Roadshow on silverware, jewellery, ceramics and so on. Anyone can start using the ™️ symbol, which suggests a common law trademark, but the ® denotes a registered trademark which is more easily enforceable by law. These are managed by government agencies (e.g. IP Australia). Also worthy of note is that if you have a trademark, you have to actively be using it, and you must defend it if someone else starts using it, or you will likely lose it.
    • It didn’t come up in this episode, but there are some complexities involved if a copyright belongs to a company and that company ceases to exist without its assets being transferred to another company or person. In the UK this can mean ownership of a work transfers half to the original creators, and half to the Crown, which has led to speculation that King Charles now owns half the rights to the Discworld videogames – though this has yet to be resolved…
  • You’ve probably heard of the Thames, but the Yarra is the common name for the river Birrarung or Biarrarung Marr, which flows through the heart of Melbourne, or Narrm. It runs for nearly 250 kilometres from the Yarra Ranges in inland Victoria to the ocean in Port Phillip Bay, though its course and nature has been changed extensively since European colonisation. It was previously nicknamed “the upside down river” due to the golden-brown muddy colouring it acquires by the time it flows through Melbourne. This is also the product of colonisation, as land clearing and mining have increased the erosion of surrounding fine clay into the water.
  • The negative reviewer of Pratchett’s work to which Ben refers was Northern Irish poet and literary critic Tom Paulin, who appeared on BBC2’s Late Review television program and derided Pratchett, writing him off as a populist: “… selling thousands of copies – a complete amateur – doesn’t even write in chapters – hasn’t a clue.” This seems to have been in around 1993 or 1994; Pratchett proudly reproduced the quote in the front many of his books, with the earliest example Ben can find being in the 1995 Corgi paperback of Interesting Times.
  • Terry Pratchett’s debut novel, The Carpet People, was first published in 1971, when Pratchett was 23 years old. However an earlier version of the story was serialised as some of his very first published fiction in the Bucks’ Free Press in 1965, when he was only 17! Most of the instalments of that version appear in the second collection of his early stories, Dragons at Crumbling Castle, published shortly after Pratchett’s death in 2015.
  • While the Vimes Boots Theory is articulated in the way of Pratchett, the idea behind it is of course not new. We’d like to thank Jeanette Hall on Twitter, who shared a link to an earlier version of the Boots Theory! In 1914, Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan wrote published the semi-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, “Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell.” (Tressell was the pen-name used by Noonan.) Based on his life working in Hastings between 1906 and 1910, the book contains a passage about the price of stockings and coal and how they are the means by which “the working classes are robbed.” We’ve included an excerpt below, but you can read the original text at the Union History website shared by Jeanette. You can also see the original manuscript! (This feels especially poignant because Ben’s own Great Great Grandfather was a painter in Belfast until his death in 1910 prompted the McKenzies to migrate to Australia.)

Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles. Everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish which is dear at any price.

Six weeks previously Owen bought a pair of second-hand boots for three shillings and they were now literally falling to pieces. Nora’s shoes were in much the same condition, but, as she said, it did not matter so much about hers because there was no need for her to go out if the weather were not fine.

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell, 1914
  • Also of note: the Vimes Boots Theory influenced the work of UK equality and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who in January 2022 created the Vimes Boots Poverty Index. The Index was intended to be a record of the prices of staple foods and other essentials over time, to demonstrate the disproportionate impact of rising prices on the poor. It was also specifically meant to show that government reports which only take inflation into account are inadequate, since they are not an accurate indicator of the way goods prices change. The Pratchett Estate – particularly Rhianna Pratchett – wholeheartedly endorsed this use of Vimes’ name. In the end, media and social media attention for the idea (using the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex) was enough to persuade the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) to change how they calculated cost of living expenses, largely making the compilation of the Index unnecessary. You can read more about it on the L-Space wiki.
  • Scooby-Doo is a children’s adventure show which began in 1969 with the Hanna-Barbera animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! It centres on a group of mystery-solving teenagers: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and Shaggy’s dog, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. Sometimes calling themselves “Mystery Inc.”, the group travel America in a mini-van called the Mystery Machine investigating supposedly supernatural occurrences. Famously most of their adventures end by revealing that the ghost, monster or other weirdness was a hoax all along, perpetrated by an old man in a costume. The show was hugely influential – not least because it helped fill the gap left after more violent superhero cartoons of the 60s like Space Ghost and The Herculoids were cancelled following protests from parent groups. There have been numerous animated series and films, and even live-action films, since 1969, and more are still being made. The characters are not usually explicitly romantically linked; Cal references a reboot that had genius Velma and dorky hippie Shaggy dating, and this has happened at least a couple of times. They are shown to try dating in both the 2010 animated series Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated and the 2011 live-action film Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster (a sequel to the 2009 reboot of the previous live-action films from 2002 and 2004). For the record, in both versions they quickly realise they don’t have a spark and remain “just friends”.
  • It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King in which a group of teenagers face a nameless evil creature, the titular “It”, which changes shape to evoke fear in its victims. It primarily appears in the shape of a clown named “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”. In a memorable sequence from early in the novel – replicated in both the 1990 TV mini-series adaptation and the first of the two-part film adaptations in 2017 – the Clown appears in the town sewer. In both versions Pennywise has primarily white-face makeup, not dissimilar to Paul Kidby’s version of Dr Whiteface. (“It” was portrayed by Tim Curry in 1990, and Bill Skarsgård in 2017.)
  • Clowns in our world can and do copyright their face makeup, and the egg gallery is based on the “Clown and Character Registry”, where many clowns actually did register to have their makeup painted on a goose egg and displayed. In the UK, the tradition can be traced back to Stan Built in the 1930s, though most of his original eggs were damaged or destroyed. In 1988 (or 1984 according to some sources), Clown Bluey, Chairman of Clowns International at the time, resurrected the tradition. This mini documentary from 2017 features Debbie Smith, the Clown Egg Gallery artist from 2010 to 2023. Clowns International still seems to run the egg gallery, with their website including a form to order a pair of eggs (one for the gallery and one for you), now painted by current artist Julie Proctor. So we’re sorry again, clowns. (Thanks to Maia in Michigan, who put us onto some sources via Twitter which helped us update this entry!)
  • Ben uses commedia dell’arte more-or-less correctly.
  • 99% Invisible is a podcast all about design, hosted by Roman Mars. The episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben while discussing the Alchemist’s Guild is “The Post-Billiards Age” from May 2015. (This episode will get mentioned again in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.)
  • There are indeed ghosts on the Discworld, appearing in several of the novels. We’ll be meeting some of them fairly soon, as one plays a major role in Wyrd Sisters. (See #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”.)
  • The final Discworld book is actually The Shepherd’s Crown; I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth-last, and the second-last to feature young witch Tiffany Aching. (We try to keep our spreadsheet handy in future episodes to avoid such basic mistakes.)
  • “Shoot” is used for arrows, as the term predates guns by many centuries.
  • CMOT Dibbler is pervasive once he arrives, but is not in The Colour of Magic. (See #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation”.) In fact he first shows up when the Watch does, in Guards! Guards! (See #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.)
  • Not only are Lord Vetinari’s plans for the future unknown, but it has also never been revealed how he ascended to the position of Patrician in the first place. We do get a little of his backstory in Night Watch; see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”.
  • We are aware that despite being asked “which Guild would you join”, we decided we would be wizards, witches or members of the Watch, none of which have an official guild – at least at the time of Men at Arms. See #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, for the creation of at least a temporary guild of Watchmen in The Fifth Elephant.

#Pratchat76 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 76, “Real Men Don’t Drink…Decaf”, discussing the 2003 standalone Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment with guest Freya Daly Sadgrove.

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Here’s “how is prangent formed”, the most famous YouTube compilation of misspelled Yahoo Answers questions about being pregnant, from 21 October 2016. While it’s mostly a bit of fun, it’s important to remember these were all asked by real people who had real fears and worries, just no way to edit their hastily (and perhaps secretly) typed questions. The US has a lot to answer for when it comes to sex (and indeed general) education…

Here’s that Traffic Accident Commission ad we mentioned, but please be warned, it’s pretty intense (though not gory).

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a bit of a mash-up of two ideas: first, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, the 1982 book by Bruce Feirstein satirising American ideas of masculinity (and which we last mentioned in our episode about The Unadulterated Cat, “The Cat in the Prat”). The second is another riff on the classic vampire line “I don’t drink…wine”, originally from the 1931 film Dracula starring Bela Lugosi (though the original line was “I never drink…wine”). Just to be clear: we don’t think there’s anything wrong with drinking decaf, or believe in the idea of a “real man”. You’re a man if you think you are; that’s how gender works.
  • “Let’s Get Down to Business” is the first line of the song “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from the 1998 Disney animated film Mulan. Mulan is an adaptation of a Chinese folk story from around the 4th to 6th centuries BCE about Hua Mulan, a young woman who disguises herself as a man to fulfil her family’s conscription obligations, saving her father from being forced to join the army. She goes on to win great battles and achieve great fame. In the film, “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is sung by Mulan’s Captain, Li Shang (played by BD Wong, but sung by Donny Osmond!), during a training montage for Mulan and her fellow fresh recruits.
  • Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011) was a British fantasy children’s author. As one of Liz’s other favourite authors, we’ve mentioned her a lot – and one of these days we’ll do an episode or more about her books. Her most famous works include the Chrestomanci series about magical parallel universes, and Howl’s Moving Castle. The titular Howl is a mighty wizard, but the protagonist of the story is Sophie, the eldest daughter of a hat shop owner, who is cursed with old age by the Witch of the Wastes. Sophie gets a job as a cleaner for the wizard Howl, and makes a bargain with his fire demon, Calcifer, that he will restore her youth if she can free him from his contract to the wizard. It was very succesfully (if very loosely) adapted into a film by Hayao Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli in 2004.
  • The panel featuring Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones was “Whose Fantasy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1988. (Ben found it after we wondered if the two were friends in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”, and we mentioned it more recently in #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”). It was chaired by Neil Gaiman and also features John Harrison and Geoff Ryman.
  • You can read the full text of the Daily Express review of Monstrous Regiment on Colin Smythe’s web page for the book. It opens with: “Not so long ago in a pub far, far, away Terry Pratchett announced that he had discovered an interesting fact. In the American Civil War more than 300 women had enlisted in the army dressed as men. There may have been more. These were just one ones who told people about it afterwards.”
  • Questionable Content (QC for short) is a long-running webcomic written and illustrated by American-Canadian cartoonist Jeph Jacques. It started in 2003, and is a slice-of-life story about indie rock fan Martin Reed and friends, set in a slightly futuristic world where artificial intelligence and advanced cybernetics are commonplace. At the time of writing it’s had more than 5,200 instalments! Elliot is a character introduced in 2011, an employee at a bakery first visited by Martin in Comic 1,845. Like Paul Perks, he’s a big but gentle man.
  • We previously met the small-but-officious Nuggan in the “illustrated Discworld fable” The Last Hero, as discussed in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • For the curious, you can find a list of Abominations Unto Nuggan mentioned in this book (and elsewhere – mainly The Last Hero and The Compleat Discworld Atlas) at the L-Space Wiki.
  • For reference, the members of the Monstrous Regiment are:
    • Lieutenant Blouse (no first name given; later promoted to much higher rank)
    • Sergeant Jack Jackrum (no other name given; later promoted to Sergeant Major)
    • Corporal Strappi (later revealed to (probably?) be a Captain and a “political”)
    • Private Oliver “Ozzer” Perks (Polly; later promoted to Sergeant)
    • Private Maladicta (Maladict)
    • Private Carborundum (Jade)
    • Private Igor (Igorina)
    • Private “Tonker” Halter (Magda)
    • Private “Shufti” Manickle (Betty)
    • Private “Wazzer” Goom (Alice)
    • Private “Lofty” Tewt (Tilda)
  • Ben gives a short account of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women in the footnote, but if you want to read it, the full text is available via Project Goodmountain – er, Gutenberg.
  • We first heard about Terry Pratchett’s 2014 interview at the Wheeler Centre during the recording of #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“ – our guest, Michael Williams, was director of the Centre at the time, and was the interviewer for the event. His story about making a faux pas – and Terry’s reaction – are included in the third episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. The full discussion, titled “Imagination, Not Intelligence, Made Us Human”, is available via YouTube. There’s a lot of good stuff in it! Pratchett mentions researching the history of women fighting and living as men at “a nice little place in London run by ladies who like other ladies very much indeed”; this is around the 31:30 mark.
  • “Sweet Polly Oliver” (also known as “Pretty Polly Oliver”) is song #367 in the Roud folk song index. It comes from around 1840 or earlier, and the first lines are “As sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed / A sudden strange fancy came into her head.” As Liz mentions, in the song Polly is following her lover, whom she eventually finds promoted to Captain and wounded; the doctors give up on him, but she nurses him back to health and they get married.
  • There are many other references to real protest and folk songs in the book; here are some of the folk songs:
    • “The World Turned Upside Down” – a British protest song from the 1640s, railing against restrictions placed on the celebration of Christmas by the British Parliament. A long-standing but unlikely story is that it was played by the British army band when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans after the Battle of Yorktown, hence the Hamilton song “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”. (Usually the band would play a song from the victor’s nation, but supposedly George Washington refused this tradition and told them to play a British song.)
    • “The Devil Shall Be My Sergeant” – a reference to “The Rogue’s March”, a song which was once traditionally played when drumming a disgraced solider out of the army. It had various sets of unofficial lyrics, many of which included the line “the Divil shall be me sergeant”. When it was no longer used officially by armies, it was played as “rough music” – yes, that was a thing on Roundworld, both in a similar sense as in I Shall Wear Midnight (see #Pratchat66, “Ol’ No Eyes is Back”), and more literally as a tune to shame followers of unpopular causes.
    • “Johnny Has Gone for a Solider” – an Irish folk song popular during the American Revolutionary War.
    • “The Girl I Left Behind Me” – Roud index #262, also known as “The Girl I Left Behind”. This is an English folk song from Elizabethan times, traditionally sung when soldiers marched off to war or a naval vessel set sail. It’s also the source of the lyric “Her golden hair in ringlets fair” which Igor quotes when coming up with excuses for Polly to have her old hair in her bag.
    • “Lisbon” or “William and Nancy” or “William and Polly” – #551 in the Roud index, this is possibly the song that Jackrum mentions when explaining the “Cheesemongers” nickname, which begins with the line “’Twas on a Monday morning, all in the month of May”. It’s sung by a sailor, William, who’s about to sail for Lisbon, and is leaving his pregnant lover, Nancy or Polly, behind. Nancy writes back to him saying she’ll disguise herself as a man so she can sail with him and save him from the terrors of the navy. The rest of the song doesn’t really match Jackrum’s description, which mashes up a whole lot of different bawdy folk tunes. There’s also “Dashing Away With the Smoothing Iron”, #869 in the Roud index, which begins with the first half of the line; it’s about a man repeatedly admiring a woman while she’s doing her ironing, and was the inspiration for Flanders and Swann’s “The Gas-Man Cometh”.
  • We read The Last Continent way back in 2020 in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”. The Last Continent is the twenty-second Discworld book, published in 1998, nine books and four years and four months before Monstrous Regiment. (Pratchett was still publishing two books a year at the time.)
  • Traditionally, tailors do indeed ask if gentlemen “dress to the left or right”, but stories conflict over whether this is because they intend to make said gentleman’s trousers more roomy on that side, or whether they just ask to avoid any awkward moments while taking inside leg measurements.
  • There have been many Roundworld equivalents of the Nugganite Working Girl Schools; some of the most infamous were the Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. These were filled with so-called “fallen women” – mostly, but not exclusively, sex workers and pregnant girls – who were forced to work for free and suffered abuse at the hands of the staff.
  • Indulgences are a practice of the Catholic church. Ben is referring to “full indulgence”, a complete forgiveness for all sins offered to Crusaders, but regular indulgences are the reason for the minor penances of saying a number of “Hail Mary”s in order to be forgiven for sins confessed. When they were introduced the idea was that previous Catholics had lived such perfect lives that there’s a “treasury of merit” within the church, allowing them to give out lesser penances than the older, much harsher ones.
  • Ogres having layers is a reference to the 2001 DreamWorks animated film Shrek, in which the titular ogre (played by Mike Myers with a Scottish accent) explains to a talking Donkey (played by Eddie Murphy) that he’s not just the awful smelly monster that everyone assumes: “Ogres are like onions. They have layers. You peel them back and you find something else.” The film is (very loosely) based on a 1990 picture book by William Steig.
  • Maladict’s hallucinations make many general references to the tropes of Vietnam War films, but the main specific one we could spot was from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). In the film, the character Joker (played by Matthew Modine) writes “BORN TO KILL” on his hat, which matches the undead Maladict’s “BORN TO DIE”.
  • Matchbox Twenty are an American rock band from Orlando, Florida, fronted by singer and keyboard player Rob Thomas. Their debut 1996 post-grunge album Yourself or Somebody Like You was a massive hit, including the song “Push”, most recently seen being sung by various versions of Ken in the 2023 movie Barbie.
  • Blink-182 are a Californian rock band formed in 1992 whose third album, Enema of the State (1999), was probably their biggest success, with the singles “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” doing well in many English-speaking countries at the time.
  • We last spoke of Danger 5 in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”. Created for SBS in 2012, Danger 5 is an action-comedy from the Australian comedy team Dinosaur. The first season is a parody of old school “men’s adventure” magazines and TV shows, with the titular “Danger 5” team repeatedly thwarting (though failing to capture or kill) Adolf Hitler in an absurd 1960s version of World War II. The second season from 2015 moves the team, Hitler and the target of their parody into the 1980s. You might still find it on Blu-Ray or DVD if you’re lucky; it was released by Madman Entertainment, but isn’t widely available. It was on Netflix in several territories for a while, but not any more; you can at least find clips, cast commentaries and even the prequel episode “The Diamond Girls” on the Dinosaur YouTube channel. In 2020 there was a new “Only on Audible” podcast series, Danger 5: Stereo Adventures. Dinosaur, or at least some of their creative team, have since created the animated series Koala Man for Hulu (it’s on Disney+ in Australia).

A few more notes coming soon!

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

#Pratchat76 – Real Men Don’t Drink…Decaf

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Kiwi writer and poet Freya Daly Sadgrove joins Liz and Ben from Sydney as we adjust our uniforms and march into the horrible realities of war (class, gender and literal) to discuss Terry Pratchett’s thirty-first Discworld novel, 2003’s Monstrous Regiment.

Polly Perks has cut off her hair, put on some trousers and joined the army under the name of Oliver, all so she can find her strong but gentle-minded brother, Paul. Is soon turns out that her regiment, led by the infamous Sergeant Jackrum who swears to look after “his little lads”, is quite possibly the last one left in all of Borogravia. In her search for Paul, Polly will have to deal with the enemy, the free press, a vampire who might kill for a coffee, Sam Vimes, and The Secret: she might not be the only impostor in the ranks…

Coming in between the first two Tiffany Aching novels, Monstrous Regiment – which is also monstrous in size, possibly Pratchett’s second longest novel – is the last truly standalone Discworld story. It introduces a wonderful cast of characters who, sadly, we’ll never see again. Not only that, but it gives major supporting roles to old favourites Sam Vimes and William de Worde, with a side order of Otto von Chriek! Critics at the time compared it to Evelyn Waugh, Jonathan Swift and All Quiet on the Western Front, and it remains one of Pratchett’s most beloved and celebrated novels – both for what it says about war, and about gender.

Did you know The Secret before you read Monstrous Regiment? What’s it like re-reading it when you do know? How do you feel about the ending(s)? How does Pratchett’s handling of gender hold up against our modern understanding? What would you prohibit, in Nugganite fashion? And would you rather have a type of food or clothing named after you? Get on board the conversation for this episode with the hashtag #Pratchat76.

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Freya Daly Sadgrove (she/her) is a pākehā writer and performance poet from New Zealand, currently living in Sydney. Her first book of poetry, Head Girl, was published in 2020 by Te Herenga Waka University Press, and she is one of the creators of New Zealand live poetry showcase Show Ponies, which presents poets like they’re pop stars. Her first full-length live show, 2023’s Whole New Woman, blended poetry with live rock music. Freya has a website at freyadalysad.com (though it might not be available at the moment), and you can also find her as @FreyaDalySad on Twitter.

As usual you’ll find comprehensive notes and errata for this episode on our website, including lots of photos of the components we discuss.

Next episode we’re discussing two short stories about animals: “Hollywood Chickens” (found in A Blink of the Screen) and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (from A Stroke of the Pen). Our guest will be the author of The Animals in That Country, Laura Jean McKay. Get your questions in by mid-April 2024 by replying to us or using the hashtag #Pratchat77 on social media, or email 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.

#Pratchat67 – The Three-Elf Problem

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This month we welcome back the very game Steve Lamattina as we put on our witch’s hats, grab our brooms and head out into Lancre to solve problems in Martin Wallace’s The Witches, the fourth official Discworld board game.

As Tiffany Aching or one of her fellow apprentice witches, you’ll run around Lancre solving problems big and small with headology and magic, helped by an assortment of local characters. But it’s not just about getting the highest score – you’ll also need to watch each other’s backs or everyone in the kingdom could lose! Be sure to stop and share tea, or you might end up a cackler…

Which witch is your favourite? How does The Witches rank against the other Discworld board games? Do you see it as a great family game, a mediocre co-op challenge, or something in between? Who do you wish had been included as a card or playable character? And would you use the game to introduce your friends to board games, the Discworld, or both?

Check out the episode notes for pictures of the game components, and use the hashtag #Pratchat67 on social media to join in the conversation on this one!

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Steve Lamattina is a writer and editor whose work spans film, music, education and technology. He was once CEO of the youth publishing company Express Media, whom we still stan, and currently works for the Victorian Department of Education. You can find him on Twitter as @steve_lamattina.

Next month we’re going back…back to nearly the beginning! Yes, for #Pratchat68 we’re setting the procrastinator coordinates for 1981 as we read and discuss Pratchett’s proto-Discworld sci-fi novel Strata. It’s a nice short book to get in before we tackle The Long Utopia in July… Use the hashtag #Pratchat68 to send us questions about Strata!

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

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.