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Short Fiction

#Pratchat63 Notes and Errata

08/01/2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 63, “Decline by Committee“, discussing the 2005 Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices”, plus some extra discussion of the novel Thud!, with special guest Matt Roden.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the “Explaining a Board Game” sketch from Australian sketch group Aunty Donna, which Ben has indeed been sent many, many times – including by Matt, shortly after we recorded this episode.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on the phrase “Design by Committee”, which refers to a situation where no-one is in charge of the design of a product, leading to a lack of direction.
  • “Trilogy in four parts” is borrowed from Douglas Adams, who described The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book series this way after publishing the fourth novel, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. It later became “The Increasingly Innacurately Named Hitchhikers Trilogy” with the publication of the fifth book Mostly Harmless.
  • You can find the first three parts of our trilogy here:
    • #PratchatPlaysThud – “The Troll’s Gambit”, about Thud the board game, with Dr Melissa Rogerson
    • #Pratchat61 – “What Terry Wrote”, about Thud!, with Matt Roden.
    • #Pratchat62 – “There’s a Cow in There“, about Where’s My Cow?, with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
  • “Nepo baby” was a buzz-term in late 2022. It’s short for “nepotism baby”, a new name for the concept of getting a leg up via a family connection. That’s as old as…well, a very old thing, but discussion of it really took off as younger social media users learned to their surprise that many Hollywood stars and influencers have parents or other relatives they’d never heard of who are also in show business. Matt asks Ben if he read “the article” – Ben hadn’t, but we think Matt meant “What is a Nepotism Baby, Anyway? How a ‘Nepo Baby’ is Born” by Nate Jones for Vulture, which was also a cover story for New York magazine.
  • Ridcully’s snooker table covered in paperwork appears not in Lords and Ladies, but in Soul Music. A footnote reveals that a wizard’s trick shots can include temporal spin, and that Ridcully once bounced a ball off the Bursar’s head “last Tuesday”.
  • We’ve listed below the senior faculty members of Unseen University who appear in most of the Wizards books. (We’ve tried to avoid any spoilers here for books not yet covered on the podcast.)
    • Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor
    • Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, Reader in Invisible Writings, and Praelector. (He later acquired more titles, including Reader in Non-Volatile Intelligence, Cantoride Speaker in Slood Refurgance and at least one it would be a spoiler to reveal here.)
    • A. A. Dinwiddie (aka “The Bursar”), Bursar. His name is revealed in The Truth.
    • Henry (last name not revealed), the Dean of Pentacles, known as “the Dean”. (His name is revealed in a later book.)
    • The Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    • The Chair of Indefinite Studies.
    • The Senior Wrangler.
  • Ponder Stibbons and Victor Tugelbend were students taking final exams at the time of the rediscovery of Holy Wood, as chronicled in Moving Pictures. (See #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.) This was indeed also the first appearance of Archchancellor Ridcully, though he doesn’t play a major part in a novel until Reaper Man, which also introduces the rest of the faculty we know best.
  • We discussed our theories about Rincewind’s entry into Unseen University in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • The “National Interest Test” (NIT) was a requirement added to the grant application process for the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2018 by the previous Liberal/National coalition government. The ARC is the independent body which assesses university grant applications for research, and recommends which projects should get grants to the Minister, who generally approves all of them. But the NIT was part of an increasingly commercial agenda of the conservative government to restrict research, and in 2021 further recommendations were given to the ARC to make this more stringent. In late December 2021, Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert rejected six grants which had been approved and recommended by the ARC on the grounds that they were not “good value for taxpayers’ money” or in the national interest. The timing of the announcement – just before Christmas – and the nature of the projects removed (which included subjects like climate change and political activism in China) suggested a political motive for the rejections, which was met with .
  • The wizard who knows about stories is most likely Ladislav Pelc, Prehumous Professor of Morbid Bibliomancy, whom Moist goes consults about the Post Office’s letters in Going Postal. He has very large ears and no beard, but out of deference to wizarding tradition he wears a false one when in view of the public.
  • The incident with Windle Poons is in Reaper Man; the other wizards attempt to bury him at the corner of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, described as two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork.
  • There are many schools in Ankh-Morpork, aside from Unseen University itself:
    • The Assassin’s Guild school appears most prominently in Pyramids and Night Watch.
    • The Clockmaker’s Guild – which seems to provide more of an apprenticeship – appears in Thief of Time. It’s implied the Thieves’ Guild has a school or apprenticeship program as well.
    • The Fool’s Guild school is important in Wyrd Sisters and Men at Arms.
    • The Musician’s Guild may also offer more of an apprenticeship, but they raised and taught Keith, Maurice’s “dumb kid”, as he mentions in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
    • By the time of Thief of Time, Susan (who herself went to Quirm College for Young Ladies) is teaching at Madam Frout’s Learning Through Play School.
  • We previously brought up the issue of copaganda – the bias towards showing police in a positive light in news media and popular culture – in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”, though we never quite got around to discussing it. Ben’s not sure we’ve done the discussion justice here, either – he’s had more thoughts since the episode – but the concept pre-dates the word, going back to at least the 1950s and the publicity stunt puff pieces in newspapers about police officers rescuing cats and early friendly neighbourhood policemen characters on television. Indeed, the concept has been used to criticise exactly the friendly English bobby image we talk about in this episode, so perhaps we have some more thinking to do. The origins of the word aren’t easily traceable, and probably it was coined more than once; it definitely dates back to before 2015, but has seen a resurgence in use and popularity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased public awareness of the failings of the police system.
  • We mention quite a few cop shows this episode, though Ben would like to say he realises we may have been unconsciously cherry picking to support our idea about the difference in pop cultural depictions of cops in the UK and Australia compared to the US (and see also the note above about copaganda). Here are the police films and television shows we mentioned:
    • The Bill was a British police drama about the life and work of beat officers at the fictional Sun Hill Police Station in metropolitan London. It was broadcast on ITV for 26 series between 1983 and 2010, and was also popular in Australia. A reboot is apparently in the works. The show’s title comes from the slang term for police, “the Old Bill” or just “the Bill”.
    • Blue Heelers was an Australian drama about the fictional rural Victorian town of Mount Thomas, told from the perspective of the local police officers. It ran for twelve years on Channel 7 from 1994 to 2006, and made stars out of Australian actors Lisa McCune (who left after the seventh series) and John Wood (who was the lead character for all twelve years). Blue heelers are an Australian breed of working dog, and also slang in some parts of Australian for a police officer or the police in general (Australian police uniforms are generally blue).
    • Police Rescue was an Australian police drama which began life as a 1989 feature film before spawning a television series which ran for five series between 1991 and 1996. It focused on the NSW Police Rescue Squad, who travelled all over the city and the state attending accidents, disasters and other emergencies. It starred Gary Sweet and Sonia Todd.
    • Water Rats was an Australian police drama focussed on the Sydney Water Police, whose bear is Sydney Harbour. It ran for six seasons on Channel 9 between 1996 and 2001, and featured Colin Friels, Gary Bisley, Aaron Pederson and Jay Laga’aia (who soon after appeared in the Star Wars prequel trilogy as Captain Typho).
    • Hot Fuzz (2007) is the second of Edgar Wright’s “cornetto trilogy” of comedy action films which began with Shaun of the Dead. It stars Simon Pegg as Sgt. Nick Angel, a hotshot London police officer whose colleagues resent his success and get him reassigned to a small town in Gloucestershire, where he is initially bored before a series of bizarre murders begins. The film also stars Nick Frost as local constable Danny Butterman.
    • Heartbeat was a British police drama which ran for 18 years between 1992 and 2010 on ITV. It was based on the “Constable” novels written by ex-cop Peter N Walker (using the pseudonym Nicholas Rhea). It was set in mid to late 1960s in fictional Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, and had a number of main characters over its run, but is probably best known for the original pair: young police officer Nick (played by ex-EastEnders heartthrob Nick Berry) and his wife Kate (Niamh Cusack), the town doctor. Other notable characters were Sergeant Blaketon (Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds), older constable Alf Ventriss (William Simons), a war veteran – partial inspiration for Fred Colon, perhaps? – and local “lovable rogue” Claude Greengrass (Bill Maynard).
  • Bernard “The Cunning Artificer” Pearson, of Clarecraft and The Discworld Emporium fame, was indeed a police officer in his youth. He was also one of Pratchett’s closest friends and often consulted on various matters, including “his policing “the more arcane policing arts”, as Rob Wilkins puts it in Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes.
  • Regarding Pratchett’s attitude towards Agatha Christie, Ben mentions this interview for the Bookwitch blog from 2010. (Interestingly he mentions several times that he’s working on I Shall Wear Midnight, and insists it will be the last Tiffany Aching book…) On Agatha Christie, he says: “Well, Agatha Christie; you have to get her out of your system sooner or later. Same with James Bond. And then you realise that not all murders happen in one house containing seven people.” He also describes her work as fantasy in his pieces “Whose Fantasy Are You?” (1991) and “Let There Be Dragons (1993)”, which can be found in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • You can find A’Tuin Sneezed’s great, long Twitter thread about Thud! by starting with this tweet:

I’m rereading Thud by @terryandrob for @PratchatPodcast so this will be quite a long thread. I’m only 6 pages in but the book has an almost epic feel to it already. Important Things Are Going To Happen. pic.twitter.com/67FoMoaOR0

— A’tuin Sneezed (@damethelog) October 17, 2022
  • Thomas the Tank Engine is an anthropomorphic steam locomotive – basically a regular train, but with a human-like face on the front – who is the star of the Railway Series books by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry, written between 1945 and 1972. While the books were very successful, it was the television series adaptation Thomas & Friends that really cemented Thomas’ popularity. The series ran from 1984 to 2021, and used live-action model train versions of Thomas and his friends with narration by Ringo Starr. The human characters – including the “Fat Controller”, who was in charge of the railway system on Thomas’ home, the Island of Sondor – were portrayed by wooden models.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat63 – Decline by Committee

08/01/2023 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

In this final fourth part of our Thud! trilogy, Liz and Ben are rejoined by designer and educator Matt Roden. As we wait for the biscuits to arrive, we turn our attention to this month’s agenda items: the 2005 Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices”, and squeezing in a bit more discussion of Thud!

Every Thursday the senior faculty of Unseen University have a committee meeting, during which they do very little except wait for the biscuits and tea to arrive – much to the annoyance of Ponder Stibbons. But this week, Ridcully announces that their latest magical mishap has annoyed the Patrician – and as a result, they have a few questions to answer from one A. E. Pessimal, newly appointed “Inspector of Universities”...

Written for the Times Higher Education Supplement and published a few months before Thud!, this very short story draws on Pratchett’s own experience on a committee. Does it tally with yours? Are you a Ponder, a Ridcully, or a Pessimal? Do you agree with Matt’s characterisations of the other faculty members? Plus we get back into Thud! – are we off the mark with our thoughts about whether it’s copaganda? What is Pratchett trying to say about religious extremism, if anything? And what Discworld cocktail would you make? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat63.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_63.mp3

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Guest Matt Roden was here just two months ago for #Pratchat61 discussing Thud! He is still the Creative Learning Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, as well as an accomplished graphic designer and educator. There are now even more photos of his dog on his Instagram at @matthewrodeo.

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

We’re easing into the year slowly with another short story for February, this time one of Pratchett’s earliest: “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor” from his time at the Bucks Free Press in 1974. Its available in both A Blink of the Screen and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner. Send us your questions about it using the hashtag #Pratchat64, or via email, which you can send to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out the all-new Pratchat Reading Challenge for 2023! All the details are on our website, and you’ll also find it on the StoryGraph.

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat53 – A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner

08/03/2022 by Pratchat Imps 1 Comment

Surprise! In an emergency substitution, Liz and Ben get a glimpse of everyday life in Ankh-Morpork as they dive into three very small bits of Discworld ephemera collected in A Blink of the Screen.

The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem captures the experience of those forced to sing patriotic songs everywhere – but even the single complete verse tells us quite a lot about the character of the city. Meanwhile the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Barber-Surgeons have put together a few Medical Notes to keep the population informed about a few diseases peculiar to the city. And, on the occasion of Ankh-Morpork being “twinned” with a small city on Roundworld, we read A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari to mark the occasion…

We picked these three “Discworld Shorter Writings” as they are both about Ankh-Morpork, whose history is explored in Night Watch (our next book), and written around the same time as that book – the anthem is from 1999 (though it its based on jokes from Moving Pictures, published in 1990) while the others are from 2002, the year Night Watch was published.

How do you feel about your national anthem? Does anyone know the second verse? What weird “diseases” are particular to the place where you live? Would you like to live in a town twinned with Ankh-Morpork – or somewhere else from the vast universe of fiction? And does anyone want a “sausoboros” T-shirt? We’d love to hear your answers! Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat53.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_53.mp3

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

Next month we’re back on track to talk about 2002’s Night Watch with guest Nadia Bailey! It’s a fan favourite and we already have an absolute tonne of questions, but if you have one you’re burning to have us answer, you can send it via the hashtag #Pratchat54, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Ephemera, Short Fiction, Vetinari

#Pratchat53 Notes and Errata

08/03/2022 by Ben 1 Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, discussing the short Discworld pieces “The Ankh-Morpork National Anthem” (1999), “Medical Notes” (2002) and “A Few Words from Lord Havelock Vetinari” (2002), all available in the collection A Blink of the Screen (2012).

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title mashes up two of the three things we’re reading this week, though we have of course not forgotten who wrote these words. “Hner ner hner” is how Pratchett represents the “forgotten” lyrics in the anthem.
  • The book with the “When shall we three meet again?” gag is Wyrd Sisters, whose opening scene concludes with one of the witches answering: “Well, I can do next Tuesday.” For more on Wyrd Sisters, see #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
  • Black Ribboners are members of the League of Temperance, a society for vampires who want to swear off drinking “the B-word”. It has chapters in Überwald and Ankh-Morpork, and notable members include Lady Margolotta (see The Fifth Elephant and #Pratchat40), Otto Schriek (see The Truth and #Pratchat42) and…another one we’ll meet in a future episode. (No spoilers!)
  • Discworld vampires are indeed incredibly resilient; while they can be turned to ash in the traditional ways – beheading, stake through the heart, (sometimes) sunlight etc – none of these methods kill them permanently, and they can be reconstituted using just a drop of blood. This is discussed in Carpe Jugulum (and #Pratchat36), but see also The Truth, where Otto works out an ingenious way to protect himself from the perils of his trade as a photographer using flash salamanders…
  • Ben does a reasonable job of explaining the two Discworld calendars. The main ones with Gregorian-style years are the Ankh-Morpork Calendar (AM), which measures full 800-day years since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which measures 400-day common years since the founding of the University by Alberto Malich. They’re not used entirely consistently in the books – another reason why Ben is right to say that you can’t solve continuity problems that way!
  • On the subject of centuries, the earlier books are generally set towards the end of the Century of the Fruitbat. In The Truth the century has turned, and it’s now the Century of the Anchovy. To complicate matters, which don’t know which kind of year they count one hundred of, and there’s no guarantee they line up with the ticking over of a round number in either calendar – the centuries seem to be an older way of marking time than either of the calendars used in Ankh-Morpork.
  • Ben will get into some more of the details towards the end of the podcast, but here’s a timeline of the Australian national anthem:
    • Since the 1788 invasion, English colonies in Australia used the national anthem of the United Kingdom, “God Save the Queen”. (That song has a whole history of its own, including the fact that it’s sort of not technically an official anthem, and England has no anthem of its own, unlike Wales or Scotland.)
    • “Advance Australia Fair” was written in 1878 by Peter Dodds McCormick, and first performed the same year. It became a popular “national song”, and performed – with some revised lyrics – by a huge choir to mark the Federation of Australia on January 1, 1901.
    • In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam initiated a competition to select a new anthem for Australia, run by the Australia Council of the Arts. None of the original songs submitted were considered good enough, though, so in 1974 they conducted a national survey to choose between “Advance Australia Fair”, “Waltzing Matilda” and “The Song of Australia”. (See below for more on this one.) The winner was “Advance Australia Fair”, which Whitlam’s government made the new anthem, though this wasn’t entirely official.
    • In 1975, Whitlam was dismissed as Prime Minister by the Governor General – it’s a whole thing in Australian history, look it up – and famously said “Well may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor-General.” His replacement, Malcolm Fraser, reinstated “God Save the King” as the official anthem for many formal occasions, though several songs were allowed to be sung as alternatives at other events.
    • In 1977, during a referendum on various topics, an optional question asked which national song the public preferred, and Advance Australia Fair was chosen again.
    • In 1984, this was made official, though using a revised, two-verse version altered by the National Australia Day Council. At the same time, “God Save the Queen” was made the “Royal Anthem” of Australia, to be played during royal visits.
  • “The Song of Australia” isn’t a song we’d heard, but it does have something of the character of Ankh-Morpork’s anthem! Thanks to listener Joy, who let us know it was written in response to a competition run by the Gawler Institute in South Australia – and was sung in schools in that state into the 1960s! It was also sung in some parts of Western Australia and Tasmania. The lyrics were written in 1859 by Caroline Carleton, an English Australian poet, who – as per the rules – submitted them to the competition under a “motto” to be anonymous to the judges, choosing “Nil Desperandum” (Latin for “do not despair”). After being selected as the winning poem, a second competition was held for music to which they could be sung; this was won by German Australian composer Carl Linger, who entered under the pseudonym “One of the Quantity”. The most famous early performer of the song was once world-famous Australian baritone Peter Dawson (1882-1961); you can hear his recording on YouTube. While it never became the official anthem of Australia – and that’s probably for the best, given its fixation on colonial additions to the landscape – the official anthem of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, “My Bougainville”, uses the same tune.
  • Sing! was a book of songs for the classroom produced by Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC. It was produced annually from 1975 until at least 2014. During that time, Ringo Starr’s “Octopus’s Garden” – from The Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road – appeared in Sing! twice, in 1981 and 1988. Since most songs only appeared once, that might count as frequently…
  • The first mention of the Ankh-Morpork national anthem was indeed in Moving Pictures, first published in 1990 – about as “early nineties” as you can get. (See #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“, for more.)
  • Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” was first published in April 1966. It tells the story of Douglas Quail, an office worker who – unable to afford a real trip to Mars – goes to a company called Rekall to get a false memory of a holiday. Things do not go according to plan… It was adapted twice into films titled Total Recall: the famous 1990 version, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Arnold Schwarzenggar and Sharon Stone, deviates wildly from the original after the main character’s trip to Rekall. A remake in 2012 starred Colin Farrell and was based more closely on the original, but still changed quite a bit.
  • For more on erudite thugs Mr Tulip and Mr Pin, and the inspiration behind them, see #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • There are a few recordings of “We Can Rule You Wholesale” online, but we probably only recommend listening to the official one. Luckily some…er…”cheeky bugger” has uploaded the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Claire Rutter version to YouTube.
  • Claire Rutter is an English soprano who’s had quite an illustrious international opera career, performing in major roles with the English National Opera, Sydney Opera House, Opéra National du Rhin in France, the Icelandic Opera, and in the US with the Dallas Opera and Santa Fe Opera.
  • “My Saint Helena Island”, the unofficial “national” song of Saint Helena, was written by American country singer Dave Mitchell in 1975. You can read all about it on the official Saint Helena website, or listen to the original song on YouTube.
  • How old is the Ankh-Morpork national anthem? It’s hard to be sure. No year is given in the preamble, though the vampire who wrote it lived – or rather, undied – between 1703 and 1872 by the University Calendar, so it was presumably in between those years. How long ago was that? More than thirty years, certainly, since the bits of Night Watch that happen in the past include Reg Shoe singing it. And while the current year is never explicitly given for any of the Discworld books – Pratchett clearly never thought that kind of stuff was that important – fan theories based on dates given in Mort, Moving Pictures and Feet of Clay put the “present” events of Night Watch at around 1998, so it’s probably at least a century old.
  • As Ben will mention in a footnote, the convention for which the “Medical Notes” were written was at the time the only Discworld Convention, and thus had no other name. It’s now known as the International Discworld Convention, or DWCon for short, even though it’s always held in the UK. (Not to be confused with IDWCon – that’s the Irish Discworld Convention.) The (mostly) biannual convention began in 1996, and the 2002 convention was something of a big deal – the 2000 con, which was to be subtitled “Millennicon Hand and Shrimp”, was cancelled due to record low number of attendees booking rooms to stay at the convention venue. (This guarantee of hotel bookings is one of the things that secures a reasonable price for a fan convention.) It has only been held twice since Pratchett’s death, in 2016 and 2018, since the 2020 convention was scuppered by COVID. The next DWCon is scheduled for August 2022, and memberships have sold out, but there is a waiting list if you’re keen! And who knows – perhaps in 2024, Pratchat will get to go… If you’re keen on getting to a convention, there are many around the world, including in Ireland, North America, Australia (see below), the Netherlands, Germany and Wales. The L-Space wiki has a handy list on their fandom page.
  • The Australian Discworld Convention, “Nullus Anxietas”, was founded in 2007, and scheduled to occur biannually in the off years for the UK convention. It’s run every two years since until 2021, when the 7Ath convention was postponed and then cancelled due to COVID uncertainty. Here’s hoping it’s back in 2023 or whenever large gatherings in small convention conference rooms feel like a good idea again. Pratchat was a guest of the 2019 convention, where we recorded our first (and to date, only) live episode, #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World“, with fellow convention guest Tansy Rayner Roberts. We were also pleased to participate in the online event “The Lost Con” – see #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive” – and the convention’s 2021 Hogswatch festivities.
  • Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is an older name for what is now Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The former “disorder” – which existed alongside the new one as two different diagnoses for a while – was folded into the latter in 1994, when doctors decided the two were not meaningfully different and that the latter name was more accurate. It’s considered neurological, and thus is a form of neurodiversity, and had a long history – various names for similar behaviours go back a century or two at least. ADHD is classically characterised by difficulty focussing attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity, and sometimes hyperfocus – sustained and intense attention given to certain subjects of interest. It’s a well-established condition, and often treated with stimulants and psychotherapy or counselling. Note that many people may have traits similar to these; it’s only considered a disorder when these behaviours are disruptive and inappropriate.
  • Liz and Ben’s histories with Lord of the Flies were first explored in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, and #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“. The subject most recently resurfaced in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • Liz has spoken of The Shawshank Redemption in many episodes, most significantly in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28, and most recently in #Pratchat38 and #Pratchat47.
  • Tourette Syndrome is characterised by physical and vocal tics: sudden, brief movements of small groups of muscles, often in the face or vocal apparatus. Most people’s tics are subtle or pass unnoticed, and most vocal tics are not full words, but brief sounds. As usual, Hollywood likes to show only the rarest and most extreme forms of a relatively common condition.
  • For more on “The Them“, see our episode on Good Omens, #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Zener cards were created in the early 1930s by American psychologist Karl Zener, whose experiments were widely discredited. Indeed the deck is a terrible way to test psychic ability, since a default set contains only 25 cards (five of each symbol), and blind guessing should result in about a 20% success rate or better!
  • The Bursar develops Planets in The Last Continent when the faculty land on Fourecks, and they are exposed to the high build-up of magical energies there. For more, see #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.
  • The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy videogame was a text adventure, or interactive novel, published by Infocom in 1984. It was adapted from previous versions of the story by Douglas Adams and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky. Like many of these games, it was considered fiendishly difficult, since you had a lot of freedom in the instructions you could type in, but each scene or location generally only had one very specific “correct” sequence of actions that would avoid getting you killed. As well as the microscopic space fleet, the game came with several other “feelies” – tactile extras included with many Infocom games. These included a “Don’t Panic!” button badge, a packet of “pocket fluff”, several documents, a pair of cardboard “peril sensitive” sunglasses, and “no tea”. Several online versions of the game have been released; here’s the 30th anniversary version, hosted by the BBC, which adds visuals, and some sound effects based on the 1980 television version.
  • English doctor Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) is known to us because in 1807 he published The Family Shakespeare, an expurgated (i.e. abridged or edited) collection of twenty of the Bard’s plays. They were based on Bowdler’s father’s readings of the plays to the family, in which he left out things “unsuitable” for his wife and children. The first volume of The Family Shakespeare was actually edited by Thomas’s sister, Henrietta Bowdler, something that only came to light two centuries later – Thomas is listed as the sole editor. He did take over for the second and third volumes, and later revisions, which added more plays. They are both remembered through the verb “bowdlerise”, meaning to edit out things “unsuitable for children” from a work, usually unnecessarily. The first edition removes about ten percent of the original, including removing any mentions of sex workers or brothels, blasphemous exclamations like “God!”, and bawdy songs and jokes. Notably, while the subtitle claims “nothing is added”, they do include substitutions for many key words.
  • Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook includes a section on “The Language of Flowers” towards the end of the Etiquette section. Like the rest of the book, this is said to have been largely cribbed from other author’s work, in this case probably Gardening in Difficult Conditions.
  • Ben has been unable to find the quote about Pratchett “preferring to hang out with fans in a pub to hanging out with literary authors at a writing festival” – if you know the quote, let us know! (Ben’s looked through A Slip of the Keyboard, A Blink of the Screen and Marc Burrows’ The Magic of Terry Pratchett, to no avail…)
  • We’ve been unable to substantiate reports that a portion of Twilight Canyons was read out at the Discworld Convention in 2016, but surely one of you listening was there! We’re not asking for you to tell us anything you’re not allowed to, but we’d love to know if it actually happened!
  • YouTube was indeed launched in 2005 – on Valentine’s Day! It was bought by Google eighteen months later for more than $1.5 billion US.
  • MySpace was launched in 2003, and you might be surprised to know it definitely still exists, and has at least a few million users.
  • Wincanton is about 33km (21 miles) from Pratchett’s home in Broad Chalk. It’s about a 48km (30 mile) trip to the West by road.
  • The Discworld Emporium is an officially licensed producer of Discworld merchandise, and an online store selling their own and other official Discworld stuff. It grew out of Clarecraft, a fantasy figurine business run by Isobel and Bernard Pearson, who were one of the first to gain a Discworld license; they contacted Pratchett’s agent Colin Smythe in 1990, and once Pratchett was impressed by their version of the Luggage, he sent them sketches of Rincewind and Granny Weatherwax as references for further pieces. (Some of Ben’s earliest fannish merchandise purchases were the Clarecraft figures of Rincewind, Death and Detritus.) They worked closely with Pratchett over many years, and while they don’t make as many figurines as they once did, they do still produce unique merchandise, including a wide selection of official Discworld stamps. The Pearsons, and especially Bernard, became fast friends with Terry; you can hear him sharing a few stories about Pratchett in his short-run podcast “And he said to me”, released in two episodes in December 2019 and April 2020.
  • As far as we know, yes, Wincanton and Ankh-Morpork were the first twinning of a real and fictional town. We haven’t been able to find any others, so it might also be the only such twinning! (Let us know if you know of any others.) As for whether or not it’s official, the answer seems to be: as official as Pratchett wanted it to be.
  • Cities can indeed have multiple sisters – including being “triple towns”. (For the alliteration, cities are usually “sister cities”, which is also the more common term in the US; towns are “twin towns”, which is the more commonly used term in the UK and Australia. Especially in America, “twin cities” are usually two separate cities which are located very close together.) Indeed many major cities will have lots of sister cities around the world – Melbourne, for example, has five sisters: Boston, Milan, Osaka, Thessaloniki and Tianjin.
  • The English city of Swindon is also in Wiltshire, about 80km (50 miles) north of Practhett’s home in Broad Chalk. In Thursday Next’s world, as depicted in the novels by Jasper Fforde, it is Next’s own home town. Fforde has published an entire page about the city, blurring the line between the fictional and real worlds; you can still find his Swindon page online – including a photo of the sign for the famous magic roundabout!
  • Walt Disney World, as mentioned in the footnote, is the second Disney theme park and resort, located in Bay Lake, Florida – though its administrative address is in the city of Lake Beuna Vista (for which the Disney-owned film company was named). It was planned by Walt Disney himself, but finished – in a substantially less ambitious form – at the insistence of his brother Roy in the 1960s, after Walt’s death. Roy also added his brother’s first name to the park to properly commemorate him.
  • Stephen Briggs contacted Pratchett in 1990 about adapting Wyrd Sisters for the stage. He met Pratchett when he attended the first production in Abingdon, and the two became friends. As he adapted more and more of the books for the stage – in later years from advance copies, so the play opened the same month the book was published – Briggs became an expert on Discworld lore, and joined a couple of other Discworld superfine as people Pratchett would consult when he had questions about details he couldn’t remember himself. This was how he got involved in the writing of the Discworld Companion, the maps and various other compilations of Discworld minutiae. It was reportedly Pratchett who thought Briggs looked like Vetinari – and also Pratchett who recommended Briggs as the replacement to record Isis Books’ unabridged audiobook of The Fifth Elephant, when previous reader Nigel Planer was unavailable. He recorded the unabridged version of every subsequent Discworld novel, and a fair few of Pratchett’s other works too.
  • Walter Charles Dance (1946-), better known as Charles Dance, is an English actor who played Lord Vetinari in Going Postal, the second of The Mob’s three live-action Discworld adaptations, broadcast in 2010. Dance scored his most famous role the following year: that of the cold-hearted Tywin Lannister, head of House Lannister, in the HBO series Game of Thrones.
  • David Jude Heyworth Law (1972-), better known as Jude Law, is an English actor whose break-out film role was probably Jerome in the 1997 sci-fi drama Gattaca. He’s had a bunch of high profile Hollywood roles, including playing Dr Watson opposite Robert Downey Jr in the two Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films. His recent work includes a starring role in The Young Pope and its sequel The New Pope, a drama about a young cardinal and ex-Archbishop of New York who ends up being made pope. He also plays a younger version of Albus Dumbledore in the Fantastic Beasts series of Harry Potter prequel films. He’s currently 50, which probably makes him a good candidate for Vetinari in an ongoing series of films…
  • Vetinari and Vimes are both around fifty years old, at least around the time of Night Watch. In that book, Vimes goes back in time about thirty years and meets his younger self, aged about seventeen; in the same sequences set in the past, Vetinari is a senior student at the Assassin’s Guild, and thus probably a few years older (though likely still under twenty). That’d make them both around fifty in the “present”, though the Patrician often acts as if he’s considerably older. Note that this timeline also makes it seem unlikely that Vetinari could be the Patrician of The Colour of Magic, but most fans think that’s unlikely anyway – despite Terry himself saying he is the same person, just “written by a worse author”.
  • We discussed “Once and Future“, Pratchett’s short Arthurian time travel story, in #Pratchat49, “Once More, With Future” – including the question of whether it would make a good novel.
  • “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor” is one of Pratchett’s earlier short stories, and the origin of many ideas that would eventually make their way into Truckers and its sequels. We’ll be covering it in a future episode.
  • Doughnut Jimmy is a horse surgeon used by Vimes in Feet of Clay to treat the poisoned Vetinari, mostly because he is usually employed by very serious men who don’t give him the option of not saving horses worth thousands of dollars. He is also mentioned in Jingo and The Last Continent, though in all his appearances he tends to treat his patients – no matter their species – as though they were thoroughbred racehorses.
  • Dr John “Mossy” Lawn – a character we’ll properly meet next episode – is gifted the money to found a hospital at the end of Night Watch. This becomes the Lady Sybil Free Hospital, which we first see in Going Postal when Dr Lawn treats Assistant Postmaster Groat. Lawn and the hospital also appear in Unseen Academicals and The Shepherd’s Crown.
  • When Liz says the old Australian anthem sounds like a “Burn Book“, she’s making a reference to the film Mean Girls. The titular clique of popular but mean high school girls keep a secret scrapbook, called the Burn Book, in which they stick photos of other students at school, about whom they write horrible things.
  • In January 2022, Australian Minister for Defence Peter Dutton announced that the Australian Army would be ordering 120 new tanks and other armoured vehicles. This was back in the news in February 2022 when a visiting US Army general endorsed the plan. Many commentators are very dubious about this plan.
  • Federation was process of the six separate British colonies in Australia becoming a single nation (at least from a European perspective). The Commonwealth of Australia was officially formed on January 1, 1901, following referendums in 1898 and 1899/1900. New Zealand and Fiji were also to be included, at least in early discussions, but opted out early on. Prior to the European invasion, Australia was home to hundreds of different mobs of people; today around 250 survive.
  • Robert Rankin (1949-) is a British comic fantasy author whose most famous books form the “Brentford trilogy”, which began in 1981 with The Antipope (no relation to The Young Pope, as far as we know). Despite the name, the series actually consists of eleven novels, the most recent (and possibly final) being 2019’s The Chronicles of Banarnia. They’re only a series in fairly loose terms – the books in this series mostly feature the same protagonists (Irishman John Omally and his best friend Jim Pooley), and are mostly set in Brentford, a suburban town in West London. Brentford is indeed a real place, as pointed out by a few listeners, including Simon and Craig! Ben did know this was the case, but the real Brentford has noticeably fewer resurrected popes, alien invasions and demonic incursions than the one in the books, so it seems fair to count Rankin’s version as a fictional place. Rankin’s style has some crossover with Pratchett, but is definitely not the same – and his books are mostly comic urban fantasy, and so most similar in content to Good Omens.
  • St. Mary Meade is the fictional home village of Miss Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s elderly detective. It’s been described as being in a few different fictional counties, but is generally thought to be in Southwest England, about 40km (25 miles) away from London. It was first mentioned by Christie in a Poirot novel, and like the homes of many famous detectives, it is unusually rife with violent crime, especially murder.
  • Sunnydale is the Californian city where Buffy Summers lives in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer television show. It is constantly beset by vampires and other demons because it is located above a “Hellmouth” – a portal to the other dimensions from which demons come. While it’s not a real place, various clues point to it being located northwest of Los Angeles.
  • There are several lists of the world’s most liveable cities, most compiled by lifestyle magazines or finance companies. The most famous such list is the “Global Livability Rating”, which has been published annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit (the research and analysis arm of The Economist magazine and media company) since at least 2002. Melbourne has often been near the top of these lists, and in the Global Livability Rating was ranked number one for seven years in a row, between 2011 and 2017. This list, like the others, is said to be based on “quality of life” factors, though it famously doesn’t take into account affordability, or say for whom the cities are so liveable.
  • You can find the Pratchat Reading Challenge for 2022 on our website, and on The Storygraph. The books Ben mentioned reading for it are:
    • Gideon the Ninth (and its sequel, Harrow the Ninth) by Tamsyn Muir
    • The Bees by Laline Paull
    • Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley
    • The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C. M. Waggoner
  • Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey was published in 2012. It’s sequel, Red Side Story, is scheduled for release either this year or next, depending on which website you trust.
  • Ben’s promise near the end of the podcast is a riff on the phrase “That’s our promise to you, from Big W“, a slogan used in ads for Big W in the late 1990s and/or early 2000s (like this one we found on YouTube). Big W is a chain of discount department stores owned by Woolworths Australia – they’re basically the Woolworths version of K-Mart. (The Australian K-Mart is owned by the other massive supermarket chain in Australia, Coles, part of the Coles Myer group.)

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Short Fiction, Vetinari

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