The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 4: The Light Fantastic Pt.1 (Exposition and Pineapple)

Episode Date: December 1, 2019

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan-Young and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 1 of our recap of “The Light Fantastic”. Magic! Golden Syrup! Spreadsheets! The Truth Fairy! Collective Nouns! Chaos! Kangaroos! Pyramid Theory!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail] to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:The Colour of Magic - TV Series (IMDB)  Dyslexie font Freytag’s PyramidClarke’s three laws (3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.)Terry Pratchett - Facing Extinction (BBC)King James Demonology (British Library)We Knew Ravens Are Smart. But Not This Smart (National Geographic)Brewers Book of Myth and Legend (Goodreads)Kangaroo Definition Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

I have very very low goals and yet probably unobtainable. Completely unobtainable. So you just just reread this or just kind of I sort of reread the end because I'd nearly finished a reread before my life went horribly wrong for two months and then I reread the first two thirds again yesterday. Okay cool so I've reread the section we're talking about. Yes. Can't entirely remember how we get to the end point of the book. I think that's okay yeah similarly I um it was a while ago I read the whole thing through and then I just reread the first section this morning so. Well then you can't claim superiority on having less post-it notes than me. I've got my original read through post-its. Yeah but um because I read it

on Kindle. All of my mad referencing has been exported to this handy weirdly formatted PDF file. That is far too technologically advanced and I don't agree. But yeah I'm not sure if we mentioned it last time but I was um I read the first one through in the in the traditional way but this one I thought I would try my new toy which is Kindle Paperwhite. Other e-readers are available. Other e-readers are available but this one I'll show you how I got it set up so I inverted the colors and used the dyslexic font. Oh cool. Um okay although I'm not dyslexic I do have ADHD and the font seems to help me if I'm tired and having so helps you focus. Yeah I think I think just because it separates the words

and the letters so well it doesn't look like an intimidating wall of text. Right. Um I think I've been kind of reluctant to make these kind of provisions for myself because just because I used to have so little problem reading. Yeah. I've just been really I don't want to admit I'm having trouble sitting down and reading a book all the way through and so I've just tried and then failed and put it off forever. So this was the result of me going oh do you know what fuck it I really just need to. Actually making allowance for yourself by the way that works better. Yeah so yeah I can highly recommend anyone who has problems with the concentration thing. Invert the colors on your Kindle change it to this dyslexic font and make the font like way bigger than you think you need to

and it's just oh it was so much easier. That was good. Did you find it easy to note take on that though? The highlighting tool is good. What isn't good is the keyboard. It's not very sensitive and I take back every bad thing I ever said about gboards predictive text because whatever Amazon have done they may as well not have done. But it's still it's less interactive for me than when I was stopping and adding post-it notes and physically taking my eyes off the page to write stuff down. Oh right. Although there's still a certain amount of that because I'm me and so if you know and then I would leap up and go and reference an encyclopedia or the brew is something or coffee. I attempted to be less intense about

my post-it notes and note-taking than I did for the color of magic which I don't know how to go. So I'm actually going to check the numbers now so I have 66 post-its in total for the light fantastic and the color of magic. I only had 64 so I've not done well. Yeah I can say if anything your copy of the light fantastic looks even more like the the results of a binge in a stationery shop. It does and reading back through honestly a lot of them are really pointless. I did not need to put this many post-it notes in this book but I like having lots of notes and trimming them down rather than just being efficient in the first place and that's why I will never work fully freelance in any one job because I am terrible at time

management. Yeah I'm having to learn that slowly but yeah so what I've done is I exported all of my notes to PDF and then converted to PDF to Word to make extra notes under my notes. This is a process I'm going to find true because obviously that was ridiculous but what I've ended up with is a very neat neat hard coffee which only has post-it notes to reference my Ninja Ana's important talking points. Yeah I mean we say important talking points but I'm pretty sure one of mine is oh there's a good omen's reference. Hey man don't talk us down. Yes all right important in inverted commas. Main our main talking points. Our key talking points. Key talking points thank you Joanna. This would be an excellent PowerPoint presentation

rather than a podcast. Yeah anyway I have um I've taken a quick photo of our copies of the light fantastic side by side mainly to show off my minimalist tendencies and I am not taking a picture of my horribly formatted actual notes. Yes your marvellous minimalist tendencies whereas I have taken our notes on the show and already scrawled all over them because I am basically just a bit of a mess as a human as well as a podcaster. We're starting this about two months after we intended to because we've just had a shitter over a year. Yeah life went wrong. Yeah we won't go deeply into that. No I don't know. But if we feel if it seems like we've forgotten anything that we shouldn't have if it was only a week ago or sorry to completely ruin the magic.

Yeah I'll complain about the the cold in mid-august. It is now in fact mid-october although I feel like this will be coming to you in December. Yeah yeah I mean it'll happen when it happens it's timeless. Time is a fluid concept. So both times how did you like rereading the light fantastic I know I know it's not one of the ones you read because it often so. Yeah no I like it more than I remember liking it. Yeah I liked it more than the colour of magic because it's more of the structure that I recognise as being a discworld book. It's not split into chapters which does mean breaking it into thirds for the podcaster is a bit harder. Yes yeah. I actually had to look at what was taking place and logically work out where there's a

comfortable break in the book rather than. That sounds difficult. Yeah I had to think it was awful. I'm sorry I only 14 more to go. What are we doing? But no I enjoyed rereading it more than I expected like you said this isn't one I come back to a lot I'm not super into the rinsewind books. Which is disgusting but fine yeah but so obviously with the colour of magic I did say to you try and convince me why I should like rinsewind a bit more because you've taken this as your task and bearing in mind what you said about his sort of cheerful nihilism made me enjoy it a bit more. Good. And also I the book itself has more of a structure it's heading towards an end point and it reads more like a novel rather than four novellas. Yes I mean I think the colour of magic

almost felt like a sketch show at points. Yeah the colour of magic was like building a sandpit to play in and now this is Terry Pratchett actually playing in the sandpit. Yeah. Although they were like less straight up fantasy tropes and this is a parody of this particular 80s fantasy which I don't think was necessarily a bad thing. Yeah I was gonna say I think I enjoyed it more because of that. I'm not saying it's a bad book but it's not quite the discworld I know and love yet. Yeah. And I still don't find the rinsewind stories as stories as compelling. Yeah. And I don't find the unseen university stories as compelling yet. Right. I think we did talk about this a little bit when we talked about colour of magic is that

the unseen university has been introduced but it gets kind of overhauled at some point and I think it's better for the overhaul. Yeah I agree that it's better for the overhaul but I must even after the overhaul my guess as to why you're not that keen on unseen university as compared to a lot of the other ones is because there isn't there isn't that much depth of character. No. Not that much subtext or kind of moral or social drive behind a lot of it. Yeah. Although there's as much as there is probably more than in most books because it's Pratchett but yeah they're they're more of a jaunt. Yes exactly. And this is sorry. It kind of it tickles my jeans and Worcester bone. Darling. Darling. Sorry. But also this does kind of hit the

fantasy trope quite nicely of a bunch of ragtag heroes go on a journey. Yeah. Except they didn't mean to end up at the point in the hour they start the journey that that was a terrible sentence. I give up. Bunch of ragtag heroes get teleported into a journey that they have no idea they're on most of the time. Yeah it's a ragtag heroes on a quest structure especially I'd say part two more than part one. Part one is which is what we're talking about today and we've arbitrarily decided where these parts are is much more setting up. It's rising action. Yes. To use a theatrical term. From the pyramid. Yes. The pyramid from last time. Yes I can't remember the name of the dude that came up. Fratag. Fratag. Fratag. Yeah. Fratag. So yeah I love it. I enjoyed it.

Sorry what's the word? Exponentially. Thank you. Exponentially more than the color of magic even though I don't dislike the color of magic because it's only three years difference between them and if you'd asked me before I'd just checked that I would have guessed it was quite a lot longer. I feel like his voice changes a lot between the two books and I'm not sure whether that's literally just the process of having sat down and written these but he'd written a couple of novels before the color of magic whether it was feedback or getting a better editor. I found myself like giggling out loud a lot more often. I found less annoyances with kind of repetition or bits dragging out as it was very fast paced. Yeah. Especially in comparison to the last one

and even I was saying in comparison to a lot of his following books. There's a lot of happens. Yeah. Because we end on page 69. 69. Yeah. I was trying so hard not to do it. We end on page 69 of this and we mean specifically in the Corgi paperback version by the way. Yeah. I love you dear listener but I am not going through all the possible publications and checking the pages for each bit. But like a lot of happens in that. Yeah. I didn't find myself bored which I know that sounds quite silly. It's difficult to get bored reading a book because you can keep going until you get to the good bit in a way. Yeah. But like I know what you mean. You find yourself reading a passage and you're like I wish we were back to the other point of view or I wish we could just get to the action a little bit and

you feel you almost start skimming sometimes. But I think reading it in general compared to where I've read it before and it's I only really reread the first two of it has been like I'm going to reread all of the Discworld books. Reading it and taking notes on it and actually looking at what takes place a lot more because I think I'd maybe only read it once as a child before I watched the screen adaptation of it which like I said kind of mixes colour of magic and life fantastic together. I found it really difficult because I picture characters such a specific way in my head but if something like that where I fairly early on watched a screen adaptation I start picturing characters as they were on screen and so you have Rincevin is meant to be quite young and scrawny

and inexplicably David Jason was cast to play him. Oh yeah. It wasn't that long ago. Yeah. David Jason has ever been that young. It was early 2000s I think and Tim Curry plays Trimon and Tim Curry plays a villain very well but that's not the character so I came into rereading it with I can't imagine Tim Curry ever being dry enough. Yeah I came into it with a mental image of this character being villainous and then read it and realised the entire point of him is he's not he's incredibly grey and bland. Yeah. Proto-auditor. Yes. Sitting on my headphones that's good. Okay. Excellent. So do you want to do the podcast? Yeah let's make a podcast. Okay. Hello and welcome to the truth shall make ye fret a podcast in which we are reading a recapping

every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series in chronological order. Today is part one of our little chat about the book two in the Discworld series The Light Fantastic. So quick note on spoilers this is a spoiler light podcast so heavy spoilers about for the book we're discussing The Light Fantastic but we'll try and avoid revealing any major plot points from future books and we won't talk at all about the events of the final book in the series The Shepherd's Crown because I know there are a few people who haven't read it yet so come on the journey with us and we'll all read it together. On a journey it's a BBC documentary and at the end snow patrol will play. Someone does something in slow motion possibly black and white. Oh Jesus.

I'm so sorry. Well introduce yourself as well. Oh yeah I'm Joanna Hagen Young. And I'm Francine Carroll. So Francine do you want to we won't do this for every book because they don't all bleed into one another but do you want to give us a bit of a previously on uh yeah previously on the True Shawmeakey fret we appropriately enough covered the first book which was the colour of magic the first in the Discworld series that is. Yep. The colour of magic followed rinsewind and inept wizard who was being expelled from unseen university and two flower the first tourist to arrive in Ankh Moorpork which is the main city on the Discworld. The two of them had various excitingly dangerous adventures culminating in them falling off when I don't know being propelled off

the edge of the world and plummeting into their almost certain doom. Yes love a bit of doom. Yes. Right so we uh for those of us who aren't joining us for the first time and listen to our discussion of colour of magic we're going to do this a little bit differently. I'm going to tell you what happened in the book and then we'll talk about it rather than making you just listen to us read aloud. Yeah this is for your benefit and for mine because God we ended up with a lot of rambling. So uh just to be clear section one we're talking about page one to 69 in the Corby paperback edition. That's the oldy looking version with Josh Kirby's beautiful illustrations. Oh don't forget I've got things to say about that when we get to part two. No. I've got thoughts.

You've got thoughts for the capital T. I might get the patriarchy duck out. Anyway so yeah so we're talking about page one to 69 in that particular edition. We'll get to where we get to. So our eight plot. Rinswin and two flowers somehow managed not to fall off the edge of the world and find themselves back in ending up in the forest of scund. The forest of scund. I love the word scund. Scund. Scund. Now this is not the same forest as they were in. No. The last one. No. No. It's a completely separate magical forest. Yeah I think there's quite a few of them on the disc. Unfortunately I don't currently have the giant map of the disc next to me. Okay hold on I might have it somewhere. Here I have.

Oh fuck yes it's massive. That's why I had it up on the wall. Yeah well all right. It doesn't matter at all by much. I want to see it. You can't let me get this far and then say oh no it doesn't matter. Yes I can. I'm gonna wear all of this out on me. Yeah. Oh man I'm bad at map reading. Luckily. Ah scund here it is. The forest of scund is near the Stowe Plains south of Lanka and see before they were further west about Moorpork because they were around. I think they were heading towards Querm. Yeah all right so it's between Moorpork and Lanka. Good. Good to know. We'll get to go to Lanka next month. Yes. That would be a fun trip. So we've gone sideways and ahead of ourselves. Sideways ahead of ourselves. I'm trying to tell

you what happened in the section one of this book aren't I? Yes do summarise Joanna. Right so I might shut up for a minute. Oh thanks. Right rinsewind somehow is no longer falling off the end to the world. Yeah. Ends up in the forest of scund. Bumps into two flower in the luggage who have also miraculously been saved. Good. They meet a gnome. They come across a gingerbread cottage. Have a lovely snack. Wizards attack them. An exclamation mark I see. The only one you've used in the entire. Yeah I'm trying to come off as less exclamation marky. Yeah I like it. Yeah arrow hits the luggage and it disappears. Rinsewind and two flower fly away upside down on a broomstick. Cool. So that is the section from the perspective of our two protagonists. Yes

meanwhile at the unseen university. Meanwhile. The octavo has a bit of a moment. Can you remind us who the octavo is or what the octavo is indeed? The octavo is an ancient grimoire that contains the eight original. Well it contained the eight original spells. However one of the spells escaped in this now lodged in Rinsewind's brain. There is a magical misfire that spreads through the university. As it spreads through the university the library university librarian gets turned into a small orangutan. I'm not saying that's relevant but we'll come to that. The universe briefly appears in the great hall of the university. So the wizards be the wizards do the right of Ashken. Summon death for a bit of exposition. Turns out the entire universe was changed.

Exposition and some pineapple and cheese on a stick. The worst buffet item of all buffet items. I feel quite strongly about this. Well we'll come to this later. I don't like a cheese and pineapple. Right so death turns out bit of exposition and pineapple explains that the octavo did this to stop the eight spell from falling off the disk and therefore save Rinsewind. We find out all eight spells must be said on Hogswatch night two months from now. Quite appropriate that we're releasing this in December hopefully. Or the desk will be destroyed. Or the desk will be destroyed. Yes quite a quite a big deal. Yeah bit of an apocalypse. I mean we all know that in the real world people take impending doom.

Super seriously. Yeah yeah cool. Let's not. It's depressing. We meet Trimon the wizard who eavesdrops on this meeting with death and goes to the library to grab a book on the great pyramid of sort. Sort is that how we're going to pronounce it? I have no idea how to pronounce it so yeah I'm going with sort. Okay. Because apparently this great pyramid contains the prophecy about all eight spells we need to said. We find out Trimon's not a great character. Golda Weatherwax the arch chancellor tries to kill Rinsewind so we can get this eight spell for himself and be the one to say it because whoever says them all gets their heart's desire. Yeah I think at this point they're just saying a very good thing will happen to you. Golda Weatherwax tries to kill Rinsewind

to get this spell while Trimon tries to kill. But that's hard to say. I don't like it. Yeah we've got some more good tongue twisters through here. Good I should have warmed up. Trimon tries to kill Golda Weatherwax and that arrow that hit the luggage that was Golda's arrow so the luggage turns up not Rinsewind and eats Golda. Naughty luggage. Naughty luggage. But I can't blame him. Always dear little bit. So that is what happens in this section of The Life Fantastic. Yeah nicely recapped. So do you have a favourite passage from this you want to read to us? I do but how about we start with yours because it is right at the beginning and is a nice kind of setting the scene. I was very lazy and just picked a really good bit from

the start. I literally just picked the intro. The sun rose slowly as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort. Another disc day dawned but very gradually and this is why. When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency. It slows right down and on the disc world the magic was embarrassingly strong which meant the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or as some would have put it like golden syrup. It paused to fill up valleys. It piled up against mountain ranges. When it reached Corrie Celeste the ten mile spire of grey stone and green ice that marked the hub of the disc and was the home of the gods it built up in heaps until it finally crashed in great lazy tsunami

as silent as velvet across the dark landscape beyond. Now that is a beautiful bit of imagery. It's just gorgeous. It is and I have to wonder whether he kind of included this literally because it was such a beautiful thing to write about because it must be a pain in the ass to include in the rest of all the books the fact that light just works in this ridiculous way and I mean obviously he just doesn't bother most of the time like every now and then when we're doing these sweeping vista descriptions he does mention it but I think generally he doesn't go into the physical difficulties this ridiculous light would create on the disc. Yeah well this is so I talked a bit last time about I quite often will picture these as I would do it either on

stage or if I was filming it but you can't film a passage like that. You can't film light moving like golden syrup it doesn't. Could you do some kind of computer rendering? You could but it works gloriously as a mental image it's a beautiful thing to read I don't think you could you could do something on film. You can abstractly actually pour golden syrup on something. Oh yeah you could do something on film but it will never be as gorgeous as the imagery is written down especially phrases like silent as velvet. Yes. There's no way to recreate that on screen and for it to be anywhere as gorgeous as it is to read it and picture it for yourself. I feel like with most of practice like grand descriptions like that if I were to film it I would literally just have a narrator.

Yeah. Doing these bits and as best imagery as I could but I think you need the words you're right. Yeah that's something that I really like about because he doesn't do the big poetic writing often when he does a grand poetic description there's always a punchline. He does that comedy thing I really love where it's big grand description syrup. Which is great but it means you don't even forget that Pratchett could write so beautifully and poetically. I don't know how much of a fan he must have been. Pratchett was a Bradbury for instance that's what this kind of thing reminds me of on a bigger scale. It's a golden eyed and seven foot tall Martians. Yeah exactly so yeah it is more reminiscent of sci-fi than fantasy and that makes sense because it's this astral scope.

Yeah and Pratchett's early stuff was sci-fi like Dark Side of the Sun and Strasser which we'll maybe talk about at some point. Yeah I need to re-read them. I've got them right there. But yeah so he was pastishing sci-fi before he was pastishing fantasy and they do overlap with each other it's just in the discard it's magic rather than science. Yeah yeah and as many a much clever commentator than me has pointed out there is considerable overlap in the bend diagram of really far-fetched science and fantasy. It just depends on what you want to address your character then sometimes doesn't it. Yeah it's any sufficiently advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. Yeah that sounds about right and I would just like to point out that Giovanna managed to do that

wonderful reference without looking at anything. Because I say that quote quite a lot mostly when I'm talking about how amazing it was getting a new iPhone and the fact that to transfer everything from my old phone to the new one I just held one phone next to the other. I don't stop shelling for Apple. Other phones are available. Well actually if I leave in the bit where you couldn't log into Gmail today. Yeah I mean Apple is not user friendly in any other way but transferring stuff from your new phone my same tabs were open at the same point and all I did was put one phone next. It's magic. Yeah I think that is probably magic. That's definitely magic. Yeah that's I always really like that quote because there is some people are weirdly like no sci-fi is better sci-fi is more

realistic and it's like now you're basically still reading fantasy it's the same thing it's just with more buttons. Yeah please don't put in the podcast me saying sci-fi is fantasy with more buttons and bleepy lights. Well it was Jack that got me into sci-fi in the first place and he was the one who kind of pointed out to me that things like Star Wars which I've never been a fan of. A basic yes gas. Blame my ex-boyfriends. Which I've never been a fan of. Basically space fantasy and there's a difference between that and the kind of sci-fi I'm into. I love it as Topia. I love a post apocalypse. You like taking a concept to its logical conclusion type sci-fi. Yeah I very much I like speculative fiction basically. And that's what I like about the

Discworld is it's literally what if the world should not work but there's just enough chaos and magic that it does. Yeah exactly and he takes very earthly concepts and plays them out in this new platform. Yeah so section that you really like that you want to read. Isn't actually far along. This is the description of the Octave. The grimoire full of the seven at the moment great spells should be eight. Yeah. This is a large but not particularly impressive book. Other books in the university's libraries have covers inlaid with radules and fascinating wood or bound with dragon skin. This one was just a rather tatty leather. It looked the sort of book described in library catalogs as slightly foxed. Although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it

had been badgered, wolfed and possibly bared as well. So that is my favorite for a couple of reasons. First and foremost being that my dad's super into Discworld as well. I got him into it and that's just something we cry a lot. So if something's sort of tatty or whatever we say. Oh god it's been badgered Neil got possibly bared as well. And partly because I feel like it it's a good early example of one of practice kind of I'm not sure themes really the right word but like kind of pet concepts which is the kind of simple but powerful object. Yeah. Which you see you do see mainly in the witches and the wizards novels. The kind of glamour versus simplicity. Yeah and it's quite

often this scruffy and remarked thing that is much more powerful than something because you if this was like an 80s high fancy book and not a parody then the book that contained the eight original spells of the universe would be on a grand scan stand. It would be encased in drunken skin. Yeah. Covered in gems. There'd be a weird blood stain somewhere on the floor near it that wouldn't come up off the floor slightly and look almost as if it slightly exists in another dimension. Yeah. Yeah. I should be writing this down. Cool I'm just going to build a time machine and write a fantasy novel. I love the idea that if you managed to get a time machine you would still just be a fucking starving writer. You know my stock in Apple? No no I'm just going to

get in on that 80s high fantasy trend. They all got super rich. And I can remember all of their names in twenty years. How is it twenty nine two? So later on in this section actually yeah there's the same section. The same kind of idea comes up again when Trimon is having a look at Goulders office. Yeah. Goulders by the Waxes office. On the high shelf above in various bottled impossibilities wallowed in their pickle jars. The place looked as though a taxidermist had dropped his stock in the foundry and then had a fight with a maddened glassblower braining a passing crocodile and a pair of assembly boots and library of grimoires and lamps and rings and mirrors and all of this. And Trimon is there going Goulders

is ridiculous and the place needs a dust and a clear out kind of thing. We do not need all of this stuff. Yeah this is silly. It's kind of a continuing theme in this flavour throughout the wizards books with ponder stippings versus the old boys and in a slightly different flavour through the witches books which is the over the top what's a chops a crappy teenage witch we don't like. Anagramma. Yes yes no the other one. There really were lots of ladies. Oh yeah no I can't remember a name. Nope not coming me all right no mine. But yeah you do get you get these witches these young modern witches you're all into you must have a long lace veil and a fancy cauldron. Yeah and then you have Granny by the Wax and Nanny Ogg who are like stick a bread knife in your

boot. Yeah stick a bread knife in your boot and there's nothing wrong with the well out back if you need to have a quick look in some. Yeah you don't need a special scrying mirror. Yeah but then there is also a kind of respect for the over the top theatrics and the boffo as they call it which we'll get into in a couple books which is like just the psychology of of having a show. So I'm sure Goulda by the Wax if he was asked to justify his office would be like oh yeah no most of this is useless but it's the look of the thing. Yes I've got to keep up appearances old chap. Yeah and I think you would say it's exactly like that because everyone would be old chap. Yeah and like yeah I just find it really interesting conflict throughout the desk world this kind of simplicity versus

drama. Yeah. That is why I picked that quote that is my book report thing. No I'm very glad you took that quote it's a nice quote and it's one I didn't sort of pick up as oh that's really good. So should we talk about some of the characters that we meet in this section because there's a few yeah so unlike the last unlike the last book where I don't think we ever meet any of those characters from last book again say Fritz von den Teufler do we? I don't think so but there are some that are obviously proto versions of characters that will come back. Yeah yeah. It's hard to talk about too much without just spoiling the rest of the series completely but like we talked about the patrician and there being a fat sergeant. And then the barbarian chap. I mean we meet a barbarian

very briefly in this we get one little section with him so we'll talk about him a lot more next week but we do briefly meet Cohen the barbarian. Yeah he's a major character going forwards. Yeah he crops up in quite a few books. I would say a major side character. Yeah and but so when we talked about the color of magic I was really excited about herun turning up and I was like oh cool and I realized that was completely misplaced excitement because I was actually thinking about meeting Cohen. Oh right yeah yeah that's why I was so excited about that. I didn't want to uh to brain on your braithers. Like if you like frown you like frown but you know he's a simple chap I haven't got a problem with him. I like frown but yeah so we only really we get one page of Cohen

in this whole section of the book. Yes. He's probably introduced in section two so we'll talk about him more next week. Yeah yeah. But I do like a brief I do like that little brief interlude where we skipped where we jumped to barbarian horse lords of the steppe. But yeah it's literally two pages of far away. There is just an old dude rolling a cigarette and says that the greatest things a man can ever have are hot water, good dentistry and soft lavatory paper. Yes. I think it's just a nice little foreshadow it's uh I am reassuring you that this story is gonna go somewhere. It's gonna span vast what's it. We're gonna meet new people stuff's gonna happen. Speaking as a writer it is a writing thing. Oh yes well that's very technical Joanna thank you. Yep yep I'm earning

my pennies today. So in in this book uh in this section even the only time we're ever gonna meet Golden Weatherwax is. It is but I wanted to talk about him because of his surname. Mm-hmm. Because I mean I don't think it was planned so spoilers I guess that when we talk about the next book a character will be introduced called Granny Weatherwax and I'm very excited for us to get there. Yes. Because the next book is one of my favourites definitely my oop definitely my favourite book of the first five I would say and maybe tied with book four. Sorry it's uh how does it go? Uh like fantastic equal rights more sorcery. Oh then yeah for me it would be tied with sorcery. Uh so yeah for me the top two of the first five are the two that don't do it with Rinsford.

Yeah. Again I'm trying to get over my Rinsford issues as you have. Anyway but I like that he's kind of used this name and then gone well that's too good of a name to use on a guy that dies in the first third of the book. I'm gonna bring that name back I think it takes a while. It's just a very magical family. It's a very magical family. Yeah and I'm sure there's a slight bit of well I mean there is as we go through the books we're not looking for how much continuity there is tons of reckoning. Yeah I mean it gets less as it goes on but certainly from these first few books. Yes. So certain events can be ignored going forward. Yeah. Which is never been an issue for me I must say. I've talked to some people who it bothers but. It bothers me on sort of TV series or

like short movie series when it happens it does not bother me in a 42 book series. Yeah yeah. Over the span of 30 40 years. Yeah exactly. I'm not going to talk about a bit of changing continuity. Exactly. So yeah Gull the Wedwax is introduced and killed off in this section. I think he's also he was also worth mentioning just because he's the first detailed incarnation of this recurring character mold which is the the old boy wizard. Yes. Which always comes into conflict with the new boy wizard. Yeah and that gets that dynamic gets explored in a bunch of different ways which I really like. So we've got this old boy very traditionalist wizard conflicting with Trimon who's another new character we meet today. He's very as you say gray. Yeah so this is what I

found really difficult because he's made into such a dramatic cape swirling villain in the TV adaptation. I mean it's Tim Curry. Tim Curry cannot play gray. Yeah. But what makes Trimon such a horrific villainous character is that he's not really evil. Yeah. There's a fantastic quote about him somewhere that I'll have to see if I can find but he's just organized. He's just someone who's really into spreadsheets. Yeah and I think that's like while you find that I think that's why or partly why the dungeon dimensions characters are so important in this book. Yeah. So the dungeon dimensions I should say are a kind of parallel dimension to the dimension that the disc world lives in and it's full of horrible misplaced

gross monsters who are constantly trying to get into the to the world of men which I think Terry Pratchett says is you know the the dimensional equivalent of handy for the bus. And they are they're not villainous but they're a very clear bad force. Yeah they're just completely ridiculous tentacles eyes coming out of eyes coming out of noses. Yeah and whereas Trimon is a bit complex is the wrong word but ambiguous in where he is on the good evil spectrum. I think Trimon's a more scary character for it like he's a more threatening character because he doesn't want to kill everyone he doesn't want to rule the world he is ambitious he wants to be the person that because that's we talked about someone's got to say all eight spells and something

good will come to them yeah and he wants to be the person he does that and he's willing to be ruthlessly ambitious to get it but like we talked a bit last week about the fact that we will eventually get a benevolent dictator character yeah and I think that's what Trimon would have become like he just really wants things to be organised and to put people a bit on the back foot. That's an interesting interpretation yeah I can see that. There's a lovely moment I mean it's actually in the second section so I'll talk about it a bit more next week but there is a lovely moment where he walks into he comes in to hold a meeting between a bunch of senior wizards and it talks about you know they've all faced terrifying things but nothing's quite as terrifying as

him walking in and just seeming a bit disapproving and I think we've all had like a boss like that or just someone from the pub like that and it's like you're not evil but you're incredibly unpleasant and I feel being around you tarnishes my soul and also makes me feel like I haven't done my homework. Yeah it's um he's almost like a true neutral on the D&D spectra wasn't he like yeah which I I always argue is actually the scariest of the classifications. I don't know D&D well enough to uh oh you must know the kind of lawful good okay it's a good kind of thing yeah but I haven't played with it enough to know sort of what's scary and what isn't oh she'll chef yeah um but it's something I think that Pratchett kind of comes back to is a theme is

like this evil neutrality where some of Pratchett's most terrifying I'd say antagonists rather than villains yes that's the better word for it like protagonist is better than heroes for Renswin very much better especially for Renswin uh yeah some of his most terrifying antagonists are terrifying because they're not bad or evil they just want things to be very organized and they're incredibly great and we'll get on to that a lot more when we get on to some other books. Yeah it's like the contrast between the auditors and uh Tia Tima. Tia Tima. Tia Tima. All right Mr. T-Time. I'm not doing that for the entire book when we get to it. No no absolutely yeah I thought I'd try it out now not a fan that might we get it although actually just massive

side tangent quickly uh the tooth fairy is hinted at or not even hinted at is like the tickling of an idea and to Pratchett's head here um when he was talking uh to when he was when Renswin was talking to uh Squires in the in the gingerbread cottage uh which is um what'd he say idea Renswin formed a mental picture of some strange entity living in a castle made of teeth it was the kind of picture you try to forget unsuccessfully. Yeah I like the Seeds Plan of Future Books because that in that it's uh Toothflower and where he's from has a concept of the tooth fairy and it doesn't see but yeah again yeah um if you're confused about why we're talking about the tooth fairy because you're reading these books for the first time it will all make sense near Christmas

one year yeah well that's helpful um oh my god well if we can't time this right so hot swatch night ends up happening in July that sounds like we will time it so it won't we'll just spread things out somewhere we'll figure out um but yeah well I was clicking through for that one I found another quote I highlighted which is Rallewin goodness me um which is uh Goulda broke off first looking hard at Trimon always bothered him it had the same disconcerting effect as gazing into a mirror and seeing no one there oh yeah yeah well he's quite good right not nice at all yeah it was all right wasn't it should we do a podcast about it? I don't know that sounds kind of ambitious so other characters we uh that's where we were

yeah yeah we're talking about character and joe's um so do you want to do as we're in the university the the librarian yeah um again I'm trying to talk about this without like like spoiling future books a whole lot but it's also and I'm not sure the librarian is a spoiler really it's not a spoiler he's never so intrinsic to the plot that we're gonna ruin anything for anyone it's not a spoiler if we sometimes say hey we'll see this character again yeah but this is one of my favorite things to happen and one of my favorite characters is that a wizard gets turned into orangutan during a random magical misfire and it also involves pineapple custard it also involves pineapple custard and then stays in orangutan for 42 books yeah and the library

the orangutan librarian is just one of the best characters in the discord books despite literally never saying anything other than uke yeah I've got um and it literally was a throwing away joke from practice so yeah I've got uh a slip of the keyboard here and I managed to find the quote where he talks about it it's um a few years ago all I knew about orangutans the orangutans I always do that all I knew about orangutans was that they were the sad ones sitting with a piece of cardboard on their heads down at the duller end of the primate house then one of the early books of the disbarred series I created a librarian who was an orangutan I did it because I thought it would be mildly amusing as a piece of creativity it took me all of 15 seconds sorry but it really did

there was no lifelong fascination no point to make it was just a joke on a different day the librarian would have been in a park but and yet because of this not only is he one of the most popular recurring characters but Terry Pratchett also drummed up this amazing interest in orangutan preservation and conservation and donated vast amounts of money to them I think and did you imagine what it would have done for aardvarks pr if oh yeah I mean there are some fuming aardvarks out there right now it could have been me yeah but I bet he's glad he did pick an orangutan because there's a lot of them because he didn't have to do so much for preservation and they're brilliant I like I've already this makes me sound like oh I like to orangutans before they were cool

before I got into the disbarred books I loved orangutans yeah because they're so intelligent and so fascinating and they're I think one of the clearest evolutionary links between us and monkeys and they speak they speak sign language I know there are other primates and I am aware that orangutans aren't monkeys before we get angry treats uh yeah no no no rather the closest thing to a common ancestor which is a real bunch of monkeys yeah um but yeah it's um they are I'm pretty I'm pretty sure I can honestly say same in in the you're already interested yeah because um I grew up on Jersey and there's the Jersey Zoo that has their own yeah I went to see the orangutans they were babies they're amazing they're babies so beautiful but yeah they are just gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous creatures

and also really fucking funny in the context of Discworld because he makes a fantastic librarian because now he's got four hands and he's really strong and can also be bribed with bananas to further along plots and he's such an ex-monkey very much not a monkey but yeah so we love the librarian we're very excited to see a throwaway joke about a librarian being turned into a orangutan because it becomes one of the best parts of the series yeah and and right away I think although it was a throwaway joke in this paragraph later on in the in this section even practically kind of runs with it right I have an orangutan here I'm not going to turn him back right now so we've got to go with it exactly so Trimon goes to get the book on to sort from

the library and brights him with a banana banana and the orangutans mournfully peeling in orange and leads him gently right it's just a beautiful way of image isn't it yeah hand like a little leather glove I think he said and just yes so we're very happy about this uh yeah so we see death again yes uh slightly more evolved version of yeah so we talked a bit last time about he's a recurring character in the books very recurring I like A that we get introduced to the rise of ash kent mm that they get lots of periphery for although it turns out you can do it with a few ccs of mouse blood and a few match six is that a clever wordplay by the way ash kent I couldn't if it is it's one that went over my head and I couldn't find anything I did look it up

no more homework okay because I just every time I think oh no that's probably not it always is like yeah there's a couple in it I feel like can we have by the way um an obscure reference corner yes um because I always find a couple I really like yes we will do a little obscure reference segment and pick an obscure reference of the week yes I was segments probably better isn't it I've gone a bit hello internet call it corner we can call it window we can call it whenever you like oh wow the creativity is bound the world is your mollusk um but this is very much death this is more the death that we start to know and love he's sarcastic he is eating cheese and pineapple on a stick which I feel very strongly about um yeah can we briefly visit that yeah it's the worst why

does anyone like it no because there is a time and a place for pineapple and it's not on a stick with cheese how do you feel about apple and cheese is a combination don't mind apple and cheese does pineapple that offends you it's partly that it's it's too juicy to go with cheese you have now that's great actually yeah that is kind of weird yeah but again we used to live together and pineapple on pizza was a no a topic of discussion that was over overruled by you yeah very good when uh when you were working of an evening I will at this point admit Joanna but when your husband and I were alone together we would sometimes order pizza with pineapple on it the betrayal the betrayal gasp no gasp yeah but no you you um you're just generally not a fan of fruit and

savory stuff together are you no I don't mind a bit of fruit and savoury I like mixing them I just feel like something that acidic and juicy has no place next to a lump of cold cheddar it which is always like a difficult thing to put on sticks anyway because good cheddar mature cheddar crumbles right off so it's not it's not good cheddar yeah it's that weird rubbery mild cheddar that's sort of taste of nothing and then you're covering it in acid it's like a weird oddly textured heartburn stick and I don't understand why people like them yeah objectively I can't disagree with anything you're saying but I will eat a plate especially if they're arranged on like a little hedgehog no come on we're in the 80s now and I will eventually stop digesting us from this death

as a character is yes as you say this is properly introduced let's say and also the like I said the rise of ashken gets introduced which is uh this uh a deer of summoning death to for exposition because every time this is performed it is so death can do exposition yeah which I love I like that you know Terry Pratchett's gone oh I need to really clearly explain exactly what is happening and I feel like in a film that would often be done by someone finding it in a dusty old book and you sort of read it over their shoulder as they read it aloud to themselves yes see it's quite interesting that Pratchett uses exposition in this way in this book because elsewhere in the book he's very omnipotent narrator in a way he's not in some later books

but I think part of it is it's all very well the narrator knowing in the audience not I'm yeah it's all very no um the narrator knowing and the audience knowing but the central conflict of this section of the book means the wizards need to know yes all right yes yeah good point yes not just us finding out it's uh yes because also this red star is obviously appearing in the sky and the turtle is clearly heading towards it yeah that's fine um so swires is the last one well that's just a little list here yeah that's another little one where like this is a seed for what will be a character it's not that correct yet we meet a gnome called swires and in later books we will meet a gnome called swires who has a Scottish accent yes I mean right yes

in this book it's kind of he's a plot device and as much as anything else yeah I mean that he's there first to demonstrate that the forest is particularly fairytale and magical because he lives in my room yep and then he's there to explain uh that the witch lived in the ginger house and the some kids pushed her in an oven yes um rude rude but he's not got a lot of personality apart from being the I'm not sure how to describe this character type the um uh you know the the mildly quirky oh you're right mr blah blah the expedition type um yeah it's like a cheeky chimney sweep type character yeah he's there to turn up hello is the plot five yeah exactly so yeah but also to contrast the difference between uh

what two flower things of what magical creatures are and what magical creatures actually are which actually comes on quite nicely to one of the things you want to talk about that's that I mean that's the last of the sort of new relevant characters yeah yeah but you want to talk about elves getting reference for the first time oh yeah so um on page 60 of this edition so rince when makes a reference to the tooth fairy says that if you don't watch out the fairy will come and take your teeth away and so I says no no that's elves um elves do that and take your toenails and they're all very bad tempered and and two flower quite indignant please there's no elves are beautiful and silver and and singing and golden and ooh and that's

comes up again in great detail in the witches books and some of the other ones maybe um but particularly in laws and ladies yeah at this idea this this contrast between the softened folklore of fairy folk and the grim reality and it's quite an interesting subject in general because if you look at early folklore and superstition as relating to fairies and kind of fair beings they are far more often mischievous and ugly and things to be frightened of yeah he's like if you can bear grim fairy tales to like disney versions exactly yeah but then by the time you enter the I'm gonna say 19th century probably you thinking like hans christian anderson era I'm not even thinking fairy tales so much as just in popular oh like images and stuff yeah so I'm

gonna say Victorian times that's cool a Victorian times might be a bit earlier yeah so you're looking at early 19th century and I actually was listening to sorry I'm not trying to yeah uh something quite interesting the other day that was talking about um earlier than that that's more in the range of the king james's no talking about in relation to the witch trials everyone was very sure this stuff existed including fairies so to the point where like the king of england was writing books about the different kinds of fairies you might meet yeah and so there was a big blaring between fact and fiction on the existence of things like fairies and elves and yeah so when you get um you get into Victorian times and it becomes pricier and more for children yes but it

was it was such a huge part of what was pop culture exactly yeah I yeah I kind of briefly noted it here because I really want to explore it in depth when we get there and this is like a super in advance warning that I'm gonna research the crap out of this like I've already started looking at round in victorian in sex video we've got over there this is quite a cool little hint of what's to come yeah there's also um kind of linked to this it was something I I had a little note on and I think I talked about this I think this came out when we were talking about the color of magic as well like this book um but in the bit where two flowers explaining the concept of a tooth fairy which like I said the tooth fairy will come up again in the in the future books and it's

done in quite an interesting way and it's slightly raccoon from here where rinseburns never had a bit yeah um but two flowers talking about where he's seen pretty gnomes and goblins and pixies which this gnome doesn't match up to in a book called the little folks book of flower fairies and how are these pictures yeah and I like it there because there is a book of fairies and fairytales and I feel like maybe there is one proto book for all of the disqual that is this book about fairies and fairytales and it's the same one two flowers read as when we get to the Tiffany aching books there's an evil queen and there's a goblin and there are pages that she's scared of yes and I don't think it is a reason I don't think that's ever ever addressed again but I like the

fact that the idea of there being one proto book of pictures of pretty fairies for the entire disworld yeah huh I like I imagine that Pratchett retconned that in his head yeah I like to think so yeah now I like that um because I'm very specifically thinking of uh hogfather right now and when Pratchett does his take on Christmas in the winter solstice he does it in a very really a part of looking at his guts yeah and I like that he's doing it this early on where he's going like yeah no that's just ridiculous what are you talking about yeah and of course I was going to take on Christmas almost like the straight man and the I'm not the straight man even just the the setters two flowers almost reflecting our reality yeah and rinson's going keep fucking

what yeah we do think rinse wind just does very well yeah um so yeah we're kind of on to our little other points bullet point sections we want to talk about what to do with this bit um so to kind of vaguely going chronological you've got uh a good omen's reference noted yeah really early on I mean I'd say it's a good omen's reference this was written before good omen's yes uh but it's I like spotting jokes in the discworld that also come up in good omen's yeah because I like reading good omen's going to write that bit they'll write that bit yeah even though it's not that simple but there's just a nice little joke about um there being fake fossil bones put down by a creator with nothing better to do than upset archaeologists and give them silly ideas and it goes into that bit in

the good omen's prologue word um it said oh the fossils are just a joke that the archaeologists haven't got yet yes and it made me very happy to spot that within this book that is good um oh yeah um in here as well I've just got this um like completely irrelevant but I liked it when it was describing the tower of art um which is the big crookedy part of the university it's like the oldest part of the university it's the tallest tower possibly on the disc definitely an antmoorport it can only be that tall because it's magical but that's another point the point is uh it briefly mentions a haunt of ravens um which is apparently the collective noun for that oh is it all haunties the collective noun well no no because the thing about collective

nouns that I'm increasingly finding out is that they're complete bollocks um oh yeah in that everyone's come up with their own um so something you know when you get these lists of really obscure collective nouns yes they've just been made up yes someone exactly so um but something like this is quite interesting because uh throughout history there have been many reasons to talk about group of ravens yeah and so it's interesting to see there's a few different ones so in this book it's called the haunt of ravens uh in a book you got me for my birthday it's uh which the awesome um compendium of compendium of collective nouns for birds thank you it's called the conspiracy of ravens which is in fact the the name of the book I will point out before we go any further on

this that I don't think with the way that sentence is written that it's meant to be a collective noun do you know oh no no from its chronalated roof the haunt of ravens and disconcerting the alert gargoyles it means it's a place that both ravens and gargoyles haunt I think oh that is the haunt of them well and oh that's made me sad I'm sorry but I think they should be called the haunt of ravens oh I completely agree because I've heard a conspiracy of ravens before because that's been used in like a million fantasy book titles yeah because there's also an unkindness of ravens which I found from babble and I think there's probably lots more but again sorry I am happened to me um all right well I'm going to add haunt of ravens onto that and put it on a web page

somewhere so that people reference it in the future yeah I mean I mean I'm going to start using a haunt as a collective noun for ravens and I'm very sorry to point out that it's not a collective noun there oh no it's fine it's fine I'd rather you did than uh someone on Twitter cool okay well that's that but that was a nice brief rabbit hole for me anyway which just kind of went into ravens in in general man they've got a bad rap over the years like they have been they're just one of those animals that gets unfairly blamed for everything and then shot um because they're um carrion birds uh yeah that kind of makes sense yeah so they turn up on battlefields and eat bodies and stuff which means that they are associated with death and war yeah because they um I was trying

to I was trying to find like a bunch of these collective nouns so I looked at the 1875 and I'll go there um and and they didn't have a collective noun for them but they did have um quite a long passage by the author going into water shame it was that everyone was so mean to ravens which I felt was quite nice yeah because I'm I'm excited about this I love this topic I will try not to give an entire PowerPoint presentation if only because this is a podcast in the digital visual medium um but ravens are amazing they're so clever they can mimic human speech just as well as parrots can they just don't because they can't be asked yeah they don't live with humans they will learn to mimic farmer's calls to wind up sheep because they're dicks which is

what I love about them is that they're really really intelligent but they're also just mean yeah are they cleverer than crows or is it comparable do you know it's comparable from what I understand and I feel like I'm not enough of an expert on this topic to answer any question in detail okay the kind of um picture that I've got through not a lot of research is that yeah ravens and crows kind of similarly intelligent and then magpies are clever but the kind of stupidish mysterious little brother like uh yeah I've always kind of read on ravens and crows are quite equal a lot of things but then even within ravens and crows there's lots of different subspecies and yeah like ravens I didn't realize how global they were oh yeah huge all over the world there's a

three-legged raven in ancient chinese folklore that kind of was within the sun oh cool yeah so that each leg was like morning noon and sunset or something there's also obviously nought mythology you've got thaws ravens that not thaws uh Odin has ravens that live on its shoulder yeah who I can't remember the names of and I should really know that because I've written and read a lot about nought mythology over the last couple of years but I've forgotten the right I've forgotten Odin's ravens names oh look at this a handy copy of uh brewers book of myth and legend oh that's handy uh that is actually I don't I'm just surrounded by tangentially related reference books as I like to be at all times um everyone needs a handy reference book so

yeah so there's just like uh does it they appear in roman legend and green legend and uh there's Zoroastrianism what's that ah I I'm gonna leave that yeah because I have a vague understanding of what Zoroastrianism is but I really don't want to get it wrong and sound like a dick but then it's in it is in the Ameri uh how do you pronounce that sorry Amerindians uh folklore as well so like it's proper global um but yeah it's really interesting and I stopped myself from going properly into that rabbit hole uh but I would like to look at it again in the future if Raven's ever turn up again in patch it looks which they might they do they do oh of course they do

yes excellent uh quotes to Raven yeah which means I'm gonna have to recite some perl on the podcast I mean I'm not going to have to I'm just going to yeah try and stop me I will bring my cuddly toy Raven who is also named Quoth and his new friend Eric the Glittery Crow oh I like Eric the Glittery Crow I'm glad you got one yeah I had to wait wait yeah so we're recording this in October which means it's Halloween time and for some reason waitries are selling sparkly crows you can use it as a Christmas tree decoration obviously yeah yeah cool I might save save stuff though only only £8 I had to buy one anyway so as it turned out that was not only a proper tangent but inaccurate completely inaccurate so let's go to footnotes well I was just excited to see footnotes used a bit

more in this like again Color of Magic had the world's longest footnote it was a page long but then he doesn't do a lot of footnotes he thinks and practically it's like the disworld books especially unknown for being brilliant with footnotes and they start going to incorporate it and I think we've even mentioned we talked about the dungeon dimensions and the creatures are coming from them and the description's a bit more but I just really like this a it's the first one in the book and b I like the description and I will read it out so this is in reference to things from the dungeon dimensions they won't be described since even the pretty ones look like the offspring of an octopus and a bicycle it's well known that things from

undesirable universes are always sinking an entrance into this one which is the psychic equivalent of handy for the buses and closer to the shops yes there we go yes so we did we mentioned this already but it's just one of my favorite things you know this is a ridiculous concept and I'm going to give a really mundane ending to the sentence yeah absolutely yes and yeah tying in with another one of our favorite things which is just Pratchett's use of footnotes in a much more amusing way than most of this yes and I'm excited to as we get more into the books we will see more and more footnotes I do feel like if anything the footnotes are kind of read in Pratchett's tone of voice with the twinkle behind it you know yeah there

is something about reading the footnotes that I very specifically do here in in a Pratchett voice as long as they're the author addressing you directly it's a fourth wall break isn't it yeah it's a it's a looks directly at the camera it's um actually now I'm not going to reference fleabag you haven't seen it but it is a thing like the tv tv slash movie equivalent of a footnote is a fourth wall break where someone directly addresses the audience as that's known is it no no I'm just that's what I'm sort of speculating about the work so to briefly mention fleabag like that's been such a popular show and part of it is the constant fourth wall breaks where she sort of turns to the camera she looks at the camera and she addresses the audience

yeah I should really watch that oh no no it's really it I'm saying don't feel like you have to just because everyone's talking about it I mean I don't really talk to anyone so as far as I'm concerned you're talking about it and you usually leave me in the right direction yeah you should watch it is it on iPlayer do you not have a tv license no I don't have a tv license Jesus fancy I've got Netflix I'll get I'll I'll get there a brickbox thing when it comes out yeah I may stop playing my tv license and get a brickbox instead oh this is a huge diversion yeah yeah yes I was just excited to have a footnote it's clever it's funny and I like the idea that our universe is handy for the shops well not the disc world yeah yeah let's be honest we live

there more than we do here so yeah I feel like that's probably a good thing yeah so kind of going to the fantasy trope um it is kind it is a fantasy trope that evil generally certainly I'd say from the 80s onwards is represented as order whereas the good side is representing chaos if we see everything as that dichotomy yeah and I feel like Pratchett takes it that little bit further and instead of having a totalitarian regime form of order it's this actual what order as a villain would look like yeah rather than Sauron or um oh I don't know do I read more fantasy than me well that's the thing but a lot of the other fantasy you know there would be this clear cut villain and it wouldn't just be and I'm talking

about movies as much as uh like books here but look at something like I don't know if you've seen legend or the dark crystal all right all the readers are gonna throw tomatoes at you in the stocks legends are a great example it's like an 80s fantasy movie Tim Curry plays the villain and and Tim Curry plays like a cape swirling villain that's why he's so miscast for the adaptation of this yeah uh and it's got a really young tom cruise in it and a horse yeah like it's one of the and a horse on the same level as a young tom cruise wasn't he's he's majestically riding a white horse like it is the epitome of cheesy 80s fantasy movie gotcha and yeah an evil is this very clear cut dark swirling thing and yeah I like the project takes it to a logical

conclusion where yes there is clear cut dark swirling evil it's in the dungeon dimensions and it looks like an octopus shagged bicycle yeah but also here is this low grade evil that you will experience every day of your life which is that person that's a little too keen on excel yeah it's not quite what I'm getting at and what I mean is when when you look at literature in general and films in general there are quite often the conflict is quite often between order and chaos yeah and I feel like at some point and somebody has done a better analysis of this at some point the the typical representation of evil went from being chaos to being order right so if you look at stars which I try not to do evil is the empire yeah

evil is the imperialist and quite often the imperialist is generally now regarded as the evil order is evil chaos having the million different tribes and the rebels and everyone's different culture is considered good yeah and we will not try and compare this to modern-day colonialism at all because that will definitely send us off on a dungeon yeah yeah but I mean what I'm saying is I think possibly the the flip came at a similar time to the flip in perception of colonialism yeah in the west but um no possibly much later actually but you know it's connected it's connected and I think Pratchett's favorite villains are the actual logical conclusion of order being the villain yeah I think that's what it takes it to the extreme

which is not Hitler or Sauron it is the auditors yeah or you know a guy who's into meetings yeah memos yeah yeah no I completely agree with you there yeah and the swirling chaos kind of evil is um is still there but isn't it is not as frightening because it's not as omnipresent and determined perhaps yeah so cut cut to something we won't go into now but uh mr. two town caster being the swirling evil yes and part of that being also that is missing something I feel like this is this is something to talk about a bit more in the later but so he's like we have we have a fairly clear cut bad guy and why he's even in this but yeah rinsewind is this chaotic figure messing up the order and somehow that does make him

yeah hero but um yeah he's the protagonist because he's written as the protagonist he is the hero because he's chaotic yes very good which actually comes to one of the things you wanted to talk about you were saying with some rent yeah check me out I'm learning how to podcast while we podcast you did say that we have some rinsewind excellence oh yeah no just more examples of um rinsewind's kind of um owned cowardism that cowardism cowardice that I particularly like uh panic said rinsewind hopefully he always held that panic was the best means of survival back in the olden days people faced with hungry saboteurs tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying what a magnificent brute and here pussy um it's just

I like his yeah as I said before my my own desire to be immortal is tied up very much in the kind of realistic view of risk and uh how to get out of it um and yeah a little bit later on um just just a just nice little quote it's like uh rinsewind you precisely what to do in these circumstances he screamed and pointed the broomstick straight down yeah it's like all of this is just disorganized panic but he's done it so often you know exactly how to panic he's a very well organized panicker now I'm I'm definitely coming around more to rinsewind as a character he's coming off as more three-dimensional now I'm doing like a detailed read of the fix he's in yeah I'm not sure if he ever becomes fully three-dimensional and that doesn't bother me

I like him as a barely three-dimensional character but I'm appreciating his nihilism more than just reading him as a straight up oh he's a coward and he's running away again yeah okay yeah I see what you mean yeah the depths of his cowardice so I'm looking forward more to other books that include him although I'm still kind of dreading sorcery oh interesting ah see that's one of the ones I absolutely love so that'll be quite interesting to that'll be fun read with it at the same time yeah cool um uh there was one other thing I wanted to talk about which is just something I absolutely love that this gets referenced which is this ridiculous naming trope which is because it's talked about as something that happens in the round world but

actually to some extent kind of bollocks yeah yeah uh which is uh I'll use the disc whilst explanation when the first explorers from the warmlands around the circle so you traveled into the chilli hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native pointing at some distant landmark speaking very clearly in an out voice and writing down whatever the bemused man told them thus for a mortalised and generations of atlases such career geographical odyssey is just a mountain I don't know what and of course your finger you fall and then we have a mountain whose name I won't pronounce but it translates as who is this fall who does not know what a mountain is yeah and I love it because there's a whole thing of uh

like kangaroo means I don't know yeah and there's no real evidence as to how much it's accurate and how much it's bollocks but there is I can see in this vein there's probably one real life example that but it also ties into uh some things that literally just named what they are like uh the Mississippi River Mississippi is a word for river yeah river river yeah and there's lots of mountain mountains and yeah there are so many mountains just called mountain in a different language but you know we were talking about the whole colonialism thing and this is something that I think practically is aware of and tries to gently rib like how entitled western people are and the idea of western explorers discovering somewhere people have lived for hundreds of years yeah and

we touched on it with the sort of untouched island culture that's talked about in uh the colour of magic a bit yes but yeah I just love it as a trope I love the idea of a mountain called what's a fucking mountain mate yes yeah even if it doesn't have that much grounding in reality it's very pleasing concept yes so I greatly enjoyed that um and you wanted to talk about uh like I remember oh yeah I wanted a obscure reference when uh uh what's his chops uh Trimon is looking at the book about the pyramid of sorts uh he goes into some detail about how it took uh thousands of men decades to build and cost this much money and it was a maze inside and everything and um it all seemed like a lot of trouble to go to to sharpen a razor

right and I was like wait did I miss a bit flip back and page no all right cool obscure reference let's have a look um and as it turns out um the idea that a pyramid can sharpen a razor blade comes from uh something called pyramid power which was an extension of like the early 20th century Egypt mania um so you know the kind of movement that had people have um mummy opening parties and stuff like that uh they just believe basically the Egyptians were more or less gods and had all this stuff figured out and then we have shadows of it now but it reached its height in the early 20th century but pyramid power held that um pyramids and objects of similar shape could do things like preserve food or trigger sexual urges uh or sharpen razor blades sharpen

razor blades exactly so um so yeah that was a reference to that and I thought that was satisfying the obscure and I probably would have missed it if I hadn't been trying to um trying to yeah trying to analyze the book so I did also just uh I know I should have done this before the obscure reference but yeah that was fine but there was something I forgot to write down as a talking point I really wanted to briefly mention because I love it which is just about there being this is very close to my heart because I write poetry you write poetry I don't know if I've mentioned that before I don't know if that's like part of the truth shall make you fret canon it's inktober by the way which means that Joanna has actually got a beret on and keeps staring

wistfully into the distance and speaking in a bit pentameter I don't know if you've noticed yeah it's an affliction so I'm writing a poem every day this month probably two on halloween maybe three and i'll do a sad brexit one that's right yeah I know anyway but there's a section where um it's explained that a previous patrician of angmore pork passed legislation to stop poetic reporting oh yeah no I did highlight that yes do go yeah I just um the point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby the second as pundit patrician of ang some legislation was passed in an in a determined attempt to put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honesty into reporting thus if a legend said of a notable

hero that all men spoke of his prowess any bard who valued his life would out hastily except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar and quite a lot of other people who've never really heard of him and I like that this patrician who banned poetic reporting was eventually killed by a disgruntled poet during an experiment conducted in the palace grounds to just prove the disputed accuracy of the proverb the pen is mightier than the sword and in his memory it was amended to include the phrase only if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp that is beautiful it's just it's one of my favorite sections because when writing I will find myself going into really florid description and then making fun of myself because I have used overly

florid description for a poet I really hate metaphor yeah the um uh I did notice once or twice when when practice doing his big astrological descriptions that he'd gone way more into the adverbs and adjectives than he would um anywhere else and he does save it all for these but like on purpose obviously um and then likes to as you've said before likes to drop in a very realistic reference like I think he's going on about the clouds swirling over the disc uh like God had stirred his coffee and dropped the creaming kind of thing um but yeah the the general advice on good writing is that take out as much of that crap as you can yes and so I'm not surprised that you've kind of gone that way in your poetry because good but I like when Prachi uses it he uses it uh

to use a metaphor now like someone seasoning a dish very well that's similar don't right metaphor and similarly are basically the same thing it's just one involves the word like yep yeah I remember primary school English yeah so but to to use that similarly it's like someone seasoning a dish very well he knows exactly how much of it to do and when yeah and he even calls himself out on it and points out why also just love the idea of a world where poets at gunpoint are forced to do their research yeah and you can tell almost his thought process as he was doing it because he called himself out as he was going and then just took that yeah to the end because like it is actually the intersection where he's saying the city's let the thieves are up and the insects

are awake and some people have insomnia yeah so yeah so I like the addresses that were themselves and that was that was my last thing I really wanted to talk about in this section cool all right well let's wrap it up for the week then so yeah I think that's about it for our discussion of section one and like fantastic we have decided section two will be again based on the call you pay for back page 69 to page 191 do you want to read maybe the first sentence of it so people can find it if they're on kindle or yeah so rinse wind rinse and open his eyes not that it helped much it just meant instead of seeing nothing but blackness he saw nothing but whiteness which surprisingly was worse which is an excellent paragraph to start with so that's a bit of a

longer section next time bit of a longer section bit more happens but it's a we're on the journey part of the story yes before we get back into uh civilization the real journey not the metaphorical and then we'll go on a metaphorical journey and we'll listen to snow patrol and cry in black and white maybe I should become a BBC documentary again or maybe I should just make parody documentaries yeah yeah yeah all right do you want to like oh I suppose I should tell people what to do should I say goodbye to our dear listeners oh yeah sorry goodbye right that's not how we say goodbye do I play this out thank you for listening to the truth shall make you fret follow us on twitter at make you fret pod on facebook at the truth shall make you fret email us with your thoughts

and angry rants about exactly why we're wrong the truth shall make you fret pod at gmail.com I'm not going to give you your address but I like the idea of having ideas on a postcard so if you want to like stick one in a bottle and hope that it gets to us on the the currents of faith and that's cool too yeah send it by albatross um preferably by albatross really uh I think I would definitely just like to receive an albatross if that don't send a postcard just send us an albatross that would be lovely thank you yeah they will and until next time thank you very much and goodbye nicely thank you for listening for the two sorry jay it's all right I believe in you I've got stage right

I believe in you slightly less than I did 30 seconds ago but I believe in you