non-Discworld – Pratchat

#Pratchat57 Notes and Errata

25/08/2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

#Pratchat60 – Eyes Turnwise

08/10/2022 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

For our sixtieth episode – our troll’s teeth anniversary – Liz and Ben are once again devoting an entire show to answering your questions, about the Discworld, Pratchett’s other work, and their own – with an eye on what’s still to come. (And yes, we allowed ourselves to break the 2.5 hour limit, just this once.)

What would your ideal Pratchett adaptation look like? Who’s the best Dicsworld villain? If one of your possessions could be made from sapient pearwood, what would it be? Which books have been the worst, the most challenging, and the most surprising? If Vetinari died and the people of Ankh-Morpork could queue up to see his body, what would happen? And which is the most confused bird? You asked these and many more amazing questions!

Plus we specifically asked you: Do you have other people in your life with whom you share your love of Pratchett? How are you reading – or re-reading – the books, if you are? What do you do when you listen to the show? Can you follow the show if you haven’t read the book? Do you have a word or phrase you’ve said most of your life that you discovered was wrong? What joke did you not get until years later?

Use the hashtag #Pratchat60 on social media to answer any of the above. (Thanks again to listener Jodie for this eternally useful idea.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:34:47 — 71.3MB)

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You can find Elizabeth on Twitter as @elizabethflux, and on Instagram at @elizabethflux. Watch out for her amazing self-made outfits.

You can find Ben and via his web site benmckenzie.com.au, on Twitter at @McKenzie_Ben and Instagram at @notongotham, where you might catch a glimpse of his T-shirt collection.

Special thanks to our sibling Pratchett podcasts for their questions: Who Watches the Watch, Desert Island Discworld, Wyrd Sisters and The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.

And thanks to each and every one of you listens, asks questions or sends in answers.

Next month is a special double-header: we’ll be reading the 34th Discworld novel, 2005’s Thud!, with guest Matt Roden. Get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat61 by late October! Plus we’re teaming up with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret to tackle the book-within-a-book, Where’s My Cow? Ask questions for this team-up using the hashtag #MakeYeChat.

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat45 Notes and Errata

08/07/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, featuring guest Penelope Love, discussing Pratchett’s 1987 short story, “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting“.

The episode title – and our choice of short story – is inspired by tradition of “Christmas in July“, Hogswatch being the Discworld equivalent of Christmas (see our Hogfather episode, #Pratchat26) and Grune being the Discworld month that comes after June. In Australia, and the rest of the Southern hemisphere, December 25 occurs during Summer, and so workplaces and friendship groups here and in New Zealand sometimes celebrate a gathering during the Winter, when the colder weather makes it feel a little closer to a traditional European Christmas (and makes it more palatable to eat enormous Christmas dinners). Much to our surprise, this tradition turns out to have begun rather more ironically in America in the 1930s or 40s, though mostly as a marketing ploy rather than an actual gathering of loved ones.
Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Petersen is a horror roleplaying game, and one of the oldest RPGs still in print: the first edition was published by Chaosium in 1981. The current 7th edition was first published in 2014. The world of the game is based on the “Cthulhu Mythos”, drawn from the stories of horror writer (and, sadly, infamous racist) H P Lovecraft and his contemporaries and successors, including Frank Belknap Long, Robert E Howard and August Derleth. It’s theme is “cosmic horror” – as Penny says, the players generally discover they live in a universe where immensely powerful and ancient beings could easily destroy our world – and the characters’ grip on reality. The game uses a version of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System, modified to track each character’s “sanity” – which they lose as they glimpse the awful truths of the universe – alongside their skills and abilities. The default setting for the game is 1930s America, where Lovecraft’s stories are set, but play in many other eras and locations is also supported – including, via one of the books Penny worked on, Australia.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) was an English author best known for his humorous novels, especially those chronicling hapless toff Bertie Wooster and his hyper-capable valet Jeeves, whose name has become synonymous with the image of the unflappable English manservant. He also wrote Broadway musicals, and worked for a time in Hollywood, though he felt his own talent and that of many others was being wasted there, and said so publicly. He moved to France to avoid paying taxes in the UK, and as a result was captured by the Germans; he was later released and made speeches over German radio, leading to outcry in the UK and effectively sending him into exile, living out the last decades of his life in the US.
Wodehouse is pronounced “Woodhouse”; Ben is getting it wrong, and Penny knows what she is talking about. This is a pattern for much of the episode.
The Code of the Woosters (1938) is the third full-length novel to feature Jeeves and his employer, Bertie Wooster. It’s a sequel to 1934’s What Ho, Jeeves and as well as returning character Gussie Fink-Nottle, it also introduces Roderick Spode, a broad parody of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Pratchett’s very first professionally published story was actually “The Hades Business”, originally published in Science Fantasy vol. 20, no. 60 in August 1963. That story is collected in Once More* * With Footnotes, A Blink of the Screen and a few other anthologies. The serious story Ben is thinking of is his third published story, “Night Dweller”, which was published in New Worlds volume 49, #156 in November 1965 – at the time edited by Michael Moorcock (more about him in a bit). You can find a digital facsimile of the original magazine at the Internet Archive. We previous talked about both stories in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” (Note that we are not counting the stories Pratchett had published in his school newspaper, the Technical Cygnet, but also note that he was fifteen years old when he had this incredibly competent and actually pretty creepy space-based horror story published in a professional magazine!)
There have been several “facsimile” editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan-Doyle, which were published between 1887 and 1927 in The Strand Magazine. The Strand featured short fiction – either complete stories, or short serialised novels – and general interest articles, and was published monthly in London for sixty years, from 1890 to 1950. It was also published in the US from 1891 until 1916. In London it had a circulation of around half a million readers. The name comes from the major London street the Strand, which was near the offices of the magazine on Burleigh Street and later Southampton Street. Conan Doyle was a frequent contributor, and published 121 short stories in the magazine, as well as nine novels (including the Sherlock Holmes ones), 70 non-fiction articles, two interviews and one poem!
We’ve previously mentioned Pratchett’s love of “gl” words; he writes about this in The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“). We’re also sure he does this in another book, but we’ve never been able to remember which one.
The epistolary novel – one presented as a series of documents, most often letters or diary entries – has a long tradition, with famous examples of the style including Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Screwtape Letters, The Color Purple, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, The Martian, Bridget Jones’ Diary, World War Z and the Illuminae trilogy by Jay Kristoff and previous Pratchat guest, Amie Kaufman. Bram Stoker’s Dracula features letters, diary entries and even transcripts of wax cylinder recordings, but it was popular for horror novels too – in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the doctor’s story is relayed by Captain Robert Walton (who finds him in arctic waters) to his sister in a series of letters.
Lovecraft used the epistolary style in several stories, most notably The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941). Some of his other stories, including The Call of Cthulhu (1928), also include newspaper excerpts or other documents without being told entirely in that style.
Verisimilitude in fiction is the believability of the work, or its contents, either in comparison to reality (“cultural verisimilitude”) or the work’s genre (“generic verisimilitude”). Victorian horror stories often strive for believability in terms of how the characters react to the bizarre and horrifying beings and situations they encounter, whereas modern horror – especially in films – often has the characters behave in unbelievably stupid ways to further the plot.
We mentioned Michael Moorcock just last month, when guest Joel Martin brought up his novel-length essay “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy”. As well as publishing one of Pratchett’s first stories (see above), Moorcock is best known for his fantasy novels, many of which depict a cosmic battle between the forces of Law and Chaos. These often feature an incarnation of “the Eternal Champion”, whom we compared to Rincewind’s “Eternal Coward” role in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, and discussed Elric of Melniboné, one of those incarnations, in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“.
While best known for Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote science fiction and horror. Such works include the novels and stories starring scientist Professor Challenger, most famously The Lost World, and many short stories such as “The Case of Lady Sannox”, “The Leather Funnel” and “The Horror of the Heights”.
Creepy collections of Victorian Christmas cards did the rounds on social media in 2015, resulting in multiple articles like this one at the BBC and this one in online magazine Hyperallergenic. Both contain excellent examples of the grotesque, bizarre and just not-quite-right illustrations which just don’t quite say “Merry Christmas”. The frogs on display there aren’t musical, but are doing a murder on each other; the one Ben discusses is actually American, but from the same era. You can find it (if you dare!) in this American Antiquarian article.
We discussed Pratchett’s Dickens homage/pastiche Dodger in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“.
To explain Ben’s “nerdy roleplaying game reference“, the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons features a city, Sigil, which is located on the inside of a torus (basically a ring) floating at the top of an infinite spire (don’t think about it too hard). Known as the City of Doors, it allows travel to and from the other planes of existence, and is ruled by a mysterious supernatural figure known as the Lady of Pain. She is generally permissive, but suffers the worship of no gods in her city; doing so, or otherwise invoking her ire, often leads to being “mazed” – placed inside a unique labyrinth-like pocket universe, which can only be escaped by traversing the maze. A lot of her victims die in the attempt.
We discussed Pratchett’s more sexual explicit writing in our previous episode, #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, in the context of some comments about Rincewind’s sexual experiences – solo and otherwise.
The tradition of the “saucy seaside postcard” (sold throughout the UK) was largely the work of one artist, the prolific Donald McGill (1875-1962). He produced more than twelve thousand postcard designs over his career, from 1905 through to his death in 1962. During World War I, he produced anti-German propaganda designs, but his most famous postcards feature cartoons of men and women making suggestive double entendres, not only at the seaside but in many other situations. He ran afoul of the “war on smut” in the 1950s, put on trial in 1954, but later helped to revise the Obscene Publications Act 1857. His most famous postcard, featuring the joke “Do you like Kipling?”; “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!”, reportedly holds the record for the world’s best-selling postcard, with claims it had sold over 6 million copies. A museum was opened in 2010 in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, celebrating his work, but has since shut down.
Penny comments that the Oxford scholar’s end was “very Pickwickian“, a delightful adjective described by the Oxford Dictionary as meaning “Of or like Mr Pickwick in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837), especially in being jovial, plump, or generous.” It is used in the novel itself to describe a word or phrase that is misused or misunderstood, which is said to be using such a phrase in “the Pickwickian sense”.
L’Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island) is an 1875 novel written by Jules Verne; it is a sequel not only to Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), but also his 1867 novel Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways). In the story, a group of prisoners of the South in the American Civil War stage a daring escape via hot air balloon, but are blown out to sea and crash on an island. They have many adventures, including rescuing a castaway from a smaller island nearby (a character from In Search of the Castaways), but are mysteriously helped by an unseen force, who saves them on multiple occasions. This turns out to be none other than Captain Nemo, who survived the maelstrom at the end of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – though this makes no chronological sense since 20,000 Leagues is set after the Civil War had ended. This book reveals his origin story as an Indian Prince, something not alluded to at all in the first novel. The book doesn’t contain any giant animals, but the 1961 film – starring Herbert Lom as a distinctly non-Indian Nemo – features a giant crab, flightless bird, bees, plants and octopus, all explained to be the results of Nemo’s genetic experiments. The creatures were stop-motion animated by Ray Harryhausen.
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, originally published in 1936. In the story, the narrator tells of his investigation into the port town of Innsmouth some years previously. He discovers much superstition and mystery surrounding the town, where its founding father Obed March started a cult, and many of the inhabitants have “the Innsmouth Look” – unusually flat noses, bulging eyes and narrow heads. It’s eventually revealed that they are hybrids, born of humans cross-breeding with the “Deep Ones”, fish people who live in an underwater city and worship the foul god Dagon.
Penny’s Lovecraft quote “things he cannot and must not recall” is from the 1925 story “The Festival”:

They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”; Weird Tales vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1925): 169–174.

The article Ben mentions about Dickens’ inventing modern time travel fiction may have been this BBC piece by Samira Ahmed in 2015, or this one, by Joshua Sargeant for SF Gate. (He’s not sure – it wasn’t as recent a read as he thought!) A Christmas Carol (1843) definitely pre-dates The Time Machine (1895), and is the first story we know of to depict someone seeing their own future and subsequently changing it. There are many earlier tales featuring a kind of time travel, including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819), which set up the tradition of one-way travel into the future via magical sleep.
Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man” was first published in the 1866 Christmas edition of Dickens’ weekly magazine All the Year Round. He started the magazine in 1859 after he had a disagreement with the publishers of his previous magazine, Household Words, who he sued to win control of the name and then shut down, with a final issue announcing it would be merged with All the Year Round. His sub-editor was William Henry Wills, who also worked on the previous publication; they co-founded and co-owned the new magazine, but Dickens had much greater editorial control. All the Year Round kicked off with the first part of Dickens’ serialised novel A Tale of Two Cities and was an immediate success, with a first series of twenty 26-week long volumes running under Dickens’ control until 1868, though he wrote less in the magazine as he spent more time doing public readings of his work. He hired his own son, Charles Jr, as a subeditor on the “new series”, then bequeathed the magazine to him; Charles Jr edited it until at least the end of the second series in 1888, with a third series running until 1895.
“Obverse” isn’t actually a synonym for “reverse”, but it’s opposite, generally used only when referring to the faces of coins or other two-sided objects. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines it as “The side of a coin or medal that contains the principal device” – i.e. the “heads” side for traditional European-style coins. In the context of the story, though, it’s used to simply mean “the other side” – as the blank sides with the writing are said to be the “obverse side” of the “windows”, which are clearly the illustrated covers of the cards.
Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) was an American horror and mystery writer, most famous for her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House (since adapted many times for the screen) and 1948 short story “The Lottery”, which was first published in The New Yorker (and is currently in development as a feature film). The story about being trapped in a painting is “The Story We Used to Tell”, which was potentially unpublished until 1996, when it appeared in the collection Just an Ordinary Day with other rare stories discovered by her children. It is currently in print as part of the collection Dark Tales, and you can also hear it read by LeVar Burton in the October 20, 2020 episode of his LeVar Burton Reads podcast.
There are no shortage of “creepy things kids say” articles on the Internet. We couldn’t find a definitive or best one, so we’ll leave you to google them for yourself…if you dare. Please share your favourites with us!
As Ben and Penny mention, the names of the three wise kings (or magi) are traditionally given as Melchior, a Persian scholar; Balthazar, an Arabian king; and Caspar (aka Kaspar or Gaspar), a King from India. The magi are only mentioned once in the Bible, in Matthew 2:1-12, without names or number; it just refers to “wise men from the East”. Most likely they are counted as three to match the number of named gifts: the famous gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their names are said to come from a Greek manuscript written around 500 CE. The magi also feature in Amahl and the Night Visitors, a one-act opera we discussed briefly back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a short horror story first published in the November 1846 issue of the American women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. It’s one of many stories of the time to revolve around someone being buried alive.
Snoopy is the beagle who features in the comic strip Peanuts, written, drawn and coloured solo by American cartoonist Charles M. Schultz (1922-2000). Peanuts is considered the most popular comic strip in history, originally running from 1950 through to 2000 (around a month before Schultz’s death) in syndication in newspapers in the United States and across the world. Its popularity led to several animated television movies, most famously A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first full-length adaptation of the characters, which along with others themed after other holidays are indeed still shown on television every year in the States. The strip follows the adventures and social interactions of a group of children, with the two main characters being determined anxious failure Charlie Brown (whose closest thing to a catchphrase was his frequent utterance “good grief”), and his dog, Snoopy, who first appeared in the third strip on October 4, 1950. Snoopy doesn’t speak, but has human-like thoughts, written as thought balloons in the comic strip but communicated through non-verbal grunts in animation. Snoopy often retreats into his imagination and adopts various alter-egos, most famously a World War I flying ace who is always shot down by the Red Baron. During the 1970s, Snoopy’s increasing popularity led to a greater focus on him in the strip. Toys and other merchandise of the main characters, especially Snoopy, have been available since the late 50s, and by the 1980s Snoopy was ubiquitous.
Candy canes have been associated with Christmas since at least the nineteenth century. An unsubstantiated origin story in folklore traces the tradition back to 1670, in Cologne, Germany, where a choirmaster supposedly wanted to give “sugar sticks” to children to keep them quiet during a recreation of the nativity scene, and justified this by asking for them to be made in the shape of shepherd’s crooks. Gingerbread men are a form of confectionary popular in Europe since the sixteenth century. They are made and eaten at various festive occasions and holidays, and especially Christmas, when they are sometimes hung from Christmas trees as edible ornaments.
We previously discussed Garfield, the orange cat and star of Jim Davis’ comic strip Garfield, in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“. Garfield is one of the few comic strips to seriously rival Peanuts in popularity, the other main contender being Bill Waterstone’s Calvin & Hobbes.
The “Kitten of the Baskervilles” is a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan-Doyle’s third and most famous novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventure, which was serialised in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902.
“Kitten Kong” is the seventh episode of the second series of The Goodies, originally broadcast on November 12, 1971. The Goodies is a television comedy written by and starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, using a hybrid sketch show and sitcom format in which the three “Goodies”, whose motto is “Anything, Anytime”, take on a variety of weird jobs and schemes. In “Kitten Kong”, they start a business looking after “loony animals” that leads to a number of misadventures, culminating in feeding too much growth formula to a kitten which grows enormous and threatens to destroy parts of London. A re-edited version of the episode with extra gags, “Kitten Kong: Montreux ’72 Edition”, won the Silver Rose at the 1972 Rose d’Or Festival, held in Montreux, Switzerland. (The Rose d’Or is a European television award, held annually since 1961.)
The original horror short story “The Birds” was written by Cornish author and playwright, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (1907-1989). It was first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree, so a bit later than Penny’s guess of the 20s or 30s (though du Maurier was definitely active then; her most famous novel, Rebecca, was published in 1938). As well as Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1963 film adaptation, it has also been adapted several times for radio and television, and even for the stage!
The Irregulars is a British mystery show created for Netflix by British screenwriter and playwright Tom Bidwell. It is very loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories, but centred on “the Irregulars” – four homeless youths who fulfil the role of the “Baker Street Irregulars” from the Conan Doyle stories. In the series they are not merely informants, but do all the detective work, contracted by Dr John Watson. The series has them investigating various mysteries with supernatural causes. The Irregulars was cancelled after its first eight-episode season.
Liz’s ghost story about person who haunts a vague acquaintance is “There in Spirit“, published in June 2020 in The Saturday Paper. (You’ll need a subscription to the paper to read it.)
Shaun of the Dead (2004) is a romantic zombie comedy film (or “rom-zom-com”) directed by Edgar Wright, written by Wright and Simon Pegg, and starring Pegg and Nick Frost, with Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, and Penelope Wilton. Pegg stars as Shaun, a retail assistant whose life is already going nowhere when a zombie apocalypse comes. He tries to rescue his ex-girlfriend Liz, her flatmates and his parents with the help of his equally aimless friend Ed (Frost). It started life as an episode of Pegg and Wright’s sitcom Spaced, in which Pegg’s character Tim hallucinates a zombie apocalypse while taking drugs and playing videogames. It’s the first film in the “Three Colours Cornetto” trilogy of films, which while unrelated in plot share core cast and crew and couch a relationship comedy in the context of a genre film.
Grabbers (2012, dir. Jon Wright) is a horror comedy starring Moist von Lipwig himself, Richard Coyle, as an alcoholic Garda (Irish police officer). His new partner gets them assigned to a remote Irish island, which they soon discover is under attack from voracious tentacled aliens who need bood and water to survive. Like Shaun of the Dead, despite the comedy it doesn’t shirk the gore.
Tremors (1990, dir. Ron Underwood) is western/sci-fi/horror/comedy film starring Kevin Bacon in which the residents of a small desert town in Nevada are attacked by giant worm-like creatures that burrow through the ground and eat people. The film was a hit and spawned six sequels, as well as a short-lived television series, though Kevin Bacon isn’t in any of them. One of the characters from the basement scene Penny describes – Burt Gummer, played by Family Ties Dad Michael Gross – does return in all of them, including a prequel set in the Old West in which Gross plays his character’s ancestor.
Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a 2017 one-hour stand-up comedy show, which was filmed at the Sydney Opera House and released on Netflix in 2018. It deconstructs comedy and also tells some honest stories of Gadsby’s experiences growing up queer and gender non-conforming in conservative rural Tasmania.
Montague Rhodes James OM FBA (1862 – 1936), better known as M R James, was not an Oxford don; sorry Penny, but he went to “the other place”: he was a provost (a senior academic administrator) and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work as an author, with a style so distinctive it has often been emulated and described as “Jamesian”. Penny specifically mentions his stories “Lost Hearts” (1895) and “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad” (1904).
Charles Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. At 3:13 PM on the 9th of June 1865, a train travelling to London on the South Eastern Main Line derailed when it crossed an aqueduct where part of the track had been removed for works. A worker was present to flag down trains, but was only about half as far from the missing section as required by regulations, and the train could not stop in time. Fifty people were injured, and ten of those died – some while being tended to by Dickens. He was hugely affected by the incident – his son said he never really recovered from it – and his story “The Signal-Man” was published a year after the accident, in the Christmas 1866 edition of All the Year Round. It may well have been influenced by the Staplehurst crash, though the train crash detailed in the story is more likely modelled after Clayton Tunnel crash of 1861. Perhaps not coincidentally died, Dickens died on June 9, 1870 – five years to the day after the accident.
The JibJab dancing elves Ben remembers is the company’s website Elf Yourself, which launched in 2007 and still exists.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale was released in 2010 and was written and directed by Jalmari Helander. It is based on two earlier short films, Rare Exports Inc and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions. It’s not included in any streaming services but you can rent or buy it on Apple TV, YouTube, Fetch and several others.
The Krampus is a mythological figure from the Alpine region of Europe. The horned beast is said to accompany Saint Nicholas on his rounds, scaring children who have been badly behaved and, in some versions, punishing them by whipping them with birch rods or even kidnapping them and taking them to hell. His origins are unclear, but he might be inspired by pre-Christian beliefs, and he was outlawed in Austria for a time. The Krampus has more recently found international fame after featuring in the 2015 Christmas horror film Krampus, written and directed by Michael Dougherty and starring Adam Scott and Toni Collette as the parents of a boy who unwittingly summons the Krampus.
A great example of the “kids drawings made real” genre is thingsihavedrawn.com, the website where Photoshop artist Tom makes “real” versions of the drawings made by his kids Dom and Al.
The BBC has adapted several of M R James short stories for television as part of A Ghost Story for Christmas – and also Dickens “The Signal-Man”! This series of shorts originally ran at Christmas between 1971 and 1978, but was revisited in the 2000s with several new adaptations of M R James stories, including “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” in 2010 and “Mezzotint” in 2021.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, dir. Frank Capra) is based on the 1943 short story “The Greatest Gift” by American author Philip Van Doren Stern, itself inspired by A Christmas Carol. In the film, George Bailey, a selfless resident of the town of Bedford Falls, thinks of killing himself, but his guardian angel – on his first assignment to Earth – intervenes, showing him what life would have been like for the people of the town if he got his wish to have never been born.
The Bon Jovi song Liz refers to is “Livin’ on a Prayer”.

#Pratchat42 Notes and Errata

08/04/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery, discussing the 25th Discworld novel, 2000’s The Truth.

The episode title is a riff on Douglas Adams’ most famous joke in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. When a race of “hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything“, it takes seven and a half million years to confidently announce the Answer is…42. A subsequent computer is built to work out what the question actually is so the answer can be understood.
As a side note, this episode marks the point at which there are more episodes of Pratchat than there are Discworld novels, a weird and bittersweet milestone. Thanks for sticking with us.
Stephanie was last a guest on #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“, discussing Mort. It was released on December 8th, 2017 – that’s three years and four months ago.
The book 42, subtitled “The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams”, is edited by his friend and collaborator Kevin Jon Davies. It will feature facsimiles of Adams’ writing taken from the archive of his work donated to his old college after his death, with added notes for context and explanations. A publication date has yet to be confirmed but it has hit its crowdfunding goal on both Unbound and Kickstarter, and at the time of publication you still have a couple of weeks to get in on it. Later in the episode Ben mentions this extract published in the Guardian UK.
Nominative determinism is the idea that one’s name will subtly influence you to do things that match your name, the most famous example perhaps being Thomas Crapper, an English engineer and plumber who made several important refinements that became standard in modern toilet design. (This is contrary to popular belief, which suggests he is the reason “crapper” is a euphemism for toilet, but this seems to pretty clearly pre-date his…er… contributions.)
Movable type is mentioned in more than one earlier Discworld book, but tracking down which ones is proving tricky. We’ll list them here when we find them out!
The Watergate scandal ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, after it became clear he both knew about and tried to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. The break-in was part of illegal wire-tapping to gain intelligence on the Democratic party; the Democratic National Convention HQ was in the Watergate building. Key evidence against Nixon were recordings he had made of conversations in the Oval Office, especially one known as the “smoking gun” in which he agrees to the cover up plan. The story was uncovered by journalists, especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who aided by anonymous sources including one who called himself “Deep Throat” and met with them in a carpark… You can see the references piling up, can’t you? The Truth also references the 1976 film about the scandal, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bernstein and Woodward.
Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit black comedy film which tells several crime stories set in Los Angeles. Two of the characters in the film are Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson), enforcers and hit-men working for a ruthless crime boss. Most of the references to the film are to their characters, who between them discuss what a Quarter Pounder burger is called in France, have a wallet with “Bad-Ass Motherfucker” written on it, extoll the virtues of dogs and declare they are going to “get medieval on yo ass”.
Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, “the Old Firm”, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story of unremarkable Scot Richard Mayhew, who, when he refuses to abandon a seemingly homeless girl on the pavement, discovers the invisible “other London” world of London Below. Neverwhere first saw life as a television series in 1996, in which Croup and Vandemar were played by Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell. It has since been a novel, a comic book, the basis of several stage productions and most recently a radio adaptation by the BBC starring James McAvoy, in which Croup was played by Pratchat favourite Anthony Head! Gaiman is currently writing a sequel. Terry himself grew tired of the frequent comparisons between the two Firms; as he says in the Annotated Pratchett File: “Fiction and movies are full of pairs of bad guys that pretty much equate to Pin and Tulip. They go back a long way. That’s why I used ’em, and probably why Neil did too.”
Yes, Stephanie – intertextuality is indeed a word! It refers to the way that works of art, especially literature, draw on and influence each other.
Ben makes a mistake here; the Watergate activities were the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which is mostly important to note because it was quickly shortened to CREEP once the scandal broke.
The Skulls (2000; dir. Rob Cohen) stars Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek and Fringe fame) as a poor law student who scores a rowing scholarship to Yale University, and is invited to join “the Skulls”, a secret society for the rich and powerful. It’s based on the real life student society called the Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is one of three major student organisations at Yale, the others being similarly ominously-named the Scroll and Key and the Wolf’s Head. The Skull and Bones have their own meeting hall called “the Tomb” and own a small island, once luxurious but now considered a dump, in the St Lawrence river in upstate New York. Plenty of conspiracy theories involve the Skull and Bones; their members, or “Bonesmen” (women have only been admitted since the 1990s) certainly include many powerful people like major league sports stars and Presidents.
We couldn’t turn up anything Terry might be referencing with the high-backed chairs and circle of candles; if you find something, let us know!
“Disruption” is a popular buzzword amongst entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sphere, where the idea is that they don’t invent a new product or service, but a new way to organise an old one – often with complete disregard for how this might affect the livelihood of people involved in the existing industry. Uber is the most-often cited example; their system allowed anyone with a car to operate as a taxi driver for rides booked through the app, undercutting existing taxi services and circumventing licensing rules in the process. In Australia and many other countries taxi drivers do not have a union, and so they were powerless to do much about it; the owners of taxi companies and cars eventually tried to act, but with little success.
There are two calendars used on the Discworld: the Imperial Ankh-Morpork calendar (AM), which counts full-years (a full revolution of the disc) since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which counts half-years (one full set of seasons), and starts with the founding of Unseen University. The University calendar begins in AM 1282. The years given in The Truth use the University Calendar, which supplementary material tells us is preferred by most folk since it actually matches the seasons. As for the Centuries, it seems they might use the other calendar, since it is clearly the Century of the Anchovy by the time of Going Postal, but in Moving Pictures and it is still the Century of the Fruitbat, and based on a number of clues The Truth seems to happen in the late 1980s or possibly 1990, the first year of the Century of the Anchovy. (For more on how seasons and so on work on the Disc, see the episode notes for #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.)
You can find out more about the State Library of Victoria’s newspaper collection on their website.
Trove is an online digital archive created by the National Library of Australia and other libraries around Australia. It really does have an amazing collection of stuff!
Liz refers to the “folly” at Werribee Mansion; a folly is an architectural feature or building constructed purely for decoration, especially one that is expensive and/or made to look like it serves a function, even though it doesn’t.
Otto’s surname may also be a reference to Max Schreck, the German actor who portrayed Count Orlok, the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu was an unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, and most of the prints were destroyed after legal actual by the Bram Stoker estate, but the surviving print turned it into a cult film.
Clippit – not Clippy, though that’s what everyone called it – was the default form of the Microsoft Office Assistant, an “intelligent assistant” introduced in Office 97. Clippit was an animated paperclip, and famously would pop up asking if you wanted help with a variety of common writing tasks based on the content of your current document. Most people did not want help, but also didn’t know how to turn Clippit off. While the assistant could have other forms, Clippit was the default and most recognisable. The assistant was based on research showing that people interacted with computers as if they were people, but the inclusion of a person-like assistant made things worse as it felt like one person too many! After widespread user dissatisfaction and industry mockery the assistant was turned off by default in Office XP in 2001 – accompanied by ads saying Clippit was out of a job! – and then removed entirely in Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac).
The recent review of The Truth in the actual -ing Times is by Laura Freeman and was published on the 26th of March, 2021. Sadly it’s behind a paywall, but you might get to access it for free depending on when you visit; it’s Rereading The Truth – a comic novel that rivals Evelyn Waugh.
The accident-prone vampire who may or may not be Otto does indeed appear in Feet of Clay. He takes jobs as a holy water bottler, garlic stacker, pencil maker, picket fence builder and sunglasses tester. (We mention him in our episode about that book: #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.)
Here’s the original version of the menboys tweet:

why do we call them cowboys when they're men. we should call them menboys
— Mr. Fuck (@Slammy_P) March 22, 2021

In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserablés – and its famous musical adaptation – protagonist Jean Valjean struggles to find work as an ex-convict and is taken in by the Bishop of Digne. In the middle of the night, Valjean decides he may as well live up to everyone’s expectations of him and steals the church’s silver, but he is caught and the next morning brought before the Bishop…who tells an astonished policeman that he gave the silver to Valjean – going so far as to hand over two silver candlesticks he claims Valjean forgot! He tells Valjean he must use the silver to become an honest man, as he has bought Valjean’s soul for God, convincing the bitter Valjean to change his life around. (As a side note, Ben is a big fan of the West End production of the musical, and in the not-as-great film, Hugh Jackman plays Valjean – and London cast Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, shows up as the Bishop of Digne!)
Before social media or web-based forums, there were Usenet newsgroups, the first internet equivalent to local bulletin board systems. Started in 1980, the Usenet system allowed for “threads” of messages posted by various users, organised into groups that were categorised in hierarchies similar to domain names. The “alt.fan” category became a popular meeting place for fans of all kinds of different media, discussing their favourite TV shows, comics and books, and posting documents – like the famous Annotated Pratchett File (APF) – that would later be hosted on websites or wikis instead. Pratchett himself was known to lurk on alt.fan.pratchett and occasionally answer questions, many of which are quoted in the APF.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1821, and notable as it is funded by a charitable trust which aims to preserve its independence. As well as the print paper in the UK, it has online publications there and in the US and Australia. The Saturday Paper is a similarly independent weekly paper produced in Australia by Schwartz Media since 2014, who also publish Quarterly Essay and The Monthly, which focus on long-form journalism and opinion, and the podcast 7am, a weekday podcast which tries to give a deeper look at a single story from the week.
Ben is remembering a story from design podcast 99% Invisible, but the streets under the streets aren’t in San Francisco, they’re in Seattle. It’s the last story in episode 290, “Mini-Stories: Volume 4“, from 2018. We previous mentioned that 99% Invisible episode in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
The story of Darwin embracing Christianity on his deathbed is commonly told by anti-evolutionists, as it also claims he recanted his theory at the same time – but it was invented by a woman who hadn’t been there. This New Yorker article is a good account of the truth.
Pascal’s wager was the posthumously published argument by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in which he used ideas of probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism to argue that all humans should try and believe in God, since the reward if He exists is infinite, and the loss if he does not is negligible.
The character of Benny in Pratchat favourite movie The Mummy (1999) first tries to ward off Imhotep the undead monster with a cross, but when that doesn’t work he reveals a collection of religious charms for which he knows accompanying prayers. (We think we last mentioned The Mummy in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, but there are many earlier examples too. See also the next note.)
While there is a Scorpion King 4: The Quest for Power, and it was released on Netflix, that was in 2016. The one recently added to Netflix Australia was Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption. There’s also a fifth film, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, a direct sequel to Scorpion King 4. (We previously mentioned the Scorpion King franchise in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.)
Stream Team is a series of Guardian articles about the hidden gems available via various streaming services. Liz did indeed eventually write an article about The Mummy films for Stream Team, in June 2021.
Hood ornaments on cars were originally invented because in early designs the radiator cap protruded from the front of the car. Instead of a boring functional cap, some manufacturers made small ornaments and used those as the cap; once they became a symbol of the brand, like the Jaguar jaguar and the Rolls Royce angel, they continued to be attached to the hood even once the radiator was relocated to entirely inside the hood. They disappeared in part due to changing tastes, but also because of pedestrian safety standards in Europe.
Mulder and Scully are the protagonists of the television series The X-Files, which we previously mentioned in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. The pair are FBI agents who investigate cases which are supernatural or otherwise unexplained. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a profiler and believer in aliens and conspiracies, while Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor and a skeptic; the professional and later romantic and sexual tension between them was a popular part of the show. They eventually begin a relationship during the last few seasons of the show’s initial run, and they try to stay together through the subsequent films and revival seasons.
Stephanie is right: The Truth (2000) comes a few years and five Discworld novels before the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men (2003). We discussed the latter in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.
Privilege comes from the Latin “privilegium”, which does indeed means private law; in many legal jurisdictions, a privilege is still defined as a “private law” that affords a particular entitlement or protection to a person or class of persons.
The one who thinks in italics is, as suggested by Liz, Edward d’Eath, the antagonist of Men at Arms. The book says of him: “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” (We discussed Men at Arms in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
The use of eyeglasses goes back to at least the 13th century, with the earliest records show them in Pisa, Northern Italy. There’s some contention about whether they may also have been invented around the same time or earlier in China or India, but unlike many other inventions which were clearly found in Asia first, the evidence for this isn’t clear.
Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He began writing professionally in around 1974, primarily in radio and television, and wrote ten books (including seven novels) between 1979 and 1992 (though it’s probably fairer to count it as nine, since The Deeper Meaning of Liff is really an extended version of The Meaning of Liff). The Salmon of Doubt was published after his death, containing a collection of fiction and non-fiction, some of which had not been published before.
While the form of “gazette” adopted into English does come via French, it ultimately derives from the Venetian phrase “gazeta dele novità“, or “a gazeta of news” – gazeta being the cost of the short paper, equivalent to a half-penny. It’s therefore not quite right to remove the -ette suffix, but we could offer “gaz” or even “megagaz” as the bigger equivalent?
Green Left, previously Green Left Weekly, is an Australian socialist newspaper founded in 1990. It is associated with the political party Socialist Alliance, though it is run independently by the Green Left Association.
The other Discworld podcasts we mention this episode are Who Watches the Watch? and The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.

#Pratchat41 Notes and Errata

08/03/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“, featuring guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro, discussing 2008’s standalone young adult novel, Nation.

The episode title is riffing on the title of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005, dir. Robert Rodriguez). It references Mau’s feeling of being like a hermit crab, looking for a bigger shell to live in, and Daphne’s status as a “trouserman”.
For listeners outside of Australia, some brief background on our opening acknowledgement: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples never ceded sovereignty of Australia to English colonisers in the 18th century. The English used the legal concept of terra nullius to claim the land belonged to no-one, and could be claimed for the Crown. Over two centuries later, in 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in the case Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that indigenous peoples’ traditional ownership could be legally recognised, introducing the concept of “native title”. While this has not yet resulted in Australia or any of its states signing treaties with indigenous peoples, it has since become common practice for an “acknowledgment of country” or “acknowledgment of traditional owners” to be given at events, paying respect to and publicly naming (if they are known) the custodians of the land on which the event takes place. We’d like to thank Charlotte for providing wording to appropriately acknowledge the history of indigenous science.
Lost is a television drama created by by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof in 2004. It follows a large ensemble cast of plane crash survivors who are lost on an island in the South Pacific. They are threatened by weird creatures, supernatural occurrences, a mysterious organisation and other inhabitants of the at first seemingly empty island. It was famous for its ongoing supernatural mystery with complex storylines; use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; and, ultimately, for failing to provide a satisfying conclusion to the mystery after six years of buildup.
Terry said Nation was his favourite of his books in many interviews, but perhaps most famously in the acceptance speech for the 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Award, which Nation won. As Ben reads out in a footnote, he said “I believe Nation is the best book I have ever written or will ever write”, and doesn’t appear to have changed his mind afterwards. The entire speech appears in his non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard. (This is a also a good source for his comments about feeling the need to write Nation.)
In nautical terms, a schooner is a ship with two or more masts with “fore-and-aft” rigged sails; to avoid more nautical jargon, this means the edges of the sails point at the front and back of the ship, rather than sticking out over the sides as in square-rigged ships. Interestingly this is the sort of rigging used by Austronesian sailors thousands of years ago – including the “lobster-claw” sails mentioned in the book (presumably a relative of the crab claw sails of our world).
In beer terms, a schooner is…certainly a size of beer glass used in Australia. The sizes of beer glasses and their names are notoriously varied across Australia’s states and territories. “Schooner” is almost universally used for a glass which holds 425 millilitres (or 15 fluid ounces), but they’re not common in all states – most pubs won’t have them in Victoria, for example. We say “almost universally” because in South Australia the 425ml glass is called a “pint” (even though every other state uses a standard 570ml glass for pints), and they use “schooner” to mean the common smaller-sized glass of 285ml. In Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane this smaller glass is called a “pot”, while in Sydney and Canberra (where standard schooners are more common) it’s a “middy”. Learning to work in a bar in Australia is quite an education.
We’ve so far covered a few of Terry’s standalone novels, most of which came at the start and end of his career. They include the early sci-fi novels The Dark Side of the Sun (see #Pratchat18) and Strata, his first novel The Carpet People, Good Omens with Neil Gaiman (see #Pratchat15), Nation and Dodger (see #Pratchat6).
Fight Club began life as a short story by author Chuck Palahniuk before being expanded into a novel published in 1996, and adapted into a film in 1999 by David Fincher starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. The story follows an unnamed insomniac protagonist who is tired of his normal, numb existence. When his home is destroyed, he moves in with soap salesman Tyler Durden and the pair start “Fight Club”, an underground group in which men physically fight each other in order to feel something. Famously, both the first and second rules of Fight Club are “Do not talk about Fight Club.”
There are many creation stories found in the Pacific Islands; Ben is taking some time to research them for signs of inspiration for those of the Nation. The idea of human souls becoming dolphins, though, is not a Polynesian one; dolphins are considered lucky and to be respected in many sailing traditions, though, and feature in many stories of Greek mythology, where it was taboo to kill them.
The Russian flu is a name sometimes used for the flu pandemic of 1889-1890, also known at the time as the “Asiatic flu”, though neither name is used in literature now. It killed around 1 million people worldwide, but what caused it isn’t known for sure. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was much worse, killing between 17 and 100 million people; it was caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus, which was also responsible for the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic.
12 Monkeys is a 1995 time travel film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt. Inspired by the French short film La Jetée, it follows James Cole, a prisoner in the virus-ravaged future of 2035, where humanity is forced to live underground. A group of scientists select Cole as a test subject to be sent back in time to stop the release of the virus, which they think was engineered by a terrorist organisation known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. The film was later adapted into a television series which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2018.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) made his famous voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, and by the time of his return to England was already well-known in scientific circles. The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. All of this marries well with the idea that the book takes place in the 1860s, though there’s plenty of room to move. We’ll talk a lot more about him eighteen months after this episode when we discuss The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch in #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“.
Disinfectant in the nineteenth century was still pretty new, since germ theory was still catching on. We’ve been unable to find any historical substance that might have inspired the dripping red substance, though it probably smelled much worse than crushed up roses. (If you know, please tell us!)
A tsunami is a series of huge waves caused by displacement of large amounts of water in a sea, ocean or other large body of water. They are primarily caused by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Pratchett was initially inspired by the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption, but not long after he had the idea for Nation there was a tsunami in the Indian ocean which killed more than 20,000 people on Boxing Day, 2004. He postponed work on the story. The name tsunami is Japanese, and means “harbour wave”. It is the preferred scientific term, rather than the older term “tidal wave”, since tsunamis are not caused by tides.
Daphne’s father, Henry Fanshaw (later King Henry IX), is Governor of Port Mercia in the Rogation Sunday Islands.
Survivor guilt – the feeling that one has done something wrong by surviving when others have died – is a common expression of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Tattersalls Club Charlotte mentions is a private gentlemen’s club founded in Brisbane in 1865 by, in their own words, “a group of gentlemen who were prominent in both business and in the thoroughbred horse racing industry”. In December 2018, after some public protest that they still only allowed men as members, a vote was held which passed by a margin of only about 1% to allow women to join, but a group of members were so against this they appealed to the Brisbane supreme court, asking for a recount thanks to some rules technicalities. Their appeal was denied in February 2019, and the club now accepts women as members.
In case you’ve been living in one, an “echo chamber” refers to any situation in which a group of people only listens to others who agree with their own views, amplifying their belief that they are right and shielding them from criticism or debate. It is especially applied to social media, where one’s curated list of who you follow can create a “bubble” of only like-minded opinions.
To answer Liz’s question, no, Terry didn’t draw the illustrations for Nation. They are by children’s book illustrator and author Jonny Duddle, who is credited as the sole illustrator for the UK edition of the book. Duddle drew everything, including the maps, the chapter illustrations and the in-character drawings by Mau and Daphne. (He also did extra endpaper designs featuring a hermit crab for the “Special Numbered Collectors’ Edition”.) As far as we can tell he also illustrated the original cover, though his art was not used in the US edition, which has a cover by Bill Mayer. We’re not sure if the US edition has any of Duddle’s art – not even the bits that seem important to the plot! The current UK edition of the book has a new cover by Laura Ellen Anderson, but we think it still has Duddle’s art inside. We don’t have access to those editions, so we’d love to hear from you with details if you do!
It is indeed true that right up until the 19th century most sailors did not know how to swim. This was both because there was little chance a ship could turn around fast enough to get them if they fell overboard, even if the captain chose to try, and because very few of them were professional sailors anyway – they were temporary hires, or drafted or press-ganged into service. Also, in the time before fast travel and public swimming pools, only people who lived near the sea or a lake would swim recreationally, so it wasn’t a common skill.
The history of bathing suits goes back to the 16th century, when they were actually used for bathing in public baths, but even when they started to be used for swimming their initial purpose was to hide women’s bodies. By the time more form-fitting styles were desired, the only material that could really be used was wool, since synthetic materials hadn’t yet been invented and everything else sagged or became too heavy in water. This article at Swim Swam covers the history of wool swimsuits in great detail.
Sweary parrots turn up in lots of places, including Tintin, the film Deep Blue Sea, the videogame Neverwinter Nights 2, and real life – including (and we checked this with a few sources) US President Andrew Jackson’s pet parrot, Poll, who had to be removed from Jackson’s funeral because it was swearing too much.
Pratchett not only had the comedy parrot in Eric, but in Moving Pictures the directors abandon using parrots to add sound to their clicks because the dialogue always ended up naughty. We covered Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“, and Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
Bridgerton is Netflix’s wildly successful 2021 series about the Regency-era Bridgerton family and their daughters’ quests for love and marriage. The series is an adaptation of the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn, which begin with 2000’s The Duke and I. The series contains a great deal more sex than anything written by Jane Austen – none of the Bridgerton sisters are likely to vaporise in their rooms! Well…probably not while alone, and certainly not quietly.
Spoiler alert: Ben is talking about the character Mrs Landingham, who dies in the penultimate episode of The West Wing‘s second season, “18th and Potomac”. The scene Ben recalls with President Jed Bartlett in the church is in the following season finale episode, “Two Cathedrals”. Both were originally broadcast in 2001.
We’ve previously mentioned 1970s Swedish pop sensations ABBA back in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, which came out the same month as the band’s reunion single “I Still Have Faith in You”. The song “Waterloo” was their winning entry for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, and the start of their rise to international fame. “Nina, Pretty Ballerina” was from their pre-Eurovision first album Ring Ring, released in 1973 under the name Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid (or, in Austria, Björn & Benny, Anna & Frida).
Studies in 2017 and 2020 concluded that regardless of culture or language, babies recognise and prefer baby talk (or “Infant Directed Language”) to regular speech.
In Mort the two prominent female characters are Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and Queen Keli of Sto Helit. Mort is instantly infatuated with Keli, but eventually marries Ysabell, with whom he has bickered for the entire book. You can hear our thoughts about all this in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“.
The Wee Free Men (discussed in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“) was published in 2003, five years before Nation. The later Tiffany Aching book Wintersmith, published a couple of years before Nation in 2006, has the now 13-year-old Tiffany deal with her first real boy trouble.
We know you’re wracking your brain to think of it too, but the “motorcycle dominos” appear in so many films and television series that they are a trope. Ben probably saw it in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton), but you’ll also find it in the Clint Eastwood movie Every Which Way But Loose, 80s slasher film Friday the 13th Part III, and even an episode of Scrubs.
How long has the Nation existed? Daphne counts 102 dead Grandfathers in the cave by the time they can no longer see the entrance, and later loses count after “hundreds”; the prose mentions “hundreds and thousands” – possibly a thought of Daphne’s – but that’s inconclusive. But even assuming there are only 1,000 of them, and that a handful of Grandfathers are put in the cave per generation, using the general estimate of one generation per 25 years tells us the Nation’s history goes four or five thousand years, if not tens of thousands. Not at all far-fetched when we consider that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures stretch back at least 50,000 years, and that they were likely the first peoples to ever cross an ocean.
Ben is using the term “cargo cult” a little loosely. It comes from World War II, when Japanese and then Allied forces visited places in Melanesia – the nations and islands of the southwest Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, many of which had had little contact with other peoples. The soldiers brought with them goods and technology that had never been seen by the locals before, sometimes trading with them, but left after the war ended. In the hopes that the visitors and their cargo might return, some local peoples developed rituals in which they imitated the soldiers, integrating stories of their visitation into their existing beliefs. Many earlier examples have been found, and some still persist today.
Despite that fact that only Charlotte can remember its title, Liz and Ben discussed The Fifth Elephant only a month earlier, in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
Ben refers to the “Battle of Wits” between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Sicilian kidnapper Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from his 1973 novel. In the scene, Vizzini has Princess Buttercup at knifepoint, but cannot resist when challenged to a battle of wits to the death. After Vizzini pours two glasses of wine, the Man in Black pours a deadly poison, “iocane powder”, into one of the glasses; Vizzini will decide which one, and then they will both drink. The scene is the basis for one of Ben’s favourite party boardgames, one of several games based on the film published by Game Salute. We previously mentioned The Princess Bride in #Pratchat17 and #Pratchat36.
Atlantis is a fictional island nation invented by Plato for his books Timaeus and Critias. The Atlantean civilisation was described as powerful, and the Atlanteans themselves as “half gods”, but they grew too proud and the gods sunk their island beneath the sea in the space of a single day. The myth has proven popular for centuries, with versions since the twentieth century often imagining Atlantis as possessing advanced technologies – and perhaps causing their own demise, rather than it being a punishment of the gods.
We didn’t end up coming back to the map, but of note is Terry’s decision to split Australia in half, as Nearer Australia and Further Australia. It’s not mentioned in the novel, so we’ll have to decide for ourselves whether this is accurate and thus representative of some unknown alternate universe calamity, or is a reference to the fact that early European maps of Australia were often very incomplete, since they rarely sailed around the entire continent. (None split it in two, but many leave a big gap in the middle where South Australia is, as if to say: “who knows?”)
The Mythbusters team did indeed test what happens when shooting into water, in episode 34, “Bulletproof Water“. They listed the myth as “partly confirmed” – high velocity sniper rifle rounds disintegrated in less than a metre of water, but bullets from smaller guns needed more water to slow down enough to be safe; the Mythbusters said at least 8 feet. Firing at an angle into the water means the target doesn’t need to be as deep to be safe, though, so Mau being safe stands up until Cox is right on top of him at the end.
Mutant superhero Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, has epic super-speed sequences in the films X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), both written and directed by Bryan Singer. Quicksilver moves so fast that everything else appears to him to be in slow motion, so he easily redirects bullets fired at his allies so that they miss. Charlotte was miming the famous sequence from the original The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis) in which protagonist Neo, now aware he is inside a complex computer simulation, breaks the rules of physics and dodges bullets. The technique used to film this, now known as “bullet time”, involved still cameras being activated in sequence, allowing a slow-motion sequence in which the point of view moved around.
We’ve previously explained the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is quite something considering we’re a book club podcast. Check out the show notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
“A shrubbery!” is the first of many ludicrous demands made by the imposing Knights Who Say “Ni” as tribute, in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mau’s list of demands is very reasonable by comparison.
The tree-climbing octopus may have been inspired by the sadly fictitious “Pacific Northwest tree octopus”, an Internet hoax dating back to 1998. It was said to live in the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, right in the northwest corner of the USA, and that its main natural predator was the sasquatch. The original spoof site Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, created by “Lyle Zapato”, has been used to teach children Internet literacy.
Sadly it seems that no octopuses have learned to count. If you want to see the adorable and very smart things they do learn, Ben recommends you check out OctoNation, the world’s biggest octopus fan club.
The character with the coffin in Moby Dick is Queequeg, who is the son of a Polynesian chief. After he becomes friends with the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Queequeg joins him on Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, where he becomes a harpooner under the First Mate, Starbuck. When a casting of runes predicts his death, he has a coffin made for himself and refuses to eat or drink. When the whal Moby Dick sinks the Pequod, Queequeg goes down with the ship, but Ishmael survives by clinging to the floating coffin until he is picked up by another ship. It seems pretty clear Cookie’s previous shipmate is a nod to the character in Herman Melville’s book.
The Pratchett interview excerpt about fantasy that’s lately been doing the rounds is from an interview he did with The Onion in 1995. This is before The Onion went online, of course, but a few months after Pratchett’s death in 2015, fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss transcribed it on his blog as part of his tribute to Terry.
Liz and Ben’s differing opinions on Lord of the Flies go all the way back to #Pratchat7A and #Pratchat9.
Heart of Darkness is a 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. Protagonist Charles Marlow becomes a steamboat captain for an ivory trading company and travels up the Congo river, where he becomes obsessed with another employee of the company, Kurtz. Kurtz, now sick and close to death, is revered as a success, but his habits and methods are extreme. It was most famously adapted by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now, with the setting relocated to the Vietnam war and the US Army replacing the ivory company.
The Blue Lagoon (1980, dir. Randal Kleiser, of Grease fame) is an adaptation of the 1908 romance novel written by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. In the story, two young American cousins – Richard (Dicky in the novel) and Emmeline (you’ll see in a moment why Daphne rejects the name) – are marooned on a South Pacific Island island with the ship’s cook. The cook dies, and the two grow up on the island alone, eventually “falling in love” and having a child together before being rescued. The movie, which starred Brooke Shields as Emmeline, was critically panned but did very well at the box office. There were two previous film adaptations in 1923 and 1949, and once since in 2012, as well as a 1991 sequel to the 1980 film, Return to the Blue Lagoon, starring Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause; it’s basically a retelling of the original story, with the twist that Krause plays the son of Richard and Emmeline, and he and Jovovich’s character decide to stay on the island after they encounter a crew of sailors.
Is mother of beer a real thing? Sort of! Listeners Felix and Elizabeth both contacted us about masato, a drink made in the Amazonian basin from the yuca plant, also known as cassava or manioc root. In traditional preparation, the yuca is peeled and soaked or boiled in water, then chewed by women who spit the juice into a bowl. Their saliva converts the starch in the juice into sugar, and wild yeast or bacteria ferments the sugar into alcohol. Raw yuca is poisonous, but it’s not the spit that makes it safe to drink – the soaking or boiling does that. Masato is basically a form of chicha, a drink made through similar means throughout Latin America from less poisonous vegetables, most often corn.
Beer is made from cereal grains, most often barley which has been malted (soaked in water to make it germinate, then dried out with heat to stop it growing, and usually mashed into a powder). The malt is mixed with warm water, and usually hops (the flowers of the hop plant) to add bitterness and flavour, before yeast is added. The yeast ferments the sugars in the malt into alcohol. Beer is one of the oldest documented foods, and has been made by humans for around 13,000 years or more.
To put Charlotte’s comment that “where humans exist, grains are” in context, evidence found in the last decade or so makes it pretty clear that grains have been part of the human diet for probably at least 100,000 years.
Kava is a plant that grows in the pacific islands; its root is made into a drink with a sedative effect. It’s hugely important in many places, drunk for medicinal, religious, political, cultural and social reasons. It’s effect is described as very different to that of alcohol, caffeine or nicotine.
It was guest Myfanwy Coghill who said anyone can learn the skill of singing; you can hear this and many other amazing insights from her in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
You can find Pratchat on Podchaser, and also a list of Discworld read-through podcasts which Ben tries to keep up to date. For a more detailed list, see The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters. Let him know if you find one that’s missing!
Our Llamedos Holiday Camp on the Clacks panel, “Podcasting Discworld”, was held online at 3 PM UK time on Sunday, March 7 (which was 2 AM Monday the 7Ath, Australian Eastern Daylight Time). As well as Liz and Ben, the panel featured Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Colm Kearns of Radio Morpork, and Al Kennedy of Desert Island Discworld.
The Answer, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is shorthand for “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. It is revealed by hyper advanced supercomputer Deep Thought to be…42. This doesn’t make sense, but Deep Thought also solves that problem: no-one actually knows what the Question is. Hence he builds another computer to figure it out, and causing no end of trouble for one Arthur Dent.

More notes coming soon!

#Pratchat34 Notes and Errata

08/08/2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“, featuring guest Oliver Phommavanh, discussing the 1993 Johnny Maxwell novel Johnny and the Dead.

The episode title is a cheeky reference to the first Johnny Maxwell book, Only You Can Save Mankind, in which Johnny similarly finds he is the only one who can save a group of otherworldly beings. We discussed it in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
Oliver’s Quentin Blake-style cover for this book was illustrated by Mark Beech, who we mentioned in our Only You Can Save Mankind episode. He has illustrated the covers for the newest editions of all Terry’s non-Discworld children’s books, as well as the recent collections of his very early stories – including the upcoming The Time-Travelling Caveman, due out in September this year. David Walliams’ books are rather less Blake-like, and are illustrated inside and out by Tony Ross.
You can find Liz’s essay “Grave Concerns“ from February 2020 online at Kill Your Darlings.
Johnny Maxwell’s other adventures include saving the alien Scree-Wee fleet (Only You Can Save Mankind; see #Pratchat28), seeing “a Loch Ness Monster” in his goldfish pond, finding a lost city of the Incas behind Tesco’s, meeting the dead (all of those mentioned from this book) and the not-spoiled-here adventures of Johnny and the Bomb.
We previous talked about the hidden nature of supernatural things, particularly in British fantasy, in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“. The TARDIS perception filter is a modern application from Doctor Who, explaining why people don’t notice the TARDIS even when a 1960s British Police Box doesn’t exactly fit in with its surroundings. (It looks like that because it’s chameleon circuit changes its outward form to blend in, but malfunctioned upon landing in 1963, causing it to become stuck. Now the Doctor likes it that way.)
Beetlejuice is a 1988 comedy horror film directed by Tim Burton. It stars Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as a young couple who die in a car accident and subsequently haunt their own house, forced to deal with the annoying new owners and a highly bureaucratic afterlife. The Handbook for the Recently Deceased is supposed to help them adjust but raises as many questions as it answers. Michael Keaton also stars at the titular Betelgeuse, a crude, wise-cracking “bio-exorcist” ghost who is an expert on scaring the living, while Winona Ryder plays goth girl Lydia, who befriends the nice dead people.
“Doorbelling” is the practice of ringing someone’s doorbell and then running away before they answer, as a prank. The Pratchat team have never done such a thing, of course.
“Thriller” was the title track from Michael Jackson’s sixth studio album, released in 1982. The single, released in late 1983 in the UK (early 1984 in the US), featured an extended music video directed by John Landis (of An American Werewolf in London fame) that featured Jackson becoming undead and dancing with a horde of Romero-esque zombies. The song also famously features a spoken-word section voiced by classic horror film star Vincent Price.
The Satanic panic was an outbreak of moral panic over supposed Satanistic abuse. It began in America, inspired in part by the publication Michelle Remembers, a biography based on “recovered memories” of child abuse linked to Satanic rituals. The book’s claims could not be verified by multiple journalists and investigators. It was followed a few years later by some highly publicised trials, Senate hearings and conspiracy theories that resemble McCarthy-era communist witch hunts. The panic particularly targeted Dungeons & Dragons and, later, heavy metal music, and by the 1990s had spread to other countries.
The West Memphis Three were three teenagers convicted in 1994 of the killing of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Tennessee in 1993. The investigation, trial and conviction were all highly controversial, including the claim that the teenagers were engaged in Satanic rituals. In 2011, after even some of the victims’ families protested that the men were innocent, they were released from prison, using the unusual “Alford plea” (in brief, they pled guilty to lesser charges but were still allowed to profess their innocence). To answer Liz’s question: the first edition of Johnny and the Dead was published on May 27, 1993, only three weeks after the crime was committed, so Pratchett couldn’t have heard of it while writing it.
The Beatle who left before they got famous is drummer Pete Best. He joined them in 1960 (when they were still “The Silver Beatles”) for their Hamburg tour, and was fired in 1962 by producer Brian Epstein at the request of John, Paul and George, who later regretted the way they handled it. He failed to find another successful band and left the music industry for twenty years, before an interest in the early history of the band finally made him famous and he formed his own band. He’s active on Twitter, and recently replied to a tweet from the official Beatles account asking “Do you remember the first time you ever heard a Beatles song?” with: “Yeah, I was playing on it.”
As Liz mentions, the Queen Victoria Market was built on top of the site of the Old Melbourne Cemetery. The bodies buried underneath still cause problems with modern plans for the expansion or development of the markets. There’s plenty been written about the cemetery; you could start with the cemetery’s official page on the City of Melbourne web site.
Public housing in Melbourne was in the news around the time of our recording this episode, as three prominent public housing estates were locked down with police presence and little notice after major outbreaks of COVID-19 were traced there. Much criticism was levelled at the Victorian state government for their police-first response, and the fact that they had ignored previous requests for assistance from residents, who had already realised that the cramped conditions and inadequate cleaning of common areas were exposing them to much greater risk of infection. As in the UK, public housing in Australia is an essential service that has suffered from neglect.
“Ryan-from-The O.C.-ing” refers to Ryan Atwood, the main protagonist of 2000s teen drama The O.C., played by the other Ben McKenzie. Ryan is a rough kid from Chino, who steals a car and is abandoned by his mother after being arrested. He’s adopted by the lawyer representing him, and moves to Orange County, where he slowly reforms and adapts to his new surroundings.
Harry Houdini (1874-1926), born Erik Weisz, is probably the most famous stage magician in history. He performed many escapes that resemble Mr Vicenti’s final trick, though he died of peritonitis. Will Alma (1904-1993), born Oswald George William Bishop, was not only a magician, but also a maker of magical apparatus and a magical historian. The name doesn’t appear to have any direct connection to Houdini, but the WG Alma Conjuring Collection, held by Melbourne Museum, is famous and has occasionally been displayed. Pratchett could perhaps have seen it during one of his many trips to Melbourne.
Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian Bombshell”, was a singer, dancer and movie star from the 1930s through to the 1950s. After finding fame in Rio, she moved to Broadway and then to Hollywood. In 1943 she starred in the Busby Berkely film The Gang’s All Here, wearing a costume that included a number of fruit hats, which became her trademark. It’s important to note, however, that Miranda was not herself Brazilian, but a Portuguese woman who emigrated to Brazil with her family as a baby. This makes her one in a depressingly long list of white folks who have gained fame for their expression of BIPOC cultures, though in Miranda’s case she was at least beloved by many Brazilians and inspired a new surge in national pride and interest in traditional samba.
Suffragettes were women devoted to the cause of women’s suffrage, i.e. the right and ability of women to vote in democratic elections. While the term became widespread and used across the world, it originally applied to the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU was founded in the UK in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst, ten years after New Zealand became the first country to extend voting rights to women. They had to fight hard, going beyond loud public protests to chaining themselves to railings inside the houses of parliament and, when imprisoned, staging hunger strikes. Mrs Liberty is clearly inspired by Emily Davidson, who in 1913 ran onto the course at the Epsom Derby to gain publicity for the movement, and tried to grab the reins of the King’s horse. She was struck by the horse and died from her injuries. The suffragette movement paused at the start of the war in 1914, and in the UK partial suffrage was gained for women over 30 in 1918; it wasn’t until 1928 that women in the UK won the same voting rights as men.
Edward VIII, aka “Edward the Abdictator“, was indeed a famous womaniser. In January 1936, his father died and he became King. He was already the source of scandal as he was in a relationship with Wallis Simpson, a divorced American still married to her second husband, and his behaviour as King caused further controversy. When he revealed his plans to marry Simpson in November, the Church of England and the governments of the UK and Commonwealth nations were outraged at what this would mean for the succession. Edward abdicated to avoid constitutional crisis, having been King for less than a year, and married Simpson, becoming Duke of Windsor. While he should be afforded some sympathy, it is also worth remembering that he harboured pro-Nazi or at least pro-fascist sentiments, and was friendly with Adolf Hitler in the lead up to World War II. History does not seem to record him as being “particularly large”, lending weight to Liz’s later comment.
Ben remembers correctly that Edward VIII is played by Guy Pearce in the 2010 film The King’s Speech, in which George VI (Colin Firth) seeks help from Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) to overcome a stammer and deliver a live radio announcement of the declaration of World War II. Other actors who have played Edward VIII include Oliver Dimsdale (Downton Abbey), Alex Jennings (The Crown seasons 1 and 2) and non less a personage than Derek Jacobi (The Crown season 3).
For more on gravestones and their epitaphs as the only evidence of someone’s life, Ben recommends episode 110 of The Allusionist podcast, “Engraving part 1: Epitaph“.
Pals battalions were indeed a real thing during World War I. One of the most famous examples was the “Gimsby Chums”, a group of nearly one thousand young men from Grimsby, Lincolnshire and its surrounding towns. 810 of them died during the war.
Royal protocol does seem to dictate that two potential heirs to the throne may not fly together, to avoid a succession crisis should the plane be lost. In a similar fashion, the President and Vice-President of the United States never fly together on Airforce One.
Nominative determinism is the idea that a person’s name subtly influences their interests and decisions in life, explaining why some people have names appropriate to their occupations or achievements. This is the opposite of how things worked prior to the 14th century, when European names were only hereditary for nobility. Common folk instead took a name from a parent (e.g. Williamson, Sigridsdottir) – a tradition that persists in some Scandinavian countries – or their profession (e.g. Smith, Cooper, Fletcher or Carpenter).
Alzheimer’s disease is a degenerative neurological disease responsible for around two-thirds of dementia cases. It usually occurs in those over the age of 65, and proceeds faster as it progresses, affecting memory, causing death in less than a decade. It is still relatively poorly understood; the causes are uncertain and there is no effective treatment. Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with a variant of Alzheimer’s, posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), unusually early, with the disease affecting him from the age of 56. PCA attacks the posterior part of the brain first, causing primarily physical and vision-related symptoms while leaving cognitive ability and memory intact. He referred to the condition as his “embuggerance”, and was able to continue working until not long before his death in March 2015.
The Onion article about George R R Martin referenced by Liz is from their spin-off site, the clickbait parody Clickhole: “When I Started Writing ‘Game of Thrones’, I Didn’t Know What Horse Looked Like“.
Rod Serling was the creator and host of the science fantasy anthology TV show The Twilight Zone. The original series ran from 1959 to 1964, and each episode had an intro and outro narrated by Serling, who also wrote many of the scripts. There was a Hollywood movie based on four of the TV episodes in 1983, and revived series in 1985, 2002 and 2019, none of which were hosted by Serling. It may have been repeated on television in the early 1990s in the UK, as many 50s and 60s series were; otherwise it’s a bit weird that Johnny knows who Serling is…
Roald Dahl was a prolific and beloved children’s author from the UK, whose most famous works include Charlie and Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda and The Witches. His books were illustrated by Quentin Blake. In The Fantastic Mr Fox, the titular chicken thief is hunted by three farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean.
The Returned and Services League – not “Returned Servicemen’s League” – is an Australian organisation formed in 1916 dedicated to the welfare of current and retired military personnel. They’re best known to many Australians for the licensed RSL Clubs which are social hubs in many rural and regional towns. Mr Atterbury belongs to the similar Royal British Legion, or British Legion for short, founded in 1921.
David Attenborough is the famous wildlife presenter and international treasure. Ben can’t find the English actor he imagined when thinking of Mr Atterbury, but he looks a bit like John Hillerman, the Texan actor who played the British Army Sergeant Major Jonathan Higgins in Magnum, P.I. (If you have any suggestions, please send them in!)
Cobbers is clearly a spoof of popular Australian soap opera Neighbours and/or Home and Away. It’s also mentioned in Only You Can Save Mankind.
“The Village Green Preservation Society” was the leading and title track on The Kinks‘ sixth studio album, 1968’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. A great cover by English folk singer Kate Rusby was recorded in 2006 as the theme song for the BBC sit-com Jam & Jerusalem. It was a bonus track on her 2007 album Awkward Annie. The original Kinks album appears in Pratchett’s later novel The Long War – see #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“.
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) is Jules Verne’s 1872 adventure novel in which precise and reserved English gentleman Phileas Fogg attempts to win a bet by circumnavigating the globe in 80 days, assisted by his newly hired French valet Passepartout. Neither of them are ghosts, so they travel via train and steamship. (Despite what you might think, they don’t travel in a balloon; that was added for the 1956 film starring David Niven, and has become a fixture of later adaptations, including the 2004 Disney version starring Steve Coogan as Fogg, and Jackie Chan as Passepartout. The award-winning 2014 interactive fiction game 80 Days, available on mobile phones, is great.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch is Joe Dante’s 1990 sequel to his classic 1984 horror comedy Gremlins. The sequel is much more cartoony – in one sequence, quite literally – and makes heavy use of parody, including poking fun at its predecessor. Notably, the film is set inside “Clamp Tower”, a skyscraper in New York owned by Donald Clamp (John Glover), a parody of both Donald Trump and Ted Turner.
In October 2016, developers demolished the Corkman Irish Pub in Carlton without seeking building or planning permission. The pub was originally the Carlton Inn, and was one of the oldest buildings in Carlton, built in 1856, and while not heritage listed, it was protected by heritage rules. The developers were fined more than $1.3 million in 2019 after failing to rebuild the pub as promised. They later appealed these fines, which were reduced, and the Victorian Planning Minister dropped the requirement for them to rebuild the pub, allowing them to seek permission to build a 12-storey apartment building (easily worth far more than the fines). There were calls in 2019 for the government to compulsorily acquire the site, but no more recent update.
Skinhead subculture first emerged in the UK in the 60s, and went through a revival in the 1980s, initially as part of punk. By the 90s, skinhead culture became associated with far-right, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi ideals, and spread across Europe, though there’s also an anarchist strain which is usually anti-fascist and anti-racist. neo-Fascist skinheads are famously depicted in the films American History X (1998) and Romper Stomper (1992), among many others.
Boxer and convicted rapist Mike Tyson famously bit off part of rival Evander Holyfield’s ear in their re-match fight in 1997. Tyson actually bit both of Holyfield’s ears during the fight, and claimed it was in retaliation for Holyfield headbutting him in the first round. Tyson was fined $3 million (US) and had his boxing license revoked, but got it back the next year.
In case you’re listening to this in the far future, this episode was recorded during the second six-week lockdown of Melbourne due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. It followed a second major outbreak of community transmissions in the state, contrasted with relatively low case numbers in the rest of the country. Not long after the recording, Melbourne moved from stage 3 to a new stage 4 level of restrictions, which included mandatory mask wearing in public, the closure of a broader range of businesses, and a curfew.
By “special alphabet“, Liz means a spelling alphabet, sometimes called a phonetic alphabet: a list of distinctive words, one for each letter, used in aviation, military and other radio communications to avoid confusion when spelling out vital information verbally. The current English spelling alphabet was standardised in 1969.
The famous flying cars Liz mentions are the hover-converted DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future (and the sequel), Greased Lightnin’, the Ford convertible from Grease which flies at the end, and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the magical car created by Ian Flemying for the book (and later film, adapted by Roald Dahl) of the same name.
Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian children’s author whose books have often tackled serious topics. His second novel, 1990’s Two Weeks with the Queen, was about Colin, an Australian twelve-year-old who visits London and tries to break into Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen to help find a good doctor for his brother, who is being treated for cancer back home. The only sympathetic adult he meets is Ted, a gay Welshman whose partner is dying of AIDS. The book was controversial at the time.
The term “political correctness” began in the 70s and 80s as a way to satirise overly cautious language, but it is now often used as a pejorative to describe any language designed to avoid offensive or be more inclusive.
Oliver mentioned A. F. Harrold, an English poet, performer and children’s author. The first of his so far twelve novels for children, Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away from the Circus (and Joined the Library), was published in 2012.
The practice of adding reversed sounds to audio recordings is called backmasking. Pioneered by The Beatles, who used reversed musical instruments to create unique sounds on their album Revolver, the 1980s Satanic panic claimed that rock bands were using backmasking to hide Satanic messages, and that they could be understood subconsciously. These claims may have been inspired by the film The Exorcist (1973), in which a girl possessed by a demon speaks gibberish which, when reversed, reveals a message from Satan.
Johnny and the Dead was published in 1993, the same year as Men at Arms (see #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“), and the year before Soul Music (#Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“), Interesting Times (#Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“) and Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“).
We talked a lot more about Neil Gaiman in our episode about Good Omens, the book he co-authored with Pratchett; that was #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)“. American Gods, published in 2001, is one of his most popular novels, and now also a television series. It tells the story of ex-convict Shadow Moon, who is caught up in a war over America between old and new gods. The Graveyard Book (2008) is a young adult novel about Nobody, a toddler who wanders into a graveyard following the murder of his family, and is subsequently raised by ghosts.
We previously talked about Steven King’s famous 1983 novel Pet Semetary in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“. It’s been filmed twice – once in 1989, and again in 2019.
Gogglebox is a UK reality TV show which films the reactions of families and other groups as they watch television. It debuted in 2013, and has been replicated in many other countries – first of all Australia, where it is soon to return for its twelfth season since 2015. The title comes from a British and Australian slang term for television.
The Mary Celeste was an American merchant ship – a brigantine, if we want to get specific – discovered deserted in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores Islands in 1872. It was bound for Genoa in Italy, but when it was found all the crew were missing, their belongings and the ship’s cargo left behind, the sails still rigged, and the ship’s log empty for ten days. The crew were never seen again, and no-one has been able to discover their fate. As listener Steve Leahy remarked on Twitter, the 1966 Doctor Who serial The Chase explained the mystery by claiming the Doctor’s TARDIS briefly landed on board while being chased by Daleks in their own time machine; the crew leapt overboard to escape the aliens.
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, about 25km North of Terry Pratchett’s home in Broad Chalke. It dates back over 5,000 years, though the famous standing stones are not quite as old as that. The site itself is a burial mound and was clearly significant for many thousands of years, but the standing stones are a long-standing mystery. How and why the ancient Britons built it is uncertain, as the larger stones would have taken incredible effort and ingenuity to carve and move, and the smaller stones seemed to come from 200km away in Wales. A recent paper, publicised between this episode being recorded and released, has revealed that the larger stones come from 25km North of Stonehenge and must have been moved on purpose.
The Loch Ness Monster is a famous cryptid, sometimes claimed to be a marine reptile like a Plesiosaur, supposed to live in Loch Ness, a large lake in the Scottish Highlands. While some earlier sources have been cited, it first came to the world’s attention when a sighting was reported in July 1933. You’ve probably seen the famous “surgeon’s photograph” of 1934, but while it was touted as proof until the 1990s, it is now known to have been a hoax.
Oliver recommended his books Con-Nerd and Super Con-Nerd for fans of Johnny Maxwell.
Ben mentioned the other Pratchett and Discworld podcasts out there; the oldest active one is Radio Morpork, which launched in August 2015. Like most of the others it’s a read-through of the Discworld books in order, and at the time of writing has done up to Thud! (That puts them about a year ahead of us, if such a thing can be measured easily.) There are several other newer ones, including The Truth Shall Make You Fret and The Compleat Discography. For a more complete list of Discworld and Pratchett podcasts, see Ben’s side project (started long after this episode) “The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters“. Let us know what you think of them if you listen – we deliberately limit our listening of other commentaries, so we can go into our discussions fresh.

A bonus note: Ben was sure he used the phrase “life is wasted on the living” in this episode, but didn’t spot it during the editing process. In any case, it originates with Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (it appears in the second radio series and also in the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe). Like many things he wrote that people see as deep, it’s a joke. Said by one of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s dead ancestors during a seance when disappointed with Zaphod, it satirises the cliche “youth is wasted on the young”. The original phrase is usually (though possibly not accurately) attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who supposedly said “Youth is the most beautiful thing in this world—and what a pity that it has to be wasted on children!”

#Pratchat58 Notes and Errata

08/08/2022 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. 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. That honour goes to 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. …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 “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.
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 tree, in the comics and film adaptations of Guardians of the Galaxy. Like a Pokémon, who can only say its own name, 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 word in a similar way to 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 first 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 novellist 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 Monty Python 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).
- 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.

#Pratchat46 Notes and Errata

08/08/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“, featuring guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins, discussing the second instalment in The Long Earth series written by Pratchett and Stephen Baxter: 2013’s The Long War.

The episode title references the Kinks song “The Village Green Preservation Society“, and our own love for and defence of Helen Green (now Valienté). We previously mentioned the song – and Ben’s favourite cover version, by Kate Rusby – in our episode on Johnny and the Dead, #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. (See below for more on the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.)
We’ve covered all of the Discworld books Deanne mentions:
- The Colour of Magic in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“
- The Light Fantastic in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“
- Equal Rites in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“
- Mort in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“
- Going Postal in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“
We link to Speculate in the episode’s podcast post, but it’s worth mentioning that both of your Pratchat hosts have appeared as panellists at both of the Speculate events held so far, in 2018 and 2019. Speculate co-director Joel Martin has also been a Pratchat guest three times, including for #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, our episode on The Long Earth.
As discussed in #Pratchat31, Stephen Baxter is best known for his Xelee Sequence of space opera novels, and for writing the official sequel to H G Wells’ The Time Machine, The Time Ships. See the episode notes for #Pratchat31 for more information.
The next two books in the series are The Long Mars and The Long Utopia, not The Long Cosmos as Ben says; that’s the final book in the series.
There’re some hints as to how the Long Earth series was planned in Chapter 18 of Marc Burrows’ The Magic of Terry Pratchett. Pratchett and Baxter planned out the series as a five-book arc when they first decided to write it together; no specific date is given, but this seems to have been around 2010 or 2011. It was a true collaboration, each contributing writing, and editing the other’s work, and complete drafts of the final three novels were finished in 2013. Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking of those books while Terry worked on his final solo projects, though he did visit Pratchett once or twice for more ideas.
Monica “Spooky” Jansson disappears for about 160 pages in Ben’s paperback edition. After Chapter 1, she’s not seen again until Chapter 23.
Given the rough timeline available from The Magic of Terry Pratchett, it seems likely that The Long War was indeed being written in 2011 and 2012.
We don’t think we ended up coming back to it, but there is a hint that there might be another direction in which to step. In Chapter 54 Bill recounts a story to Joshua about a comber who, on a bet, spent the night drunk and naked on “the Cue Ball”, a Joker Earth whose surface is weirdly featureless and smooth. Spooked by a sound the next morning, he tried to step while hungover and claims he stepped not East or West, but in some other direction… No doubt this will either never be heard of again, or form the entire basis of one of the sequels.
Leukaemia – originally Leukämie in German, from the Greek words leukos (λευκός), “white”, and haima (αἷμα), “blood” – is the collective name for a number of forms of blood cancer. It usually begins in bone marrow, where blood cells are manufactured, and the risk of contracting the disease does increase with exposure to radiation. There are four main types of leukaemia, with many sub-classifications, but Spooky’s specific diagnosis is not specifically mentioned – indeed, the word “leukaemia” is only mentioned once in the entire book, in Chapter 23.
The first book starts with Step Day in 2015, but most of the action – including all of “The Journey” – takes place in 2030, with flashbacks to various events in the fifteen years between. As we later mention, this book takes place 25 years after Step Day, in 2040.
For the record: Helen is 18 in 2031 when she marries Joshua, who is 29. Liz and her maths are right when she says they met the year before, a meeting which occurs in chapter 50 of The Long Earth.
The American War of Independence, aka the American Revolutionary War, was fought by citizens of the then thirteen British colonies in America between 1775 and 1783. The Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives from the colonies, who gathered in a “Continental Congress”. We could go on, but there is a lot written about this stuff on the Internet, so we’ll let you do your own research. Ben does mention the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest by a group called the Sons of Liberty against laws which allowed the East India Company to sell tea in America without paying the same taxes levied on citizens of the colonies. A whole shipment of the company’s tea was thrown into Boston harbour, and while the Sons of Liberty had a good point, it still stings to know all that good tea went to waste…
“Old Faithful” is one of several geysers in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. A geyser is formed when an underground reservoir of water is close to a volcanically active area; the water is heated by magma, turning into steam, and enough pressure forms to force the cooler water on top out of a vent at the surface. Old Faithful erupts every 44 minutes to two hours, but even that amount of variation is unusually predictable – a result of it being relatively separate to the other geysers and geothermal systems in Yellowstone. It’s been recorded erupting more than a million times, but like all geysers it is not a permanent feature. The Yellowstone Caldera is the most active volcanic system in the United States, and is thought to have had three major eruptions occurring 2.08 million, 1.3 million and 631,000 years ago. Its most recent eruption was much more minor: a lava flow that happened 70,000 years ago. Geologists seem to be of the opinion that a “super-eruption” like the one 1.3 million years ago is very unlikely, though it will erupt again at some time in the future.
When Ben says “your brain’s not fully cooked” until you’re 25, he is quoting Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, the Australian science communicator. Dr Karl – not to be confused with the other Dr Karl, the fictional medical doctor from Neighbours – has been broadcasting mostly via ABC radio since 1981, and has written 47 books, mostly collections of short articles about popular science. He often talks about the fact that human brains are still developing well past the teenage years, though he more recently has given the age of 20-23 for when the brain is “fully cooked” – i.e. when cognitive development is thought to have completed. You can find Dr Karl’s various books, podcasts and more on his website.
Joshua and Helen meet in Chapter 50 of The Long Earth. Unlike most of Helen’s story in that book, it’s not written from the perspective of her diary, though something we didn’t mention was that Joshua is already famous well before setting off on “The Journey”, as he saved dozens of kids on Step Day who got lost on a stepwise Earth. Upon meeting him, Helen exclaims “The Joshua Valienté…” and starts to blush. To be fair, they’ve heard of her, too: her diary is actually a blog, and is read by many folks. Joshua thinks that she is “kinda cute”, and also likes the look of Reboot, considering it the kind of place he could live.
Sally makes it clear to Joshua that they will only be friends in Chapter 43 of The Long Earth, where she says: “Joshua, you are fun to know, and a good companion, reliable and all that, even if you are a little bit weird. Someday we might be friends. But please don’t make comments about my legs. You’ve seen very little of my legs since most of the time they are inside premium grade thorn-proof battledress. And it’s naughty to guess, OK?”
The thing about Ghostbusters not being comedy came about in the wake of the latest trailer for the upcoming sequel, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which at first had many fans asking where the comedy was! In response, many younger fans came out to declare surprise that anyone would think the original was a comedy, and so a Twitter trend was born.
Tim Ferguson is the source of Ben’s figure that comedy requires four laughs per minute, on average – but you won’t find this specific pearl of wisdom in his book The Cheeky Monkey. Ben actually picked it up in one of Tim’s online sitcom writing workshops, which he runs semi-regularly.
Our previous episode was #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, which discussed Pratchett’s short story “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”.
The Snowpiercer television series, released on Netflix in May 2020, is based on the 2013 South Korean-Czech film Snowpiercer directed by Bong Joon-Ho, of The Host and Parasite fame. The “Snowpiercer” is a high-speed train that circumnavigates the globe, now covered in snow after an attempt to alter the atmosphere and reverse climate change went wrong and plunged the world into a new ice age. The train is segregated, with poor workers stuck in the rear carriages while the wealthy elite enjoy luxury in the forward cars. The film stars Chris Evans as a leader of a revolt by members of the tail section, and also features Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-Ho, Jamie Bell, John Hurt and Ed Harris. The series is a retelling, not a sequel, and stars Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly as analogous characters to Evans and Swinton, respectively. The series and the film are both adapted from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige; the first volume was published in 1982 by writer Jacques Lob and artist Jean-Marc Rochette, with later volumes by Rochette and Benjamin Legrand in 1999, 2000 and 2015.
All jokes aside, helium really is a precious resource – liquid helium is an important coolant used in industry and scientific work, and indeed party balloons account for only 10% of the world’s helium use. Or at least they did, before the pandemic. Helium demand has lessened in other industries, where fears of running out had led to caps and rationing, but while availability has improved in the last year, prices are still at an all-time high. Accordingly, plans are underfoot to try and recycle and reuse helium, and stop it from being lost to the upper atmosphere.
“Bosun Higgs” is a reference to the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle very important to the Standard Model of physics. Bosons are particles which carry forces, and differ in many ways from fermions, the particles that make up mass. Other bosons include photons (electromagnetic force), gluons (the strong force which holds quarks together) and gravitons (the still-theoretical particles which propagate gravity). Higgs bosons are produced by the Higgs field, which gives other particles mass. The Higgs boson is the subject of Leon Lederman’s 1993 book The God Particle, though It was proposed as an explanation for mass by Peter Higgs and his team in 1964, but remained theoretical as while it is massive compared to other bosons, it is also highly unstable and quickly decays. Its existence was confirmed in 2013 by scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider, and Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on the boson in 2013.
While the September 11 terror attacks certainly had a big impact on air travel restrictions, these were really a tightening of security measures brought about in the 1970s because of the frequency of aeroplane hijacking in the 1960s. These were extraordinarily common in the wake of the Cuban revolution, and especially so between 1968 and 1972. The security measures started in 1969 with profiling of passengers, asking individuals to submit to questioning and personal metal detector tests. The first metal detectors used for everyone were introduced in 1970 in Louisiana; this became a nation-wide practice in the US in 1973, with X-ray screening of baggage added in 1974. These measures spread to the rest of the world during the 1970s by agreement of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which establishes internationally agreed rules for civilian air travel. Since 2001, additional security measures have included “random” chemical tests of passenger clothing and baggage for explosives (ask your brown friends how random it feels to them), the requested removal of shoes, coats and hats during security screening, and the use of full-body scanners, though these have been controversial.
For many years Australia has had incredibly harsh policies regarding the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who arrive by sea. As well as indefinite detention – mostly offshore – a particular claim of the last few (conservative) Liberal-National coalition governments has been that they “stopped the boats“, a phrase particularly loved by cabinet minister Peter Dutton, previous Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and current PM Scott Morrison – who infamously has a trophy in the shape of boat, gifted by a supporter, bearing the legend “I stopped these”, from his time as Immigration Minister. The government frequently claims that the inhumane treatment they meet out to asylum seekers is meant to deter any more from coming, and thus stop the predatory people smugglers who charge them outrageous sums of money to make the dangerous journey. They’ve claimed now for many years that the boats have stopped, when the truth is that they have not – they are merely being intercepted at sea by the Australian Navy as part of “Operation Sovereign Borders” and so are not reported as “arrivals”. The pressures in nearby countries forcing desperate, persecuted people to try and reach safety by any means have not gone away, and those are the main factors. And yet cruel policies of long, indefinite detention, lack of support, denial of long-term visas and vilification in the media continue, as a way to court the votes of those who approve of strong border protection. It’s a source of shame for many of us in Australia; if you’d like to support the plight of asylum seekers in Australia, please consider supporting a couple of our favourite charities: the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and RISE.
Brexit – the removal of Great Britain from the European Union – really started becoming a thing in the early 2010s, though the first floating of a public referendum on the topic wasn’t until early 2013. It was a promise of Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron that he would bring about such a referendum if he won the 2015 general election, so while the idea was around when The Long War was being written, it seems unlikely it was a major influence on the novel.
We discussed Terry’s own favourite of his books, Nation, in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
For more on Pratchett’s first use of “Jokers“, see our episode on The Dark Side of the Sun – #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
The kobold Finn McCool is named after one of the great heroes of Irish mythology, Fionn mac Cumhaill. His adventures form the Fenian Cycle (an Fhiannaíocht in Irish), and also feature his people, a band of warriors known as the Fianna. His exploits are too numerous to go into, but form a cycle of stories as vibrant and exciting as those of King Arthur or Hercules. Ben recommends having a read.
“Kink-shaming” is pointing out someone’s kinks (specific sexual interests) with the intention of embarrassing them, often as supposed evidence that they are not a good person or have something “wrong” with them. This is not a new practice, but has in recent years been highlighted for the damage it does: it makes people ashamed of their kinks, and thus less likely to embrace the things that will satisfy them; it reinforces the idea that only regular “vanilla” sex is acceptable; and it conflates harmless (when consensual) kinks and fetishes with actually harmful behaviours, derailing serious conversations we need to be having. It’s more or less the opposite of the sex-positive movement, which seeks to reinforce a healthy embrace of positive sexual communication and behaviour.
The Kinks were a English rock band formed in Muswell Hill by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1963. The original line-up featured Ray, Dave, Pete Quaife and Mick Avory; Quaife left in early 1969, but the other three remained members throughout the group’s subsequent history and several alternate line-ups, including talk in the last few years of a reunion album. Their last public performance was in 1996. The bands’ biggest hits include “You Really Got Me” in 1963 from their first album Kinks, the single “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” in 1966, “Waterloo Sunset” from 1967’s Something Else, and “Lola” from 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Underground, Part One. The album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was a passion project of Ray Davies, a concept album released on the 22nd of November 1968 – the same day as The Beatles, aka The White Album. It was the last album on which bass player Pete Quaife played. Its production was quite long, and late in the process Ray Davies asked for the release to be postponed so it could be expanded into a double-album, but only got permission from their record label to add three more tracks. The “twelve-track mono version released in Europe” mentioned by Bill in the novel was the original shorter version, released in France, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Italy, but never in the UK, making it a bit of a rarity, with a different line-up of songs and some alternate, earlier mixes.
Local examples of the kind of “Instagram experience places” Ben is thinking of include Sugar Republic (giant candy props) and ArtVo (large-scale perspective art you can photograph yourself in).
Bounce, the “trampoline place” mentioned by Deanne, is one of many indoor trampoline parks around Melbourne and indeed the world. Their website says they’re part of a “global freestyle movement”, though we struggled to find out where this idea comes from. Basically it’s like BMX or skateboard stunts but without a vehicle, performed while jumping on a trampoline, jumping off and running up walls and so on. Bounce has several outlets, but there are also other businesses offering similar experiences.
That cat you can hear meowing in the background is the fabled third Pratcat, Kaos, who has lived with Ben since late December 2020. Despite what he would have you believe, he is fed five or six times every day, and not once a century when the Moon is in the Eighth House…
We discussed The Fifth Elephant – where Vimes is hunted by the von Überwald werewolf clan – in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King.”
Ben is probably wrong to say that English is not the majority language of the world – but it depends how you count it. According to stats published by the language reference journal Ethnologue, Mandarin Chinese has about 921 million native speakers, Spanish 471 million, and English 370 million. But if you include folks who speak it as an additional language, English edges into first place with 1.348 billion speakers, compared to Mandarin’s 1.21 billion and Hindi’s 600 million (with Spanish having a total of 542 million speakers worldwide).
The Beagle matriarch, Granddaughter Petra, is presumably named after Petra, the first pet featured on long-running British children’s program Blue Peter. Petra, a dog of indeterminate breed, joined the show in 1962; when Peter Purves (previously of Doctor Who fame) became a presenter in 1967, he also became Petra’s permanent handler to help her be more comfortable in the studio, and she lived with him when not filming – an arrangement used with presenters and crew for all subsequent Blue Peter dogs. She died in 1977, and was commemorated by a bust at BBC Television Centre (later moved to MediaCityUK). She was followed by the most famous Blue Peter dog, Shep, a border collie who stayed with the show from 1971 to 1978 and was famously attached to presenter John Noakes, who often had to tell him to calm down while trying to present. The current Blue Peter dog is a beagle/basset hound cross named Henry, and the programme has also had cats, tortoises and parrots as pets.
Ben briefly mentioned the Kromaggs, antagonists from the 1995 US parallel universe TV series Sliders, in our episode on The Long Earth. They are also non-human ape-descendants, though presumably their ancestor was Cro-magnon man, giving rise to the name. Their society is technologically advanced and militaristic; they have flying craft that can “slide” between parallel worlds, and when first encountered they have conquered around 150 Earths, stripping them for resources and enslaving their human populations. It is revealed in later seasons that they originally came from a world where they lived alongside humans, but when they grew violent they were exiled using sliding technology and prevented from returning. This becomes part of the back story of the protagonist Quinn Mallory, though by the later seasons multiple cast changes and shifts in tone and focus had lost a lot of early fans. (Ben mostly dropped off around the end of season three.)
The “love languages” are a popular way of describing the ways in which humans express and receive love, made famous by Baptist pastor and radio host Gary Chapman in his 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. Of the original five, we mention “Acts of Service” (doing things for your partner) and “Words of Affirmation” (telling them you love them or giving them verbal praise); the other three are “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch”. Psychologists and counsellors have since expanded on this, either by adding one or more additional specific languages, or redefining the concept such that languages are unique to each relationship dynamic or individual. The original book has sold more than 11 million copies, though, so the concept of the original five love languages has become deeply entrenched in popular culture discussions of love and affection. Chapman has since written ten other books about similar subjects, though note his work has not been without criticism – he is not professionally trained in psychology or counselling, and holds some deeply conservative and homophobic views, making the widespread applicability of his ideas suspect. He has also been opposed to later expansions of the idea, rejecting the addition of other languages as just “dialects”.
Tintin is the fictional young Belgian journalist who is the protagonist of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of French-language comic albums written by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907-1983), better known by his pen name, Hergé. Tintin first appeared in a newspaper supplement in 1929, but became hugely popular, starring in 24 full-length albums between 1929 and 1986 and selling millions of copies. Tintin is accompanied by his faithful dog Snowy, a small white fox terrier, and often aided by his best friend, merchant sailor Captain Archibald Haddock. While the books are largely great adventurous fun, it should be noted that it makes use of many racist caricatures and stereotypes common in the first half of the twentieth century, though some of the albums hold up better than others. Its cultural influence is huge, though; 1980s new wave/pop group The Thompson Twins is named after Thomson and Thompson, a pair of bumbling moustachioed detectives (who are not related, but look near-identical) from the series, and no lesser a team than Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish banded together to make a CGI film adaptation in 2011, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
The Aboriginal concept of connection to Country is hugely important; rather than have us tell you about it, we encourage you to learn about it from First Nations sources, for example Common Ground. While its expression in Australia is unique, the concept is common to many traditional cultures around the world.
The hugely popular sci-fi franchise Stargate, which began with the 1994 feature film, is just the most famous expression of the “ancient astronauts” idea, popularised by Swiss author Erich von Däniken in his scientifically panned but bestselling 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? It’s notable that in the work of von Däniken and others, it only ever seems to be non-Abrahamic gods who are said to be aliens. (Star Trek at least had an alien claiming to be the one true God, though that was in the generally hated film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.) If you want to learn more about the harm done by such racist theories, this article by Sarah Bond for Hyperallergic is a great overview.
The “Bury Your Gays” trope has a sadly long history; you can find some further explanation and a long list of examples at TV Tropes.
Frank Woods is not mentioned in The Long Earth – he’s a totally new character, making Ben’s annoyance about his role at the end of book many times greater. Ben may have been thinking of “the boy genius” Franklin Tallyman, who signs up with Jack Green’s company as a blacksmith and is instrumental in the founding of Reboot. He also repairs the Mark Twain when Joshua and Sally come through Reboot on their way back to Datum Madison. (Ben will soften on Frank in the next next book.)
An “OTP“, short for “One True Pairing”, is a fan or fan group’s favourite couple in a show, book series or other work of fiction. “Shipping” is itself short for “relationshipping”, and is used as a verb for actively wanting two (or more) characters to get together, regardless of what a show or book’s writers will actually have them do. Non-romantic versions are sometimes called “BroTPs” or FrOTPs.
“The ‘In’ Crowd” was originally recorded by American singer Dobie Gray in 1964; it featured on his album Dobie Gray Sings for “In” Crowders That Go “Go-Go”, and also on Dick Clark’s popular radio documentary program Rock, Roll and Remember. There have been a few influential covers since, most notably UK English singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry, who released it as a successful single and on his 1974 album Another Time, Another Place. (Ben is also partial to the Mike Flowers Pops version from their 1996 album “A groovy place.”, though the original is yet to be surpassed.) The chorus and verses feature the refrain “I’m in with the ‘in’ crowd”, and so it’s the most likely reference for Lobsang’s line “I’m in with the Oort Cloud”. The Oort Cloud, by the way, is the theoretical cloud of icy “planetismals” (essentially, very small planet-like objects, much smaller than true or dwarf planets) which forming the the boundary of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’s named for Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who revived this old theory in 1950 as a way of explaining the origin of comets with very long periods. The Oort Cloud is a looooong way from the Sun, with its objects lying between 0.03 to 3.2 light years away. Voyager 1, the Earth craft furthest from Earth, won’t reach it for another 300 years, though it will no longer have power left to send images back to Earth by then.
Joshua’s lost limb getting “Star Wars’d into a new hand” references the fact that multiple characters in the Star Wars franchise lose their hand (or other limbs), only to get prosthetics that are so lifelike and functional as to make the loss effectively meaningless in a dramatic sense. The first to do so (in terms of real world chronology at least) was Luke Skywalker, whose right hand is cut off by Darth Vader during their duel in The Empire Strikes Back; he gets a new hand before the credits even roll. (For the nerds: it’s an L-hand 980, produced by Antilles BioGen.) Vader himself lost his right arm from the elbow in a duel with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones, and gets a cybernetic replacement that’s stronger than his natural arm – again within ten minutes of screen time! Anakin later loses it, along with all his other limbs, in Ben’s most hated part of Star Wars – Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith – paving the way for him to become “more machine now than man”. He eventually loses one of his cybernetic hands again in his final duel with Luke in Return of the Jedi, but he dies soon after so no-one bothers to replace it.
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent makes his own Scrabble tiles when trapped on prehistoric Earth. In the story, the Earth is a hugely complicated computer built by a species from another dimension to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, after their previous computer, Deep Thought, calculated that the Answer to the (unknown) Question was “42”. Without knowing the actual Question, the Answer makes no sense, and so Deep Thought designed the Earth to find out. Arthur and his friend Ford discovered this, then ended up travelling back in time and crashing on Earth in the early days of human beings. Arthur has the early humans pull letters at random out of the bag as a way of testing how the planetary computer’s program to calculate the Ultimate Question is going; the results are not encouraging. This happens near the end of the Primary Phase of the original radio series (in Fit the Sixth), in the final episode of the original television series, and at the end of the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
As we mentioned in our The Long Earth episode, The Gap is an American clothing store established in 1969. They’ve been involved in several controversies, but we’re particularly displeased with what they’ve been up to since #Pratchat31: in particular forcing Australian social enterprise Clothing the Gap to change their name to Clothing the Gaps, costing them a great deal of money and energy. Clothing the Gaps is majority Aboriginal owned and run by health professionals as a way to support the “closing the gap” movement, which isn’t about shutting down the US brand (tough that’s something we’d like to do now), but rather about addressing the massive gap between health outcomes like life expectancy and the prevalence of many preventable diseases, between Aboriginal Australians and the general Australian population. Their stuff is great and we recommend you check them out at clothingthegaps.com.au.
Robur is the “science tyrant” antagonist of Jules Verne’s novels Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer) and Maître du monde (Master of the World), as mentioned in #Pratchat31. His craft, the Terror, is ten metres long and can travel on land, on or under the sea, and through the air at incredible speeds, but it is struck by lightning and destroyed. Robur’s body is never found, though his captive, Inspector John Strock, survives the crash…so you never know.
The train-based war game based on Deadlands was Deadlands: The Great Rail Wars, released in 1997. Unfortunately there were no train miniatures – players fielded teams of humans (and maybe other creatures) who fought in standard Wild West terrain, though they did use steampunk gatling pistols and magic.
There is indeed such a thing as a train that lays its own track; the real world kind are used to lay new track for the passenger and freight trains that will follow. Here’s an example from China, featured on trainfanatics.com. Ben was thinking of something more fictional, though he hasn’t been able to track it down (no pun intended); listener Graham Kidd suggested the 1974 science fiction novel Inverted World by British author Christopher Priest, which features a city travelling north on train tracks, which cannibalises the tracks already used to build more tracks ahead. It sounds great but isn’t the one Ben’s thinking of!
We’ve found some claims that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones were also good friends, though we’ve not found any evidence of that; we have found proof that they met, though, in the form of this Institute of Contemporary Arts talk, “Whose Fantasy?”, from 1988, chaired by Neil Gaiman, and featuring both Pratchett and Wynne Jones, along with John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. It sounds like a bootleg recorded from the audience, but it’s quite a good listen!

#Pratchat57 – Get Your Dad to Mars!

25/08/2022 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat15 – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)

08/01/2019 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We kick off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk with our fifteenth episode, heading not to the Discworld at all, but to Earth, 1990! Two guests – academic Jen Beckett and writer Amy Gray – join us as to tackle a book written by two authors: Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman!

The time has come for Armageddon: the End of Days, the Final Battle between Good and Evil. Which comes as rather a shock to the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, who’ve been more or less friends for centuries, and rather enjoy Earth the way it is, thank you very much. But can they really do anything about it in the face of the ineffable plan of God? Or when everything that happens has been foretold by a 16th century witch – as interpreted by her descendant, Anathema Device? And has anyone asked the Antichrist himself what he thinks? Well no, of course not. They don’t know where he is.

Good Omens was Sir Terry’s first collaboration with another author, and Gaiman’s first novel, written while he was still working on his biggest comics success, Sandman. In part a parody of The Omen, but joking about everything from motorways to computers and the Greatest Hits of Queen along the way, it’s an epic tale of Armageddon soon to arrive on the small screen via Amazon Prime and the BBC – adapted by Neil himself. Did you come to this as a Pratchett fan, or a Gaiman one? Did you cross over and start reading the others’ work? And how different do you find it to the rest of Pratchett? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat15 on social media to join the conversation.

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Dr Jennifer Beckett lectures at Melbourne University in Media and Communications. Her specialist areas as a researcher include Irish cinema and cultural studies, social media, and transmedia world-building. (Jen’s basically an expert in all the cool parts of popular culture.) A current focus for Jen is the connection between social media and trauma, as explored in her most recent article for The Conversation: “We need to talk about the mental health of content moderators“.

Amy Gray has written for The Age, The Guardian, the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre and many other publications and organisations. She’s currently working on her first book, hopefully to be published in 2019. You can find out more and support her independent writing via her Patreon. You can also find her on Twitter at @_AmyGray_.

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

We love bringing you Pratchat every month, but in order to make sure we can stick it out to the very end – and cover every one of Sir Terry’s books – we need your help! We’ve started an optional subscription service via Pozible which will help us keep making Pratchat for you, and even let us do it better; find out all about supporting Pratchat on our new Support Us page.

Next month we’ll continue the religious theme as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones for an examination of faith, Discworld-style, in Small Gods! Send in your questions about gods (big or small) via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat16.