interview

These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus Pratchat episode “We’re on a Road to Elsewhere“, in which Ben discusses recent Pratchett news, and interviews guest Danny Sag from the Australian Discworld Convention.

Iconographic Evidence

Notes and Errata

• The episode title is a riff on the chorus lyric from the Talking Heads son “Road to Nowhere”. It might have made a good title for the Strata episode, but Ben will have to think of another one now! (Elsewhere is the equivalent of hyperspace in Strata, traversed through the use of a “Matrix drive”.)
• You can see the new narrators and covers for the Penguin Discworld audiobooks at their official website.
• As well as the intro sequence above, you might find these Good Omens links handy:
  • Our episode discussing the book, #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”, from January 2019.
  • The release date was announced via a musical parody produced by The Hillywood Show; you can find “Good Omens Parody” and a behind the scenes video on YouTube.
• “Cute aggression”, originally “playful aggression”, was popularised around 2013 by the work of psychologists Rebecca Dyer and Aragón. Note that it refers to superficial aggression; folks who express their feelings about cute things this way are not actually violent or aggressive.
• A Stroke of the Pen was announced on the 28th of February 2023. You can read about how the stories were rediscovered in this article at LoveReading. The blurb available on several bookstore listings has this to say about the stories within: “Meet Og the inventor, the first caveman to cultivate fire, as he discovers the highs and lows of progress; haunt the Council with the defiant evicted ghosts of Pilgarlic Towers; visit Blackbury, a small market town with weird weather and an otherworldly visitor; and travel millions of years back in time to The Old Red Sandstone Lion pub.”
• Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch was announced on the 12th of May 2023, with more details revealed on the 1st of June. There’s an official page for the book at terrypratchett.com, and an article in The Bookseller magazine which includes some of Rhianna’s thoughts about writing for Discworld.
• You can find out more about Gabrielle Kent on her website, gabriellekent.com. The books about a boy who inherits a magic castle are the Alfie Bloom series, beginning with Alfie Bloom and the Secrets of Hexbridge Castle, published in 2015. Rani Reports is the series about the young journalist, beginning with Rani Reports on the Missing Millions, which was published in May this year.
• Knights and Bikes (2019) is the first videogame from indie UK developer Foam Sword Games. It was created by Rex Crowle and Moo Yu, who you might know from their work on games like Tearaway, Little Big Planet, Ratchet & Clank, Ring Fling and MonstrosCity. Crowle is also the brain behind the roleplaying game inspired to-do list app Epic Win. The game is available on most platforms.
• There are several Discworld books specifically credited to the Discworld Emporium, but most of them do include Terry’s name in one way or another! The credit on The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas is “Terry Pratchett aided and abetted by the Discworld Emporium”. (The copyright has Terry Pratchett and the Emporium as a partnership as the officially credited authors, with Emporium identified as Isobel Pearson, Reb Voyce, Bernard Pearson and Ian Mitchell in that order.) Earlier books produced by the Emporium like The World of Poo and Mrs Bradshaw’s Handbook are credited on the cover only as “Terry Pratchett presents”, with the Handbook “aided and abetted” credit on the inside, while for the earlier World of Poo fictional author Miss Felicity Beadle was “assisted by Bernard and Isobel Pearson”. Only The Nac Mac Feegles’ Big Wee Alphabet Book uses the credit “by the Discworld Emporium”, separately including the same “Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” identifier seen on Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. (The description on the website says the Feegle book was “lovingly produced by Ian Mitchell”.) Earlier books worked on by Bernard Pearson, like the Discworld Almanack, have him as a co-author with Terry.
  So the new Tiffany book is not the first to identify specific people as the author without Terry being one of them, but it is the first to do so on the front cover. Ben is wrong, but it still feels like a big deal to him.
• You can see Colleen Doran‘s impressive list of comic book credits, and some of her amazing artwork, at colleendoran.com. You can get notified about the crowdfunding campaign for the Good Omens graphic novel by signing up at Kickstarter.
• You can see a list of the books published by Dunmanifestin on the company website. They don’t yet list the Good Omens Kickstarter, but “The Terry Pratchett Estate” is listed as the campaign owner, and their username is “dunmanifestin”, so that seems pretty clear. The campaign has been mentioned by the official Good Omens Twitter account, which is @GoodOmensHQ.
• There are currently eight other active Pratchett podcasts by Ben’s count. He keeps track of them via the Pratchat side-project wiki, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
• Ted Lasso is an Apple TV+ show starring Jason Sudeikis as the title character, a college football coach from Kansas who is hired to manage Richmond AFC by the ex-wife of its previous owner, who took it in her divorce. It’s a beautiful and heartwarming show that has just finished up its third and (supposedly) final season, and as so many people have said about Unseen Academicals, “the important thing about football is that it’s not about football.” Ben highly recommends the show.
• As well as Nullus Anxietas, which you can find at ausdwcon.org, we mention lots of Discworld conventions this episode, but missed out a few. Here’s a run-down:
  • The original Discworld Convention, now known as the International Discworld Convention, started in the UK in 1996, as Danny mentions, and runs every two years. Thanks to Rachel Rowlands of Discworld Monthly for pointing out that it has missed two of those years: 2000 and 2020. The next one is in Birmingham in August 2024, and you can find out more at dwcon.org.
  • The Irish Discworld Convention began in 2009 and also runs every two years, though not in 2021. The next one is in Cork in October 2023; find out more at idwcon.org.
  • The North American Discworld Convention also started in 2009, and has run five times since then, most recently (as per Ben’s footnote) in 2019. Their website, nadwcon.org, is offline as of the publication of this episode, but Rachel Rowlands informs us that a team is working on putting together another convention in the US, so keep an eye out for information about it in the near future.
  • Die Scheibenwelt Convention, aka the German Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, most recently in May 2023 – and they hold it in a castle! (The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s Joanna Hagan went this year; keep on eye on their social media for her video diary if you want to know more about what that was like.) They’re planning the next one for 2025. Find out more at discworld-convention.de (the website is in German and English).
  • Cabbagecon, the Dutch Discworld Convention, has run six times since 2011, and most recently in 2022. The next one will be in October 2024; find out more at dutchdwcon.nl (they also have info available in English).
  • The Ineffable Con is not a Discworld convention, but as it’s name suggests a celebration of Good Omens, specifically the television series. It’s run three times in the UK since 2019, and a fourth online-only convention is coming in October 2023. Find out more at theineffablecon.org.uk.
  • The Llamedos Holiday Camp is the newest fan event, which has run in Wales since 2020. It’s organised by the folks behind Discworld Monthly (hello again Rachel – thanks for the reminder!), and rather than being a traditional convention, describes itself as an “Interactive Immersive Discworld Experience” – it’s presented as if the event is taking place in Llamedos as the Discworld equivalent of an old-school British holiday camp. It will next appear in 2024 with a “Scout Jamboree” theme, and you can find out more at llamedosholidaycamp.com.
• The special convention episodes we’ve released in conjunction with Nullus Anxietas are:
  • #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, recorded live at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.
  • #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive”, recorded for The Lost Con online event in 2021.
  • A special Hogswatch video for the con’s 2021 Christmas event; it’s available to Pratchat subscribers on YouTube.
  • “A Tale of Two Carpets”, recorded for the Discworld Virtual Fun Day in June 2022; the title is from a special version released to Pratchat subscribers with extra footnotes, but you can see the original that played at the event at this link.
• Blow Up is a 2023 Australian reality television show made by Channel 7 in which contestants compete to make the biggest and best balloon sculptures. It’s based on a Dutch show, also called Blow Up, from 2022. You can watch Blow Up via 7Plus, which is the channel’s catch-up streaming service, though it may not be available to viewers outside Australia. We won’t spoil the results in case you want to watch it for yourself, but don’t get your hopes up for a second season; Blow Up was moved from Channel 7 to one of their digital-only channels, 7flix, after two episodes, thanks to disappointing ratings.
• Werewolf is a social deduction party game. Players are secretly assigned a role as a werewolf or villager, and play in alternating day and night turns. The werewolves, who know who each other are, eliminate one villager player each night turn, while during the day turns the villagers must debate who are the werewolves and vote to eliminate players they suspect. Either team wins if they eliminate all of the other players. The game was invented in Russia as Mafia by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986, but didn’t take off in America until it was re-themed to be about werewolves by Andy Plotkin in around 1997. It is often treated like a folk game, even though it’s origin can be traced, and there are many, many published and free versions available, many with large numbers of unique roles for the villagers which grant them various special abilities and win or lose conditions. Personally Ben considers it inferior to newer social deduction games that don’t rely so heavily on player elimination, but he’s developed a couple of variations of his own, including Spy Catcher and Smuggletown.
• For more about the Australian Discworld Convention, visit their website or Facebook page, join their Facebook group, or follow them on Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.

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