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#Pratchat13 – Don’t Quarry Be Happy

8 November 2018 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

In episode thirteen, Marlee Jane Ward joins us to talk Terry Pratchett’s Diggers! Published in 1990, it picks up where Truckers left off, splitting the story of the Nomes in two. (You can catch up on Truckers in #Pratchat9, and join us for the end of the story in #Pratchat20.)

The Nomes, having fled the destruction of the Store in a stolen lorry, have spent six months – something like five years in Nome time – making a new life in an abandoned quarry. But as humans start to take an interest in their new home, Grimma must hold the quarry Nomes together – no easy task when Nisodemus, the acting Abbott, is trying to convince them all to return to the old ways of the Store. Meanwhile Dorcas, the engineer who made the Long Drive possible, has made a secret discovery in one of the old quarry sheds – a mighty beast, known only as Jekub…

With many of the main characters from Truckers exiting the novel quite early on, Diggers focuses on Grimma and Dorcas, with the books’ events happening concurrently with those in the third book, Wings. Among its many themes are Pratchetty commentaries on religion, faith, community and responsibility, as well as many new jokes about the ways in which Nomes misunderstand humans – or, perhaps, understand humans perfectly. Have you read Diggers? What did you think? Use the hashtag #Pratchat13 on social media to join the conversation. We particularly want to see your original drawings of Nomes (see the original description from Truckers in the notes below), and to hear what you think about the exciting news of the The Watch TV series being officially greenlit by BBC America! 

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_13.mp3

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Guest Marlee Jane Ward is an author and writer, best known for the YA sci-fi novella Welcome to Orphancorp, which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adults in and it’s sequel Psynode, both published by Seizure. A third and final book in the series, Prisoncorop, was published in 2019. Marlee also has a podcast of her own, Catastropod, in which she discusses apocalyptic fiction with a variety of guests. You can find out more about Marlee at her web site, marleejaneward.com, or by following her on Twitter at @marleejaneward.

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

November 24, 2018 marks a special Pratchett anniversary – 35 years since the publication of the very first Discworld novel! That’s right, we’re going back to the very beginning to read The Colour of Magic and find out if it really is a very good place to start, with help from fantasy writer and freelance editor, Joel Martin! We’re sure you have loads of questions, so please send them in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat14.

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, Bromeliad, Diggers, Dorcas, Elizabeth Flux, Grimma, Marlee Jane Ward, Middle Grade, Nomes, non-Discworld

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

8 January 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.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_15.mp3

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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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Amy Gray, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Good Omens, Jennifer Beckett, Neil Gaiman, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat57 Notes and Errata

25 August 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”. A slightly straighter film adaptation of the story was released in 2012, starring starring Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel was directed by Len Wiseman of Underworld fame. 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 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 involve “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 protect them from injury or death.
  • We’ve discussed space elevators before in our episodes 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) and Strata (#Pratchat68). 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 being Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise and Charles Sheffield’s The Web Between the Worlds, published almost simultaneously in 1979. The elevator in Clarke’s novel is eventually built on Mars, and many novels set on Mars have featured space elevators too. Notable examples include 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! (For more about Larry Niven, see our Strata episode, #Pratchat68.)
  • 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 1912’s A Princess of Mars, the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series, but it incorporates elements from later books as well. The novel is a classic of early space fiction, birthing the genre of “planetary romance”. Both the book and film feature American Civil War veteran and Confederate solider John Carter, who is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to its local population as “Barsoom”. Mars’ lower gravity gives him enhanced strength, and after becoming friendly with the local “green Martians”, Carter 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 unrelated 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 set foot there. This apparent contradiction is because he got out of the lunar module first, but 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 the module. Cernan died in 2017 (we wonder if anyone told him about the twain in The Long Mars?), but Schmitt is still alive at the time of this episode’s release.
  • 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.

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

#Pratchat45 Notes and Errata

8 July 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”.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Christmas, Elizabeth Flux, horror, non-Discworld, Penelope Love, short story

#Pratchat42 Notes and Errata

8 April 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.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat41 Notes and Errata

8 March 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!

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

#Pratchat46 Notes and Errata

8 August 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!
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Deanne Sheldon-Collins, Elizabeth Flux, Helen Green, Joshua Valienté, Lobsang, non-Discworld, Sally Linsay, The Long Earth

#Pratchat6 Notes and Errata

8 April 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 6, “A Load of Old Tosh“, featuring guest David Astle discussing Terry’s 2012 standalone Dickens pastiche Dodger.

  • The “interrobang” is the combination of a question and exclamation mark (‽, or more often ?! or !?), used to indicate a question asked with excitement or otherwise strong emotion. One of Ben’s favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible, produced a whole episode on the origin and history of the interrobang. [Square brackets] (or just “brackets”, since round brackets are parentheses and curly brackets are braces) are most often used in journalism, where they indicate something that’s been left out or changed inside a quotation to improve clarity. David describes the pilcrow (or “paragraph mark”) in the podcast, but in case you’re wondering, it looks like this: ¶
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are…well, they’re teen-aged mutant anthropomorphic turtles, trained as ninjas by a mutant anthropomorphic rat, who live in the sewers of New York and fight for justice. They originally appeared in 1984 in a gritty, black-and-white comic book parody written and drawn by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. They were quickly picked up by a licensing company and became a toy line and a very popular cartoon, followed later by a less popular series of live-action films. They were recently re-imagined in big-screen CGI form by Michael Bay – seemingly the fate of everything liked by children in the 1980s – but most recently have returned to cartoons under the eye of Invader Zim creator Johnen Vasquez.
  • Terry dressed up as William Brown, the protagonist of Just William and its sequels by Richmal Crompton (like Terry, an incredibly prolific author), for the “26 Characters” exhibition at the Story Museum in Oxford. The photos aren’t available on the museum’s web site – the point was to visit to see them, after all! – but versions of many (including Terry’s) are featured in this BBC interview with photographer Cambridge Jones about the exhibition. The museum’s site has audio interviews with all the featured authors recorded during the photo shoots in 2014, including Terry talking about his own school days. Listeners of this podcast might also particularly enjoy the interviews with Neil Gaiman (who chose Badger from Wind in the Willows), Philip Pullman (Long John Silver from Treasure Island) and Terry Jones (Rupert the Bear), but they’re all great. It’s worth clarifying that Just William takes place when it was written, in 1922 – considerably after the time of Dodger. Tom Brown’s School Days, on the other hand, was written in 1857 and is set in the 1830s – so around the time of Dodger. There’s a stark contrast between Dodger’s life and that of Tom Brown…
  • A “flâneur” (via French for “stroller” or “loafer”, from the Old Norse verb flana “to wander with no purpose”) was a “gentleman stroller of the streets”: a person of leisure who would walk through a city just observing what went on around them. It’s uncertain if Dickens would have described himself as one; the word dates back a century or two earlier in France, but wasn’t popularly used in a positive sense until Walter Benjamin used it in discussions of modernity in the early twentieth century. (Oscar Wilde described himself as “a flâneur, a dandy” in De Profundis, but only when lamenting how he had wasted his life.)
  • Nicholson Baker is an American writer who loves newspapers as much as footnotes. He’s best known for his non-fiction, including the award-winning 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper in which he investigated the loss or destruction of thousands of books and newspapers during the “microfilm boom” of the 1980s.
  • The small, dog-like creature from The Dark Crystal is Fizgig.
  • Laphroaig whiskey is distilled in Port Ellen, on the southern coast of the Isle of Islay in Argyll, Scotland, near the bay that gives the whiskey its name, Loch Laphroaig. It is now owned by Japanese whiskey giant Suntory.
  • The Wombles are a group of vaguely mole-like intelligent creatures who live under Wimbledon Common, invented by Elisabeth Beresford for her children’s novels, first appearing in 1968. They are very familiar to Australians of a certain age because of the BBC-commissioned stop-motion animated television series, whose theme song emphasised the Womble’s forward-thinking policy of reuse and recycling: “Making good use of the things that they find, things that the everyday folk leave behind.” Less familiar to Australian listeners will be the novelty pop group formed by Mike Batt, or the related live-action Womble film Wombling Free, featuring short-statured actors – including Kenny Baker and Jack Purvis! – in Womble costumes, with voices provided by the likes of David Jason and Jon Pertwee! Aside from “making use of bad rubbish”, one of their most endearing features is that Wombles choose their name by throwing a dart at a map of the world; hence they have names like Great Uncle Bulgaria, Tomsk, Orinoco and Adelaide.
  • For those not familiar with Oliver Twist, Fagin is the criminal mastermind who sends the Artful Dodger and other children out to steal things for him in return for minimal food and shelter. He is a deeply unsympathetic character, essentially keeping the children enslaved. Even in Dickens’ day, Fagin – who was constantly referred to as “the Jew” in the novel – was seen as anti-Semitic. Dickens protested that he had no hatred of Jewish people, but was being “realistic”, because “that class of criminal was invariably a Jew”, but towards the end of his life Dickens came to realise the harm he was doing in perpetuating such a stereotype. He not only revised the last 15 chapters of the book, but removed all racist signifiers from his performance of the character in his public readings.
  • The Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (and the Russian empire, which at the time included much of Eastern Europe) were at their worst in the 1880s, after the period in which Dodger is set, but there were sadly many earlier examples as well. Solomon Cohen never says exactly where (or indeed what) he fled from, but it may have been the Odessa Pogrom of 1859.
  • Onan is a minor figure in the Bible best known as the source of the term “onanism”, a euphemism for masturbation – though that’s not entirely true to the source material. In the Book of Genesis, Onan’s brother Er is slain by God for generic wickedness and had no children, so their father Judah orders Onan to marry Er’s widow Tamar and give her children. Onan does marry her but during sex, knowing that any children will be heirs to Er and usurp his own inheritance, he chooses to “spill his seed upon the ground” – a crime for which he too was slain by God. It was really rough being in the Bible before Jesus came along.
  • PTSD is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a relatively common psychological disorder affecting people who have experienced trauma – usually violence, and especially interpersonal violence – without the time or opportunity to heal psychologically. It was poorly understood prior to the 1970s, but pretty clearly fits the symptoms ascribed to soldiers returning from war throughout history.
  • The pilot episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and by this we mean the aired pilot, not the unaired pilot) was actually relatively true to the rest of the series, with the one major exception of Buffy’s powers. While she kept her super strength and highly tuned intuition, somewhere between episodes 1 and 2 she apparently lost the power to jump (fly?) over a fence about three times her height.
  • Thanks to listener Wayne for finding the Wikipedia article for Crown and Anchor, which is a dice game originally favoured by English sailors. It uses three special six-sided dice marked with symbols instead of numbers: the four card suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades), a crown and an anchor. Players place their bets on a playing mat marked with six large squares, one for each symbol, like a simpler version of a roulette table; they then throw the dice and win money based on how many show the symbol which matches their bet. Variations with slightly different symbols appeared in many countries, though the English version is now rarely played outside the Channel Islands and Bermuda.
  • The classic “Penny Dreadfuls” were cheap mass-produced serial fiction magazines of the Victorian era, usually of the ‘orrible murder or supernatural thriller variety; they filled a niche later occupied by comic books, and cost a penny (hence the name). Hugely popular in Dodger’s time, many were rewrites or outright plagiarism, but they nevertheless made household names of popular historical and fictional characters including Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Sweeney Todd, who first appeared in The String of Pearls: A Romance in 1846.
  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill is a incredibly detailed comic book series spanning multiple volumes which brings together characters from hundreds of works of Victorian (and related) fiction. The most famous version of the titular league features Mina Harker (from Dracula), Alan Quartermain (from King Solomon’s Mines), Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo, amongst others, as they deal with a war between criminal elements and then an invasion of Martians (drawn from The War of the Worlds). The series is so dense with references big and small that companion volumes have been compiled uncovering them all. There’s a fairly loose film adaptation starring Sean Connery which is…not great.
  • Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has become probably the most popular version of the Todd story (not least thanks to Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation), and is based heavily on Christopher Bond’s 1973 play of the same name, which gave him a backstory – including being transported to Australia – and made the character a little more sympathetic, transforming his story into a modern revenge tragedy. The original London cast of the musical included Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett, Sweeney’s accomplice and encouragement. (In the podcast, Ben confuses her with Mrs Miggins, the proprietor of a similarly suspicious pie shop in classic historical sit-com Blackadder the Third.)
  • Penny Dreadful the television series was a gory sexy gothic horror co-produced by Showtime and Sky, weaving a new narrative around characters taken from Frankenstein, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and predominantly British and Irish folklore. It ran for three seasons with an all-star cast including Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Billie Piper and Josh Hartnett. Ben loved it more than he probably should have.
  • Asterix is the protagonist of the long-running Asterix & Obelix series of comic albums created by French cartoonists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. Set during the Roman Empire’s occupation of Gaul – a region of Western Europe bigger than France, populated by Celtic peoples of the La Tène culture – it imagined a single small village which held out against the invaders through judicious use of a magic potion, brewed by their Druid, which gave them super strength. The main character, Asterix, was very small but a shrewd warrior, assisted by his enormous, dim-witted but big-hearted friend Obelix, who was permanently super-strong due to drinking an entire cauldron of the potion as a baby. A key feature of the books are the names which pun on common cultural suffixes of the era, which have been translated into many languages.
  • “Bedlam” was a nickname for Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital whose name became synonymous with the barbaric ways in which the mentally ill were treated in the Victorian era.
  • “Nits” is the common name for headlice in Australia and New Zealand, thankfully rarely encountered these days except in primary schools.
  • Augusta Ada King-Noel (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace, aka Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. She was also a poet, but she is most remembered as the first computer programmer: she was a friend of Charles Babbage, and while translating a French transcript of a speech Babbage gave about his Analytical Engine, annotated it with notes which included an algorithm of her own design to make the machine calculate Bernoulli numbers. Sadly Babbage’s Analytical Engine was never completed, but just as it is now recognised as the first computer, her algorithm is now recognised as the first computer program.
  • The Tenniel in the book is indeed Sir John Tenniel, the primary political cartoonist for Punch (and therefore well known to Mayhew and Dickens), and most famously the illustrator for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. The eye injury referred to was accidentally inflicted by Tenniel’s father when they were fencing, when Tenniel was 20. Tenniel gradually lost his sight in that eye, but not wanting to make his father distraught, never revealed how serious the injury was.
  • A “growler” was a second-hand “clarence”, a four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage named after Prince William, Duke of Clarence, and introduced into London around 1840. Once sold by aristocrat owners, clarences were often used as cabs, and were known as “growlers” because of the sound they made on London cobblestoned streets.
  • Pratchett did indeed have plans for a Dodger sequel, saying at New York Comic Con and in an interview with the AV Club in 2012 that he’d love to write one “if he was spared”… The final scene of the book, in which Dodger is working with Serendipity as a spy in Paris, is a good indicator of the direction that book may have taken, but any notes for it would have been lost as per Terry’s instructions, when his hard drives were destroyed by a steam roller after his death.
  • Some later editions of Dodger – including Ben’s – include a “Bonus Scene” in which Dodger visits Sweeney Todd in Bedlam. (We cut our short discussion of the scene for time, and because David and Liz hadn’t read it.)
  • Cloacina was indeed a real Roman goddess, and like many was assimilated from another culture – in this case, Etruscan mythology. She was specifically the goddess of the Cloaca Maxima (“Greatest Drain”), the main sewer channel in Rome, construction of which was said to have been started and finished by two Estruscan Kings of Rome. Sometimes also seen as “a protector of sexual intercourse in marriage”, she was later known as “Venus of the Sewer”.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charles Dickens, David Astle, Dodger, Elizabeth Flux, Henry Mayhew, non-Discworld, standalone, Sweeney Todd

#Pratchat49 Notes and Errata

8 November 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 49, “Once More, With Future“, featuring guest Richard Watts, discussing the 1995 short story “Once and Future“, originally published in the anthology Camelot.

  • The episode title is a on Pratchett’s original short story collection Once More* *with footnotes (more about that below) parodying the musical director’s cliche, “Once more, with feeling!” While it’s best known now as the title of the celebrated musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the phrase’s first use as a title was for the 1958 British play One More, with Feeling!, about an egomaniacal orchestra conductor and a harpist who have a terrible relationship. The play was filmed in 1960, starring Yul Brynner and Kay Kendall. (It’s billed as a comedy, but by modern standards it mostly sounds kind of gross.)
  • The Colour of Magic was first published by Colin Smythe on 24 November, 1983. Depending on the edition he managed to get hold of, Richard might indeed have read it in 1984, but it’s perhaps more likely he’d have read it in 1985, when the first Corgi paperback edition was published in a much larger print run. (See #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“, for more on The Colour of Magic.)
  • As we do on our About page, it’s considered respectful to acknowledge the traditional owners or custodians of the places where we live and work in Australia. As Richard mentions, he’s lived on the lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung Peoples (which includes the city of Bendigo), the Gunaikurnai people (Gippsland), and the Wurundjeri (Narrm/Melbourne). Pratchat is made on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurung People, who like the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung are part of the Kulin Nation. We encourage all our listeners to research the local people of wherever you live, even outside Australia, especially if you live in a colonised place.
  • Little penguins – also called fairy penguins in Australia, and kororā in New Zealand – are the world’s smallest penguin species. A large colony of the penguins famously walk in a “parade” every night along the beach on Philip Island, which is located in Port Philip Bay south of Melbourne.
  • ArtsHub is Australia’s biggest professional arts industry resource website, established about twenty years ago. As well as industry news, it is also a primary source for listing and finding arts jobs in Australia. It makes money primarily through selling listings and ads, and paid memberships to industry professionals. It has expanded into a network of four main websites: ArtsHub, ArtsHub UK, ScreenHub (for the Australian screen industry) and GamesHub (for the videogame industry).
  • 3RRR community radio started as 3RMT, a student station at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1976. In 1979 it moved to Fitzroy and became 3RRR, and though the 70s, 80s and 90s picked up a significant following, especially among lovers of post punk and new wave music. In 2004 it moved to its present (and hopefully permanent) home in Brunswick East. While primarily a music station, it also broadcasts special and local interest programs about everything from science and technology to gardening and speculative fiction. Its morning show, The Breakfasters, It’s funded by sponsorships from local community businesses, and memberships purchased by listeners, mostly during an annual subscription drive. You can find the station at rrr.org.au, via various streaming apps or – if you’re in Melbourne – by tuning your radio to 102.7 FM.
  • Richard’s radio program SmartArts is broadcast on 3RRR every Thursday morning from 9 AM to Noon, and is also available as a podcast after the fact.
  • The Melbourne Fringe Festival is an open-access multi-arts festival held in Spring each year since 1982. Originally run by the Fringe Art Network, formed to preserve independent art after the closing of the alternative theatre venue Pram Factory, that organisation has since evolved into Melbourne Fringe. They now also operate a venue, the Fringe Common Rooms, at the Victorian Trades Hall.
  • We previously discussed the Matter of Britain thanks to an excellent pun in A Hat Full of Sky; see #Pratchat43 for more.
  • The Green Knight is a 2021 film directed by directed, written, edited and produced by American filmmaker David Lowery. It is an adaptation of the 14th century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which combined earlier folk tales into a story of one of Arthur’s knights, Gawain – played in the film by English actor Dev Patel. In Australia, it’s currently available to stream via Amazon Prime Video.
  • Pendragon is an Arthurian themed tabletop roleplaying game by Greg Stafford originally published in 1985 by Chaosium, the company behind Call of Cthulhu (see below). It’s based primarily on Le Morte d’Arthur (more about this later). Characters go on relatively few quests and adventures, spending most of their time pursuing courtly love, marrying and running a noble household, including siring heirs; Pendragon was notable for popularising generational play, in which players pay attention to their primary character’s family and eventually retire them, continuing play as the heir. Pendragon has had five editions, published by multiple companies including White Wolf (of Vampire: The Masquerade fame), but returned to Chaosium in 2018. A sixth edition is due to be released in 2021.
  • Chaosium is one of the earliest roleplaying game companies, formed in 1975. It’s best known for The Call of Cthulhu, a horror game based on the works of H P Lovecraft, first published in 1981 and currently in its seventh edition. Other notable Chaosium games include the fantasy game RuneQuest, occult mystery game Nephilim, and the Basic Roleplaying System, a generalised version of the rules used for many of their other games. They also now publish the swashbuckling fantasy 7th Sea (a favourite of Ben’s) and the chivalric romance Pendragon (see above).
  • Ernest Shackleton was one of many notable Antarctic explorers in the early twentieth century. In 1914, his ship the Endurance became trapped in ice and eventually destroyed, forcing his crew to abandon it. They were stranded in Antarctica for over 18 months, and amazingly Shackleton kept them all alive and got them rescued. Like fellow explorer and rival Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton kept a diary, and published an edited version of it. Both men’s diaries established the now well-known Shackleton’s diary style of recording hardship and hope in extreme conditions. For example: “Though we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope, we are alive and have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us…”
  • Thor’s hammer – named Mjölnir, which translates to “the grinder” or “foe-grinder” – is important both to the original mythological figure (as much as there is a single original), and the Marvel comics superhero. The film and one version of the comic book story tell us that the hammer was forged from the magical metal uru in the heart of a star, and enchanted by Thor’s father, Odin, with various magical powers and properties, most famously the restriction that none may wield it unless they are “worthy” (the interpretation of which leads to some interesting storylines). In the early comics, Thor was enchanted such that he had a mortal persona, Dr Donald Blake, who was physically weak and required a cane to walk; the cane was actually Mjolnir in disguise, and he had to bang it on the ground to transform it and himself when Thor was needed. Some versions of the comics repeat the mythological origin of the hammer, which date back to at least the 11th century, and it appears in both the Prose and Poetic Edda, the main sources for stories of the Norse gods. In those stories, Mjölnir was forged by the dwarf Eitri as part of a bet, but Loki – who would lose if Eitri forged a superior treasure – turned into a fly and bothered Eitri such that he was distracted from his forge, causing the hammer to be made with a shorter than intended handle. Its powers in the mythology are more limited, but are possessed by both versions – it will strike as hard as Thor wishes; it can be thrown, and never miss its target; it will return to its owner; and it may be concealed inside a shirt. Unfortunately, like many major symbols of Norse mythology, the traditional depiction of Mjölnir has been appropriated as a symbol by racist and neo-nazi organisations, but those uses are still in a minority, and actively opposed by many modern pagan groups.
  • While the version of the Mjölnir electromagnet Ben discusses was not feasible – the hammer was meant to be normal so it could be taken away by whoever bought it – the trick has been done with a different scheme! Allen Pan devised a version for his YouTube channel Sufficiently Advanced made from a commercially available toy version of the movie Mjölnir, using an electromagnet made from microwave oven parts and using a thumbprint scanner in the handle, though to use it in public he needed to find a handy metal plate or sewer entrance cover.
  • Le Morte d’Arthur (“The Death of Arthur”; changed by the publisher from the original title, The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table) is the famous 15th century book remixing the folklore around King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was written by English nobleman and criminal Sir Thomas Malory during a stint in prison (assuming modern historians have his identity correct), and first published by William Caxton in 1485. Its vision of Arthur has influenced nearly every major new version in the centuries since, including most of the novels and films we mention during this episode. Of note, Malory based it on earlier French and Middle English versions of the stories, though exactly which sources are unclear.
  • The sword in the stone dates back to the early 13th century, where it appears stuck in an anvil atop a stone in a churchyard on Christmas Eve, either in Londinium (London) or Logres, an old name derived from the Welsh Lloegyr, describing the region of southern and eastern England ruled by Arthur. Later versions have placed the stone in various more specific places, and often leave out the anvil, placing the sword directly in the stone itself.
  • Once More* with footnotes was a collection of Pratchett’s shorter writings – fiction and non-fiction – published by the New England Science Fiction Association to mark Pratchett’s attendance as Guest of Honour at Noreascon Four, the 62nd World Science Fiction Convention. (There’s no separate World SF Convention; pre-existing conventions around the world take turns to host it, a bit like cities hosting the Olympics.) Nearly everything in Once More* with footnotes shows up in the later (and still in print) books A Blink of the Screen (short fiction) and A Slip of the Keyboard (non-fiction), which also include stuff written after 2004. But there are a small number of unique things in the earlier collection, and since the original had only three limited print runs (and a much better title), it’s still sought after by Pratchett collectors. We’ll have to track down a copy so we can share with you the few goodies inside that didn’t make it into the later books.
  • We’ve previously mentioned that, as per the conditions of his will, Terry’s hard drives containing his unfinished books were all destroyed by being crushed under a steam roller. Presumably his floppy discs would have suffered a similar fate, otherwise there’s a bit of a get out clause in which the hard drives’ contents could have been backed up beforehand…
  • The Long Earth (not The Long World, but look, it’s been a long few lockdowns) is Terry’s sci-fi series co-written with Stephen Baxter. We’ve already covered the first two books: The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, and The Long War in #Pratchat46.
  • While this episode of Pratchat comes in between Thief of Time (#Pratchat48) and Night Watch (watch out for it early in 2022), both books were written several years after “Once and Future”. The later books were published in 2001 and 2002, respectively.
  • Ben didn’t have much luck finding the tweet about what you should take back in time; given the answer to the question, possibly the search was complicated by the recent release of a certain big budget film about the intergalactic spice trade… (That, and the tweet we think it was has since been deleted by the author.)
  • As Richard reveals later in the podcast, the historical Merlin is thought to be the poet and seer Myrddin Wyllt (“Myrddin the Wild”) from “the Old North” of England, the bit near Scottish lands. Myrddin is a Welsh name, anglicised into “Merlin” by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the 12th century British Catholic priest who lived in Wales and wrote Historia regum Britanniae, a history of British Kings which mixes real history with stories, and one of the oldest sources for King Arthur. (Richard has more to say about the historical Merlin at around the 39:53 mark.)
  • As Richard notes, the sword in the stone is not always Excalibur. In earlier stories they are usually the same sword. When Arthur is dying, he tasks one of his knights to throw the sword into a lake, where a hand rises from the water to catch it. Later versions move this event to earlier, and Arthur is given back the sword by the Lady of the Lake. In still later versions, the sword from the stone is broken, and Arthur gets a new one – Excalibur – from the Lady (aka Nimue etc; see below). Nice one, Arthur Two-Swords. (This will all become relevant again when we talk about The Watch.)
  • In the 1975 comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Arthur (Graham Chapman) accidentally insults a peasant named Dennis, who claims to be part of an “anarchs-syndicalist commune” and derides Arthur’s claim to the divine right to rule:

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis: Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!

Arthur: Be quiet!

Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!

Arthur: Shut up!

Dennis: I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones)
  • The idea of an historical Roman-era Arthur comes from the earliest surviving source which mentions him: the Historia Brittonum (History of Britain) from the early ninth century CE, attributed to the Welsh priest Nennius. It describes a leader of warriors named Arthur who fought with the kings of the Britons; only later sources name him as a king as well. These battles supposedly happened three hundred years earlier, and do agree with earlier sub-Roman British sources from the 6th century, notably De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae by Gildas the Wise, which includes a British victory against the Saxons. Gildas, however, doesn’t name Arthur or any other military commanders or kings, and modern historians are generally in agreement that he is a mythical figure, even if he was inspired by the stories of several historical people. (For more on the archaeological evidence, see our note about Leslie Alcock below.)
  • Ben refers to several events where Mervin might have ended up in the modern day that we’ll quickly explain:
    • “Ren-Fair” is short for “Renaissance Fair”, a popular form of medieval re-enactment of varying levels of historical accuracy that is popular in the United States.
    • LARP is an acronym for “Live Action Role Play”, and describes a particular style of roleplaying game in which players dress in costumes and act in character, often in an outdoor setting, and sometimes with mock combat using props and safe weaponry. Note that not all LARP games are medieval, or violent; many styles of LARP are quite rules-light and are more like an immersive form of improvised theatre.
    • Ben uses the term “conference” when describing a roleplaying con; usually such an event – where players gather to play a number of shorter games over a weekend – is called a “convention”.
  • Pratchett first mentions the “trousers of time” in Guards! Guards! (we talked about it in #Pratchat7A). For more on possible influences and origins for the phrase, see the episode notes for #Pratchat27 (about Jingo).
  • Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin – better known as Enya – is an Irish musician famous for her distinctive and multi-tracked vocals and Celtic influence. Her song “Orinoco Flow”, from her 1988 second album Watermark, was a global hit and helped make her the second-best selling Irish artist of all time, behind U2.
  • Nimue and Viviane are two of the traditional names for the Lady of the Lake, though there are many, many variations. Her origins are not certain, but she is likely drawn from one or several stories from Irish or Welsh traditions. The sorceress Morgan Le Fay, who has a complicated relationship with Merlin and Arthur, is usually a separate figure, but in some later stories is conflated with or said to be close to the Lady.
  • Mary Stewart (1916-2014) is the British author of the Merlin novels, which began with The Crystal Cave, first published in 1970. It was followed by The Hollow Hills (1973) and The Last Enchantment (1979), the three books forming a trilogy telling the story of Merlin from the age of six through to his retirement after trying to help Arthur avoid the schemes of Morgause, mother of Mordred. Stewart later added two more novels: The Wicked Day (1983), which continues the story without Merlin using Mordred as the main character, and the much later The Prince and the Pilgrim (1995), which is a standalone novel set during Arthur’s reign in the earlier books, focussing on a pair of new protagonists.
  • The 1998 Merlin miniseries, made for US network NBC, stars Sam Neill as the titular wizard. He is not trapped in a crystal cave, but at the start of the (sort-of) sequel, 2006’s Merlin’s Apprentice, he decides to sleep for a while to rejuvenate, and does so in a cave that does indeed seem to have crystals. He’s not trapped, but he doesn’t set his alarm, and so accidentally wakes fifty years later to find Camelot in ruins.
  • “The one with the young Merlin” is the 2008 BBC TV series Merlin, starring Colin Morgan as Merlin, a young “warlock” who comes to Camelot under the rule of the magic-hating king Uther Pendragon (played by Anthony Head of Buffy fame), and befriends his son, the knight Arthur, and his love, servant Guinevere (known as Gwen). He is mentored by Gaius, Uther’s court physician, and the Great Dragon (voiced by John Hurt!), the last of his kind after Uther killed all his kin and imprisoned him under the castle. He’s not imprisoned in the Crystal Cave, but does visit it a couple of times. Nimueh also appears, but this version of the character is a human witch, a High Priestess of the Old Religion outlawed along with magic by Uther. She and Merlin did not get along.
  • Pratchett did indeed live near places associated with Arthur. From Broad Chalke, where he lived from 1993 until his death in 2015, it’s only 40km (25 miles) west to Cadbury Castle, a famous site of archaeological work related to Arthur (see the note about Leslie Alcock below), and 55km (about 34 miles) to the northwest to Glastonbury. Glastonbury Abbey is said to be the resting place of Arthur and Guinevere – tombstones bearing their names were found within, as were the bones of two people, though this seems likely to have been a scam by 12th century monks hoping to attract pilgrims. Glastonbury Abbey was also originally on an island in a lake – now dried up – and so is also given as the location of the Isle of Avalon. A bit further afield, around 200km (125 miles) to the west of Broad Chalke on the coast of Cornwall, lies Tintagel Castle, the most popular choice of location for Camelot itself. A sea cave underneath is known as Merlin’s Cave.
  • We found this very interesting 2018 article about the rise of salt and pepper as the key Western spices on NPR’s Gnawing Questions column.
  • Ben is thinking of the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution, which was most famously championed by fantasy author Ursula Le Guin in her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in 1986. She refers to Carrier Bag Theory as the work of Elizabeth Fisher, from Fisher’s 1979 book Women’s Creation (though Le Guin cites it as being published in 1975), and quotes’ Fisher’s claim that “the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.” Sadly Fisher’s sources for this are not listed, her book has been out of print for twenty years, and it’s not easy to find much information about her. This might be partly explained by the essay, in which Le Guin makes the point that our patriarchal view of stories preferences the traditional “man’s first tools were clubs and spears” narrative, since it has excitement and violence (and is about men). For more on her essay, see this great 2019 article at The Outline, which makes a compelling argument that we should all read more of Le Guin’s explicitly feminist work. (If you want to get started, you can find the original essay online at The Anarchist Library.)
  • Romans did indeed have running water and heating, available – at least in wealthy homes – as early as 200 BCE, when they discovered lead was a cheap and easy to work material from which to make water pipes, which connected to the aqueducts for which they were famous. Aqueducts are elevated water courses which use a slight downward gradient to transport water over large distances using just the force of gravity. There’s a theory that the lead piping would have lead to widespread lead poisoning, and contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, but this is contested. As for heating, they used an underfloor heating system called a hypocaust, in which a fire heated air ducted into the room above; this seems to have been mainly used in baths and large common buildings, and only the most lavish private homes.
  • Ben’s essay about silk and potatoes was largely based on the 1998 book Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy, by British writer Adam Roberts. Roberts, it turns out, went on to be an award-winning novelist, best known for his sci-fi novels like Salt (2000), Gradisil (2006) and Jack Glass (2012), and for writing numerous short but broad parodies of popular sci-fi and fantasy works including The Soddit, Star Warped and The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo. He is still a scholar of mythology and fantasy, and some of his novels and short stories are pastiches of Arthur, Jules Verne and others.
  • It’s impossible to know how many knights of the round table there were, on account of them not being real and there being so many different accounts! Wikipedia lists more than fifty significant Arthurian knights worthy of their own articles, though Ben’s guess that Arthur and his knights are “fourteen people” is probably reasonable for a “pub test” of how many most people could name.
  • The time travel business with Shakespeare in Jasper Fforde’s books is a minor event in the first of the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair. (The time traveller in question is Thursday’s mysterious father, Colonel Next.)
  • A bootstrap paradox – more formally a “causal loop”, but also called a predestination paradox in fiction – is one in which something causes itself to happen through the use of time travel, making the actual cause seemingly non-existent. For example, if a time traveller constructs a time machine using plans they have found, then goes back in time to hide the plans where their past self found them…where did the plans originally come from? Who created them? The Twelfth Doctor explains the bootstrap paradox with a musical example in a prelude to the Doctor Who episode “Before the Flood”.
  • Richard is spot on with his details about Michael Moorcock’s time travel story Behold the Man. The novella version, published in New Worlds magazine, won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1967.
  • For more about Moorcock publishing Pratchett, see the notes for our previous short story episodes #Pratchat39 and #Pratchat45.
  • Sir Ector first appears by that name in versions of the story from around the 12th century. His son Kay goes back to the Welsh versions, where his father was known as Cynyr.
  • The Sword in the Stone is the first of four short novels written by T H White, which were revised and expanded into a series (and collected into a single book) as The Once and Future King in 1958. The four books are:
    • The Sword in the Stone (1938), which covers Arthur’s youth, and was adapted into the famous Disney animated film in 1963.
    • The Witch in the Wood (1939), in which Arthur grows up, creates the Round Table and secures his kingship; it was renamed The Queen of Air and Darkness and heavily rewritten for the Once and Future King version.
    • The Ill-Made Knight (1940), mostly about Lancelot – the knight of the title – but also the quest for the Holy Grail.
    • The Candle in the Wind (1958), which covers the end of Arthur’s reign and his death. It was first published in the collected edition of the books. This book and the previous one were adapted into the stage musical Camelot in 1960, which was then turned into a 1967 film starring Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave as Arthur and Guinevere.
  • As hinted in the story itself, both Arthur and Ursula are names associated with words for “bear”, though as usual with etymology of old names and words its not simple. “Arthur” is certainly an old Welsh name, but it has become so linked to the Arthurian legend that it’s hard to find early sources that don’t reference the stories. It may come from Roman or Welsh origins, though for complex linguistic reasons not directly from the Welsh word for bear, which is arth. Mervin refers to him as “Artos the Bear”, which is the name given to a Roman-era, Celtic, “real” version of Arthur in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s 1963 novel Sword at Sunset. Ursula, meanwhile, is straightforward: while popular across Europe, it is a diminutive form of the Latin word for bear, ursa, as in the constellations of Ursa Minor and Ursa Major.
  • Johnny Lee Miller is an English actor best known for his (vastly different) roles in Trainspotting as “Sick Boy” and a modern Sherlock Holmes, working in New York, in Elementary. Elementary ran for seven seasons on CBS between 2012 and 2019, and is possibly our favourite version of Holmes, certainly for television. It also stars Lucy Liu as Dr Joan Watson, plus Aidan Quinn as Captain Gregson and Jon Michael Hill as Detective Marcus Bell, members of the NTPD who engage Holmes and Watson as consultants. Miller’s next major television project is the upcoming fifth season of The Crown, in which he will play UK Prime Minister John Major.
  • The Arhurian films we mention are:
    • King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017, dir. Guy Ritchie), starring Charlie Hunnam as Arthur and Jude Law as Vortigern;
    • King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua), “the Bronze Age one”, starring Clive Owen as Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot and Keira Knightley as Guinevere;
    • First Knight (1995, dir. Jerry Zucker), the one with Sean Connery, Richard Gere and Julia Ormond – “the gauntlet scene” features Gere’s Lancelot navigating an obstacle course in order to win a kiss from Guinevere.
    • Excalibur (1981, dir. John Boorman), the good one, though it’s forty years old and hasn’t aged well in some respects. It features many actors in supporting roles who’d go on to be much more famous than its stars, including Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne. Nicol Williamson’s Merlin and Helen Mirren’s Morgana Le Fay are especially brilliant, though.
    • The Kid Who Would Be King (2019, dir. Joe Cornish) stars Louis Ashbourne Serkis (son of Andy “Gollum” Serkis) as Alex, the modern-day who finds Excalibur. It also features Patrick Stewart as an older version of Merlin, though most of the time he’s played by Angus Imrie in a younger form (he ages backwards, as in many versions of the myth).
    • The Green Knight (2021, dir. David Lowery) – see the earlier note above.
  • Peter Jackson, while best known for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, had been a filmmaker in New Zealand for many years beforehand. After his early cult horror-comedy films Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989) – see also #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles” – and Braindead (1992), he found international acclaim with his 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, also the feature film debut of Kate Winslet. His 1996 film The Frighteners, a dark supernatural comedy starring Michael J Fox, was his first for a Hollywood studio. In 1999 he adapted Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, about a teenage girl who is murdered and resists entering Heaven so she can watch over her family. His most feature was Mortal Engines, which he produced but did not direct; it’s also an adaptation of a novel, in this case the 2001 steampunk-is YA fantasy by Philip Reeve. It had a huge budget but was also not a success. Jackson’s first “documentary” was Forgotten Silver, actually a mockumentary telling the story of a forgotten New Zealand pioneer in filmmaking, Colin McKenzie, who never really existed. Jackson has a fascination with World War I, and in 2018 released the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old to general acclaim; the film uses modern animation and reconstruction techniques to bring archival film and photographs of the war to life. His next work is indeed a documentary: The Beatles: Get Back is a three part series using the same techniques as They Shall Not Grow Old to tell the story of the making of the Beatles album Let It Be. Ben is cautiously excited. (The documentary West of Memphis, about Elvis, was produced by Jackson, but not directed by him.)
  • Marty McFly has to avoid meeting himself towards the end of Back to the Future Part II, when he and Doc Brown travel back to 1955 and interact with events from the first film.
  • Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court follows the story of Hank Morgan, an engineer from Hartford, Connecticut who gets hit on the head and wakes up in King Arthur’s court. He sets about using his superior technical knowledge to gain power and influence, earning him the ire of Merlin. It has been adapted for the screen many times; the first one was a silent film in 1921.
  • Disney’s run of sci-fi and fantasy films occurred mostly in the 1970s. Ben mentions The Cat from Outer Space (1978, dir. Norman Tokar) and Escape to Witch Mountain (1975, dir. John Hough); others include the Witch Mountain sequel Return from Witch Mountain (1978, dir. John Hough), The Island at the Top of the World (1974, dir. Robert Stevenson) and The Black Hole (1979, dir. Gary Nelson).
  • Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979, dir. Russ Mayberry), aka The Spaceman and King Arthur and A Spaceman in King Arthur’s Court, starred Dennis Dugan as Tom Trimble and the android Hermes. Dugan later went into directing, specialising in whacky comedies, and has worked frequently with Adam Sandler; his films include Problem Child (1900), Brain Donors (1992), Happy Gilmore (1996), Jack and Jill (2011) and most recently Love, Weddings and Other Disasters (2020). Meanwhile Unidentified Flying Oddball co-stars many actors famous in the UK, including Jim Dale (of Carry On fame) as Mordred, Ron Moody (best known as Fagin in Oliver!) as Merlin and Dad’s Army star John Le Mesurier as Sir Gawain. It’s available on streaming services, including Disney+.
  • The Mists of Avalon is Marion Zimmer-Bradley’s retelling of the Arthurian story from the perspective of its women, most notably Morgaine, who is trying to prevent her pagan religion from being ousted by Christianity. It was first published in 1983, and eventually followed by seven sequels. In 2001 it was adapted for television as a mini-series for American cable network TNT, starring Julianna Margulies as Morgaine and featuring Anjelica Huston as Viviane, the Lady of the Lake.
  • Etrigan the Demon is a superhero character created by Jack Kirby for DC Comics, first appearing in his own series The Demon in 1972. In the origin version, Etrigan – a large, yellow and powerful demon – is summoned by Merlin, who is his half-brother via the demon Belial. (This is in line with many myths, which call Merlin a “cambion” or half-demon, citing this as the source of his power.) When Etrigan refuses to tell Merlin what he wants to know, he binds the demon’s soul to that of Jason Blood, one of Arthur’s knights, making Blood immortal. Blood lives into the modern day, where he is a noted demonologist; on a trip to Gotham City he discovers a poem which can cause him to transform into Etrigan (they effectively swap places), and develops an uneasy friendship with the demon, working together to fight against greater evils. Etrigan’s dialogue is usually written in rhyming verse, something of a tradition for demons in DC comics. A revision of this story in later comics has Blood and Etrigan working together from soon after the bonding, leading a medieval superhero team known as the Demon Knights. While a lesser-known DC character, Etrigan is nonetheless quite popular, and continues to appear in comics today.
  • Jabberwocky is Terry Gilliam’s 1971 comedy film, his first as solo director. It’s very loosely based on the Lewis Carroll poem, which appears in Through the Looking Glass. Jabberwocky stars Michael Palin as Dennis, a cooper’s apprentice, who tries to find his fortune while the titular monster terrifies the local population. The combination of ridiculous gore, filth, slapstick comedy and period griminess give it look and tone similar to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, though it’s not nearly as funny.
  • The “Dorito flavour would overwhelm someone from centuries ago” tweet that Liz mention is this one, from Matt Crowley, a staff writer for The Onion:

We take it for granted today, but a single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.

— Matt Crowley (@MatthewPCrowley) July 14, 2015
  • The “pub test” is a phrase used often in recent Australian media and political discussions to mean something the average Australian person – such as the folks drinking in your local pub – would understand or agree with. It’s been a subject of some debate, particularly amongst conservatives who don’t like the idea that it might show they’re out of touch, but it is analogous to ideas in law of what a “reasonable person” would think – especially in terms of understanding a risk. In old-fashion UK legal terminology, this was often phrased as “the man on the Clapham Omnibus”, or in Australian terms, “the man on the Bondi tram”.
  • The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) was founded in 1966, at the University of California Berkley. The name was coined by fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley, who was an early member. It still exists, with tens of thousands of members and participants worldwide, administered by various “Kingdoms” “ruled” by a King and Queen. The SCA is pretty upfront that they have a variable approach to historical accuracy, selecting the fun and interesting aspects of pre-seventeenth century culture – i.e. they don’t let the meat get rotten, but do try to use the cooking techniques and ingredients of the time. The idea is to learn about this period by actively participating in activities, rather than just reading about them. Members choose names appropriate to the period and have a lot of fun. You can find out more about them at sca.org.
  • Count Nikolai Dmitrievich Tolstoy-Miloslavsky, usually known as Nikolai Tolstoy, is a British historian and current head of the House of Tolstoy, a Russian noble family, and a distant cousin to “the other Tolstoy” – Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace. As well as the scholarly book Richard mentions, The Quest for Merlin (1985), Nikolai Tolstoy has written an Arthurian novel, The Coming of the King (1988). His non-Arthurian work is largely about World War II and historical and political issues around Russia – unsurprising as his father fled the country in 1920 in the aftermath of the revolution. He is also an outspoken monarchist and a member of the UK Independence Party, or UKIP, which championed Brexit, though while he has run for office has never been elected.
  • Leslie Alcock OBE FSA FSA Scot FRSE (1925 – 2006) was a prominent archaeologist and expert in Early Medieval Britain. Born in Manchester, he was Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University and the University of Glasgow, and is best known for his excavations in the late 1960s at Cadbury Castle – a site long associated with King Arthur. He made the most of this famous association, attracting the attention of the media. This attention popularised the open excavation style now employed by most archaeologists, including those on Time Team. His book Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology was published in 1971, and popularised the idea of an historical Arthur as a war leader in sub-Roman Britain who led fights against the Saxons, agreeing with this historical sources mentioned above. Later scholars have increasingly questioned if an historical Arthur existed at all – the stories are more likely an amalgamation of several real people, where they have any basis in reality – but many live in hope.
  • On that note, Richard’s pick for a possible historical Arthur is Riothamus, a Romano-British military leader from around 470 CE. His name comes from the old British Celtic language, Brythonic, and either means “the most kingly” or “freest”; he was described by sixth-century historian Jordanes as “King of the Britons”, though what that would have meant in the late 5th century isn’t entirely clear. Regardless, he’s a good choice.
  • The Disney animated film Robin Hood – the one with the fox – was released in 1973. As well as translating the characters into animals, it takes a few liberties with the traditional story – most notably, none of the Merry Men appear other than Little John and Friar Tuck. It remains a favourite, though critically has had mixed reviews; the most notable voice actor is Peter Ustinov as both Prince John and King Richard.
  • Robin of Sherwood was an ITV series which ran for three series between 1984 and 1986. Michael Praed played Robin of Loxley, the first Robin Hood, for the first two series, but is replaced in series three by Jason Connery – yes, son of Sean – as his successor, Robert of Huntingdon, chosen by the shamanic figure Herne (named for the Celtic god of the hunt, Herne the Hunter – parodying in Pratchett’s Lord and Ladies as Herne the Hunted). Other notable actors to appear were John Rhys-Davies as King Richard, Ray Winstone as Will Scarlett, and Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror fame as a sorcerer.
  • Ben brings up Cary Elwes, and we continue to talk about his famous go at being Robin Hood, but somehow no-one mentions that the film in question is Mel Brooks’ 1993 parody Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The “character with the mole” mentioned by Liz is Prince John, played in the film by American comedian Richard Lewis.
  • Modern jeans date back to 1871, when Jacob W. Davis added rivets to the pockets of blue denim jeans for the Levi Strauss company. But the term “jeans” dates back to at least 1795, and denim dyed blue with indigo is older still. While Jack Kerouac and the beats did wear jeans – working class clothing was common for them – blue jeans’ big cultural moment was when James Dean wore them in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, associating them with rebellious youth. For a really great history of blue jeans, we recommend “Blue Jeans“, episode five of Avery Trufelman’s Articles of Interest, a podcast mini-series about clothing released as part of Ben’s favourite design podcast, 99% Invisible.
  • The ångström (Å) is a metric unit of length, with 1Å equivalent to 1×10-10 metres (or one ten-billionth of a metre). It is not part of the standard System Internationale (SI) of units, but still sees use in physics and other natural sciences where there is a need to describe the size of atoms and sub-atomic structures. It’s named for 19th-century Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström, though we note that Pratchett uses the unusual spelling “Ångstrom”, which preserves only one of the Swedish characters.
  • The Chinese story of the archer who shot down the extra suns is the story of Hou Yi (后裔), also known as Shen Yi or just Yi. There are many versions of his story, but he is nearly always married to Chang’e (嫦娥), who is – or becomes – goddess of the Moon.
  • We’ve previously talked about Journey to the West (西遊記), by Wu Cheng’en – and especially the 1980s Japanese television adaptation, Monkey, which was very popular in Australia – in #Pratchat18 (The Dark Side of the Sun). We also talked about various versions of the story in episode six of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club. The standard English translation of the original novel has long been the abridged version by Arthur Waley, published in 1942. The new translation is Monkey King: Journey to the West, by Julia Lovell, published in 2021; it’s received some glowing reviews, including this one from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
  • We covered Eric back in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“. Rincewind’s psuedo-Odysseus ancestor is Lavaeolus, whose name is roughly Latin (or Latatian, the Discworld equivalent) for “Rinser of Winds”.
  • The Hercules movie with the Rock is Hercules (2014, dir. Brett Ratner), based on a graphic novel by Steve Moore, though Moore received no payment for the eventual film and was subsequently very reasonably upset that his name was used prominently in marketing the film. Other notable cast include Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell and John Hurt.
  • Agatha Christie’s The Labours of Hercules was published in 1947 and the mysteries within all star her least favourite creation, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The stories had all been previously published in periodicals. Poirot prefaces the collection, saying that he has chosen these cases to fit the theme, and hopes to close his career as a detective with their account, though Christie did not get her way and several more collections of stories and novels were published after this one. Eleven of his mysteries come chronologically after, so Poirot didn’t get his way either; his final case is Curtain, written by Christie during World War II, but not published until 1975 – the last of her works published before her death in January 1976.
  • C S Lewis and his take on schools?
  • The tweet comparing C S Lewis and Tolkien’s attitudes to their allegories is (probably) this one:

Tolkien : "For the billionth time, I DID NOT write my books as a coping mechanism for my experiences from world war 1!!!!"

Lewis : "Bro, you see that big lion. Yeah that one, he's Jesus. What do you mean you don't see my chirstian allegory?! I will just kms then."

— Taylor D. Swift (@migraine_hai) May 6, 2021
  • Ophelia is a 2018 film directed by Claire McCarthy, adapted by Semi Chellas from the novel Ophelia by Lisa Klein. Alongside Daisy Ridley as Ophelia the cast features Naomi Watts as Gertrude, Clive Owen as Claudius, and Tom Felton as Laertes.
  • Ben mentions Uprooted by Naomi Novik, which he also talked about in a bit cut from #Pratchat46 and featured in our most recent Ook Club episode as a bit of bonus content. Novik’s other novel is a similar vein is Spinning Silver, which is loosely based on the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
  • The series Richard discusses is A Fairy Tale Revolution from Penguin Books. Aimed at younger readers, it comprises Hansel and Greta by Jeanette Winterson, Blueblood by Malorie Blackman, Duckling by Kamila Shamsie (all illustrated by Laura Barrett) and Cinderella Liberator by Rebecca Solnit (illustrated by Arthur Rackham).
  • Nullus Anxietas 7A, the one-before-the-ninth Australian Discworld Convention, is happening in Sydney from the 8th to the 10th of April, 2022. Get all the details via ausdwcon.org.
  • “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” are the famous words uttered by Oz, the Great and Terrible, when his giant magical face is exposed as a sham by the drawing of the curtain where the actual Oz, a regular human from Dorothy’s world, is operating the head’s controls.
  • A Slip of the Keyboard, as mentioned in the note about Once More* with footnotes above, is the 2014 collection of Pratchett’s non-fiction writings. We’ll try and fit it in somewhere, though many of its works are so short that they probably wouldn’t work as individual episodes…
  • We discussed Pratchett’s standalone Dickins pastiche Dodger way back in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“.
  • We’re not sure if the world is ready for a photo of the weird brick mouse thing, but we’ll see if Liz can find one.
  • The “Lovecraft Circle” was a group of “weird fiction” writers who, though they never met him in person, regularly corresponded with Lovecraft, sharing and using motifs and ideas which appear in their collective writings. As well as Clark Ashton-Smith, the Circle’s most well-known members included August Derleth, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long. Robert W Chambers was not a member of the Circle; he was active significantly earlier, having written The King in Yellow in 1895, when Lovecraft himself was only five years old.
  • Australian filmmaker Baz Luhrman released The Great Gatsby in 2013. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher and Elizabeth Debicki (soon to be seen as Princess Diana in The Crown). There was huge buzz around the film, generated by a trailer released a year in advance, but its critical reception on release was lukewarm at best.

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, non-Discworld, Richard Watts, short story, time travel

#Pratchat13 Notes and Errata

8 November 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy“, featuring guest Marlee Jane Ward, discussing the second book of the Bromeliad, 1990’s Diggers.

  • The episode title puns Bobby McFerrin’s famous 1988 a cappella hit, “Don’t Worry Be Happy”. It originally appeared on the soundtrack to the Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown film Cocktail, and the music video features Robin Williams. Despite persistent rumours that he had died by suicide – fuelled seemingly by nothing more than folks liking the supposed irony – McFerrin is not dead and continues to work as a jazz vocalist and musical genius.
  • Marlee’s story “The Walking Thing” and Liz’s story “Naming Rights” can both be found in the short story anthology Best Summer Stories published by Black Inc.
  • Neil Gaiman is an English writer who started out as a journalist, but became better known for his comic book work. His most famous series, Sandman for DC’s mature imprint Vertigo, chronicles the life of Dream, also known as Morpheus, one of the seven Endless, anthropomorphic personifications of concepts including Destiny, Despair and, yes, Death. (See the Once and For All podcast for a comparison.) Gaiman was the first journalist to interview Terry, soon after the publication of The Light Fantastic, and the two quickly became friends. Neil has since gone on to become a best-selling novelist, award-winning screenwriter and, most recently, a TV producer, in order to keep a promise to Terry that the television adaptation of Good Omens – the novel they wrote together, based on an idea of Neil’s – would be good.
  • The creepy little girl with long black hair who walks weirdly is Sadako, the vengeful spirit of a young girl murdered and thrown into a well in Ring, a 1998 Japanese horror film directed by Hideo Nakata. It was remade in English as The Ring in 2002, directed by Gore Verbinski and starring Naomi Watts. Both versions follow the plot of the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki, which was been made into an earlier 1995 film and a television series in 1999.
  • Ten is indeed an aspirational age for outdoor nomes, but is about the expected number of years for Store nomes. The original Abbott in Truckers died at the age of fifteen, and was considered extremely long-lived.
  • “Winter is coming” are the words of House Stark, one of the noble houses struggling for control of the fantasy kingdom of Westeros in George R. R. Martin’s blockbuster series of fantasy novels, “A Song of Ice and Fire”, adapted for television as Game of Thrones. The Stark words are significant in Westeros because their Winters do not come regularly or last for a consistent amount of time.
  • John Snow is one of the main protagonists of Game of Thrones, an illegitimate son of the head of House Stark, though there’s much speculation about whether this is in fact true. His character in some ways resembles Masklin: he is a born leader who wishes he didn’t have to lead, and prefers to go off on his own to get things done.
  • The “guy in King’s Landing who makes stuff” mentioned by Liz could be a few different people, including Tobho Mott, the blacksmith, Hendry, Mott’s apprentice, or Hallyne the Pyromancer, who mostly makes wildfire, an alchemical substance which burns long and hot.
  • In Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 time travel comedy Back to the Future, high school student Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) is transported 30 years into the past and accidentally stops his parents from having the meeting that led to their relationship and marriage. In his efforts to help his father George (Crispin Glover) get together with his mother Lorraine (Lea Thompson) he gives him some pointers on how to talk to her; George misreads his notes as “my density has bought me to you“.
  • In the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Anya is a former vengeance demon who once granted the wishes of women who had been wronged by men. In her first appearance her source of power is destroyed and she becomes mortal, and she provides a great deal of comic relief as she struggles to adjust to normal human life. She has a fraught relationship with Xander, the regular human of the group, and the end of her story is…well. We won’t spoil it for you. (It’s not a Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast after all.)
  • The Castle is a 1997 Australian comedy film about the working class Kerrigan family, whose fight the compulsory acquisition of their Melbourne home, which is extremely close to an airport. The film is a cultural touchstone in Australia, grossing over $10m domestically, and many lines from the film are now part of the Australian vernacular.
  • Muriel’s Wedding is a 1994 Australian comedy film about socially awkward Muriel, who dreams of a white wedding and moving to Sydney to escape her unhappy life, bullying friends and domineering father. It was a breakout role for Toni Collette, and also starred Rachel Griffiths and Bill Hunter. A box office smash and classic of Australian cinema, it was adapted into a stage musical in 2017, featuring both original songs and many by ABBA, which feature heavily in the film. Liz’s comment that the film is “terrible” references the famous line from the film featured in the trailer: “You’re terrible, Muriel!”
  • Enter the Dragon is a 1973 martial arts film starring Bruce Lee. He plays “Lee”, a kung fu instructor persuaded to attend a martial arts tournament to infiltrate the criminal empire of a drug lord.
  • Although it feels like more, Australia has had six Prime Ministers (including Kevin Rudd twice) between 2007 and the time of writing in November 2018. This is in sharp contrast to the eleven-year Prime Ministership of the previous incumbent, John Howard. 
  • For more on Australian leadership spills, see Liz’s article for The Guardian, “Another nick in the wall at Melbourne cemetery’s Prime Minister’s Garden” from August 2018, and Marlee’s blog post “Two Strong Women and the Whole World Watching: The Spill & The Filibuster” from June 2013.
  • You can read about the “Friends for Stability” WhatsApp group, which played a crucial role in the most recent (as of November 2018) leadership spill, in this ABC News article from August 2018.
  • The “Geneva Conventions” are several treaties and protocols that established international legal standards for the treatment of combatants, prisoners and civilians in war. You can read more about them with commentary at the International Committee of the Red Cross. Pratchett references the conventions – or the idea of them – in several books, including the first Johnny Maxwell novel, Only You Can Save Mankind, where one of the ScreeWee aliens mocks the idea of having rules in war.
  • “Millennials are destroying X” became such a pervasive mainstream media discussion topic by mid 2018 that it was subject to widespread deconstruction via a Twitter hashtag and several response articles. “Here is a list of things that millennials are killing” at The Comeback is a good place to start if you want to read about it.
  • The “O-Bahn Busway” is a sort of weird fusion between bus lane and railway in which busses travel without stopping along a guided track between major interchanges. Brisbane’s busways are similar and longer, but do not have guiding tracks like the O-Bahn. In both cases parts of the busway are underground.
  • Pixar’s Cars series of films have generated much discussion because the living, personified cars seem to exist in a world with no humans, and yet they still have doors, and drive on roads amongst human buildings. If you want to wander down the hellish road this has led some to pave, just google “Pixar Cars theories”; you’ll find versions where the cars are AI vehicles who have taken on the personalities of their last driver, where they are highly evolved insects, and where they are a weird fusion of human and technology. All of them are disturbing.
  • There are lots of explanations for why we traditionally say “bless you!” when someone sneezes, but none can be definitively proven to be the one true source. Myth-debunking web site Snopes has a list of many of them.
  • Local authorities ignoring the hero’s warnings of a murderer, monster or other source of mayhem aren’t restricted to 80s films; the TV Tropes web site has a whole list of films, TV shows and other media in which the hero cries “You have to believe me!” to no avail.
  • The original description of Masklin from chapter one of Truckers says he is “a small, stumpy figure”, then goes on: “It was not entirely human. There were definitely the right number of arms and legs, and the additional bits like eyes and so on were in the usual places, but the figure that was now creeping across the darkened floor in its mouseskins looked like a brick wall on legs. Nomes are so stocky that a Japanese Sumo wrestler would look half-starved by comparison, and the way this one moved suggested that it was considerably tougher than old boots.”
  • On the subject of punching sharks in the nose, shark researcher Ryan Johnson in this BBC article from 2017 suggests that if you are being attacked already, you might as well just go at the shark as hard as you can, preferably with an inanimate object if you have one handy. Shark expert Dr David Shiffman, interviewed by The Smithsonian in 2013, reckons you should try poking the shark in the eye, since punching anything in the water is very difficult. Both articles remind us all that we are very, very unlikely to be attacked by a shark. Even in Australia.
  • In his 1955 lecture “English and Welsh”, J. R. R. Tolkien described the phrase “cellar door” as among the most beautiful in the English language, though he was speaking only of the sounds of the words, not their meaning.
  • Douglas Adams fans do not usually describe themselves as anything except “Douglas Adams fans”, but many do celebrate Towel Day each year on the 25th of May – coincidentally the date of The People’s Revolution of the Glorious 25th of May, as previously discussed in episode 7A.
  • The Emperor’s New Groove is a 2000 Disney animated film about Kuzco (David Spade), a teenage Incan emperor who is magically transformed into a llama by evil sorceress Yzma (Eartha Kitt) when he fires her as his advisor. He teams up with a humble farmer, Pacha (John Goodman) to take back the throne, while Yzma and her sidekick Kronk (Patrick Warburton) try to find Kuzco. The film was a modest box office success – if a disappointment compared to most of Disney’s 90s films – but has found a devoted audience since its release. Its development was so protracted and troubled – including not only the Sting incident mentioned by Liz, but multiple major changes in personnel and direction – that there’s a documentary about its production titled The Sweatbox.
  • “JCB” is a single from the album Half of These Songs Are About You by the English alternative folk duo Nizlopi, who are sadly no longer performing together. The super cute music video is on YouTube, and includes a hand-drawn JCB which the song also describes as a “digger”. (It seems to be the same kind of digger as Jekub.)
  • The “how dinosaurs are drawn” episode of 99% Invisible is “Welcome to Jurassic Art“. Liz would be proud.
  • Caramello Koala is a koala-shaped chocolate filled with gooey caramel, made by Cadbury. Along with Freddo Frog and (for older folks) Bertie Beetle, he’s a staple of the kids range of Cadbury chocolates, often sold individually wrapped as part of charity drives.
  • Tiny Teddy biscuits are…well, tiny, teddy bear-shaped sweet biscuits made by Arnott’s. They come in a variety of flavours and one of their big selling points to parents is that they contain no artificial colours, flavours or preservatives.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Bromeliad, Diggers, Dorcas, Elizabeth Flux, Grimma, Marlee Jane Ward, Middle Grade, Nomes, non-Discworld
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