Short Fiction

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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