Vimes

#Pratchat1 – Boots Theory

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In our first full-length episode, Elizabeth and Ben are joined by comedian Cal Wilson to discuss the winner of our poll – Terry Pratchett’s 1993 novel Men at Arms! The fifteenth Discworld novel, Men at Arms is the second to focus on the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, following Guards! Guards!

Samuel Vimes, Captain of the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch, is only a week away from marriage and retirement. So of course “ethnic tensions” between dwarfs and trolls are at boiling point, something explodes in the Assassin’s Guild, and there’s a murderer on the loose – a murderer who uses a mysterious and uniquely deadly weapon… Luckily the Watch has expanded, taking on three unorthodox new recruits. But will they be enough to stop war in the streets, and catch a murderer who can kill from a distance?

Men at Arms is a real smorgasbord of Discworld stuff, and a great introduction to the world – especially the quintessential Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork. It’s also a fun howdunit (i.e. we know who, just not how they’ll be identified and caught), has one of the best (and most tragic) friendships in the series, introduces (if clumsily) one of Pratchett’s favourite romances, and carries a message about the dangers of killing machines which sadly hasn’t got any less relevant in the last quarter of a century.

Do you agree this is great place to start? Is it the best Watch book, or at least up there? Was Pratchett ahead of his time in how he handled the issues in the book, and would he have done it differently if he’d been writing now? We want to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat1 on social media if you want to comment on our discussion here.

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Guest Cal Wilson (she/her) was a Melbourne-based New Zealand stand-up comedian and author. The children’s book she couldn’t name at the time is George and the Great Bum Stampede, illustrated by Sarah Davis and published by Scholastic. It’s the first in a series about George’s family, the Peppertons. Cal passed away unexpectedly after a brief illness in October 2023; she is sorely missed. GNU Cal Wilson.

You can find the full show 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.

#Pratchat1 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the notes and errata for episode 1, “Boots Theory“, featuring guest Cal Wilson discussing the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms.

  • We did indeed have Cal back to discuss Sourcery – see #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. Cal also returned for our fiftieth episode, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, to discuss Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook. Tragically Cal passed away unexpectedly in 2023; but a person’s not dead while their name is still spoken. GNU Cal Wilson.
  • For more on our decision to start with Men at Arms, see #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and also Liz’s post, “Let’s Start From the Very Beginning (but not actually)”.
  • Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, and the second to feature the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Ben does now write these things down (and, indeed, has a very comprehensive spreadsheet).
  • What Ben meant about the copyright on “Discworld” is that this is the first book in which “Discworld” appears on the imprint page as a registered trademark. Intellectual property (or IP) law is a complex topic, and can differ greatly from region to region, but to cover the basics:
    • Copyright (denoted by ©) is the protection of original works from being copied or otherwise used without the creator’s permission. This mostly applies to literary, dramatic, musical or other artistic work (including visual art), often lasts for a fixed period (the creators’ life plus 70 years in Australia), and is automatically applied without a creator having to do anything. A creator can extend it to others, as Terry later did by assigning copyright to he and his wife Lyn, and then their company, Dunmanifestin Limited. Copyright doesn’t protect ideas, only the specific expression of ideas, which is where some of the complexity comes in.
    • A trademark (denoted by ™️ or ®) is a “sign” that shows a product was made by a certain person or company. The sign can be almost anything: a word, a specific colour or style of packaging, a logo, a design, even a sound. It’s an old concept, similar to the “maker’s mark” used by artisans that is often mentioned in Antique Roadshow on silverware, jewellery, ceramics and so on. Anyone can start using the ™️ symbol, which suggests a common law trademark, but the ® denotes a registered trademark which is more easily enforceable by law. These are managed by government agencies (e.g. IP Australia). Also worthy of note is that if you have a trademark, you have to actively be using it, and you must defend it if someone else starts using it, or you will likely lose it.
    • It didn’t come up in this episode, but there are some complexities involved if a copyright belongs to a company and that company ceases to exist without its assets being transferred to another company or person. In the UK this can mean ownership of a work transfers half to the original creators, and half to the Crown, which has led to speculation that King Charles now owns half the rights to the Discworld videogames – though this has yet to be resolved…
  • You’ve probably heard of the Thames, but the Yarra is the common name for the river Birrarung or Biarrarung Marr, which flows through the heart of Melbourne, or Narrm. It runs for nearly 250 kilometres from the Yarra Ranges in inland Victoria to the ocean in Port Phillip Bay, though its course and nature has been changed extensively since European colonisation. It was previously nicknamed “the upside down river” due to the golden-brown muddy colouring it acquires by the time it flows through Melbourne. This is also the product of colonisation, as land clearing and mining have increased the erosion of surrounding fine clay into the water.
  • The negative reviewer of Pratchett’s work to which Ben refers was Northern Irish poet and literary critic Tom Paulin, who appeared on BBC2’s Late Review television program and derided Pratchett, writing him off as a populist: “… selling thousands of copies – a complete amateur – doesn’t even write in chapters – hasn’t a clue.” This seems to have been in around 1993 or 1994; Pratchett proudly reproduced the quote in the front many of his books, with the earliest example Ben can find being in the 1995 Corgi paperback of Interesting Times.
  • Terry Pratchett’s debut novel, The Carpet People, was first published in 1971, when Pratchett was 23 years old. However an earlier version of the story was serialised as some of his very first published fiction in the Bucks’ Free Press in 1965, when he was only 17! Most of the instalments of that version appear in the second collection of his early stories, Dragons at Crumbling Castle, published shortly after Pratchett’s death in 2015.
  • While the Vimes Boots Theory is articulated in the way of Pratchett, the idea behind it is of course not new. We’d like to thank Jeanette Hall on Twitter, who shared a link to an earlier version of the Boots Theory! In 1914, Irish house painter and sign writer Robert Noonan wrote published the semi-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, “Being the story of twelve months in Hell, told by one of the damned, and written down by Robert Tressell.” (Tressell was the pen-name used by Noonan.) Based on his life working in Hastings between 1906 and 1910, the book contains a passage about the price of stockings and coal and how they are the means by which “the working classes are robbed.” We’ve included an excerpt below, but you can read the original text at the Union History website shared by Jeanette. You can also see the original manuscript! (This feels especially poignant because Ben’s own Great Great Grandfather was a painter in Belfast until his death in 1910 prompted the McKenzies to migrate to Australia.)

Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles. Everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish which is dear at any price.

Six weeks previously Owen bought a pair of second-hand boots for three shillings and they were now literally falling to pieces. Nora’s shoes were in much the same condition, but, as she said, it did not matter so much about hers because there was no need for her to go out if the weather were not fine.

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell, 1914
  • Also of note: the Vimes Boots Theory influenced the work of UK equality and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who in January 2022 created the Vimes Boots Poverty Index. The Index was intended to be a record of the prices of staple foods and other essentials over time, to demonstrate the disproportionate impact of rising prices on the poor. It was also specifically meant to show that government reports which only take inflation into account are inadequate, since they are not an accurate indicator of the way goods prices change. The Pratchett Estate – particularly Rhianna Pratchett – wholeheartedly endorsed this use of Vimes’ name. In the end, media and social media attention for the idea (using the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex) was enough to persuade the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) to change how they calculated cost of living expenses, largely making the compilation of the Index unnecessary. You can read more about it on the L-Space wiki.
  • Scooby-Doo is a children’s adventure show which began in 1969 with the Hanna-Barbera animated series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! It centres on a group of mystery-solving teenagers: Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers and Shaggy’s dog, a Great Dane named Scooby-Doo. Sometimes calling themselves “Mystery Inc.”, the group travel America in a mini-van called the Mystery Machine investigating supposedly supernatural occurrences. Famously most of their adventures end by revealing that the ghost, monster or other weirdness was a hoax all along, perpetrated by an old man in a costume. The show was hugely influential – not least because it helped fill the gap left after more violent superhero cartoons of the 60s like Space Ghost and The Herculoids were cancelled following protests from parent groups. There have been numerous animated series and films, and even live-action films, since 1969, and more are still being made. The characters are not usually explicitly romantically linked; Cal references a reboot that had genius Velma and dorky hippie Shaggy dating, and this has happened at least a couple of times. They are shown to try dating in both the 2010 animated series Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated and the 2011 live-action film Scooby-Doo: Curse of the Lake Monster (a sequel to the 2009 reboot of the previous live-action films from 2002 and 2004). For the record, in both versions they quickly realise they don’t have a spark and remain “just friends”.
  • It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King in which a group of teenagers face a nameless evil creature, the titular “It”, which changes shape to evoke fear in its victims. It primarily appears in the shape of a clown named “Pennywise the Dancing Clown”. In a memorable sequence from early in the novel – replicated in both the 1990 TV mini-series adaptation and the first of the two-part film adaptations in 2017 – the Clown appears in the town sewer. In both versions Pennywise has primarily white-face makeup, not dissimilar to Paul Kidby’s version of Dr Whiteface. (“It” was portrayed by Tim Curry in 1990, and Bill Skarsgård in 2017.)
  • Clowns in our world can and do copyright their face makeup, and the egg gallery is based on the “Clown and Character Registry”, where many clowns actually did register to have their makeup painted on a goose egg and displayed. In the UK, the tradition can be traced back to Stan Built in the 1930s, though most of his original eggs were damaged or destroyed. In 1988 (or 1984 according to some sources), Clown Bluey, Chairman of Clowns International at the time, resurrected the tradition. This mini documentary from 2017 features Debbie Smith, the Clown Egg Gallery artist from 2010 to 2023. Clowns International still seems to run the egg gallery, with their website including a form to order a pair of eggs (one for the gallery and one for you), now painted by current artist Julie Proctor. So we’re sorry again, clowns. (Thanks to Maia in Michigan, who put us onto some sources via Twitter which helped us update this entry!)
  • Ben uses commedia dell’arte more-or-less correctly.
  • 99% Invisible is a podcast all about design, hosted by Roman Mars. The episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben while discussing the Alchemist’s Guild is “The Post-Billiards Age” from May 2015. (This episode will get mentioned again in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.)
  • There are indeed ghosts on the Discworld, appearing in several of the novels. We’ll be meeting some of them fairly soon, as one plays a major role in Wyrd Sisters. (See #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches”.)
  • The final Discworld book is actually The Shepherd’s Crown; I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth-last, and the second-last to feature young witch Tiffany Aching. (We try to keep our spreadsheet handy in future episodes to avoid such basic mistakes.)
  • “Shoot” is used for arrows, as the term predates guns by many centuries.
  • CMOT Dibbler is pervasive once he arrives, but is not in The Colour of Magic. (See #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation”.) In fact he first shows up when the Watch does, in Guards! Guards! (See #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.)
  • Not only are Lord Vetinari’s plans for the future unknown, but it has also never been revealed how he ascended to the position of Patrician in the first place. We do get a little of his backstory in Night Watch; see #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes”.
  • We are aware that despite being asked “which Guild would you join”, we decided we would be wizards, witches or members of the Watch, none of which have an official guild – at least at the time of Men at Arms. See #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King”, for the creation of at least a temporary guild of Watchmen in The Fifth Elephant.

#Pratchat52 – A Near-Watch Experience

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This month, we’ve put down the books and picked up the remote control! Guests Patrick Lenton and Fury join us to discuss a show “based on characters created by Sir Terry Pratchett”: 2021’s The Watch.

Sam Vimes was a street kid in Ankh-Morpork who joined the Watch to kill its Captain and free the imprisoned members of his gang. But he had a change of heart. Twenty years later, he’s still there – a washed-up drunk of a Captain, whose force of misfits have almost nothing to police since the criminal Guilds were all legalised. But during his latest assignment – to find a missing library book – he sees someone who died twenty years ago. Soon the Watch is up to their necks in dragons, ancient artefacts and magical experiments gone wrong, and it’ll take all their cunning and heart to get to the bottom of it…plus a little help from noblewoman-turned-vigilante, Lady Sybil Ramkin.

After a long road through development hell, initially with Pratchett himself at the helm, The Watch eventually emerged as a surprisingly “punk rock police procedural”; a brightly-coloured Dungeon-punk explosion which wears its queerness on its sleeve. The Watch remixes characters and concepts from the books into something so different that fans and friends of Pratchett quickly disowned it. The critical reaction was middling at best, and it took six months for it to be released on Pratchett’s home soil.

But is it any good?

Could you divorce yourself from the source material? If so, does The Watch work on its own terms? Is it funny? Is it comprehensible? Is watching it a good time? Which bits got up your nose, and which did you love? Who was your favourite character, and why was it Cheery? And given we barely scratched the surface of talking about it this episode – should we do a bonus mini-series, discussing it episode by episode? Let us know by joining the conversation, using the hashtag #Pratchat52.

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Guest Patrick Lenton is currently Deputy Editor: Arts + Culture for The Conversation, and was previously a senior editor at Junkee. He is also a freelance writer whose work has spanned journalism, theatre, fiction and comedy. His most recent short story collection is Sexy Tales of Palaeontology from Subbed In, and he writes the newsletter All the Hetereosexual Nonsense I Was Forced To Endure with Rebecca Shaw. You can find Patrick on Twitter as @PatrickLenton, and his handy LinkTree will help you find his other stuff.

Guest Fury is a writer, illustrator and performer who previously appeared on Pratchat in #Pratchat19 (Soul Music) and #Pratchat29 (The Last Continent) – our last in-person episode, recorded in the before times! Their live multi-disciplinary show Gender Euphoria toured Australia in 2019 and 2020, and their book I Don’t Understand How Emotions Work is (probably) still available. You can find out more about them at furywrites.com, or follow them on Twitter as @fury_writes. Their first TV show, Crazy Fun Park, is currently in production and scheduled to premiere on ABC ME and ABC iview in late 2022.

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

Next month we’re heading to one of the books that (sort of) provided a big chunk of inspiration for The Watch, and a fan favourite, frequently topping rankings of the Discworld series: Night Watch! Meet the original Carcer Dun, Jocasta Wiggs, young Sam Vimes, and – eventually – Young Sam Vimes… Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat53, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

#Pratchat54 – The Land Before Vimes

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The Trousers of Time end up in a knot as writer Nadia Bailey rejoins Liz and Ben and we go back to the Glorious Past in the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, 2002’s Night Watch.

While pursuing dangerous killer Carcer across the rooftop of Unseen University, a magical bolt of lightning (or something) sends Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh, thirty years into the past – along with his quarry. Carcer kills Vimes’ old mentor, Sergeant John Keel, and Vimes steps into Keel’s thinly-soled shoes; he’ll have to show himself the ropes to keep history intact. But he’s not just reliving any old past: it’s almost the Glorious 25th of May. The day the people deposed the paranoid Patrician Lord Winder; the day hundreds were killed in violent clashes across the city; and the day John Keel died…

Night Watch is beloved by Discworld fans, no least because it gives a double dose of everyone’s favourite “honest copper”, Sam Vimes. But he leaves Sybil in labour as he’s thrust back intp the best and worst days of his early career, forced to grapple with the darkness in his and others’ souls with only the technobabble of a few time boffin monks for guidance. It’s possibly Pratchett’s darkest book, and certainly takes us into one of the darkest corners of the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork before the rise of Vetinari and the Guilds.

Does Vimes knows where to draw the line in this book? Is Carcer an intriguing villain, or a cookie cutter evil psychopath? Could you teach your younger self everything you needed to know to become you? And is this book in your top five, or do you fail to see what all the fuss is about? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat54 on social media.

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Guest Nadia Bailey is a writer, editor and critic. She’s published a number of pop-culture related books about such diverse subjects as Stranger Things, Frida Kahlo and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her latest publication is The Deck of Crystals, a deck of cards which looks into the history, superstition and lore of gemstones. Nadia has just begun a PhD researching (among other things) the lives of queer women during World War I. You can find Nadia on Twitter as @animalorchestra, or visit her website at nadiabailey.com.

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

Next month we’re joining a ragtag crew of misfits on a desperate mission to save the Disc in the second big illustrated Discworld adventure, The Last Hero! And to help us navigate Paul Kidby’s astonishing illustrations, we’re welcoming back illustrator and comic book creator Georgina Chadderton. Send us your questions via the hashtag #Pratchat55, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

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

#Pratchat61 – What Terry Wrote

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Designer and educator Matt Roden delves deep under Ankh-Morpork with Liz and Ben as they unravel the mystery of the penultimate City Watch book, 2005’s Thud!.

As the anniversary of the Battle of Koom Valley approaches, the dwarfs and trolls of Ankh-Morpork find their ancient enmity stirred up – not least by Hamcrusher, a conservative leader of the “Deep Down” dwarfs, who has preached hatred against the trolls. But now Hamcrusher’s dead – not that the other deep downers want the Watch to know about it – and Vimes must solve the puzzle of his murder before tensions explode across the city. On top of that, he’s also been sent a government inspector, he’s had to take on the Watch’s first vampire, someone’s stolen the most talked-about painting in town – and he has to get home at 6 o’clock sharp, every night, to read Where’s My Cow? to his infant son…

While most Watch books have a mystery that needs solving, none so far have felt as much like a contemporary thriller as Thud! There’s an awful lot going on, with politics, religion, art and history all in the mix. Is it too much for one book? Are there threads that get dropped along the way? Is Pratchett having his cake and eating it too with his fantasy abstractions of real world issues? And who do you think should star in Discworld legal drama The Good Dwarf? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat61 on social media!

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Guest Matt Roden is a graphic designer, educator and the Creative Learning Manager for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Matt has a long history with storytelling and education; he helped set up The Ministry of Stories in London, and was the first volunteer and a long-running Storyteller with Sydney’s Story Factory. You can follow Matt on Instagram (where you can see photos of his dog) at @matthewrodeo.

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

We apologise that this episode has gone out much later than planned. While our schedule has gotten a little out of whack, we’ll still be continuing our “Thud! trilogy” next episode with our special crossover with sibling Pratchett podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret. We’ll be joined by Jo and Francine to discuss Where’s My Cow?, the hottest children’s book in Ankh-Morpork! Plus we have plans to extend our Thud! trilogy to four parts – details coming in our very next episode.

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.

#Pratchat62 – There’s a Cow in There

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In this very special episode, Liz and Ben are joined by fellow Discworld podcasters Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel on an existential journey deep into our very souls! Yes, it’s part three of our Thud!-related trilogy, in which we discuss Where’s My Cow?

Every night at six o’clock, Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch, reads the picture book Where’s My Cow? to his one-year-old son, Young Sam. But tonight, in between doing the barnyard noises, Vimes starts to question whether this is really the right story for a child of Ankh-Morpork.

Released at the same time as Thud!, Where’s My Cow? is a picture book based on a novel inspired by a board game. Lavishly illustrated by newcomer to the Discworld Melvyn Grant, it takes the couple of pages explaining the book – and the “Vimes street version” – and brings them vividly to life, along with wonderful new visions of some of our favourite Discworld characters. But is Young Sam cute, or in the uncanny valley? What’s the deal with that flying book? What do you think the Discworld’s answer to duct tape would be? Are are you, in some way, looking for your cow? Join the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat62.

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Guests Joanna Hagan (chef, poet, playwright, author) and Francine Carrel (writer, editor) are the hosts of the Discworld podcast The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, which is about to reach its 100th episode! Their format splits each novel up into three weekly episodes per month, and they’re going through the Discworld books in mostly publication order, with side trips to Pratchett’s non-Discworld work along the way. Find them wherever good podcasts are available, but also at their website, thetruthshallmakeyefret.com, and on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, TikTok and probably something else by the time you read this. If you like what they do, please consider supporting them on Patreon.

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

As mentioned above and at the end of the episode, we’ve decided to cut ourselves some slack in the new year by extending the “Thud! trilogy” to four parts. In January we’ll be welcoming back Matt Roden to discuss the Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices“, featuring A. E. Pessimal and available in A Blink of the Screen. We’ll also tackle some more of your brilliant Thud! questions! If you have questions about the short story, send them via social media with the hashtag #Pratchat63 or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Finally, if you want to catch The Amazing Maurice before the rest of the Australia, and you’re in Adelaide, the Australian Discworld Convention’s fundraiser screening is on Saturday, the 10th of December, at 3 PM at the Palace Nova Prospect. Get details and book your tickets here! (We won’t be there, but do tell us if you go!)

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.

#Pratchat66 – Ol’ No Eyes Is Back

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Returning guest, author Amie Kaufman heads back to the Chalk with Liz and Ben to face the rough music in a bumper-size discussion of the penultimate Tiffany Aching book, 2010’s I Shall Wear Midnight.

Tiffany Aching, nearly sixteen, is no longer an apprentice. Now two years under the witch’s hat, she cares for those as can’t care for themselves, and deals with the harsh realities of rural life. But all is not well in the Chalk: the unending need for its only witch is pushing Tiffany to the edge, and an act of violence – and its consequences – test her limits. Roland, the Baron’s son, is engaged – but not to Tiffany. While he’s away, the old Baron dies, and Tiffany must fetch him home to take his place. And on top of all that, something is stirring: something old and evil that stirs up old prejudices and fears about witches – and is aiming them directly at Tiffany Aching…

Content note: this episode contains discussion of (fictional) intimate partner and family violence, miscarriage and suicide.
If you or anyone you know needs help, use the Wikipedia list of crisis lines to find one local to you.

Nearly three years after she danced the Dark Morris and kissed the Wintersmith, we rejoin Tiffany Aching, who is discovering that even fixing her mistakes can have consequences. But is this really a book for younger readers – or even young adults – when it includes some of the heaviest stuff of any Discworld novel? Does it all hang together, or are there a few ideas fighting each other in this plot? Who knew what and when about the Cunning Man, and is he Pratchett’s creepiest villain yet? What spill words do you not say when you’re listening to the show? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat66 on social media!

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Returning guest Amie Kaufman is the author of (so far) twenty novels for middle grade and young adult audiences, including the Illuminae Files and Aurora Cycle sci-fi trilogies with Jay Kristoff; the Elementals, Starbound and Unearthed series with Meagan Spooner, and the World Between Blinks books with Ryan Graudin. For Pratchett fans she recommends her upcoming YA fantasy novel Isles of the Gods, launching in May 2023. As mentioned in the episode, Amie also produces two podcasts about writing: Amie Kaufman on Writing, a 10-minute masterclass on writing techniques, and Pub Dates, in which she and co-writer Meagan Spooner take you behind the scenes on writing and publishing a novel, and what comes after. For more of Amie’s exploits visit amiekaufman.com or sign up for her Substack newsletter Finding North.

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

Catch Liz in person when she’s one of the speakers for the Sci-Fight science comedy debate “Should we fear AI?” on Thursday, 13 April 2023 at Howler in Melbourne! It’s hosted by previous guest Alanta Colley and features a great line-up of comedians, writers and scientists. Get all the details and book tickets vis moshtix.

Next month, now that we’ve met all the characters who’ll appear in it, we’ll be playing and discussing the 2013 board game The Witches: A Discworld Game, designed by Martin Wallace! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat67, and if you’re a subscriber, watch out for an unboxing video via our Ko-Fi page soon. And while our plans for #Pratchat68 in June aren’t quite fixed yet, here’s an earlier than usual heads up that in July we’ll be discussing the fourth Long Earth novel, The Long Utopia, with returning guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins. Those books are long, so you might want to get started now! Send in your questions for that one using the hashtag #Pratchat69 – or drop 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.

#Pratchat70 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 70, “Punching Up”, discussing Terry Pratchett’s 1993 Discworld short story, “Theatre of Cruelty”, with guest Caimh McDonnell.

Iconographic Evidence

Since it was available for free, there are lots of scans floating about on the internet, and it’s a shorter version than the one available for free on the L-Space web, we figure it should be okay for us to share the original two-page spread of the story from Bookcase magazine, including the original version of Josh Kirby’s illustration.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title plays on Mr Punch, the concept of “punching up” in comedy (i.e. the idea that the targets of derision in comedy should be those with more power), and the other concept of “punching up” in writing (i.e. adding more jokes and/or pace to a script to improve it).
  • We’ve mentioned Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series of urban fantasy novels before. They follow the adventures of new police officer Peter Grant as he becomes apprentice to the last wizard in England, who also works for the London police. There are now nine novels, four novellas, a short story collection, nine graphic novels (originally published as separate issue comic books) and a tabletop roleplaying game. The best place to start is probably Rivers of London, the first novel from 2011, which was originally titled Midnight Riot in the US (but is now published there under its proper title). The first comic, Body Work, is also a good place to dip in, as are most of the novellas and short stories.
  • The Fortean Times is the magazine of the Fortean Society, an organisation founded by American researcher and writer Charles Fort. He collected and wrote about “anomalous phenomena” – unusual events and experiences which had gone unexplained by science, though apparently he did it to keep scientists on their toes rather than because he believed any of the theories put forth in his writing. The Fortean Times is still published in the US, UK and other countries today, and you can find them online at forteantimes.com (though you have to subscribe in print). Fort himself is mentioned in Good Omens.
  • We can’t find a good reference for the edition of Good Omens with two Thursdays in one week, if that is a real error and not a fevered imagining of Ben’s. But there have been other notable ones: in some recent editions, Anathema is referred to as Agnes in one sentence when showing her index cards to Newt, and a persistent one in earlier editions was Famine saying his name had seven letters when cryptically referring to himself with a crossword clue. Some white editions of the book had a cover misprint in which the text and Crowley’s glass of wine appear, but the demon himself does not!
  • On Roundworld, “theatre of cruelty” is an artistic concept created by Antonin Artaud, a French poet and theatre maker (among many other things) active in the 1920s and 30s. His theatre of cruelty wasn’t literally theatre, or literally cruel, but rather a reaction against realism. He wanted performance to be something more visceral: a spectacle, incorporating music, dance, lights and everything other than text, performed by “athletes of the heart” who would surround audiences to shock them out of complacency and wake them up to the horrors and violence of real life. While not embraced widely, it’s been an influence on many theatre makers, notably director Peter Brook in his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s, including a famous 1966 production of the play Marat/Sade. This YouTube video from CrashCourse is a pretty good overview.
  • Neil Gaiman’s Sherlock Holmes stories are “A Study in Emerald”, from the 2003 anthology Shadows Over Baker Street, and “The Case of Death and Honey”, from the 2011 collection A Study in Sherlock. “A Study in Emerald” won both a Hugo and Locus Award in 2004, and has been adapted into a board game by Martin Wallace, of Discworld: Ankh-Morpork and The Witches fame.
  • Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was an American speculative fiction writer whose work encompassed novels, short stories, television (most famously the Star Trek episode “The Guardian on the Edge of Forever”), videogames and more. Angry Candy is his 1988 anthology about death, containing the award-winning short stories “Eidolons”, “Paladins of the Lost Hour” and “Soft Monkey”. Dangerous Visions was a 1967 collection of groundbreaking science fiction stories edited by Ellison and was hugely influential, not least for the way it included sex in the genre. It was followed by Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, and he announced a third, The Last Dangerous Visions, in 1973, but it was not published in his lifetime. His failure to publish the book became a controversy in speculative fiction circles, especially after several of the authors who sold him stories died before seeing them in print; British author Christopher Priest wrote about the book for his own fanzine, eventually expanding the piece into a short book titled The Book on the Edge of Forever in 1988. Ellison’s literary estate is now managed by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, who announced in 2022 that The Last Dangerous Visions would finally be published in September 2024, preceded by new editions of the first two books.
  • Regular listeners will be familiar with Liz’s love for Diana Wynn Jones, and we’ve previously mentioned her 1988 novelette “Carol O’Neir’s Hundredth Dream”. It’s part of her Chrestomanci series of stories and books, set in a magical universe where there are a specific number of alternate worlds.
  • We’ve also previously discussed American horror and mystery writer Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), most notably in #Pratchat58, “The Barbarian Switch”. Her famous story “The Lottery” appears in the many collections, including 1949’s The Lottery and Other Stories. Dark Tales is a more recent anthology, published by Penguin in 2016.

More notes to come soon!

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

#PratchatNALC – Twice as Alive

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With the ei- the twice-fourth Australian Discworld Convention postponed until next year, Liz and Ben fired up their crystal balls to project themselves live for the one-day online event, Nullus Anxietas: The Lost Con! In this special one-hour mini-episode, we revisit the very first Terry Pratchett book discussed on the podcast: the fifteenth Discworld novel, 1993’s Men at Arms!

You can of course listen to #Pratchat1 again if you like, though we’ve included a few important excerpts in this revisit episode. As well as discussing the book in the light of everything we’ve read (and everything that’s happened) since, we reminisce about figuring out how the podcast would work, and answer some questions posed by the live online audience. Has your opinion of Carrot/Angua changed over time? Is Cuddy’s death still too upsetting to think about? What other names and Discworld-specific words are we pronouncing wrong? We’d love to know! (Except maybe that last one.) Use the hashtag #PratchatNALC on social media to join the conversation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:13 — 26.1MB)

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Intrigued by the idea of a Discworld fan convention? You should be! Old-school fan conventions are few and far between, and we’d love you to support one of the few left in Australia. Find out more about Nullus Anxietas, the Australian Discworld Convention, and get a convention membership (attending or supporting) at ausdwcon.org. You can also follow Nullus Anxietas on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

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

Huge thanks to everyone who attended the convention, those who listened to us live and asked questions, and to the other panelists – there were some amazing discussions and great fun to be had by all! Especially big thanks once again to the massive team of hard-working volunteers and committee members at Nullus Anxietas, especially “the Man with the Vote”, Steve Lewis, and question wrangler Danny Sag. While Nullus Anxietas 7A was sadly cancelled in the end, the Australian Discworld Convention returns to life in 2024 with Nullus Anxietas IX: Come ALIVE in Überwald! in Adelaide. We hope to see you there.

This is the closest thing we’ve done to a live show since our appearance at the last Nullus Anxietas convention, but the online format seemed to work pretty well. We’ll look into the possibility of doing our more online live events in future – let us know if that’s something you’d like to see!

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.

Eeek Club 2021

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Welcome to a new tradition: the Pratchat Eeek Club! Each year, on the Glorious 25th of May, we will release a bonus episode discussing Terry Pratchett-related topics selected by our Eeek tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • How would Ankh-Morpork deal with COVID-19?
  • What would happen if Granny Weatherwax was head of Unseen University – or if Angua commanded the Watch?
  • Are golems alive? (For that matter, is fire alive?)
  • How has Pratchett and/or the Discworld informed our personal philosophies?
  • If Pratchett had kept writing the Discworld series, would it have evolved into science fiction?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:27 — 46.0MB)

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to our Eeek Club contributors: Karl, Catherine, Soren, Jess and David, and Frank!

You’ll find detailed notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.