Johnny Maxwell

#Pratchat28 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“, featuring guest Steve Lamattina, discussing the 1992 novel Only You Can Save Mankind.

  • This episode’s title is a play on the famous meme “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”. The phrase is from the intro sequence of Japanese shoot-’em-up game Zero Wing. The English version was produced for the Sega Megadrive in 1992, and the questionable translation was discovered and popularised as a meme, then celebrated in a song and accompanying music video posted on the web site NewGrounds in 2001. The video shows the phrase photoshopped into a variety of real world locations. You can watch the video on YouTube here.
  • The vampire series mentioned by Steve is Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire, also known as Thirst, consisting of nine books published between 1994 and 2013. It chronicles the life of Sita, a vampire born 5,000 years ago in India. Ben mentions The Last Werewolf (2011), the first in a trilogy of books by Glen Duncan. Neither series is appropriate for children.
  • The vampires of Middle-Earth are only mentioned briefly in Tolkien’s writings, but we never learn much about them. Barrow-wights are evil spirits that fear the sun and possess and animate human corpses. The origins of orcs are not entirely clear. Tolkien supplied several partial explanations, all the opinions of characters in the fiction, which are variations on them being corrupted versions of existing beings, because Morgorth could not create life – only Eru Ilúvatar, the ultimate god of Middle-Earth, could do that. In his later life Tolkien seems to have settled on the idea that orcs were corrupted from men, and even worked on changes to the history of Middle-Earth to make this make sense (originally orcs appeared before the first men did). This will all come up again in #Pratchat83, “This Time for Ankh-Morpork”.
  • There are many stories revolving around “games coming to life”, or in which people are trapped inside games, wittingly or not. We mention a few videogame ones: the Disney film TRON (and it’s sequel and some spin-offs); the novel Space Demons and its sequels Skymaze and Shinkei, by Gillian Rubenstein; and the Gamer’s Quest series of books by George Ivanoff. There’s also the films Jumanji and Zathura, about magical board games, which started as books by Chris Van Allsburg. You can find a list of other examples on the All the Tropes page for “the game come to life”.
  • As Ben mentions, The Last Starfighter (1984) blurs the line of the trope a bit – the video game isn’t real, but it is a training program for starfighters in a real space war.
  • In Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game (1985), based on his 1977 short story and revised in 1991, Ender is one of many children trained to fight from a young age in an orbital Battle School, using a series of games. This is supposedly to prepare them for future conflicts with the alien Formics, and Ender turns out to be a tactical genius, eventually given more and more difficult mission simulations. The film version in 2013 starred Asa Butterfield as Ender and also features Harrison Ford and Ben Kingsley.
  • Rhianna Pratchett has worked on many games, including the humorous Lord of the Rings parody series Overlord, the modern iteration of Tomb Raider and its first sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Mirror’s Edge, among many others. She is also co-director of Narrativia, the company that holds and manages licensing rights to Terry Pratchett’s intellectual property. You can find out more at Rhianna’s website, rhiannapratchett.com, and you can follow her on social media, including Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. (We do!)
  • The Gulf War was a conflict between Iraq – who had invaded its neighbour Kuwait over land and oil disputes – and a coalition of forces primarily from the US, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Egypt, though many other allied countries (including Australia) also participated. The war lasted for six months, beginning on 2 August 1990, and ending on 28 February 1991 with the defeat of Iraq. The US military named the operation “Desert Shield”, then “Desert Storm”, and it was commanded by General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf. It was extraordinary at the time for the extensive news footage of front-line fighting; some journalists and political commentators nicknamed it “the videogame war”, no doubt part of Pratchett’s inspiration for the novel. Towards the end of the war, an uprising against Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein failed when promised US support was not delivered. Hussein remained the country’s ruler until his death during the later Iraq War (referenced in Pratchett’s later foreword to the novel), which began in 2003 over claims – later found to be false – that the country was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction”.
  • Wing Commander (1990; released in 1994) is probably the main inspiration for the game Only You Can Save Mankind. It contains many elements seen in the book, including the (then) graphically impressive image of the starfighter cockpit, a variety of weapons, and a higher degree of “realism” (for a given value of realism). The player is a pilot in the 27th Century Terran Confederation, fighting the aggressively expansionist lion-like species, the Kilrathi. It was a huge hit and spawned numerous expansion packs and multiple sequels. The series became famous for its use of cutscenes to advance the plot; from the third instalment these included full-motion video and many famous Hollywood actors including Mark Hamill, John Rhys-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, Clive Owen and John Hurt. The Kilrathi were originally very one-dimensional villains, but were given a more complex and sometimes sympathetic portrayal in later games. There were also novels, an animated television series in 1996, and a (very unsuccessful) live action film in 1999 starring Freddie Prinze Junior, Saffron Burrows, Matthew Lillard, Tchéky Karyo, Jürgen Prochnow and David Warner.
  • Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters is a space adventure game created by developer Toys For Bob in 1992. The player captains a ship constructed from advanced alien technology and discovers the alien Ur-Quan have come to Earth’s part of the galaxy, destroying or enslaving every species they meet. The player is tasked with recruiting alien cultures to join the Earth in an alliance to defeat the Ur-Quan. The game is a cult classic remembered for its huge story, resource management, space battles, weird aliens and sense of humour, though its representation of women is problematic. There was one sequel, Star Control 3 (not by the original developers), and recently a prequel, Star Control: Origins (also not by the original developers). There’s an official free version of the Star Control II, originally as just The Ur-Quan Masters and later Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters for copyright reasons. It includes new music and the voice-acting files from a later console version of the game. In 2024, the original creators, through their new company Pistol Shrimp, crowdfunded a new sequel, Free Stars: Children of Infinity, expected to release in May 2025.
  • Text adventure games, also known as “interactive fiction” or “interactive novels”, were a popular game genre in which the player types commands to perform various actions, with feedback supplied as prose. One of the biggest publishers was Infocom, whose break-out hit was the fantasy spoof Zork and its many sequels – there are hints in his works that Pratchett was a fan. Another fan was Douglas Adams, who himself penned an interactive fiction version of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for Infocom and loved the form so much he used a sophisticated version of it for his one original video game, Starship Titanic. You can play the Hitchhikers text adventure online: the BBC hosts fancy, updated 20th anniversary and 30th anniversary editions of it. Another significant text adventure was The Hobbit, written in large part by Dr. Veronika Megler for Australian publisher Melbourne House in 1982, but there are literally thousands of them – including all the far too difficult ones described by Steve.
  • The text adventure Twitter account Ben refers to is the bot “Frustrated Quests”, which you can find at @verbquests. It’s also on Mastodon at @verbquests@llull.club.
  • “The Hero with the Thousand Extra Lives” is a nod to “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, Joseph Campbell’s book in which he describes the “mono-myth” – a story which can be found in thousands of variations across many cultures. Pratchett is clearly familiar with the work as he subverts and references its tropes many times throughout the Discworld books.
  • We talked with Amie Kaufman about Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • ICQ was an early live chat program created by the company Mirabilis in 1996, though it was soon bought by AOL and later the Russian internet company Mail.Ru. Its name is not an acronym, but a short version of “I Seek You”. As early 2020 ICQ is still available, including on smartphones, though its popularity has sharply declined since its heyday of over 100 million users every day.
  • IRC is an acronym for Internet Relay Chat, an early chat service in which users could log on to a server and then join channels to chat live with other users. It’s notable for being the birthplace of many of the text abbreviations now commonly used on mobile phones and across the Internet, including LOL, ROFL, IMHO, AFK and many others. It’s also where the convention of naming channels with a leading hash comes from (e.g. #general or #project-omega), now used by Slack and Discord.
  • Gmail (originally Google Mail) started with a testing phase in 2004, and you could only join by being invited by another user. This ended in 2009 – as did the ability to get a gmail address that resembled your actual name.
  • Mavis Beacon, of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing fame, is not a real person. She was a fictional character created to make the program feel more personable. In early versions of the software she was only represented by a photo of Renée L’Espérance, a perfume counter worker discovered by an employee of Software Toolworks.
  • The letters Steve’s Scottish teacher was reciting – properly ASDF, JKL; – are the “home row”, the keys on which a trained typist’s fingers are supposed to rest on a QWERTY keyboard. Most keyboards still have raised dots or bars on the F and J keys to allow typists to find the home row keys without looking.
  • The Typing of the Dead is a 1999 typing game based on The House of the Dead 2 (1998). The original was an arcade game “rail shooter” – the character’s movement was controlled by the game, and the player used a light gun (or mouse or other controller in home versions) to shoot zombies in each new area as they investigated a creepy house. Typing of the Dead – originally released as an arcade game as well! – swapped out the light gun for a keyboard; words appear over each zombie, and the player (or players – you could have two at once) had to quickly type the matching word before the zombies reached them. The player characters in the game are even altered to be wearing computers like backpacks, with a keyboard on wearable shelf at around torso height. The game was later released on home consoles and computers.
  • Johnny and the Dead was adapted in 1995 as a four-part television series by London Weekend Television for ITV, featuring George Baker and Brian Blessed as two of the prominent ghosts, with Johnny played by Andrew Falvey (whose best-known role is probably the voice of Fiver in the late 90s series of Watership Down). Johnny and the Bomb was adapted as a three-part series in 2006 by Child’s Play Television for CBBC, featuring Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon and starring a young George MacKay – recently seen in big budget war film 1917 – as Johnny. Neither are easy to get hold of now, as they only had limited release on VHS and DVD.
  • After a workshop season in 2000, the musical version of Only You Can Save Mankind debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, with music by Leighton James House a book and lyrics by Shaun McKenna, who also wrote the musical version of The Lord of the Rings and many other theatre, television and radio programs. You can find information about the 2009 album version of the show, featuring six songs (we don’t know if that’s all of them), at ifnotyouthenwho.com. The composer’s Twitter account suggests that the musical might return in the near future!
  • We should note that Johnny and the Bomb has also been adapted into a musical, available for schools to perform, as has The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Johnny and the Dead has also been adapted for the stage, though not as a musical.
  • Liz really loves The Shawshank Redemption. You can hear her speak about it in several previous episodes.
  • Naomi Alderman’s The Power is an award-winning science fiction novel which describes a future matriarchy, created after women all over the world develop the supernatural power to emit electricity from their hands to protect, attack and heal. It was adapted as a television series for Amazon Prime Video in 2023.
  • Alien Nation was a 1988 American sci-fi film set in the near future, a few years after a ship of alien refugees crash-lands in the American desert. The refugee occupants are a human-like species, the Tenctonese; they have been accepted as “Newcomers” in American society, but face prejudice from the humans they live with. The plot follows a human detective (James Caan in the film) and his Newcomer partner (Mandy Patinkin), the first to become a detective, as they solve crimes. The film was quite serious, but successful enough to be adapted into a television series in 1989. The series was also titled Alien Nation, but had a lighter tone and a new cast. It only lasted one full season, ending on a cliffhanger, but the story was concluded a few years later in five television movies featuring the same cast.
  • The original V was an American sci-fi television show which began as a two-part mini-series in 1983. This was followed by another mini-series in 1984 and a full season of episodes from 1984 to 1985. The plot involved a seemingly human-like species of aliens, known only as “Visitors”, who arrive on Earth seemingly in peace. The original series starred Jane Badler as Diana, glamorous deputy leader of the Visitors, who memorably unhinged her jaw to swallow a rat whole in a scene where a journalist discovers the truth: the Visitors are lizard-like creatures disguised as humans, and are working to conquer the planet. (The title “V” comes from the shorthand graffiti used by the resistance against the Visitors.) A remake television series ran for two seasons from 2009 to 2011, starring Morena Baccarin as Anna, leader of the Visitors. Jane Badler appears as Anna’s mother, named Diana after her character in the original series. In both series, some of the Visitors are shown to be sympathetic to the humans.
  • The Tomorrow People was an ITV sci-fi series about a group of teenagers who developed psychic powers, and sought each other out to protect themselves from governments and aliens. The original series ran from 1973 to 1979, but after reruns of the original proved popular in America, a remake was made in 1992 with a new cast and the same basic premise.
  • Pokémon is a series of videogames developed for Nintendo by developer Game Freak. In the game, the player is a budding trainer of Pokémon (a name derived from “Pocket Monster”). Pokémon are creatures with a variety of special powers which can be captured and trained for battle against other Pokémon. The goal of the game is to become the greatest trainer by defeating the leaders of various Pokémon gyms and the mysterious “Elite Four” trainers, and to capture an example of every different species of Pokémon – hence the catchphrase “Gotta catch ‘em all!” The first two games were Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green (Pokémon Blue in English speaking markets) for the Nintendo GameBoy in 1996. Between them the games featured 151 unique Pokemon species, but each version had some that were unique, requiring players to trade with each other to complete their collection. Professor Oak is a character in the game, a researcher who gives the player their first Pokémon, allowing them to choose one of three. He provides some guidance and information at various parts of the game, and also became a character in the popular anime series spawned from the games’ massive success. As of 2020 there have been seven more generations of the games, each one adding a new region to the game’s world (usually modelled on a real world location) filled with new species of Pokémon. There have also been card games, films, toys and many spin-off games, including the hugely popular mobile game Pokémon GO.
  • Pokémon Yeah and Pokémon Nah are spoof designs for a pair of Pokémon games set in a new “Straya” region, resembling Australia. Complete with several new Pokemon designs, the art is elaborate and amazing; it’s the work of artist Liz, aka @VivInkArt on Twitter, and you can find the designs in a thread starting with this tweet. The earlier collection of Australian Pokemon is a full Pokédex worth – 151 pixel-art designs by Australian artist Paul Robertson, aka Probzz. The easiest place to find them is probably on his Instagram; start with this post.
  • Braveheart (1995) is an historical war film directed by and starring Mel Gibson as William Wallace, a Scottish knight and major leader in the First War of Scottish Independence (1296-1328). While it was a tremendous box office success, it has been criticised for being highly inaccurate. A sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019 with Angus MacFayden reprising the role of Robert, another historical character and King of Scotland, whom many felt was misrepresented in the original film. (We’ll talk about Braveheart again in the context of the Nac Mac Feegle in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.)
  • The Illuminae Files are trilogy of YA sci-fi novels – Illuminae, Gemina and Obsidio – by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Set centuries in the future, mega-corporation Beitech Industries launches an attack on a corporate rival’s illegal mining operation on a backwater planet. The books follow the fleeing survivors, especially a small group of teenage protagonists, as they try to outrun their pursuers, who want no witnesses. The story is presented as a series of first-hand documents compiled by the mysterious “Illuminae Group”, delivered as evidence to a trial of senior BeiTech officials.
  • Gaston is the antagonist of Disney’s 1991 animated musical version of Beauty and the Beast (and its 2017 live-action remake). Presented as a traditionally brave, strong and handsome hero-type, Gaston is also vain, arrogant, anti-intellectual and blind to his own faults. When he learns Belle loves the Beast, he attempts to kill him. His sidekick Le Fou spurs him to sing his own praises in the song “Gaston”, which includes lines like “No-one’s slick as Gaston / No-one’s quick as Gaston / No-one’s neck’s as incredibly thick as Gaston”.
  • At the end of Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), protagonist Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) brings the girl Newt back to the rescue ship piloted by her android ally Bishop (Lance Henrikson)…only to find the Alien Queen has snuck on board, and announces her presence by impaling Bishop with her barbed tail. This leads some fans to shout “Queen takes Bishop!” when watching the scene.
  • Billy Elliot (2000) is a “dance drama” film set in the North of England during the 1985 miner’s strike. Billy, the youngest in a family of striking miners, discovers a love for ballet, but is forbidden from attending lessons by his traditionally masculine father. Kirsty’s comment when she invites Johnny into her bedroom is a tamer version of Debbie, Billy’s teacher’s daughter, who invites him into her bedroom and also offers to show him her fanny.
  • Wobbler’s game Journey to Alpha Centauri inspired a real game, Journey to Alpha Centauri (In Real Time), written by Julian Fleetwood in 1998 using the interactive fiction language Inform. It doesn’t currently seem to be available anywhere, but you probably don’t have a spare 3,000 years to finish it anyway.
  • Johnny’s nickname, “Rubber”, is surprisingly rude for a middle-grade book: it comes from “rubber johnnies”, a common slang term for condoms in the UK.
  • Wreck-It Ralph is a 2012 computer-animated Disney film in which the title character grows tired of being a video game villain and tries to be a hero in other games, causing glitches which might get his arcade machine shut down permanently. It’s wonderful and you should definitely watch it. The 2019 sequel, Ralph Breaks the Internet, is also pretty good.
  • Cacodemons are one of the common demonic enemies in the Doom videogames, unleashed by human experiments in dimensional travel on Mars. They resemble a floating ball covered in spikes, with a single eye and a huge mouth full of sharp teeth – not dissimilar to the Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons (though with spikes instead of extra eyes on stalks). They appear as the mascot and icon for the first game in the series. The name comes from the Greek κακοδαίμων (kakodaimon), “evil spirit”, and is the original term from which the modern English meaning of “demon” is derived.
  • The shoot-‘em-up Ben mentioned was Xenon 2 Megablast, released for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1989, and later ported to other computers and consoles.
  • The old-school videogames mentioned by Steve are probably Dig Dug and Burger Time, both of which were originally arcade games.
  • The Witness is a 2016 exploration/puzzle game by Jonathan Blow, in which the player wanders an abandoned island complex solving a variety of puzzles with minimal instructions.
  • Goodnight Mister Tom is a 1981 novel by English author Michelle Magorian. The protagonist, Willie, is evacuated from 1939 London to the countryside, where he begins to bond with his elderly guardian Mister Tom and understand that his mother had been abusing him.
  • Who Killed Kennedy is long out of print, but you can download a twentieth anniversary edition – with a new ending and commentary from the author – from the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club.
  • Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993) is the first in a series of hugely successful novels by John Marsden which depict the invasion of Australia by a coalition of South Asian nations, and a small group of teenagers who escape initial capture and try to fight back. It was followed by six sequels. The first book has been adapted into a 2010 film and a 2016 television series for ABC3. Marsden died in 2024.

#Pratchat37 – The Shopping Trolley Problem

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Author Will Kostakis returns to face time travel, unexploded bombs and a tangle of timelines in Terry Pratchett’s final Johnny Maxwell book from 1996, Johnny and the Bomb!

When Johnny and his misfit friends look after homeless eccentric Mrs Tachyon’s shopping trolley, they soon discover she has a complicated relationship with time. Johnny, Yo-less, Wobbler, Bigmac and Kirsty travel back to World War II, on the eve of the “Blackbury Blitz”. Johnny knows bombs are meant to destroy Paradise Street – but can he and his friends do anything about it? Do they even have the right? And how will they get back ho- hang on. Where’s Wobbler?

Pratchett’s first book focussing on time travel also touches on the worries of teenagers, local history, racism, sexism and the nature of fate and destiny. It might seem weighty for a children’s book, but children think about this stuff all the time! Did you follow all the time travel shenanigans? How do you think Pratchett’s handling of these issues compares to modern middle grade fiction – or even his own previous Johnny books? And if you could go back in time, would you try and change things for the better? Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat37.

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Returning guest Will Kostakis is a writer and award-winning author. Since we last saw him in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, he’s published his first fantasy YA novel, Monuments, and its sequel, Rebel Gods. His new novella, The Greatest Hit, is out now from Lothian Children’s Books as part of the Australia Reads initiative. Find out more about Will at willkostakis.com, or follow him on Twitter at @willkostakis.

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

As mentioned at the end of this episode, the fiction anthology Collisions from Liminal Magazine is out now, featuring Liz’s story “The Voyeur”! Order it from your local bookshop. And we also announced that the Australian Discworld Convention in Sydney has had to be postponed from 2021 to 2022. Find out more at ausdwcon.org.

Next month we see out the year with a favourite, as we time travel about ten Discworld books ahead to meet Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal! We’ve invited two experts on con artistry to discuss it with us: writer and magician Nicholas J Johnson, and comedian and actor Lawrence Leung! Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat38.

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.

#Pratchat28 – All Our Base Are Belong to You

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In episode 28, players Liz, Ben and guest Steve Lamattina press start and blast away at Terry Pratchett’s 1992 novel of kids, war and videogames, Only You Can Save Mankind.

Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell isn’t the best at computer games, but he loves them all the same. While playing Only You Can Save Mankind, a space combat simulator, he’s taken by surprise when the Captain of the enemy ScreeWee fleet offers to surrender. After he accepts, the game starts to invade his dreams, and the aliens disappear – from everyone’s computer. Something weird is going on – but at least it’s a distraction from the war on TV and the Trying Times at home…

Only You Can Save Mankind – dedicated to Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, now a renowned videogame writer – is explicitly about the first Gulf War (1990-1991), at a time when games looked more real and televised war looked more like a game. In early 2020, many themes of the book seem alarmingly current – even as the experience of computer games it describes is firmly rooted in the past. Did you connect with Johnny’s experience? Do you like videogames? Does this episode contain too much Pokémon and Freddi Fish? Use the hashtag #Pratchat28 (and maybe #DeliciousPokémon) on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Steve Lamattina is a writer and editor who has worked in film, music, education and tech. He was also CEO of youth publishing company Express Media, and has written about food, events, movies, games, social media and much much more. You can find him on Twitter as @steve_lamattina.

Next month it’s back to the Discworld, and close to home – more or less – as we catch up with Rincewind in 1998’s The Last Continent, and welcome back a returning guest: Fury! We’ll be recording in late February, so get your questions in before then via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat29.

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.

#Pratchat37 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“, featuring guest Will Kostakis, discussing the third and final Johnny Maxwell novel, 1996’s Johnny and the Bomb.

  • The episode title, inspired by Will and Liz, is a reference to the famous ethical dilemma called “the trolley problem”. The short version is that a cable car trolley is going to hit and kill a bunch of people, but you are standing next to a lever that could shift it onto another track, where it will only hit and kill one person. The ethical debate centres around whether it is right to cause someone’s death, even to save others. It features fairly heavily in the television series The Good Place, especially in the episode titled…er…”The Trolley Problem”.
  • For our discussions of the previous Johnny Maxwell books, see #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
  • The Big Mac is one of the main hamburgers on the menu at McDonald’s Restaurants, at least in English-speaking countries.
  • In Good Omens, Famine – one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – goes by the name of Dr Raven Sable, famous dietician and author of Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful. He invented the hamburger and owns the biggest fast food chain on Earth, though its name is not revealed. See #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“, for more.
  • The TV adaptations of the Johnny books are entirely unrelated to each other. Johnny and the Dead was produced for Children’s ITV in 1995, only a year after the book was published, and featured Brian Blessed as Marxist ghost William Stickers. Johnny and the Bomb was made much later, in 2006, by CBBC, and featured Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon. They were released on video and DVD in the UK, but are very hard to get ahold of now. (While there’s not yet been a television adaptation of Only You Can Save Mankind, it was adapted for radio by the BBC in 1996.)
  • Foul Ole Ron is the, er, greatest of the beggars of Ankh-Morpork and a member of the so-called Canting Crew, who show up in many of the books. As well as his distinctive catchphrase (see below), he is also famous for his Smell (which exists independently of him), and for having a “thinking brain dog”, most likely a side gig for Gaspode the talking dog. Ron features most prominently in Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Hogfather, Jingo and The Truth.
  • The phrase “Buggrit buggrit millennium hand and shrimp” was first uttered by the Bursar of Unseen University during his trip to Lancre for the royal wedding in Lords and Ladies. (Foul Ole Ron first says it in Soul Music.) As noted in the Annotated Pratchett File for that book, Terry used a computer program to generate nonsense phrases from a bunch of source texts, including a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song “Particle Man” – just one of many TMBG references scattered throughout his books.
  • Timecop is a 1994 science fiction action film directed by by Peter Hyams and based on a comic book story of the same name. It does indeed star Jean-Claude Van Damme, and is in fact his highest-grossing and probably most popular film as a lead actor. He plays a cop fighting time travel crime named Max Walker, though as far as we know he is not modelled after the beloved Australian cricketer and commentator of the same name.
  • Cassandra or indeed Kasandra was a princess of Troy and priestess of Apollo. He fancied her, and gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she spurned him (or just wasn’t into him) he twisted the gift so that no-one would believe her. It’s almost as if Kirsty had seen her own future…
  • Johnny is twelve years old in Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead, and fourteen in this book. It probably makes more sense to imagine that he’s actually thirteen in the middle book, meaning he has one big weird adventure a year, in between the other smaller ones (see a later note).
  • We’ve previous mentioned Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in #Pratchat22, “The Prat in the Cat” and #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. The protagonist, Richard Mayhew, does indeed send his life off on an unpredictable course when he stops to help Door, a seemingly homeless woman who is actually a member of a noble house in the fantastical realm of “London Below”.
  • Ben’s time travel show from six years ago is Night Terrace, and the episode about evil robot Hitlers is the fifth from season one, “Sound & Führer”, by John Richards. You can find the show at nightterrace.com.
  • We discussed The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents in #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids” with Michelle Law. In between this episode being recorded and released, on November 5, there was a major announcement regarding the film adaptation, The Amazing Maurice: it has a confirmed release date of 2022, will now premiere on Sky Cinema (in the UK at least), and has several roles cast, including Hugh Laurie as Maurice! Check out the full announcement on the Narrativia web site.
  • We’ve previously talked about famous English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968) many times, but especially in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat and The Amazing Maurice. Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine discusses many of the tropes in her work we’d now consider harmful.
  • The 3rd of October appears in the 2004 film Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey and based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, about the social dynamics of high school girls. Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) asks new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who has a crush on him, what day it is in class, which she sees as a milestone in their relationship. The date was October 3rd.
  • The fax machine – short for “facsimile” machine – has roots in much older technology, but the version that transmitted pictures over a standard telephone line was first patented by Xerox in 1964. In many places they are still in use, especially for transmission of medical records in hospitals, medical practices and other public health organisations. In the UK’s National Health Service, they were planned to be phased out by early 2020, though it’s unclear if that goal was met. Fax machines are still widely used in Japan, and found in many convenience stores. In many countries, however, non-medical businesses have adopted email and other forms of Internet-based communication instead.
  • Will is thinking of the reaction image meme known as “Math Lady“ (or “Confused Lady”), which features Brazilian telenovela star Renata Sorrah thinking intensely, with superimposed mathematical diagrams.
  • Liz is a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series, which spans seven books published between 1977 and 2006. They chronicle the adventures of Christopher Chant and others who magically travel between alternate worlds. We’ve previously mentioned Jones many times, but the Chrestomanci books come up mostly in our discussion of parallel worlds book The Long Earth, #Pratchat33, “It’s Just a Step to the West“.
  • We talked about white feminism only last episode. It’s a term for feminism practiced from a privileged perspective that is not intersectional – it doesn’t consider how discrimination based on factors other than gender (race, sexuality, disability, class etc) complicate sexism and put many “solutions” out of reach.
  • “The classic” Will is referring to is the Grandfather Paradox, which was considered “age old” as long ago as the 1930s. It describes a situation in which time travel into the past creates a logically impossible or at least inconsistent sequence of events. The name comes from the most frequently cited example of going back in time and killing your own grandfather when he was a child, making it impossible for you to exist.
  • English singer-songwriter Kate Bush known for her distinctive style which mixes electronic and acoustic sounds, and for drawing on literary inspiration for her lyrics. Her very first single, “Wuthering Heights”, was released when she was 19 years old and hit number one in the UK and Australian charts in 1978. “Running Up That Hill” is her second most successful single, making it to number three in the UK (and number six in Australia) in 1985, the first single from her fifth studio album, Hounds of Love. A remix of “Running Up That Hill” released in 2012 made it to number six in the UK.
  • We mentioned Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) back in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“. The film stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, an immortal being who cannot die unless decapitated. He and others like him are drawn to fight and kill each other, concentrating their magical powers in fewer and fewer immortals until only one is left, who will claim “the Prize”. Spoilers: the star of the film claims the Prize at the end, and exclaims “I can see through time!” It makes him mortal, but also “at one with all living things”.
  • Dad’s Army was a long-running and popular BBC sit-com about a (fictional) platoon of the (real) Home Guard, a volunteer militia (originally called the the Local Defence Volunteers, or LDV) made up of men exempt from conscription during World War II, mostly for reasons of age. Set in the fictional seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea, the local chapter is led by local bank manager Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) and a clerk from his bank, Sgt Wilson (John Le Mesurier). Their platoon is filled with elderly misfits, as well as a young man excused from service because of his rare blood type; the humour largely resolved around them incompetently attempting various schemes to protect the town, and they rarely engaged the enemy, though they were certainly game to try. It ran for 8 series between 1968 and 1977, though it was repeated well after that in the UK and Commonwealth countries. There was also a film in 1971, and a new film in 2016 with a new cast, including Toby Jones and Bill Nighy as Mainwaring and Wilson.
  • Bakelite was the first synthetic plastic, developed in 1909 by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland (hence the name) in New York. It became widely used in the casings of electrical equipment since it was non-conductive and relatively resistant to heat. The first Bakelite telephone handset was designed by Eriksson in 1930, and various designs were produced through to the 1960s. Many stayed in service until the introduction of touchtone-dialling in the 60s and 70s saw them gradually replaced by handsets with push-buttons, made of newer plastics like polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
  • We’ve been unable to determine what exactly the rules were around unauthorised use of air raid sirens during the Blitz, but they would have been under the control of Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens.
  • “Had a stressful day? What you need is a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down” was the 1950s and 60s advertising pitch for “Bex”, a popular Australian painkiller sold as tablets and powder. It combined a little caffeine with the analgesics aspirin and phenacetin; the latter was banned in the early 1970s, as it was discovered to be addictive and caused kidney problems. In 1965 a Sydney comedy revue titled A Cup of Tea, a Bex and a Good Lie Down, starring future television stars Ruth Cracknell and Reg Livermore, ran for over 250 performances, further cementing the phrase in Australian popular culture. It’s sometimes used as a directive to calm down or relax.
  • The study of psychological trauma was advanced greatly, unfortunately, by the plight of British soldiers from World War I, as many as 10% of whom were identified as suffering from “shell shock”. The condition was first formally described in The Lancet in 1915 by Charles Myers. This evolved into a broader diagnosis of “gross stress reaction” in the 1950s, and then the more modern idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was first listed as an official psychiatric diagnosis in 1980.
  • Pratchett sometimes gave hints about his future writing plans, and had said in interviews he had a sequel to Dodger in mind, but he never mentioned as far as we can find anything about further Johnny books. Ben might not be right about him planning the last two books together, though, as he wasn’t sure in 1994 when the final one would come out, and it at one point had a working title of Johnny and the Devil, which suggests a very different plan! Vague details of some of his unrealised Discworld plans were revealed in an afterword to The Shepherd’s Crown: a whodunnit with goblins starring Constable Feeney, a story of elderly heroes battling failing memories to defeat a dark lord, and the return of the Amazing Maurice – now a ship’s cat! When the hard drives containing Pratchett’s unfinished writing were destroyed by a steam roller, his personal assistant Rob Wilkins revealed they contained ten unfinished novels, though it’s unknown whether these match up to the afterword. The manuscripts were probably “draft zeroes”, the term Pratchett used for the first versions of his books; these were entirely unedited, and no-one else was permitted to see them.
  • As we mention, the “naff epilogue” Will refers to is the widely derided one from the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, set nineteen years later as the now married (to each other) protagonists send their own children off to Hogwarts, aka “the Hogwarts for killing people“.
  • Pratchett’s thoughts on J K Rowling are actually more guarded than Ben remembers, but what he doesn’t say speaks volumes… (Though note this relationship is given considerable more context by the Pratchett biography, A Life In Footnotes.) We’ve linked to this 2004 article from The Age, “Mystery Lord of the Discworld“, before, but it seems very timely to do so now as he was in Australia on a tour to promote the next book we’re reading, Going Postal! He also mentions his initial meeting with Snowgum Films, makers of the Troll Bridge short film, which was finally released in 2019.
  • Many towns and cities become “twinned” with another, usually in another country, as a form of cultural exchange. In the UK and much of Europe these are known as “twin towns“, whereas in the US and Australia they’re often referred to as “sister cities” (in Australia perhaps because there are at least two prominent towns split in two over state borders, which are sometimes referred to as twin towns). At the start of chapter five of Johnny and the Bomb, it’s mentioned that Blackbury is twinned with “Aix-et-Pains“, which is indeed a fake-French pun for “aches and pains”. For more on twin towns, see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, in which we discuss the speech given by “Lord Vetinari” on the occasion of its twinning with the UK town of Wincanton.
  • We couldn’t find a real “Bonza Feed” award, but the term itself is still in use in Australian slang (indeed fast food chain Red Rooster used it in advertising around Australia Day as recently as 2018). “Bonza” itself is a slang term roughly meaning “excellent” or “deserving of admiration”, and dates back to at least the early 1900s. Its origins are uncertain, but one frequent suggestion is that it comes from the French “bon ça“, which means “that’s good”. Another almost certainly fabricated story is that it comes from a Cantonese phrase meaning “good gold”, used by Chinese immigrants in the gold rush, but there’s no evidence for this, or indeed matching words in Cantonese. A more likely explanation may be that it is a localised contraction of “bonanza“, a Spanish word meaning prosperity that was used in America when finding a good vein of silver to mine. That might place it back in the gold rush, though how it came to Australia (when few Americans seem to have made the trip at that time) is uncertain.
  • Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is a 2012 Australian crime drama set in 1920s Melbourne, based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood. Essie Davis stars as Miss Phryne Fisher, wealthy socialite and private detective, who solves various crimes. It ran for three series between 2012 and 2015 on the ABC, and enjoyed some cult success overseas. The original cast and crew made a feature film set after the TV show, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, which was released in February 2020. There was also a 2019 series of spin-off telemovies for Channel 7, Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries; these were set in the 1960s and starred Geraldine Hakewill as Phryne’s niece Peregrine Fisher, who joins a secret society of women adventurers after her aunt disappears. While all three screen adaptations were made by Any Cloud Productions, the differing production partners may make licensing all the content for a streaming service quite difficult, and at the moment the series seems to be only available to stream on AcornTV, a streaming service specialising in British television.
  • A “stobie pole” is a kind of power line pole made of two steel joists separated by concrete, invented by James Cyril Stobie in 1924. They were a workaround for the fact that termite-resistant timber was in short supply, and were mostly used in Adelaide in the 1930s and 1940s, though some are still standing today.
  • In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione Granger is given permission to use a magical Time Turner so that she can attend classes that are scheduled at the same time. She, Harry and Ron use it to go back in time, eventually realising they are responsible for several weird occurrences they had previously noticed.
  • The time travel heavy episodes of Night Terrace written by Ben are season one’s “Time of Death”, which is both a parody of Phryne Fisher and a murder mystery that happens out of order, and “Ancient History”, in which the protagonists land in ancient Europe but can’t figure out when or where they are, complicating their efforts to avoid changing history.
  • Sliders was a 1990s American science fiction TV show in which genius physics student Quinn Mallory invents a method of travelling between parallel universes, but accidentally transports himself, his lecturer, his nerdy friend (who has a crush on him) and a passing soul singer into another universe. To escape a disaster he is forced to modify his “sliding” device, which means it now counts down a random amount of time before opening a portal to a random parallel universe. Many episodes revolve around them either losing the timer or trying to find a safe place to hide until it opens a portal to take them home.
  • The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a way of explaining the macro-level consequences of quantum theory. According to quantum theory, fundamental particles like electrons do not occupy a definite position in spacetime, but can only be represented by a wave function, which gives a probability of their location. In the many-world interpretation, such particles literally exist in all of the possible positions, giving rise to many different universes in which each possibility plays out. Those changes are small in local effect but would add up to an infinite number of universes with large-scale differences – the classic idea of parallel universes (though they’re not parallel, as they branch off from each other).
  • Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis) is one of the most famous time travel movies. In the film, teenager Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) accidentally uses a time travelling car invented by his eccentric scientist friend Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), landing in 1955. He inadvertently changes history so that he might never be born, and he seeks out the younger version of Doc for help putting things right. The sequels, Back to the Future Part II and Part III, were filmed back-to-back. In Part II, Marty buys a Sports Almanac in the future with the intention of using it to win horse races in the present, but it is stolen by Biff, the antagonist of the first film, who gives it to his young self. Marty and Doc must go back to 1955 and interact with events from the first film to put history back on track. In Part III, Marty discovers Doc, who is trapped in 1885, will be killed by Biff’s outlaw ancestor, and goes back to save his friend. We’ve previously talked about the films in our discussions of Reaper Man, Diggers, Good Omens, Johnny and the Dead and The Science of Discworld.
  • About Time (2013) is a romantic comedy written and directed by Richard Curtis, starring Domhnall Gleeson as Tim, Rachel McAdams as Mary and Bill Nighy as Tim’s father James. James reveals to Tim that men in his family can travel back in time to any moment they have lived before, but warns him not to use the gift to become rich or famous, so he tries to use it to improve his love life and gradually learning the limitations of his gift. It got a lukewarm reaction from critics, but did pretty well with audiences, especially – to everyone’s surprise – in South Korea.
  • Unfortunately there were many actors shafted by the modern Star Wars sequel trilogy. John Boyega, who plays ex-Stormtrooper Finn, has talked openly about his experience of facing racism from fans, something also experienced by Kelly Marie Tran, whose character Rose Tico was all but dropped from the third film. Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson’s characters were also given short shrift in the final film in favour of turning the whole plot around to appease a vocal minority of fans who wanted something more traditional, summed up by the often ridiculed line of dialogue: “Somehow, Palpatine has returned…”
  • Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989; dir. Stephen Herek) follows two Californian high school slackers, Bill S Preston (Alex Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan. Their dreams of being rock stars are threatened as they are about to flunk history, which will result in Ted’s Dad sending him away to a military college. They are visited by Rufus, a time traveller from a future were Bill and Ted’s band Wyld Stallyns has brought world peace through their music, who lends them the time machine to research history so they can pass their final oral presentation exam. The sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991; dir. Pete Hewitt), is Ben’s favourite of the two, though it involves less time travel and more weird afterlife shenanigans, including a comedic version of Death not a million miles away from Pratchett’s. (We previously mentioned the sequel in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.) Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020; dir. Dean Parisot) is a “legacy film” sequel which was written in 2010, but took a decade to secure a production deal; in the film, an older Bill and Ted are struggling to live up to the legend of themselves they’ve been told awaits them.
  • Ben mentioned a few other time travel stories that he loves, but we cut them for time. Obviously there’s Doctor Who, but also the films Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009, dir. Gareth Carrivick), Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, dir. Colin Trevorrow) and 12 Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam), and the television series Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982), Quantum Leap (1989-1983) and Continuum (2012-2015), plus many many more.
  • The Time Traveller’s Wife is the 2003 debut novel from American author Audrey Niffenegger. It tells the story of Henry, a man who has a genetic condition which causes him to randomly travel through time, and Clare, an artist who meets him many times throughout her life. They have a romance which each experiences in a different order. The film adaptation from 2007 starred Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, but was not a success. Stephen Moffat is currently writing a new television series adaptation for HBO.