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#Pratchat64 – GNOME Terry Pratchett

08/02/2023 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

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.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_64.mp3

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https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_64.mp3

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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Andy Matthews, Ben McKenzie, Bromeliad, Bucks Free Press, Nomes, Short Fiction, standalone, Younger Readers

#Pratchat16 – He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis

08/02/2019 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Episode twice-the-number-which-must-not-be-spoken (i.e. sixteen) takes us inside the Church of Om for a story of faith, religion and truth as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones to discuss Terry Pratchett’s 1992 Discworld novel, Small Gods!

Brutha is a lowly novice in the Omnian Citadel, dismissed by his superiors as a simpleton whose only notable talent is an extraordinary memory. He’s the last person expecting to hear the Voice of the Great God Om, though Brutha has his doubts: Om is supposed to manifest as a mighty golden bull or pillar of flame, not a one-eyed tortoise. Om’s not happy either: this isn’t how he planned his return from the celestial realm, and no-one but Brutha can hear him. Before god or novice can figure out what’s happening, Brutha is recruited by Deacon Vorbis – head of the feared Quisition – for a mission to nearby Ephebe: a nation of heretics, democracy and philosophers, one of whom has dared to pen a treatise describing the world as a flat disc which travels through space on the back of a turtle…

One of the few truly standalone Discworld novels, Small Gods focuses on how humans of the Disc create gods, rather than the other way round – for good and for ill. Drawing on the best and worst traditions of monotheism, Galileo’s defiance in the face of Catholic censure, and big philosophical questions, Small Gods still manages to be full of Pratchett’s trademark humour and humanism, and a long-time favourite for many fans. Do you rate it amongst the best Discworld novels? Would you recommend someone start with it? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat16 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_16.mp3

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Our guest, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones (she/her), is a Minister in the Uniting Church and an all-round wonderful human being. Always a geek, Avril rose to fame in 2011 via Adam Hills’ ABC comedy show In Gordon Street Tonight with the foundation of the Church of the Latter Day Geek, which for some reason got more attention than any of the work she has done advocating for LGBTIAQ+ rights or asylum seekers. Avril also appeared in the “Seven/Religion” episode of Splendid Chaps (mostly in part two, but you may also want to listen to part one), and on Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death. You can read about her adventures at her blog, Rev Doc Geek, follow her on Twitter at @DocAvvers, or head along to a Sunday service! She used to be in Williamstown, but since 2020 you’ll find her at North Balwyn Uniting Church.

You can find the show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

It’s been a big year already for the Pratchat crew: we’ve launched our subscription service – a huge thank you to all our supporters! – and Liz and Ben will be appearing at both Speculate 2019 in mid-March, and Nullus Anxietas 7, the Australian Discworld Convention, in mid-April! Plus Ben will be performing a new show, You Chose Poorly, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from April 1-7.

Next month it’s back to the Ramtops as the witches return home in Lords and Ladies with writer, critic and editor Nadia Bailey! ! We’re recording that episode hot on the heels of this one’s release, so get your questions in via social media before February 16th using the hashtag #Pratchat17.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Avril Hannah-Jones, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, standalone

#Pratchat68 Notes and Errata

08/08/2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 68, “Discus Ex Machina”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s third novel, 1981’s Strata, with guest EJ Mann.

Iconographic Evidence

Australian Bush Heritage’s thread of “Pedro Pascal as Australian frogs” first appeared in a Twitter thread, but we’ve embedded the Instagram version below. (Twitter is…not as stable as it once was.) Make sure you check out all of them!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bush Heritage (@bushheritageaus)

Here are the first edition covers of Pratchett’s two early science fiction novels. Ben mistakenly remembered Pratchett’s cover for The Dark Side of the Sun featuring dragonflies, not bees; he may be remembering the later cover, also by original Strata artist Tim White, which depicts a robot insect which…well, it’s also not a dragonfly, but it’s more like one than Pratchett’s bees. Though the weird fungal creatures on his Strata cover do look like dragonflies – one of the many details that makes it entirely unlike the book in every way, aside from the inclusion of a lightning bolt.

Strata first edition; cover art by Tim White
Strata first edition; cover art by Tim White
The Dark Side of the Sun, first edition; cover art by Terry Pratchett
The Dark Side of the Sun, first edition; cover art by Terry Pratchett

Below is the earliest post we could find for the photo of the common snapping turtle with the “world” on its back. It’s from the source, the Twitter account for Task Force Turtle; see below in the notes for more on the turtle, and for an article where you can see it if Twitter becomes too unstable to supply this embedded tweet.

pic.twitter.com/eEM4lyukCh

— Task Force Turtle (@TaskForceTurtle) November 27, 2018

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays with the well-known Latin phrase “deus ex machina”, “God from the machine”. Originally used in Ancient Greek theatre as a literal stage direction, in which actors playing the roles of gods would be brought on stage via a machine, it has come to mean an unexpected plot resolution brought about by supernatural or implausible means, especially if those means have not previously been established in the narrative. We don’t think Strata is an example of this, but the Latin for “disc from the machine” seemed too perfect not to use.
  • The last in-person Australian Discworld Convention was Nullus Anxietas 7, held in Melbourne in April 2019. We recorded a live episode there: #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”, discussing the short story “Troll Bridge”.
  • Bush Heritage Australia is a non-profit organisation which was started as “The Australian Bush Heritage Fund” in 1991, with the purchase of forest land in Tasmania by environmentalist and former leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown. The charity now owns millions of hectares of bushland across Australia, which it manages in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. You can find out more at bushheritage.org.au, or follow them (and their very funny social media manager) as @BushHeritageAus on Twitter or Instagram.
  • You can read what Pratchett had to say about the Disc in 1981 on Colin Smythe’s website, where you’ll also find early reviews – including one by Neil Gaiman! Of the Discworld, Pratchett said:
    “I am also working on another ‘discworld’ theme, since I don’t think I’ve exhausted all the possibilities in one book!”
  • Thanks to subscriber Craig, who shared a photo of the full blurb for the first edition of Strata, which we can also confirm was first published by Colin Smythe in hardcover. (See above for the original covers of both Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun.) Here’s the longer blurb:

A flat earth? Impossible.
Kin Arad is the 210-year-old supervisor in charge of resurfacing the newly named planet, Kingdom. When she finds Jago Jalo, a man who has a cloak of invisibility and should have died a thousand years ago, in her office, she decides he must have an unusual tale. He has. He knows where such a world is. It is like the medieval earth…almost. Leiv Eiriksson is setting off for the New World, but he will never find it. Instead he sails to the edge of the world and its eternal waterfall.
It is obvious that this ‘earth’ has been built by the Great Spindle Kings, makers of universes, inventors of the strata machine and the ultimate in claustrophobes, and Jalo lures the human Kin, the kung Marco Farfarer and the fiftv-six-syllable-named shand better known as Silver, to undertake a voyage of discovery with him: the rewards must be beyond their dreams…or nightmares.
In Strata Terry Pratchett again shows the remarkably witty, imaginative and descriptive talents that have characterised his earlier works and show him to be one of the best s.f. writers of the younger generation.

Strata – blurb from the first hardcover edition (1981)
  • You can find many different covers for Strata at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. While many seem to use stock sci-fi or fantasy art, most use Josh Kirby’s cover (though some use his art for The Dark Side of the Sun!). The German cover by Katarzyna Oleska is Ben’s favourite, and is the only one to show Kin as a Black woman; we also like the French one by Marc Simonetti, though he inexplicably depicts Kin as a cyborg with red skin, though accurately makes her bald. The mass market US paperback has a cover by Darrell K. Sweet which gets special mention for the very retro image of Kin in a silver spacesuit holding a raygun while on a Viking ship menaced by a dragon, but it makes her white (and ginger) and leaves out Marco and Silver entirely.
  • Magrathea is the fabled planet manufacturing planet which features prominently in the plot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As well as many luxury planets built during a boom in the galactic economy, it also built the planet Earth; the fjords were designed by planetary architect Slartibartfast, who meets Arthur Dent during the final chapters of the first radio series/book/film etc.
  • Speaking of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ben is correct: the original radio series was broadcast betweem 1978 and 1980. The first novel was published in 1979, while the original BBC television series was made in 1980, but broadcast in 1981. There have been numerous other versions, including an LP (which differs from the radio series), a videogame, a feature film, several stage plays, a comic book and, supposedly, another television series currently in production at Hulu.
  • The film Liz mentions with Olivia Wilde where remaining lifetime is a currency is indeed In Time (2011, dir. Andrew Niccol), a sci-fi action film starring Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake. It’s similar to the earlier film Price of Life (1987, dir. Stephen Tolkin), and also the 1965 Harlan Ellison short story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”. Ellison briefly sued Niccol (who is best known for Gattaca) and the producers of In Time, but dropped the suit after seeing the film.
  • Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by American author Larry Niven. In the book, 29th century human Louis Gridley Wu is recruited on his 200th birthday by an alien “Puppeteer” named Nessus to go on an expedition. He is to investigate the Ringworld, a massive construct surrounding a Sun which has an immense Earth-like inner surface. He travels there with Nessus, a cat-like Tzin named Speaker-to-Animals, and another human, Teela Brown. Their ship is damaged on arrival and crashes; its hyperdrive still functions but it cannot get back into space to use it safely. The crew head towards the edge of the Ring, hoping to find technology to help them repair their ship, encountering strange technologies and the remnants of the Ring’s civilisations along the way. As Terry Pratchett put it on alt.fan.pratchett, “I intended Strata to be as much a (pisstake/homage/satire) on Ringworld as, say, Bill the Galactic Hero was of Starship Troopers. All Niven’s heroes are competent and all his technology works for millions of years…but he’s a nice guy and says he enjoyed the book.” There are four sequels: The Ringworld Engineers (1979), The Ringworld Throne (1996), Ringworld’s Children (2004) and Fate of Worlds (2012), which is also the last book in Niven’s Fleet of Worlds series. All of these books are set in Niven’s broader “Known Space” universe.
  • EFTPOS systems, which allow a transfer of funds direct from a purchaser’s bank account to a merchant, first appeared in America in 1981. The system was slow to be adopted by consumers, and credit cards and cheques remained much more popular alternatives to cash. Australian banks were pretty quick to adopt a national EFTPOS system, in part because they had already had to cooperate to set up Bankcard, a domestic credit card implemented in the 1970s before the major card companies came to Australia and New Zealand. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with these things, it appears one of the main reasons Australians call it EFTPOS is advertising: the major company making and selling the infrastructure equipment, and marketing it to the public during the 80s and 90s, was “eftpos Australia”. EFTPOS is also popular, and known by that term, in New Zealand and Singapore.
  • Budgie is the nickname for the budgerigar, a small species of parakeet with long tails. Like Liz, many Australians growing up in cities don’t realise they’re native birds, in part because they’re so commonly kept as pets – very unusual for native animals! In country areas they gather in huge flocks at water holes. Their popularity is largely due to their small size, colourful plumage (usually white and blue or yellow and green, but many other breeds exist), and their ability to “speak” and whistle. They’ve been exported – legally and otherwise – to many countries around the world. A common bit of Australian slang for men’s swimming costumes is “budgie smugglers”, referring to the fact that they don’t leave much to the imagination and the wearer’s genitals are often outlined, appearing around the same size as a budgie.
  • The Wayfarer series by American author Becky Chambers begins with her debut 2014 novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which she originally crowdfunded and self-published. It was nominated for several awards and republished by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015. The Wayfarer of the series title is a “tunnelling ship” – a spacecraft which builds wormholes between distant parts of space for other spaceships to use as shortcuts. The original novel follows the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer and their relationships during one long mission. It has so far been followed by three sequels: A Closed and Common Orbit (2016), Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021), plus a short story, “A Good Heretic” (2019), though these follow different characters and stories in the same universe. The species who can communicate via coloured patches on their cheeks are the Aeluon, otherwise plain-coloured humanoids who are one of the more powerful species in the galaxy.
  • The Lying Bastard, the spaceship constructed by the Puppeteers for the mission to the Ringworld and named by Louis Wu, was sadly not shaped like a disc. In most depictions, including the ones sanctioned by Larry Niven himself, it looks more like a fighter jet.
  • Silver actually says her name is fifty-six syllables long – considerably more than Ben’s guess of twenty-three! The “unpronounceable name” trope is a common excuse to give aliens, demons and the like simple names, even when their origins suggest they should have a language and/or culture very different to human ones. Doctor Who has several examples, including the Doctor’s own name (in the modern series a secret, but hinted to be very long in some of the books) and that of fellow Time Lord Romanadvoratrelundar, more commonly known as Romana (though when they first meet, the Doctor also offers to call her “Fred”).
  • Slashie and multi-hyphenate are both terms for those who diversify into multiple disciplines, particularly in the arts. “Multi-hyphenate” is more common in the screen industry, where one might be a writer-director-producer on the same project; “slashie” is a more general arts term, for folks who (like Ben) have several different freelance careers to ensure enough work. (Ben is an actor/writer/game designer/educator, among other things.)
  • We’re still pretty sure that the whole “you might outnumber me, but how many of you will die before you get me?” thing does appear in a Discworld book somewhere, but we haven’t been able to find it. Do you know where it is? Let us know!
  • The turtle that burrows underground and comes up looking like A’Tuin (or Torterra, if you’re a Pokémon fan) is the common snapping turtle of North America, Chelydra serpentina. They migrate to muddy holes where they bury themselves to hibernate during Winter. In 2018, a photo of one such turtle was taken in Maryland by Timothy Roth, a psychology professor working with Task Force Turtle. The photo went viral on social media and is now posted to various Discworld forums at least a few times each year, though this turtle hadn’t just woken up from hibernation… You can see the image above, and read the story of how and why it was taken, and learn more about the turtles themselves, in the LiveScience article “How Butt Gas, Drugs and Amazing Memories Led to This Weird Turtle Photo”, from December 2018. As EJ mentions, its often linked to the “turtle island” stories of several North American peoples, including the Lenape and Haudenosaunee.
  • Stephen Briggs’ unabridged audiobooks of both Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun were released by Isis Audio Books as boxed sets of CDs in the early 2000s. The same recordings were re-released around 2007 on “mp3-CD” – yes, a CD-ROM with the tracks from the original CDs as mp3 files. This format was playable by some CD players produced in the 2000s (and may still be playable by some in-car CD players now), but quickly became obsolete as solid-state media (like USB drives) became cheaper, and then the audio industry shifted to download and streaming. When the Isis unabridged recordings of the Discworld novels and other books were licensed for digital distribution via Audible, Apple Books and so on, it seems Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun were not included, but then the Isis Discworld audiobooks – including the earlier ones narrated by Nigel Planer – don’t seem available digitally any more either. (We assume they were removed to avoid confusion, now the new Penguin audiobooks are out; Tony Robinson’s ones are still available, but under the series title “Discworld (abridged)” to make the distinction clear.) You can still find the physical media versions secondhand, though, if you’re keen.

More notes to come soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, EJ Mann, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, sci-fi, standalone, Strata

#Pratchat41 – The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl

08/03/2021 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

Educator Dr Charlotte Pezaro joins Liz and Ben on a trip to the South Pelagic, where they find tsunamis, gods and science in Nation, Terry Pratchett’s standalone young adult novel from 2008.

Mau is returning from his rite of passage when a huge wave washes over his island Nation, killing everyone he has ever known. He is all alone, stuck without a soul between the states of boy and man. Lost in his despair and anger at the gods he now isn’t sure he believes in, he’s ready to give in to the dark water until he meets Daphne, the only survivor from a “trouserman” ship flung into the Nation by the wave. As they learn each others’ customs and languages, and other survivors gradually begin to arrive, Mau and Daphne must both reckon with the gods and ghosts of the Nation’s past – and work hard to ensure it has a future…

Pratchett’s own proudest achievement, and winner of multiple of awards, Nation presents an alternate universe where things are a little bit different in some ways…and considerably different in others. Pratchett examines his favourite themes of belief, death, imperialism and science through a new lens, in a tale of loss, growing up, and asking big questions.

Is this Pratchett’s magnum opus? Does inventing an entire universe next door make it okay for a white Englishman to tell a story about South Pacific Islanders with the serial numbers filed off? Why did he split Australia in half ? Tell us by using the hashtag #Pratchat41 on social media to join the conversation!

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_41.mp3

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Guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro is an educator with a PhD in pedagogy and years of science and technology communication experience. Charlotte is also a qualified primary school teacher, and works with other teachers to help them improve their skills. You can find out more about Charlotte at charlottepezaro.com, or follow her on Twitter at @dialogicedu.

Next time we’re heading back to Ankh-Morpork for a tale of journalism, vampirism and authoritarianism, the 25th Discworld novel: 2000’s The Truth! We’ll be joined by returning guest, writer and deputy culture editor for Guardian Australia, Stephanie Convery. Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat42, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

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

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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat68 – Discus Ex Machina

08/08/2023 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We engage the matrix drive and set course for the Discworld that might have been, as EJ Mann joins us to discuss Terry Pratchett’s first attempt at writing a flat Earth, 1981’s Strata.

200-year-old human Kin Arad works for the Company building planets – the traditional, oblate spheroid kind. So when deep space pioneer Jago Jalo shows up wearing an invisibility cloak, and says he’s discovered a flat Earth full of advanced technology, she can’t resist. She’s joined by Marco, a four-armed paranoid Kung pilot who thinks he’s human; and Silver, a huge, gentle, bear-like and potentially ravenous Shand linguist. But the expedition soon goes wrong: betrayed by Jalo, their ship destroyed, the trio are stranded on a bizarre Disc-world full of dragons, demons and humans with strange beliefs. It’s also a duplicate of medieval Europe – but the world is breaking down. It’s a race against time as they journey to the centre of the Disc looking for a means of escape – and something is watching them all the way…

Pratchett’s third novel, the last before The Colour of Magic changed his life forever, Strata is a direct parody of Larry Niven’s 1970 sci-fi classic Ringworld. Many of Pratchett’s favourite ideas, jokes and themes appear here for the first time. You’ll find talking ravens, magic mixed with technology, characters who TALK LIKE THIS and an author taking the fantastic seriously to the point of absurdity. There are even a few bright young things who’ll later make it big on the Discworld, like the Broken Drum and Mrs Widgery’s Lodger.

Did you know this was a parody of Ringworld? Does it stands on its own, or is it doomed to live in the shadow of it’s more successful younger sibling? Could Pratchett have made it as a science fiction writer if he hadn’t switched to fantasy? And what standalone novel do you wish would inspire a series of 41 similar-but-different novels? Let us know! Use the hashtag #Pratchat68 to join the conversation. Though not on Bluesky, if you’re joining us there, because apparently they’re too good for hashtags?

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_68.mp3

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Guest EJ Mann (they/them) is spec fic fan, occasional spec fic writer (as E. H. Mann), nature nerd and long-time participant and organiser on the Australian convention scene. You can read some of their short fiction at their website, ehmannwrites.com. As mentioned at the top of the episode, EJ currently works for conservation charity Bush Heritage Australia, who work to preserve Australian wildlife by buying and caring for bushland in consultation with traditional owners. You can find out more about them at bushheritage.org.au.

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

Next month we get back to the actual, honest-to-Glod Discworld with the short story “Theatre of Cruelty”, which we’ll be discussing with Irish author Caimh McDonnell! You can most easily find the story in Pratchett’s fiction anthology A Blink of the Screen. Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat70 (again, not on Bluesky), or send us an email at 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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, EJ Mann, Elizabeth Flux, non-Discworld, sci-fi, standalone, Strata

#Pratchat18 – Sundog Gazillionaire

08/04/2019 by Pratchat Imps 2 Comments

For episode eighteen we go back to Terry Pratchett’s science fiction beginnings as – in the evening between the two days of the 2019 Speculate festival – author Will Kostakis joins us to talk about Pratchett’s standalone 1976 novel, The Dark Side of the Sun!

Dom Sabalos is about to become Chairman of the planet Widdershins when he is messily assassinated. Well…mostly. When he survives against all odds, he discovers his death had been predicted using probability math. The same science also predicts he will discover Joker’s World, the mysterious home of the vanished ancient species thought to have laid the foundation for all intelligent life. Dom sets out to fulfil his destiny with his alien mentor Hrsh-Hgn, his new robot, Isaac, and a strange, lucky creature from his homeworld’s swamp.

Filled with references and homages to prominent science fiction authors like Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert, The Dark Side of the Sun is the first of Pratchett’s two early science fiction novels. (We’ll get to the other one, Strata, in fifty episodes’ time.) It features the first appearance of many names and concepts he would later recycle for the Discworld. It’s a short, fast-paced book with big ideas – not least Pratchett’s own take on the classic sci-fi trope of a vanished, ancient precursor species known only through mysterious artefacts. But does it work? Is this an early sign of genius, or a run-up for someone who needed more time to come into his own? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat18 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_18.mp3

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Guest Will Kostakis is a writer and award-winning author. He’s written many short stories and four novels, all for young adults, including The Sidekicks and The First Third. As mentioned in the episode, his first fantasy YA novel, Monuments, will be released in September 2019. You can find out more about Will and his work at willkostakis.com, or follow him on Twitter at @willkostakis.

You can find the full show notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

(This episode was released just before Liz and Ben appeared at Nullus Anxietas 7, the Australian Discworld Convention, on April 13 and 14 2019! The live episode they recorded at the convention is available in the podcast feed as #PratchatNA7, “A Troll New World”.)

Next month it’s back to the Discworld as we crank up the volume and rock out with Death! Yes, we’ll be reading Soul Music, so get your questions in via social media by mid-April using the hashtag #Pratchat19.

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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Elizabeth Flux, sci-fi, standalone, Will Kostakis

#Pratchat6 – A Load of Old Tosh

08/04/2018 by Pratchat Imps 3 Comments

In episode six, word nerd and crypto-cruciverbalist David “DA” Astle joins us to discuss our first non-Discworld novel, Terry Pratchett’s Dodger! Published in 2012, it’s set in Victorian London and is heavily inspired by Charles Dickens and Punch magazine co-founder Henry Mayhew, author of London Labour and the London Poor – and both men appear as characters!

In the first quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign, a young woman falls from a carriage during a London storm, followed by two threatening men. Out of a nearby sewer grate springs Dodger, street orphan and accomplished “tosher” (sewer scavenger), who fights them off before Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew happen by and take the woman to safety. Dickens enlists Dodger’s aid in investigating their mysterious charge, who is clearly on the run but refuses to speak of herself or those coming after her. Dodger will need to be sharp as a razor and to have all the luck the Lady of the Sewers can give him in this adventure – but will he be the same Dodger when it’s over?

In a spot of time travel, we leap forward to one of Pratchett’s last books. More serious than many of his other works, though still light in tone and written in a very Dickensian style – including chapters! – Dodger is quite a departure for Pratchett in many ways while still remaining essentially Pratchetty. (Pratchettesque?) What do you think of Dodger? Let us know! Use the hashtag #Pratchat6 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_06.mp3

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You can find David Astle online at davidastle.com, itself a haven of word puzzles and anagrams, and he’s on Twitter as @DontAttempt (a joking translation of his cryptic crossword-maker initials, DA, which some see as proof of difficulty!). His latest work is David Astle’s Gargantuan Book of Words, which is available now through publishers Allen & Unwin, but watch out for Rewording the Brain and 101 Weird Words and Three Fakes, appearing in 2018. You can also catch him on the wireless on ABC Melbourne.

You can read the full notes and errata for this episode on our website.

We return to the Discworld for our May 8th episode, though we are going slightly out of order to read Eric, the first illustrated Discworld book! And who better to discuss it than an illustrator? So we’ll be joined by Adelaide-based artist and comic book creator, Georgina Chadderton (aka George Rex)! This one is recorded hot on the heels of our April episode, so by the time you read this we may have already asked for your questions, but even if you missed that callout you can still join in on social media with the hashtag #Pratchat7.

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.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charles Dickens, David Astle, Dodger, Elizabeth Flux, Henry Mayhew, non-Discworld, standalone, Sweeney Todd

#Pratchat15 – It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)

08/01/2019 by Pratchat Imps Leave a Comment

We kick off the Year of the Incontrovertible Skunk with our fifteenth episode, heading not to the Discworld at all, but to Earth, 1990! Two guests – academic Jen Beckett and writer Amy Gray – join us as to tackle a book written by two authors: Good Omens, written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman!

The time has come for Armageddon: the End of Days, the Final Battle between Good and Evil. Which comes as rather a shock to the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, who’ve been more or less friends for centuries, and rather enjoy Earth the way it is, thank you very much. But can they really do anything about it in the face of the ineffable plan of God? Or when everything that happens has been foretold by a 16th century witch – as interpreted by her descendant, Anathema Device? And has anyone asked the Antichrist himself what he thinks? Well no, of course not. They don’t know where he is.

Good Omens was Sir Terry’s first collaboration with another author, and Gaiman’s first novel, written while he was still working on his biggest comics success, Sandman. In part a parody of The Omen, but joking about everything from motorways to computers and the Greatest Hits of Queen along the way, it’s an epic tale of Armageddon soon to arrive on the small screen via Amazon Prime and the BBC – adapted by Neil himself. Did you come to this as a Pratchett fan, or a Gaiman one? Did you cross over and start reading the others’ work? And how different do you find it to the rest of Pratchett? We’d love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat15 on social media to join the conversation.

https://media.blubrry.com/pratchat/pratchatpodcast.com/episodes/Pratchat_episode_15.mp3

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Dr Jennifer Beckett lectures at Melbourne University in Media and Communications. Her specialist areas as a researcher include Irish cinema and cultural studies, social media, and transmedia world-building. (Jen’s basically an expert in all the cool parts of popular culture.) A current focus for Jen is the connection between social media and trauma, as explored in her most recent article for The Conversation: “We need to talk about the mental health of content moderators”.

Amy Gray has written for The Age, The Guardian, the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre and many other publications and organisations. She’s currently working on her first book, hopefully to be published in 2019. You can find out more and support her independent writing via her Patreon. You can also find her on Twitter at @_AmyGray_.

You can find full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

We love bringing you Pratchat every month, but in order to make sure we can stick it out to the very end – and cover every one of Sir Terry’s books – we need your help! We’ve started an optional subscription service via Pozible which will help us keep making Pratchat for you, and even let us do it better; find out all about supporting Pratchat on our new Support Us page.

Next month we’ll continue the religious theme as we’re joined by the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones for an examination of faith, Discworld-style, in Small Gods! Send in your questions about gods (big or small) via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat16.

Posted in: Podcast Tagged: Amy Gray, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Good Omens, Jennifer Beckett, Neil Gaiman, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat42 Notes and Errata

08/04/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery, discussing the 25th Discworld novel, 2000’s The Truth.

  • The episode title is a riff on Douglas Adams’ most famous joke in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. When a race of “hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything“, it takes seven and a half million years to confidently announce the Answer is…42. A subsequent computer is built to work out what the question actually is so the answer can be understood.
  • As a side note, this episode marks the point at which there are more episodes of Pratchat than there are Discworld novels, a weird and bittersweet milestone. Thanks for sticking with us.
  • Stephanie was last a guest on #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“, discussing Mort. It was released on December 8th, 2017 – that’s three years and four months ago.
  • The book 42, subtitled “The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams”, is edited by his friend and collaborator Kevin Jon Davies. It will feature facsimiles of Adams’ writing taken from the archive of his work donated to his old college after his death, with added notes for context and explanations. A publication date has yet to be confirmed but it has hit its crowdfunding goal on both Unbound and Kickstarter, and at the time of publication you still have a couple of weeks to get in on it. Later in the episode Ben mentions this extract published in the Guardian UK.
  • Nominative determinism is the idea that one’s name will subtly influence you to do things that match your name, the most famous example perhaps being Thomas Crapper, an English engineer and plumber who made several important refinements that became standard in modern toilet design. (This is contrary to popular belief, which suggests he is the reason “crapper” is a euphemism for toilet, but this seems to pretty clearly pre-date his…er… contributions.)
  • Movable type is mentioned in more than one earlier Discworld book, but tracking down which ones is proving tricky. We’ll list them here when we find them out!
  • The Watergate scandal ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, after it became clear he both knew about and tried to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. The break-in was part of illegal wire-tapping to gain intelligence on the Democratic party; the Democratic National Convention HQ was in the Watergate building. Key evidence against Nixon were recordings he had made of conversations in the Oval Office, especially one known as the “smoking gun” in which he agrees to the cover up plan. The story was uncovered by journalists, especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who aided by anonymous sources including one who called himself “Deep Throat” and met with them in a carpark… You can see the references piling up, can’t you? The Truth also references the 1976 film about the scandal, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bernstein and Woodward.
  • Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit black comedy film which tells several crime stories set in Los Angeles. Two of the characters in the film are Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson), enforcers and hit-men working for a ruthless crime boss. Most of the references to the film are to their characters, who between them discuss what a Quarter Pounder burger is called in France, have a wallet with “Bad-Ass Motherfucker” written on it, extoll the virtues of dogs and declare they are going to “get medieval on yo ass”. 
  • Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, “the Old Firm”, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story of unremarkable Scot Richard Mayhew, who, when he refuses to abandon a seemingly homeless girl on the pavement, discovers the invisible “other London” world of London Below. Neverwhere first saw life as a television series in 1996, in which Croup and Vandemar were played by Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell. It has since been a novel, a comic book, the basis of several stage productions and most recently a radio adaptation by the BBC starring James McAvoy, in which Croup was played by Pratchat favourite Anthony Head! Gaiman is currently writing a sequel. Terry himself grew tired of the frequent comparisons between the two Firms; as he says in the Annotated Pratchett File: “Fiction and movies are full of pairs of bad guys that pretty much equate to Pin and Tulip. They go back a long way. That’s why I used ’em, and probably why Neil did too.”
  • Yes, Stephanie – intertextuality is indeed a word! It refers to the way that works of art, especially literature, draw on and influence each other.
  • Ben makes a mistake here; the Watergate activities were the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which is mostly important to note because it was quickly shortened to CREEP once the scandal broke.
  • The Skulls (2000; dir. Rob Cohen) stars Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek and Fringe fame) as a poor law student who scores a rowing scholarship to Yale University, and is invited to join “the Skulls”, a secret society for the rich and powerful. It’s based on the real life student society called the Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is one of three major student organisations at Yale, the others being similarly ominously-named the Scroll and Key and the Wolf’s Head. The Skull and Bones have their own meeting hall called “the Tomb” and own a small island, once luxurious but now considered a dump, in the St Lawrence river in upstate New York. Plenty of conspiracy theories involve the Skull and Bones; their members, or “Bonesmen” (women have only been admitted since the 1990s) certainly include many powerful people like major league sports stars and Presidents.
  • We couldn’t turn up anything Terry might be referencing with the high-backed chairs and circle of candles; if you find something, let us know!
  • “Disruption” is a popular buzzword amongst entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sphere, where the idea is that they don’t invent a new product or service, but a new way to organise an old one – often with complete disregard for how this might affect the livelihood of people involved in the existing industry. Uber is the most-often cited example; their system allowed anyone with a car to operate as a taxi driver for rides booked through the app, undercutting existing taxi services and circumventing licensing rules in the process. In Australia and many other countries taxi drivers do not have a union, and so they were powerless to do much about it; the owners of taxi companies and cars eventually tried to act, but with little success.
  • There are two calendars used on the Discworld: the Imperial Ankh-Morpork calendar (AM), which counts full-years (a full revolution of the disc) since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which counts half-years (one full set of seasons), and starts with the founding of Unseen University. The University calendar begins in AM 1282. The years given in The Truth use the University Calendar, which supplementary material tells us is preferred by most folk since it actually matches the seasons. As for the Centuries, it seems they might use the other calendar, since it is clearly the Century of the Anchovy by the time of Going Postal, but in Moving Pictures and it is still the Century of the Fruitbat, and based on a number of clues The Truth seems to happen in the late 1980s or possibly 1990, the first year of the Century of the Anchovy. (For more on how seasons and so on work on the Disc, see the episode notes for #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.)
  • You can find out more about the State Library of Victoria’s newspaper collection on their website.
  • Trove is an online digital archive created by the National Library of Australia and other libraries around Australia. It really does have an amazing collection of stuff!
  • Liz refers to the “folly” at Werribee Mansion; a folly is an architectural feature or building constructed purely for decoration, especially one that is expensive and/or made to look like it serves a function, even though it doesn’t.
  • Otto’s surname may also be a reference to Max Schreck, the German actor who portrayed Count Orlok, the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu was an unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, and most of the prints were destroyed after legal actual by the Bram Stoker estate, but the surviving print turned it into a cult film.
  • Clippit – not Clippy, though that’s what everyone called it – was the default form of the Microsoft Office Assistant, an “intelligent assistant” introduced in Office 97. Clippit was an animated paperclip, and famously would pop up asking if you wanted help with a variety of common writing tasks based on the content of your current document. Most people did not want help, but also didn’t know how to turn Clippit off. While the assistant could have other forms, Clippit was the default and most recognisable. The assistant was based on research showing that people interacted with computers as if they were people, but the inclusion of a person-like assistant made things worse as it felt like one person too many! After widespread user dissatisfaction and industry mockery the assistant was turned off by default in Office XP in 2001 – accompanied by ads saying Clippit was out of a job! – and then removed entirely in Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac).
  • The recent review of The Truth in the actual -ing Times is by Laura Freeman and was published on the 26th of March, 2021. Sadly it’s behind a paywall, but you might get to access it for free depending on when you visit; it’s Rereading The Truth – a comic novel that rivals Evelyn Waugh.
  • The accident-prone vampire who may or may not be Otto does indeed appear in Feet of Clay. He takes jobs as a holy water bottler, garlic stacker,  pencil maker, picket fence builder and sunglasses tester. (We mention him in our episode about that book: #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.)
  • Here’s the original version of the menboys tweet:

why do we call them cowboys when they're men. we should call them menboys

— Mr. Fuck (@Slammy_P) March 22, 2021
  • In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserablés – and its famous musical adaptation – protagonist Jean Valjean struggles to find work as an ex-convict and is taken in by the Bishop of Digne. In the middle of the night, Valjean decides he may as well live up to everyone’s expectations of him and steals the church’s silver, but he is caught and the next morning brought before the Bishop…who tells an astonished policeman that he gave the silver to Valjean – going so far as to hand over two silver candlesticks he claims Valjean forgot! He tells Valjean he must use the silver to become an honest man, as he has bought Valjean’s soul for God, convincing the bitter Valjean to change his life around. (As a side note, Ben is a big fan of the West End production of the musical, and in the not-as-great film, Hugh Jackman plays Valjean – and London cast Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, shows up as the Bishop of Digne!)
  • Before social media or web-based forums, there were Usenet newsgroups, the first internet equivalent to local bulletin board systems. Started in 1980, the Usenet system allowed for “threads” of messages posted by various users, organised into groups that were categorised in hierarchies similar to domain names. The “alt.fan” category became a popular meeting place for fans of all kinds of different media, discussing their favourite TV shows, comics and books, and posting documents – like the famous Annotated Pratchett File (APF) – that would later be hosted on websites or wikis instead. Pratchett himself was known to lurk on alt.fan.pratchett and occasionally answer questions, many of which are quoted in the APF.
  • The Guardian is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1821, and notable as it is funded by a charitable trust which aims to preserve its independence. As well as the print paper in the UK, it has online publications there and in the US and Australia. The Saturday Paper is a similarly independent weekly paper produced in Australia by Schwartz Media since 2014, who also publish Quarterly Essay and The Monthly, which focus on long-form journalism and opinion, and the podcast 7am, a weekday podcast which tries to give a deeper look at a single story from the week.
  • Ben is remembering a story from design podcast 99% Invisible, but the streets under the streets aren’t in San Francisco, they’re in Seattle. It’s the last story in episode 290, “Mini-Stories: Volume 4“, from 2018. We previous mentioned that 99% Invisible episode in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
  • The story of Darwin embracing Christianity on his deathbed is commonly told by anti-evolutionists, as it also claims he recanted his theory at the same time – but it was invented by a woman who hadn’t been there. This New Yorker article is a good account of the truth.
  • Pascal’s wager was the posthumously published argument by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in which he used ideas of probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism to argue that all humans should try and believe in God, since the reward if He exists is infinite, and the loss if he does not is negligible.
  • The character of Benny in Pratchat favourite movie The Mummy (1999) first tries to ward off Imhotep the undead monster with a cross, but when that doesn’t work he reveals a collection of religious charms for which he knows accompanying prayers. (We think we last mentioned The Mummy in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, but there are many earlier examples too. See also the next note.)
  • While there is a Scorpion King 4: The Quest for Power, and it was released on Netflix, that was in 2016. The one recently added to Netflix Australia was Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption. There’s also a fifth film, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, a direct sequel to Scorpion King 4. (We previously mentioned the Scorpion King franchise in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.)
  • Stream Team is a series of Guardian articles about the hidden gems available via various streaming services. Liz did indeed eventually write an article about The Mummy films for Stream Team, in June 2021.
  • Hood ornaments on cars were originally invented because in early designs the radiator cap protruded from the front of the car. Instead of a boring functional cap, some manufacturers made small ornaments and used those as the cap; once they became a symbol of the brand, like the Jaguar jaguar and the Rolls Royce angel, they continued to be attached to the hood even once the radiator was relocated to entirely inside the hood. They disappeared in part due to changing tastes, but also because of pedestrian safety standards in Europe.
  • Mulder and Scully are the protagonists of the television series The X-Files, which we previously mentioned in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. The pair are FBI agents who investigate cases which are supernatural or otherwise unexplained. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a profiler and believer in aliens and conspiracies, while Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor and a skeptic; the professional and later romantic and sexual tension between them was a popular part of the show. They eventually begin a relationship during the last few seasons of the show’s initial run, and they try to stay together through the subsequent films and revival seasons.
  • Stephanie is right: The Truth (2000) comes a few years and five Discworld novels before the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men (2003). We discussed the latter in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.
  • Privilege comes from the Latin “privilegium”, which does indeed means private law; in many legal jurisdictions, a privilege is still defined as a “private law” that affords a particular entitlement or protection to a person or class of persons.
  • The one who thinks in italics is, as suggested by Liz, Edward d’Eath, the antagonist of Men at Arms. The book says of him: “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” (We discussed Men at Arms in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
  • The use of eyeglasses goes back to at least the 13th century, with the earliest records show them in Pisa, Northern Italy. There’s some contention about whether they may also have been invented around the same time or earlier in China or India, but unlike many other inventions which were clearly found in Asia first, the evidence for this isn’t clear.
  • Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He began writing professionally in around 1974, primarily in radio and television, and wrote ten books (including seven novels) between 1979 and 1992 (though it’s probably fairer to count it as nine, since The Deeper Meaning of Liff is really an extended version of The Meaning of Liff). The Salmon of Doubt was published after his death, containing a collection of fiction and non-fiction, some of which had not been published before.
  • While the form of “gazette” adopted into English does come via French, it ultimately derives from the Venetian phrase “gazeta dele novità“, or “a gazeta of news” – gazeta being the cost of the short paper, equivalent to a half-penny. It’s therefore not quite right to remove the -ette suffix, but we could offer “gaz” or even “megagaz” as the bigger equivalent?
  • Green Left, previously Green Left Weekly, is an Australian socialist newspaper founded in 1990. It is associated with the political party Socialist Alliance, though it is run independently by the Green Left Association.
  • The other Discworld podcasts we mention this episode are Who Watches the Watch? and The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone

#Pratchat41 Notes and Errata

08/03/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“, featuring guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro, discussing 2008’s standalone young adult novel, Nation.

  • The episode title is riffing on the title of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005, dir. Robert Rodriguez). It references Mau’s feeling of being like a hermit crab, looking for a bigger shell to live in, and Daphne’s status as a “trouserman”.
  • For listeners outside of Australia, some brief background on our opening acknowledgement: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples never ceded sovereignty of Australia to English colonisers in the 18th century. The English used the legal concept of terra nullius to claim the land belonged to no-one, and could be claimed for the Crown. Over two centuries later, in 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in the case Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that indigenous peoples’ traditional ownership could be legally recognised, introducing the concept of “native title”. While this has not yet resulted in Australia or any of its states signing treaties with indigenous peoples, it has since become common practice for an “acknowledgment of country” or “acknowledgment of traditional owners” to be given at events, paying respect to and publicly naming (if they are known) the custodians of the land on which the event takes place. We’d like to thank Charlotte for providing wording to appropriately acknowledge the history of indigenous science.
  • Lost is a television drama created by by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof in 2004. It follows a large ensemble cast of plane crash survivors who are lost on an island in the South Pacific. They are threatened by weird creatures, supernatural occurrences, a mysterious organisation and other inhabitants of the at first seemingly empty island. It was famous for its ongoing supernatural mystery with complex storylines; use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; and, ultimately, for failing to provide a satisfying conclusion to the mystery after six years of buildup.
  • Terry said Nation was his favourite of his books in many interviews, but perhaps most famously in the acceptance speech for the 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Award, which Nation won. As Ben reads out in a footnote, he said “I believe Nation is the best book I have ever written or will ever write”, and doesn’t appear to have changed his mind afterwards. The entire speech appears in his non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard. (This is a also a good source for his comments about feeling the need to write Nation.)
  • In nautical terms, a schooner is a ship with two or more masts with “fore-and-aft” rigged sails; to avoid more nautical jargon, this means the edges of the sails point at the front and back of the ship, rather than sticking out over the sides as in square-rigged ships. Interestingly this is the sort of rigging used by Austronesian sailors thousands of years ago – including the “lobster-claw” sails mentioned in the book (presumably a relative of the crab claw sails of our world).
  • In beer terms, a schooner is…certainly a size of beer glass used in Australia. The sizes of beer glasses and their names are notoriously varied across Australia’s states and territories. “Schooner” is almost universally used for a glass which holds 425 millilitres (or 15 fluid ounces), but they’re not common in all states – most pubs won’t have them in Victoria, for example. We say “almost universally” because in South Australia the 425ml glass is called a “pint” (even though every other state uses a standard 570ml glass for pints), and they use “schooner” to mean the common smaller-sized glass of 285ml. In Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane this smaller glass is called a “pot”, while in Sydney and Canberra (where standard schooners are more common) it’s a “middy”. Learning to work in a bar in Australia is quite an education.
  • We’ve so far covered a few of Terry’s standalone novels, most of which came at the start and end of his career. They include the early sci-fi novels The Dark Side of the Sun (see #Pratchat18) and Strata, his first novel The Carpet People, Good Omens with Neil Gaiman (see #Pratchat15), Nation and Dodger (see #Pratchat6).
  • Fight Club began life as a short story by author Chuck Palahniuk before being expanded into a novel published in 1996, and adapted into a film in 1999 by David Fincher starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. The story follows an unnamed insomniac protagonist who is tired of his normal, numb existence. When his home is destroyed, he moves in with soap salesman Tyler Durden and the pair start “Fight Club”, an underground group in which men physically fight each other in order to feel something. Famously, both the first and second rules of Fight Club are “Do not talk about Fight Club.”
  • There are many creation stories found in the Pacific Islands; Ben is taking some time to research them for signs of inspiration for those of the Nation. The idea of human souls becoming dolphins, though, is not a Polynesian one; dolphins are considered lucky and to be respected in many sailing traditions, though, and feature in many stories of Greek mythology, where it was taboo to kill them.
  • The Russian flu is a name sometimes used for the flu pandemic of 1889-1890, also known at the time as the “Asiatic flu”, though neither name is used in literature now. It killed around 1 million people worldwide, but what caused it isn’t known for sure. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was much worse, killing between 17 and 100 million people; it was caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus, which was also responsible for the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic.
  • 12 Monkeys is a 1995 time travel film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt. Inspired by the French short film La Jetée, it follows James Cole, a prisoner in the virus-ravaged future of 2035, where humanity is forced to live underground. A group of scientists select Cole as a test subject to be sent back in time to stop the release of the virus, which they think was engineered by a terrorist organisation known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. The film was later adapted into a television series which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2018.
  • Charles Darwin (1809-1882) made his famous voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, and by the time of his return to England was already well-known in scientific circles. The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. All of this marries well with the idea that the book takes place in the 1860s, though there’s plenty of room to move. We’ll talk a lot more about him eighteen months after this episode when we discuss The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch in #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“.
  • Disinfectant in the nineteenth century was still pretty new, since germ theory was still catching on. We’ve been unable to find any historical substance that might have inspired the dripping red substance, though it probably smelled much worse than crushed up roses. (If you know, please tell us!)
  • A tsunami is a series of huge waves caused by displacement of large amounts of water in a sea, ocean or other large body of water. They are primarily caused by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Pratchett was initially inspired by the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption, but not long after he had the idea for Nation there was a tsunami in the Indian ocean which killed more than 20,000 people on Boxing Day, 2004. He postponed work on the story. The name tsunami is Japanese, and means “harbour wave”. It is the preferred scientific term, rather than the older term “tidal wave”, since tsunamis are not caused by tides.
  • Daphne’s father, Henry Fanshaw (later King Henry IX), is Governor of Port Mercia in the Rogation Sunday Islands.
  • Survivor guilt – the feeling that one has done something wrong by surviving when others have died – is a common expression of post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • The Tattersalls Club Charlotte mentions is a private gentlemen’s club founded in Brisbane in 1865 by, in their own words, “a group of gentlemen who were prominent in both business and in the thoroughbred horse racing industry”. In December 2018, after some public protest that they still only allowed men as members, a vote was held which passed by a margin of only about 1% to allow women to join, but a group of members were so against this they appealed to the Brisbane supreme court, asking for a recount thanks to some rules technicalities. Their appeal was denied in February 2019, and the club now accepts women as members.
  • In case you’ve been living in one, an “echo chamber” refers to any situation in which a group of people only listens to others who agree with their own views, amplifying their belief that they are right and shielding them from criticism or debate. It is especially applied to social media, where one’s curated list of who you follow can create a “bubble” of only like-minded opinions.
  • To answer Liz’s question, no, Terry didn’t draw the illustrations for Nation. They are by children’s book illustrator and author Jonny Duddle, who is credited as the sole illustrator for the UK edition of the book. Duddle drew everything, including the maps, the chapter illustrations and the in-character drawings by Mau and Daphne. (He also did extra endpaper designs featuring a hermit crab for the “Special Numbered Collectors’ Edition”.) As far as we can tell he also illustrated the original cover, though his art was not used in the US edition, which has a cover by Bill Mayer. We’re not sure if the US edition has any of Duddle’s art – not even the bits that seem important to the plot! The current UK edition of the book has a new cover by Laura Ellen Anderson, but we think it still has Duddle’s art inside. We don’t have access to those editions, so we’d love to hear from you with details if you do!
  • It is indeed true that right up until the 19th century most sailors did not know how to swim. This was both because there was little chance a ship could turn around fast enough to get them if they fell overboard, even if the captain chose to try, and because very few of them were professional sailors anyway – they were temporary hires, or drafted or press-ganged into service. Also, in the time before fast travel and public swimming pools, only people who lived near the sea or a lake would swim recreationally, so it wasn’t a common skill.
  • The history of bathing suits goes back to the 16th century, when they were actually used for bathing in public baths, but even when they started to be used for swimming their initial purpose was to hide women’s bodies. By the time more form-fitting styles were desired, the only material that could really be used was wool, since synthetic materials hadn’t yet been invented and everything else sagged or became too heavy in water. This article at Swim Swam covers the history of wool swimsuits in great detail.
  • Sweary parrots turn up in lots of places, including Tintin, the film Deep Blue Sea, the videogame Neverwinter Nights 2, and real life – including (and we checked this with a few sources) US President Andrew Jackson’s pet parrot, Poll, who had to be removed from Jackson’s funeral because it was swearing too much.
  • Pratchett not only had the comedy parrot in Eric, but in Moving Pictures the directors abandon using parrots to add sound to their clicks because the dialogue always ended up naughty. We covered Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“, and Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
  • Bridgerton is Netflix’s wildly successful 2021 series about the Regency-era Bridgerton family and their daughters’ quests for love and marriage. The series is an adaptation of the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn, which begin with 2000’s The Duke and I. The series contains a great deal more sex than anything written by Jane Austen – none of the Bridgerton sisters are likely to vaporise in their rooms! Well…probably not while alone, and certainly not quietly.
  • Spoiler alert: Ben is talking about the character Mrs Landingham, who dies in the penultimate episode of The West Wing‘s second season, “18th and Potomac”. The scene Ben recalls with President Jed Bartlett in the church is in the following season finale episode, “Two Cathedrals”. Both were originally broadcast in 2001.
  • We’ve previously mentioned 1970s Swedish pop sensations ABBA back in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, which came out the same month as the band’s reunion single “I Still Have Faith in You”. The song “Waterloo” was their winning entry for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, and the start of their rise to international fame. “Nina, Pretty Ballerina” was from their pre-Eurovision first album Ring Ring, released in 1973 under the name Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid (or, in Austria, Björn & Benny, Anna & Frida).
  • Studies in 2017 and 2020 concluded that regardless of culture or language, babies recognise and prefer baby talk (or “Infant Directed Language”) to regular speech.
  • In Mort the two prominent female characters are Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and Queen Keli of Sto Helit. Mort is instantly infatuated with Keli, but eventually marries Ysabell, with whom he has bickered for the entire book. You can hear our thoughts about all this in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“.
  • The Wee Free Men (discussed in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“) was published in 2003, five years before Nation. The later Tiffany Aching book Wintersmith, published a couple of years before Nation in 2006, has the now 13-year-old Tiffany deal with her first real boy trouble.
  • We know you’re wracking your brain to think of it too, but the “motorcycle dominos” appear in so many films and television series that they are a trope. Ben probably saw it in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton), but you’ll also find it in the Clint Eastwood movie Every Which Way But Loose, 80s slasher film Friday the 13th Part III, and even an episode of Scrubs.
  • How long has the Nation existed? Daphne counts 102 dead Grandfathers in the cave by the time they can no longer see the entrance, and later loses count after “hundreds”; the prose mentions “hundreds and thousands” – possibly a thought of Daphne’s – but that’s inconclusive. But even assuming there are only 1,000 of them, and that a handful of Grandfathers are put in the cave per generation, using the general estimate of one generation per 25 years tells us the Nation’s history goes four or five thousand years, if not tens of thousands. Not at all far-fetched when we consider that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures stretch back at least 50,000 years, and that they were likely the first peoples to ever cross an ocean.  
  • Ben is using the term “cargo cult” a little loosely. It comes from World War II, when Japanese and then Allied forces visited places in Melanesia – the nations and islands of the southwest Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, many of which had had little contact with other peoples. The soldiers brought with them goods and technology that had never been seen by the locals before, sometimes trading with them, but left after the war ended. In the hopes that the visitors and their cargo might return, some local peoples developed rituals in which they imitated the soldiers, integrating stories of their visitation into their existing beliefs. Many earlier examples have been found, and some still persist today.
  • Despite that fact that only Charlotte can remember its title, Liz and Ben discussed The Fifth Elephant only a month earlier, in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
  • Ben refers to the “Battle of Wits” between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Sicilian kidnapper Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from his 1973 novel. In the scene, Vizzini has Princess Buttercup at knifepoint, but cannot resist when challenged to a battle of wits to the death. After Vizzini pours two glasses of wine, the Man in Black pours a deadly poison, “iocane powder”, into one of the glasses; Vizzini will decide which one, and then they will both drink. The scene is the basis for one of Ben’s favourite party boardgames, one of several games based on the film published by Game Salute. We previously mentioned The Princess Bride in #Pratchat17 and #Pratchat36.
  • Atlantis is a fictional island nation invented by Plato for his books Timaeus and Critias. The Atlantean civilisation was described as powerful, and the Atlanteans themselves as “half gods”, but they grew too proud and the gods sunk their island beneath the sea in the space of a single day. The myth has proven popular for centuries, with versions since the twentieth century often imagining Atlantis as possessing advanced technologies – and perhaps causing their own demise, rather than it being a punishment of the gods.
  • We didn’t end up coming back to the map, but of note is Terry’s decision to split Australia in half, as Nearer Australia and Further Australia. It’s not mentioned in the novel, so we’ll have to decide for ourselves whether this is accurate and thus representative of some unknown alternate universe calamity, or is a reference to the fact that early European maps of Australia were often very incomplete, since they rarely sailed around the entire continent. (None split it in two, but many leave a big gap in the middle where South Australia is, as if to say: “who knows?”)
  • The Mythbusters team did indeed test what happens when shooting into water, in episode 34, “Bulletproof Water“. They listed the myth as “partly confirmed” – high velocity sniper rifle rounds disintegrated in less than a metre of water, but bullets from smaller guns needed more water to slow down enough to be safe; the Mythbusters said at least 8 feet. Firing at an angle into the water means the target doesn’t need to be as deep to be safe, though, so Mau being safe stands up until Cox is right on top of him at the end.
  • Mutant superhero Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, has epic super-speed sequences in the films X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), both written and directed by Bryan Singer. Quicksilver moves so fast that everything else appears to him to be in slow motion, so he easily redirects bullets fired at his allies so that they miss. Charlotte was miming the famous sequence from the original The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis) in which protagonist Neo, now aware he is inside a complex computer simulation, breaks the rules of physics and dodges bullets. The technique used to film this, now known as “bullet time”, involved still cameras being activated in sequence, allowing a slow-motion sequence in which the point of view moved around.
  • We’ve previously explained the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is quite something considering we’re a book club podcast. Check out the show notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
  • “A shrubbery!” is the first of many ludicrous demands made by the imposing Knights Who Say “Ni” as tribute, in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mau’s list of demands is very reasonable by comparison.
  • The tree-climbing octopus may have been inspired by the sadly fictitious “Pacific Northwest tree octopus”, an Internet hoax dating back to 1998. It was said to live in the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, right in the northwest corner of the USA, and that its main natural predator was the sasquatch. The original spoof site Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, created by “Lyle Zapato”, has been used to teach children Internet literacy.
  • Sadly it seems that no octopuses have learned to count. If you want to see the adorable and very smart things they do learn, Ben recommends you check out OctoNation, the world’s biggest octopus fan club.
  • The character with the coffin in Moby Dick is Queequeg, who is the son of a Polynesian chief. After he becomes friends with the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Queequeg joins him on Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, where he becomes a harpooner under the First Mate, Starbuck. When a casting of runes predicts his death, he has a coffin made for himself and refuses to eat or drink. When the whal Moby Dick sinks the Pequod, Queequeg goes down with the ship, but Ishmael survives by clinging to the floating coffin until he is picked up by another ship. It seems pretty clear Cookie’s previous shipmate is a nod to the character in Herman Melville’s book.
  • The Pratchett interview excerpt about fantasy that’s lately been doing the rounds is from an interview he did with The Onion in 1995. This is before The Onion went online, of course, but a few months after Pratchett’s death in 2015, fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss transcribed it on his blog as part of his tribute to Terry.
  • Liz and Ben’s differing opinions on Lord of the Flies go all the way back to #Pratchat7A and #Pratchat9.
  • Heart of Darkness is a 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. Protagonist Charles Marlow becomes a steamboat captain for an ivory trading company and travels up the Congo river, where he becomes obsessed with another employee of the company, Kurtz. Kurtz, now sick and close to death, is revered as a success, but his habits and methods are extreme. It was most famously adapted by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now, with the setting relocated to the Vietnam war and the US Army replacing the ivory company.
  • The Blue Lagoon (1980, dir. Randal Kleiser, of Grease fame) is an adaptation of the 1908 romance novel written by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. In the story, two young American cousins – Richard (Dicky in the novel) and Emmeline (you’ll see in a moment why Daphne rejects the name) – are marooned on a South Pacific Island island with the ship’s cook. The cook dies, and the two grow up on the island alone, eventually “falling in love” and having a child together before being rescued. The movie, which starred Brooke Shields as Emmeline, was critically panned but did very well at the box office. There were two previous film adaptations in 1923 and 1949, and once since in 2012, as well as a 1991 sequel to the 1980 film, Return to the Blue Lagoon, starring Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause; it’s basically a retelling of the original story, with the twist that Krause plays the son of Richard and Emmeline, and he and Jovovich’s character decide to stay on the island after they encounter a crew of sailors.
  • Is mother of beer a real thing? Sort of! Listeners Felix and Elizabeth both contacted us about masato, a drink made in the Amazonian basin from the yuca plant, also known as cassava or manioc root. In traditional preparation, the yuca is peeled and soaked or boiled in water, then chewed by women who spit the juice into a bowl. Their saliva converts the starch in the juice into sugar, and wild yeast or bacteria ferments the sugar into alcohol. Raw yuca is poisonous, but it’s not the spit that makes it safe to drink – the soaking or boiling does that. Masato is basically a form of chicha, a drink made through similar means throughout Latin America from less poisonous vegetables, most often corn.
  • Beer is made from cereal grains, most often barley which has been malted (soaked in water to make it germinate, then dried out with heat to stop it growing, and usually mashed into a powder). The malt is mixed with warm water, and usually hops (the flowers of the hop plant) to add bitterness and flavour, before yeast is added. The yeast ferments the sugars in the malt into alcohol. Beer is one of the oldest documented foods, and has been made by humans for around 13,000 years or more.
  • To put Charlotte’s comment that “where humans exist, grains are” in context, evidence found in the last decade or so makes it pretty clear that grains have been part of the human diet for probably at least 100,000 years.
  • Kava is a plant that grows in the pacific islands; its root is made into a drink with a sedative effect. It’s hugely important in many places, drunk for medicinal, religious, political, cultural and social reasons. It’s effect is described as very different to that of alcohol, caffeine or nicotine.
  • It was guest Myfanwy Coghill who said anyone can learn the skill of singing; you can hear this and many other amazing insights from her in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.  
  • You can find Pratchat on Podchaser, and also a list of Discworld read-through podcasts which Ben tries to keep up to date. For a more detailed list, see The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters. Let him know if you find one that’s missing!
  • Our Llamedos Holiday Camp on the Clacks panel, “Podcasting Discworld”, was held online at 3 PM UK time on Sunday, March 7 (which was 2 AM Monday the 7Ath, Australian Eastern Daylight Time). As well as Liz and Ben, the panel featured Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Colm Kearns of Radio Morpork, and Al Kennedy of Desert Island Discworld.
  • The Answer, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is shorthand for “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. It is revealed by hyper advanced supercomputer Deep Thought to be…42. This doesn’t make sense, but Deep Thought also solves that problem: no-one actually knows what the Question is. Hence he builds another computer to figure it out, and causing no end of trouble for one Arthur Dent.

More notes coming soon!

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Charlotte Pezaro, Elizabeth Flux, Nation, non-Discworld, standalone
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