Pratchat
  • Home
  • News
  • Episodes
  • The Books
  • More!
    • Reading Challenge
    • The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters
  • Support Us
  • About

Leonard da Quirm

#Pratchat56 Notes and Errata

8 June 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 56, “do { Podcast(); } while ( unreadPratchetts > 0 );“, discussing the 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” with guest Sean Williams.

Iconographic Evidence

Conspicuously missing from this section is that illustration from the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys, but despite what much of the Internet is like it’s not actually okay to publicly share artwork without the artist’s permission.

However, it does appear in the picture section of A Blink of the Screen! There is presented the full, original artwork, which was painted for the cover of a 2001 German anthology of short stories, Retter der Ewigkeit, subtitled “Geschichten zwischen Diesseits und Jenseits” (roughly “Saviour of Eternity: Tales between this world and the afterlife“). This version shows the whole scene – unlike the versions used for either of the German collections – and answers a few of our questions, especially that the yellow leg is indeed that of Michael Dever in his AR chair. In the ebook edition it’s presented at quite a low resolution, and sideways (in the print edition it’s a double-page spread), which might be why Ben thought it was familiar but didn’t recognise where he’d seen it.

While it’s not amongst the images available on Josh Kirby’s official website, if we find it somewhere else public, we’ll point you to it. Sven and Ben have both shared the versions they have via the Pratchat Discord, so subscribers with access can see it there.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is valid C++ code, assuming that the function Podcast exists and updates the value of unreadPratchetts to avoid the podcast going on forever. Or is that what you all secretly want?
  • Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) – who’ll be mentioned quite a bit this episode – was an American science fiction author, many of whose novels and short stories have been famously adapted for the screen. These include The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (adapted twice as Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (more about that in another note) and A Scanner Darkly, among others.
  • You can hear Sean’s episode of Splendid Chaps, “Three/Family“, over at the Splendid Chaps website. It was recorded on Sunday, 10 March 2013, at the pop-up Adelaide Fringe venue the Tuxedo Cat, and released on 23 March 2013.
  • Strata was Pratchett’s third novel, first published in June 1981, about two and a half years before The Colour of Magic. It’s features a science fiction version of the Discworld – a planet shaped like a flat disc, which seems to have been built by ancient aliens. It’s more-or-less a parody of Larry Niven’s popular Ringworld books, with many specific jokes and references. But we’ll say no more about it here, as we’ll definitely be covering it on the podcast in future.
  • The Ferals (1994-1995) was an Australian children’s television program on the ABC starring a mix of humans and puppet animals: Rattus, a rat; Modigliana, a feral cat; Mixy, a rabbit (her name is a pun on myxomatosis, a disease used to control wild pest rabbits in Australia); and a “dopey dog”, who it turns out is both not a dingo and not a Darren – his name is actually Derryn. While the original show only ran for two seasons, the puppet characters were very popular and continued to host and appear on other shows for several years. This included the five-minute Feral TV, in which the ferals ran a television station headed up by Kerry the Cane Toad (a clear parody of Kerry Packer, then owner of Australia’s Channel 9 TV network) and his assistant Rodney, a cockroach.
  • The story was written for the 1990 anthology Digital Dreams, edited by British writer, editor and sociologist specialising in religion, David V. Barrett. Barrett has a long history editing and writing for speculative fiction and similar magazines, including Vector and the Fortean Times. He also edited Tales From the Vatican Vaults, a collection of short fiction based on the premise of secret Vatican files being released to the public in an alternate history where Pope John Paul I reformed the Catholic Church. It was published in 2015, and features a few stories by authors who contributed to Digital Dreams. As we discussed, authors in the collection include Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynn Jones, Dave Langford, Storm Constantine, Ian McDonald, Keith Roberts and Andy Sawyer. You can see the cover and full list of authors at the book’s entry in the Speculative Fiction Database (SFDB).
  • The short story commentary in which Pratchett says “short stories cost me blood” and “I doubt I’ve done more than fifteen in my life” is “The Sea and Little Fishes”, which we discussed in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” The book in which this commentary appears, A Blink of the Screen, contains thirty-two short pieces of fiction. Admittedly, a few of those don’t really count as stories – see #Pratchat53 for three examples – but that’s not counting the four volumes of his early short stories for children, published separately.
  • Neil Gaiman’s short story about the troll under the bridge is titled, er… “The Troll Bridge” (or sometimes “Troll-Bridge”). It seems to have been first published in the short story collection Snow White, Blood Red in 1993, two years after the first publication of Pratchett’s story of the same name. The story was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1994, and has appeared in a few other places, including Gaiman’s own anthologies Angels and Visitations (1993 – probably the collection Sean is thinking of), Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and M is for Magic (2007), and was adapted into the comic book Ben read in 2016 by Colleen Doran. While he was certainly better known as a comics writer at the time, Gaiman had written and published several short stories by 1990, though his most famous short fiction came after Digital Dreams. One of his notable earlier stories is 1984’s “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale” – the title clearly riffing on Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” – about a young man who finds an assassin in the phone book and discovers they do bulk discounts, a very Pratchetty idea.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s 1995 short story for the collection Camelot, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future“.
  • The “internal monologue” is the way many people think to themselves: in words. But while common, this is far from a universal experience – and most people assume others think in the same way as they do. Finding out otherwise often blows people’s minds, as with the cascade of articles and viral social media posts that cropped up in the way of this 2020 tweet:

Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don't

As in, some people's thoughts are like sentences they "hear", and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them

And most people aren't aware of the other type of person

— Kyle 🌱 (@KylePlantEmoji) January 27, 2020
  • “Atari” was never that widely-used as a synonym for game consoles, but “Nintendo” was – which is why some sources credit them with aggressively re-popularising the still fairly new generic term “game console” in the 1990s, so they could hang on to the trademark. It worked! And while some folks did (and do) use “Playstation”, “XBox” or even “Game Cube” as a stand-in for game console, those never became as widespread. (Earlier consoles were referred to as “game systems”, but by the time Nintendo massively dominated the market in the early 1990s, “console” – which differentiated a dedicated system for games from a more versatile personal computer, and from an arcade “cabinet” that could only play a single game – had become the preferred term.)
  • Genericisation can indeed make a product’s name ineligible as a trademark. This process is also known as “trademark erosion” or “genericide”, and in America – where most of the famous cases have occurred – it’s controlled by the Lanham (Trademark) Act. The Lanham Act allows a registered trade mark to be cancelled if it “becomes the generic name for the goods or services, or a portion thereof, for which it is registered”. In Australia, the Trade Marks Act 1995 has a similar clause: the mark can be cancelled if it “becomes generally accepted within the relevant trade as the sign that describes or is the name of an article, substance or service”. This has happened to some significant and surprising things: Aspirin and Heroin were both once trademark names used by the Bayer company! To protect against this modern drugs are often given a specific, non-proprietary name, with different company’s specific versions having trade names as well. Other famous examples include cellophane, dry ice, escalator, kerosene, laundromat, videotape and zipper! Examples like Hoover, Kleenex and Google (see below) have certainly become generic terms for a kind of thing, but not to the extent where a trademark has been revoked or expired. In Australia, the legal test seems to be whether the trade mark has become the only term used for a product or service.
  • The Google company went through a major restructuring in 2015 with the creation of Alphabet Inc, a new company which owned Google (the Internet services company that runs the search engine, GMail, YouTube and various other online services) and several other companies that were previously subsidiaries of Google. The driver behind this wasn’t a worry about genericisation; rather Google stated that wanted to make the company more accountable and give subsidiaries more freedom. But Google is commonly used to mean “search the Internet”, including as a verb (“I googled it”), and this has come up in court as a reason to cancel the trademark, as per the Lanham Act mentioned above. In 2017, a case in Arizona set a new precedent that the test for genericisation was whether the “primary significance of the trade mark in the minds of the consuming public” had become the product, rather than the producer. They ruled that while people did use “google” as a verb, they also understood Google was a company and not the only way to search the Internet.
  • Amstrad was a British computer company created by English tycoon and politician Alan Sugar. It operated between 1968 and 2010, and was most famous for their personal computers in the 1980s and 1990s. These included later iterations of the ZX Spectrum, which Amstrad bought from its original creator Sinclair Research, and the Amstrad Mega PC, a Windows-PC which also had a built-in Sega Mega Drive game console (known as the Sega Genesis in the US).
  • Hitachi is a Japanese company founded in 1910, which has grown into a conglomerate best known for their technology products. They no longer make personal or mainframe computers, but do make everything from military vehicles to air conditioners and the Hitachi Magic Wand, a “vibrating massager” introduced in 1968 which experienced a huge swell in sales when it featured in a 2002 episode of Sex and the City.
  • The 1980s-style retro-VR cyberpunk videogame trailer Ben remembered was for the game Jazzpunk, released in 2014. You can watch the live action Jazzpunk trailer on YouTube.
  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the first and most influential cyberpunk novels, was first published in 1984, so around six years before Pratchett wrote “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”. Neuromancer popularised many terms and concepts which are now essential parts of the genre, and it’s also the only novel ever to have won the Nebula, Hugo and Philip K. Dick Awards.
  • “Carnie” is an American nickname for “carnival worker”; the traditional Australian equivalent is “showie”, short for “showman” or “showwoman”, since we call them “shows” rather than carnivals. We previously talked about this in #Pratchat51, where our previous research suggested the Australian term might even be a little older than the American one. (The surname in this story – and, most of the time, in real life – is spelled “Carney”.)
  • We dance around this a little in the episode, but clues in the story suggest that “Seagem” – the name for the artificial reality company that becomes a generic name for AR machines – comes from the acronym CGEM, which probably stands for “Computer Generated Environment Machines”.
  • The term AFOL, an acronym for “Adult Fan of Lego”, can be traced back to the newsgroup rec.toys.lego, where it was first coined by Matthew J. Verdier on the 14th of June, 1995 after another user, Jeff Thompson, was the first to use the phrase “adult fan of Lego”. It was a niche term for a decade or so, but in the 2010s not only had more people who grew up playing with Lego returned to it as adults, but the Lego company themselves realised there was a whole underserved market of adult Lego fans, and started making sets which would appeal to them. Unlike some other niche adult fandoms for things traditionally seen as “for kids”, the AFOL community often mingle with and involve young Lego fans too, and you’ll see whole families at Lego conventions, in stores and at events.
  • The word “paragorithm” appears in the context of Darren thinking you wouldn’t need something very complex to simulate most conversations with people, since they’re “just to reassure each other that they’re alive”. It might be a neologism Pratchett invented for “parallel algorithm”, a set of instructions for completing multiple tasks at once. These were relatively uncommon in computing at the time the story was written, since most computers weren’t capable of processing multiple instructions at once, but modern multi-threaded processors are specifically designed to do this and make extensive use of parallel processing.
  • “Technobabble” describes jargon-filled scientific-sounding nonsense, originally the sort used by technologists in the 1980s, but increasingly over time the sort used in science fiction to make it sound like the characters understand things we don’t. The term seems to have been derived from “psychobabble”, a term used to deride similar nonsense jargon used in popular psychology, coined in 1975 by writer R.D. Rosen and popularised by his 1977 book, Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling. Rosen specifically used the term to mean “an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardised observations” – he was critical of the way psychology at the time sought to reduce the “infinite variety of problems” faced by people into a very small set of formal definitions.
  • “Handwavium” and “phlebotinum” are common fannish terms for substances, devices or phenomena in science fiction which behave in mysterious ways that nonetheless explain otherwise nonsensical events.
  • “Unobtainium” (or “unobtanium”) was originally engineering jargon, coined in the 1950s, for any theoretical substance that could solve a specific problem, if only it existed. It grew to also encompass substances that existed but were too expensive or rare for practical use, and by the 2000s had appeared in its traditional usage in several science fiction novels and films. In 2009, James Cameron used it as the seemingly actual name for the rare and highly valuable super-conducting mineral sought by the mining corporation his film Avatar, to much derision.
  • The book of Doctor Who memories mentioned by Ben is Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, edited by Steve Berry. Pratchett, while clearly not a big fan, seems mostly to have been motivated to write the introduction because it was a fundraiser for Alzheimers research. There are far too many celebrities of interest to Pratchat listeners for us to make a full list, but we will mention that the authors Ben Aaronovitch, Michael Moorcock and Gideon Defoe all appear, as does the creator of the often-mentioned-in-this-episode Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker.
  • As Ben mentions in the footnote, Handwavium is also a delightful Doctor Who podcast hosted by friends of Pratchat, “a fan and her Da (no, a fan and his daughter).” Yes, Ben managed to mess up their very cute intro, but if you want to hear a daughter and father duo discussing Doctor Who, this is the best show for it! Find it at handwavium.net.
  • My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a 2018 novel by American author Ottessa Moshfegh. We won’t spoil any more about it than Liz has already said, but we will note that it has been optioned to be adapted as a film by none other than Australia’s own Margot Robbie and her husband, Tom Ackerly.
  • The terms “fridged” and “breeder” refer to pervasive harmful tropes in the way women are portrayed in fiction, in both cases having them contribute to someone else’s story without getting to be characters in their own right. A “breeder” is a woman who only matters to the story as a mother or potential mother, while “fridging” is when a woman is killed off or harmed primarily to provide motivation for a male protagonist. The latter term was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone as the phrase “women in refrigerators”, named for a specific example of the trope from the Green Lantern comic. We previously discussed fridging in our discussion of Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Space Invaders is a videogame developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, first released in 1978 as an arcade game by Taito Inc in Japan and Midway/Bally internationally. In case you’ve never seen it, the player controls a gun at the bottom of the screen that can move left and right, and fire straight upwards; the goal is to shoot increasingly fast and numerous waves of invading aliens before they reach the ground. Home console, computer and arcade machine versions of the game are still available today, largely unchanged except for nicer graphics and sound effects (though these often emulate the original designs). Elite is a videogame developed by British designers David Braben and Ian Bell, and first published by Acornsoft for personal computers in 1984. The player is a space pilot who operates as a freelance trader, buying and selling goods or turning to mercenary work or piracy to earn money and upgrade their ship. Its combination of space combat, wireframe 3D graphics and freedom to decide how you played made Elite a massive hit, and it spawned several sequels: Frontier: Elite II (1993), Frontier: First Encounters (1995) and more recently Elite Dangerous (2015), though these have become progressively more sophisticated. (Ben was probably thinking of Frontier: Elite II, the first one he encountered, which is why he thought there was a much bigger gap between Elite and Space Invaders.)
  • VR, Virtual Reality, is an entire simulated 3D world, while AR, Augmented Reality, is layering elements of a simulated world onto the real one. This has become a big deal over the last decade, with the launch of games like Pokemon GO that let you catch monsters at your local sightseeing spots, and hardware like the Google Glasses, that promise to deliver that Terminator-like heads up display without needing to surgically replace your eyeballs. So far, only the kind of AR that uses your mobile phone camera has really caught on, but there are new glasses and similar products touted every year…
  • It’s well-documented that Neil and Terry exchanged floppy disks via mail to write Good Omens. Here’s one of many sources for this info: Neil answering a fan’s question about the book on Tumblr in 2019.
  • Ben probably mentioned Pratchett’s interview with Bill Gates in one of our bonus episodes. It was for GQ Magazine in 1995, and unearthed by Marc Burrows during research for his biography, The Magic of Terry Pratchett, in May 2019. (You can see his viral tweet, which includes an excerpt, below.) The idea that Terry had predicted “fake news”, online misinformation and and the return of nazis twenty-four years earlier was written up in The Guardian, Gizmodo and many other news sites at the time, though as Marc notes in a follow up tweet, Gates was on the money later in the interview about the fate of physical media.

In 1996 Terry Pratchett interviewed Bill Gates for GQ and accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimise fake news. Gates didn’t believe him. pic.twitter.com/MqjawT4NVV

— Marc Burrows  (@20thcenturymarc) May 28, 2019
  • Grand Theft Auto, abbreviated GTA, is a series of videogames launched in 1997, originally developed by British company DMA Design. The first two games were modest successes, and featured a top-down 2D city in which the player could steal and sell cars, cause car crashes and commit other crimes as they tried to get to a goal number of points, expressed in dollars. Grand Theft Auto III translated the open world of the game to a 3D environment, and it and its sequels have been hugely successful: Grand Theft Auto V is still one of the biggest selling videogames nearly a decade after it was first published in 2013. This is partly because of its online mode, which regularly adds new content and lets players team up and commit crimes together. Since the series got popular, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar especially for the last few games produced by Rockstar, it has been a constant source of controversy. Some of it is deserved; for example, the games are pretty misogynistic, featuring no playable female characters (except for ones you create yourself in the online version), and relying on ageing tropes of crime fiction for its female NPCs, who are all wives, sex workers and family members. It’s also held up as evidence of videogames’ influence on young people, supposedly leading them to crime and violence, but the evidence of that is less certain. The culture of players around the game, however, is definitely a problem, as it is with the broader world of mainstream videogames.
  • “The Minority Report” was originally a novella by Philip K Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe magazine in January 1956. It imagines a future in which three mutant “precogs” have pre-cognitive abilities, and predict all crime, but the creator of the Precrime department is led to discover more about how it all works when they predict he’ll murder someone he’s never heard of. It was adapted as a film, Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise in 2002, and a sequel television series set a decade later. The film and TV show change many things about the original story, including the nature and abilities of the precogs, and the ending of the story. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Black Mirror, mentioned many times this episode, is a British speculative fiction anthology show, mainly focusing on the consequences of technology. It was created by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in 2011, before being acquired by Netflix in 2015. As of this episode there have been five series of 3-6 episodes, plus a Christmas special featuring multiple related stories, and an interactive “choose your own adventure” style film, Bandersnatch. Some episodes do rely on a reveal for their full impact, so we’ll be careful about spoilers, but here are some that are especially relevant to our discussion:
    • People living on digitally after death – or as a copy of a living person – feature in “Be Right Back” from series two, “San Junipero” from season three, and “USS McCallister” and “Black Museum” from series four.
    • Augmented Reality technology editing your experience of the real world appears in the special “White Christmas” and the episodes “Men Against Fire” from series three, and “Playtest” and “Arkangel” from series four.
    • Full Virtual Realities appear in many episodes, but often as a surprise or twist, so the only one we’ll mention is season five’s “Striking Vipers”.
  • We previously discussed the true nature of the Emerald City in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, visitors to the City are made to wear green-tinted glasses, and only the external walls are actually green. This idea is dropped in later books (of which there are thirteen!), which describe the city as green and don’t mention the glasses. It’s one of many differences between L Frank Baum’s original Oz books and the popular film adaptation.
  • To look through rose-coloured (or rose-tinted) glasses is to see something in its most favourable light, ignoring its negative aspects. The phrase definitely pre-dates The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as use of it dates back to at least 1838, when it appears in Slight Reminiscences of the Rhine, Switzerland, and a Corner of Italy by English writer and traveller Mary Boddington (1776-1840). The use of “rosy” or “rose-coloured” as euphemisms for things being generally happy or pleasant is much older, attested as early as the 1700s, and probably stems from the earlier idea that having a rose-coloured complexion was seen as a sign of good health in Europe by around 1590.
  • It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an accurate word count for books and stories; it’s not a commonly recorded statistic, and ebooks don’t tell you how long they are either (or let you copy and paste the text so your word processor can tell you.) We’re looking into a solution for this! Note that this work has already been done for many of the Discworld novels.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times before; his most famous series of books are the Thursday Next series, about a detective, Next, who enters the worlds of books to solves crimes.
  • As mentioned, the story’s title is a reference to the opening lines of the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by English author Andrew Marvell. It was first published after his death, in 1681. The opening lines of the poem are: “Had we but World enough, and Time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Other uses of “World Enough and Time” include the episode of Doctor Who mentioned by Ben (the penultimate episode of the tenth series, first broadcast in June 2017), and several books, including novels by Robert Penn Warren, James Kahn, and Joe Haldemann, the latter changing the title to Worlds Enough and Time.
  • Reception theory, or audience reception, is the idea that each individual reader (or listener, watcher, player etc) of a work receives, interprets and understands it through their own cultural frame of reference. Generally agreed ideas about what a work means emerge through consensus, usually amongst individuals who share a common cultural background. It stems from the work of German academic Hans-Robert Jauss (1921-1997) in the 1960s, and popularised and expanded by Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014) in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The “Hannibal” to which Sean refers is Hannibal Lecter, specifically the version of the character who appears in the television series Hannibal, played by Mads Mikkelsen. Lecter is a forensic psychiatrist assigned to observe FBI profiler Will Graham, who has a talent for imagining himself in the role of – and thus catching – serial killers. But Lecter is himself secretly a cannibalistic serial killer, and as well as considering himself far smarter than the police (who are far from catching him), also tries to tip Will over the edge into becoming a killer himself. Lecter is best known from Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal in the 1991 film adaptation of Thomas Harris’ 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs, in which another FBI agent visits the killer in prison to enlist his help catching another killer. The television series draws instead on the other novels in which he appears: Red Dragon (1981), Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006). The television series was widely acclaimed and ran for three seasons on NBC between 2013 and 2015.
  • “The Gernsback Continuum” is a 1981 short story written by William Gibson. In it, a photographer is tasked withtroversy as police acti taking pictureons of “futuristic” 1930s architecture. He begins to experience visions of the alternate future world imagined by the architects and the likes of Hugo Gernsback, the publisher who pioneered pulp science fiction in the 1920s when he created the magazine Amazing Stories. The story coined the term “Raygun Gothic” for the architectural style it describes; in the story, this name is given by Cohen Downes, an editor for the London-based publisher who hires the photographer. The story was adapted in 1993 as a short film, Tomorrow Calling, originally broadcast on Channel 4 television.
  • The meme “The World If” (aka “The World Without…”, “What Society Would Be If…” etc) depicts a futuristic, supposedly utopian cityscape, accompanied by text informing us this is what the world would be like, if only one thing were different. It dates back to 2018, with the earliest example referring to the jailing of rapper Bobby Shmurda, which drew controversy for a variety of reasons, including police acting on supposedly autobiographical rap lyrics, which supposedly listed his real crimes.
  • Upload (not Uploaded) is an Amazon Original streaming series created by Greg Daniels, best known for co-creating the US version of The Office and Parks and Recreation with Michael Shur. It’s set in 2033 in a future where humans can have their consciousness uploaded into a digital afterlife as they die. The protagonist, Nathan Brown (played by Robbie Amell), dies unexpectedly and is uploaded, but he’s not free of his even more possessive, still-living girlfriend, Ingrid (Allegra Edwards), which is one of the unfortunate tropes of the show. Meanwhile his “angel” Nora (Andy Allo) – the handler from the afterlife company who looks after him – starts to think his death was suspicious. It’s run for two seasons since 2020, with a third on the way.
  • Severance is an Apple TV+ streaming series created by first-time show runner Dan Erickson. It stars Adam Scott (also best known from Parks and Recreation) as Mark, an employee at Lumon Industries. Mark works on the “severed floor”, where he and the other workers have undergone a procedure which means they can’t access their memories of their regular lives while at work, and vice versa. Ben’s only seen the first episode so far but agrees with Sean that it’s great, though be aware it’s a thriller rather than a comedy.
  • The Usborne computer books were published in the 1980s for Usborne, a UK publisher of children’s educational books. They were phenomenally popular, not least because they were approachable introductions to everything from how computers worked to how to program them at a time when most computer books were full of jargon. As well as ghosts the books also featured monsters and robots. While the originals are hard to find in print, in 2015 Usborne made them available for download from their website. Ben is pretty sure he had The Usborne First Book of the Computer from 1984, which seems rarer than the others. This might be because as far as Ben can tell it was a compilation of content from the “First Computer Library” series: All About Computers, Computer Fun and Simple BASIC. (The last two of those appear at the bottom of the page linked above, and include the computer ghosts.)
  • Agent Smith is the primary antagonist of the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix. A computer program tasked with rooting out rogue humans connecting to the Matrix, he and his fellow Agents appear as Men in Black, with sunglasses, black suits and an earpiece. There’s something a bit off about him in the first film; he returns in the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as a virus-like threat both to the free humans of Zion and the machines themselves, as he gains the ability to rewrite other programs and human consciousnesses into copies of himself. We previously talked about Smith in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • We previously talked about La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“. It’s an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the famous one you’re thinking of). Liz reviewed Opera Australia’s 2022 production of La Traviata for The Age.
  • We mention a few films and television series about living people this episode:
    • The Social Network is a 2010 film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, adapted from the 2009 non-fiction book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It tells the – or at least a – story of the creation of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in 2003, and the legal problems he faced over ownership of the idea and original website. It’s a fictionalised account, and its accuracy has been disputed; Zuckerberg was also not happy about it, saying at the time that “I wish no-one had made a movie about me while I was still alive”. Historical accuracy aside, it’s pretty great, and also stars Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, co-creator of the original “The Facebook”, and features a killer soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
    • Rocketman is a 2019 Elton John biopic starring Taron Egerton as Elton John (though it was originally supposed to be Tom Hardy), and Jamie Bell as his writing partner Bernie Taupin. It was directed by Dexter Fletcher, who may be known to listeners from his role as a young man playing Spike in the UK series Press Gang. (Fletcher had previously stepped in to finish directing Bohemian Rhapsody, the 2018 Queen biopic centred on Freddie Mercury, after Bryan Singer was fired from the project.) In contrast to The Social Network, Elton John had been trying to make a film about his life for decades, and is an executive producer on this film. (Reaction to Bohemian Rhapsody was decidedly more mixed, particularly regarding its handling of Mercury’s sexuality and family, amongst other things.)
    • Pam & Tommy is a 2022 Hulu streaming miniseries about the three-year marriage between actor Pamela Anderson (played by Lily James) and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee (played by Sebastian Stan), revolving mostly around the theft and public release of a sex tape they made on their honeymoon. It was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article, “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape“. While some aspects of the production were praised, many critics pointed out that it is a story of the exploitation of Pamela Anderson without her consent – made without her consent. (She was apparently contacted to be involved in some way, but did not want to be part of it; some sources say its production caused her some distress.)
  • Biopics – whether about the living or dead – don’t legally require the permission of the subject because they are, at least in theory, based on the facts of someone’s life – and facts are not considered intellectual property. This is the same principle that allows for unauthorised biographies (many of which become the basis of biopics). Generally the only legal recourse if someone doesn’t like how they’re portrayed is to sue via libel or defamation laws, but those put the burden of proof and money on the person mounting the claim, so even wealthy subjects don’t often consider it worth trying.
  • The simulation hypothesis – the idea that we’re all simulated people in a hyper-realistic simulation of the world – has been around for a while. It was made popular by the release of The Matrix in 1999, and then again by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. In Bostrom’s version, the idea is that future humans will build computers so powerful that they will be able to run millions of incredibly detailed simulations of all of human history, including human minds as sophisticated as real ones. If that were to happen, then the vast majority of human-like minds to ever exist would be simulated ones, and so it’s plausible to suggest that’s what we are – artificial minds in a computer simulation of the world.
  • Ben’s Virtual Reality game is Table of Tales: The Crooked Crown by Tin Man Games. In the game, the player is bequeathed the magical “Table of Tales” by a deceased aunt, and it comes to life. A mechanical bird, Arbitrix, is the Table’s Game Master, and helps the player take control of a group of “scoundrels” who are at first dubbed heroes, then years later framed for a crime they didn’t commit, and must go on a high seas fantasy adventure to find out who’s behind it. It plays like a single-player tabletop roleplaying game, with cards and dice for powers, direct manipulation of the pieces, and a branching narrative with multiple possible endings. The game was originally released exclusively for PlayStation VR in 2019, and was a finalist for the “Excellence in Narrative” category at the 2019 Freeplay Awards. In the last year or so it’s been released on other platforms too: PC via Steam in 2021, and in July 2022, Nintendo Switch and the Meta Quest 2 standalone VR headset. The PlayStation VR and Quest versions are VR-only; the Switch version doesn’t support VR; and the Steam version can be played either way.
  • The other Dungeons & Dragons-like VR games Ben mentions are:
    • Demeo (Resolution Games, 2021) – a multiplayer VR game similar in many ways to Table of Tales – so much so that it’s frequently mentioned in Table of Tales reviews! It’s available on Steam, Steam VR, Meta Quest and Meta Rift.
    • TaleSpire (Bouncyrock Entertainment) – not actually VR, and not a game in itself… TaleSpire is a virtual 3D environment for use with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, letting you build and share a virtual map and miniatures with other players. As of writing (July 2022) it’s still in Early Access on Steam, meaning you can buy it early to access a working but incomplete version as its being finished.
  • Wii Fit (2008) was Nintendo’s fitness game for their popular Wii game console. As well as the “Wii-mote” motion controllers, it used a custom “balance board” that ould measure the player’s centre of balance and weight, using this to assess fitness based on the (often criticised) Body-Mass Index, or BMI. Fitness activities available in the game included yoga, aerobics and other exercises, and it was a huge hit for Nintendo. Combined with Wii Fit Plus, the updated version released in 2009, it’s estimated to have sold nearly 44,000,000 copies worldwide, putting it just outside the top ten biggest-selling console games of all time.
  • Zero Latency is a free-roam VR experience company which started up in Melbourne in 2015. The “free roam” part means that players are free to move around a play area, with their movement relative to the game world and each other tracked by cameras. This is in sharp contrast to most VR games, especially headsets available for use at home, where the player remains mostly stationary while the game world moves around them. Since its launch its grown considerably, with nine locations in Australia and nearly fifty more in twenty-five other countries around the world. While most of their games are in the first-person shooter style, and the game Ben remembers is no longer on offer, they do have Engineerium, a puzzle game which sounds like it’s in a similar vein.
  • Liz’s phrase “Too much time down at the Jasmine Allen” is a reference to the perpetually crime-ridden Jasmine Allen housing estate in long-running UK police drama The Bill.
  • Terry’s poem “An Ode to Multiple Universes” was first published in the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book in which it was collected is untitled but generally known as Terry Pratchett’s Folio or the MMXIV Green Folio, and was published for the 2014 Discworld Convention, where copies were given to attendees with a special bookmark labelling it a present from Terry. Fifty copies made it to the Australian Discworld Convention in 2015, and a few more were sold via discworld.com with proceeds going to charity.
  • Of Sean’s more than fifty novels, he suggests Pratchett fans might enjoy Her Perilous Mansion, his standalone middle grade fantasy novel first published in April 2020. The “sidequel” coming later this year (2022) is Honour Among Ghosts.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#EeekClub2023 Notes and Errata

25 May 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2023“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

The “I’m not an actor” scene from My Favourite Year, starring not Laurence Olivier, but Peter O’Toole.

Notes and Errata

  • If you need an explanation of the Glorious 25th of May, see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”, our episode discussing Night Watch. As mentioned in our previous Eeek Club specials, the 25th of May is also Towel Day and Geek Pride Day.
  • This is our third Eeek Club special; the other two are (predictably) Eeek Club 2021 and Eeek Club 2022.
  • The Pratcats are the cat owners of your two human hosts. They are Asimov and Huxley, who live with Liz, and Kaos, who lives with Ben. Kaos lived up to his name this episode when he unplugged Ben’s microphone near the end of the recording; if you notice any decline in audio quality towards the end, that’d be why.
  • We mention a lot of actors and shows in our casting discussion:
    • Brian Blessed has been suggested as a Mustrum Ridcully by many, many fans, if you go looking, so it’s a little surprising Ben hasn’t seen anyone do it before. Ben lists many of his famous screen roles, but Blessed wasn’t in Excalibur; in Ben’s defence, as he says, everyone else was. One role Ben neglected to mention is that Blessed was in the 1995 television adaptation of Johnny and the Dead, playing William “Bill” Stickers. A dream come true for Pratchett if he did base Ridcully on him!
    • Elisabeth Moss is an American actor best known for her starring role as June (aka Offred) in the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but has also been in the 2020 film version of The Invisible Man, the television adaptation of time travel horror Shining Girls, and the upcoming Taika Waititi film Next Goal Wins. Liz also mentions The Square, a 2017 Swedish satirical film directed by Ruben Östlund, in which Moss plays a journalist named Anne.
    • Richard Ayoade’s more recent screen roles have included voice acting in The Lego Movie 2, The Mandalorian, DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys and Pixar’s Soul, as well hosting the television shows Gadget Man and Question Team and frequently appearing as a guest on panel shows. He was also in the other The Watch, a terrible 2012 movie about a group of idiot neighbourhood watch members who stumble across an alien invasion. (It was discussed by our sibling podcast, Who Watches the Watch, in the episode “Who Watches ’The Watch’ (2012)”.)
    • Taika Waititi is now best known as a director of big Hollywood films, but we still fondly remember him as Viago in the original What We Do in the Shadows, which also features his Our Flag Means Death co-star Rhys Darby, the third member of Flight of the Conchords. If you’re not familiar with Our Flag Means Death, it’s a heartwarming, comic, queer retelling of the story of Stede Bonnet, a real merchant turned pirate from the golden age of piracy, who did indeed cross paths with Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard.
    • Charles Dance is now most famous for playing Tywin Lannister, the scheming patriarch of House Lannister, in Game of Thrones, but his turn as Vetinari in Going Postal was just the year before! He’s also known for Alien3, The Crown and more recently the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, where he appears as Roderick Burgess, the man who summons and traps Dream and sets the plot of the series in motion.
    • Yeun Sang-yeop, or Steven Yuen as he’s usually credited, does indeed play Glenn in The Walking Dead; he played the character for a little over six seasons. You may also have seen him in Bong Joon-ho’s Netflix film Okja, Jordan Peele’s recent sci-fi spectacle Nope, or as the voice of the title character in the animated Amazon superhero adaptation Invincible. He’s also in Love Me, a sci-fi film scheduled for release in 2024 and apparently not related to the TV series.
    • Ivor Novello was a Welsh singer and actor, who gained fame not only in silent films but also on the stage. He was a successful composer and writer too, with many hit films and stage musicals from the 1930s to the 1950s.
    • Melissa Jaffer has had a long career in Australian television, but you probably know her from the gloriously weird US/Australian sci-fi series Farscape, where she played Utu-Noranti Pralatong in the show’s final seasons. The ABC’s Swap Shop, which ran for a single season of 52 episodes in 1988 (and managed to so impress itself on a young Ben’s brain), featured Jaffer as Mimi, the proprietor of the tiitular shop where anyone could swap something new for something in the shop. It’s not related to the earlier BBC series The Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, a live Saturday morning show for kids hosted by Noel Edmonds, or the reboot of that Swap Shop with puppet fox Basil Brush, Basil’s Swap Shop, in 2008.
    • Bob Morley is an Australian actor best known, as Liz mentions, from teen sci-fi drama The 100, which she’s mentioned on the show before. As well as roles in both of the major Australian soaps, Home and Away and Neighbours, he’s recently appeared in episodes of Nathan Fillion’s police drama The Rookie and the Australian series Love Me for streaming service Binge, an adaptation of the Swedish series Älska mig.
  • In Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the television adaptation of the Phyne Fisher books written by Kerry Greenwood, the titular detective is played by Essie Davis, who was . Davis’ version of the character seems to be somewhere in her 30s or early 40s, but in the novels Phryne is 28.
  • Guest Andy Matthews joined us in #Pratchat64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, to discuss the short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”.
  • It is indeed Ponder who, with the help of Ridcully and the other wizards of the High Energy Magic Building, traps sound in a string in a box in Soul Music. More on the book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In”.
  • The “Machete Order” for Star Wars is named after the blog on which it first appeared, “No Machete Juggling”, written by film fan Rob Hilton in 2011. The basic idea is to avoid spoiling the big reveal near the end of The Empire Strikes Back, which comes as no surprise if you’ve already watched the prequel movies. The original recommendation is to watch Episodes IV, V, II, III and VI in that order, leaving out Episode I entirely. Others have gone deeper, suggested specific moments when you stop one of the films to watch others before returning to the film you paused, or including only specific scenes from certain films, and so on. You can read the original blog post on Rob Hilton’s current website, alongside an update which answers questions and adds the sequel films (the short answer is anything after Episode VI is just watched in chronological order).
  • As we’ve noted in our episodes about them, Tiffany ages 1-3 years between most of her books, whereas the gap between other Discworld novels usually seems shorter, but also is never stated as clearly. There are therefore two different attempts to assemble a timeline of the series just on the L-Space wiki; for the record, Ben prefers the original. In shorthand, though, most of the books take place in chronological order, with the notable exception of Small Gods (most of which happens about a century before everything else), and possibly Pyramids, though the discrepancy over this is happily waved aside in Thief of Time.
  • Catfishing refers to using a fake identity, including using photos of someone else, to interact with other people via social media. The term was coined by the 2010 documentary Catfish, which documents an online relationship begun by the brother of one of the filmmakers which turns out to be with a fictional person. There’s some controversy over how early the creators knew about the deception, and whether they pretended not to catch on in as part of making the film, but the false persona and the person behind it were real. The term comes from a story told by a person in the film about how catfish were sometimes shipped with cod to keep them alert and active, even though the cod were the marketable fish.
  • Byron Baes is a 2022 Netflix reality series set in the beach town of Byron Bay, New South Wales, following the lives of several social media stars. Byron is a hotbed of dubious wellness and hippie culture and has become hugely commercialised over the past few decades, so it’s no surprise influencers spend a lot of time there.
  • We’re sure we’ve linked to the British man who greeted his farm animals on social media before, but we’ve so far been unable to find him (it’s not easy searching through nearly seventy previous episodes’ worth of notes). If you know who he is, let us know!
  • For those who missed the Maggi Noodles reference, Pratchett famously cancelled his contract with his original German publisher Heyne Verlag when he discovered they were inserting ads into the middle of their sci-fi books – including ads for Maggi Soups (not noodles) in their translations of Pyramids, Sourcery and others. It wasn’t just an inserted extra page, either – they added text to the book to give context to the Maggi logo! This post on the Stuffed Crocodile blog has a good summary of the whole palaver, including a picture of an affected copy of Sourcery. Pratchett wasn’t singled out for this nonsense; author Diane Duane has also written about this, including some images of Heyne’s altered translations of her Star Trek novels, and the story of how Pratchett found out about it. Diane noticed this link and blogged about it briefly again on Tumblr. (Hello to Diane, and to any listeners who found us via that link!)
  • Liz’s short story about women transforming into mops is “Call Him Al”, published in Meanjin in 2017. You can read it online.
  • We discussed the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles”.
  • We discussed the concept of Ankh-Morpork elections in last year’s Eeek Club 2022, and it was indeed Karl’s question. (It’s right at the end.)
  • Thanks to subscribers Sally and Danny, who pointed out that we haven’t yet read the last important book which involves Nobby and Colon. Ben clearly doesn’t remember Snuff as well as he thought! (But no further spoilers, please.)
  • For more on Teppic, Ptraci, Djelybeybi and You Bastard the camel listen to our Pyramids episode, #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”.
  • Victor Tugelbend and Theda “Ginger” Withel are protagonists in Moving Pictures, which we discussed in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.
  • It’s not Laurence Olivier but Peter O’Toole who utters the line “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!” It’s from the 1982 film My Favourite Year; see the iconographic evidence section above for the clip.
  • Liz mentioned the “AI Influencer” Lil Miquela, who is entirely artificial. You can find her as @lilmiquela on Instagram, where her bio reads “🤖 19-year-old robot living in LA 💖”. Be warned, she’s a bit uncanny valley.
  • We’ve mentioned Jasper Fforde many times; he’s most famously the author of the Thursday Next series of novels in which the titular heroine lives in a world where fiction and reality are blurred, and investigates literary crimes. We are eagerly awaiting Red Side Story, the follow-up to his weird sci-fi novel Shades of Grey (subtitled The Road to High Saffron to differentiate it from that other book), about a world where humans have mostly lost the ability to see colour.
  • Ben mentions a “Yesterday-style scenario”, referring to the 2019 film Yesterday in which a man is struck by a bus and awakes to find himself in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed, and he’s the only one who can remember their music. The world is annoyingly otherwise exactly the same as the one with the Beatles in it.
  • Susannah Clarke is the British author of the enormous (and excellent) Regency fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and the much shorter (and also excellent) Piranesi, as well as a number of short stories set in the Jonathan Strange universe.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat58 Notes and Errata

8 August 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 58, “The Barbarian Switch“, discussing the 1988 short story “Final Reward“.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ve so far been unable to find the Edwardian cartoon of the shocked boy reading the final Sherlock Holmes story, but we’ll add it here if we can!

In the meantime though, here’s the Czech short film of “Final Reward” – 2013’s Poslední odměna (The Final Reward), adapted by writer and director Lasidlav Plecitý, and starring Jarek Hyebrant as Kevin Dogger (aka Kevina Jareše), Lenka Zahradnická as Nicky (aka Nikola), Tomáš Matonoha as Dogger’s agent, and Marko Igonda as Erdan the Barbarian (aka Barbara Erdana). It’s in Czech, but there are English subtitles. It’s more of a student film – made with the resources of a film school and many supporters – than a fan film.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title was inspired by Netflix’s 2018 Christmas movie The Princess Switch, a romantic comedy remix of The Prince and the Pauper which stars former pop star Vanessa Hudgens. If you like The Christmas Prince and films of that ilk, you’ll love this one. It was popular enough to spawn two sequels, though the first one is (in Ben’s opinion) the best.
  • The Edwardian era from which Penny’s favourite comfort fiction comes is quite short: it includes the years between 1901 and 1914, beginning with the reign of King Edward VII and concluding with the outbreak of World War I. The books Penny mentioned are:
    • Pollyanna was written in 1912 by American author Eleanor Porter. The titular orphan girl is sent to live with her wealthy but stern Aunt in Vermont. Throughout her misadventures she maintains “The Glad Game” – a persistent optimism she learned from her father as a coping mechanism. (It’s a bit mean we know use “Pollyanna” to mean “overly or annoyingly positive”.) It was the first of twelve “Glad Books” about the character, though Porter herself only wrote the first two. Pollyanna was hugely successful at the time, ranking in the top ten best-selling books in the US for three years between 1913 and 1915, peaking at number two in 1914.
    • Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was written in 1903 by American author Kate Douglas Wiggin. Rebecca is not an orphan, but is sent to live with two of her mother’s sisters in Riverboro, Maine to improve her prospects, as her family is large and poor. She also exhibits a joy for life that inspires her Aunts.
    • We’ve yet to identify the one with the violin-playing child who redeems a crusty old farmer; let us know if you recognise this one!
    • Little Lord Fauntleroy was written by English-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett, originally in serialised form from 1885 to 1886. That makes it Victorian rather than Edwardian, but it fits in here. Cedric Errol lives in “genteel poverty” in New York with his mother after the death of his English father; his grandfather, a wealthy Earl who was disappointed that his son married an American, offers them a house if they will come to England so Cedric can be raised and educated as an English aristocrat, but of course in the end it’s the Earl who is educated by the boy.
    • The Secret Garden was also written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, serialised from 1910 to 1911. The protagonist Mary Lennox has a pretty miserable start: her British parents live in India and do not want or care for her, and being doted on by their servants leaves her spoilt and ill-tempered. When her parents die in a cholera epidemic she is eventually sent to live with her uncle Archibald Craven, described as a “hunchback”, who lives in a country house on the Yorkshire Moors.
  • By Gutenberg Press, Penny is referring to Project Gutenberg – the oldest digital library in the world. It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael Hart, and is run by volunteers. It works to create and freely offer electronic versions of books which are out of copyright – including all of the above books!
  • Of note is a recent Twitter thread discussing Pratchett’s allusions to classic children’s fiction:

I really think Terry Pratchett would be a good point of focus for this. He is so very wise on stories and stories of childhood. Perhaps @20thcenturymarc @LegoAnkhMorpork may have some ideas.

— Dr Mark Anderson (@markandersonrun) July 30, 2022
  • We’ve previously discussed Tom Brown’s School Days in our episode about Pyramids (#Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“).
  • George MacDonald Fraser (1925-2008) was a British author best known for The Flashman Papers, a series of eleven novels and one story story collection in which Harry Flashman, a bully from Tom Brown’s School Days who was expelled from Rugby School for being drunk, joins the army. It’s probably a bit of a stretch to call Flashman even an anti-hero, as he rarely does the right thing – he’s a drunkard, a rake and a cad. Usually through cowardice, Flashman survives and indeed influences (often badly) many historical battles, and pursues (with varying levels of success) many famous women from history. While he lives into the twentieth century – he is said to have died in 1915, making him around a century old, as Tom Brown’s School Days is set in the 1830s – the books only detail his military career between 1839 to 1894. The final book, Flashman and the Tiger, was published in 2005, but note that the books were not written or published in chronological order.
  • Cobra Kai is a 2018 streaming series, originally produced for YouTube but now owned by Netflix. It’s a sequel to the original Karate Kid films. In the 1984 original, new kid in town Danny LaRusso trains with his Japanese neighbour, Mr Miyagi, so he can defend himself from the local bullies of the Cobra Kai dojo – including Johnny Lawrence, who he defeats at a tournament at the end of the first film. The new series looks at the events of that time from Johnny’s perspective, but takes place in the present, when Johnny re-opens the Cobra Kai dojo – and his rivalry with Danny. Many other characters from the original films have appeared, most played by their original actors. The show has run for four seasons so far, with a fifth due for release in October 2022.
  • G.M. – The Independent Fantasy Roleplaying Magazine was published monthly by Croftward Publishing in the UK between September 1988 and March 1989. It lasted 19 issues in competition with the official Dungeons & Dragons magazines, Dragon and Dungeon, and White Dwarf magazine from Games Workshop, the company behind the popular Warhammer tabletop wargames. “Final Reward” appeared in the magazine’s second issue. Issue eleven features the short story “The Exam” – Pteppic’s Assassin’s Guild exam from Pyramids (see #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House”), with the flashbacks to his life in the Guild edited out, plus the “Adventuring in Discworld” article, the bulk of which is an adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and Pratchett’s response to it. The adventure has some lovely touches, including a suspiciously familiar plot setup involving a tourist to Ankh-Morpork named “ThreeTree”, the first ever published map of Ankh-Morpork (as far as we can tell), and a section on additions to the AD&D rules which includes the non-weapon proficiencies “Alcohol Lore”, “Mix Cocktails”, “Smell Coins”, “Speak Utter Rubbish”, “Detect Utter Rubbish” and “Dramatic Entrance”. Also of note: this article describes the Discworld books as “classics” in 1988 – contemporary evidence that they really made a splash early, at least in nerd circles! You can find the entire issue 11 of GM in the Internet Archive here.
  • As it turns out, the G.M. article mentioned above was not the first Discworld article in a roleplaying magazine. There were at least two earlier ones:
    • The first seems to have been issue 82 of White Dwarf magazine, from October 1986, which included an extract from The Light Fantastic – only a few months after the book was first published. The three pages include the sequence of Galder Weatherwax summoning Death, and Rincewind and Twoflower’s encounter with the gnome in the forest of Skund. It’s followed by a competition in which readers could win signed copies of the first two Discworld novels, plus a copy of the very first Discworld computer game – The Colour of Magic “graphic adventure” (the term used optimistically for text adventures with accompanying pictures at the time, rather than the later era of graphic adventures in the 1990s), published by Pirahna in 1986. The issue also includes “A Stroll Across the Discworld”, written by Ashley Shepherd, which adapts details from the first two novels for play using Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It includes notes on characters, magic, and creatures, plus a few plot ideas, over five pages, though the first one of those is a full-page reproduction of Josh Kirby’s cover of The Light Fantastic with the title of the article and some very hard to read red text over the top explaining the basic premise of the world.
    • Terry was also interviewed in the eleventh and final issue of Adventurer, “The Superior Fantasy & Science Fiction Games Magazine”, published in July 1987. It featured Josh Kirby’s artwork for Equal Rites on the cover, and a four-page interview with Terry in which he discusses his first three novels, as well as the one he’d just sent to the publishers (Mort) and the one he was currently writing (Sourcery). There’s no Discworld adventure, but Terry does also talk about his own experiences with Dungeons & Dragons, including the fun he had as a DM and laying claim to being “the first person to put a lavatory in a dungeon”. Adventurer #11 also on the Internet Archive, along with the ten previous issues. It sounds very much like a “Discworld roleplaying” episode lies in our future, doesn’t it?
  • Letters and Numbers is the Australian version of the very nerdy gameshow Countdown, itself the UK’s version of the original French gameshow Des chiffres et des lettres (“Numbers and Letters”), from which the Australian version gets its name. The show alternates between letters rounds, in which contestants request a mix of randomly drawn consonants and vowels and must make the longest word possible, and numbers rounds, in which contestants request a mix of random “large” and “small” numbers, which they must use in a series of equations to achieve a randomly assigned target result. Letters rounds were overseen by crossword compiler and previous Pratchat guest David Astle (#Pratchat6), and numbers rounds by mathematician Lily Serna. The Australian version, produced by SBS, ran from 2010 to 2012, and Ben was a contestant on one episode! (He didn’t win, but made a reasonable showing against the multiple-episode champion.) The original Letters and Numbers was hosted by former Australian newsreader Richard Morecroft. In 2021 SBS brought the show back as Celebrity Letters and Numbers, hosted by Michael Hing but with Astle and Serna in their prior roles. The celebrity version retains the original format, if with more time for banter between (and during) rounds. In the UK, there’s the similar Nine Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown, which takes the host and comedian guests from the panel show Nine Out of Ten Cats and has them play Countdown (though only very, very loosely).
  • Dungarees is a slang term in British English for “bib-and-brace” style overalls. The name comes from “dungaree”, the name of a tough calico-like cotton cloth similar to denim, and which was used to make overalls sold in the UK. Since dungarees were originally sold as safety gear for manual labourers, the “women in dungarees” stereotype is one of many that seeks to ridicule women who fulfil traditionally masculine roles.
  • Zen Buddhism is a meditative form of Buddhism that originated in China and later spread to Korea, Vietnam and Japan. Zen (禅) is the Japanese name; it comes from the original Chinese name, Chánzōng (禪宗), where chán is a short form of chánnà (禪那), itself a translation of the Sanskrit word for meditation, dhyāna (ध्यान). While sitting meditation is a common and importance practise in Zen Buddhism, receiving money for doing so isn’t really a thing. Yen, meanwhile, is the English name for the Japanese currency en (圓 or えん), represented by the symbol ¥. The “Y” comes from historical pronunciations in Japan which used a J sound, which was written down and interpreted by Portuguese missionaries as a “Y”, something which affected the way many Japanese words were written in English too.
  • Kring the talking sword appears in books two and three of The Colour of Magic, as discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”. Penny compares him to the magical sword possessed by Michael Moorcock’s anti-hero Elric of Melniboné, Stormbringer (not Stormbreaker as we mistakenly refer to it). Stormbringer gives the usually physically weak Elric great strength, but only by feeding on the souls of intelligent creatures.
  • “I am Groot” is the only phrase spoken by the character Groot, an alien who is essentially a humanoid, animate tree, in the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy comics and their film adaptations. Like most Pokémon who can only say their own names, Groot still manages to convey a variety of meanings. It’s even implied in the films that he’s speaking a complex language which his companions, Rocket Raccoon and later Thor, are able to understand – a bit like Chewbacca’s growls in the Star Wars films.
  • Cosplay – a portmanteau of “costume play” – is a Japanese term which dates back to 1984; the Japanese word is kosupure (コスプレ). This means it was around when Pratchett wrote “Final Reward”, but it didn’t become a common term – certainly not outside of Japan – until the 1990s, so he probably hadn’t heard it then. It can be traced back to an article written by Nobuyuki Takahashi, a Japanese television director, after his experience seeing the “Masquerade” at the 1984 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon for short) in L.A. “Masquerade” has connotations of “aristocratic” costumes in Japanese, so he coined a new compound word in the tradition of many Japanese terms. Such costume events had been a mainstay of science fiction and fantasy conventions since the 1960s, and indeed Pratchett had seen some himself in his early attendance of UK cons, including EasterCon.
  • The Northern Line is a route on the London Underground, coded black on standard underground maps. It runs from Morden in the south all the way to High Barnet in the north, and uniquely has two separate alternate routes. This makes it tricky to place Dogger’s residence, though as its one of the most underground lines (there are a lot of above-ground stations in the underground), and Dogger’s part of the line seems to be surface level, it’s likely he’s somewhere in north London, perhaps in the vicinity of Finchley. Fun stations on the Northern line include Tooting Bec, three of the English Monopoly board stations, and most importantly…Mornington Crescent! (That’s a slightly obscure now British radio comedy reference, so don’t worry if you didn’t get it.)
  • By 1988, Pratchett had in fact quit his day job to write full-time, and signed his first big publishing contract for a lot of money. Terry had given notice to his manager at the Central Electricity Generating Board in July 1987, in between the publication of Equal Rites and that of Mort, and told Colin Smythe, now his agent rather than his publisher. Smythe solicited a deal for Terry’s next six books, and after some competition between Gollancz and Transworld, Pratchett signed with the former in December 1987 for an advance of £51,000 per book – a total of £306,000 (around £740,000, or more than one and a quarter million Australian dollars, in today’s money). He was definitely doing very well, so it’s little wonder he could write about Dogger doing the same.
  • The TARDIS – the Doctor’s time and space travelling home in Doctor Who – is meant to blend in with its surroundings by changing shape using its “chameleon circuit”, but since the programme’s invention that circuit has malfunctioned and its been stuck as various designs of 1960s London Police Box. While this sometimes did cause some it to be noticed in the original series, as Liz remarks it’s still invisible to “most people” thanks to the concept of the “perception filter” – a presumably slightly psychic effect that causes those who notice it to treat it as commonplace, in a manner similar to Douglas Adams’ idea of the “Somebody Else’s Problem” field.
  • Neighbours was Australia’s longest-running and most internationally successful soap opera. Since 1985 it ran daily during the week for just over 8,900 episodes, initially produced for Channel Seven, but then moving over to Ten. It became hugely popular in the UK, where it aired on BBC One for 21 years until 2008, when it was picked up by Channel 5. In 2022 Channel 5 announced they would not be continuing to carry the show, cutting off its main source of funding, and Fremantle Productions were unable to find another broadcaster to pick up the deal. It thus ceased production and went out with a big double-episode finale on 28 July, 2022, featuring the return of many beloved characters from its long history – including big name actors and pop stars who got an early break on the show, like Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Margot Robbie. It’s left a huge gap in the Australian television landscape, as it provided jobs and professional experiences for thousands of production crew, directors, writers and actors.
  • Houris are mentioned just four times in the Quran, and are (at least in the majority opinion) not mortal women but supernatural creatures of Hannah, the Islamic Paradise. Houris are described as “companions” whose main features are that they have “wide and beautiful eyes” and are “untouched” (which probably means what you’re inferring, yes). The Quran does not promise any specific number of them to anyone, though hadiths – other accounts of the words and deeds of the prophet Mohammed, seen as more or less canonical depending on an individual’s beliefs – describe them in many ways, lots of them pretty weird.
  • On the subject of characters having a life of their own, the closest thing we could find Pratchett saying is that he often doesn’t know what he’s doing when starting to write a book – writing it is the way he finds out, and “often, one of the characters says something that tells me what the story is about.” This is from the acceptance speech he wrote (but did not personally give) for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, which he won for Nation in 2009. The speech is collected in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • The Hero’s Journey (aka the “monomyth”) is Joseph Campbell’s famous condensation of the Western canon into a single structure, presented in his 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. While its not nearly as universal as Campbell presumed, it has become canonised and used repeatedly in the construction of modern fiction, most famously when George Lucas explicitly used it as a model for Star Wars. “The Refusal of the Call” is an early stage of the Journey, in which the hero initially refuses to leave their home behind and go on the quest to which they are being called. This is still really common in fantasy fiction, especially urban fantasy, where protagonists often deny that the fantastic world they’re being shown is even real.
  • “In the beginning was the Word” is that first line of the first chapter of the Book of John, one of the four canonical gospels in the New Testament of the Bible. It goes on to say “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”, which has been a subject of debate among theologians for centuries. In this context, “the Word” is an English translation of the Greek logos (λόγος), which is usually interpreted to mean Jesus, and so the full verse is the genesis of many Christian beliefs, including the Trinity – that Jesus is God but also separate from God.
  • 100 Story Building is the creative writing centre for children and young people where Ben has worked for the last seven years or so. In their workshops they try to deal with a number of barriers young people face when writing, including the intimidating feeling of staring at a blank page waiting to be filled.
  • The quote “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, and sometimes to another author, Gene Fowler. As is so often the case with these things, neither of those is likely to be true. Anecdotally at least a version close to the one attributed to Hemingway was attributed to Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith, whose work was known to Hemingway, making it plausible he might have said it. That version was: “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” But it seems the earliest confirmed version was written by American sportswriter and novelist Paul Gallico (of The Poseidon Adventure fame) in his 1946 book Confessions of a Story Writer, in which he says: “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.”
  • We’ve previously mentioned Terry’s hard drives of unfinished being destroyed by a steamroller in #Pratchat6, #Pratchat16, #Pratchat26, #Pratchat30, and #Pratchat49. This was indeed part of his will, executed by his personal assistant Rob Wilkins in August 2017, as described in this Guardian article.
  • Bohemian writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) did write a letter to his best friend, Max Brod, in which he seemingly requested all his work to be burned. Brod found the letter – described as a “last will” – when going through his desk after Kafka had died of tuberculosis. “Everything I leave behind me…is to be burned unread”, he wrote, though there’s some thought that his applied only to his personal and unpublished writing. Brod did not comply, though its worth noting that Kafka’s most famous story, “The Metamorphosis”, had been published during his life, in 1915. Even that did not find widespread fame, though, until after his death.
  • Jules Verne’s posthumously published novel Paris in the Twentieth Century – discovered by his great grandson in a safe in 1989, and published in 1994 – thankfully does not seem to be disputed in its authenticity. Tolkien’s later published works are also seen as legit, including the twelve-volume A History of Middle-Earth, compiled by Christopher Tolkien (J.R.R.’s son, not his grandson as we mistakenly say). These books are a compilation of his notes, drafts and other writings, forming a history of Tolkien’s process of creating the world of Middle-Earth (and not, as the title might suggest, a history of the world itself).
  • Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) was an American horror and mystery writer, whose best known work includes the novel The Haunting of Hill House and the short story “The Lottery”. We previous discussed her in Penny’s last appearance, #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune”. The anthology Penny read is Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, edited by two of Jackson’s four children and published in 2015. It contains more than forty unpublished (and very likely unfinished) pieces of writing.
  • “The High Meggas” (discussed in #Pratchat57West5), the short story precursor to Prachett’s Long Earth series, was first published in early editions of The Long Earth in 2012, and then again in the collection A Blink of the Screen later that year. It’s given a date of 1986 in the introduction used in both books, but accounts conflict between Pratchett and his publisher Colin Smythe as to when exactly it was written. See the notes to #Pratchat57West5 for more on this.
  • Of the collections of Pratchett’s early short stories, only the first two (2014’s Dragons at Crumbling Castle and 2015’s The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner) have introductions written by Terry, indicating that he had tweaked the stories within a little. They are, though, “mostly as they were first printed”.
  • English horror writer Ramsay Campbell started writing his first book when he was eleven, and it is this unpublished collection of fiction – titled Ghostly Stories – which contained the infamous sentence “The door banged open, and the afore-mentioned skeleton rushed in.” In an interview given in 2008, he cited it as evidence that he wasn’t yet at the height of his powers though he did submit it to publishers and got some encouragement, if not a contract.
  • Stephen King’s The Dark Half is a 1989 horror novel about alcoholic author Thad Beaumont, a writer of serious but unpopular “literary fiction” who finds success as “George Stark”, a pen name under which he writes violent crime thrillers about a sadistic serial killer. When Thad is outed as Stark, he and his wife stage a mock burial of the pseudonym…only for him to rise bodily from the grave and go on a killing spree of his own… This does seem to have been prompted by King’s own outing as Richard Bachmann, the name under which King wrote darker, more cynical books. Both pen names were inspired by “Richard Stark”, a pseudonym used by Donald E Westlake.
  • Subscriber Ian Banks identified a couple of other Stephen King stories relevant to this episode: “Word Processor Of The Gods”, published in Skeleton Crew, has a main character who is gifted a word processor that can reshape reality, while “Umney’s Last Case” (collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes) is quite similar to “Final Reward”, but told from the point of view of the fictional character.
  • Inkheart (Tintenherz) is a 2003 young adult fantasy novel by German author Cornelia Funke. It tells the story of Meggie, a young woman whose father, Mo, is a bookbinder who she discovers has a special gift: he is able to bring things out of the world of books, the Inkworld, into the real world – but only if something from the real world goes into Inkworld in return… Inkheart is the first in the Inkworld trilogy, followed by Inkwell (2005) and Inkdeath (2008). Funke announced in 2021 she will return to the series with The Colour of Revenge (Die Farbe der Rache), scheduled for publication in 2023. The first book was filmed in 2006 as Inkheart with a great cast including Brendan Fraser (as Mo), Eliza Bennett (as Meggie), Helen Mirren, Jim Broadbent, Paul Bettany and Andy Serkis.
  • As Penny alludes, Shirley Jackson’s marriage to college teacher and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman was likely unhappy; her biographers reckon Stanley frequently cheated on her – often with his college students – and eventually made her agree to an open relationship she didn’t really want, and also controlled her finances even though she earned most of the money in the household. Perhaps unsurprisingly he was the first person to publish some of her unfinished work, specifically Come Along with Me. This was an unfinished novel, bulked out with many of her best short stories, published three years after her death in 1968.
  • Stranger Things – the hit Netflix show drawing on many of the popular “kids on bikes” style horror fantasy films of the 1980s – released its fourth season in two parts in May and July 2022. A new character introduced is Eddie Munson, an older teenager who has failed to graduate from high school several times and is the head of the school’s Dungeons & Dragons club, “The Hellfire Club”. Despite his involvement with D&D, he exemplifies the “nerd jock” role: he bullies the younger members of the club, is disdainful and disrespectful to those who don’t share the hobby, and controls who can and can’t play with them. He also plays heavy rock music and is a known drug dealer at the school, fulfilling many of the negative stereotypes of Dungeons & Dragons players common at the time of the “Satanic panic”, though he does have a kinder side and genuinely seemed to want to help the character who came to him for help.
  • Tripod vs the Dragon is a musical written and performed by Australian musical comedy trio Tripod, with guest star Elana Stone. Originally titled Dungeons & Dragons: The Musical and renamed for legal reasons, the trio make themselves into adventurers and get caught up in a plot involving a tree from the dawn of time and its guardian, a dragon. Its first proper season was in 2010 for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, alongside two lesser known Dungeons & Dragons-inspired comedy shows, +1 Sword and Dungeon Crawl, starring some weird nerds named Ben and Richard McKenzie… The Tripod vs the Dragon album is available via Bandcamp, and the song Penny mentions is the final track, “Bard”. The show was filmed in 2012, and might still be available on DVD; we’ll find out where from and let you know! But if you can’t find one, there’s a watch party coming up just after this episode is published, on 14 August 2022; see this Tweet for details.
  • “The Adventure of the Final Problem” was first published in December 1893, and intended by Arthur Conan-Doyle to kill off Sherlock Holmes and be his final story. In it, Holmes tells Watson he has finally proven that many crimes he has investigated are part of the plans of one man: Professor Moriarty, a mastermind who aids other criminals. He avoids several attempts on his life before finally tracking Moriarty to the Reichenbach Falls, a real waterfall in Switzerland that Doyle had visited earlier that year, inspiring the story. Watson is lured away by a false emergency, and when he returns, Holmes has gone – seemingly to his death over the edge of the falls with Moriarty, leaving behind only a letter to Watson. To say this was unpopular with readers of The Strand magazine is a huge understatement; they cancelled their subscriptions in droves, and made their displeasure known in letters to the magazine and Doyle himself. The pressure eventually led him to write The Hound of the Baskervilles (a serialised novel, set before Holmes’ apparent death) in 1901, and later to write more stories – beginning with “The Adventure of the Empty House” in 1903 – which establishes that Holmes had in fact survived, luckily plausible since in the fiction no-one directly saw Holmes die or discovered his body.
  • Call of Duty is a long-running series of military first-person shooter videogames published by Actvision. They initially focussed on World War II, though later branched out to other fields of conflict. The 2008 game Call of Duty: World at War, and begins the “Black Ops” storyline that would continue through Call of Duty: Black Ops and its sequels. It also introduced the alternate “zombies” mode, an alternate history multiplayer mode in which players must kill hordes of Nazi zombies. This storyline would persist through multiple games as well, and introduces the character of Doctor Edward Richtofen, a Nazi scientist who creates many of the monsters battled in Zombies mode.
  • Amazingly, frozen mammoth meat was supposedly served at a banquet in 1901 at St. Petersburg, and also in around 1951 at the Explorer’s Club in New York. But in both cases, it seems the story was a lie, even if it is true that the indigenous Evenki people of Siberia did sometimes feed it to their dogs. For more on why it would be a) gross and b) impossible to serve up mammoth steak, see Sarah Zhang’s great article “What Happens to Meat When You Freeze It for 35,000 Years”, written for The Atlantic in December 2019.
  • Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen (1892 – 1918), aka The Baron von Richtofen or the Red Baron, was a notorious German World War I flying ace who shot down around eighty enemy planes, a huge number for the time. In Germany he was known as Der Rote Kampfflieger, “The Red Fighter Pilot”, and this was the title he used for his 1918 autobiography. The “Red” came from the bright colour of his aircraft; his squadron were known as the “Flying Circus”, both for their bright colour, and the fact that they moved around to different stages of the war using tents wherever they set up an airfield. (And yes, this was the inspiration for the title of the Monty Python television series.) He’s been played by many actors, notably Adrian Edmondson in an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, where he is shot by rival fighter pilot, Rik Mayall’s Lord Flashheart.
  • We’d have to make a whole podcast to get through all the Sherlock Holmes stuff we mention this episode (not that Ben, as a Holmes fan, would mind that…), so we’ll instead just list our references here:
    • August Derleth’s Solar Ponds appeared in thirteen books’ worth of short stories between 1928 and 1971, and then some more written by Basil Copper.
    • Arsene Lupin was created by French author Maurice Leblanc, and is one of several “gentleman thief” type characters created in part as an answer to Holmes. He first crossed paths with Holmes in 1905 in “Sherlock Holmes arrive trop tard” (“Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late”), and he was indeed renamed “Herlock Sholmes” (or “Holmlock Shears”), and Watson “Wilson”, at the time (though modern reprints often revert their names, since copyright concerns are no longer as pressing). We note that in the medical mystery television series House, often also said to be inspired by Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House (who displays many Holmesian characteristics) also has a sidekick named Wilson.
    • Holmes doesn’t appear in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, but in its historical spin-off series, The Great Ace Attorney, set in the Meiji Restoration period of Japan, which coincides with the Victorian era of Holmes. In the original Japanese, Sherlock Holmes appears alongside ten-year-old Iris Watson, Watson’s daughter, after John is murdered. They are renamed Herlock Sholmes and Iris Wilson in international translations.
    • In 2020 the Conan-Doyle estate sued several authors for copyright infringement, including Nancy Springer for her books starring Holmes’ young sister, Enola Holmes. The estate claimed that the final ten stories (set after The Final Problem) were not yet in the public domain, and specifically citing the more emotional nature of Holmes in those stories as a comparison point. The suit was dismissed; of note, Holmes already passed into the public domain in the UK in 2000, seventy years after Conan-Doyle’s death, but copyright law varies in different places. In the US, where the Holmes stories were published at the same time as in The Strand, all of the original Holmes stories (and thus the characters themselves) will be out of copyright by 2023.
    • Mr Holmes is a 2015 film adaptation of the 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind by American author Mitch Cullin. It’s set in 1947, with a retired 93-year-old Holmes – played by Ian McKellen – trying to remember the details of the last case he took on before retiring 35 years earlier.
  • The chimera is a creature from Greek mythology, a fire-breathing hybrid monster most often depicted as a lion with a goat’s head growing from its back and a serpent’s tail (sometimes with a snake’s head at the end). It appears in The Iliad, among other accounts. Most famously, when the hero Bellerophon rejects the advances of King Proetus’s wife, Proetus (who is told Bellerophon approached the Queen) seeks revenge by sending Bellerophon to slay the Chimera, in the hopes he will die in the attempt. Advised by a seer, he captures Pegasus the winged horse and attacks the monster from above, using trickery to kill it. The word chimera is from the Greek Χίμαιρα, Chímaira, meaning “she-goat”. In English the word is now also used to mean any creature (or sometimes any thing) made up of different parts.
  • Upstart Crow is Ben Elton’s TV sitcom starring David Mitchell as William Shakespeare, which has run for three series since 2016. A stage play was also performed in 2019.
  • Ben touches on the idea of heteropessimism, the acceptance that heteronormative relationships must be awful by heterosexual couples. It’s explored in this article in The Conversation from July 2022.
  • Eleanor Morton is a Scottish stand-up and sketch comedian, and one of the funniest people on the Internet. You can see her videos on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, and also on YouTube. Here’s the recent one Ben mentioned about JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis trying to outdo each other with stupid character names; she also has a series of videos in which historical figures read hatemail sent to them; this video of Arthur Conan-Doyle reading reactions to the death of Sherlock Holmes is especially appropriate to the discussion in this episode. If you’re in the UK, get to the Edinburgh Fringe where you can catch her show Eleanor Morton Has Peaked until 28 August 2022. Alternatively if you enjoy her videos, throw her a few bucks on Ko-Fi. You can hear her talk about her comedy career, as well as Carpe Jugulum, in the second episode of season six of Desert Island Discworld.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Leonard da Quirm, non-Discworld, Penelope Love, short story

#Pratchat55 – Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon

8 May 2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

It’s an illustrated Discworld crossover special as Georgina Chadderton rejoins Liz and Ben to talk gods, dragons and outer space in the twenty-seventh Discworld novel, 2001’s The Last Hero, illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Genghiz Cohen, Emperor of the Agatean Empire, has deserted his throne, and along with his horde is heading for the mountain at the hub of the world. He is planning to pay a little visit on the gods, and “return what the first hero stole” – with explosive interest. According to the wizards, this will destroy the source of the Disc’s magic and thus end all life on (and under) it. A rag-tag team of misfits is quickly assembled – a dangerously genius inventor, a stout and honest officer of the Watch, and a reluctant “wizzard” – to take a risky flight looping around the Disc, and intercept Cohen before its too late…

The second large-format illustrated Discworld novel, The Last Hero – subtitled “A Discworld Fable” – is a relatively short story, but crosses the streams of the various sub-series more than any other book, providing Paul Kidby with the chance to showcase a whole host of characters and places – including the Disc as seen from above and below! It both feels like a throwback to some of the earlier books – the whole world at stake, Rincewind and Cohen on wild Disc-crossing adventures, the gods playing games with mortals – and a fitting last hurrah (more or less) for two of Pratchett’s most beloved characters.

Is this a fitting send-off for Cohen? What’s happening in the Agatean Empire now its Emperor is gone? How many hours have you spent poring over the illustrations finding references, in-jokes and Easter eggs? And what do you imagine the minstrel’s saga sounds like? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat55 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_55.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:20:15 — 64.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Guest Georgina Chadderton (aka George Rex) is a comic book creator and illustrator based in Adelaide. She was last our guest way back in #Pratchat7 in 2018 to talk about the first illustrated Discworld novel, Eric. Since then she’s continued to make delightful autobiographical comic (including her upcoming book), run comic-making workshops, organise the Papercuts Comics Festival, and even found the time to create the cover art for Pratchat! You can find her online at georgerexcomics.com, where you can find out about Georgina’s upcoming events and also buy all manner of cool comics, postcards and stickers. You can also follow her on Instagram at @georgerexcomics.

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

Over the next two months we’re returning to Pratchett’s sci-fi work. In June, we’re discussing his 1990 short story “ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’” with science fiction author Sean Williams. That’ll leave us (and you) a bit of extra reading time before July for the third Long Earth novel, The Long Mars, which we’ll be discussing with our old friend Joel Martin! But in the meantime, you can send us your questions for the short story using the hashtag #Pratchat56, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat56 – do { Podcast(); } while (unreadPratchetts > 0);

8 June 2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We travel down a leg of a very 1990s pair of the trousers of time this month, as author and musican Sean Williams joins Liz and Ben to get stuck into the artificial reality of Pratchett’s 1990 short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world’/’enough’ + ‘time’“.

Darren Thompson is a repairman who specialises in Seagems: artificial reality consoles that can edit aspects of your everyday life, or plug you into a whole artificial world. His latest job is to inspect a machine in which the user has died. That’s not a first for Darren – but there’s something about this particular corpse in the machine that makes this job feel different…

Originally published in the anthology Digital Dreams alongside works by authors including Diana Wynn Jones, Neil Gaiman and Storm Constantine, “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world’/’enough’ + ‘time'” is a short story that packs a lot in – and potentially goes to a much darker place than most of Pratchett’s other work. It’s since been collected in A Blink of the Screen, Once More* *with Footnotes and the German collection Der ganze Wahnsinn: Storys (in which it’s accompanied by an original illustration by Josh Kirby).

Was Pratchett right to think that the virtual reality angle dates this horribly – or would he have thought differently only a few years later, as VR comes round again? Is this a happy ending, a dystopian nightmare, or the fantasy ramblings of a self-important creep? Would you want to be a ghost in the machine? And just what is going on with that illustration in the German collection? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat56 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_56.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:54:33 — 52.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Guest Dr Sean Williams is an award-winning author of science fiction novels and short stories, makes music under the name “the Adelaidean”, and teaches creative writing at Flinders University. His novels run the gamut of original sci-fi and best-selling work for the worlds of Star Wars and Doctor Who, and he’s also collaborated with other authors – including previous Pratchat guest Garth Nix (#Pratchat51). You can find out more about Sean via his (hopefully updated) website, seanwilliams.com, and listen to his music via his Bandcamp page. He’s also (sometimes) on Twitter at @adelaidesean.

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

Next month we continue the sci-fi theme with the third Long Earth novel, The Long Mars, which we’ll be discussing with returning guest Joel Martin! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat57, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat58 – The Barbarian Switch

8 August 2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We explore every author’s worst nightmare as writer Penny Love returns to Pratchat and finds the barrier between reality and fiction getting all wibbly-wobbly in Terry Pratchett’s 1988 short story, “Final Reward“.

After a particularly bad row with his girlfriend Nicky – and a pint of wine – author Kevin Dogger decides to kill off the protagonist of his best-selling fantasy series. The next morning, Erdan the Barbarian appears on Dogger’s doorstep with the milk. He was, after all, promised a final reward: an eternity of carousing in the halls of his creator…

Content note: the story “Final Reward” contains discussion of (fictional) suicide.
If you or anyone you know needs help, use the Wikipedia list of crisis lines to find one local to you.

Written for the short-lived roleplaying magazine G.M., “Final Reward” is Pratchett’s go at the age-old tradition of writers writing about writers. But in true Pratchett form, it’s not just about that… Hailing from around the time of Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids, but “tinkered with” before appearing in A Blink of the Screen, it depicts an author ill at ease with the real world and human relationships – by all accounts not much like Pratchett himself at all. And then there’s the way it ends…

What did you think of this one? Have you ever written a character you’d like to meet in person? Would you swap places with them? And is this a dig at any real fantasy authors, and we’ve missed the joke? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat58 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_58.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:34:45 — 43.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Guest Penelope Love is a writer best known for her roleplaying game work, especially with Chaosium for Call of Cthulhu, including the upcoming Victorian London campaign she mentions this episode. She previously joined us for #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, discussing the quite Lovecraftian “Twenty Pence with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”. Penny is also part of Campaign Coins, who as well as making gorgeous metal coins for use with tabletop games, publish Penny’s comic fantasy short story collections about “The Three Dungeoneers”, which you can find here. Penny is on Twitter as @PennyLoveWrites, or you can follow @CampaignCoins for more on their projects.

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

As previously advised, due to some technical difficulties – and not a time machine, to Ben’s disappointment – the next episode to be released will be #Pratchat57, discussing the third Long Earth novel, The Long Mars, with Joel Martin. Look for it in the Pratchat podcast feed on August 25.

Next month in #Pratchat59, we’re discussing The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch with science and fiction writer, Dr Kat Day! And after that, in October, it’s finally time for another general questions episode, #Pratchat60. This is the perfect opportunity to ask us about books you missed first time round, or general questions about Discworld, Pratchett, us and the show! Send in your questions for either of those episodes via social media (using the appropriate hashtag), 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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat57West5 Notes and Errata

8 July 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for bonus Pratchat episode 57 West 5, “Daniel Superbaboon“, discussing the 1986 short story “The High Meggas“.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is…well, if you’ve read the story, you get it. Ben would share his draft title idea, but he’s actually pretty sure it will work even better for The Long Mars, so we’ll wait until that episode comes out.
  • Our previous Long Earth episodes are #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, and #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”. We talk about The Long Mars in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”
  • “The High Meggas” was first published in 2012 – but A Blink of the Screen wasn’t actually its first appearance! The Long Earth was published four months earlier, and one of the first editions – specifically the “Iron Edition” with a metallic cover, produced in an edition of 8,000, mostly for Waterstones – included the short story at the end, along with an author’s note which seems to match the one in A Blink of the Screen. Interestingly, Colin Smythe’s website suggests that the story was written “in late 1985 or early 1986 after completing Equal Rites“, which contradicts Pratchett’s introduction, which places it in between The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Either timeline works, though The Colour of Magic would have been sent to Colin Smythe years before 1985, since it was published in 1983. This could mean Smythe is right, and the story was actually written between The Light Fantastic (published in June 1986) and Equal Rites (published in January 1987, and so written in 1986). But if Pratchett’s recollection is correct, it’s possible he was just doodling with these ideas for years – which certainly makes sense given how developed the concepts are in “The High Meggas”.
  • “Hard science fiction“, as we explained in the notes for #Pratchat31, is “realistic” science fiction that tries to stick to established science, or plausible extensions of it.
  • The “fan on speed-dial” was David Langford, an editor and writer who became one of Pratchett’s close friends. He was one of the first people to review The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic in their first editions, both for White Dwarf magazine, and as a result was asked to give a reader review for the manuscript of Equal Rites by Gollancz. His feedback was well received, and he continued to provide notes at an early stage for each novel thereafter, eventually corresponding directly with Terry via letters and email. He wasn’t just on call to prevent the repetition of jokes, but also to act as part of a collective Discworld encyclopaedia (this was in the days before wikis, remember). This arrangement continued up to Thud! As well as a long list of non-fiction and short fiction, Langford write a novel that Pratchett loved, The Leaky Establishment, and edits the long-running and multiple Hugo Award-winning fanzine Ansible, which is still going today. (It’s named after a term for a long-distance communicator coined by Ursula Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon’s World.) Dave also compiled the two Discworld quiz books, Unseen University Challenge and The Wyrdest Link. You can find out more about Dave and Ansible at ansible.uk.
  • Libertarianism – the philosophy or political position of libertarians – believes in maximum personal freedoms, usually (if we may editorialise) the detriment of society as a whole. It’s particularly popular in the United States, where it’s linked to some of the ideas behind the founding of the country and its split with the United Kingdom, but in practice it usually means a resistance to all forms of government intervention, both personally and in the free market ideal of capitalism, and usually a strong distrust of authority. Its influence on the politics of America, and particularly the Republican Party, has been profound, especially over the last four decades or so.
  • Ron Swanson – played by the wonderful Nick Offerman – is a character in the American sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009-2015). Swanson is the Director of the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Illinois, but despite his senior role in local government is a staunch libertarian who tries to reduce his department’s activity as much as possible. (He’s a big softie at heart, though, which is why we love him.)
  • The “double-tap” rule is the idea in fiction that competent killers always make sure their target is dead, usually by shooting them twice. It comes from the military term “double-tap”, which means to shoot twice in rapid succession – a technique introduced in the 1930s to overcome limitations of full-metal jacketed ammunition. (We’d rather not go into any more detail about the history of making sure guns can kill people, but if you’ve the stomach for it some of the details are quite interesting.)
  • We filmed a special video discussion of The Carpet People for the Australian Discworld Convention, which was played as part of their Virtual Discworld Fun Day on 18 June, 2022. It’ll be released publicly soon, and we’ll link to it when you can watch it. Because it’s a discussion of the differences between the two versions of the book, and we show off the illustrations in the original, we don’t plan to release it as an audio-only episode of the podcast. Subscribers and one-off supporters already have access to a special annotated version of the video on Ko-Fi titled “A Tale of Two Carpets”. You’ll need to be a Ko-Fi donor or member to access it, and to log in. (See the Support Us page for more about how that works.)
  • Terry’s early short stories for children have been published in four volumes: Dragons at Crumbling Castle (2014), The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (2016), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard (2017) and The Time-Travelling Caveman (2020). These are collected from those he wrote for the Bucks Free Press between 1965 and 1973 (so between the ages of 17 and 25, skewing towards the younger end), though the third volume contains some later Christmas-themed stories as well. In his introduction to Dragons at Crumbling Castle, the only volume published before his death, Pratchett says the stories are “mostly as they were first printed”, with just “the odd tweak here, a pinch there, and a little note at the bottom where needed, and all because the younger me wasn’t as clever back then as he turned out to be.”
  • Ben couldn’t find the quote he mentions about the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Pratchett has certainly had much to say about both, but he doesn’t make such a clear distinction between the two; he’s said both that science fiction is a modern sub-set of fantasy, and something to the effect that science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on the outside. There are multiple versions of that last one, but Ben couldn’t find a source, so treat it with a grain of salt, even if it’s definitely the sort of thing Pratchett would say.
  • The Expanse is a series of nine novels (and associated shorter fiction) beginning with 2011’s Leviathan Wakes. The books are written by “James S. A. Corey”, a pseudonym for writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who came up with the idea initially as a setting for a roleplaying game. The story takes place in a realistic 24th century future in which humans have colonised Mars and parts of the asteroid belt, and combines hard sci-fi, inter-planetary politics and class warfare with more fantastic sci-fi ideas. It was adapted for television over seven seasons between 2015 and 2022, first by SyFy, then Amazon Prime for seasons four through seven.
  • Liz’s specialist subjects have been brought up by her on the podcast before:
    • Queen Victoria Markets and (to a lesser extent) the Melbourne General Cemetery were both mentioned in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“
    • We just recently talked about magician Will Alma in #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes“
  • We discussed “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”, Pratchett’s 1990 story about machine-created artificial realities, in #Pratchat56, “do { Podcast(); } while (unreadPratchetts > 0);“.
  • In The Long Earth, the asteroid, comet or whatever it is that destroys the Earth of the Gap doesn’t yet have a name. It’s christened “Bellos” by the nerds at GapSpace, as we learn in Chapter 31 of The Long War, after the rogue planet in the 1951 film When Worlds Collide.
  • We did indeed discuss fuel weight and other considerations of air travel, especially on Concorde, in our episode about Wings, the third and final book in Pratchett’s Bromeliad trilogy. That was in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • Roger Moore was the third actor to play James Bond in the official series of films from Eon Productions, taking on the role in seven films between 1973 and 1985. “The High Meggas”, assuming it was written in 1986 (see the third note at the top of this page), was actually written in between Moore’s final Bond film and the first of his predecessor, and Ben favourite, Timothy Dalton. It’s also worth noting that while this story certainly does delve into “real Bond areas”, the stock character of the femme fatale is much older.
  • Robinson Crusoe is the titular protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Standards for titles have changed a lot in three hundred years.
  • “Manumission” is an obscure word these days; it’s a term for a slave owner freeing their slaves. Modern descriptions of such acts would more likely use the less specific terms “enfranchisement” or “emancipation”.
  • A quick guide to the other references we mention in passing:
    • Marion Robert Morrison (1907-1979), better known by his screen name John Wayne, was an American actor best known for playing heroes in Western and war films during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was also an outspoken conservative and supporter of the Republican Party, and held some pretty horrendously racist views.
    • Captain Nemo is the captain of the Nautilus, the mystery submarine in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. We previously talked about that book in #Pratchat27 and #Pratchat31, and about its sequel, The Mysterious Island, in #Pratchat45.
    • Daniel Boone (1734-1820) was a real person – a pioneer who founded European settlements in Kentucky. He published an account of his “adventures” in 1784 and became a folk hero during his own lifetime. He’s been idolised (and idealised) ever since, notably in a popular American television series that ran from 1964 to 1970 and was also broadcast in Australia.
  • While it does seem like a modern idea, even in 1986 proxy wars and secretly state-funded militias were a familiar feature of the Cold War (and go much further back in history). The Soviet-Afghan War ran from 1979 to 1989, and provided an excuse for America and other countries to supply funds and arms for Mujahideen insurgent groups to use fighting the Russian-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, their forces left Afghanistan, and a few years later the country’s government was toppled and the Taliban took over.
  • Liz loves to mention The Shawshank Redemption – it’s probably her most “left ear” conversation topic! Previous mentions include #Pratchat14, #Pratchat28, #Pratchat38, #Pratchat47 and #Pratchat53.
  • How to Host a Murder is the most famous brand of murder mystery party game. The series was first published by Decipher Inc between 1983 and 2003. They were hugely popular for a decade or so, with around two dozen published, including ones themed for teenagers and children, and even one set in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Players take on the roles of guests at a dinner or other party where a murder (or sometimes another crime) has been committed, and every one of them is a suspect. Over several rounds (and between courses; it’s designed to played over dinner), players are guided by an audio recording and individual booklets, which give them secret information about themselves and other guests. Through conversation they are meant to reveal some of this information, gradually gathering enough clues together to try and work out who committed the murder. (No-one – not even the murderer – knows who did it until the end.) The series is pretty light-hearted, and often silly, with lots of puns, corny jokes, over the top characters and outlandish themes. If you’re thinking of picking one up (and they show up often in charity shops, since you can’t play the same one twice), note that some – especially the earlier ones – also feature plenty of lazy racist and sexist tropes that wouldn’t fly today.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#EeekClub2022 Notes and Errata

25 May 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2022“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add a photo of the enormous Senate ballot paper from the 2013 election as soon as we can find one!

Notes and Errata

  • We’ll find the “buckle up as I teach you about something I just learned myself!” tweet at some point, but it’s eluded us for the moment. (Let us know if you find it!)
  • You can find the biggest Democracy Sausage project at democracysausage.org or on Twitter at @DemSausage. Note that this project is not, In any meaningful way “official”, but it’s an impressive effort nonetheless. We’d also make the comment that while the democracy sausage is a fun tradition, it ought not to be so universally necessary for public schools to fundraise for themselves in this way every election…
  • We did indeed talk about the confluence of the Glorious 25th of May and Towel Day in last year’s Eeek Club episode.
  • Our previous T-shirt ideas have been a “Sausage Inna Bunnings” design, from #Pratchat50, and the “Sausorobos” design – a sausage in a circle eating it’s “tail” – in #Pratchat53. We also considered a Helvetica names T-shirt of the Hogfather’s four boars in #Pratchat26.
  • Listen Sven told us about the early, cheaply-made German editions of the Discworld books, from publisher Heyne, who inserted an ad for Maggi cup-a-soup into their version of Sorcery (and possibly other books). These were discontinued not long after Terry found out. They “wouldn’t promise not to do it again” in Terry’s words, and so they took the German publication rights to Goldmann instead.
  • Our previous reflective episode, with also served to give us some breathing room at the start of the pandemic lockdowns, was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, in April 2020.
  • Our single episode overview of The Watch is #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.
  • We mention three recent screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes this episode:
    • Sherlock (2010-2017) – the BBC “prestige” series, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as a modern-day Holmes and Watson.
    • Elementary (2012-2019) – the CBS procedural crime drama, born out of a failed attempt to make a US adaptation of the BBC show. It stars Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock who, after becoming addicted to heroin, relocates to New York to start over. Lucy Liu plays Joan Watson, an ex-doctor and Sherlock’s assigned “sober companion” as he recovers from his addiction.
    • Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) – Guy Ritchie’s film versions, set in the same time as the original stories, but with dashes of action, steampunk and occultism. Both star Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock, and Jude Law as Watson.
  • The 100 (2014-2020) is an American dystopian science fiction TV series. The series is set in a future where the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war, but humans have survived in an orbiting space station, the Ark. A century after the war, one hundred “juvenile delinquents” are sentenced to a form of community service in which they are sent back to Earth to determine if it’s safe for the rest to return.
  • Liz has previously written about adapting the work of one of her other favourite authors, Philip K Dick, in this piece for Kill Your Darlings magazine.
  • The Hunger Games was originally a series of three novels – The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay – by American author Suzanne Collins, published between 2008 and 2010, with a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, published in 2020. The original trilogy was adapted into four films – the last book in two parts – and Collins co-wrote the adaptations for all of them except Catching Fire. She has also adapted the screenplay for the prequel, which is set to be released as a film in 2023.
  • We’ve mentioned Diana Wynne Jones loads of times on the podcast. As well as the 2004 Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle – which as Liz says, is fairly loosely based on the book – another of her books, Archer’s Goon (1985), was adapted for television by the BBC in 1992. The book features an ordinary family who find a “goon” on their doorstep, who says he has come to collect the two thousand words which thirteen-year-old Howard supposedly owes to someone named Archer. (Which is an amazing concept for a story in any medium!) Wynne Jones was quite closely involved in the adaptation, as the producer, Richard Callanan, wanted to make the series faithful to the book; Wynne Jones described her job as sitting with the producer around a table with scriptwriter Jenny McDade, persuading her to make it more like the book. While she didn’t think McDade enjoyed this process, Jones seems to have been happy with the result. The author also commented that she sees the two modes of writing as very different ways to tell a story, and scriptwriting did not appeal to her.
  • To clarify, the “one million dollars per hour” figure for drama television refers to how much it costs to make an hour of finished television, not how much it costs to work on a show for an hour. This number is based on analysis done by Screen Australia, but Ben’s fudged an overall average here he got from someone else because the cost of television varies a lot. For long-running series or serials, costs are spread out over dozens of episodes, bringing that cost down to about $350,000 per hour. That average is probably quite a bit lower than most shows cost, though, due to the effect of long-running soaps like Home and Away and Neighbours, which produce hundreds of hours every year on very tight budgets. (Now Neighbours has closed down, the average will probably shoot up considerably!) Compare that to a mini-series, which costs much more than Ben’s average – over $1.7m per hour. And then children’s drama, treated as a separate category, costs quite a lot too: about $1.25m per hour! Possibly because it’s more often fantastical, whereas we make hardly any adult sci-fi or fantasy in Australia these days?
  • Firefly (2002) was a fan favourite space western infamously cancelled by the Fox network half-way through its first season. Set in the 26th century, it imagines a future where the wealthiest cultures on Earth – implied to be the US and China, though elements of some other cultures also remain – terraform the numerous planets and moons of a trinary star system and establish a new life there after the Earth is “used up”. It was followed by the film Serenity in 2005, produced by Universal, which continued and wrapped up the main story arc from the series. The story has continued though, mainly in comic books. The rights to the show passed to Disney when they bought Fox, and as recently as February 2022, rumours circulated that Disney might reboot the show for Disney+ – though the fan base is much keener on a continuation of the old one.
  • Troll Bridge, based on the first Discworld short story (see #PratchatNA7), was produced in Australia by Snowgum Films, starring Don Bridges as Cohen the Barbarian. The original crowdfunding campaign ran on Kickstarter in 2011, though work on the film started as early as 2004. The film was released in 2019, and is now available for free on YouTube.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished at a perfectly acceptable point after seven seasons, but it was continued in several comics both during and after its run – including an official continuation of the series from IDW Publishing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, produced by original series creator Joss Whedon from 2007 to 2011. It was a big success for IDW and led to a follow up, Season Nine, from 2011 to 2013, and also a similar continuation of Buffy’s spin-off series Angel, and a connected series based on the popular character of Spike.
  • The Mob’s Discworld adaptations for the UK pay television channel Sky1 are Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006), Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – which combined The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic – and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010). All three are presented as two-part telemovies.
  • The Doctor Who novelisations were most famously produced by Target Books, an imprint of Universal-Tandem publishing and later W H Allen, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Aimed at middle grade readers (mostly), each book adapted one of the original show’s serialised adventures, which usually ran for four to six episodes, and included a few internal illustrations as well as exciting covers. Where possible the original scriptwriter was hired to adapt their own stories, sometimes resulting in very interesting choices and a chance to restore things cut or changed during editing, or adding additional background or motivation to characters. A huge number of these were written by former Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks, who is affectionately known as Uncle Terry by many fans who grew up reading the books. Target no longer truly exists – W H Allen was bought by Virgin (who produced original Doctor Who novels in the 1990s), who was in turn bought by Random House and folded into their imprint Ebury Books. The Doctor Who license reverted to the BBC, and since 2018 they’ve published both novelisations of the stories never originally covered by Target, and new novelisations of stories from the 2005 incarnation of the show, published in a paperback format which deliberately mimics the old Target books style. You can still find the Target books in secondhand book shops all over Australia, which is where Ben collected nearly all of them as a boy.
  • The cynicism/stoicism/epicurean quote is, in fact, from Terry himself! It appears in Small Gods as a summation of the philosophy of Didactylos, who combines the thinking of all three schools (or at least their modern popular interpretations). Here’s the relevant section:

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn’t philosopher material. He didn’t bath often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophised about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of thing. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: Is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous conundrum: ‘Yes, But What’s It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!’

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools – the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans – and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink. Mine’s a double if you’re buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!’

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1990)
  • Ben mentions our episode about Guards! Guards!, which sis #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, from June 2018.
  • A quick primer to the various philosophies that crop up in this discussion:
    • Cynicism dates back to around 400 BC, and the philosophers Antisthenes (a student of Socrates) and Diogenes (who it’s said lived in a clay jar in the streets of Athens). The core belief of cynicism is that being virtuous is the only important goal of life, and thus they rejected societal morés as a distraction. They were big on rejecting most things, actually, including hierarchy, shame and pomposity. They distrusted earnestness and anyone who claimed superiority, and thought it hypocritical to claim that humans are anything other than another kind of animal. This way of thinking led to the original Cynics giving away their wealth and possessions and trying to live “naturally”, or at least simply. They were not popular at the time; the name “Cynics” was a derogatory one, meaning “of a dog” in Ancient Greek, but they adopted it wholeheartedly. (Thanks to subscriber Felix for supplying some of this info!)
    • Stoicism is also an Ancient Greek philosophy, founded by Zeno in around 300 BC. It also asserts that being virtuous is the only important goal in life, but they considered everything else – wealth, pleasure etc – to be neither good nor bad in themselves. They were also keen on living in harmony with nature, and emphasised the importance of action over speaking when it comes to evaluating virtue. The modern meaning of stoicism – of someone who resists strong emotional responses – comes from the original Stoic philosophy that “virtue is sufficient for happiness”, meaning that they considered that as long as you acted in a virtuous way, you could be happy no matter what misfortune you suffered.
    • Epicureanism is named after its founder, Epicurus, another Greek philosopher, and is also from around 300 BC, originally as a challenge to the philosophy of Plato. It’s more or less a form of hedonism: its main tenet is that pleasure (rather than virtue) is the greatest good in life, and that one should live as pleasurably as possible (though in moderation, to avoid the suffering that comes from overindulgence). Epicureanism is about pleasures of the mind rather than physical ones, though, and also concentrates on “natural” desires, though Epicurus didn’t think much of sex or passion. He instead focussed on the desires of minimising negative experiences like pain, suffering and anxiety, which he saw in part stemming from belief in the gods.
    • Utilitarianism is an ethical framework which judges whether an action is right or wrong based on its outcomes, with the goal of maximising happiness or wellbeing for the largest number of people. Thus it considers that it is okay for one or a small number of people to suffer, if it means much much larger number of people are made safe or happy. It has ancient roots, but was popularised as a distinct position in the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
    • Paternalism is less an ethical stance and more a derisive term for those who seek to limit the freedoms of others supposedly in their own good. It’s been applied to a wide range of things from parenting styles to government interventions; in Australia the term “Nanny State” has been used to criticise everything from the introduction of seatbelt laws to the restriction of sales of alcohol and tobacco.
  • Vetinari reads sheet music for pleasure in Soul Music, not Feet of Clay, as Ben guessed. We discussed Soul Music in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • The article Frank sent us about Pratchett’s philosophy is “Terry Pratchett rethought as a philosopher in new study“, from The Guardian in 2014. It refers to the book Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, which we don’t currently have on our list for the podcast – let us know if you’d like us to cover it! (We have a few other similar books in the collection – we can talk about those too, though as they generally contain essays about a wide breadth of Pratchett’s work, episodes like that would necessarily contain some spoilers for books we’ve not yet discussed, and we’d probably leave them until near the end of the show’s run.)
  • Here’s Patrick Alexander’s classic Australian election comic “You Can’t Waste Your Vote!”, starring Dennis the Election Koala and Ken the Voting Dingo (please disregard whatever names Ben misremembered). If you find it useful, please consider throwing a tip Patrick’s way; he isn’t otherwise paid for doing this!
  • You can find the list of weird Australian Capital Territory political parties in the Wikipedia article about the 1989 ACT election. Thanks again Karl!
  • More notes to come!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat55 Notes and Errata

8 May 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“, discussing the twenty-seventh Discworld novel, 2001’s illustrated “Discworld Fable”, The Last Hero with returning guest Georgina Chadderton (aka George Rex).

Iconographic Evidence

Here are George’s drawings that we mentioned in the podcast!

Georgina’s earliest surviving art – a self-portrait of her as Rincewind
A cartoon illustration of characters from the book The Last Hero, sitting at a long table in the style of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"
“The Last Hero’s Last Supper” by George Rex!

Notes and Errata

As a quick note, we’ve preferenced using page numbers from the 2002 and 2007 editions of the book, since they’re probably the one you have. We’ve included page numbers for the first edition (where relevant) in brackets.

  • The episode title is a reference to Australian children’s television icon Mr Squiggle, the “Man from the Moon” who visited Earth in his pet rocket (named Rocket) to turn children’s “squiggles” – scribbled drawings of random lines and shapes – into delightful pictures of birds, fish and koalas with yo-yos using the pencil he had for a nose. His show is an Australian institution, running for forty years between 1959 and 1999 on the public broadcaster, the ABC. We previously mentioned him in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“. (The episode was originally titled “Mr Leonard, the Man on the Moon”, but then Ben rediscovered that the nickname “Mr Doodle” was suggested for Leonard in Men at Arms, and it was too perfect a fit not to change it!)
  • Other guests who’ve returned after a few years include Cal Wilson (in #Pratchat1 and #Pratchat3, and then #Pratchat50), Stephanie Convery (#Pratchat2 and #Pratchat42), Richard McKenzie (#Pratchat5 and #Pratchat40), and most recently Nadia Bailey (#Pratchat17, then #Oggswatch2021 #Pratchat54). Guests who’ve come back without such a big break include Will Kostakis, Fury and Joel Martin. (If there’s a guest you’d love us to get back on the show, let us know! We already have a few in mind…)
  • Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, and the smallest state capital on the mainland (Hobart in Tasmania is much smaller). Unlike the other British colonies in Australia, it was established by free settlers rather than convicts, but it still nearly destroyed the Kaurna people who lived there. Like Australia’s many smaller cities (basically everywhere that’s not Sydney or Melbourne), it has a reputation of being more like a big country town.
  • Earthquakes in Australia are usually too minor to be noticed by humans, but in March 2022 Adelaide experienced two big enough to rattle windows and give people a fright (and prompt the posting of images of garden chairs knocked over with captions like “We will rebuild”, a common sentiment when mild disasters occur). Adelaide is surrounded by fault lines, though, which explains why sometimes they get a few in a row; this ABC News article gets into the details (and gives an example of the meme we mentioned).
  • If you want to get a preview of George’s graphic novel, she released Oh, Brother, a teaser of the original version, which you can find in the shop on her website. (Ben’s read it, it’s really good.)
  • You can find out more about the Paper Cuts Comics Festival on their website, papercutscomicfestival.com.
  • Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a British comedy film directed by Anthony Fabian set to be released in July 2022. It’s based on the 1958 novel Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico, and stars Lesley Manville as the titular cleaner living in post-war London, who dreams of escaping her life and owning a fancy gown made by Christian Dior. The nearly three-minute long trailer does indeed reveal pretty much every plot beat of the film.
  • In Greek mythology, Prometheus is one of the younger Titans who helped the gods overthrow the other Titans. In many versions of his story, he subsequently tricked Zeus, including causing him to accept bones and fat rather than meat as a sacrifice from mortals, which is what angered Zeus into hiding fire from them. Prometheus then stole it back, but in some accounts also taught humans many other hallmarks of civilisation, and possibly saved them from obliteration at Zeus’ hand. For these transgressions he was, like Fingers-Mazda, chained to a rocks and had his liver eaten by an enormous eagle in the day, only to grow whole again overnight to repeat the torture for eternity. He is eventually freed by Heracles, in some versions with Zeus’ permission, though Heracles kills the eagle rather than letting Prometheus do it.
  • The Bayeux Tapestry is a famous artwork depicting the history of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It’s huge, almost 70 metres long, and was probably made in England not long after the events describes, perhaps in the 1070s. Traditionally it is thought to have been commissioned by Queen Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror, but historians consider it more likely to have been commissioned by the Bishop Odo, William’s half-brother. It got its name in the 18th century when it came to the notice of scholars as it was displayed in a cathedral in Bayeux, Normandy. The seventy or so illustrations on it are not woven into the linen fabric, as in many tapestries, but are embroidered, using a form of wool yarn, leading some scholars to prefer the term “Bayeux Embroidery”, though many think this is splitting hairs as the term “tapestry” isn’t that precise.
  • Fan service means anything including in a work of fiction that’s specifically designed to please an existing fan base. The term originates with Japanese manga and anime, where it often more specifically means content which is titillating or sexual in nature.
  • If you’re interested in learning about the visual literacy in comics, and in general about how comics work, we highly recommend the now classic work by Scott McLeod, Understanding Comics.
  • A Clockwork Orange is a 1962 science fiction novel written by English author Anthony Burgess (1917-1993). It depicts a dystopian future in which teenagers speak in a slang called “Nadsat” (from the Russian suffix meaning “-teen”) and form gangs to engage in random acts of “ultra-violence”. The protagonist, Alex, recounts some of his exploits, including falling out with his gang and being abandoned by them after an assault and robbery to be arrested, imprisoned and eventually put through an experimental form of aversion therapy, the “Ludivico Technique”. Stanley Kubrick famously filmed the novel in 1971, with a young Malcolm McDowell in the role of Alex; the film was controversial for including the violence (including murder and rape) present in the book, and has been hugely influential, introducing some of the slang terms like “droogs” (friends) and “ultra-violence” into common parlance. The Kubrick film was based on the US edition of the novel, which omitted the final chapter, and Burgess did not like the result. Burgess himself wrote a musical stage adaptation in 1987, and there have been many other stage productions since.
  • bell hooks (1952-2021) was the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins, an academic, activist and writer who wrote many influential books about race, feminism and class. hooks used lowercase for her pen name (which was also the name of her Great Grandmother) in an attempt to emphasise the work over the person. Ben is mistaken when he says she doesn’t use much capitalisation or punctuation, though; while she does favour plain language and long sentences, she uses standard English grammar.
  • There have been four editions of The Last Hero in English:
    • The original 2001 hardcover (160 pages; UK – Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-06885-X; US – HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-104096-7) is the one all three of us have read. It has Cohen atop a mountain on the cover, and is roughly 24cm wide and 28.5cm tall. As far as we know is the only one to feature the full-colour illustration of Leonard on the Moon looking at the Disc, which appears on the back cover of the dust jacket. (A pencil drawing of this illustration appears in the background on page 121 (or page 133 in the later editions). There’s a German translation of this edition, but it seems most other translations are of the second edition.
    • 2,000 copies were made of a limited “Deluxe Edition” of the UK hardcover (ISBN 0-575-07370-5), though we’re not sure what exactly was different about it – all the photos we can find look just like the hardcover Ben has with the dust jacket taken off! (For the record: the cloth cover underneath is plain black, embossed with the title, authors’ names and just Cohen from the original cover in gold.) Some sources list it as a “slipcase” edition, so it might have been exactly the same except with a slipcase instead of a dust jacket. (It was only £25 compared to the standard edition’s price of £17.99, so this minor change seems about right.)
    • The 2002 paperback edition (176 pages; UK – Victor Gollancz, ISBN 0-575-07977-2; US – Eos/HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-050777-2) has the same page dimensions as the original hardcover (though the cover is a little smaller). This one features the Rincewind “Scream” cover and includes text describing it as “The No. 1 Bestseller” and “Includes 16 pages of all-new illustrations”. That the new illustrations did not appear in the deluxe edition caused some fans to be disgruntled with the publishers…
    • The 2007 paperback edition (176 pages; Victor Gollancz, ISBN 978-0-575-08196-3) is pretty much exactly the same as the 2002 version, except with an illustration of the entire Silver Horde on the cover, and it’s smaller: about 17cm wide and 19.5cm tall. Thanks to the specific layout, the page numbers are identical. This version has stayed in print since it was introduced, and is also the version on which the ebook, published in 2015, is based.
    • There’s also an audiobook of The Last Hero, published in 2008 by Isis Books (ISBN 978-0-7531-4058-1 / 040202) – the company with the original license to produce unabridged audiobooks of Pratchett’s works. Its narrated by Stephen Briggs. Its unclear as yet if a new audiobook of The Last Hero will be released as part of the new Penguin Audiobooks…
  • The Scream – whose actual title is Skrik (Norwegian for “Shriek”) or Der Schrei der Natur (German for “The Scream of Nature”) – is an 1893 pre-expressionist artwork by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944). It depicts a bald figure in the foreground, standing on a bridge or pier near the sea, under a red sky; the figure is clutching its head and has its mouth open in a scream. Munch painted four versions, two in oils and two in pastels, and a lithograph – a carved version from which several monochrome prints were made, some of which were then hand-coloured by Munch. The first version is on display in the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, and bares a pencil inscription in Norwegian, written by Munch, that went unnoticed until 1903: “Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!“, “Could only have been painted by a madman!”
  • Is Rincewind a “young person”? He’s certainly much younger than Cohen, but by the time of The Last Hero he would by some accounts be around 57, though he looks considerably younger in Kidby’s drawings. Perhaps wizards age more slowly than other folks – or his time in the Dungeon Dimensions put a temporary stop to his physical ageing.
  • Ben makes good on his promise to describe at least most of the new illustrations from the second and later editions, but for reference, here’s a list:
    • Pages 50-51 – a map of part of the Disc, showing the route of the fleet that set out from Ankh-Morpork towards Krull.
    • Pages 70-71 – a portrait-oriented image of Death, the Death of Rats and Albert (holding a kitten in a box) looking up at A’Tuin’s immense life timer.
    • Pages 90-91 – the view down to the Hub from the spire of Cori Celesti.
    • Pages 104-105 – the Kite flying towards the viewer off the edge of the Rimfall.
    • Pages 116-117 – a painting of the wizards, the Luggage and Vetinari in the darkened hold of the ship, looking at the glowing lines of the spell tracking the Kite‘s path. (This is the one Ben later thinks is based on an existing work; see below for the answer we’ve come up with, thanks to subscriber Fiona Margolotta!)
    • Pages 126-127 – a portrait-oriented image of Rincewind on the moon, with one of the elephants in the background, in “the Scream” pose. (This is the image used for the cover of the second edition.)
    • Pages 138-139 – Ridcully, Ponder and another member of the Faculty (possible the Lecturer in Recent Runes) in the bow of the ship, the Luggage in the prow. The wizards are looking up at the moon, where the Kite blasting off can be seen, resembling a shooting star. Ridcully is fishing over the side of the ship – there’s a pile of very weird fish on the deck, and a worried looking sea serpent in the ocean. (This scene doesn’t quite appear in the text, but it’s a great painting.)
    • Pages 154-155 – a parody of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”, depicting Cohen in Adam’s pose giving the finger to Blind Io, who takes the place of the Christian God, and is surrounded by the other gods. (This appears in sketch form in the background of the pages where Rincewind talks the heroes out of their plan, on pages 144-145 of the first edition and 160-161 of the later editions.)
  • Our episode about Interesting Times was #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“, a pun on the novel and film Memoirs of a Geisha. (See the episode notes for more.) The pun just about still works if you pronounce it “A-gatt-ee-ah”… Sadly the official source, The Discworld Companion, neglects to supply a pronunciation, but probably whatever Stephen Briggs says in the audiobooks is “correct”.
  • Old Vincent is noted as being 87 in Interesting Times, and having trouble with his memory. He is not actually the oldest of them; that would be Mad Hamish, who in Interesting Times is 105. Cohen himself estimated his own age as between ninety and ninety-five, while Caleb the Ripper was 85. Boy Willie is noted as being the only one under eighty.
  • How much time has passed since Interesting Times? As usual there’s no canonical answer, but clues and fan theories suggest it’s probably been about three or four years.
  • The Cabin in the Woods is a 2011 horror comedy, directed by Drew Goddard and written by Goddard with Joss Whedon, which parodies slasher films and serves up a critique of more modern “torture porn” style horror films. It has a great cast, including Chris Hemsworth (of Thor fame) and Bradley Whitford (of The West Wing), plus many actors familiar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel. It has a stereotypical collection of college student horror characters head for a weekend in cabin out in the woods, while a pair of scientists observe them and subject them to chemicals and other stimuli that force them to behave like horror movie characters, all leading to a mysterious ritual. The scientists receive messages from other labs around the world advising them that other experiments have failed, leaving the American team as the last hope…and we won’t spoil any more than that, because it’s a pretty great film.
  • The Agatean Empire does not appear in any subsequent novels, but there is a canonical answer to what happens next in The Compleat Discworld Atlas, so we’ll revisit this when we cover that book.
  • Leonard of Quirm – as he is more often called, though he is also referred to as Leonard da Quirm in the books – is first mentioned in Wyrd Sisters (see #Pratchat4), where he is responsible for designing the wave machine used for special ocean effects at The Dysk theatre in Ankh-Morpork. Notably he is still “at large” in that book, working primarily as a painter from the Street of Cunning Artificers, and doing engineering as a side hustle. He’s safely ensconced in the Patrician’s palace by the time of Men at Arms (#Pratchat1), having designed and built the gonne which – deemed more dangerous than the other things Leonard had actually constructed – was meant to be destroyed by the Assassin’s Guild. By the time of Jingo (#Pratchat27) he’s been in the palace for five years – and we realise he does get to go along on the submarine adventure in that book, but only under the Patrician’s strict supervision. He also appears in The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40), and is mentioned briefly in Soul Music (where one of his illustrations inspires the Librarian to build his motorcycle; see #Pratchat19) and The Truth (where Mr Tulip admires one of his artworks; see #Pratchat42), but will only return once more, in Monstrous Regiment.
  • Cohen doesn’t wear a loincloth – it’s always been described and illustrated as a “leather hold-all”, like the furry underpants worn by He-Man.
  • The exhibition of Terry’s life and work that Ben remembers was Terry Pratchett: HisWorld, which featured at the Salisbury Museum from September 2017 to January 2018. Two books were produced for the exhibition – one limited edition small hardcover available only at the exhibition, and another larger art book. and you can find it and details of the exhibition at pratchetthisworld.com. The Shed of Doom was not actually build for HisWorld, but the following year for the Chalke Valley History Festival, where the HisWorld recreation of Terry’s writing room was also exhibited again. We’ve included a Tweet from the official @Discworld_com account below with some great photos of the Shed, and the CVHF also have a time-lapse video of its construction on Vimeo.

It looks incredible! Terry Pratchett's Shed of Doom has been built! But there's much more to come! Make sure you get a chance to visit the Chalke Valley History Festival and check out the Discworld! https://t.co/RicDsVB0Iz #ShedofDoom #AmazingHistory pic.twitter.com/OEvfZWZ4dz

— Discworld (@Discworld_com) June 19, 2018
  • In the Pokémon series of videogames, there are several goals: one is to fill out your “Pokédex”, an index of every Pokémon creature, by capturing at least one specimen of every species. But you are also on a quest to prove yourself as the greatest Pokémon trainer in the region, usually by defeating the gym leaders – the best trainer is each of the local “Pokémon gyms”, which are basically training camps for Pokémon trainers, usually specialising in Pokémon of a certain type. When you enter a gym you find a unique (or at least distinctive) challenge you must overcome to get to the gym leader, which always includes fighting Pokémon battles against their gym members. And that’s even before you get to the final part of each game, which involves battling against the champion trainers above the individual gyms! Which is all to say that Evil Harry Dread being one of those unnamed trainers in the gym before the leader is a pretty scathing review from Liz of his Evil Overlord status.
  • Crufts is a famous UK dog show. We previously talked about it briefly in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • The Nothingfjord Blue swamp dragon does indeed seem to be a clear reference to Monty Python’s famous “Dead Parrot Sketch”. In the sketch, Mr Praline (John Cleese with a silly voice) tries to return a large, blue and clearly dead parrot to a pet shop, the owner of which (played by Michael Palin) tries to argue that it is not dead. The parrot in the sketch is described as a “Norwegian Blue” (a nonexistent species) which has “beautiful plumage”; the shopkeeper at one point claims that it is “pining for the fjords”. NoThingfjord, meanwhile, was first mentioned in The Last Continent as the birthplace of Mad the dwarf. It’s also mentioned in The Last Hero – it was the Duke of NoThingfjord who employed Mad Hamish and other members of the Silver Horde as mercenaries, in the battle they were asked to repeatedly re-stage for the purposes of capturing it in a tapestry. Some more details are given in The Discworld Mapp, where it’s revealed that it’s home to the Discworld’s equivalent of vikings, who were great explorers but not very successful raiders since they always made appointments with their potential victims, giving advance warning of their arrival.
  • The barbarian heroine in The Light Fantastic is Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan, who also gets a passing mention in Eric. We should also give Conina, Cohen’s daughter from Sourcery, a shout-out too.
  • Open All Hours was one of two successful BBC sitcoms developed from Seven of One, a showcase of sitcom pilots starring Ronnie Barker, which was broadcast in 1973. (The other was the prison comedy Porridge.) Barker, in a false moustache and pronounced stutter, plays Arkwright, the owner of a corner store in Yorkshire, who longs for and lusts after Nurse Gladys, who lives across the road with her elderly mother. He also attempts to teach all his dirty tricks for selling to customers to his assistant, his orphaned nephew Granville, played by David Jason – known to Discworld fans as both Albert in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, and Rincewind in the live-action adaptation of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Open All Hours ran for four series between 1976 and 1985, and remained popular enough to spawn a sequel, Still Open All Hours, in which Granville (still played by David Jason) has taken over the store. Still Open All Hours has had six series between 2014 and 2019.
  • Liz has mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy novel The Homeward Bounders before, in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left”, and #EeekClub2021, our first special episode discussing topics chosen by subscribers. In the book, demonic entities known only as Them play a boardgame with the denizens of the many alternate universes that exist – in part by selecting mortals who will be thrown out of their own universe, and must then try to make it home.
  • The Mysterious Cities of Gold (in Japanese 太陽の子エステバン, “Esteban, Child of the Sun“, and in French Les Mystérieuses Cités d’Or) is a French-Japanese animated television series that ran for one season of 39 episodes in 1982 and 1983. Set in the sixteenth century, the show follows three children – Esteban, Mia and Tao – as they travel with (and sometimes run from) the roguish explorer Mendoza and his bumbling sidekicks, as they search for the legendary “Seven Cities of Gold”. Along the way it turns out all three of the children are connected to various ancient, technologically advanced civilisations, and they discover several technological marvels of the ancient world, including the “Golden Condor”, a bird-like flying machine roughly the size of the Kite, which is powered by the Sun. Aside from its super catchy theme song, one of the things that distinguished it from other cartoons was the live-action educational segment at the end of each episode, which aimed to teach viewers about the real-world history and cultures of South America (though let’s remember this was the early 1980s, so it probably wasn’t very culturally aware). It was broadcast in Australia on the ABC in the mid-80s, and again more recently on NITV. Three new seasons, continuing on from the original, were produced in France between 2012 and 2021. The new seasons also spawned two videogames.
  • In the 1970s and 80s there were several European-Japanese co-productions in animation, predominantly in France. The other well-known example is Ulysses 31 (also created by Jean Chapolin, of The Mysterious Cities of Gold and Inspector Gadget fame), which translated the story of Odysseus/Ulysses into a science-fiction context. There are others, but they’re not nearly as well known in English-speaking countries.
  • We haven’t been able to find any pictures of the Kite model made as a drawing reference, though we know that it exists from a quote from Pratchett himself, featured in the Annotated Pratchett Guide. We’d still love to see it, though, so if anyone knows of any photos that exist, please send us a link!
  • NASA did send an ape into space! There were many monkeys and apes involved in the early spaceflight program at NASA, used as passengers or even trained pilots in test flights made prior to sending a human. This was not, of course, very nice for the animals, many of whom did not survive; in fact before they returned from any mission, the chimpanzees at NASA were only given numbers, not names, to reduce the emotional impact of press stories about their deaths, which puts the whole thing into grim perspective. But the success story of the program was Ham, the chimp who became the first great ape in space when he successfully returned from a sub-orbital flight on January 31, 1961. He lived for another twenty-two years, mostly at a Zoo in Washington, D.C., and when he died he was buried at the International Space Hall of Fame – a much nicer end that the original plan to stuff him and put him on display in the museum, something Russia did with some of the dogs from its own early space program.
  • Goodby Bindle Featherstone of Quirm – better known as Errol – appears in Guards! Guards!, where he is first encountered by Vimes on his visit to Lady Ramkin to learn about dragons. He is later gifted to Vimes, who has already taken a liking to him, and gains his shorter name when Nobby comments that “he looks more like my brother Errol”. His ability to flame from the, er, other end is said in that book to be partly genetic and partly down to the swamp dragons’ ability to rearrange their internal plumbing to make use of whatever fuel they can find.
  • Leonard’s drawings of swamp and moon dragons appear on pages 77 and 129 (73 and 117 in the first edition).
  • The painting of Ridcully fishing near the Circumference while the Kite blasts off from the moon is on pages 138 and 139.
  • The painting of the wizards observing the spell (from pages 116-117 of the later editions) appears to be based very specifically on A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun, painted in 1766 by Joseph Wright of Derby. Wright’s style (and Kirby’s excellent copy of it) probably seems familiar to you – he also painted An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which was the inspiration for Kidby’s cover painting for The Science of Discworld. (See #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, for more information.) Thanks to subscriber Fiona Margolotta for helping us solve this mystery!
  • The picture of Cohen holding his sword outside the background that frames him appears on page 136 (124 in the first edition). There doesn’t appear to be a general term for this in art, but in comics it’s known as a breakout panel, or panel breaking.
  • The Lady first appears in The Colour of Magic, where she appears to Rincewind and Twoflower, giving them a chance to escape their fate (and, er, Fate) in Krull. She also appears in Interesting Times, starting a new game against Fate. Her original description states that her eyes are “Not the pale green of ordinary eyes … the green of fresh emeralds and as iridescent as a dragonfly.” Interestingly they’re not described as being entirely green until Interesting Times, though the dryad Rincewind meets earlier in The Colour of Magic does have eyes like that.
  • Modern dice have their numbers arranged so that the ones on opposite faces add up to the number of faces plus one. This arrangement – called “sevens” for the sum on a six-sided dice – makes sure that if the dice gets flattened somehow, making the numbers on two opposite sides more likely to be rolled, the average result of the dice will stay the same. Ben has a novelty twenty-sided dice a bit bigger than a golf ball that’s like this; it mostly rolls a 3 or an 18, but this still evens out to good or bad luck. The sevens configuration goes back to ancient Roman times, though it fell out of fashion around the twelfth century, when dice became more standardised and switched to a “primes” configuration. Sevens came back into vogue from around 1450 – seemingly alongside an increasing understanding of mathematics and basic probability during the Renaissance – and was extended to other die sizes too. (As an aside, we’re using “dice” as both singular and plural here, which is accepted modern usage.)
  • The Scandanavian story of the dice is the story of Oláf Haraldsson from the Heimskringla saga, told by Snorri Sturluson – though even he thought it was a bit on the nose, and credited the story to another bard, Thorstein the Learned. Haraldsson was a Norwegian Viking who in 1015 proclaimed himself King Oláf II of Norway in a bid to reclaim his land from Danish and Swedish rule. He sorted out the Danes without much trouble – King Canute was not much interested in Norway at the time – and made peace with Sweden, in part by marrying King Oláf of Sweden’s daughter. (This is why history is never the great for stories – who gives their two protagonists the same name?) When the two kings met to finalise which kingdom would own what, they disagreed about the Island of Hísing, but rather than go back to war they played dice for it. In a story reminiscent of one of Arnold Rimmer’s Risk stories from Red Dwarf, the Swedish king threw double-sixes; then the Norwegian King threw double-sixes; then the Swedish King threw double-sixes…and then King Oláf II therew the dice, and one split in half, showing a six and a one, giving him a result of thirteen and breaking the ongoing tie. As Ben mentions, this story is mentioned in The Science of Discworld in Chapter 34, “Nine Times Out of Ten”, about probability. (It’s Chapter 32 in the original edition.) While the result is far-fetched, it’s far from the only time powerful people have gambled for something so valuable: Ben is reminded of the story of a Japanese businessman in “Anything For the Client“, a 2015 story from the Snap Judgment podcast.
  • “Are We the Baddies” refers to a series of sketches from That Mitchell and Webb Look, a BBC Three sketch comedy series starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb. In the sketches, the pair play nazi officers during World War II; Mitchell’s character begins to worry that the skulls on their caps and various other clues might mean they are not the good guys. You can watch a compilation of the sketches on YouTube.
  • The illustrations of Carrot facing up to the Horde appear on pages 158 and 159 (142 and 143 in the first edition).
  • Michael Williams was our guest in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“. His story of the time he interviewed Pratchett live on stage was cut for time from #Pratchat26, but appears in the third episode of our subscriber-only podcast, Ook Club. (Our Support Us page has info on how you can get access to that podcast.)
  • We discussed Johnny and the Dead back in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
  • Emperor Carelinus is the Discworld equivalent of Roundworld’s Alexander the Great, at least seen through the lens of mythologising and popular culture. His name might be a reference to the Roman emperor Charlemagne, also known as Carolus. Alexander famously cut the Gordian knot, whose Discworld equivalent the minstrel informs us was located in Tsort. The bit about him reaching the end of the world and weeping is based on Alexander’s life, but also seems to be specifically a reference to the movie Die Hard, where Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber supposedly quotes the ancient historian Plutarch’s book about his life: “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.” That phrase, however, doesn’t appear anywhere in Plutarch – it’s cobbled together from several passages and echoes similar things from other later sources, but was invented (or perhaps messed up artfully) for the film.
  • We mention the various editions of the Discworld books this episode, which is probably something to which we should devote an entire episode one of these days. But here’s a quick guide to the major ones, or at least the ones we get in the UK and Australia:
    • The original English editions, published in hardcover by Gollancz (up to Jingo; Doubleday afterwards) and paperback by Corgi, had the Josh Kirby covers up until Thief of Time. From Night Watch on, they have covers by Paul Kidby. Kidby also obviously illustrated The Last Hero, but didn’t do the original cover for The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, which was by David Wyatt. Kidby did later do a cover for The Amazing Maurice, but the newest editions have covers by Mark Beech, who’s done covers (and sometimes internal illustrations) for all of Pratchett’s books for younger readers. No editions of the earlier Discworld books have been published with covers by Kidby, even though he has done illustrations for some of them. (Though see the note on the new 2022 editions below.)
    • In 2012, Corgi began reissuing slightly larger B-format editions of the Discworld novels, which replaced the earlier paperback editions. These re-use Kirby and Kidby’s artwork, but reworked the cover designs, giving them a more consistent look, usually by using a smaller piece of Kirby’s artwork for the cover.
    • The hardcover/cloth ones mentioned by George are the Collector’s Library editions, which we previously discussed in #Pratchat30. These were first published between 2014 and 2016 by Gollancz, Terry’s first publisher, but because they didn’t have hardcover rights to the books after Jingo, the set remained incomplete. In 2017, Terry’s later publisher Doubleday (owned by Penguin Random House) got on board and continued the series with matching editions of the later books, though the “younger readers books” – The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and the Tiffany Aching books – weren’t published in this format until 2021. Of special note: Eric has been published in this format, as just the text, but The Last Hero has not, since the format doesn’t allow for the illustrated format.
    • As part of the “50 Years of Terry” celebration (marking fifty years since his first novel, The Carpet People, was originally published in 1971), new editions of “all 40 Discworld novels” will be published with a consistent cover design, coinciding with the release of the new unabridged audiobook versions (which use square versions of the same designs). Each sub-series is published together, with the standalone books distributed among the publication dates; the first batch, of the five witches books and Small Gods, were released in 2022 on Pratchett’s birthday, April 28. It seems likely The Last Hero will not be re-issued in this edition, explaining the “all 40” comment above.
  • Teflon and velcro are both often cited as having been originally created to solve problems for the space program, but in fact both were invented decades earlier. This is such a persistent “fact” that NASA still has an FAQ page answering the question “Are Tang, Teflon and Velcro NASA spin-offs?“
  • This is Spinal Tap is a 1984 improvised mockumenary film, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as the members of Spinäl Tap, a British rock band who are supposedly one of the biggest in the world. Parts of the film flash back to the band’s earlier days, including a sequence in black and white showing one of the earlier incarnations of the band, the Thamesmen, who had a Beatles-like hit titled “Gimme Some Money”. The song Ben references here, “Listen to the Flower People”, was recorded after the band changed their name to Spinäl Tap. The film is consistently named one of the funniest ever made, and established the largely improvised documentary format which Christopher Guest has returned to many times for films like Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind. Rob Reiner announced in 2022 that he is planning a sequel, reuniting the original cast.
  • The illustration of the Kite crew on the moon looking at the elephant and disc appears on pages 130-131 (118-119 in the first edition).
  • In James Cameron’s 1986 film Aliens, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) joins a group of marines to investigate the silence of a colony established on the planet where her crew picked up a vicious alien lifeform in 1979’s Alien. When they confirm that the aliens are still there and have killed most of the colonists, and most of the marines have been killed as well, Ripley says one of many famous lines from the film: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” The dog-Latin version appears in Leonard’s drawings on page
  • Discworld books with few footnotes from around the time of The Last Hero include Night Watch, Monstrous Regiment (each of which has only ten), The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (with just four) and Going Postal (which has none!). Thud! has closer to an average number, with twenty footnotes.
  • “Second star to the right, and straight on ’til morning” are the directions given to Neverland by Peter Pan when Wendy asks his address in Peter Pan – or at least in the film adaptations. In the 1904 play Peter Pan and 1911 novel Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, Peter doesn’t specify he means a star; he only says “Second to the right and then straight on till morning”, leaving Wendy none the wiser.
  • At the end of the 1991 film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the starship Enterprise is sent back to Earth to be decommissioned. Captain Kirk decides to take it on one last journey, and when asked for a heading by helm officer Chekhov, says “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.” It’s nearly the last line of he film.
  • Ben mentions several sources for annotations for the book:
    • The original Annotated Pratchett File entry for The Last Hero;
    • The annotations page for The Last Hero on the L-Space wiki (Ben has added a few to this list);
    • The Discworld wiki page for The Last Hero (look under “Popular references”; note that a fair bit of this is cribbed from other sources, it’s not very well organised, and there’s some stuff Ben considers pretty dubious, but there are still some good ones in there);
    • The TV Tropes article about The Last Hero (these are organised by trope; look especially under “Call-back” for references to past Discworld books, and “Shout Out” for references to other stuff).
  • You can find lots of Paul Kidby’s other artwork – including pictures of gnomes, dragons, unicorns, fairies and many more – on his website, paulkidby.com.
  • The painting of Dunmanifestin is on page 17.
  • The Moai – the famous statues of Easter Island – are more than 900 monolithic statues of ancestors, created by the Rapa Nui people between around 1250 and 1500. While they are often referred to as “heads”, they are complete bodies, though many of the famous photos are of Moai from the coast, which are often buried in the earth up to the shoulders. They are on average around four metres tall, but the biggest is nearly 10 metres high – and an unfinished one was more than twice that!
  • Chichen Itza is a Mayan city in the Mexican state of Yucatán. Probably the biggest city of the Mayan civilisation, it is now an archeological site and tourist destination, at the centre of which is the Temple of Kukulcán, a step-pyramid also known as El Castillo or La Pirámide, names given by European explorers. It was built in worship of Kukulcán, the Mayan incarnation of the a feathered serpent deity known to the Aztecs as Qetzacoatl. A very similar temple to a fairly similar god features in Eric.
  • We couldn’t identify the building out the back of Dunmanifestin on our own – but we reached out to Paul Kidby on Twitter, who told us it’s the home of the Great God Om (of Small Gods fame), as requested by Terry himself! You can see our question and his response below.

It is where the Great God Om lives. It was added at Terry's request. Well spotted!

— Paul Kidby 🇺🇦 (@PaulKidby) May 21, 2022
  • The Man in the Moone is a 1638 novel by Bishop Francis Godwin of Hereford, in which a Spaniard travels to the moon in a chariot which is, well done Ben, drawn by swans. (The illustration of Leonard in a chariot drawn by swamp dragons – what the Patrician imagines his plan to be – appears on pages 32-33.) Godwin’s book is one of the earliest published stories about space travel, and was famous enough to be parodied by the real life Cyrano de Bergerac twenty years later, as referenced in Rostand’s famous 1897 play about Bergerac. Godwin’s story, or Bergerac’s parody, may have influenced many other writers, including Rudolf Raspe in his tales of Baron Munchausen.
  • “Tribute” is the first single from American rock duo Tenacious D, comprised of Jack Black and Kyle Gass. It was originally written for their HBO television series, and was released on their first album, Tenacisou D, in 2002. In the song, the pair tell the story of how they meet a demon and beat him in a “rock off” by playing “the Greatest Song in the World”, in a manner similar to the fiddling competition from “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”. Afterwards they cannot remember the song they played, and instead write this song as a “tribute” to that one. Apparently it wasn’t a huge hit in the US, but in Australia and New Zealand we loved it, rocketing it into the top ten; its certified platinum in AUstralia, New Zealand and the UK, and also did well in the Netherlands. A version of the “rock off” features in the Tenacious D feature film, The Pick of Destiny, where they compete against Satan after plotting to steal the titular guitar pick, which is made from a piece of his horn. (Ben, a big Tenacious D fan, recommends the soundtrack album for the film, but not the film itself.)
  • Ballads and sagas are different things, but only the former is usually a “story song“.
    • Traditional ballads can be songs or poems, but they usually tell a story in many short verses. (Ben wrote one himself, retelling the story of Frankenstein from the perspective of the often forgotten ship’s captain whose letters serve as a framing narrative.) They were particularly popular in Ireland and England for many centuries; the name seems to derive from the medieval Scottish ballares, which itself comes from the Latin ballare, meaning “to dance”, showing that they were also originally songs you danced to. (Both ballet and the different form of French poetry, the ballade – as practised by Cyrano de Bergerac in the famous poetic fight scene near the start of Rostand’s play – also get their name from the same Latin root.) Early ballads often have anonymous sources, but they are sources of stories about Robin Hood, Beowulf and many other figures. The ballad went on to have a rich history, in storytelling, political satire and popular music, until they fell out of fashion in the 19th century.
    • In historical terms, saga properly describes long prose stories from Iceland and other Scandinavian countries. The word saga (whose plural is sǫgur) is Old Norse, and evolved from meaning “what is said” to describing a story or history. (The modern words for all these things in Scandinavian languages are derived from saga.) The earliest sagas were mostly passed on orally, and were written down in the 13th century, but especially in Iceland – where the language has changed very little over a thousand or more years – they are still well understood. Probably the most famous author of sagas was Snorri Sturluson, a law speaker of the Althing in Iceland who lived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and is credited with composing or compiling many sagas about Icelandic history and legend, including the Prose Edda – on which our modern understanding of Norse mythology is based – and the Heimskringla, a history of Scandanavian kings we’ve already mentioned in these notes. In modern English usage, a “saga” is any long story, especially if its told in parts; for example the main films of the Star Wars universe are usually referred to as “the Skywalker saga”.
  • “Bardcore” is, as Ben says, a musical genre in which modern songs are performed in a “medieval” style, to varying levels of authenticity. There are indeed several bardcore versions of Led Zeppelin’s classic track “Immigrant Song”, from heir 1970 album Led Zeppelin III on YouTube. Our picks include this instrumental one by Constantine Bard; this one with English vocals by Grace Sledd; and this one translated into Old Norse by the Miracle Aligner, which he suggests might be better termed “Skaldcore”. Thanks to subscriber Sven who suggested that last one! (And while we’re talking “Immigrant Song”, some of Ben’s other favourite covers of it include The Cybertronic Spree, Robyn Adele Anderson (in a 1940s swing style), Karen O with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (for the soundtrack to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), and The Foo Fighters, featuring Tenacious D and Slash!)
  • Sea shanties have enjoyed a few rounds of popularity on TikTok, where shared videos can be offered as a “duet”, allowing other users to record themselves singing along and post a new video of both singers side by side. (You can do this multiple times, adding many levels of voices or instruments, and its not limited to music – some very funny videos have been created this way!) Shanies are perfect for this since hey’re designed to be easy to sing, but also they are traditionally sung a cappella without harmonies, leaving lots of room for modern additions. The most well-known shanty to become TikTok famous is “The Wellerman”, particularly a performance by Nathan Evans. This YouTube compilation gives you a good idea of the form. (Evans recently did a filk song version about the 2022 Doctor Who special “Legend of the Sea Devils”.)
  • The black-figure style – as seen in the image of Blind Io and Fingers-Mazda on page 8 – was very popular in Greece and parts of what is now Italy from around the 7th to 5th centuries BCE, though it hung around for a few centuries after its height. This style of art was painted in black, white and usually shades of orange or red on vases, amphorae and other ceramic vessels.
  • Kidby’s parodies of Leonardo da Vinci’s work in The Last Hero include:
    • A version of his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, on page 30. This is known as the Mona Ogg, because as revealed in The Art of Discworld – another book it seems we need to cover! – she and Leonard were romantically involved in their youth. Leonard’s version is indeed a painting of a young Gytha Ogg. In fact the one in this book seems to be a new version, since the Mona Ogg has existed before the gonne affair in Men at Arms, so perhaps the original was painted in their youth?
    • A version of the Vitruvian Man on pages 86 and 87, showing Rincewind strapped into Leonard’s spaceflight training device, with the usual number of arms. (This appears on pages 82 and 83 in the first edition, and it also the end papers.) da Vinci’s original artwork was an ink drawing from around 1490 titled Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio, or “The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius”. It shows a man with his arms and legs draw in two different positions, describing both a circle and a square; Rincewind is drawn only in the circular position. Vitruvius was a Roman architect, and Leonardo’s notes that accompany the drawing – in mirror-writing, of course – refer to notes Vitruvius made about the proportions of the human body in his book De architectura (“On architecture”), written around 15-30 years BCE. It’s important to note that these proportions are of a typically masculine body, and so are not truly universal.
  • The story of the space pen vs the pencil is indeed mostly a myth. As Liz mentions, NASA had legitimate reasons for wanting to avoid pencils – highly flammable pencil shavings could present a hazard aboard a spacecraft, especially as graphite can conduct electricity and potentially cause a short-circuit if bits got into electronic components. The Fisher Space Pen ended up being the answer, but NASA didn’t spend billions of dollars creating it – the Fisher Pen Company was already working on a pressurised ink cartridge that enabled writing at various angles, and they perfected it after NASA reached out to them.
  • A mission patch – also known as a “space patch”, since they are mostly known from space exploration – is an emblem representing a particular mission which is worn as an embroidered cloth badge by astronauts and other mission personally. They date back to one of the early soviet space missions, Vostok 6, when the first one was worn by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. Mission patches come from the military tradition of shoulder sleeve insignia (SSI) or shoulder patches – embroidered badges worn on the sleeves of military uniforms, especially in the US, to show the division to which a soldier belongs. (You can see them in Stargate SG-1, where the airforce personnel assigned to the Stargate program wear patches which seem part SSI, part NASA mission patch…and they’re attached by velcro, so they can remove them when operating on Earth and avoiding disclosing the classified Stargate program.)
  • The Lego Space theme is a classic theme for Lego sets introduced in 1978 and originally running until 1987. It’s logo, of a white space shuttle with a smaller red shuttle shown orbiting around it, deliberately resembles the NASA “meatball” logo. Sets using this theme were hugely popular, and it was revisited many times up until 2013. The character of Benny in The Lego Movie is a classic Lego Spaceman, with the Lego Space logo on his chest and the iconic oxygen tanks and helmet from that theme.
  • Rincewind’s motto “Morituri Nolumus Mori“ echoes the famous Latin phrase “Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant” – “Hail, Emperor; those who are about to die salute you”. While it is popularly believed to have been said by gladiators to watching emperors, there’s actually no evidence this ever happened. It is documented in contemporary histories only once, in the work De vita Caesarum (“The Life of the Caesars”) by Suetonius. There it is said by soldiers participating in a mock naval battle in 52 AD.
  • In Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo (“The Creation of Adam”), his famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, God is surrounded by a billowing cloak. This was famously described as a brain in an episode of the television series Westworld, but that theory is older than that – and contentious, as some think it’s more like a uterus! This article at The Verge goes into detail.
  • Several books contain references to Rincewind’s childhood:
    • In The Light Fantastic, upon meeting Cohen, he recalls his grandad telling him stories about the barbarian.
    • Rincewind claims in Sourcery that his mother “ran away before I was born”.
    • Interesting Times reveals that Rincewind “had no personal experience of either parent but felt that they were probably at least vaguely humanoid, if only briefly.”
    • In The Last Continent Rincewind recognises sheep, despite growing up in the city, in part because he’d had a stuffed toy lamb as a child.
  • The tradition of orphans in Ankh-Morpork being given to a Guild is mentioned not only in Thief of Time (see #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“), where Lobsang is apprenticed to the Thieve’s Guild and Jeremy to the Clockmakers’, but also The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, where we learn Keith the pipe player was left on the doorstep of the Musicians’ Guild.
  • Esk’s age does not seem to be a factor in Equal Rites, where many of the prospective wizards hoping to enter the university are young enough to be accompanied by their parents.
  • Jedi are trained very young: Yoda claims the 22-year-old Luke is “too old to begin the training” in The Empire Strikes Back. The Jedi Council considered that even 9-year-old Anakin Skywalker might be too old in The Phantom Menace, and in Attack of the Clones we see a group of four- to eight-year-olds learning to use lightsabers. (Ben notes that if he tried such a thing he would certainly lose his Working With Children Check.)
  • We previously mentioned Wallace and Gromit in our discussion of Thief of Time (#Pratchat48). In their first stop-motion animated short film, A Grand Day Out (1989), inventor Wallace and his long-suffering but faithful dog Gromit build a rocket and fly to the moon in search of cheese.
  • Jules Verne’s De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (From the Earth to the Moon, a direct route in 97 hours and 20 minutes) – better known as From the Earth to the Moon – was first published in serial and novel form in 1865. In the book, an American gun club build an enormous “space gun” and use it to fire a hollow projectile containing three men with the aims of landing them on the Moon. The novel only details the adventure up until the gun is fired; their adventures on – or rather near – the Moon are detailed in the 1870 sequel, Autour de la Lune (Around the Moon).
  • We previously mentioned Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books in #Pratchat7A. The dragons in question are alien lifeforms on the planet Pern, where human riders form a two-way psychic bond with their dragons at the time of hatching. There are 23 novels in the series, some written or co-written by McCaffrey’s son Tom, beginning with 1968’s Dragonflight. The third part of The Colour of Magic, “The Lure of the Wyrm”, is a parody and homage to dragon fiction, including the Pern books.
  • We previously mentioned the Room 101 radio show in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” It has also been a television show.
  • The Repair Shop is a BBC television series in which family heirlooms are repaired and restored by experts. It first began in 2017, and is currently in the midst of its ninth season. It’s filmed at the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, which has a working smithy required to repair some of the items brought. An Australian version, The Repair Shop Australia, began on the Foxtel pay-TV channel LifeStyle on 3 May, 2022 – just before this episode came out!
  • Chris Hemsworth plays the hot-but-stupid receptionist Kevin in the 2016 Ghostbusters film, also known as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. We won’t say much more to avoid spoilers, but this scene of his job interview will give you a pretty good idea of what he’s about.
  • Imp y Celyn – aka “Buddy” – is one of the protagonists of Soul Music, which we discussed in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“. In that book it’s revealed that Mort and Ysabel died when the extra time granted them by Death ran out, and their carriage ran off the edge of a mountain road. We only get a few glimpses of their life between then and the end of Mort (discussed in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“), when the couple have become the new Duke and Duchess of Sto Helit, and Ysabel is pregnant with Susan.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

Follow Pratchat

Apple PodcastsSpotifyPodchaserPodcast IndexYoutube MusicRSSMore Subscribe Options
  • Bluesky
  • Mastodon
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Latest episode:

  • Pratchat86a - A (Not So) Glorious Announcement
    A (Not So) Glorious Announcement

Next time…

#Pratchat84 - Ankh-Morpork Archives & Discworld Almanak8 April 2025
Listen to us discuss the in-universe Discworld books The Ankh-Morpork Archives volume I and II, collecting the Discworld diaries, and The Discworld Almanak. Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

We’re on Podchaser!

Podchaser - Pratchat

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright © 2025 Pratchat.

Pratchat WordPress Theme by Ben McKenzie

 

Loading Comments...