Joel Martin

#Pratchat44 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

You can listen to the State Swim jingle right here:

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat78 – One Step Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat57 – Get Your Dad to Mars!

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We prepare to find out why infinite Earths aren’t enough as writer, editor and podcaster Joel Martin returns to the podcast to fire up the fusion engine and have a close encounter of the crustacean kind in the third Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Long Earth novel, The Long Mars.

It’s 2045 – five years after the eruption of the Yellowstone super-volcano on Datum Earth. The climate has catastrophically changed and there’s been mass migration to stepwise Earths. Maggie Kauffman, captain of the new stepping airship Neil Armstrong II, is sent ten times further into the Long Earth than anyone has gone before, to find out what happened to the ship’s missing predecessor. Meanwhile reclusive stepping pioneer Joshua Valienté is called back to the Datum by the A.I. Lobsang to search for a new kind of human emerging from the Long Earth. And Willis Linsay, who disappeared after giving Stepper box technology to the whole world thirty years ago, sends a message to his super-stepper daughter, Sally. He wants her to go on a mysterious mission to Mars…

The last of Pratchett’s novels to be published before his death, The Long Mars marks a turning point in the series where Pratchett’s involvement was limited after the first draft, and Stephen Baxter did most of the polishing. Like The Long War it skips over the immediate aftermath of the disaster at the end of the previous book to inhabit the world of its longer term consequences. It also continues the tradition of switching between multiple narratives with at least a dozen key characters. There are old friends and new faces, but some of them are barely glimpsed. It’s a book full of big ideas, but not so much plot – and even less emotional and character development.

Does this one feel more Baxter than Pratchett? Is this the troubled middle episode of the series? What did you think of the portrayal of the Next? How cool are those acid snakes? Will any of these awesome ideas return in the final two books? And where the Hell-Knows-Where is Helen? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat57 on social media.

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Guest Joel Martin is a podcaster and writer who is now our first four-time guest. He previously joined us in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat44 for The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, and in #Pratchat31 for The Long Earth. His independent podcasts, The Morning Bell and The Youth Vote, are currently on hiatus, but watch out for the new season of The Dementia Podcast from The Dementia Centre, produced by Joel, in September 2022. Find Joel online at thepenofjoel.com or on Twitter at @thepenofjoel.

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

Due to some technical difficulties we ended up delaying this episode until after #Pratchat58, so thank you for your patience! We’ve already recorded our next episode, #Pratchat59, in which we discuss The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch with science and fiction writer, Dr Kat Day. But in October for our sixtieth episode we’re having an open slather questions-only special, just like we did for #Pratchat30! So please send us your general Pratchett-related questions: about the show, books we’ve already covered, Sir Terry himself, the Discworld in general, the Guild of Recappers & Podcasters, Liz and Ben, being Australian/Fourecksian or anything else even vaguely on-topic. Use the hashtag #Pratchat60 on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, 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.

#Pratchat31 – It’s Just a Step to the West

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In episode 31, Liz, Ben and returning guest Joel Martin step sideways into the infinite earths of Terry Pratchett’s 2012 collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth.

In 2015, plans for a strange but simple box-shaped device called a “Stepper”, powered by a potato, are posted online. Kids all over the world build them and discover that the boxes let them step “East” or “West” into other Earths. There are thousands of such worlds – perhaps millions – all subtly different. But they do have one thing in common: there are no humans on any of them. Fifteen years after “Step Day”, human society is irrevocably altered, and experienced far-stepper Joshua Valienté is offered a new job: to step further from Earth than even he has ever been, and explore the mysteries of the Long Earth in the company of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman reincarnated as a supercomputer…

Based on ideas from Pratchett’s 1986 short story “The High Meggas”, written before the popularity of The Colour of Magic led him down a particular leg of the trousers of time, The Long Earth is the first in a series of five novels set in a near future world forever changed by the existence of limitless worlds next door. An epic journey across millions of worlds, Pratchett chose to work with his friend Stephen Baxter, a prolific science fiction author whose work encompasses hard future sci-fi, speculative evolution, alternate history and sequels to classic novels by the likes of H. G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. That all seems quite a distance from comic fantasy – but the pairing just works. So – it’s five years since Step Day. Would you visit another Earth? Could you pick which bits were Pratchett, and which Baxter? And what kind of potato is in your stepper box? Use the hashtag #Pratchat31 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Joel Martin is a writer, editor and podcaster who previously appeared on Pratchat in episode 14, discussing the book that derailed the Long Earth back in 1986, The Colour of Magic. Joel is also the director of the Speculate speculative fiction festival (specfic.com.au). His latest work is the short story “Hunting Time” in Strange Stories Vol. 1, scheduled to be published this month by 42books. Joel’s writing podcast, The Morning Bell, is currently on hiatus, but you can find the full back catalogue at themorningbell.com.au. Find out more about him at thepenofjoel.com.

Next month we’re stepping back onto the Disc to meet adventurous nine-year-old Tiffany Aching, in 2003’s The Wee Free Men! Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat32 by around May 23rd.

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.

#Pratchat14 – City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation

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In episode fourteen we celebrate 35 years of the Discworld by going all the way back to the beginning! Writer and podcaster Joel Martin joins us for a bumper A’Tuin-sized discussion of the very first Discworld story, adventure, chronicle, tale…Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, published in 1983!

Rincewind, a wizard unable to cast spells, makes a living of sorts in the mighty city of Ankh-Morpork through his gift for languages. But his gift gets him more than he bargains for when he becomes the guide to the Discworld’s first tourist. Fresh off the boat from the distant and obscenely wealthy Counterweight Continent, naïve Twoflower has come armed with a phrasebook, a demon-powered picture box and his magical Luggage full of enormous gold coins, determined to see the barbarians, brawls and beasts he’s read about in stories back home. But seeing them is the easy part – surviving to talk about them is another matter entirely…

Though we’ve often talked about the differences between the earliest books and those that came later, The Colour of Magic introduces Ankh-Morpork, Rincewind, Death and of course Great A’Tuin and the Disc itself with varying degrees of familiarity. Split into four sections – The Colour of Magic, The Sending of Eight, The Lure of the Wyrm and Close to the Edge – it manages to be both homage and parody of multiple beloved fantasy genres, while at the same time trying to establish its world – and author – as something new. Do you think it succeeds? Did you start at the start? Use the hashtag #Pratchat14 on social media to join the conversation and tell us! We’d also love to see some fan art of the Luggage based directly on the text, rather than Kirby’s ubiquitous, fleshy baby-legged version.

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Guest Joel Martin is a fantasy author whose several novellas and novels include his own take on classic sword-and-sorcery, The Broken World (whose protagonist is not Kane, but Karn). For more about him and his work, visit his web site, thepenofjoel.com, or follow him on Twitter at @thepenofjoel. He also hosts the writing discussion podcast The Morning Bell with Luke Manly and Ian Laking; find it at themorningbell.com.au.

You can find full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

This is our final episode for the Year of the Justifiably Defensive Lobster (aka 2018), but we’ll be back in January, when we’ll fire up Queen’s Greatest Hits and kick off proceedings with one of Pratchett’s most celebrated novels: Good Omens! Yes, we’re getting in to cover Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman before said co-author and Amazon Prime bring their version to subscribers’ screens in 2019. (Don’t worry, it’ll be on the BBC at some point too.) With twice the authors, we’re expecting twice the questions (though we’ll try and stick to our usual running time of under two hours), so send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat15.

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.


#Pratchat57 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!“, discussing the third book in the Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Long Earth series, The Long Mars, with guest Joel Martin.

Iconographic Evidence

(This is the section where we add pictures, where appropriate! Watch this space…)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a reference to famous Mars sci-fi flick Total Recall – the 1990 original version, that is, directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sharon Stone, and featuring the memorable line “Get your ass to Mars!” The film is (fairly loosely) based on the Philip K Dick short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”. A slightly straighter film adaptation of the story was released in 2012, starring starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel was directed by Len Wiseman of Underworld fame. We talked a lot about Dick in #Pratchat56.
  • Joel was most recently a guest of the podcast in June 2021 for #Pratchat44, when we discussed the second Discworld novel, The Light Fantastic – three and a half years after he first appeared to discuss the first one, The Colour of Magic, in #Pratchat14.
  • You can find out more about The Dementia Centre at their website, dementiacentre.com, or you can find The Dementia Podcast at dementiapodcast.com. You can also just search for “The Dementia Podcast” in your podcast app or directory of choice.
  • We previously complained about the lack of war in The Long War in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”, with guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins.
  • Warhammer 40,000 – or “40k” for short – is the franchise of science fiction war and roleplaying games made by Games Workshop. A futuristic reimagining of their medieval high fantasy Warhammer setting, it has space alien versions of elves (Aeldari), undead (Necrons), orcs (er…Orks) and more. But the most famous factions are humans – specifically the genetically modified super-soldiers of the various chapters of Imperial Marines. These Space Marines are technologically enhanced stormtroopers fanatically loyal to their undying emperor, and full of more testosterone than strictly necessary. The franchise is still going strong with many tabletop and digital games currently available, despite its “Imperium of Man” being a fascist regime, and most of the other factions aren’t much better. In the “grim darkness of the 41st millennium,” there aren’t really any “good guy” factions, though the alien T’au Empire might come close. (Ben has seldom played, but his favourite faction – back in the second edition at least – were the weird Space Orks.)
  • Terry Pratchett died on the 12th of March, 2015. The last Discworld novel to be published before his death, Raising Steam, was released in November 2013, while The Long Mars was published on the 19th of June, 2014. His last three novels were the last two Long Earth books, The Long Utopia (18 June 2015) and The Long Cosmos (14 June 2016), and the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd’s Crown (2 June 2016).
  • A quick guide to the timeline of the Long Earth so far:
    • 2015 – “Step Day”, when Willis Linsay releases the plans for the stepper box on the Internet, giving the masses the ability to visit the Long Earth.
    • 2030 – “The Journey”, Lobsang and Joshua’s trip into the Long Earth which makes up the bulk of The Long Earth. The nuclear bomb in Madison goes off in this year.
    • 2040 – most of the events of The Long War occur in this year, including Maggie’s mission as captain of The Benjamin Franklin, the titular “war”, and the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano.
    • 2045 – the main events of The Long Mars are spread across this whole year.
  • The Long Mars was indeed originally titled The Long Childhood, but The Long Cosmos did not have an alternate title.
  • “Stoke Me a Clipper” requires a little bit of backstory: in the sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, one of the characters is uptight Arnold Rimmer, a lowly technician aboard the eponymous mining starship who died in an accident with the rest of the crew. Three million years later the Red Dwarf’s only survivor – David Lister, the only technician ranked lower than Rimmer – is awakened from cryogenic suspension by the ship’s computer Holly, who supplies him with company: a computer simulation based on a scan of Rimmer’s brain and projected as a hologram. Their rivalry gives Lister a reason to go on, despite the likelihood of every other human being being dead. In “Dimension Jump”, an episode of the fourth series first broadcast in 1991, the Red Dwarf crew meet “Ace” Rimmer, a version of Arnold from an alternate dimension who is a brave, sexy and successful hero; his catchphrase before embarking on a dangerous mission is “Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.” Many years later they encounter him again, only this time he shares his secret: there isn’t just one Ace Rimmer, it’s a mantle passed from one alternate version of the Arnold to another, and now the hologram Arnold’s time has come. When he puts on the wig and outfit, he has to act brave, but managed to mangle the catchphrase as “Stoke me a clipper”. This happens in series seven, in the episode also titled “Stoke Me A Clipper”, first broadcast in 1997. (T-shirts featuring both versions of catchphrase were among many designs released at the height of the show’s popularity in the 1990s.)
  • The “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” – usually shortened to “the Outer Space Treaty” – was created in 1967 by the United Nations. All the major spacefaring countries then and now have agreed to it, and among its most important clauses is one stating that countries cannot claim sovereignty over any extra-terrestrial body. So while Frank would definitely have planted a flag, surely there’s no way he’d have tried to claim Mars for America – unless, of course, it’s been determined that the Mars of other universes doesn’t count? He’s also not acting on behalf of his country, and there’s been much debate in recent years about what the treaty means for private exploration of space. It does, however, make it clear that States are responsible for any activities conducted in space by their citizens, whether privately or otherwise, and says that outer space shall be “free for exploration and use by all States”, so we’ll have to see if that holds up.
  • Michael Fenton Stevens is an English actor and comedian. He started out in the Oxford Revue, where his cohort – which included Angus Deayton, Helen Atkinson-Wood and Geoffrey Perkins – followed the time-honoured British comedy pathway of doing an Edinburgh Fringe show which spawned a radio programme (Radio Active) and then became a television series (KYTV). He has since been a fixture around the 1980s guard of comedians, appearing in plenty of sitcoms and radio series, including the later instalments of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy based on the books. His most famous role, though, was probably as a voice artist for satirical puppet program Spitting Image, because he sang “The Chicken Song”. Released in 1986, this was an infamous parody of holiday disco dance pop songs like “Agadoo”, and was written by Red Dwarf scribes Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. It was #1 in the UK for three weeks and was performed live by the Spitting Image puppets on Top of the Pops. As well as reading The Long War series, he also reads the science chapters of the Science of Discworld books (as we’ll mention in #Pratchat59), and played the roles of Spider and one of the Ratcatchers in the 2004 BBC Radio 7 adaptation of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, alongside David Tennant as Dangerous Beans.
  • The Expanse is a series of hard sci-fi novels written by “James S. A. Corey”, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. They are set in the 24th century, imagining a future in which humans have colonised Mars and the asteroid belt, but in which “belters” who are born and live in low or zero gravity have become an exploited underclass, and Mars has declared independence from Earth, now ruled by a United Nations world government. The series begins with 2011’s Leviathan Wakes, and concludes with the ninth book, Leviathan Falls, published in 2021. Ben is mostly familiar with the popular television adaptation, also titled The Expanse, in which the characters are noticeably more argumentative. The long debates about what to do while in space are a result of the setting’s very realistic spaceflight; while the ships of its future have advanced engines capable of producing massive thrust, there’s no “artificial gravity” or “inertial dampening” technology. Changes in course while travelling involve “multiple G burns” which put enormous stress on the bodies of a ship’s crew, who have to be strapped into special chairs and have fluids injected into their bodies to protect them from injury or death.
  • We’ve discussed space elevators before in our episodes about The Science of Discworld (#Pratchat35) and The Science of Discworld II: The Globe (#Pratchat47), and we’ll see them again in The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch (#Pratchat59) and Strata (#Pratchat68). The origins of the concept go back to the late nineteenth century, with ideas of building towers tall enough to reach space, but the modern version – where a cable under tension is built down to Earth from a counterweight in geosynchronous orbit – was first described in the late 1950s. Despite this pedigree, they didn’t start appearing in science fiction until two decades later, with the earliest novels to feature space elevators being Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise and Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds, published almost simultaneously in 1979. The elevator in Clarke’s novel is eventually built on Mars, and many novels set on Mars have featured space elevators too. Notable examples include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and Larry Niven’s Rainbow Mars – a collection of short stories which started life as a collaboration with Terry Pratchett! (For more about Larry Niven, see our Strata episode, #Pratchat68.)
  • Ben and Joel are both big fans of Disney’s 2012 science fantasy film John Carter, which previously came up in #Pratchat44. The film is an adaptation of 1912’s A Princess of Mars, the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series, but it incorporates elements from later books as well. The novel is a classic of early space fiction, birthing the genre of “planetary romance”. Both the book and film feature American Civil War veteran and Confederate solider John Carter, who is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to its local population as “Barsoom”. Mars’ lower gravity gives him enhanced strength, and after becoming friendly with the local “green Martians”, Carter reluctantly gets involved in the conflict between the forces of two warring city-states of the “red Martians”. It’s pretty great fun, with very watchable performances from Taylor Kitsch as John Carter and Lynn Collins (who should be in way more things) as the Princess of the book’s title, Dejah Thoris. The script is a thoughtful and modern adaptation written in part by novelist Michael Chabon. It’s clearly set up as the first in a series of films, but it was hugely expensive, and was not commercially successful. Fans of the film often credit this to Disney’s failure to adequately market the film, which ironically seems to have been fuelled by their fears it wouldn’t succeed. (Ben often refers to it affectionately as Riggs Takes His Shirt Off on Mars – a reference to Taylor’s previous leading role in the television drama Friday Night Lights as teenage footballer Tim Riggins, and the number of films in which he takes his shirt off, including the infamously bad Battleship film, aka Riggs Takes His Shirt Off at Sea.)
  • The “Space Jockey” is the giant humanoid pilot of the crashed spaceship encountered in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, which is where the crew of the human space truck Nostromo encounter the titular alien. The name “space jockey” was a nickname given by the crew, but it’s also the title of an unrelated 1947 science fiction story by Robert A. Heinlein, about a human space pilot dealing with the everyday humdrum problems of ferrying stuff and people between Earth and the Moon. The space jockey itself remained entirely mysterious until the more recent (and much worse) Alien films, beginning with Prometheus, which reveal it was an Engineer – the species who created both life on Earth and the aliens themselves.
  • The ad where Martians use photorealistic printouts to fool a Mars rover was “Mars Mission”, made for Hewlett-Packard (not Canon, as we thought), and broadcast (we think) in 1996 and/or 1997. You can watch it on YouTube here.
  • Twelve humans have set foot on the Moon, all of them NASA astronauts. While Eugene “Gene” Cernan was the last person to stand on the Moon, he was also the eleventh, not twelfth, person to set foot there. This apparent contradiction is because he got out of the lunar module first, but got back in last, after his Apollo 17 crewmate, Harrison Schmitt. Cernan and Schmitt also spent the longest time on the Moon: over 12 days, they spent 22 hours and 2 minutes outside the module. Cernan died in 2017 (we wonder if anyone told him about the twain in The Long Mars?), but Schmitt is still alive at the time of this episode’s release.
  • We previously mentioned the 1986 My Little Pony: The Movie in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea”. The “purple slime” was the “Smooze”, created by villain Hydia (played by Cloris Leachman!) to destroy the ponies’ home. It’s defeated by a magical wind created by the flying Flutter Ponies.
  • In Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, American Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper becomes delusional and goes rogue. He uses a code known only to him to order a nuclear bombing run on Russia because he believes they put fluoride in the water to corrupt the “precious bodily fluids” of Americans. His aide, Colonel Mandrake (one of three roles played by Peter Sellers), eventually deduces Ripper’s code from the paranoid ramblings in his notes, which repeat “purity of essence”. The film is a classic, and was based (if loosely) on the more serious novel Red Alert.
  • Ben says “less babies”, and yes, as “baby” is a countable noun, it should be “fewer babies”. He’s sorry about that.
  • When Ben’s talking about “older Star Trek”, he really means anything made before the new batch of shows that started with Star Trek: Discovery in 2017. Prior to this, the most recent Star Trek show was Enterprise, which finished in 2005. All of those older shows are set in the 22nd to 24th centuries, and yet include conventions of gender, sexuality and relationships which make them feel old-fashioned by today’s standards, making a little difficult to imagine they’re really set in the future. The exceptions often occur in alien cultures, rather than in the future humans – for example the Next Generation episode “The Outcast” tries to deal with the idea of stepping outside gender roles with a character who, like Cheery Littlebottom, comes from a culture which recognises only one gender, but who wishes to be female.
  • The thinking beagle in The Long War was not Snowy, but Brian – possibly named after the talking dog from American animated sitcom Family Guy. His speech about being weird for a beagle appears near the end of chapter 51.
  • Sam Allen appears in chapters 18 and 19 of The Long War; he’s in command of the squad who get stranded in Reboot when their gear is mistakenly delivered to the Earth next door, and none of them have brought steppers. He has a confrontation with Helen’s father, Jack Green, nearly starting a fight. Following the incident, Maggie puts him off her ship the first chance she gets.
  • Page counts and estimates tell us that The Long Earth is the shortest book in the series, at probably around 105,000 words, while The Long War is the longest by a fair margin (approx. 131,000 words). The Long Mars is the second shortest (approx. 110,000 words), with the final two books pretty close to the same length (each is somewhere between 116,000 and 118,000 words), with The Long Utopia the slightly shorter of the two.
  • Shangri-La is a Tibetan monastery nestled in a valley beneath the mountain of Karakal – both fictional locations drawn from the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by English novelist James Hilton. In the book, a party of four English and American folks crash their plane in the Kunlun mountains (which are not fictional) and find they way to Shangri-La, which is an idyllic paradise. The people living there age very slowly, living as long as 250 years, but if they leave the valley they age and die quickly. Looked at through modern eyes, the story has plenty of problems, not least of which that this supposedly Tibetan “lamasery” is revealed to have been founded by a Catholic monk, who as he is about to die, wishes one of the English visitors to take over as leader. (“Lamasery” itself is an erroneous term used in English for Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, based on the misunderstanding that “lama” means “monk”. Lama is actually a highly revered title, only given to very few Buddhists.) The book gained attention after Hilton’s next novel, Goodbye, Mr Chips (about the life of a schoolteacher) was a big hit. The concept of Shangri-La as a distant, utopian place has been a part of popular culture every since, and has inspired many stories – notably that of The Immortal Iron Fist, a white Marvel superhero who learns his supernatural martial arts after surviving a plane crash in the mountains of Tibet as a child and being brought up by the monks of the hidden mystical city of Kunlun.
  • Don’t Look Up is a satirical 2021 Netflix film in which a pair of astronomers (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet which will destroy all life on Earth, but struggle to get anyone to take the threat seriously. Its mix of dark humour and unsubtle climate change metaphors split audiences, many of whom thought it was clumsy. But there are plenty of things to like about it – including Mark Rylance’s role of Peter Isherwell, a tech billionaire who wants to mine the comet for rare minerals instead of destroying it.
  • The Pink Panther series of comedy films began with 1963’s The Pink Panther, directed by Blake Edwards, which focussed on the Phantom, a jewel thief played by David Niven. But Peter Sellers stole the show in his role as a bumbling French detective, Inspector Jacques Clouseau, so he became the main character for four increasingly oddball sequels between 1964 and 1978. A recurring gag that begins in the second film, 1964’s A Shot in the Dark, is that the Inspector has tasked his manservant Cato (Burt Kwouk) to attack him by surprise, to keep him in top fighting condition. Clouseau often survives these attempts on his life only because Cato stops to answer the Inspector’s phone when it rings… While Sellers is the best-known version of the character, there have been others. Blake Edwards went on to make three more Pink Panther films after Sellers’ death with new lead characters, though none succeeded. Earlier, in 1968, the company who owned the rights made their own separate Inspector Clouseau film without any of the original creative team, starring Alan Arkin. Most recently, a reboot of the series starring Steve Martin as Clouseau lasted for two films: The Pink Panther (2006) and The Pink Panther 2 (2009). A new film was in development in 2020, but there’s been little news of it since.
  • Professor Charles Xavier – known as Professor X – is a Marvel comics character, a powerfully psychic mutant who founds a school, ostensibly to help young mutants master their extraordinary powers. He does do that…but also recruits his young students to reform the image of mutants in the public eye by acting as a team of superheroes, known as The X-Men. This is necessary in part because Xavier’s fellow powerful mutant, Erik Lensherr – aka Magneto, Master of Magnetism – has decided to deal with prejudice against mutants more directly. He creates The Brotherhood of Mutants, more-or-less a terrorist organisation whose aim is to either force humanity to treat mutants as equals, or bow before them as their servants. (In early comics Magneto’s group were named “The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”, just in case you were wondering if they know they’re being nasty.)
  • Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel that imagines a future where humans are grown in artificial wombs, sorted into distinct castes based on physical and mental ability, and controlled through the use of drugs. Most castes are encouraged to be promiscuous to keep them happy, and the use of contraception is mandatory; they are also subjected to various forms of conditioning to get them to behave in the way the state approves, including encouraging children to engage in sexual play from a young age.
  • We mention a few classic sci-fi novels during our discussion of the Next:
    • The Chrysalids is John Wyndham’s 1955 post-apocalyptic novel in which a society practices eugenics to keep itself pure of mutations, and a group of children with telepathic abilities try to keep their abilities secret;
    • The Stepford Wives is Ira Levin’s 1972 “feminist horror” novel, in which a female photographer moves to a small town and is increasingly disturbed at the way all the women there are uniformly beautiful and subservient to their husbands;
    • The Midwich Cuckoos is another Wyndham novel from 1957, in which an English village suffers an unusual visitation in which all its residents are made unconscious, after which all the women of the village discover they are pregnant and later give birth to unusual and similar children;
    • A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’ 1967 dystopian novel, which we mentioned in #Pratchat55; it depicts a future where gangs of teens speak their own slang language and engage in random acts of “ultra-violence”, and the state tries a new form of aversion therapy on the protagonist;
    • The Sound of Music (which was not “the one with the children” Ben was thinking of) is the stage musical and subsequent film adaptation based on the 1949 book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta von Trapp.
  • When Liz says “a parasite like a Yeerk” she is referring to the alien foes of the shape-changing Animorphs, teenage protagonists of the Animorph books by K. A. Applegate published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001. We’ve previously mentioned them in #Pratchat19, #Pratchat25, #Pratchat35 and #Pratchat43…though when we say “we”, we really mean Liz. Ben has never read an Animorph in his life.
  • In the various Stargate television series, the Goa’uld are a parasitic species who take humans for hosts, granting the body great strength and regenerative properties, and able to live for hundreds of years, changing hosts if necessary over time. Their true form is a snake-like aquatic creature, which wraps itself around the spinal cord of the host to gain access to their brain and motor functions. While the antagonistic Goa’uld System Lords believed they were superior to other lifeforms, using their advanced technology to pose as gods to the humans they sought to enslave, a breakaway faction called the Tok’ra lives in harmony with their hosts, and opposes the ways of the System Lords.
  • We mention a couple of hologram meetings from films that are similar to the one in the book. The first takes place in the 2014 film Captain America: The Winter Soldier (not The Avengers, though similar technology is later used in Avengers: Endgame), when Nick Fury meets with the World Security Council. The Star Wars one is the meeting of the Jedi Council in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).
  • It was indeed Mac talking about war being fun in The Long War, in the middle of Chapter 67.
  • George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) was an officer for the United States in the American Civil War, though became most famously known for the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana, in which he led American army forces against Native Americans and lost, dying along with his entire regiment. This has been romanticised as “Custer’s Last Stand”, and he is sometimes held up as an example of an officer whose decisions caused the death of those under his command. Whatever it’s called it remains an act of colonial aggression, and just one of many examples of Custer’s participation in violence against the First Nations peoples of America, including many incidents we would today regard as warcrimes.
  • There aren’t any other Cutlers who immediately come to mind, but it is a very common name; like many English surnames, it’s based on an occupation, in this case a maker of cutlery.
  • When Liz says it’s “just like Lord of the Rings” in reference to Joel’s use of the phrase “just to carry a nuke there and back again”, it’s a double reference – both to the Ring as an allegory for nuclear weaponry, and its prequel The Hobbit, whose full title is The Hobbit, or There And Back Again.
  • Foundation is Isaac Asimov’s series depicting a future history of a spacefaring human empire. The Foundation of the title is an organisation created by genius Hari Seldon to collect and preserve human knowledge, and prevent the coming of an extended dark age. Seldon does this thanks to his invention of “psychohistory” – an accurate mathematical modelling of society able to predict its future – which allows him to leave instructions for the Foundation on how to alter history’s course. Originally written as a series of short stories, collected into three novel-length books, Asimov later added four more novels, the last of which was published after his death. Foundation covers a vast span of time – about a thousand years – and so necessarily leaves many human characters behind after they die. It was hugely influential, both on science fiction and science, and is clearly one of the influences on The Long Earth series.
  • A Hohmann transfer orbit can be used to transfer a spacecraft between any two orbits around the same central body, so its not just for travelling between Earth and Mars. You could use this method to travel between any two planets in the solar system, or between a low-Earth orbit and the Moon.

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

#Pratchat14 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, featuring guest Joel Martin discussing the 1990 novel Good Omens.

  • A note on this episode’s title: we’ve opted to parody a parody in order to name a discussion of a parody. (Does that make it a parodyox?) The film in question is National Lampoon’s Vacation, which was released in 1983 – the same year The Colour of Magic was published! (Though you might argue our title is closer to the sequel, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, from 1985.)
  • The Morning Bell is recorded live at the Brunswick Street Bookstore. Liz has been a guest a few times, most recently on episode 46 (February 2017), while Ben has been on just the once, for episode 63 (November 2017).
  • Joel is director of Melbourne’s new speculative fiction writing festival Speculate, returning in 2019 for its second year; Liz and Ben were guests the first time around and will be again in 2019. You can see both of them in the short film made for the 2018 festival here, or visit specfic.com.au to find out more about what’s in store for 2019.
  • Liz’s comment about eye anatomy refers to the fact that as well as the structures found in regular human eyes which are sensitive to light – rods for dim light, and cones for bright light and (normal) colour vision – wizards also have octagons, which can detect octarine. This suggests that there is a genetic (or otherwise biological) component to being a wizard, and since Rincewind can see octarine, it seems inarguable that he really is a wizard.
  • Time Team began in 1994, making it much younger than The Black Adder, the first of the four series of Blackadder sit-coms, which was produced in 1983 (there’s that year again!). It also comes slightly later than Tony Robinson’s abridged audiobooks, the first of which – The Colour of Magic, of course – was first released on cassette in 1993. The unabridged versions, initially read by Nigel Planer, are harder to pin down, but seem to have begun a little later in 1997.
  • The ethos that “every issue could be someone’s first” is said to be the reason that Marvel comics had so much dialogue explaining stuff the characters already knew – often with accompanying editor’s notes (the asterisked, comic book equivalent of a footnote) pointing the reader to the previous issue in which the thing being explained took place!
  • ABBA is a Swedish pop group comprising two couples: Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the band’s name is an acronym of their first names). They shot to world-wide fame in 1974 after winning the Eurovision Song Contest, but the band and their marriages broke up by 1982, as their staggering popularity caused their personal lives to suffer. They remain incredibly popular in Australia and around the world, with their music being adapted into the hit musical Mama Mia! and its filmic sequel. They announced in April that they had recorded their first new music in more than 35 years, and the new single, “I Still Have Faith in You”, is due to be released this month (December 2018)!
  • Japanese avant-garde artist, peace activist, musician and filmmaker Yoko Ono was long blamed by disappointed fans for the break-up of The Beatles in 1969 because of her marriage to John Lennon. These days this is generally recognised as a grossly unfair and simplistic explanation, but her name is still synonymous with the idea of an outside relationship catalysing the end of a creative partnership.
  • In cosmology, the steady state model is an alternative to the now generally accepted Big Bang theory. It states that the universe would continue to expand forever, but remain in a “steady state” of density as new matter is constantly created. By contrast, in the Big Bang model, the amount of matter is fixed, and the universe becomes less dense as it expands, so the expansion will slow down either to the point where it reverses and matter contracts into another singularity – the Big Crunch – or keep going long enough for all the stars to burn out and leave nothing behind but black holes – the Big Freeze. Feel free to write your own pun versions of these for Great A’Tuin, but they’ll probably be more depressing than Pratchett’s originals.
  • The story about translating Pratchett’s puns appears in various editions of The Discworld Companion, and definitely in the most recent (as of this writing), Turtle Recall. Ruurd Groot, who translated Pratchett into Dutch, ended up tweaking an alternate name for the Big Bang theory so that it could be interpreted as “the Making Love Outwards Model”, a name Terry loved!
  • As Ben mentions, the film Krull is one of a crop of cheap Star Wars rip-offs, and it was released the same year as Return of the Jedi – 1983 again! Critics were not kind to Krull, and it was a huge financial flop (the massive budget blowout caused by huge alterations to the sets didn’t help), but it’s found a cult audience of fans who appreciate its weird mix of fantasy, swashbuckling and sci-fi, outlandish ideas, and ambitious production, as well as early film roles for Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson. (Ben had a lot more to say about it, but the episode was already running long!)
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the author of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot, also wrote the Pellucidar series of novels set inside a hollow Earth full of dinosaurs and psychic pterodacyl-men. The first book, At the Earth’s Core, was adapted into another favourite film from Ben’s youth, starring Doug McClure and Peter Cushing.
  • You too can enjoy the video posted to Twitter of “Inside Earth Girl“.
  • The Monty Python sketch starring John Cleese and a hovercraft full of eels (mentioned only) is usually referred to as “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook”. It first appeared in the twelfth episode of the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, and was adapted as part of the film And Now for Something Completely Different the following year.
  • While continuity among Discworld books is generally pretty good, Terry’s “don’t worry about it too much” attitude has produced a surprisingly difficult to pin down chronology – in no small part because of the time travel magic employed by Granny Weatherwax halfway through Wyrd Sisters. The most widely-accepted timeline puts the events of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic about two years before those in Equal Rites, three years before Mort, nine years before Sourcery, twelve years before Pyramids and twenty-one years before Guards! Guards!. Assuming Rincewind is 33 when we first meet him, which seems the most likely age, this means he is 41 when he is cast into the Dungeon Dimensions in Sourcery, and that three years pass on the Disc before he escapes in Eric!, though it’s unclear how much he’d have aged in that time. By the time we’ll meet him again in Interesting Times, the timeline has him wandering the Disc for another six years, making him at least 47, and possibly as old as 50 – but still considerably younger than David Jason, who was 68 when he played Rincewind at the beginning of his adventures in The Colour of Magic.
  • The Great Fire of London started in a bakery in Pudding Lane and destroyed most of the City of London over four days in September 1666, burning down over 13,000 houses and hundreds of larger structures, including St Paul’s Cathedral. Many older buildings survived the fire, including the Tower of London and several pubs and churches.
  • The idea of going on holiday goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire, where wealthy citizens would travel for as long as two years at a time. The more modern version dates back to the “Grand Tours” undertaken by wealthy young European men from the 17th century onwards. By the late 19th century, the innovations of the industrial revolution like steam trains and ocean liners made travel for pleasure more affordable for workers, but just like the other things he brought from the Agatean Empire, Twoflower’s brand of tourism seems a twentieth century idea, rooted in the culture of the 1950s and 60s.
  • It’s amazing we didn’t mention this, but Rincewind appears without his signature pointy hat. Well…he has one, of some sort, but he quickly loses it and it’s clearly not the one with “WIZZARD” written on it sequins which is later so dear to him. (It might also seem odd that someone with such a talent for languages is unable to spell his own job description in his mother tongue, but then again spelling on the Discworld is at best described as “informal”.)
  • Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné – Elric of Melniboné for short –  is the most famous creation of fantasy author Michael Moorcock. Physically frail and sickly, Elric is an anti-hero, reluctant ruler of his people and the only one among them to have a conscience. He is also an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, a doomed pawn in the battle between the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos across the multiverse. Early in his adventures he finds the magical black sword Stormbringer – a clear inspiration for Kring – which gives him strength, but consumes the souls of others – including many of those for whom Elric cares most.
  • To clarify Ben’s description of who’s keeping Twoflower alive, the Boy Emperor of the Agatean Empire sent the message asking for protection for Twoflower; the message calling for his assassination is from the Emperor’s Vizier. Both of them appear briefly in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort.
  • Pratchett had published three novels – and numerous short stories – prior to The Colour of Magic. The Carpet People (1971), for younger audiences, was originally written when he was 17; he later revised it, describing it as a collaboration with his younger self. The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) are comedy sci-fi novels, and contain the first appearances of a disc-shaped world – no turtle though! – and Hogswatch.
  • A mimic is one of a number of classic monsters from Dungeons & Dragons which appears as something innocuous – in the mimic’s case, it can change shape to resemble an inanimate object, most commonly a treasure chest. It first appeared in the original edition of the Monster Manual in 1977, and so was almost certainly an inspiration for the Luggage.
  • The Shawshank Redemption (1994, dir. Frank Darabont) is an award-winning film based on a novella by Stephen King. It stars Tim Robbins as a banker who is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and forced to use his accountancy skills to aid the corrupt prison warden’s money laundering scheme.
  • The Kanes mentioned by Joel are Solomon Kane, a Puritan witch hunter created by Robert E Howard, and Kane, Karl Edward Wagner’s reimagining of the Biblical Caine, red-headed son of Adam and his first wife Lilith who is cursed by God to walk the Earth for eternity as punishment for committing the first murder. Neither are traditional sword and sorcery heroes, and Wagner’s Kane has much in common with Moorcock’s Elric. As far as we can tell, there’s no-one named Kane on the Discworld.
  • If you want to know more about the Winchester Mystery House, episode 162 of the 99% Invisible podcast is a great place to start.
  • Australian spiders – and other deadly venomous animals like snakes and jellyfish, in Australia and elsewhere – probably got so deadly because they need to guarantee a kill when they use their venom. As in so many areas of evolution, there’d be an arms race between predator and prey, forcing venom to become more and more deadly over time. And that’s a race we humans aren’t even in, since we’re so rarely killed by venomous creatures that we’ve not evolved any kind of immunity to them. Evolution thus overcompensated on its potency, because it’s better to expend more energy than strictly necessary on creating super venom to make sure 100% of predators or prey to die, than it is to make a weaker venom which might leave some victims alive, meaning they leave the creature hungry, and also gives the victim a chance to pass on their resistance to their offspring. The BBC article “Why some animals have venoms so lethal, they can’t use them” by Josh Gabbatiss from 2016 is a great exploration of all of these ideas.
  • Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice was a collaboration between Bakshi and fantasy artist Frank Frazzetta, best known for his comic book, book cover and album cover art – including a version of Conan the Barbarian which redefined the character from the 1960s on. The film used the rotoscoping technique, in which actors were filmed and then traced to lend realistic movement to the animated characters; Bakshi also used this technique for his other films, Wizards and Lord of the Rings. Fire and Ice was released in – surprise! – 1983.
  • The other movie that Ben thought Joel was talking about was The Flight of Dragons, a Rankin/Bass production based on a book by Peter Dickinson, which deals largely with the question of whether magic and science are compatible. It was released in 1982, though, so clearly it was the wrong film.
  • The Doctor Who story with people who are naked under their holograms is the 2013 Christmas special The Time of the Doctor, in which the Church of the Papal Mainframe requests that visitors do not wear clothes while visiting. It’s the final story for Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, and occurs soon after the events of the fiftieth anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.
  • Pete’s Dragon is a 1977 live-action Disney musical in which a young boy, Pete, escapes an abusive foster family with the help of Elliott, a friendly, animated fire-breathing green dragon who can make himself invisible. He befriends a lighthouse keeper and his daughter while pursued by his cruel foster parents, and a travelling snake oil salesman plots to capture Elliott and use his organs for potions that might actually work. It was remade in 2016, though in the new version Pete is orphaned in a car crash in the woods and survives there for six years with Elliott’s help before being found by a park ranger. The new one has a fancy CGI dragon that probably resembles Twoflower’s, but no songs.
  • Death by the Books is a fortnightly podcast about mystery, crime and other someone-dies books. In episode 9, Death by Pratchett, hosts Kirsti and Lianne out themselves as massive fans of you know who. It’s a great introduction to Pratchett and the Discworld as a whole, and they might cover some of the individual books in the future – after all, someone dies in most of them… They’re also on Twitter at @deathbythebooks.
  • Zweiblumen is, in fact, German, and literally translates as “Two Flowers”. (Twoflower would be “Zweiblume”, but presumably Pratchett thought Zweiblumen sounded better.)
  • Rincewind is clearly channelling an inspiration particle when he says “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” though as usual the particles have got it slightly wrong: the famous catchphrase of Hardy, the larger half of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, was actually “this is another nice mess you’ve gotten us into”, though the confusion is understandable since they titled one of their films Another Fine Mess.
  • CW’s The Flash, now in its fifth season, is itself a spin-off of Arrow, both shows based on superhero characters from DC Comics. Along with later addition Supergirl, they started out with just the one main superhero character but have since brought many fan favourites from the comics to the small screen, albeit often with a twist. Case in point: the Elongated Man, who shows up in The Flash’s fourth season, is a lesser known superhero with stretching powers, though the television version draws more on Jim Carrey’s performance in The Mask than anything from the comics.
  • A “backronym” is a phrase crafted to turn a specific word into an acronym, as opposed to a real acronym in which the phrase comes first. They are often associated with words that are not normally acronyms, e.g. “Something Posing As Meat” is a backronym for Spam.
  • In Greek mythology, Tethys is a Titan, a daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and – as is the way with Greek myths – sister and wife of the sea Titan Oceanus. One of the moons of Saturn is named for her, which makes more sense when we recall that Saturn is the Roman equivalent of Kronos, one of Tethys’ brother Titans.
  • Waterworld is a famously terribly 1995 post-apocalyptic action film starring Kevin Costner as the Mariner, a mutant uniquely suited to life on a future Earth drowned under the melted polar ice caps. A trader played by Kim Coates offers the Mariner a paper page from a book as a valuable commodity, repeating the word “paper” over and over; the scene has been parodied and recreated many times as one of many things people find ridiculous about the film.  
  • The contestants from each district in The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins (and their film adaptations) are given lavish quarters before being forced to fight each other to the death; the winner is also treated to a luxurious lifestyle when the games are over.
  • When he says we never meet wizards who aren’t inept, Ben means as major protagonists; The Light Fantastic contains numerous wizards who are extremely ept, but most of them are out to kill Rincewind (and each other). Ipslore the Red in Sourcery is likewise an antagonist, and few of the faculty of Unseen University in that book are trustworthy.

#Pratchat31 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2012 Long Earth novel The Long Earth.

  • The episode title is a play on “It’s just a jump to the left”, the first instruction from dance anthem The Time Warp from the musical The Rocky Horror Show. It follows a young couple who are on their way to visit their old science lecturer to tell him they’re engaged, but on the way – actually, no, we can’t explain it. It makes no sense. You just have to experience for yourself.
  • “Hard” science fiction is science fiction that attempts to be scientifically accurate, or at least scientifically plausible. Notable authors in this style include Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson and Stephen Baxter. (Yes, it’s a bit of a boy’s club; please let us know your favourite hard sci-fi authors of other genders!)
  • Joel previously appeared on episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“, discussing The Colour of Magic on the 35th anniversary of its publication. We still hope to have him back for our episode covering The Light Fantastic on its 35th anniversary in June 2021.
  • Stephen Baxter is an English science fiction author with degrees in Engineering and Mathematics who has written nearly sixty novels, giving Terry a run for his money! His most famous book is probably the award-winning 1995 novel The Time Ships, an official sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. His Xelee series encompasses thirteen books, beginning with Raft, a novel that evolved out of the short story Joel mentions here. (Not to be confused with the Steven King short story “The Raft”, which is…very different.)
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is, unfortunately, the very real fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise. Released in 2008, and directed by Steven Spielberg, its set in 1957 and stars Harrison Ford as whip-cracking, two-fisted adventure archaeologist Indiana Jones, who alongside old flame Marion (Karen Allen) and her son Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) battles Soviet agent Cate Blanchett for control of an alien crystal skull which can unlock psychic powers. You can probably see why we weren’t into it. A fifth Indiana Jones film is in pre-production and scheduled for release in 2022.
  • 1917 is a 2019 World War I film directed by Sam Mendes, and made to look like it happens in two long, continuous shots. It follows two young British soldiers sent across France to deliver orders calling off a doomed offensive.
  • Mink Car is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band They Might Be Giants, released on September 11, 2001. Pratchett appears to have been a fan of the band, as references to their work appear in a few of his books, including the spoof band “We’re Definitely Dwarves” in Soul Music.
  • The mulefa are peaceful intelligent creatures from a parallel Earth featured in The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the original His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. They have a superficial resemblance to elephants, but have a diamond-shaped skeleton with no spine, and a sophisticated culture, language and tools – including the use of special seed pods as wheels.
  • Jasper Fforde is an English author best known for his novels about Thursday Next, beginning with 2001’s The Eyre Affair. Next is a “literary detective” from a not-entirely-serious parallel world, and her investigations sometimes take her inside great works of fiction. She is from her reality’s version of 1985, and many of Fforde’s books are set in worlds which feel like the recent past.
  • As one of Liz’s faves, we’ve mentioned English author Diana Wynne Jones many times in previous episodes. Her works include the Chrestomanci series, Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequels, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Jones has been cited as an inspiration by many British writers, including Pratchett.
  • The term Datum Earth refers to the concept of a datum reference (or just datum) – an important part of an object nominated as a reference point for measurements. Hence the Datum Earth is the reference point for all travel East and West. The concept of datums – and yes, that’s the correct plural in this sense – sees use in many disciplines, including charting, mapping, engineering and many crafts. Big thanks to listener Nathan J. Phillips for explaining this one over Twitter!
  • The North American Discworld Convention is a bi-annual convention which began in 2009, running opposite the UK convention which operates bi-annually in even years. The convention moves around the US; in 2011 it was held in Madison, Wisconsin, hence that city’s prominence in The Long Earth, while the 2019 convention was held in Los Angeles, with a theme of “Hooray for Holy Wood”. (We were very kindly invited, but unable to attend – maybe in 2021!) You can find out more at the official web site, nadwcon.com.
  • We have mentioned the film Stargate and its television successor, Stargate SG-1, many times. Both follow an archaeologist and military commander who travel through a “stargate”, an ancient alien device that allows near-instantaneous travel to other worlds with stargates across the galaxy. The television series has often made a plot point out of the possibility of knowledge of the stargate – and the US military’s stargate programme – becoming public.
  • Prometheus is Ridley Scott’s 2012 film set in the Alien universe, a prequel in which humans discover an extinct alien civilisation on a distant planet. Oh, and some horrible monsters, of course. It features Michael Fassbender as android David 8 (more on him below) and Noomi Rapace as archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw. It’s not good; maybe archaeologists and aliens just don’t mix?
  • Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French science fiction writer in the 19th century whose books were adventures based on scientific ideas. His most famous books are Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), all of which involve fantastic journeys either to extraordinary places or via extraordinary means. Maître du monde, or Master of the World, was his penultimate novel, published a year before his death. It’s a sequel to the earlier book Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer), and serves as a warning of totalitarianism. In the novel, science tyrant Robur uses his mastery of technology to create an extraordinary craft that can travel on land, sea and through the air so fast it is invisible, and uses it to terrorise the United States.
  • Stonehenge is the most famous monument consisting of standing stones, first constructed around 5,000 years ago for purposes which remain mysterious. It’s in Wiltshire, the part of England in which Terry and his family lived much of their lives. The Singing Stones are an invention for the book, but there are stones that resonate when struck in much the same way. These “lithophones” occur naturally, like the “ringing rocks” found in Pennsylvania and New South Wales, and can be made into instruments called lithophones. A famous example are the Musical Stones of Skiddaw, constructed in the 18th century and now on display at the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in northern England.
  • Neal Stephenson is an American speculative fiction author who has written sixteen novels, the most famous probably Snow Crash (1992). Stephenson mixes themes of history, technology, religion and politics with a wry sense of humour – the main character in Snow Crash is named “Hiro Protagonist” – and the comparison to the combined Pratchett/Baxter style is apt. As well as books set in not too distant cyberpunk-ish futures, he has also written historical novels, but most also involve themes of technology and computers.
  • “The High Meggas” was written in 1986, but not actually published until 2012, when it was included in Pratchett’s 2012 collection of short fiction, A Blink of the Screen – the same year as The Long Earth! In the short story, reclusive stepper Larry Linsay is minding his own business on an Earth in the High Meggas, avoiding the local “super baboons” and their leader, which he calls Big Yin. He detects the arrive of two security guards from the “gumment”: Joshua Valienté and Anna Shea. He captures them both, and each claims the other poisoned the water supply at Forward Base, the nearest government facility, killing fifty people. He has to decide who to trust, while still pondering the mysteries of the High Meggas… The term “High Meggers” (note different spelling) appears in chapter two of the novel with the same meaning as in the original short story: those earths more than a million steps away from Earth (not just in the high thousands, as Ben mentions). Both the story and chapter two of the book also use the term “Low Earths” to describe worlds only a few steps away from the original. The terms “Datum Earth”, “Long Earth” and even “step” do not appear in the original story, which uses “move” to describe the act of stepping – a term echoed in The Long Earth when Joshua refers to a “Knight’s Move”.
  • The names Joshua and Jesus are close to each other in both English and the original Hebrew. In Hebrew, ישוע or “Yeshua” was a common alternative form of יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (“Yehoshua”). While they’re distinct in the source, Greek texts translate them both as Iesous (Ἰησοῦς), which became the Latin Iesus, and then in English, Jesus. In Greek Bibles Joshua is thus also named Jesus, though he is referred to as “Jesus, son of Naue” to differentiate him from Jesus, son of God. There are some English Bibles in which Joshua is referred to as Jesus, as well. The confusion doesn’t usually go back the same way, and some ancient texts seem to make it clear that Jesus only ever used the shorter version of the name, though it’s worth pointing out that Jesus was a pretty common name back then.
  • We’ve not been able to find any record of gunmetal covered Bibles being used during the First World War, but there are certainly plenty of stories of Bibles in pockets stopping bullets – most of them probably apocryphal. The stories had an effect, though; metal-covered “heart shield Bibles” were common artefacts carried by American soldiers during World War II.
  • The Biblical Joshua (aka Hoshea, Jehoshua or Jesus; see the note above) was Moses’ assistant, as documented in the Books of Exodus and Numbers in the Torah and Old Testament. He was born in Egypt before the exodus, and was present for many of Moses’ famous deeds. Later he spied on Canaan for Moses and after Moses’ death was chosen by God to lead the Israelites, and blessed with invincibility. He led the conquest of Canaan and lived a long life, dying aged 110. His later life is chronicled in the Book of Joshua.
  • The toaster episode of The Simpsons is Treehouse of Terror V from the show’s sixth season in 1994, one of the annual Halloween anthologies. In the second segment, “Time and Punishment”, Homer accidentally turns a broken toaster into a time machine and travels to the past, altering history multiple times. As well as the no donuts world, he also creates a dystopia ruled by a despotic Ned Flanders.
  • In the fourth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Quidditch World Cup stadium is hidden from non-wizards through the use of a “Muggle-Repelling Charm“. Muggles who came too near would suddenly remember an appointment for which they were late and hurry away.
  • Celtic mythology is the source of most modern ideas of “the fae” in Western cultures, and belief in the “fair folk” (who go by many epithets) is still common in Ireland, as briefly discussed in episode 15 (and further in an outtake featured in episode three of our subscribers-only bonus podcast, Ook Club). The Otherworld as a concept is older and broader, and present in many religions and belief systems, but the Celtic version – known as Tír na nÓg, Annwn or Avalon in various traditions – matches up pretty well with the way the Trolls and Elves of the Long Earth use stepping to occasionally visit Datum Earth.
  • In August 2019, an American musician tweeted about the need to ban assault weapons; in response, another Twitter used asked “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?” The hypothetical was widely mocked and quickly became a widespread meme, though it didn’t last long. It resurfaced briefly in September that year after a news report of feral hogs in Canada potentially crossing the border into Montana. It’s worth noting that feral hogs – or feral pigs as we call them in Australia – are definitely real and can be quite destructive to wildlife, especially in countries like the US and Australia where they are not a native species. While they are indeed dangerous, attacks are rare.
  • In X-Men comics, Nightcrawler is the alias of the German mutant, circus performer and superhero, Kurt Wagner. His mutation gives him a demonic appearance, with blue skin, red eyes, a prehensile tail, pointed ears and three-fingered hands and two-toed feet. He also has the ability to teleport short distances, disappearing and reappearing in a puff of smoke, with the smell of brimstone. He first appeared in 1975, and has featured in many adaptations of the comics. Nightcrawler is a major character in the 2003 feature film X2, where he is played by Scottish actor Alan Cumming. In the opening scene he attempts to kill the American President, leaping and teleporting to avoid the President’s security. He is often depicted fighting in the same way in various X-Men videogames.
  • Sliders is an American science fiction series that ran for five seasons from 1995 to 2000. It starred Jerry O’Connell as Quinn Mallory, a genius physics student who invents a device that creates temporary wormholes into parallel universes. He accidentally traps himself and three others – his physics professor (John Rhys-Davies), his friend Wade (Sabrina Lloyd) and passing soul singer Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) – on the other side of a wormhole. Each episode Quinn’s “timer” randomly resets, counting down the time until a new wormhole opens to another alternate reality. The episode Ben describes about a population controlled alternate Earth is “Luck of the Draw”, the first season finale. While there are no Trolls or Elves, Sliders does have the Kromaggs, an intelligent species of apes from a parallel Earth who can also travel between universes, stripping other versions of Earth for resources. (Ben recommends the first two seasons, but it gets a bit rocky after that, with three of the four main cast leaving )
  • The Gap is an American clothing company founded in 1969. It grew to prominence in the 1990s, and now has thousands of stores in more than forty countries. The company owns several famous clothing brands, including Banana Republic and Old Navy. It has been involved in controversy over conditions in its factories and those of its suppliers in Saipan, Jordan and India.
  • Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence spans nine novels and more than fifty short stories. It touches on many hard sci-fi ideas drawing on quantum physics, and follows humanity’s expansion into the wider universe and their conflict with the Xeelee, an ancient species of aliens in the “so technologically advanced they are almost gods” mould.
  • The song “Step in Time” was written by the Sherman Brothers for the Walt Disney’s 1964 feature film adaptation of Mary Poppins. It’s sung by Mary’s friend Bert (American actor Dick Van Dyke, doing an infamously dodgy Cockney accent) and his fellow chimney sweeps as they dance on the rooftops of London. It’s a lot like “Knees Up Mother Brown”, with each verse identical except for a different repeated dance instruction, like “Kick your knees up”, “Flap like a birdie” and “Link your elbows”. (Later verses change these up for other phrases – including “Votes for women”!) In the 2004 Broadway musical, the song is introduced with the idea that chimney sweeps are like guardian angels who “step in, just in time” when someone is in trouble.
  • A potato battery is created by sticking a piece of zinc and a piece of copper into a potato and connecting their exposed ends to an electrical circuit. The acidic potato juice reacts with the metals, resulting in a build up of free electrons in the zinc, and a loss of electrons from the copper. This creates an imbalance in electrical charge, causing electrons to travel from the zinc through the electrical circuit to the copper, producing an electrical current of about 0.5 Volts. (Lemons, the more popular vegetable battery choice, generate a higher voltage because they have more acidic juice.)
  • In the 2007 videogame Portal, the player character, Chell, is forced to navigate a series of “test chambers” that can only be escaped through the use of a “portal gun”, which creates pairs of portals that link two locations. The test facility is run by a sinister artificial intelligence named GlaDOS. In the sequel, 2011’s Portal 2, GlaDOS is deposed by another AI and has her “personality core” attached to a potato battery, forcing her to team up with Chell. Neither of them is happy about it.
  • Most laptops do contain metallic iron, since most of them still use magnetic hard drives. This form of storage, while susceptible to damage from physical knocks, is still a lot cheaper than hardier solid-state technology, so many laptops – especially ones with large storage capacities – still use it. Modern magnetic drives use iron and cobalt layered over aluminium, but a solid state drive largely depends on silicon, so it wouldn’t be too hard to make laptops that could travel between Earths.
  • British glam rock star David Bowie appears on the cover of his 1973 album Aladdin Sane in character as Aladdin Sane, with a stylised red and blue lightning bolt painted across his face.
  • Michael Fassbender plays two android characters – David 8 and Walter – in the films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Like the androids in the earlier films – particularly Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien, and Lance Henrikson’s Bishop in Aliens and Alien 3 – he is portrayed as an advanced synthetic organism, rather than a metal robot.
  • We discussed Thomas and Will Riker, the transporter twins from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in our previous episode, “Looking Widdershins“. See that episode’s show notes for an explanation.
  • In the X-Men comics and adaptations, mutants like Nightcrawler are humans who possess a specific genetic mutation, known as the X-gene, which causes them to develop superpowers, usually around puberty. Despite the prevalence of superheroes in the Marvel universe, mutants as a group are subject to mistrust, prejudice and bigotry. Their stories have served as allegories for the struggles of queer folks, people of colour and other marginalised communities. Anti-mutant sentiment is often shown to be political or religious in origin, or at least justified that way. There are many examples of charismatic leaders stirring up hatred against mutants for their own ends, including the Reverend William Stryker in the 1982 graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, and recurring character Senator Robert Kelly, both of whom appear in the film adaptations.
  • For any younger listeners, September 11 refers to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which members of the group Al-Quaida highjacked four passenger aircraft and flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people.
  • A “pilot episode” is the initial episode produced of a television series, especially in the United States, where pilots are ordered by networks to determine if a series will be produced. As a result they are often double the normal length and spend as much time setting up the characters and premise of the show as exploring any particular plot. Many pilots are re-shot after a series has been given the green light to produce more episodes, or are repurposed as flashback material or a later episode.
  • The 1999 film Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot, is about the cast of a 1980s sci-fi show, Galaxy Quest, who now spend most of their time attending conventions. They are contacted for help by the alien Thermians, who believe the TV show was a documentary. The all-star cast includes Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, Enrico Colantoni, Tony Shalhoub and Justin Long. It’s a loving parody of science fiction television and its fans, but with a heavy emphasis on the “loving”. It’s lasting popularity, especially among Star Trek fans, led to the production of Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary, released for the film’s twentieth anniversary in 2019.
  • In the world of Harry Potter, a squib is the child of magical parents who is not magical themselves – or at least, not able to do magic, for example the casting of spells. The canonical example is Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch. We’ve previously talked about squibs, including way back in episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“.
  • Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind is not the first sequel to The War of the Worlds, but it is the only official one, authorised by the Wells estate. Baxter – who also wrote an official sequel to The Time Machine, The Time Ships – is a vice president of the H. G. Wells Society, a position he has held since 2006. The book is set in 1920 – 13 years after the events of the original book – and follows Julie Elphinstone’s journey through a second Martian invasion. Like many sequels it is also an alternate history, showing how the original invasion changed Europe and the rest of the world.
  • Baxter collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on the Time Odyssey trilogy, which is related to Clarke’s Space Odyssey series (Clarke coined the term “orthequel” for them, which is…unhelpful). They deal with a species of godlike aliens who – in an opposite move to Space Odyssey’s monolith building aliens – seek to remove other intelligent species, but wish to preserve a record of their cultures in an alternate universe. Baxter also wrote the 2000 novel The Light of Other Days, based on a synopsis by Clarke, which explores the consequences of technology allowing instantaneous viewing of events from anywhere in space and time.
  • We discussed Good Omens, Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman, in episode 15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and We Feel Nice and Accurate)“. Both Pratchett and Gaiman acknowledged that Pratchett was the dominant voice in that book, not least because Gaiman was not an experienced novelist at the time and was busy making the release schedule for his hit comic Sandman. Despite that, elements of Gaiman’s style, and his influence on the plot, are definitely noticeable.
  • The short story version of Raft, which Baxter expanded into the first novel of the Xeelee Sequence, was first published in the magazine Interzone in 1989. Finding out if it’s been collected anywhere has proven difficult, but you can find it online here, thanks to UK sci-fi ebook publishers infinity plus. You can also find a lot of short works by Baxter on his official web site, including many excerpts from and additions to the Long Earth series (most of them from later in the series, so beware of spoilers). We’ll add some more recommendations for works by Baxter here when we get them.
  • We also mentioned the Moa in episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“. It was a large flightless bird native to New Zealand, now extinct. They were not carnivorous but could certainly kill a human being.
  • Logan Paul is an American YouTube star, actor, podcaster and boxer. He became infamous in 2018 after visiting Aokigahara forest near Mount Fuji in Japan and posting footage of a man who had died by suicide there on his YouTube channel. While this was his worst stunt, he has done a lot of other awful stuff, including being cruel to animals, making disparaging remarks about homosexuality, and participating in dangerous trending fads. He was suspended by YouTube for a “pattern of behaviour”, though he claims brain damage sustained playing high school football has impaired his ability to have empathy for others. He’s also a Flat Earther.
  • Depending on who you ask there are between four and five thousand varieties of potato. Let that sink in for a second. If you want to find out more, a great place to start is the European Cultivated Potato Database, maintained by SASA, a division of the Scottish Agriculture and Rural Delivery Directorate. The database very happily has all kinds of data, including “Utilisation Characteristics”; Ben’s favourites are “Crisp suitability” and “French fry suitability” (covering both possible meanings of “chips”).
  • We’ve mentioned the Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones before, in episode 22, “The Cat in the Prat“. It consists of six novels and one collection of four novellas, all published between 1977 and 2006. In the books, the “Chrestomanci” is an enchanter – a powerful magician – employed by the government of World 12B to police the user of magic. The current Chrestomanci in nearly all the books is Christopher Chant.
  • In Verne’s Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet), first published in 1877, 36 humans are swept away on the surface of comet that briefly collides with Earth near Gibraltar. The title character, a Captain in the French Algerian army, must contend with the English and Spanish solders and other people with whom he is marooned, while experiencing many strange phenomena on a two year orbit away from and then back towards Earth. The original has an anti-Semitic tone concerning one character which drew criticism even at the time, leading to low sales by Verne’s standards. Ben first experienced the story via the Australian animated adaptation made in 1979, which leaves out the offending character. (It’s here on YouTube, though with subtitles and misattributed to a 1976 US cartoon series.)
  • There are twelve “series” of alternate worlds in the Chrestomanci series, each one a collection of worlds which are all similar to each other. Christopher Chant is from world 12A, where magic is common; world 12B is the “real world”, i.e. where we live. The worlds were first explored and numbered by the “Great Mages” who live on the worlds of series one.
  • In the 2001 film The One, directed by James Wong, Jet Li plays Gabriel Yulaw, an agent of the MultiVerse Authority, who goes rogue and starts killing the alternate versions of himself in other universes, as this makes the remaining versions stronger. Li also plays Gabe Law, the las remaining alternate of Gabriel, who is a police officer in Los Angeles on our world. It’s a cool concept but critics pretty universally panned the film.
  • In Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders, demonic entities known only as Them play boardgames with the many alternate universes – not unlike the gods of Dunmanifestin. When twelve-year-old Jamie discovers a group of them playing with his world, they make him a “Homeward Bounder” – forced to “bound” between the worlds, unable to influence Their game, but also virtually unaging and immortal as he searches for his home universe.
  • “Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa“, aka Cyril Henry Hoskin, wrote and published The Third Eye in 1956. In it he claimed to have awakened his powers of clairvoyance through “the third eye” ritual, in which fellow Lamas drilled a hole in his forehead and implanted a sliver of wood “treated by fire and herbs” in his brain. Afterwards, one of the Lamas told him that for the rest of your life he would “see people as they are and not as they pretend to be”. When Hoskin was uncovered as a potential fraud by private investigators working for a Tibetologist, he did not deny his origins, but claimed that his body was now inhabited by Lobsang Rama. The story only gets weirder and we recommend you read up on it.
  • Susan Calvin is a brilliant but emotionless “robopsychologist” who features in a dozen of Isaac Asimov’s short stories about robots. Marvin, the “Paranoid Android”, is a genius robot with a “genuine people personality” that means he is always depressed; he appears in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in all its incarnations. We discussed the horse from The Dark Side of the Sun in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
  • Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content is a web comic launched in 2003. It’s set in Northampton, Massatuchetts, in either a near future or alternate reality setting, and revolves around the day to day life of indie rock fan Marten Reed and his extended circle of friends, who include several artificial intelligences with robotic bodies. In 2019 it passed 4,000 strips and is still going, with instalments released three times a week. Liz and Ben are fans.
  • Jack&Ian is the compound name for biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart, co-authors of the four Science of Discworld books, as well as What Would a Martian Look Like? and several other fiction and non-fiction books. Jack passed away in 2019.
  • The Kardashev scale, created by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, is a way of classifying intelligent civilisations based on the amount of energy they are able to use. Type I civilisations harness the energy naturally available on their own planet (as humans currently do); Type II civilisations harness all the power available from their home star; and Type III civilisations harness the power output of an entire galaxy. Extensions to the scale have since added Type IV (the power of an entire universe) and Type V (the power of multiple universes).
  • Andre Norton was an American speculative fiction writer, and the first woman to hold many of science fiction’s highest honours. Her novels The Crossroads of Time (1956) and Star Gate (1958) are among the earliest alternate worlds stories to reference the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, and blend science ficiton with sword and sorcery.
  • InterWorld is a 2007 standalone novel written by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, in which high school student Joey discovers he is a Walker, one of a number of people who can step between alternate realities, and is recruited by InterWorld, an organisation working to keep the forces of magic and science in balance.
  • Nine Princes in Amber by American fantasy writer Roger Zelazny is the first in the Chronicles of Amber series. In the series, “Amber” is one of two true worlds; all others, including the regular Earth that we know, are merely shadows caused by the tensions between these two worlds. Nobles of those true worlds are able to gain the power to “walk through Shadow”, travelling to any permutation of reality they can imagine.
  • Feels like a while since we referenced 99% Invisible! The episode “Ten Thousand Years” from December 2014 is one of Ben’s favourites, and discusses the difficulty of creating adequate warnings for nuclear waste, which might need to be understood many thousands of years in the future. Stick with it right to the end, it’s amazing.
  • The Long Earth audiobook is narrated by English actor and comedian Michael Fenton Stevens, who also narrated the other books in the series, as well as the non-fiction parts of The Science of Discworld books, The Folklore of Discworld, and some of the stories in the collection A Blink of the Screen.