sci-fi

These are the show notes and errata for episode 37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“, featuring guest Will Kostakis, discussing the third and final Johnny Maxwell novel, 1996’s Johnny and the Bomb.

• The episode title, inspired by Will and Liz, is a reference to the famous ethical dilemma called “the trolley problem”. The short version is that a cable car trolley is going to hit and kill a bunch of people, but you are standing next to a lever that could shift it onto another track, where it will only hit and kill one person. The ethical debate centres around whether it is right to cause someone’s death, even to save others. It features fairly heavily in the television series The Good Place, especially in the episode titled…er…”The Trolley Problem”.
• For our discussions of the previous Johnny Maxwell books, see #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You” and #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.
• The Big Mac is one of the main hamburgers on the menu at McDonald’s Restaurants, at least in English-speaking countries.
• In Good Omens, Famine – one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – goes by the name of Dr Raven Sable, famous dietician and author of Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful. He invented the hamburger and owns the biggest fast food chain on Earth, though its name is not revealed. See #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“, for more.
• The TV adaptations of the Johnny books are entirely unrelated to each other. Johnny and the Dead was produced for Children’s ITV in 1995, only a year after the book was published, and featured Brian Blessed as Marxist ghost William Stickers. Johnny and the Bomb was made much later, in 2006, by CBBC, and featured Zoë Wanamaker as Mrs Tachyon. They were released on video and DVD in the UK, but are very hard to get ahold of now. (While there’s not yet been a television adaptation of Only You Can Save Mankind, it was adapted for radio by the BBC in 1996.)
• Foul Ole Ron is the, er, greatest of the beggars of Ankh-Morpork and a member of the so-called Canting Crew, who show up in many of the books. As well as his distinctive catchphrase (see below), he is also famous for his Smell (which exists independently of him), and for having a “thinking brain dog”, most likely a side gig for Gaspode the talking dog. Ron features most prominently in Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Hogfather, Jingo and The Truth.
• The phrase “Buggrit buggrit millennium hand and shrimp” was first uttered by the Bursar of Unseen University during his trip to Lancre for the royal wedding in Lords and Ladies. (Foul Ole Ron first says it in Soul Music.) As noted in the Annotated Pratchett File for that book, Terry used a computer program to generate nonsense phrases from a bunch of source texts, including a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song “Particle Man” – just one of many TMBG references scattered throughout his books.
• Timecop is a 1994 science fiction action film directed by by Peter Hyams and based on a comic book story of the same name. It does indeed star Jean-Claude Van Damme, and is in fact his highest-grossing and probably most popular film as a lead actor. He plays a cop fighting time travel crime named Max Walker, though as far as we know he is not modelled after the beloved Australian cricketer and commentator of the same name.
• Cassandra or indeed Kasandra was a princess of Troy and priestess of Apollo. He fancied her, and gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she spurned him (or just wasn’t into him) he twisted the gift so that no-one would believe her. It’s almost as if Kirsty had seen her own future…
• Johnny is twelve years old in Only You Can Save Mankind and Johnny and the Dead, and fourteen in this book. It probably makes more sense to imagine that he’s actually thirteen in the middle book, meaning he has one big weird adventure a year, in between the other smaller ones (see a later note).
• We’ve previous mentioned Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere in #Pratchat22, “The Prat in the Cat” and #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. The protagonist, Richard Mayhew, does indeed send his life off on an unpredictable course when he stops to help Door, a seemingly homeless woman who is actually a member of a noble house in the fantastical realm of “London Below”.
• Ben’s time travel show from six years ago is Night Terrace, and the episode about evil robot Hitlers is the fifth from season one, “Sound & Führer”, by John Richards. You can find the show at nightterrace.com.
• We discussed The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents in #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids” with Michelle Law. In between this episode being recorded and released, on November 5, there was a major announcement regarding the film adaptation, The Amazing Maurice: it has a confirmed release date of 2022, will now premiere on Sky Cinema (in the UK at least), and has several roles cast, including Hugh Laurie as Maurice! Check out the full announcement on the Narrativia web site.
• We’ve previously talked about famous English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968) many times, but especially in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat and The Amazing Maurice. Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine discusses many of the tropes in her work we’d now consider harmful.
• The 3rd of October appears in the 2004 film Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey and based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes, about the social dynamics of high school girls. Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) asks new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who has a crush on him, what day it is in class, which she sees as a milestone in their relationship. The date was October 3rd.
• The fax machine – short for “facsimile” machine – has roots in much older technology, but the version that transmitted pictures over a standard telephone line was first patented by Xerox in 1964. In many places they are still in use, especially for transmission of medical records in hospitals, medical practices and other public health organisations. In the UK’s National Health Service, they were planned to be phased out by early 2020, though it’s unclear if that goal was met. Fax machines are still widely used in Japan, and found in many convenience stores. In many countries, however, non-medical businesses have adopted email and other forms of Internet-based communication instead.
• Will is thinking of the reaction image meme known as “Math Lady“ (or “Confused Lady”), which features Brazilian telenovela star Renata Sorrah thinking intensely, with superimposed mathematical diagrams.
• Liz is a big fan of Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci series, which spans seven books published between 1977 and 2006. They chronicle the adventures of Christopher Chant and others who magically travel between alternate worlds. We’ve previously mentioned Jones many times, but the Chrestomanci books come up mostly in our discussion of parallel worlds book The Long Earth, #Pratchat33, “It’s Just a Step to the West“.
• We talked about white feminism only last episode. It’s a term for feminism practiced from a privileged perspective that is not intersectional – it doesn’t consider how discrimination based on factors other than gender (race, sexuality, disability, class etc) complicate sexism and put many “solutions” out of reach.
• “The classic” Will is referring to is the Grandfather Paradox, which was considered “age old” as long ago as the 1930s. It describes a situation in which time travel into the past creates a logically impossible or at least inconsistent sequence of events. The name comes from the most frequently cited example of going back in time and killing your own grandfather when he was a child, making it impossible for you to exist.
• English singer-songwriter Kate Bush known for her distinctive style which mixes electronic and acoustic sounds, and for drawing on literary inspiration for her lyrics. Her very first single, “Wuthering Heights”, was released when she was 19 years old and hit number one in the UK and Australian charts in 1978. “Running Up That Hill” is her second most successful single, making it to number three in the UK (and number six in Australia) in 1985, the first single from her fifth studio album, Hounds of Love. A remix of “Running Up That Hill” released in 2012 made it to number six in the UK.
• We mentioned Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) back in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“. The film stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, an immortal being who cannot die unless decapitated. He and others like him are drawn to fight and kill each other, concentrating their magical powers in fewer and fewer immortals until only one is left, who will claim “the Prize”. Spoilers: the star of the film claims the Prize at the end, and exclaims “I can see through time!” It makes him mortal, but also “at one with all living things”.
• Dad’s Army was a long-running and popular BBC sit-com about a (fictional) platoon of the (real) Home Guard, a volunteer militia (originally called the the Local Defence Volunteers, or LDV) made up of men exempt from conscription during World War II, mostly for reasons of age. Set in the fictional seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea, the local chapter is led by local bank manager Captain Mainwaring (Arthur Lowe) and a clerk from his bank, Sgt Wilson (John Le Mesurier). Their platoon is filled with elderly misfits, as well as a young man excused from service because of his rare blood type; the humour largely resolved around them incompetently attempting various schemes to protect the town, and they rarely engaged the enemy, though they were certainly game to try. It ran for 8 series between 1968 and 1977, though it was repeated well after that in the UK and Commonwealth countries. There was also a film in 1971, and a new film in 2016 with a new cast, including Toby Jones and Bill Nighy as Mainwaring and Wilson.
• Bakelite was the first synthetic plastic, developed in 1909 by the Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland (hence the name) in New York. It became widely used in the casings of electrical equipment since it was non-conductive and relatively resistant to heat. The first Bakelite telephone handset was designed by Eriksson in 1930, and various designs were produced through to the 1960s. Many stayed in service until the introduction of touchtone-dialling in the 60s and 70s saw them gradually replaced by handsets with push-buttons, made of newer plastics like polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
• We’ve been unable to determine what exactly the rules were around unauthorised use of air raid sirens during the Blitz, but they would have been under the control of Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens.
• “Had a stressful day? What you need is a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down” was the 1950s and 60s advertising pitch for “Bex”, a popular Australian painkiller sold as tablets and powder. It combined a little caffeine with the analgesics aspirin and phenacetin; the latter was banned in the early 1970s, as it was discovered to be addictive and caused kidney problems. In 1965 a Sydney comedy revue titled A Cup of Tea, a Bex and a Good Lie Down, starring future television stars Ruth Cracknell and Reg Livermore, ran for over 250 performances, further cementing the phrase in Australian popular culture. It’s sometimes used as a directive to calm down or relax.
• The study of psychological trauma was advanced greatly, unfortunately, by the plight of British soldiers from World War I, as many as 10% of whom were identified as suffering from “shell shock”. The condition was first formally described in The Lancet in 1915 by Charles Myers. This evolved into a broader diagnosis of “gross stress reaction” in the 1950s, and then the more modern idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which was first listed as an official psychiatric diagnosis in 1980.
• Pratchett sometimes gave hints about his future writing plans, and had said in interviews he had a sequel to Dodger in mind, but he never mentioned as far as we can find anything about further Johnny books. Ben might not be right about him planning the last two books together, though, as he wasn’t sure in 1994 when the final one would come out, and it at one point had a working title of Johnny and the Devil, which suggests a very different plan! Vague details of some of his unrealised Discworld plans were revealed in an afterword to The Shepherd’s Crown: a whodunnit with goblins starring Constable Feeney, a story of elderly heroes battling failing memories to defeat a dark lord, and the return of the Amazing Maurice – now a ship’s cat! When the hard drives containing Pratchett’s unfinished writing were destroyed by a steam roller, his personal assistant Rob Wilkins revealed they contained ten unfinished novels, though it’s unknown whether these match up to the afterword. The manuscripts were probably “draft zeroes”, the term Pratchett used for the first versions of his books; these were entirely unedited, and no-one else was permitted to see them.
• As we mention, the “naff epilogue” Will refers to is the widely derided one from the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, set nineteen years later as the now married (to each other) protagonists send their own children off to Hogwarts, aka “the Hogwarts for killing people“.
• Pratchett’s thoughts on J K Rowling are actually more guarded than Ben remembers, but what he doesn’t say speaks volumes… (Though note this relationship is given considerable more context by the Pratchett biography, A Life In Footnotes.) We’ve linked to this 2004 article from The Age, “Mystery Lord of the Discworld“, before, but it seems very timely to do so now as he was in Australia on a tour to promote the next book we’re reading, Going Postal! He also mentions his initial meeting with Snowgum Films, makers of the Troll Bridge short film, which was finally released in 2019.
• Many towns and cities become “twinned” with another, usually in another country, as a form of cultural exchange. In the UK and much of Europe these are known as “twin towns“, whereas in the US and Australia they’re often referred to as “sister cities” (in Australia perhaps because there are at least two prominent towns split in two over state borders, which are sometimes referred to as twin towns). At the start of chapter five of Johnny and the Bomb, it’s mentioned that Blackbury is twinned with “Aix-et-Pains“, which is indeed a fake-French pun for “aches and pains”. For more on twin towns, see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, in which we discuss the speech given by “Lord Vetinari” on the occasion of its twinning with the UK town of Wincanton.
• We couldn’t find a real “Bonza Feed” award, but the term itself is still in use in Australian slang (indeed fast food chain Red Rooster used it in advertising around Australia Day as recently as 2018). “Bonza” itself is a slang term roughly meaning “excellent” or “deserving of admiration”, and dates back to at least the early 1900s. Its origins are uncertain, but one frequent suggestion is that it comes from the French “bon ça“, which means “that’s good”. Another almost certainly fabricated story is that it comes from a Cantonese phrase meaning “good gold”, used by Chinese immigrants in the gold rush, but there’s no evidence for this, or indeed matching words in Cantonese. A more likely explanation may be that it is a localised contraction of “bonanza“, a Spanish word meaning prosperity that was used in America when finding a good vein of silver to mine. That might place it back in the gold rush, though how it came to Australia (when few Americans seem to have made the trip at that time) is uncertain.
• Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is a 2012 Australian crime drama set in 1920s Melbourne, based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood. Essie Davis stars as Miss Phryne Fisher, wealthy socialite and private detective, who solves various crimes. It ran for three series between 2012 and 2015 on the ABC, and enjoyed some cult success overseas. The original cast and crew made a feature film set after the TV show, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, which was released in February 2020. There was also a 2019 series of spin-off telemovies for Channel 7, Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries; these were set in the 1960s and starred Geraldine Hakewill as Phryne’s niece Peregrine Fisher, who joins a secret society of women adventurers after her aunt disappears. While all three screen adaptations were made by Any Cloud Productions, the differing production partners may make licensing all the content for a streaming service quite difficult, and at the moment the series seems to be only available to stream on AcornTV, a streaming service specialising in British television.
• A “stobie pole” is a kind of power line pole made of two steel joists separated by concrete, invented by James Cyril Stobie in 1924. They were a workaround for the fact that termite-resistant timber was in short supply, and were mostly used in Adelaide in the 1930s and 1940s, though some are still standing today.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione Granger is given permission to use a magical Time Turner so that she can attend classes that are scheduled at the same time. She, Harry and Ron use it to go back in time, eventually realising they are responsible for several weird occurrences they had previously noticed.
• The time travel heavy episodes of Night Terrace written by Ben are season one’s “Time of Death”, which is both a parody of Phryne Fisher and a murder mystery that happens out of order, and “Ancient History”, in which the protagonists land in ancient Europe but can’t figure out when or where they are, complicating their efforts to avoid changing history.
• Sliders was a 1990s American science fiction TV show in which genius physics student Quinn Mallory invents a method of travelling between parallel universes, but accidentally transports himself, his lecturer, his nerdy friend (who has a crush on him) and a passing soul singer into another universe. To escape a disaster he is forced to modify his “sliding” device, which means it now counts down a random amount of time before opening a portal to a random parallel universe. Many episodes revolve around them either losing the timer or trying to find a safe place to hide until it opens a portal to take them home.
• The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a way of explaining the macro-level consequences of quantum theory. According to quantum theory, fundamental particles like electrons do not occupy a definite position in spacetime, but can only be represented by a wave function, which gives a probability of their location. In the many-world interpretation, such particles literally exist in all of the possible positions, giving rise to many different universes in which each possibility plays out. Those changes are small in local effect but would add up to an infinite number of universes with large-scale differences – the classic idea of parallel universes (though they’re not parallel, as they branch off from each other).
• Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis) is one of the most famous time travel movies. In the film, teenager Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) accidentally uses a time travelling car invented by his eccentric scientist friend Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), landing in 1955. He inadvertently changes history so that he might never be born, and he seeks out the younger version of Doc for help putting things right. The sequels, Back to the Future Part II and Part III, were filmed back-to-back. In Part II, Marty buys a Sports Almanac in the future with the intention of using it to win horse races in the present, but it is stolen by Biff, the antagonist of the first film, who gives it to his young self. Marty and Doc must go back to 1955 and interact with events from the first film to put history back on track. In Part III, Marty discovers Doc, who is trapped in 1885, will be killed by Biff’s outlaw ancestor, and goes back to save his friend. We’ve previously talked about the films in our discussions of Reaper Man, Diggers, Good Omens, Johnny and the Dead and The Science of Discworld.
• About Time (2013) is a romantic comedy written and directed by Richard Curtis, starring Domhnall Gleeson as Tim, Rachel McAdams as Mary and Bill Nighy as Tim’s father James. James reveals to Tim that men in his family can travel back in time to any moment they have lived before, but warns him not to use the gift to become rich or famous, so he tries to use it to improve his love life and gradually learning the limitations of his gift. It got a lukewarm reaction from critics, but did pretty well with audiences, especially – to everyone’s surprise – in South Korea.
• Unfortunately there were many actors shafted by the modern Star Wars sequel trilogy. John Boyega, who plays ex-Stormtrooper Finn, has talked openly about his experience of facing racism from fans, something also experienced by Kelly Marie Tran, whose character Rose Tico was all but dropped from the third film. Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson’s characters were also given short shrift in the final film in favour of turning the whole plot around to appease a vocal minority of fans who wanted something more traditional, summed up by the often ridiculed line of dialogue: “Somehow, Palpatine has returned…”
• Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989; dir. Stephen Herek) follows two Californian high school slackers, Bill S Preston (Alex Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan. Their dreams of being rock stars are threatened as they are about to flunk history, which will result in Ted’s Dad sending him away to a military college. They are visited by Rufus, a time traveller from a future were Bill and Ted’s band Wyld Stallyns has brought world peace through their music, who lends them the time machine to research history so they can pass their final oral presentation exam. The sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991; dir. Pete Hewitt), is Ben’s favourite of the two, though it involves less time travel and more weird afterlife shenanigans, including a comedic version of Death not a million miles away from Pratchett’s. (We previously mentioned the sequel in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.) Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020; dir. Dean Parisot) is a “legacy film” sequel which was written in 2010, but took a decade to secure a production deal; in the film, an older Bill and Ted are struggling to live up to the legend of themselves they’ve been told awaits them.
• Ben mentioned a few other time travel stories that he loves, but we cut them for time. Obviously there’s Doctor Who, but also the films Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009, dir. Gareth Carrivick), Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, dir. Colin Trevorrow) and 12 Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam), and the television series Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982), Quantum Leap (1989-1983) and Continuum (2012-2015), plus many many more.
• The Time Traveller’s Wife is the 2003 debut novel from American author Audrey Niffenegger. It tells the story of Henry, a man who has a genetic condition which causes him to randomly travel through time, and Clare, an artist who meets him many times throughout her life. They have a romance which each experiences in a different order. The film adaptation from 2007 starred Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, but was not a success. Stephen Moffat is currently writing a new television series adaptation for HBO.