Short Fiction

#Pratchat73 – This Christmas Goes to Eleven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat73 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

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

Notes and Errata

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

More notes to come!

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

What’s in Father Christmas’s Fake Beard?

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

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

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

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

#Pratchat72 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

More notes to come soon!

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

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

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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.

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

#Pratchat63 – Decline by Committee

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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.

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

#Pratchat64 – GNOME Terry Pratchett

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This month, Ben flies solo with guest Andy Matthews as they reach back into Pratchett’s earliest fiction to discuss Beatrix Potter, writing practice, The Matrix…oh, and Terry’s 1973 short story for the Bucks Free Press, “RIncemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”!

The suspiciously familiar-sounding Gnome Rincemangle lives a sad, solitary life on the strange and mysterious (but also wet and cold) Even Moor. One day an owl tells him about the wonders of the nearby human village of Blackbury, so off he goes, accidentally hitching a ride on a lorry to department store. There he discovers he’s not the only Gnome in the world – but is the Store truly as much of a paradise as it seems?

Written on Thursday evenings for “Uncle Jim’s” children’s page when Pratchett himself was just 25 years old, this story forms the blueprint for the novel Truckers, published sixteen years later. How has Pratchett’s writing evolved over time? Is Andy right that “yearning” lies at the heart of his most successful work? Would this story amuse or frighten your children? Which of his other short stories should we give the full episode treatment? And is Pratchett the undisputed king of “fishing in his own stream” (sorry again, Ryn), or is this something all writers do, just less obviously? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat64.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:22:01 — 38.0MB)

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Guest Andy Matthews is a comedian, podcaster and most recently an author. He writes and performs sketch comedy with Alasdair Trembly-Birchall, both live and on the podcast Two in the Think Tank, and the pair previously hosted the ABC radio comedy science quiz The Pop Test. Andy is also the Director of Stupid Old Studios, a podcast and video production studio in Melbourne, and the author of two volumes (so far) of Gustav & Henri, a “science fiction mystery time travel detective story” about friendship and snacks starring a dog and a pig, illustrated by Peader Thomas. You can find Andy on Twitter at @stupidoldandy, and his podcast at @twointank.

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

For our March episode, we’re going where Pratchat has never gone before: into Pratchett’s nonfiction! Author, publisher and roleplayer Peter M. Ball joins us for a collection of Pratchett’s scribblings about genre, fandom and Neil Gaiman. The specific pieces are “Kevins”, “Wyrd Ideas”, “Let There Be Dragons” and “Notes From A Successful Fantasy Author”, plus “Neil Gaiman: Amazing Master Conjuror” and Neil’s foreword to the book in which all of these were collected, 2014’s A Slip of the Keyboard. You’ll find all of those (except the foreword) in the book’s first section, “A Scribbling Intruder”. Send us your questions about them via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, or on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat65.

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

#Pratchat70 – Punching Up

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Liz and Ben are joined by guest author Caimh “C. K.” McDonnell as they read a very early and very short chapter in the history of the Watch: Terry Pratchett’s 1993 short Discworld story, “Theatre of Cruelty”.

When the Watch discover a murdered entertainer with pockets full of change, a string of sausages round his neck, and no witnesses to the crime, the Clues are very unhelpful. But Corporal Carrot is on the case – and when it comes to solving the crime, he knows the way to do it…

Written for W H Smith’s free Bookcase magazine – a pristine copy of which now fetches a few hundred dollars – “Theatre of Cruelty” was published not long before the second Watch novel, Men at Arms. It packs more jokes into 1,000 words than most people write in a lifetime, and is also a delightful extra outing with the original officers of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. But don’t take our word for it: you can read it yourself at the L-Space web.

Is it a satisfying murder mystery? Why does Pratchett seem to have a thing for Punch and Judy? And how on Earth did we talk for nearly two hours about such a short piece of writing? Join the conversation – and send us your favourite short stories and cruel bits of theatre – using the hashtag #Pratchat70.

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Guest Caimh McDonnell is a comedian, writer and author best known for two series of books. The first is the “Dublin Trilogy” comic thrillers, starring Bunny McGarry and a cast of loveable rogues, beginning with A Man With One of Those Faces in 2016 (though see the reading order on his website). The other – as C. K. McDonnell – is the comic urban fantasy series The Stranger Times, about a weird newspaper called The Stranger Times, and beginning with the novel titled…er…The Stranger Times in 2021. Aside from his books you can hear his writing on two podcasts: The Bunnycast for further crime stories, and The Stranger Times Podcast for more Stranger Times. You might also catch him live this Halloween via his Facebook or YouTube accounts! Caimh is on Twitter at @caimh, and his website is whitehairedirishman.com. The Stranger Times series has its own site at thestrangertimes.co.uk.

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

For our October episode, we’re going on one last trip to Roundworld as we read and discuss The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day with two special guests, including our old friend and Uniting Church minister, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones. We’re recording around the 25th of September, so don’t delay – get your questions about the book (or the Science series as a whole!) in ASAP via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com, or on social media using the hashtag #Pratchat71.

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

#Pratchat65 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 65, “Let There Be Gaimans“, discussing several pieces from the “Scribbling Intruder” section of Pratchett’s 2014 nonfiction anthology, A Slip of the Keyboard, with special guest Peter M Ball.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ve mentioned it before a few times, but here again is Michael Williams’ interview with Terry Pratchett from 2013, during his tour to promote Snuff, titled “Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.” (It used to be available as an audio recording, but now it’s only available via YouTube.)

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is probably not Ben’s best work, but it was there…
  • GenreCon is a writing conference in Meanjin (aka Brisbane) specifically for genre writers that tries to cover as many genres as possible: science fiction, romance, crime, fantasy, horror, and more. It just ran its eighth conference from 17-19 February 2023, with this year’s guests including friends of this podcast Garth Nix (#Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“) and Will Kostakis (#Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire” and #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“).
  • The Queensland Writers Centre is a not-for-profit membership organisation supporting local writers of all kinds. It was established in January 1990, and as well as GenreCon runs workshops and other events, and provides various services including consulting, mentorship and manuscript assessment and editing.
  • The Author is the quarterly journal of The Society of Authors, established in 1884, and is the UK’s union for writers, illustrators and literary translators – not just for authors any more! Terry was Chair of their Management Committee from 1994 to 1995, helping to shape their policy and strategy. His time in those meetings inspired the short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices”, which we discussed in #Pratchat63. He was also elected as a member of the Society’s Council. Philip Pullman was President of the Society from 2013 until early 2022, when he resigned following some controversy around a memoir. The current Chair is Joanne Harris, best known for her novel Chocolat. Notably both Harris and Pullman were some of the more level-headed voices speaking up about the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy (see below), with Harris in favour of the changes, and Pullman advocating letting Dahl’s books fade away without being republished.
  • Ben is wrong about one thing in his FAQ footnote: the Pratchett newsgroups (see below) did have an FAQ! You can still find it at lspace.org here. We think this was the last version, updated in 2005; like the Annotated Pratchett File (also see below), it was maintained by Leo Breebaart, who also created the L-Space web.
  • We’ve previously talked about newsgroups in #Pratchat10 and #Pratchat42, but for context: the Usenet system was created in 1980 as an Internet-based alternative to local Bulletin Board Systems. Setting standards that would later be used by web-based internet forums, they organised posts by users into conversation-like “threads” of messages, which were themselves organised into “newsgroups” under hierarchical categories, similar to (but distinct from) domain names. There were three newsgroups of primary interest to Pratchett fans: alt.books.pratchett for discussion of the books themselves; alt.fan.pratchett (the big one) for general fan chit-chat (though this often included the books); and alt.fan.pratchett.announce, a moderated group for announcements of signings and other events of interest to fans. Pratchett was active on the first two.
  • Peter says Pratchett started publishing Discworld in about ’88, but we suspect he meant that the Discworld really took off around then, with the publication of the fourth and fifth books, Sourcery and his first really big hit, Wyrd Sisters. The Colour of Magic was first published in November 1983.
  • Pratchett’s fifth and tenth books (including the three pre-Discworld ones) were The Light Fantastic in 1985, and Pyramids in 1989. The gap in between contained the first big growth spurts of the Internet, but to put them in perspective, Tim Berners Lee only created the first version of the World Wide Web in 1989, and the first widely available web browser, Mosaic, didn’t launch until 1993 – by which time Pratchett was onto his twenty-fourth book, Johnny and the Dead! If you wanted to chat to people on the internet, newsgroups and mailing lists were the go in the 1990s…
  • In Benjamin Partridge’s monthly comedy podcast, The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast, Partridge plays the unnamed host of the fictional industry body’s podcast. Through mostly unscripted interviews with characters played by various guest actors and comedians, Partridge slowly builds up a bizarre alternate reality over many years. One of the recurring characters is disgraced “Bovine Poet Laureate” Michael Banyan (played by comedian Henry Paker), author of a book of cow poetry titled Crab of the Land, who often tells outrageous stories about partying with Jonathan Franzen.
  • ChatGPT is an “AI chatbot” created by the company OpenAI and publicly launched in a prototype state in November 2022. It’s capable of producing sophisticated text responses to prompts using the GPT 3 large language model previously created by OpenAI, and as a result has become hugely popular and controversial. It’s not actually intelligent; rather it uses statistical models based on a huge corpus of text (i.e. large parts of the internet up to 2021) to assemble sentences, poems or lines of code which are drawn from that corpus. We’ll probably talk about it some more in the next episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club.
  • Pratchett told alt.fan.pratchett he was leaving for the reasons outlined in “this piece”Wyrd Ideas” on the 3rd February 1999, after a user speculated about Sam and Sybil having children (he was writing The Fifth Elephant at the time). This was despite other users in the group (and possibly the version of the FAQ available at the time) asking people not to do this sort of thing. You can see his post here – and thanks to Jo and Francine of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, who saved Ben the trouble of searching for this by linking to it from their own episode notes! Pratchett didn’t leave newsgroups altogether; he continues to “lurk” (i.e. read without posting much) on alt.books.pratchett and other newsgroups (mostly about videogames) until around 2008.
  • We mention several famous writers who published their works in serial form, usually in magazines. But we could have mentioned many more! As well as French authors Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, there’s also Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Robert Louis Stevenson and many, many more.
  • Speaking of Alexandre Dumas, his surname is pronounced “Doo-ma”. He was indeed paid by the line by some of the newspapers who published his stories, though others paid him by episode, leading to very long books rather than very short dialogue. According to some accounts, his publishers eventually caught on to his writing style, and insisted that a line had to fill half a newspaper column to count, supposedly forcing him to kill off a monosyllabic character he’d invented to extend his dialogue. Charles Dickens, by contrast, is said to have written verbosely as he was paid by the word, but in fact he was paid for instalments which had a very specific page count (32 pages in some accounts). Like a first year arts student, he may have used more words to fill the pages faster…a style emulated by Pratchett in Dodger (discussed in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“).
  • Watch this space for a brief history of fanfic, but in the meantime you can check out Archive of Our Own (aka AO3) for yourself – and yes, there’s an extensive Discworld collection there!
  • The Nanny (not Nanny Ogg) was a hugely popular American sitcom which ran from 1993 to 1999 – coincidentally the period between “Kevins” and “Wyrd Ideas” – on the CBS network. It starred co-creator Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, a down on her luck Jewish woman from Queens who tries selling makeup door-to-door. She’s hired by high class English Broadway producer and widower Maxwell Sheffield to be the new nanny to his three children, and the two have a will-they or won’t-they relationship aided by Sheffield’s butler Niles and opposed by Sheffield’s business partner C.C. Babcock.
  • You can find the second edition of the Turkey City Lexicon on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association website.
  • The Neil Gaiman Masterclass on “The Art of Storytelling” is offered as part of the Masterclass streaming video service, which features hundreds of tutorials from famous leaders in their fields covering everything from acting to philosphy, personal style and astronomy. The BBC has a similar series of videos, BBC Maestro, with a class on Storytelling hosted by Alan Moore.
  • Pratchett used the term “figgin” for the kind of joke Peter describes because he used the word for exactly that kind of joke in Guards! Guards! In that novel, figgin is used by the Supreme Grand Master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night in one of the order’s oaths, secure in the knowledge that none of his flock knows what it means. (In this instance Pratchett doesn’t make us wait until the very end to discover the truth for ourselves; it’s defined in a footnote. In fact he only uses the word eight times in the novel, and three of those are callbacks made after the footnote.)
  • To avoid confusion, Ben would like to explain that the “sherbert lemon” kind of joke is not an example of shelving, which is when a comedian mentions a concept seemingly in passing so that they can come back to it later in a new context once the audience has forgotten about it and helping the comedy work through surprising recognition. (There’s a reason explaining how comedy works is described as “dissecting the frog”.)
  • Pratchett is on record (in the APF, of course) that there’s no pun in Twoflower:
    “[…] there’s no joke in Twoflower. I just wanted a coherent way of making up ‘foreign’ names and I think I pinched the Mayan construction (Nine Turning Mirrors, Three Rabbits, etc.).”
  • Andrew Harman is the English author of eleven pun-filled comic fantasy novels, published between 1993 and 2000. Most of them are set in the medieval fantasy kingdom of Rhyngill and surrounds, and five, beginning with The Sorcerer’s Appendix and ending with One Hundred and One Damnations, form a loose series following the adventures of the peasant Firkin and his friends. Harman went on to find more creative success as a game designer, founding his own publisher, YAY Games, which specialises in “gateway games” – ones that work well for introducing new people to hobby boardgames.
  • Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s classic sitcom farce about long-suffering but obnoxious hotel manager Basil Fawlty, ran for two series in 1975 and 1979 on BBC Two. It is often cited amongst the greatest sitcoms ever made, though its characters and many of the episodes’ premises rely heavily on ethnic and gender stereotypes. The titular hotel is located in the resort town of Torquay in the coastal “English Rivieria” region of Devon. Cleese was inspired to create the setting and main character for the show after an experience with the manager of a real Torquay hotel where the Monty Python crew stayed while filming on location in 1971.
  • For some perspective on the Roald Dahl rewrite controversy, you could do worse than these pieces from The Conversation:

More notes coming soon!

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

#Pratchat64 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 64, “GNOME Terry Pratchett“, discussing the 1973 short story “Rincemangle, the Gnome of Even Moor”, with special guest Andy Matthews.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the Two Ronnies sketch mentioned by Andy in which they use letters (and numbers) instead of words. It’s framed as “Swedish Made Simple”, a “Swedish lesson in Norwegian”, in which the subtitles use only single letters and numbers to represent words. It seems to be from the second episode of the fourth series of the show, broadcast on BBC Two in January 1975 – and please be warned that the sensibility of the sketch reflects the state of comedy in that era, especially in the way it’s ended.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a play on the “GNU Terry Pratchett”, which many websites – including this one, if our plugin is working correctly – add to a special “Clacks overhead” bit of information. This is a reference to Going Postal, in which a message prefixed GNU is sent up and down the Clacks system forever. John Dearheart’s name is preserved this way, in accordance with the idea in Pratchett’s writing that “a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”. GNU is also a reference to the Roundworld GNU Project, a cornerstone of the free software movement which set out to create a free Unix-like operating system. In this context, GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”
  • We mention a lot of Terry’s other books this episode; here’s a list with our episodes:
    • Feet of Clay – discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“
    • Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes – Terry’s official biography written by Rob Wilkins, which we’ve not yet covered.
  • In the 1999 film The Matrix, future humanity is enslaved by sentient machines, who use the humans as living batteries after environmental disaster prevents traditional methods of power generation. They keep the humans subjugated by plugging them into an artificial reality known as “The Matrix”, but there are some free humans who present the imprisoned ones with the truth. Famously one of them – Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne – does so by offering a prospective recruit two pills. The red one will allow them to see the truth of their situation, exiting the Matrix, never to return. The Wachowskis, who wrote and directed the film, turned it into a trilogy by making two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, in 2003. A fourth film, The Matrix Resurrections, was released in 2021.
  • Owls are indeed mentioned in the Bromeliad – Granny Morkie describes them in Diggers while attempting to “cheer up” the Nomes who’ve gone outside at night to try and rescue Dorcas. In her words: “Cunning’ devils, owls. You never hear ‘em till they’re almost on top of you.” The Nomes who grew up in the Store are terrified.
  • The four books collecting Pratchett’s early stories are Dragons at Crumbling Castle, The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (which contains this story), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard and The Time-traveling Caveman. Most of the stories are from the Bucks Free Press, but Father Christmas’s Fake Beard also contains a number of Christmas-themed stories from other points in Pratchett’s career.
  • The origins of the name Rincewind are actually known: it comes from the long-running humour column “By the Way” in the Daily Express newspaper. Written by various writers under the pen name “Beachcomber”, “By the Way” was a broad spoof of society news, with short snippets of nonsense about various fictional characters. One group of frequently recurring characters were “twelve red-bearded dwarfs” who were highly litigious, and who were at one point given individual names – one of which was “Churm Rincewind”. As mentioned in the Annotated Pratchett File entry for The Colour of Magic, Terry read a lot of the columns in published collections when he was 13, but didn’t realise that’s where he’d picked up the name until his friend Dave Langford pointed it out many years later. So Ben’s dramatic recreation wasn’t too far off the mark…
  • “Fishing from the same stream” is mentioned in the L-Space wiki, though the specific quote about it is not sourced. Pratchett is said to have invoked this when saying its ridiculous that anyone would suggest a certain famous author had plagiarised him just because they both had schools of magic in their books, since it was an old concept that both had drawn on. “That’s how genres work,” he says, and indeed sites like TV Tropes and All the Tropes would agree.
  • In the film Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant and his young friends escape a Tyrannosaurus rex in part because Grant advises them its vision is “based on movement” – much as Rincemangle advises his fellow gnomes. But Rincemangle is partially correct – cats are ambush predators and while they have excellent night vision are relatively short-sighted. While it’s not true that stationary objects or mice are invisible to them, they are instinctively drawn to movement and use it to identify prey when laying in wait. To see why this is probably a silly assumption to make about T. rex, try to imagine the dinosaur as it appears in the film hiding in the grass and waiting to ambush its prey… Modern thought is that T. rex probably had great eyesight, just like many modern predatory birds, making it able to see prey from quite a long distance and chase it down. The assumption also appears in Crighton’s original 1990 novel, though in that case Grant makes the observation after seeing the live dinosaurs, though this is backtracked in the sequel, The Lost World.
  • For more on how cats see, here’s the MYSTERIOUS FELINE VISION article from catveteran.com shared with us by subscriber Ian Banks.
  • Jorges Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer, and one of the most influential Spanish-language writers in the world. While he’s most famous for his short stories, which came to the attention of English-language readers in the 1970s, he also wrote novels, poetry and nonfiction, and perpetrated a great number of literary hoaxes. His most famous stories were mostly written in the 1940s and 1950s, and include “The Library of Babel”, about a library that contains every possible book that could ever exist, and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which Borges discovers that a secret society invented a country and the world of its legends, and by doing so conjured them into being.

More notes coming soon!

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