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

non-Discworld

#Pratchat41 – The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl

8 March 2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Educator Dr Charlotte Pezaro joins Liz and Ben on a trip to the South Pelagic, where they find tsunamis, gods and science in Nation, Terry Pratchett’s standalone young adult novel from 2008.

Mau is returning from his rite of passage when a huge wave washes over his island Nation, killing everyone he has ever known. He is all alone, stuck without a soul between the states of boy and man. Lost in his despair and anger at the gods he now isn’t sure he believes in, he’s ready to give in to the dark water until he meets Daphne, the only survivor from a “trouserman” ship flung into the Nation by the wave. As they learn each others’ customs and languages, and other survivors gradually begin to arrive, Mau and Daphne must both reckon with the gods and ghosts of the Nation’s past – and work hard to ensure it has a future…

Pratchett’s own proudest achievement, and winner of multiple awards, Nation presents an alternate universe where things are a little bit different in some ways…and considerably different in others. Pratchett examines his favourite themes of belief, death, imperialism and science through a new lens, in a tale of loss, growing up, and asking big questions.

Is this Pratchett’s magnum opus? Does inventing an entire universe next door make it okay for a white Englishman to tell a story about South Pacific Islanders with the serial numbers filed off? Why did he split Australia in half ? Tell us by using the hashtag #Pratchat41 on social media to join the conversation!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_41.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:29:46 — 69.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro is an educator with a PhD in pedagogy and years of science and technology communication experience. Charlotte is also a qualified primary school teacher, and works with other teachers to help them improve their skills. You can find out more about Charlotte at charlottepezaro.com, or follow her on Twitter at @dialogicedu.

Next time we’re heading back to Ankh-Morpork for a tale of journalism, vampirism and authoritarianism, the 25th Discworld novel: 2000’s The Truth! We’ll be joined by returning guest, writer and deputy culture editor for Guardian Australia, Stephanie Convery. Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat42, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

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

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat58 Notes and Errata

8 August 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

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

More notes coming soon!

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

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

#Pratchat73 – This Christmas Goes to Eleven

8 December 2023 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

In this very special Christmas episode, Liz and Ben fly without a guest as they turn the seasonal silliness up to maximum and discuss all eleven stories in Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short Christmas stories, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.

It’s not always easy being Father Christmas. You might be forced out of home by a rogue submarine or the harsh reality of a job where you only work one day a year; you might be sent fifty thousand identical letters by a computer or put on trial for three thousand counts of breaking and entering. But at least you don’t live in Blackbury, where giant pies explode, the snow falls so thick you have to dig tunnels to see your granny, and where weird creatures show up every other day. And you won’t believe the true stories behind some of your favourite Christmas songs…

While he later claimed short stories “cost me blood”, Pratchett wrote scores of stories every year while working in his first newspaper jobs between 1965 and 1979, and continued to sell them to his old papers even after he went to work for the Central Electricity Governing Board. These included plenty of Christmas stories – and eleven of them (well…eight plus three wintery ring-ins) from between 1967 and 1992 are collected in this third volume of his early work for children.

Have you read Father Christmas’s Fake Beard? Is “Father Christmas” more British than Santa Claus? Do you prefer these (close to) original versions of the stories, or some of the later re-written versions unearthed for A Stroke of the Pen? Have you ever seen one of these stories in their original habitat, the Southwestern British Newspaper? And what should we name our Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh team? Join in the conversation on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat73!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_73.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:51 — 47.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

“Guest” Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor, and also currently Arts Editor for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. You can find out where Liz’s short fiction has been published via her website, elizabethflux.com.

“Guest” Ben McKenzie is a writer, game designer and educator who doesn’t usually work in short fiction. But you can find a few short Twine games on his website, benmckenzie.com.au.

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

Next episode we have two actual very special guests: Rhianna Pratchett and Gabrielle Kent! They’re joining us for a chat about their new book, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch. This will be more an interview than an in-depth discussion about the book (which, we feel we should warn you, include spoilers for some key events and characters for The Shepherd’s Crown, but we’ll try to keep those spoilers to a minimum). As well as asking our own questions, we want to ask them yours! So send them in using the hashtag #Pratchat74 or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, but be quick: we’ll be recording on the 15th of December!

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Blackbury, Christmas, Elizabeth Flux, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard, non-Discworld, Short Fiction, Uncle Jim

#Pratchat73 Notes and Errata

8 December 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 73, “This Christmas Goes to Eleven”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 2017 collection of short children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard.

Iconographic Evidence

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Pratchat (@pratchatpodcast)

Here’s the Instagram photo of Richard from Cracked and Spineless bookshop in Hobart, showing off his Ineffable Edition of The Definitive Good Omens in 2019!

We’ll be sure to add photos of some of the Christmas food we mentioned here when we can.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a reference to the famous scene in the 1984 mockumentary film This is Spinal Tap. The film follows famous metal band Spinal Tap on a fairly disastrous tour; at one point guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) shows off his amplifiers which he has had custom made with dials that go to eleven rather than ten, which makes them “one louder”. When asked why he didn’t just “make ten louder”, he replies: “This one goes to eleven.” It seemed a perfect reference for the extreme Christmasness of Father Christmas’ Fake Beard, which also contains eleven stories.
  • The twelve days of Christmas are a Christian celebration of the Nativity of Jesus. Some traditions have it starting with Christmas Day, and some the day after, which is Boxing Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries like Australia, and also St Stephen’s Day (the “Feast of Stephen” referenced in the other song featured in this book, Good King Wenceslas). The season is also called Twelvetide, though “Christmastide” is technically a different thing that doesn’t exactly match up, depending on your church. The last night is “Twelfth Night”, as in the Shakespeare play.
  • Father Christmas is now synonymous with Santa Claus, but this wasn’t always the case. He was the folkloric personification of Christmas in Britain, going back a few hundred years, but by Victorian times began to more resemble the modern Santa Claus, especially after the American version was imported in the mid 1800s. As Ben mentions, Santa Claus’s origins lie with Sinterklaas, the Dutch version of Saint Nicholas (not German as Ben misremembers), but the modern version also incorporates bits of Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas. Ben did once know this, but it’s as if he’s forgotten everything he learned for our Hogfather episode back in 2019! And Pratchett certainly dove deep on the folklore and history when he was writing the novel. But we’re still keen to know what modern sentiment is around the names, because there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between the traditions – Father Christmas has been fully Santa-fied.
  • The book is still in print as far as we can tell! But this isn’t as easy to determine as it once was…
  • Pratchett’s other collections of children’s stories also contain a few stories seen elsewhere. Dragons at Crumbling Castle and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner both had deluxe slipcase editions which contained a couple of additional stories, and those stories are included in all editions of the fourth volume The Time-travelling Caveman (though it too had a deluxe edition with a story so far not collected elsewhere). In addition, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner also includes “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, which also appears in Once More* *with Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
  • Some of these stories were originally published without any title, especially those from the Bucks Free Press. The titles were made up for the purposes of this book. But then again, according to the list in the book, that includes some of the stories which had been previously published in earlier collections under other titles, like “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas”.
  • Father Christmas’s Fake Beard includes the opening section of Truckers as bonus material. It’s in that book that “Arnold Bros (est 1905)” (not 1903) is revealed to be owned by Arnco Group, along with a great many other businesses, when Gurder, Masklin and Grimma travel to the Top of the Store to learn the truth about the Thing’s warnings of it being demolished. You can hear more about that in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • “Old man yells at cloud” is a meme derived from The Simpsons, specifically the 2002 episode “The Old Man and the Key”. In one scene Homer’s father Abe Simpson needs a photograph for a driver’s license, and uses a photo from a newspaper story about him; it shows him shaking his fist at a cloud in the sky, with the headline “OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD”. It’s been used as a meme since around 2008, usually to denote someone complaining about something for no good reason.
  • Clinkers are a lolly (or sweet or candy, depending on which flavour of English you speak) manufactured by the Australian confectionary brand Pascall (now owned by Cadbury, in turn owned by Mondelez International). They consist of brightly coloured oval-shaped hard nougat, much like the candy honeycomb you find in Violet Crumble or Crunchie chocolate bars, coated in Cadbury chocolate. We’re not actually sure what Liz’s Dad thinks “Clinker” means, but Ben is pretty close: it’s a generic name for industrial waste products formed by the burning of coal or working of metal, which usually forms small, brittle glassy round shapes – much like the candy.
  • Isembard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) was an English engineer best known for his work during the Industrial Revolution, especially with steamships, railways, bridges and tunnels. There’s a lot to say about him – way more than we can fit in a note – but remember that “Great Man” histories are always over-simplified and leave out a lot of people who were vital to whatever the man in question did, even if he was very great.
  • It’s been a while since we mentioned the steamroller story, but the short version is that his hard drives containing his unfinished work were destroyed by a steamroller, according to his wishes, in 2017 – the same year Father Christmas’s Fake Beard was published! You can read about it in this Guardian article.
  • We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook back in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat”. B S Johnson’s giant pie was also a disaster. Described informally as “the Great Fruit Pie” (it was made mostly of apples), and under the title “Bloody Stupid Johnson’s Individual Fruit Pie”, Ben remembers rightly that Johnson thought of making a giant pie whistle; however it wasn’t finished until a week after the explosion, and the 30-foot-high “whistling blackbird” is said to be a memorial to those lost to the pie, situated in Hide Park. (The dish created for the pie is now the roof of a house.)
  • While there is more detail to be found at colinsmythe.co.uk, Ben entirely missed that the book does include original titles and publications for each of the stories in it – they’re in small text on the imprint page, just before Rob Wilkin’s introduction.

More notes to come!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Blackbury, Christmas, Elizabeth Flux, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard, non-Discworld, Short Fiction, Uncle Jim

What’s in Father Christmas’s Fake Beard?

30 November 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

We’ll shortly be discussing the third collection of Terry Pratchett’s early short stories for children, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard, for our December episode #Pratchat73! This is the first time we’re discussing an entire book’s worth of short stories, and we’ve realised this book isn’t as readily available as others, so we thought we’d better come through on our promise to list the individual stories we’ll be discussing.

Ben’s deluxe edition of Father Christmas’s Fake Beard in its fancy red slipcase.

Here they are, in the order they appear in the book. We’ve noted where else they appear, in case you want to read one you have access to and ask about that!

  • “Father Christmas’s Fake Beard”
  • “The Blackbury Pie” – this is a slightly revised version of the original 1967 story; a different version from 1970, retitled “The Great Blackbury Pie”, appears in A Stroke of the Pen. (It’s largely the same, but a lot of the specific details are changed.)
  • “Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh!”
  • “A Very Short Ice Age”
  • “The Computer Who Wrote to Father Christmas” – also appears, under the title “FTB”, in Once More* *With Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.
  • “Good King Wences-lost” – Pratchett seemingly significantly rewrote this story a few years later to produce “How Good King Wenceslas Went Pop for the DJ’s Feast of Stephen”, which appears in A Stroke of the Pen.
  • “The Weatherchick”
  • “Judgement Day for Father Christmas”
  • “The Abominable Snow-baby” – adapted for television for Channel 4 for Christmas 2021.
  • “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas” – also appears, under the original title of “The Prince and the Partridge”, in A Blink of the Screen.
  • “Father Christmas Goes to Work at the Zoo” – also appears in special editions of Dragons at Crumbling Castle, in the US version as “Father Christmas Goes to Work”.
Posted in: News Tagged: Blackbury, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard, non-Discworld, Short Fiction

#Pratchat72 Notes and Errata

8 November 2023 by Ben 2 Comments

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 72, “The Masked Dancer”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1989 short story “Turntables of the Night” with guest Andrew McClelland.

Iconographic Evidence

The cover art of the 1997 anthology The Flying Sorcerers is a Josh Kirby illustration of this story. The full jacket illustration also appears in A Blink of the Screen.

Notes and Errata

  • The quest for this month’s episode title was a long one, but we settled on this riff on The Masked Singer, a popular reality gameshow based on a format originating in Korea. In the show, celebrities perform songs in elaborate costumes that hide their identities and a judging panel and the audience try to guess who they are while also voting for their favourites, with the singer with the fewest votes being unmasked and eliminated each round. Appropriately enough, the Australian show’s most recent season which finished the day before this episode was published featured a singer dressed as the Grim Reaper, who turned out to be Darren Hayes of Savage Garden fame!
  • The Vengaboys are a Dutch Eurodance group who were huge in the late 1990s, best known for the songs “We Like to Party” and “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!”, the former of which includes the line “The Vengabus is coming”. Ben’s memory is sketchy but he thinks Liz is referring to a comedy bit Andy used to do about the nature of the Vengabus, painting it as something more ominous. (We’ll check up on this and update this note!)
  • Gilbert and Sullivan are dramatist W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) and composer Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), who wrote a series of comic light operas in the Victorian era which have since become world famous. Andy’s love for them was expressed through his most recent comedy show with Martine Wengrow: The Very Model of a Modern Major Musical, a two-person performance of his own full-cast opera in the distinctive Gilbert and Sullivan style which he wrote during the lockdowns of 2020.
  • Truckers, published in 1989 (the same year as “Turntables of the Night”), is the first book in Terry Pratchett’s trilogy about a band of tiny Nomes trying to survive in the human world. We discussed it way back in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven”.
  • Good Omens is Pratchett’s famous 1990 collaboration with Neil Gaiman about an angel and demon who share an unlikely friendship and try to avert the impending apocalypse, a task made more difficulty when they mislay the Anti-Christ. We discussed it in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)”.
  • The Long Earth is Pratchett’s collaboration with sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, a sci-fi series based on an idea he had around the time of The Colour of Magic about a string of infinite parallel Earths devoid of humans. We’ve discussed four out of the five books; for an overview of the plot of the first three, see #PratchatPreviously, “The Long Footnote”.
  • Actor and comedian Peter Serafinowicz is probably best known for his film and television work in things like Look Around You, Black Books, Shaun of the Dead and The Tick. He has a distinctive deep voice (a feature of his guest role on Black Books), and was famously the speaking voice of Darth Maul in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Maul was physically played by stunt performer Ray Park). He played the demon Crowley opposite Mark Heap’s Aziraphale in the 2014 BBC Radio adaptation of Good Omens before going on to perform the voice of Death in all forty recently released Penguin Discworld audiobooks (they didn’t do The Last Hero), which are otherwise read by a different narrator for each sub-series. (Bill Nighy also appears in every book, reading the footnotes.) Serafinowicz also voices Death in the animated feature film The Amazing Maurice.
  • Harry Harrison (1925-2012) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat, an interplanetary con man and rogue who starred in several short stories and novels beginning with “The Stainless Steel Rat” in 1957. The final book, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns, was published in 2010.
  • Harry Turtledove is an American speculative fiction author best known for his works of alternate history. Andy mentions Turtledove’s 1992 novel The Guns of the South, in which time-travellers from 2014 South Africa supply advanced arms to the Confedercy, allowing them to win the US civil war. He is also known for the similar Southern Victory series, in which the Confederacy wins thanks to one small difference in history (no time travel is involved), and the Worldwar series, in which aliens invade Earth in 1942 during World War II.
  • Hidden Turnings was published in February 1989 and included works by Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Roger Zelazny (best known for The Chronicles of Amber), Tanith Lee and many others. You can find all the details of the book and the stories within at its Internet Speculative Fiction Database entry.
  • We’ve talked many times of British fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011), and especially of her Chrestomanci series about a connected series of parallel magical worlds; Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequel; and her parody of both travel guides and fantasy tropes, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
  • The panel Ben featuring Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones was “Whose Fantasy” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. (Ben found it after we wondered if the two were friends in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”). The talk was indeed chaired by Neil Gaiman, and also featured John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. Ben was on the money when he said it was from around the time of “Turntables of the Night” – it’s from the same year, 1988!
  • The Flying Sorcerers is a 1997 (not 1996) anthology of comic fantasy stories, organised into three sections: “Hordes of the Things: Comic Fantasies”, “Deadly Nightshapes: Tales of the Supernatural” and “Vacant Space: Stories of Science Fiction”. As well as Pratchett’s story it features work from P. G. Wodehouse, Mervyn Peake, C. S. Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Michael Moorcock, Roald Dahl, Stanislaw Lem and Angela Carter and many others. You can see the full list of stories on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
  • Peter Haining has edited and written introductions for a long list of books, mostly compilations of previously published works. As well as The Flying Sorcerers he also published Pratchett works in Space Movies II, The Wizards of Odd and Vintage Science Fiction. He also compiled five major nonfiction books about Doctor Who in the 1980s, including the 25th anniversary book 25 Glorious Years in 1988. Haining’s full bibliography can also be found on the ISFDb.
  • The Wizards of Odd was published in 1996. It was also edited by Peter Haining, featured a previously published piece by Terry Pratchett as its first story, and used a Josh Kirby illustration for that story as its cover art. In this case it was “Theatre of Cruelty”, which we just discussed in #Pratchat70, “Punching Up”. The full contents are (you guessed it) on the ISFDb.
  • Hordes of the Things was a 1980 BBC radio series written by Andrew Marshall and John Lloyd (who had just written and produced The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams), under pseudonyms with three initials to emulate J R R Tolkien, and starring Simon Callow and Paul Eddington. A fairly broad parody of Lord of the Rings set in the kingdom of Albion as it faces an invasion of the “Dark One”, it was also loose political satire.
  • Small caps can be simulated by modern word processing and desktop publishing software, but this is usually unsatisfactory since scaled-down capital letters have a lighter weight (i.e. because they’re shrunk the lines are thinner), whereas proper small caps should have the same weight as full size lower case letters.
  • Death’s dialogue has varied a bit between editions; in some, like the Corgi paperback of The Colour of Magic and the collector’s library editions of many of the books, he speaks in all small caps – i.e. only small capital letters. In others, like the first hardcover edition of Hogfather, he speaks in mixed small caps, with regular capitalisation. It’s only in anthologies like The Flying Sorcerers where he seems to speak in all caps.
  • Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) was an award-winning American science fiction writer. His Chronicles of Amber series, consisting of two sets of five novels published between 1970 and 1991, is about a group of immortals, the Princes and Princesses of Amber, who rule their one “true” world of Amber. They are able to walk between “shadows”, the infinite alternate realities given order and substance by the Pattern, a mystic labyrinth; the royals of Amber gain their shadow-walking ability by walking the Pattern. They organise into several factions and scheme amongst themselves to take the throne. A hugely popular roleplaying game of the 1990s, Amber Diceless Roleplaying, was based on these stories; player characters oppose each other, vying for power, and instead of using dice are simply ranked in order of who is best at what during an “auction” at the start of the game.
  • “Kalifriki of the Thread” is a short story about Kalifriki, more or less an assassin who can travel between dimensions (called shifting into the “side-by-side lands”) and whose signature method of killing is the Thread, an unusual and seemingly multidimensional weapon or force. In the story, Kalifriki is hunting the Kife, another shifter who inhabits the bodies of others. The character returns in the short story “Come Back to the Killing Ground Alice, My Love”, first published in Amazing Stories in 1992. Both stories were collected into one volume in 2022.
  • DJ Ian Bell was not only a DJ, he was also a photographer, a music historian, and a record store worker and owner. He died in May 2023. You can hear him talking about his history in this 2019 segment from ABC Radio in Adelaide, played again the week after his death.
  • Since 2021 Taylor Swift has been re-recording and releasing new versions of her first six studio albums, in part because she regretted signing away ownership of the master recordings as a teenager (she was 15!) in her original contract with the label Big Machine in 2005, and subsequently became responsible for something like 80% of their revenue. After a series of disagreements, including not being able to buy the masters rights, and Big Machine selling out to her former manager, Scooter Braun, she enacted the re-recording plan under her new and much more favourable contract with Republic Records. Because she wrote her own songs, she owns the composition rights, and so controls who can record new versions of the songs – including herself. The new releases are subtitled “(Taylor’s Version)” and so far have included Fearless, Red, Speak Now and 1989, and they’ve plummeted streams and sales of the originals as her loyal fans stick to her versions.

More notes to come soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Andrew McClelland, Ben McKenzie, Death, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, Short Fiction, short story

#Pratchat72 – The Masked Dancer

8 November 2023 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Unlike some DJs, Liz and Ben do take requests – like this month’s short story! They’re joined by comedian and DJ Andrew McClelland to spin discs with the soul collector, as they discuss Terry Pratchett’s 1989 short story “Turntables of the Night”.

John, one half of the “Hellfire Disco” mobile DJ business, is helping the police with their enquiries. His latest gig, a fairly sedate Halloween party, did not go smoothly – and it all revolves around a mysterious visitor to the dancefloor, who had an unusual request for DJ Wayne…

Written for Diana Wynne Jones’ 1989 collection of original fiction Hidden Turnings, “Turntables of the Night” came to Pratchett title first. It’s a spooky tale of obsession, records, music and death – or rather Death, appearing outside the Discworld for perhaps the first time in Pratchett’s writing.

Is this fantasy or horror? Did Pratchett really know who Ian Curtis was? Who did he call up to get insight into the DJ trade? What would Death ask you to curate for him? Who would be the crown jewel in his collection now? And which of Pratchett’s other short stories do you want us to devote an entire episode to? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat72 on social media.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_72.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:45:11 — 48.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

Guest Andrew McClelland (he/him) is a writer, comedian and DJ who has often mixed in his other loves, like history, music, DJing and Gilbert & Sullivan, to create the “niche” nerdy and gentlemanly comedy for which he’s known. Andy has also frequently collaborated with #Pratchat38 guest Lawrence Leung. As a DJ, Andy works constantly in Melbourne and did indeed open for Cher during her 2018 Australia and New Zealand tour. His club night Andrew McClelland’s Finishing School doesn’t run as regularly as it used to, but as of this episode it has a 15th anniversary night on 10 November, and an annual 90s night on 24 November. Find Andy on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (if you must) or at his website djandrewmcclelland.com. Finishing School is on Facebook.

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

Next episode we get into the Hogswatch spirit by opening an entire book of season stories, as we discuss the 2017 collection of Pratchett’s children’s fiction, Father Christmas’s Fake Beard. You can send us questions about any of the stories (which we’ll list on our website for reference), or about the book in general, using the hashtag #Pratchat72 on social media. Or send them in via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Andrew McClelland, Ben McKenzie, Death, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, short story

#Pratchat57 – Get Your Dad to Mars!

25 August 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.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_57.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:29:58 — 69.1MB)

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

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

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

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, Joel Martin, Joshua Valienté, Lobsang, non-Discworld, Sally Linsay, The Long Earth, Tje Long Mars

#Pratchat60 – Eyes Turnwise

8 October 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.)

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_60.mp3

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

Subscribe: RSS | More

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, no book, non-Discworld

#Pratchat68 Notes and Errata

8 August 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 68, “Discus Ex Machina”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s third novel, 1981’s Strata, with guest EJ Mann.

Iconographic Evidence

Australian Bush Heritage’s thread of “Pedro Pascal as Australian frogs” first appeared in a Twitter thread, but we’ve embedded the Instagram version below. (Twitter is…not as stable as it once was.) Make sure you check out all of them!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bush Heritage (@bushheritageaus)

Here are the first edition covers of Pratchett’s two early science fiction novels. Ben mistakenly remembered Pratchett’s cover for The Dark Side of the Sun featuring dragonflies, not bees; he may be remembering the later cover, also by original Strata artist Tim White, which depicts a robot insect which…well, it’s also not a dragonfly, but it’s more like one than Pratchett’s bees. Though the weird fungal creatures on his Strata cover do look like dragonflies – one of the many details that makes it entirely unlike the book in every way, aside from the inclusion of a lightning bolt.

Strata first edition; cover art by Tim White
Strata first edition; cover art by Tim White
The Dark Side of the Sun, first edition; cover art by Terry Pratchett
The Dark Side of the Sun, first edition; cover art by Terry Pratchett

Below is the earliest post we could find for the photo of the common snapping turtle with the “world” on its back. It’s from the source, the Twitter account for Task Force Turtle; see below in the notes for more on the turtle, and for an article where you can see it if Twitter becomes too unstable to supply this embedded tweet.

pic.twitter.com/eEM4lyukCh

— Task Force Turtle (@TaskForceTurtle) November 27, 2018

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays with the well-known Latin phrase “deus ex machina”, “God from the machine”. Originally used in Ancient Greek theatre as a literal stage direction, in which actors playing the roles of gods would be brought on stage via a machine, it has come to mean an unexpected plot resolution brought about by supernatural or implausible means, especially if those means have not previously been established in the narrative. We don’t think Strata is an example of this, but the Latin for “disc from the machine” seemed too perfect not to use.
  • The last in-person Australian Discworld Convention was Nullus Anxietas 7, held in Melbourne in April 2019. We recorded a live episode there: #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, discussing the short story “Troll Bridge”.
  • Bush Heritage Australia is a non-profit organisation which was started as “The Australian Bush Heritage Fund” in 1991, with the purchase of forest land in Tasmania by environmentalist and former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown. The charity now owns millions of hectares of bushland across Australia, which it manages in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. You can find out more at bushheritage.org.au, or follow them (and their very funny social media manager) as @BushHeritageAus on Twitter or Instagram.
  • You can read what Pratchett had to say about the Disc in 1981 on Colin Smythe’s website, where you’ll also find early reviews – including one by Neil Gaiman! Of the Discworld, Pratchett said:
    “I am also working on another ‘discworld’ theme, since I don’t think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in one book!”
  • Thanks to subscriber Craig, who shared a photo of the full blurb for the first edition of Strata, which we can also confirm was first published by Colin Smythe in hardcover. (See above for the original covers of both Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun.) Here’s the longer blurb:

A flat earth? Impossible.
Kin Arad is the 210-year-old supervisor in charge of resurfacing the newly named planet, Kingdom. When she finds Jago Jalo, a man who has a cloak of invisibility and should have died a thousand years ago, in her office, she decides he must have an unusual tale. He has. He knows where such a world is. It is like the medieval earth…almost. Leiv Eiriksson is setting off for the New World, but he will never find it. Instead he sails to the edge of the world and its eternal waterfall.
It is obvious that this ‘earth’ has been built by the Great Spindle Kings, makers of universes, inventors of the strata machine and the ultimate in claustrophobes, and Jalo lures the human Kin, the kung Marco Farfarer and the fiftv-six-syllable-named shand better known as Silver, to undertake a voyage of discovery with him: the rewards must be beyond their dreams…or nightmares.
In Strata Terry Pratchett again shows the remarkably witty, imaginative and descriptive talents that have characterised his earlier works and show him to be one of the best s.f. writers of the younger generation.

Strata – blurb from the first hardcover edition (1981)
  • You can find many different covers for Strata at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. While many seem to use stock sci-fi or fantasy art, most use Josh Kirby’s cover (though some use his art for The Dark Side of the Sun!). The German cover by Katarzyna Oleska is Ben’s favourite, and is the only one to show Kin as a Black woman; we also like the French one by Marc Simonetti, though he inexplicably depicts Kin as a cyborg with red skin, though accurately makes her bald. The mass market US paperback has a cover by Darrell K. Sweet which gets special mention for the very retro image of Kin in a silver spacesuit holding a raygun while on a Viking ship menaced by a dragon, but it makes her white (and ginger) and leaves out Marco and Silver entirely.
  • Magrathea is the fabled planet manufacturing planet which features prominently in the plot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As well as many luxury planets built during a boom in the galactic economy, it also built the planet Earth; the fjords were designed by planetary architect Slartibartfast, who meets Arthur Dent during the final chapters of the first radio series/book/film etc.
  • Speaking of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ben is correct: the original radio series was broadcast betweem 1978 and 1980. The first novel was published in 1979, while the original BBC television series was made in 1980, but broadcast in 1981. There have been numerous other versions, including an LP (which differs from the radio series), a videogame, a feature film, several stage plays, a comic book and, supposedly, another television series currently in production at Hulu.
  • The film Liz mentions with Olivia Wilde where remaining lifetime is a currency is indeed In Time (2011, dir. Andrew Niccol), a sci-fi action film starring Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake. It’s similar to the earlier film Price of Life (1987, dir. Stephen Tolkin), and also the 1965 Harlan Ellison short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”. Ellison briefly sued Niccol (who is best known for Gattaca) and the producers of In Time, but dropped the suit after seeing the film.
  • Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by American author Larry Niven. In the book, 29th century human Louis Gridley Wu is recruited on his 200th birthday by an alien “Puppeteer” named Nessus to go on an expedition. He is to investigate the Ringworld, a massive construct surrounding a Sun which has an immense Earth-like inner surface. He travels there with Nessus, a cat-like Tzin named Speaker-to-Animals, and another human, Teela Brown. Their ship is damaged on arrival and crashes; its hyperdrive still functions but it cannot get back into space to use it safely. The crew head towards the edge of the Ring, hoping to find technology to help them repair their ship, encountering strange technologies and the remnants of the Ring’s civilisations along the way. As Terry Pratchett put it on alt.fan.pratchett, “I intended Strata to be as much a (pisstake/homage/satire) on Ringworld as, say, Bill the Galactic Hero was of Starship Troopers. All Niven’s heroes are competent and all his technology works for millions of years…but he’s a nice guy and says he enjoyed the book.” There are four sequels: The Ringworld Engineers (1979), The Ringworld Throne (1996), Ringworld’s Children (2004) and Fate of Worlds (2012), which is also the last book in Niven’s Fleet of Worlds series. All of these books are set in Niven’s broader “Known Space” universe.
  • EFTPOS systems, which allow a transfer of funds direct from a purchaser’s bank account to a merchant, first appeared in America in 1981. The system was slow to be adopted by consumers, and credit cards and cheques remained much more popular alternatives to cash. Australian banks were pretty quick to adopt a national EFTPOS system, in part because they had already had to cooperate to set up Bankcard, a domestic credit card implemented in the 1970s before the major card companies came to Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with these things, it appears one of the main reasons Australians call it EFTPOS is advertising: the major company making and selling the infrastructure equipment, and marketing it to the public during the 80s and 90s, was “eftpos Australia”. EFTPOS is also popular, and known by that term, in New Zealand and Singapore.
  • Budgie is the nickname for the budgerigar, a small species of parakeet with long tails. Like Liz, many Australians growing up in cities don’t realise they’re native birds, in part because they’re so commonly kept as pets – very unusual for native animals! In country areas they gather in huge flocks at water holes. Their popularity is largely due to their small size, colourful plumage (usually white and blue or yellow and green, but many other breeds exist), and their ability to “speak” and whistle. They’ve been exported – legally and otherwise – to many countries around the world. A common bit of Australian slang for men’s swimming costumes is “budgie smugglers”, referring to the fact that they don’t leave much to the imagination and the wearer’s genitals are often outlined, appearing around the same size as a budgie.
  • The Wayfarer series by American author Becky Chambers begins with her debut 2014 novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which she originally crowdfunded and self-published. It was nominated for several awards and republished by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015. The Wayfarer of the series title is a “tunnelling ship” – a spacecraft which builds wormholes between distant parts of space for other spaceships to use as shortcuts. The original novel follows the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer and their relationships during one long mission. It has so far been followed by three sequels: A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021), plus a short story, “A Good Heretic” (2019), though these follow different characters and stories in the same universe. The species who can communicate via coloured patches on their cheeks are the Aeluon, otherwise plain-coloured humanoids who are one of the more powerful species in the galaxy.
  • The Lying Bastard, the spaceship constructed by the Puppeteers for the mission to the Ringworld and named by Louis Wu, was sadly not shaped like a disc. In most depictions, including the ones sanctioned by Larry Niven himself, it looks more like a fighter jet.
  • Silver actually says her name is fifty-six syllables long – considerably more than Ben’s guess of twenty-three! The “unpronounceable name” trope is a common excuse to give aliens, demons and the like simple names, even when their origins suggest they should have a language and/or culture very different to human ones. Doctor Who has several examples, including the Doctor’s own name (in the modern series a secret, but hinted to be very long in some of the books) and that of fellow Time Lord Romanadvoratrelundar, more commonly known as Romana (though when they first meet, the Doctor also offers to call her “Fred”).
  • Slashie and multi-hyphenate are both terms for those who diversify into multiple disciplines, particularly in the arts. “Multi-hyphenate” is more common in the screen industry, where one might be a writer-director-producer on the same project; “slashie” is a more general arts term, for folks who (like Ben) have several different freelance careers to ensure enough work. (Ben is an actor/writer/game designer/educator, among other things.)
  • We’re still pretty sure that the whole “you might outnumber me, but how many of you will die before you get me?” thing does appear in a Discworld book somewhere, but we haven’t been able to find it. Do you know where it is? Let us know!
  • The turtle that burrows underground and comes up looking like A’Tuin (or Torterra, if you’re a Pokémon fan) is the common snapping turtle of North America, Chelydra serpentina. They migrate to muddy holes where they bury themselves to hibernate during Winter. In 2018, a photo of one such turtle was taken in Maryland by Timothy Roth, a psychology professor working with Task Force Turtle. The photo went viral on social media and is now posted to various Discworld forums at least a few times each year, though this turtle hadn’t just woken up from hibernation… You can see the image above, and read the story of how and why it was taken, and learn more about the turtles themselves, in the LiveScience article “How Butt Gas, Drugs and Amazing Memories Led to This Weird Turtle Photo”, from December 2018. As EJ mentions, its often linked to the “turtle island” stories of several North American peoples, including the Lenape and Haudenosaunee.
  • Stephen Briggs’ unabridged audiobooks of both Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun were released by Isis Audio Books as boxed sets of CDs in the early 2000s. The same recordings were re-released around 2007 on “mp3-CD” – yes, a CD-ROM with the tracks from the original CDs as mp3 files. This format was playable by some CD players produced in the 2000s (and may still be playable by some in-car CD players now), but quickly became obsolete as solid-state media (like USB drives) became cheaper, and then the audio industry shifted to download and streaming. When the Isis unabridged recordings of the Discworld novels and other books were licensed for digital distribution via Audible, Apple Books and so on, it seems Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun were not included, but then the Isis Discworld audiobooks – including the earlier ones narrated by Nigel Planer – don’t seem available digitally any more either. (We assume they were removed to avoid confusion, now the new Penguin audiobooks are out; Tony Robinson’s ones are still available, but under the series title “Discworld (abridged)” to make the distinction clear.) You can still find the physical media versions secondhand, though, if you’re keen.

More notes to come soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, EJ Mann, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, sci-fi, standalone, Strata
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »

Follow Pratchat

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

Latest episode:

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

Next time…

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

We’re on Podchaser!

Podchaser - Pratchat

Meta

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

Copyright © 2025 Pratchat.

Pratchat WordPress Theme by Ben McKenzie

 

Loading Comments...