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#Pratchat77 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 77, “How to Get Below in Advertising”, discussing the 1963 short story “The Hades Business” with guest Lucas Testro.

Iconographic Evidence

The specific Bob Newhart advertising sketch that Lucas was thinking of is this one about Abraham Lincoln. (See also the further note about Bob Newhart below.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the 1989 British black comedy film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard E Grant and written and directed by Bruce Robinson (both of Withnail and I fame).
  • You can find a digital copy of the August 1963 issue of Science Fantasy magazine at the Internet Archive here.
  • The Unfriendly Future was published in October 1965 by Four Square Books, edited by Tom Baordman, Jr. (As Ben guessed, Pratchett was indeed 17 at the time.) The book included the following stories, mostly previously published in John Carnell’s magazines:
    • Russkies Go Home!, a 1960 novelette by Mack Reynolds
    • “The Food Goes in the Top”, a 1961 short story by Will Mohler (as Will Worthington)
    • Danger: Religion!, a 1962 novella by Brian W. Aldiss
    • “Rescue Operation”, a 1964 short story by Harry Harrison
    • “The Hades Business”, a 1963 short story by Terry Pratchett
    • The Seed of Violence, a 1958 novelette by Jay Williams
  • Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is best known as the author of the fantasy novel Titus Groan and its sequels, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, usually referred to as the Gormenghast series. Peake intended to write many more books in this series, but only completed the three novels and a novella, Boy in Darkness, before he died from Parkinson’s Disease. Titus Alone was republished in 2007 in a new version reconstructed from his handwritten manuscript, the original version having errors produced from misreadings of the manuscript. Peake was also a poet, playwright and illustrator, and illustrated editions of many books including his own, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. If you want to know more, as of April 2025 our sibling podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret are discussing the Gormenghast books during the first year of their post-Pratchett second season.
  • Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a prolific British science fiction writer best known for his Helliconia trilogy of novels (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter, published between 1982 and 1985) which chronicle the history of a civilisation on an otherwise Earth-like planet with incredibly long seasons. He also wrote the 1969 short story “Super Toys Last All Summer Long” which decades later inspired the Stanley Kubrick/Stephen Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Like Pratchett, his first published story was published by John Carnell in Science Fantasy, 1958’s “Criminal Record”, though he was considerably older, having spent his younger years in the army and working as a bookseller and editor. He was was a long-time collaborator with Harry Harrison, and the two were part of the “British New Wave” of science fiction. As related in A Life With Footnotes, Terry and his mate Dave met Brian Aldiss (and Harrison) at the 1965 Eastercon in Birmingham.
  • We previously mentioned Harry Harrison (1925-2012) in #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”. Harrison was an American science fiction author best known for his character the “Stainless Steel Rat”, an interplanetary con man and rogue who first appeared in an eponymous novel in 1957. He also wrote the 1966 dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted (very loosely) into the film Soylent Green in 1973. (If you know one thing about the film, it’s not in the novel.) Pratchett is known to have been a fan of Harrison’s work, considering Bill, the Galactic Hero to be the funniest science fiction novel ever written over The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (which he also rated, to be clear), considering that the former novel wasn’t a big hit because not enough readers were familiar with the source material being parodied. He also met Harrison at science fiction conventions as a teenager.
  • “Stagger soup” doesn’t seem to be a Pratchett invention, but existing slang for whiskey – though most sources we could find say it’s from North America (some say it’s still in use in Canada), perhaps dating from the prohibition era. Our guess would be that Pratchett found it through American sci-fi writing. “Joy-juice” has similarly American origins, perhaps inspired by “Kickapoo Joy Juice”, a fictional beverage from the comic strip Li’l Abner, and which was later turned into a real life soft drink by the Monarch Beverage Company in 1965.
  • The Good Place is one of Ben’s favourite sictoms, following Eleanor Shellstrop (played by Kristen Bell), a terrible, selfish young woman from Arizona who dies and ends up in “The Good Place”, a heaven-like afterlife. Eleanor quickly realises she’s been swapped with someone else by mistake, and convinces her supposed soul mate, ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), to help her learn to be a better person so she can belong there. Over it’s four short seasons the show evolves a lot and has many twists and turns it’s more fun to discover yourself, but it is a plot point in later episodes that there are many more people in The Bad Place than The Good Place.
  • Donald Cotton (1928-1999), the subject of Lucas’ documentary Myth Maker: The Legend of Donald Cotton, was a British writer for radio, television and stage. He is best known for the early Doctor Who stories he wrote which took the show in a more comedic direction: “The Myth Makers”, in which the Doctor travels to the Trojan war, and “The Gunfighters”, in which he gets mixed up in the famous gunfight at the O. K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. He’d likely have written more, but the new producers of the show decided not to do so many historical episodes. He also helped create the television program Adam Adamant Lives!, a later project of Doctor Who co-creators Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman.
  • Bedazzled is a 1967 film written by Peter Cook in which George Spiggot (played by Cook), a man claiming to be the Devil, offers meek and depressed cook Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) seven wishes. None of them, of course, go as planned – it’s more or less a parody of Faust. While there’s some very witty and clever stuff in there, it should also be said that the entire premise revolves around Moon wanting to date a waitress (played by Eleanor Bron) at the hamburger place where he works, and it has some very 1967 ideas which don’t really stand up today. A 2000 remake, also titled Bedazzled and directed and co-written by Ghostbusters’ Harold Ramis, starred Brendan Fraser as Elliott Richards, an equivalent to Stanley Moon who pines for a woman he works with at a computer company. Elizabeth Hurley played The Devil, who doesn’t go by an alias.
  • Bob Newhart (born 1929) is an American comedian who found fame in 1960 when his album The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart became the first comedy album to reach number one in the American charts (it also reached number two in the UK). The advertising sketch mentioned by Lucas is “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” from that album, and in a 2005 interview Newhart claimed it was his own favourite. Newhart went on to a successful screen career, with his own sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and Newhart (1982-1990), and subsequent appearances in films and other shows, including the recurring role of “Professor Proton” in The Big Bang Theory and its spin-off Young Sheldon.
  • Bewitched (1964-1972) is an American fantasy sitcom starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha, a witch who against the wishes and advice of her mother and community, marries a “mortal” man, Darrin Stephens (originally Dick York; he was replaced by Dick Sargent for the last three seasons due to illness). The series was created by comedy writer Sol Saks, based in part on the 1942 film I Married a Witch. Like the ad man in Newhart’s sketch, Darrin works on Madison Avenue for the fictional firm of McMann and Tate, his boss being one of the named partners, Larry Tate.
  • We get into a bit of business jargon familiar to Australian freelancers here, so let us explain. A sole trader – not a “soul trader”, though we considered that as a title for this episode – is a business classification used in Australia. It’s basically a one-person company, and costs very little to set up; the downside is that there’s no limited liability as there is in other structures. All Australian businesses require an Australian Business Number, or ABN, to identify them. GST is the Australian Goods and Services Tax, a 10% value-added tax introduced in 2000 on most goods and services sold in Australia. Companies (including sole traders) with revenue of more than $75,000 a year are required to register for GST, which means that they have to charge GST to their customers and pay that to the Australian Tax Office (ATO), but can also claim the GST they pay on good and services bought to run the business as a credit, reducing the GST payment they make to the ATO.
  • The story about Pratchett almost buying a DeLorean appears in chapter 15 of A Life With Footnotes.
  • Geryon was a giant in classical mythology said to have three heads. The name was later used by Dante in his Inferno as the name of greater demon, the Monster of Fraud, who is more like a dragon; Dante and Virgil ride on its back into the eighth circle, where those who committed fraud in life are found.
  • A “noodle incident” is a comedy fiction trope in which a past incident is referred to by characters but never explained. It takes its name from an example in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, in which the characters often refer to “the noodle incident” but writer Bill Watterson decided to never explain it since the readers’ imagination will always be better than than anything he could come up with. Pratchett is fond of them, the major Discworld example being what happened to Mr Hong’s restaurant, The Three Jolly Luck Takeaway Fish Bar, which seemingly disappeared from Ankh-Morpork after being build on an old Temple of Dagon.
  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British public intellectual best known as a philosopher and political activist. A lifelong pacifist, Russell opposed Britain’s participation in the First World War, leading to him being convicted under wartime censorship acts in 1916. He was fined £100 and when he refused to pay, hoping to be sent to prison to further attention for the cause, his books were siezed and sold at auction; most were bought by his friends and returned to him, some stamped as confiscated by the police. He was subsequently dismissed from his position at Trinity College London, though this was an unpopular decision and he was reinstated in 1919. He generally regarded religion as a form of superstition and an impediment to moral and social progress, describing himself as an agnostic or atheist, publishing an essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” in 1927. His most famous work is Principia Mathematica, a book laying out the principles of mathematical and symbolic logic, written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. It was a follow up to Russell’s earlier 1903 work The Principles of Mathematics. His other famous works include the essay “In Praise of Idleness”, and the books Power: A New Social Analysis and A History of Western Philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.
  • Satan in the Suburbs was Bertrand Russell’s first work of fiction, published in 1953 – rather earlier than Ben remembered. It collected three novelettes, Satan in the Suburbs or Horrors Manufactured Here, The Corsican Ordeal of Miss X (which had been previously published anonymously) and The Infra-Redioscope, plus two short stories, “The Guardians of Parnassus” and “Benefit of Clergy”. The book was apparently well-received at the time, but modern readers aren’t so kind. The titular story is more or less a variant on “The Monkey’s Paw”, in which four ordinary people respond to a plaque on the suburban house of the mysterious Dr Mallako, and don’t get what they bargained for. Russell’s journey to fiction writing was sort of opposite to Pratchett’s, coming near the end of his life – he was 80 when he wrote these stories.
  • Hades is a hit videogame developed by Supergiant Games, previously best known for their breakout hit Bastion. It’s a rogue-like game, meaning the player enters a series of randomised levels of increasing difficulty and likely dies before reaching the end, which sends them back to the start; but they improve in skill each time, making them able to get further on subsequent attempts. The player character is Zagreus, a reasonably obscure figure from Greek mythology who in some stories is the sone of Zeus, and in others the son of Hades. In the game he is the latter, and journeys through the Underworld in an attempt to find out how and why his mother, Persephone, has left. In the game, Cerberus is seen having a rest next to the desk of Hades where he receives new souls; the player is able to speak to him and pat and scratch his heads. A sequel, Hades II, is in early access; the player is no longer Zagreus, but instead his sister Melinoë, another character who is said to have been fathered by Zeus.
  • Heck is a 2013 graphic novel by Eisner Award-nominated American comic creator Zander Cannon, published by Top Shelf Comix. It collects the original comic which first appeared in Top Shelf’s digital magazine Double Barrel. In the novel, protagonist Hector “Heck” Hammarskjöld inherits his estranged father’s house and discovers a portal to the Underworld in the basement. He initially uses it to settle disputes around wills by contacting the souls of the dead, but eventually gets drawn into a bigger adventure that sees him travel through the Circles of Hell. Cannon’s most recent series is Kaijumax for Oni Press, about a prison for giant monsters, published in six volumes between 2015 and 2022.
  • We discussed Faust Eric way back in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies”, with guest Georgina Chadderton.
  • We discussed Good Omens (the novel) in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World (and I feel Nice and Accurate)”, with guests Jennifer Beckett and Amy Gray.
  • The traditional marketing mix was introduced by American marketing professor E. Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. The original version, itself an evolution of earlier ideas, was “the Four Ps of Marketing”: product, price, place and promotion. It was extended in 1981 by Booms and Bitner into the “Seven Ps”, adding not just “people” but “process” and “physical evidence”. Modern usage seems to vary with anything between four and seven “P”s, depending on who you ask and what industry is involved.
  • Matt Damon’s 2021 crypto ad, “Fortune Favours the Brave”, featured the actor walking between exhibits of supposedly great human endeavour and exhorting the viewer to be bold…and invest in cryptocurrency using the exchange crypto.com. Damon later said he only did it to support the charity water.org, which tries to improve access to safe drinking water to communities worldwide. American actor (and ex-economist) Ben McKenzie, who wrote the book Easy Money about the crypto fad, gave his highly critical opinion about the ad (and what it was trying to sell) in many places, including a January 2022 episode of the Slate podcast What Next: TBD.
  • The “comma, for the use of” jokes are primarily seen in Men at Arms (as discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”) when Fred Colon is handing out equipment to the new recruits, though it returns as a callback once or twice.
  • Fallout: New Vegas is the sixth game in the satirical post-apocalyptic Fallout series. The games are set in the wastelands of a future America, decimated by a nuclear war with China in 2077, though the pre-War America of the games was a 1950s retro-futuristic vision of nuclear-powered cars and household robots. The first couple of games were made in the late 1990s by Black Isle Studios (originally under a different name), but following a couple of spin-off games, the license for the franchise was acquired by Bethesda Softworks, makers of the hugely successful Elder Scrolls series of fantasy roleplaying games. They made Fallout 3 in 2008, the first game to have a modern first person perspective, but some fans thought it lost too much of the satirical tone of the originals. Obsidian Entertainment, another studio which included developers who’d worked on earlier Fallout games, pitched an idea for another game using the Fallout engine set in a different part of the game’s America; it was accepted and released in 2010 as Fallout: New Vegas. In the game, the player is a Courier given the job of delivering a special poker chip to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas, but they are waylaid by a gangster working with the Great Khans, a local tribe of raiders, who steal the chip, shoot the character and leave them for dead. They survive and try to find the chip and complete the job, along the way altering the future of the entire Mojave Wasteland, which is being fought over by the Khans, the New California Republic, and the mysterious Mr House, who controls New Vegas itself.
  • Monty Python, as we’re sure you probably know, were a British comedy group formed in 1969, best known for their television sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus which ran from 1969 to 1974, and their films, which most relevantly here include Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), in which God appears to King Arthur as a cut-out animation of bearded man in a cloud, created like all the Python animations by Terry Gilliam. Their next film, Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), follows the mis-adventures of a man born at the same time as Jesus and mistaken for a messiah; God does not appear, though Jesus is seen from a distance giving the Sermon on the Mount.
  • Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) is an overtly patriotic American action film about an alien invasion starring an ensemble cast including Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman. When the immense alien saucers arrive in Earth’s atmosphere (launched from an even bigger mothership in high orbit), they create clouds to shield themselves from view.
  • Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999) is a fantasy film in which two exiled angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) plan to re-enter Heaven by exploiting an open offer of indulgence from an American Cardinal. Early on in the film, protagonist Bethany Sloane (Linda Fiorentino) is visited by Metatron (Alan Rickman), a Seraphim who is the Voice of God. As he explains: ‘Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God’s true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. We went through five Adams before we figured that one out.’
  • Pandæmonium – not Pandæmomium, as Ben mis-speaks it here – is the name invented for the capital city of Hell by British poet John Milton in his famous 1667 epic Paradise Lost. It draws on Greek, and translates roughly as “place of all demons”.
  • The “sand ropes” stories can be found in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale index as type 1174, “Deceiving the Devil with a Rope of Sand”. Examples can be found in Scotland, England, Ireland and Germany. Some of the stories star Michael Scot, a thirteenth century mathematician and astrologer.
  • The issue of Science Fantasy in which the story first appeared was volume 20, number 60, published in August 1963. A digital version of the issue is available via the Internet Archive; the link will take you to the first page of “The Hades Business”.
  • Janet is one of the major characters of The Good Place, played by D’Arcy Carden. While she frequently has to remind the human characters that she is “not a robot” and “not a girl”, Janet is the afterlife equivalent of a computer interface, able to access all knowledge and providing the means for Architects of the afterlife to create the Neighbourhoods in which human souls live out existence. Carden also plays other versions of Janet, including Bad Janet (the Bad Place’s ruder equivalent), and Neutral Janet (the very bland version who works in the “Accounting Department” responsible for deciding who goes where after death).
  • Benidorm isn’t the kind of place Ben is thinking of – it’s not even in the UK! It’s a municipality on the southeastern coast of Spain. It became a major tourist destination in the 1980s, has three world-renowned beaches, and has a famous hotel which is one of the tallest buildings in Spain. There’s also a popular British sitcom set there, also called Benidorm, which ran on ITV from 2007 to 2018. It follows a large ensemble cast of British holidaymakers from various social classes who make repeat visits to an all-inclusive holiday resort in Benidorm, though the cast changed significantly over the ten series.
  • Skegness is more the kind of place Ben is talking about. Located on the Lincolnshire coast on the East of Britain, Skegness was formerly one of the most popular holiday resort towns in the UK, but went into decline from the 1970s as overseas holidays became cheaper. It’s the home of the original Butlin’s holiday camp, now known as Butlins Skegness, and one of only three still in operation, the rest having closed in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a bit fancier than our description makes it sound, with pools and activities and entertainment, and a range of different types of accomodation.
  • Better Than a Poke in the Eye is the British fantasy newsletter formerly known as Discworld Monthly. Its creators, Jason and Rachel, appeared in our special Discworld anniversary episode, “How Did Discworld Get to 40?” The Llamedos Holiday Camp now runs every two years, with the next one in 2026, themed as “The Llamedos Hogs Ball 2026”.
  • The Prisoner is a 1967 television series created by Irish actor Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009), best known at the time for starring as spy John Dake in the earlier spy series Danger Man. Danger Man initially only lasted one season in 1960, and afterwards McGoohan was offered the role of James Bond, and Simon Templar in The Saint; he turned both down on moral grounds, mostly because as a Catholic he objected to those characters’ promiscuity (he famously insisted on no kissing in Danger Man). The popularity of Bond led to a Danger Man revival in 1964 that made McGoohan the highest-paid television actor in the UK. The show was a hit in the UK and America, where it was re-titled Secret Agent and had the popular theme song “Secret Agent Man”. It inspired various copycats and spoofs, including the cartoon Danger Mouse. McGoohan’s star power also got him more control over the show, and when he was announced he was quitting, was able to negotiate to make a new series of his own devising: The Prisoner. The premise was that a spy angrily quits his job, but after leaving the agency’s office is abducted and taken to a weird, almost surreal holiday camp known as “The Village”, where everyone is referred to only by number – the protagonist is “Number Six”. The secret controllers of the camp use all kinds of bizarre gambits to try and find out why Number Six quit the agency, but he refuses to tell them, and makes repeated attempts to escape and discover who is in charge – the mysterious and never seen Number One. Each episode features a different Number Two, who acts on behalf of Number One. Though originally conceived as a mini-series of just seven episodes, The Prisoner was extended to seventeen episodes, broadcast in 1967 and 1968. It got behind schedule, though, and a final two colour episodes of Danger Man (shown in the US as a telemovie) were broadcast in the first two weeks of its timeslot, instead of after the finale as originally planned. The finale is…well, it’s a whole other discussion, but let’s just say opinion is fairly sharply divided on the ending. But the show itself is otherwise seen as something of a weird masterpiece, and Ben highly recommends you check out some of the best episodes.

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

#Pratchat85 – AT LAST, SIR TERRY

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To mark ten years since Terry Pratchett’s death, Liz, Ben and guest Myfanwy Coghill discuss his 2010 Richard Dimbleby lecture, “Shaking Hands with Death”. Please note that this episode includes discussions of death, terminal illness, assisted dying and suicide.

Pratchett was the first novelist to give the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, an annual talk broadcast on the BBC in memory of Dimbleby, a BBC broadcaster who died in 1965. His subject was a turning point in his activism: from raising awareness (and money) for Alzheimer’s Disease, to talking openly about the inevitability of death, and the importance of being able to choose a good one, safely and legally. The speech was collected in A Slip of the Keyboard in 2014, and published in a standalone volume with an introduction by Rob Wilkins in 2015. The televised version is also (currently) on YouTube.

We hope we’ve done Pratchett justice in carrying on this discussion. We are lucky to live in Australia, where citizens in most states have access to assisted dying – even if under more narrow circumstances than Pratchett might have liked. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill provides similar access, and was introduced in the UK parliament by backbench Labour MP Kim Leadbeater in November 2024. It’s currently at the committee stage. (See our episode notes for more details.)

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Guest Myfanwy Coghill (she/her) has been many things, including an opera singer, a teacher, a funeral director, and a Dungeon Master (of the Dungeons & Dragons variety). She previously appeared to discuss Maskerade in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt”, in September 2019.

GNU Elspeth Sutherland; Kat Muscat; Stella Young; Cal Wilson; DJ Ian; and Terry Pratchett. We’d love you to consider supporting the Kat Muscat Fellowship, which provides support and development for a young Australian writer or editor each year; or helping to fund a new documentary about Stella Young, I Am Not Your Inspiration (which coincidentally launched in between us recording and publishing this episode). Pratchett’s favoured charities are well known: the Orang Utan Foundation, and the Alzheimer’s Society. The local Australian equivalent is Dementia Australia.

You can find episode notes and errata on our web site.

Next month is our rescheduled discussion about both volumes of the Ankh-Morpork Archives, which collect material from the Discworld diaries, and their sibling publication The Discworld Almanack! There’s still time for a few more questions; send them in via email (chat@pratchatpodcast.com), or social media using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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.

#Pratchat81 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 81, “Only Fowls and Horses”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1990 short story “Hollywood Chickens”, and 1972 short story “From the Horse’s Mouth”, with guest Dr Laura Jean McKay.

Iconographic Evidence

We’re hoping to find the illustration from the original version of “Hollywood Chickens” from More Tales From the Forbidden Planet; if you have access to a copy, please let us know!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on Only Fools and Horses, a popular BBC sitcom which originally ran between 1981 and 1991, and continued to show up in the form of Christmas specials until 2006. It starred David Jason (known to Discworld fans for playing Albert and later Rincewind in The Mob’s adaptations for Sky Television) and Nicholas Lyndhurst as “Del Boy” and Rodney Trotter, two half brothers living in south-east London. The show revolves around their various get rich schemes, mostly to do with buying and selling dodgy goods. It holds the record for the highest ratings for a UK sitcom, with 24 million people tuning in to watch the supposed last ever episode in 1996.
  • If The Animals in That Country sounds familiar it may be because it’s won many awards, including the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature, the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for Fiction, being named a Slate and Sunday Times Book Of The Year, and the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award. The title might also be familiar – it’s named after a collection of short stories by Margaret Atwood.
  • Thelma & Louise – the regular one, without a dingo – is a beloved 1991 film directed by Ridley Scott (yes, the Alien guy) and written by Callie Khouri. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon as the titular friends, whose holiday road trip goes horribly wrong…which isn’t a great description of the film, but it’s considered a modern feminist classic for good reason. David and Sarandon were both nominated for Academy Awards, and it was also nominated for several others, winning for Best Screenplay. A musical version is currently in development.
  • Pratchett’s most prolific year was, in fact, 1990 – the same year he wrote “Hollywood Chickens”. That year he published five novels: Diggers (#Pratchat13), Good Omens (#Pratchat15), Wings (#Pratchat20), Eric (#Pratchat7) and Moving Pictures (#Pratchat10).
  • Anaïs Nin (1903-1977), whose full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, was a French-American writer best known for her prolific personal journals, which she started writing at the age of 11.
  • Pratchett actually says that “short stories cost me blood” twice – and in the same book! In A Blink of the Screen, he says this in the author’s note for “Turntables of the Night” (see #Pratchat72, “The Masked Dancer”) and “The Sea and Little Fishes” (see #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?”).
  • Pratchett’s meeting with Arthur C. Clarke is detailed in Chapter 3 of A Life With Footnotes. It did indeed happen in the toilet.
  • The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award for the year’s best science fiction novel. It was established in 1987 via a grant from Clarke; the winner is chosen by a panel made up of members of three prominent British science fiction organisations. The Animals in That Country won in 2021; the most recent winner is Martin McInnes for his novel In Ascension.
  • Diane Duane is an American science fiction and fantasy author, best known for the Young Wizards series of fantasy novels, as well as decades of work on Star Trek as a novelist, screenwriter and more. But that’s just scratching the surface of her work. As Diane was kind enough to point out to us in a comment below (when this note was sadly left very unfinished), she was also a long-time friend of Pratchett’s. We’ve previously linked to Diane’s blog post about the Maggi soup ads incident, as well as this post about it on the Stuffed Crocodile blog; both of them have pictures of the affected books. The previous mention of the soup story was in Eeek Club 2023.
  • The Hollywood Freeway Chickens are absolutely real, though their origins are a mystery. The original colony lives near the exit to Vineland Avenue, and they seem to have been there since 1969 (so a bit earlier than Diane’s story). There’s also a second colony, the “New Freeway Chickens”, a couple of miles away. Several people have come forward over the years claiming to have put them there (via truck accident or otherwise), but none of these stories have been verified. Attempts to remove the chickens have never managed to catch them all, so while we couldn’t find definite confirmation of this, it seems likely that they’re still there now. Listener Natalie was kind enough to ask Diane Duane about it via Tumblr on our behalf; and Diane was a good sport and gave a lovely answer. You can read the original discussion on Tumblr, but in brief: Diane had seen the chickens “often”, and mentioned that “when the subject came up in some convention bar or other, (a) we were in Telling Another Writer About A Cool if Unlikely-Sounding Thing mode—at which time you do not “pull the long bow,” just lay out the facts as known to you—and (b) I knew quite well Terry’d later do his fact-checking and possibly find out more about the story than I knew: which would be fun. …Thus (eventually/accidentally) leaving me with one of the greatest blurb slugs ever seen. 😄”
  • The X-Files (1993-2002; 2016-2018) is a classic sci-fi crime drama. It follows two FBI agents, weirdo Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and skeptical Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who are assigned weird unsolved cases – the “X-Files” – which usually (but not always) have a supernatural explanation. We’ve previously mentioned the show in #Pratchat35, #Pratchat36, #Prachat42 and #Pratchat69.
  • The Ursula Le Guin story about ants Laura mentions is “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, first published in the 1974 anthology Fellowship of the Stars. The phrase being debated in the story is indeed “Up with the Queen!”
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat81 – Only Fowls and Horses

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Author and poet* Dr Laura Jean McKay joins Liz and Ben for two of Terry Pratchett’s short stories about intelligent animals: “Hollywood Chickens” (1990) and “From the Horse’s Mouth” (1972).

In 1973 Hollywood, a truck full of chickens overturned on a busy highway, depositing a population of chickens on the verge. A decade and a half later, scientists try to piece together the story of how they developed and evolved in pursuit of a very specific goal…

In the town of Blackbury, rag and bone man Ron is amazed to discover that his carthorse, Johnno, can talk. Will their relationship be forever changed by the adventure they share together?

These stories don’t share too much in common beyond being about animals, but they are a nice sample of Pratchett’s writing from two interesting points in his career: towards the end of his early phase of children’s stories for newspapers, not long after his first novel was published; and at the height of his early fame – the year, in fact, that he published five novels. You can find “Hollywood Chickens” most readily in A Blink of the Screen, and “From the Horse’s Mouth” in A Stroke of the Pen.

Do you have a favourite Pratchett short story? What do you think of the way he writes animals? Should we have inserted an ad for Maggi noodles into this episode? What are your best horse pun names, and how would you get to the other side? We’d love to hear from you whether you’re a horse, chicken, human or have mutant powers: join the conversation for this episode via email, or by using the hashtag #Pratchat81 on social media.

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Dr Laura Jean McKay (she/her) is an author, poet* and an Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University. Her novel The Animals in That Country – “like Thelma and Louise with a woman and a dingo” – has won multiple awards, including the Arthur C Clarke Award. Her latest book is the short fiction collection Gunflower, published in 2023. You can find Laura as @laurajeanmckay on Twitter and Instagram, and find out more about her books on her website, laurajeanmckay.com.au.

* Even if she doesn’t know it.

You’ll find full notes and errata for this episode on our website, and you can hopefully still get tickets for Guards! Guards! at the Roleystone Theatre in Perth, which opens on 22 November 2024.

Next episode we’re back on track to crack the Clacks in the most recent Discworld board game: Clacks! If you have questions about this game recreating the race between Moist and the Grand Trunk company, get them in to us ASAP by tagging us or using the hashtag #Pratchat82 on social media, or emailing us at chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

#Pratchat79 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 79, “Unalive from Überwald”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2002 short story “Death and What Comes Next”, with returning guest Tansy Rayner Roberts and new guest Karen J Carlisle.

Iconographic Evidence

If you also took photos of us at the convention, please get in touch – we’d love to see them and add a few here!

You can also find photos of the convention at the official website.

A photo of Ben and Liz, in costume as Rincewind and Moist von Lipwig, attempting to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo.
Ben and Liz attempted to recreate the pose from the Pratchat logo, with costume and iconographic assistance from Danny Sag.
A photo of a small piece of white paper on a green surface. Handwriting in black pen reads: “dead and not dead” Schrödinger’s cat What if the cat is Greebo? Next to the writing is drawn a small cartoon cat with prominent whiskers and an eye patch.
The audience question with the very cute illustration of Greebo!

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the theme for Nullus Anxietas IX, “Come Alive in Überwald”, but since we were talking mostly about Death, “Live from Überwald” didn’t seem quite right.
  • Nullus Anxietas IX is, as you probably know, the ninth bi-annual Australian Discworld convention. As mentioned at the end of the episode, the next convention will be in Sydney in 2026, and you can already get a supporting membership for the next convention. For details, plus information on past conventions and Discworld fan clubs across Australia, head to ausdwcon.org.
  • Our previous live shows are:
  • Liz mentions two of her short stories:
    • The story about women turning into cleaning equipment is “Call Him Al”. You can read it in Meanjin, where it was published in 2020.
    • The story about an immigrant splitting into two people is “One’s Company”, originally published in the anthology Best Australian Stories 2017. It was published online at InterSastra in an Indonesian translation (“Cukup Sendiri”) by Nicolaus Gogor Seta Dewa; the original English version is also available there.
  • “Pantsers and Plotters” are widespread terms for “the two types” of writers, embraced to varying degrees by writing communities and individuals. The classification is based on whether a writer works out a plot in advance (a plotter), or writes by the seat of their pants (a pantser), making it up as they go along. It’s not entirely clear where these terms originated, but these days some writers refer to themselves as “plantsers” (a combination of the two), and other terms exist for roughly the same ideas. For example, in 2011 George R. R. Martin used the terms architect (similar to a plotter) and gardener (a variation on pantser in which the emphasis is on the weeding, i.e. editing).
  • Tansy’s stories that get mentioned include:
    • Musketeer Space, the gender-swapped Three Musketeers in space;
    • Teacup Magic, the Regency-inspired fantasy mystery series (we’ve linked to the collection);
    • We don’t think Tansy has written “Beauty and the Beast with cyborgs”, but she has written Curse of Bronze, a novella which riffs on Beauty and the Beast. It’s available for free as an ebook via BookFunnel (you’ll need to sign up to Tansy’s mailing list), or in audio form on her podcast Sheep Might Fly.
  • More notes coming soon.

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

#Pratchat79 – Unalive from Überwald

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Recorded live at the Australian Discworld Convention in Tarntanyangga (Adelaide), Karen J Carlisle and Tansy Rayner Roberts join us on stage to discuss short fiction, Death and the (sort of) last of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld short stories, 2004’s “Death and What Comes Next”.

Somewhere in time and space, a philosopher lies on his deathbed…and Death has come to collect. Only the philosopher isn’t convinced he’s real, or that any of this is even happening. Will “quantum” and cats in boxes be enough of an argument to dissuade Death from his job?

Created for the now defunct Time Hunt puzzle website, “Death and What Comes Next” was written somewhere between 2002 and 2004. At under 1,000 words it’s one of Pratchett’s shorter pieces of fiction, and contains several jokes he’d go on to re-use elsewhere, as well as a word puzzle which provided a code word for Time Hunt site. You can read the story for free at the L-Space Web, which also hosts fan translations in many languages.

Despite its placement in A Blink of the Screen, is this truly a Discworld story? Have you tried to solve the puzzle? How would you challenge Death to delay the time of your passing – and have you thought about what an encounter with the Discworld Death might be like for you? And is Death at his funniest here, or do you have other favourite Death moments? Join the conversation by using the hashtag #Pratchat79 on social media.

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Guest Tansy Rayner Roberts (she/her) is a Tasmanian author of sci-fi, fantasy, cosy crime and much, much more. Her essay series Pratchett’s Women was collected into a book, and her follow up series on Pratchett’s men, “Men Who Respect Witches”, can be found at the online magazine Speculative Insight. Her latest novel is a time travel comedy called Time of the Cat, and you can find Tansy online at tansyrr.com and as @tansyrr on social media. Tansy was also a guest on our previous live episode, “A Troll New World”, recorded at Nullus Anxietas 7 in 2019.

Guest Karen J Carlisle (she/her) is a writer and illustrator based in Adelaide whose work spans Victorian mystery, steampunk, fantasy and yes, even (mostly) cosy murders. She has some new writing in the works, but her recent “Jack the Ripper thing” is Blood Ties, which you can find via her website, karenjcarlisle.com. You can also find her on Instagram, Twitter and various other social platforms as @karenjcarlisle.

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

Next month it’s back to the books as we rejoin Moist von Lipwig for Making Money! Send us your questions about the book ASAP using the hashtag #Pratchat80.

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.

#Pratchat78 – One Step Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat78 Notes and Errata

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat69 Notes and Errata

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat77 – How to Get Below in Advertising

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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