The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - Bonus: LIVE from the Discworld Convention 2024

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, we’re releasing a very special episode – a conversation with Ian Stewart, recorded live at the Discworld Convention 2024! We talk about Tiffany Aching books, the Science of Discworld, and involve the audience in a Very Scientific Poll on the best Witches book. Magic! Science! LIVE!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretDiscord: https://discord.gg/29wMyuDHGP Want to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Photos from DWCON 2024 - TTSMYF Professor Ian Stewart FRS - Royal Society Sir Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld - YouTubeScience of Discworld Series - PenguinJack Cohen obituary | Science | The Guardian Terry Pratchett Receives Honorary Degree from University of Warwick [and awards honorary UU degrees to Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen]Music: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

Hello, dear listeners of The Truth Shall Make You Fret. You are about to listen to a live podcast episode that we recorded at the International Discworld Convention in Birmingham a few weeks ago. Not only that, it's an interview with Professor Ian Stewart, who turned out to be a very interesting chap. He is a science man. He is one of the science of Discworld men. It was very cool. Told us all about how it got started and some fun anecdotes about Terry Fractchett and Jack Kerr. Yeah, absolutely delightful conversation. Apologies dear listeners that the audio quality is not amazing. You are listening to our backup recording because our actual recording didn't work because... It kind of worked. It did kind of work. It wasn't listenable, but it kind of worked. We ran

into some unexpected technological issues at the very last minute. Too much. Worked too well, if anything. Yes, it worked enthusiastically. You didn't want to listen to 45 minutes of clipped audio to listeners. You really did. Yes. It's taken me a little while to write it. So again, thanks for patience, everybody. And apologies if it's a little muffled in places, but I think we salvaged it. I think we did. Yeah. So that was cool.

Whole convention was amazing. What was your favourite bit of the convention? Oh gosh, I should have thought about this before we started. Now I'm just going to put you on the spot. Panic Francine, panic. Do you know what? It was just fucking hanging out with people a bit. Like obviously it was really well organized and all the events looked very cool. We didn't do, we didn't like pack our schedule with stuff because we were already tired and stressed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and me, I was just a fucking bundle of nerves. Joe's quite good on the stage. I'm not. So between us, we were okay. But yeah, no, it was like really

cool just meeting people. A few people came up to us and said they liked the podcast, which was really cool. And if you're listening to this, hi. It was very nice to meet you. Yeah. And I'm really sorry if you're one of the people who approached me after midnight and I didn't seem as friendly as I would normally. I promise I was, it's just hard to make my face do the things. Okay. Also, I'm very sorry if you approached me after two in the morning and I was still continuing to drink when I really shouldn't have.

Yeah, Joanna had about 50% more convention than I did because she just didn't sleep. Yeah, no, I slept like four hours in four days. It wasn't a great, great thing. I didn't tell Francine until after we'd recorded the live episode that I hadn't actually come to bed until 5.30 in the morning that day. But it was fun. It was very fun. We danced in a keili. Oh, we did dance in a keili. Yeah, that's very unlike us. Unlike me, certainly you did folk dancing at school, didn't you?

That was a long time ago. But yeah, that was really good. Very sorry if the lady who was actually good at it and I think was getting a bit frustrated with us listening. Thank you for your patience. We tried our best. We did. It's just our best is not the most coordinated after a three course meal. Oh my gosh, yeah, that was after the gala dinner, wasn't it? Yeah, the convention very kindly invited us to the gala dinner, which was Fairyland themed, which is very cool.

We had some lovely food, we wore some lovely outfits. We did. There are photos on the Twitter? On the Twitter and all the places in the Discord and such. Nice. And I will probably try and remember to put them in the show notes on the website too. Yes. Memory permitting. Yeah. But the whole thing was fun and special. What was your favourite bit?

Oh, I don't know. I had loads. I mean, the Caleigh was really fun just because I don't join in with stuff like that. And I sometimes act a bit overly cool. Again, meeting everyone, lots and lots of just hanging out. And it is really nice to be able to just hang out in a room full of people you know you are either going to agree and get on with or if you're going to disagree with them, it's going to be really fun. Yes, it was very chill. But for a convention full of fanatics, it was very chill. So I always imagine, I knew that a squirrel con would be better than what I imagined things like Comic Con or a Doctor Who convention would be like, but I didn't realize quite how far removed it is from those things. It's very non-commercial. It's very, it is much more like just an organized hangout, like a very organized hangout, but

then it is a very intense convention to be like, yeah, it's very cool and good. Oh, shout out as well to Mr. Mark Burroughs, who did his live show, The Manchester Terrier Pratchett. Oh, yeah, that was our favourite bit, of course. That was obviously our favourite bit. Thanks, Mark. I really like the stand up as well. I'd seen the show before. It was like very polished now. And I think he's up in Edinburgh.

He might have finished his round, actually. We will look down by the time this comes out. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. But he is still touring the UK. We'll share a link in the show notes for the rest of the tour dates if you've not seen it yet. Mark's stand up, which started at midnight, because it's been delayed now to be

fair, but was very, very cool and was the only severely non-PG bit of entertainment I saw during the weekend. So I kind of had two days of being like, not completely family friendly, let's say, but definitely free watershed. And then just straight in there with that, whoop, okay. It was great. It was a nice, and it it was not discord focused but full of discord jokes and we all had a very nice time with it. That was really cool. What else do we do? We saw Oh, I liked the granny a kings library thing. That was really cool. Oh, yeah, they did a sort of desert island dis type chat. And yeah, like five books. Yeah. Yeah. Seeing Diane Dwayne and Peter Horwen talk about books was really cool.

I could have listened to them for ages. And there were some fun guest panels and stuff. Oh, we actually got to meet CK MacDonald, who's been on the podcast before. And that was really lovely. Yeah. Queef was really cool. And his wife Elaine. Yes. Yeah. They were really, really cool and nice.

Yeah. There were some interesting panels on publishing and things. Yeah. I came away from this very desperate to finish writing the fiction I'm working on and trying to get those in front of people. Yes, please. I would like to read it. Obviously, this is all for my benefit, trying as my personal entertainment machine. Yes, I am basically Francine Scorchester.

Oh, and we did two live things, didn't we? Because we did a kind of talk chat on folklore and history. Yes, as well as doing our live episode. Which was cool. That was very exciting. Which I'm going to try and clean up and put on the Patreon, which you might have already seen or listened to, patrons, but I don't know yet. We don't know what order all this is.

I don't know what's going on. France seems to be in charge of all this. We're all being finished up today and we'll just see how far I get. Amazing. Yeah, special shout out to the con, like all of the committee and everyone, but especially Kirsteen, who organized everything and who I'm amazed was not jibbering wreck at the end. And the tech people. Yeah, especially Dave, who really helped us out when we were panicking.

And Graham, who was looking after all the guests and he was very lovely. Yeah. Obviously, thank you to everyone. And if anyone from the con is listening, thank you very much for having us. Please have us back. We want to do that again. Yes, that was fun and good. It was very fun. And listeners, if you've not been to a Discworld convention before, go to one.

Excellent fun. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know us. We're not like overly involved in all the fan spaces all the time. But this was just really cool. And now I feel like I might be more. Amazing. Before we go into our wonderful live episode,

a couple of bits of admin for the listeners. First of all, you can expect our first episode on Dodger to come out on Monday, the 2nd of September. Keep an eye on socials and in the Discord to find out how much of the book we'll be covering because I haven't worked that out yet. Also, we're just putting some feelers out, just little ideas, listeners. If in December we were to organise some sort of Hogswatch celebration episode, possibly with an audience of sorts. With an audience.

With an audience in front of people. In person. And in person. We were, we are thinking of a live Hogswatch extravaganza this year. If you want to see me panic. If you really want to see Francine panic, if you want a chance to meet the actual Hog Father for some reason, he keeps turning up to our episodes. I don't know how that happens. Maybe you'll meet him this time Joanna.

Maybe I will. And if we do this, we're going to try and organize it to be probably a Saturday afternoon to make travel work. We'll try and organize it so we can sort of hang around with the listeners afterwards and have a little Hogswatch party. So yeah, let us know what you think. Just want to get a vague idea of numbers. We'd like to know if there's a chance of us actually having an audience before we hire a venue, basically. Because obviously, this will exist on the funds. It will have to be a ticketed event, but it will be recorded for all listeners as well. And, you know, buy us drinks afterwards as well, please. And you know, buy us drinks afterwards as well please. Thank you. Anyway. Oh yeah, before we launch into it, is your book out now?

Officially it is now coming out on the 30th of August rather than the 30th of July. Unfortunately there was a dial out at the printers which I can do nothing about. But I was featured in the Scottish Sunday Post today. Oh good. out. But I was featured in the Scottish Sunday Post today. Honest truth thing. Unfortunately, it's in print, but it's not up online yet. When it's up online, I'll make sure I share a link around talking about the book and the legacy of friends. Cool. We can put a little photo of the print on the Twitter on the show notes, can't we? Also, the book is, if we've got anyone listening who does like to review books or blog about

books, it is now up on NetGalley. So it's there to be reviewed if you fancy having a look. And if you do, either be nice about it or don't tell me at all. Because I got a review the other day with like a minor criticism and I can't stop thinking about it. Oh no. It was a really minor criticism and it was a foul one. I can't stop thinking about it. Yeah, that's just how it goes. Yeah. So anyway, just adulation, Emily. Thanks, Liz. Cool. Right. Please enjoy our bonus live from the International Discworld Convention interview with Ian Stewart.

On with the podcast? No, wait, let's do a podcast. How do we say this? Do you want to make a podcast? But a while ago? Yeah, we made a podcast. Let's play the podcast. Hit it, Jack. Cool. That was really graceful and well done, I thought. Yeah, well. Yeah, no, I think we did that well. Hello and welcome to The True Shell Make Ye Fret, live from the International Discworld Convention 2024.

This is a podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one assignment in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And joining us today, the the wonderful the fantastic Professor Ian Stewart Honorary Wizard of the Unseen University. As you noticed I said usually we are not recapping a specific Discworld book today because that would be actually quite boring for all of you. So we're going to

chat a little bit about Tiffany Aking, we're going to have a wonderful chat with Ian himself of course, and then we're going to rope you all into an audience poll and make you all embarrass yourselves. Finally, note on spoilers before we crack on. We're a spoiler-like podcast so it's safe for new readers if they're going chronologically. This episode will not contain any spoilers past I Shall Wear Midnight and as always we're saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel The Shepard's Crown until we get there so you dear listeners can come on the journey with us. With many stops for a quick drink at the bar along the way.

Yes absolutely. So Tiffany Akin. Pratsy, when did Tiffany Akin start? Well Tiffany Akin's first book or Terry Pratchett's first book about Tiffany Aking, was released in 2003. It was We Free Men. By this point, I should say, almost all of the reviews and everything I can find about Terry Pratchett's books are very positive. By 2003, everybody had been converted. So I can't do what I like to do with some of the earlier ones and find something hilariously

rude or misguided from a review. So I will say it won the WH Smith Teen Choice Award. It won a Locus Award. It was, in Terry Pratchett's words, a bit of a change of pace, getting out in the fresh air after the horrors of Night Watch and The Amazing Morris. This was a really good run of books.

It was like Thief of Time, A Night Watch, Amazing Morris, We Three Men. Yes. Excellent full book run. Fantastic. And then carried on with A Hatful of Sky in 2004. Again, lots of awards, the Locus Awards. Very popular was Librarians and Feminists.

It was A Hatful of Sky. Winter Smith came out in 2006. Again, amazing critical reviews. Best book for young adults from the American Library Association. Also led to the 2013 Steel Ice Spanner album of the same name. Very cool. And I Shall Wear Midnight came out in 2010, won the Andre Norton Award for best young adult book among others and yeah, just threw out a very popular run of books.

Incredible series of books. So favorite Tiffany Oaking book, we'll let you go first Ian, have you got a favorite? Well it's difficult, they're all pretty good. Oh we know this is just your answer now and it could change in five minutes. Yeah sure, Wintersmith. Yeah, I'm allowed to talk about that?

Oh absolutely. Yeah, it's a pretty young adult novel and of course every dismal fan knows it doesn't matter what age you are, you read all of them. It's quite dark in some ways. It starts with Tiffany making a huge mess of everything by dancing this part of the Dark Morris dance. We get so mixed up with the Summer Lady. It's very tightly plotted, it's a rather complex plot.

So the Winter Smith and the Summer Lady between them make the seasons go round. They keep swapping seasons. I think one of the images in the book is that this is a bit like the clocks that tell you what the weather's going to be like, and this little man who comes out for rain and the woman who comes out for sun when we celebrate around, but they never both come out at the same time. And it's supposed to be like that for the summer lady and the Winter Spirit. But Tiffany puts her foot in it, having been told not to, and causes endless trouble.

And that's quite an interesting way to start a book about your heroine. She makes a total mistake. She's learning to be a witch. She's actually pretty good at witch-roiding, but she's, you know, young lady, she's got to learn, and she makes a big mistake. And he weaves half a dozen different threads through the book.

It's a very complex structure, which he handles very well. I was re-reading it the other day and I was struck by just how how deeply Terry weaves these things in. And of course there's always the standard Terry actually touches. So at one point suddenly a band of travel and librarians turns up. Yes. And it's at the point when the winter spirit is causing trouble as it's very, very cold, and they run out of fuel for their fire, and they're complaining about this, and they're surrounded by books, being travel librarians, and it's pointed out to them, but you've got lots of books.

Yes, we have. And then there's some commentary like like that basically you now have two different people viewing exactly the same scene and totally failing to understand each other. The librarians would not burn the book under any circumstances. And then there's a lot of little, he throws in a lot of jokes, it's really quite funny. One bit I quite liked, it's one of these computer science, I think it's, so anagrammer is also training to be a witch and is making a real passion because she's much too vain, doesn't listen to anybody and so forth. And one of the other young witches, I think it's Petunia, is complaining. She always calls me the pig witch.

And Tiffany says to her, but you are the pig witch. Petunia says, yeah, but when anagrama says it, there's too much pig and not enough witch. Oh yeah, that's terrible. So I don't want to recap the entire plot. But the other thing about it, and I only really realised this when I looked it up on the web. It is full of references to Grimsberry Tales, other books, other stories. You can spend many hours reading the book thinking, hmm, now what does that bit remind me of? So Terry always used to collect little ideas from here, there and everywhere. I never

found out where he's broken down, stuck him in this computer or just kept him in his head. But from time to time, these references to other things crop up. And you can have a lot of fun with Wintersmith just tracking down and thinking about these different sources he must have got some of the ideas from. And we can attest to going down quite a lot of rabbit holes in that one. Yeah. What's yours? I think I would go for I Shall Wear Midnight.

Yeah. And I do love Winter Smith as well. I love the imagery in Winter Smith, but there's a lot from I Shall Wear Midnight that's stuck with me in that very sticky way that I've lost it for a fraction. Theories have, or concepts have. The idea, of course, of the hair running into the fire, just absolutely beautiful imagery and metaphor.

But also the darker stuff, the less beautiful stuff that comes across in I Shall Wear Midnight, obviously the scene in the beginning, the very harrowing one in the barn, hell of a thing to put in a young adult book but it's an example of Terry Pratchett respecting his audience, be they younger than usual or not. And then the kind of ongoing themes throughout of the best and the worst of humanity being showcased in these situations and the worst of humanity being brought out by the cunning man who I would say has a really good shot at being the scariest villain in Terry Pratchett. For me, he's just viscerally terrifying in a way most of them aren't.

And yes, you've got this mob justice, you've got the rough music, and you're on the side of the mob for that one, and then you realize how quickly that can turn to be against something that you're on the side of. And then of course you get the return of Esk, which is just the most fantastic twist. Just, yeah, just a beautiful book,

beautiful in imagery and in concept throughout. And it shows Tiffany growing up a bit and does really well. And she still gets something wrong and she's still really grappling with a lot of stuff in her head, but she's doing it while she's being the witch of the village and taking care of people and becoming, you know, probably becoming the young woman her grandmother would have wanted her to be. And that's, yeah. How about you?

I mean, I would have also probably gone with Wintersmith. That's one of my favorites though. I used to go back and reread a lot before we started doing a podcast where we read a lecture book every month, but I don't have time to go back and reread as often. But Hatful of Sky, I think there's something about, because The Wee Free Men is very introductory and it's beautiful and the elves are one of the most terrifying villains as well. This absolute lack of humanity in space. But it's very much setting up Tiffany for who she's going to become. But Hapful of Skies is seeing her really start the journey and go on her way there and be... There's something about reading a young girl protagonist who is so incredibly flawed and

petulant and wants to be proved right and is incredibly prideful. It's really satisfying to read. I don't like to do the, you know, strong female protagonist who don't like saying that because it's a monkey-o-newster. Yeah, but like realistic female protagonist. A whole person. Yeah, a real female protagonist. So I think seeing the beginning of the journey in Half-Moon of Sky is fascinating and the amount of introspection it takes for her to defeat the Hiver and the kind moments on the sands of the end. I think it's a wonderful book. But yeah, what's so great about the Tiffany Erking books anyway? Any thoughts?

Any thoughts? But the other thing about Wintersmith of course is that Terry's low-grade band was Steele's friend and they made an album based on it. And I hadn't realised this, being somewhat stupid about these things, until there was a memorial event for Terry in Barbican. Yes, we were there. A steel-ice band play. Everyone was there and it went on for about twice as long as it was intended.

And I think it was Rob who was congratulating everyone in the audience on the strength of their bladders. I remember that feeling. But after I heard it, I immediately went out and bought the album. I can understand why Terry was such a fan, mostly a nice fan. And every time I play it, it reminds me of that event, which was reminds me of Terry. So I think that's a... That's a really wonderful connection to have to it.

Yeah, there's a connection there which is very important. It's lovely. The Tiffany and Brits as a whole, I think, are kind of a culmination of a lot of what Terry Pratchett was working up to with the witches' books in general and with a lot of the other world building, a lot of the kind of, you know, moral messaging again sounds a little bit,

a bit of twee or. Yeah, but there are the powerful messages in the books. Yeah, the themes, yeah. The, the, the inner narrative of Tiffany is fantastic from the start. This almost the, who watches the Walkman, but going on in the head of a witch kind of thing. The second and the third are literally false thoughts.

Did we get to fifth? I don't remember. I think we got to fourth somewhere in Ration Women though. But yeah, I mean, I think we talked about an episode of the podcast before how they almost seem like not sequels, maybe successors to the witch's arc. Yeah, very much so. And they are of course, they're a really good entry point for young people. Yeah. They're a really good starting point if you are trying to get a younger reader into them,

although you have to kind of age up with the books. Yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. When you get to the opening of I Shall Wear Midnight, it's a really heavy start for a young reader. There's also something about this feeling of homecoming in them, because the area in it, the short franchise

is rising about where he lives, where he's from. And so after you've got this fantastical city and even Lanka with its terrifyingly steep hillsides, there's something really sweet about this beautiful green landscape that is Terry Pratchett's home. Like he talks about what we've remembered being some of the getting out in the fresh air. Yes, yeah.

And the kind of powerful imagery for Elric's of the land being on Tiffany's side and her, and voiding her, and our family as well. And it is, there's a sense, despite all the terrifying things that happen, and often happen on the chalk, there's this sense of safety and home in this fight. Yeah.

I mean, actually, talking about the chalk reminded me, certainly in Winter Smith, I don't know if he does it earlier, he reveals the meaning of the name Tiffany. Yes. It's in land under wave. That is chalk. Yeah. Yeah.

Rock that is deposited at the bottom of the sea. Now I remember him saying to me at some point, when he first started writing about Tiffany, he didn't know that. He just plucked my name from where it goes, it's in the right name. And she lives on the chalk and so forth. And he was talking on the telephone and he said, I've just found out what Tiffany means. And he explained the relationship to talk. And I think his whole attitude to Tiffany changed at that point because suddenly there was this connection that he hadn't realized was there.

Was this coincidence? Was it something at the back of his mind he didn't realised it was dead. Was this coincidence? Was it something at the back of his mind? He didn't know. I think it was probably narrative here. It was inevitable that he chose a name for his character, which some point later would connect with big ideas in the background to the story. Of course.

So, yeah, definitely narrative. That's Harry Bratcher, he's quite the writer really, isn't he? Yes. And speaking about you talking to Terry about all this kind of stuff, I mean, we could start talking about the relationship with Terry Bratcher, about even the relationship to the disabled. So how did you come to know and work with Jerry Bratchett? It was Jeff Clubbing's talk. So 1990, I'd just met Jeff.

I'd written a book called Does God Play Dust? And Jeff, me and Jeff, was interested in it, and he phoned me up and said, I want to talk to you about your book. So I'd never met him, but it sounded like an interesting idea. So we went off to the local pub and four hours later we were still there talking about a lot of things. And he was a milder discerning mathematician, particularly in those days, these were rather poles apart. But we discovered we had a lot in common.

These were rather poles apart. But we discovered we had a lot in common. It wasn't the subject area. It was almost everything. What do you do when your PhD student is struggling? That kind of thing. And we realized, maximum, why was he having the same things in common? Anyway, so Jack was guest of honor at NovaCon.

Not very far down the road from here, at a Birmingham hotel that no-one exists because they probably built something else. And Jack Persuading had come along to NovaCon. We were sitting there in an interview in Interzone with him. He writes his fantasy books, doesn't he? I said, I'm not in red on them. He said, you're shrewd. They're not the sort of fantasy books you think they are. Anyway, it turned out Terry was there, paying his money in the door to come in, as all of you remember. He was already famous, the books were doing very well, but he wasn't there to give a talk.

He just wanted to come along and meet his mates. And Jack and Terry had been friends since long before Terry was famous. So we had lunch together, and got on very well. And every time after that, Jack and I tended to hang out together because we were in the writing various books together and so forth. And from time to time, our travels around the UK would take us near where Terry lived at the time, which was outside Bristol. And we dropped by and said hello.

And then a bit later, at another, I think it was another Novocon, Terry was there, Jack was there, I was there, and we decided the hotel food was not very good. And Jack said, oh, I know a Mungo restaurant, not too far from here. Turned out it was in Dudley, a little bit. And I had a bright red sports car at that point.

So we got in my sports car and drove off to the restaurant. And Terry said, a mathematician shouldn't own a car like this. Anyway, we were in the restaurant and we were talking about, it was the time when the Physics of Star Trek book had just come out. So this was all of how warp drives really work and so forth. And we got discussing this. We said, well, actually warp drives don by the way, because they're fiction. And the idea popped up that really there should be a disqual book that related to real science.

And Terry said, you know, actually I would like to do a book on that. In fact, there's a certain amount of pressure on me that I want to do a book like that. It would be great to do one with the three of us. But there's a problem. This world does not run on science. And we said, oh, we'll look, but there's all sorts of science jokes, like the cat in the box. There are three states to a cat in a box, alive, dead, and absolutely bloody furious.

Because the cat is green mode. And Terry said, yeah, but you can't really write a book just about that sort of stuff. And so we put it on the back burner, and Jack had a part-time position in the mathematics department with a foot in the biology department at Warwick University, largely courtesy of the Vice Chancellor of the Prime Minister, Slash Button. And Jack and I were in the common room, about six months later, in the maths department. So, it's a pity we can't do the Science of This World book, because there's no science in this world. And then the idea popped up from somewhere. Hang on. So Jack, Tom, Terry said, Terry, we know there's no science in this world,

but we thought a way to put something there. And it won't interfere with anything that's going on. It's the Round World Project. So somehow or other the wizards of Unseen University bring into existence Round World, which is a magical containment field that keeps magic out. And actually it's our entire universe, or planet, it's always very ambiguous which means it's precisely within. And one of the reasons is there's no narrative in it so it doesn't actually know what science is meant to be, or what thing it ought to be. But

genuine round world science goes on inside the groundwork project. And the wizards looking in from outside are completely baffled by the stupid things that are going on inside this template. For example, the world is round. Now that's completely battle by the stupid things that are going on inside this dead end gate.

For example, the world's ram. Now that's mad. People on the bottom fall off. So, there's this thing called gravity that holds them on. Yeah, I suppose. Wouldn't it be simpler to have it flat before it opens to hold up? That's a sensible way to paint the world. So what we're telling you, if there were elephants holding up around the world, people would walk around it and end up looking at a giant elephant lying on its back and squeaking, pointing up into the air. And you could paint the souls of its feet yellow and get angel elephant glow.

Why do elephants paint the souls of their feet yellow and get angel out of their throat. Why do elephants paint the socks of their feet yellow so you can't see them when they're floating upside down in custard? That's impossible. I'm totally going to hear this. That's one of the stories of Sauravip Jaya. So we played around with this. Eventually, gentlemen, I said, we're

going to have to actually make something happen here. So we sat down and we wrote the opening wizard, Terry's story. We decided the way this book would be structured, Terry would write a short story about the wizards bringing Round World into existence and totally puzzled about what was going on. And we would interleave that, talk it out into about 15 or 20 20 pieces and put very big footloose in between the pieces, mainly the science chapters, explaining what was really going on around the world. Anyway, so the big problem was finding the story of Terry. So Jack and I sat down and wrote the re-roll and wrote about three or four pages of Terry's story

and sent it to him. Right. So Terry reads on the poem. I've just read your idea of his story. Now it's all wrong if I'm happy, I wasn't going to do that. That's not the way to do it. Pause. I'm telling you how you should go. Right. Got it. Got it.

It's like when they say, they always say if you want to get the right answer from a group of experts, just give them the wrong answer and they can't help themselves. It goes correct. Yeah. We knew that. what we were doing. There's a lot of fun. They are fantastic books. Were there any particular areas in the books, and they became multiple books,

that you wanted to explore, that you had a great time exploring? The first thing that happened, when we did book one, we didn't realise that we were going to be books two, three and four. So book one has about twice as much material in it as it should have had. It had been crammed in everything from the Big Bang through to the point at which something has left the planet because there's a common current. The chapter before that, there's a bunch of rather stupid apes, who were mostly obsessed with sex. The Arch Chancellor is trying to teach them to read and write. So there's this big black object that he's writing on, it's a blackboard but it's playing its deliberate reference from 2001, the monolith.

Right at the beginning of the 2001 film the apes are dancing around the big monolith and they're going to be turned into human beings by this experience and in fact in the film one of them throws a bone, they're bashing each other on his with bows, one of them throws a bone on the air and it flips over and it morphs into the spaceship. Right, so the arch-chancer is trying to do the same thing, but the very next scene in the story is not about human beings, it's the wizards are fast-forwarding and they skip humans altogether and they just know something is leaving the planet. Well this left a nice big gap for everything else. But if you had any sense we would have the big problem was will these books sell to the intersection of popular science and Discworld fans, which will not be very big, or will it be the evening. Bob decided people liked it as well. Fans liked it. It did pretty well.

But anyway, so we had this celebration dinner and so it was absolutely enormous fun. We really enjoyed the event. We can't do another one. And Jake was like, that's a shame. Why not? Sequels never do as well as the previous one.

And it'll never be as much fun the second time around. Or, if we didn't do it, what would be in it? What sort of science would we do? What would the Discworld story look like? And this was his way of setting Minajak a challenge. And the challenge was to, we actually had to give him a kind of framework for his story, not in terms of what the wizards did, but in terms of what they would be looking at inside Roundel. So we had to think, I think we thought of about 18 different scenarios, each one of them was turned out and eventually one of them worked. And then we got one, we took it, yeah I can run with that.

And then the way we wrote it was Jack and I were already used to working together. So it was a sort of Jack and Ian collaborating with Terry. So it was a two-way collaboration effectively. Both of them handled it. Three people, we started with arguments and two of them came out against the third one. We didn't have to do that. And so we got that one sorted and it went the same way for the third one. And we were in real trouble thinking of, I mean at one point, one of the ideas for the third one was that another dis-world-like world which was based on Mars rather than the Earth would approach and basically attack this world. What happened on Mars would be like

the Icarus Buries is Mars. And Terry said, what the hell do we think is happening on this earth? So reading that sort of a vast number of them. And I was reading a very nice biography of Charles Darwin. And I was reading his thing. And various events in Darwin's life happened in a way that just did not make sense. For example, you know, Darwin does all this voyage on the Wimbledon, where he picks up all the stuff that leads him to think about English.

The problem, of course, he wanted to go on the beach but his father said, no, you can't go. You've been trained to be a country vicar, which means you've spent a lot of time collecting vehicles, which he was interested in. That's the sort of thing country vickers did in Victoria. You became the world expert on A-beetle. You had lots of spare time, lots of beetles around, and the country side you would find one.

Nobody else on the Union could study it. You could write papers and send them to a law society and all that sort of thing. And that's what Dad wanted him to do. And that all made perfect sense. Except at that point his dad says to the young man, Of course if your uncle recommends that you should go, I might change my mind. Well, the uncle was the kind of person who would say, Oh yes, let the young man go, it will be the making of you.

And I'm sitting there thinking, his father must have known that. He must have known this was totally going to subvert what he was trying to do. This makes no sense. And a little bit later I thought, that must be the wizards intervening or something in this world

has intervened with Charles Darwin's life. And then the whole thing, oh, look in front of me, okay, I've got business. For some reason, Terry didn't know what it is, it turned out to be the audit as a reality, didn't like what was going on around the world, it was getting too interesting and that's not what you want. Diamond writes the wrong book. Instead of writing the origin of species, he writes something more other which fits into the Christian religion of Victorian times. And science and religion get on extremely well, and they're able to argue about things, and the whole society is stagnant as a result of them striking sparks of each other. And so I put together a kind of five or six steps in Darwin's career where clearly this interference is happening,

and sent it to Terry, who said, what do you want? That one will work. But for six months we could not figure out what the'd written was the theology of species. Theology rather than the origin. And then the whole thing came together. So, yeah, and then, well, the fourth book was, there was a problem with the fourth book. We had the whole thing mapped out. We were about to send the synopsis off to the publisher to get a contract from them and Terry found out that he had just been diagnosed with PCA for stereococcal atrophy. So the whole thing went on back then. Now Terry being Terry, about four years later, the funder one day said, Jack Emeigh, I've been thinking about science at this world for

and well you know I'm having trouble writing now, I've got a lot of things I want to write and I'm in the middle of about 30 books, so we thought okay, I'll be an artist. So I think this is a really good time to start some of the book. He had been rooting for four years on not being able to do what he promised he would do and write that book. It's extraordinary. Fantastic. Do we have any questions from the audience for you excellence is brilliant and it explains a lot of things that I've been done for easy explanations to the general public when did that really come from?

okay so ex-intelligence is like intelligence because it comes from outside of people, etc. and inside. Jack and I were writing some popular science books, and the second one came up. I can't remember which one the two of us were, they're muggled together in my head anyway. But the second one is called Fingerns of Reality, and the idea was not that reality is a figment of our imagination. It's the other way around. What goes on inside our heads is based on these nerve cells, electrical impulses, chemical reactions, no matter how it works, but everything we experience is happening in there.

But it's happening in there because the nerve cells and everything else are part of the physical world. But I'm trying to explain how, I mean basically our brains are no smarter than those of Stonehenge people. I'm beginning to realise how the Stonehenge culture was a lot more subtle and complex than people used to think. But we haven't changed very much. But what we can now do, technologically and in other ways, is way beyond anything that they've done in the Stonehenge. Why? Because we've developed this technique of keeping cultural capital outside us.

So once someone has figured out how to make a flint axe, anyone can do it. It was passed on by a word of mouth. Then we get writing, then we get the internet. And suddenly, the repository of human abilities can continue even when people die. And it just grows and grows and grows. And we wanted a name for it. And Jack and I always like wordplay. If you read our drawing book, you'll find a lot of wordplay by various kinds in there.

And it was kind of inevitable that one of us would come up with ex-telligence as the important thing. Later on we did a book on alien life. Jack Anderson did a series of lectures called Life on Other Planets, Possibility of Life on Other Planets, probably what we call it. He did about 300 of these, scores. But we wrote a book about it. The whole point of the book was there is no reason why life on other planets should be more or less identical to life on this one.

If the conditions on the planet are different, the life forms will be different. But we realised that there's all this search for intelligent life. We thought, no, it's ex-telegram life we should be looking for. They're the ones who are going to have the space ships. So it kind of emerged from this interaction between the two of us. Any other? I think we've got time for one more? Yeah. So Terry was famous for reading his friends when he got stuck on something or needed to know about something. What is your favourite example of Terry reading you work and asking you a question to help him with the story of the book. Okay, so put that in context, that's absolutely right.

Terry had this stable of a dozen or so people who were, at least in his mind, were experts on various areas. Anything biological he'd bring Jack. Anything to do with folklore he would bring Jack to. Anything to do with mathematics or physics, things like that, he'd bring me. So one day, it always happens this way, I'm sitting in my office at the university, the phone goes, pick it up, hello, Terry here, oh hi Terry, you got a minute? Yeah, sure. It doesn't matter what we're doing, we all sit there, we walk. He says, if something got really, really hot, so hot that basically the temperature becomes infinite, does it keep going and suddenly

become very, very cold? Because one of the points would be, he never explained why he wanted to know this story. He would just ask the question. So I said to Terry, as it happened I knew the answer to that, well, an answer I said. Terry you just asked something that, when I was an undergraduate in Cambridge, in our thermodynamics course, exactly this point came up, and the answer is yes. It goes from plus infinity to minus infinity, and then works its way out again, so it's very very cold at minus infinity. And the reason is that in thermodynamics it's not temperature that matters, it's one divided by temperature.

And one divided by zero is plus or minus infinity. And I can even send you a photocopy of the page of the textbook that explains this. So, Terry, my device has his phone. I threw one at you. So Terry went away satisfied. The other thing that happens is about three years later in one or other of the books, you come across a passage and you go, oh! That's why he called me. That's why he called me. You suddenly spot, there was something in Morrison's Educative Role, which he'd asked me some years before. Of course, he had several books on the go at different stages in different books.

He was collecting stuff that might never turn up in the book or it might. Yeah, so just occasionally, Terry's helpers in this way would be able to look at one book and say, ha ha, I told you that. The best one I know for Jack, Terry phoned Jack and said, Jack, tell me 12 things about rats that nobody else knows. And without being Jack, it means that you've milled off 12 things about rats. And one of them was about the thing called a rat king. What is a rat king? It is about 16 rats whose tails are all tangled together. And these things happen.

And there are lots of theories about how this happens. One is there's an awful lot of rats in a very small space and they just get tied up. Jack said, well actually I think what it probably causes is some kid comes along and finds all these rats and grabs them by the tongue and ties a knot in it. But you don't need to know that and we don't know for sure. And so Terry Redd, well the amazing Morris, one of the, the villain of the piece is a rap king in that sense. So this is one way Terry picked up the side of you from another one of his elders. It was always very nice to get that sort of phone call and he always felt he was contributing something.

and you always felt you were contributing something. That's wonderful. We have got a few minutes left. So we're going to make the most of having an audience here and do something scientific. We're going to do a very scientific poll of which is the best witches book. The more this we do need, have we got any audience volunteers willing to say which they think is the best witches book in one?

Very short pitches. We've got one at the front here. Do you mind? Yeah, go for it Grants is growing into how to be countered. McGrath is growing into a councilman, a witch, and a queen, and a mother. The vampire tropes are hilarious. The subset of vampires, Henry, Wendy, is just superb. He brings back his favorite toilet film, where the bureaucracy of people in council where getting the bad

villain in and you know damn well the loyalty card to the human cattle is not too far away but on top of all that you've got granny being the most powerful she's ever been but also the most human most vulnerable she's ever been and bringing those two together in something you can only really appreciate if you are a British reader that the Van Kermit bloodlust program, the T, is really exact then he ties the entire lot together in the same book of Freddie's speech regarding that sin is tripping the sense and it's just a phenomenal book, I feel like it's massively underrated

That's an excellent picture. Have we got any other volunteers for Best Witches book? So you can just pass them on for a moment. So I'm going to make a pitch for Lords of Lanes. Because despite being in the middle of all the witches, however, whatever you call a sequence of five books. It also feels like the climax in some ways. This is being dramatic about it. We go back to Granny's past.

We have the wizards interacting with the witches for the first time, and the sequence that always sticks out in my head is when Granny is running away from the dancers with the young witch whose name I can't remember and she has to try and save her. It's this great moment of the central theme of sort of passing with the torch, of passing with time, quite prevailing in a magic book having this big action moment to highlight it. Amazing.

Have we got, do we have one more pitch from the audience? I think I would go for Book of the Book. I mean, it's a wonderful, it feels less like a comics of the witch's fable, but it really feels like Perry saying, here's the thing I've been saying that stories forever, let's have one book where I'm entirely self-adulting and saying, I'm going to go out and play with my parents,

take them away from the house, do everything else, have a lot of fun, and say, here's one of the best stories, here's one, and whether I'm going to be successful or not. Fantastic. All right, so I think three pictures, this is not anywhere else. Fantastic. Alright, so I think three pictures is going to help. Yep, I like that. So now our very scientific polling, viral applause. For Carpe Jugulam.

For Lords and Ladies. For Witches and ladies. For witches abroad. I think that witches abroad might have just got that. That was going to be Francine's choice. Liam, quick thought? Do you feel like the audience has chosen one? Amazing. Right, I think we've taken up everyone's time, but just not enough. So we're going to do a little outro, and you'll know when it happens, but at the end of...

We like to end our episodes with a don't let us detain you. So what's going to happen is I'm going to tell you where to find us on the internet and all of those things and then I'm going to say until next time and if we can all as one do a don't let us detain you we might accidentally summon a little Fettinarium. We're going to try. Thank you very much for coming to the first ever live episode of the True Show Making Freight. Listeners at home, thank you for listening to the first ever live episode of the True Show Making Freight. If you've not listened to us before and you want to find us, come find me afterwards. We've got lots of cards and things. Or just Google us. That works too. If you do want to stay in touch with us, you can join our Discord. There'll

be a link in the show notes. Or just kind of find us and talk to us. And follow us on Instagram at the True Show Makinginkiefrest on Twitter and blue sky at MinkyFretpod on Facebook at the truechaminkiefrest. You can join our subreddit r slash ttsnyf. You can email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks and avatars at the truechaminkiefretpod at gmail.com. And if you want to support us financially, and I do not know why you would, you can find me drinking the bar afterwards. Or you can go to patreon.com forward slash the true Shamiki for us and exchange your hard-earned pennies for all sorts of bonus nonsense. And until next time, dear listeners, Don't let us dissent you!

Fantastic. Thank you. I've never been able to wrangle more than two people to do it that well at the same time, so... Well done! Thank you.