short story

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

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

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

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

Arthur: Be quiet!

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

Arthur: Shut up!

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

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975, dir. Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones)

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

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

— Matt Crowley (@MatthewPCrowley) July 14, 2015

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

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

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

— Taylor D. Swift (@migraine_hai) May 6, 2021

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

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