The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 52: Strata Part 1 (Meta Metaphorical Metaphor Muscles)

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is usually 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 continue our Proto-Pratchett season with part 1 of our recap of “Strata”. Gods! Worlds! Raven?Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Ringworld | Larry Niven Wiki - Fandom/r/mendrawingwomenStrata Book Covers - L-SpaceYou're Dead To Me, Old Norse Literature - BBC Radio 4Strata - The Annotated Pratchett FileAlderson disk - WikipediaMetamaterial cloaking - WikipediaMedieval warm period - BritannicaMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

flaccid toast flaccid is another word for the list of words we shouldn't ever say flaccid i'll add it to the list thank you we have a literal list listeners if this makes it to the show somewhere if this ends up in the show yes listeners we have a list of bad words have you put clown eggs on it um i think no maybe not hold on um here it is bad words my bad words list so clown eggs and what did we just say flaccid flaccid all right so we've got flesh ripe slippery leatherous froth mumble sucker hinge clown eggs and flaccid words to the forbidden words one day i will remember all of them and try and sneak all of them into a single episode summary i think i won't notice you think i won't notice if you say mumble sucker

all right mumble suckers a bit hard but i feel like i can separately get mumble and sucker into a sentence yeah so how have you been how have you been i enjoyed uh week off not that i did anything different than what i've been doing for the last five months i studied and sewed on bank holiday monday i decided to see if i could make a dress from scratch in a single day and kitty i could and i'm calling all of the ways in which it is asymmetric a design feature rather than i am bad at sewing straps on it's a feature not a bug this is something you're learning concurrently with the development uh developing stuff so yeah between studying web development and studying sewing that is the main thing i've learned feature not bug i also had a

brilliant moment of genius yesterday so in the coding course i'm doing we're currently building a massive app front and back end called yelp camp where people can list campsites and review them and okay but it involves building the server side of everything as well and i was the day before yesterday i was studying how to handle errors in servers which meant intentionally generating errors so i could then look at all the ways in which they get handled it's very dull uh yesterday morning some tickets for a festival i was hoping skater in august went on sale but obviously their servers went down because everyone was trying to get tickets so i clicked on the link and it came up with this error and it was the same error i had been trying to generate

so that i could learn how to handle it the day before and it wasn't very well handled they didn't have like a nice template for it to come up or anything but i got very i got really confused and thought i'd accidentally reopened my server and clicked on that page rather than the ticket link before i realized what was happening ah yes yeah yeah i did not eventually succeed in getting tickets for this festival sadly yeah i've said one of my favorite things about learning basic web development stuff was uh learning how to click into like crane development tools and get rid of annoying elements on web pages yeah that that bit is quite yeah fucking pop up yes disabling pop up fire the dev tools is quite fun and uh also since i started learning like

especially uh things like css frameworks being able to look at websites and go hmm this is bootstrap yes yeah or eventually you'll get to this is square space not a sponsor we are not sponsored by square space i've listened to so many square space ads this week i'm going to go berserk i've just had a glut of podcasts all square spaced square spaced and what's the other one hello fresh and uh better health that one keeps coming up a lot no not that one is some cbd bollocks oh yeah i don't know yeah don't know me it's bollocks not many of the podcasts i listen to have adverts uh i think because i don't listen to many american ones and i find that the bigger american ones tend to be the ones that then have the bad revenue

and stuff i've not been against podcasts having adverts no no the the more kind of indie british ones and indie american ones i listen to do tend to have ads but for other podcasts within their little network which yeah that i don't mind so much yeah yeah like pushkin and uh rusty quill whatever hmm that i don't mind so much some of the bigger ones i listen to uh like the storm the lost one they have adverts but they are always in the same place in the episode so they're very easy to skip yes yeah yeah like i love it when podcasts put distinctive music on the back of their adverts so they're easy to fast forward through yes yeah when it's just the podcast hosts like reading out there things and then a more voice that is a bit tricky um the what was the oh naked wines there it

is i thought of it oh yeah it's the other one i've had a lot of yeah which i don't feel bad about like sometimes i'll just try and leave the add-ons i'm like oh in a tiny tiny way i'm helping support by not skipping but if it's like wine or cvd or something i'm like yeah i have a card to use here jay reyna's podcast out to lunch uh i'd never skip the adverts on it purely because they tend to actually be for things i'll actually use because it tends to be food related i sure like i found my favorite online butcher through a discount code on one of his adverts well there you go you do very not an advert but farmers and do supply very lovely meat and uh have the my favorite small marketing tool which is on the email list they will send out an email saying

would you like to opt out of things like mother's day emails and valentine's day emails yes uh that is good i will probably not be using an online butcher but well yes you are a vegetarian is it raining again now i'm it's not because uh if it does start raining heavily the sound of mine is going to be shite because oh no yeah you've got all the windows and the balconies in there yeah i've just left my letterbox taped up constantly there's a big enough gap that the postman appears to just be able to get letters through i did catch i caught the postman and apologized the other day for the fact it's tape posed and explained why and it's just like yeah it's fine it's worse just getting some foam uh it doesn't stop it i'll just get thuds rather than

bangs and the taping is the only way the wind something about where the entrance to my flat is the wind catches it and will slam it against itself constantly yeah some yeah because it's some like weirdo there's a microclimate helps yeah that's what i'm trying to say thank you well done and i bet you thought i was just pleased to see you hey well on that note doanna should we make a podcast yes let's make a podcast clearly not got anything interesting to say today have you know my microclimate is fascinating yes darling but not before the water shed hello and welcome to the two shall make you friends a podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from terry pratchett's discworld series one us time in

chronological order i'm joanna hagan and i'm francy and carol and this is part two of our proto pratchett season yes we are discussing strasser terry pratchett's second novel and this is part one of our discussion yeah don't alarm people i managed to post part two of the last one as part three on the reddit and managed to alarm somebody slightly but it was just sleepy we're good at numbers here at the true shall make you fresh true shall make you fresh brackets good at numbers if you have to specify you know it's true yes this is part one of our discussion of strasser terry pratchett's second novel yes another sci-fi parodyish third novel oh yeah of course carpet people sorry which we will be discussing in november yes because we like to do things out of

order and because that's when it's it's 50th anniversary i'm out of order you're out of order this whole podcast is out of order uh note on spoilers before we get started we're a spoiler like podcast obviously heavy spoilers for strasser the book we're on but we will avoid spoiling major feature events in the discworld series and we're saving any in all discussion of the final disc world novel the shepherd's crown until we get there so you dear listen i can come on the journey with us in a terrifying spaceship with a cryogenically frozen dude in it and an elsewhere engine uh so have we got anything to follow up on anything you've got anything to follow up on no i need that our first patron episode came out so yes patrons will be able to find that now if

they haven't already if you haven't signed up to our patron yet we've released our first bonus down the rabbit hole episode in which i had a much more qualified than me friend come on to discuss landscape architecture it's not me do you not have a degree in landscape architecture what i am equally unqualified at everything as you are but being unqualified has never stopped me before and it's not going to stop me now and remember if you sign up to the patreon at any time you'll have access to all previous bonus nonsense previous bonus nonsense my new band name excellent yeah apart from that no i don't have any flow if i can think of did i write anything down i don't think so

i wrote many things down but it doesn't mean i'm going to keep track of them we're good we're good we're good yeah i found a note in my ideas notebook the other day that just said pirate dolphins in capital letters good it turns out it's due with the tumblr post i read when i was half asleep someone else then sent me the tumblr post to get the next day and now i've got the context from that every now and then i go through some of my notebooks that i really need to throw out just to see if there's anything like valuable in there good bit of writing or like a bank card number or something yeah because unfortunately i'm fairly indiscriminate with most of my notebooks and occasionally yeah i'll just find like lists of

completely unrelated things as far as i can tell i once found a list that split into two um and one side had like a bunch of random kitchen equipment listed and the other side was empty i was like hmm wonder what i got into doing that hope it's not dangerous whatever i left undone well so far you've not died so i think we're doing well uh so strata francing oh yeah right introduce us to the book i suppose if we must stop talking about random crafting notebooks um yeah so strata is this book holding up for the camera and listeners please look at your covers because i'm told all of them are bad we've got josh kerby's masterpiece of our men drawing women um just just tits i think slightly before he started using reference pics

because as far as i can tell these tits are in several dimensions at once trans dimensional tits my future band name absolutely uh yeah it's a it's a cover i've got to say this style for me works a lot better on fantasy than it does on sci-fi i think this is just parody is shun the side of sci-fi for the cover to work but i can't get past the business yeah anyway so this is strata which i despite the cover have quite enjoyed the book they should make a saying about that um it is part of our proto pratchett season as you said the third third of terry pratchett's novels and the last one before disquad started it was yeah originally published in 1981 it was inspired by or is a parody of uh larry niven's niven

niven yeah ring world in many many ways i mean it's 200-year-old protagonist mysterious artificial world mission crash landing etc etc and Pratt himself said like i intended strata to be as much a pistake slash homage slash satire on ring world as say bill the galactic hero was of starship troopers all niven's heroes are competent and all this technology works millions of years but he's a nice guy and says he enjoyed the book i saw it mentioned somewhere that uh he and pratchett were considering a collaboration at one point but decided their writing styles or working styles were just too incredibly difficult yeah and i had a look through some of the reviews and they are almost all glowing and my favorite which is to say most important line is from

Kirkus where they said there's a gleefully madcap flat earth jaunt gleefully madcap gleefully madcap jaunt Joanna you thought it couldn't get better than journey i feel like we need to put madcap in the same category as vivacious as words we don't use oh zany wacky yeah no there's a different list for these words yeah it's not because they make us physically recoil it's because they make us like mentally shrivel yeah wacky zany madcap madcap i don't mind vivacious i've never seen vivacious used to describe literature no i think i'm mixing up the wacky and zany line about red teds in sitcoms from the opening of one of the other books anathema in gidomans i didn't mean vivacious i did mean wacky zany and madcap it's very very easy to mistake they all freak of

organized fun don't they and that is one of my least favorite kinds of fun i try i try i try to enjoy organized fun and on occasion i do organized fun always involves someone usually a man going right guys and that makes me want to tear out my i know by those eyeballs and throw them at him yes as soon as i learn how to say eyeballs anyway do you want to summarize part one oh where do we go up to because we've got you've got two editions i bought two editions by accident the first one i bought which doesn't match yours is a much older copy so the early corgi paperback uh it went up to i believe page 98 and in the newer paper mapper it's page 139 the final line of this section on the disc east couldn't be a direction it had to be a point of the

circumference there were four directions on the disc circle right circle left in out they headed in otherwise known as turn-wise widow students hubwoods and rimwoods yes yay so they're going hubwards so in this section on a beautiful brochure day our hero kin arid watches a beach being built before berating a couple of young builders for a brilliant prank a mysterious man appears in kin's office with wild tales of advanced tech he demonstrates invisibility cloak and hence matter transmission kin and jago jalo her office in churuda had for lunch he came to be a terminus pro pilot sent out into the universe to explore its reaches over a thousand years ago he tells kin of a mysterious flat world and bribes her with clever counterfeit days to join him on an exploratory

mission before vanishing into the ether a few weeks later kin greets the first settlers of the newly completed planet and finds her ex-husband set on freezing himself to watch over this new world finding a way to live longer into the future than the current immortal currency of gene therapy and days allows he warns kin of an incoming economic crash after the discovery of jalo's clever forgeries leaving the new earth kin finds jalo has redirected her ship to kung a damp and desolate world on kung kin heads to the pub and meets marco a human in kung form and talented and a talented pilot hired by jalo with a bank producing infinite currency a large raven interrupts and joins the uniform gang as they find themselves taken to a suspiciously epic spacefaring vessel

on the ship marco and kin meets silva a batasked shandy linguist slash historian slash herder ready to join me as an excellent word sorry to interrupt no that's fine ready to join the excursion to the flat earth jalo enters pistol in hand and threatens the gang the raven sweeps to their defense and jalo suffers a massive coronary luckily death is not the end as he's placed into cryogenic stasis and the raven hides after a brief film of what appear to be dragons our ragtag bunch of misfits agree to head across the universe and investigate the flat earth the mystery raven lurks in an airlock as kin disposes of the infinite purse shandy reads kin's theory of constant creation before the gang arrive at the flat planet they experience the strange

spherical orbit and a dome full of fake planets maneuver their way into the planetary dome crash into a fake faux planet and lose half their ship we see a more ordinary ship go sailing over the edge of the world and the gang make their landing with the dumb waiter in tow to provide dinners the raven follows at a distance as dawn comes they agree to attempt to find the masters of the disk an obviously man-made planet a human ship approaches the edge and the gang rescue it before befriending the distinctly Norse natives after a parallel history lesson kin concludes that the disk must be a company artifact traveling with the vikings marco fights off the dragon attack before landing and using the dumb waiter as a portable valhalla until a brawl ensues amid

tales of the second coming of a christlike figure the rest of the gang's ship crashes across the disk with its impact felt everywhere after some healing and goodbye gifts the gang donned their flying suits and resolved to head inward to the hub and the home of the disks and masters have you got some pent up poetry entity that was very beautifully done i haven't written for a i haven't written any poetry for ages so yeah i think it uh snuck in that was very enjoyable well done try thank you and the raven hides was one of the standout lines i think honestly it was just having a raven lurking around gave me a lot of opportunities something poetic about a raven yeah someone should write a poem about that

yeah i wonder if anyone's done that no never more uh anyway oh i'm sorry you're right they're light did you see any helicopters that look lots of things fly they do lots of things fly so lots of things do fly do any fly in a helicopter-ish motion yes no further question that was genuine genuinely and ask i forgot to look out for it so i didn't notice any direct helicopter parallels but i'm still giving the bit i'm gonna say for once i'm not sure loincloth are implied i don't know the norsemen i don't think norsemen last very long in loincloth yeah probably not might be wearing them under that leather watsits okay leather watsits strongly implied yes many leather watsits uh but yes generally no then is the answer to this bit

yeah right no loincloth it's all right it can sometimes just be no uh quotes i believe yours is first yes kin is arguing with herself about whether to follow this interesting trap with interesting job she switched off and sat back you should have told the company she said silently there's still time she answered you know what will happen he might be mad but he's no fool he'll be prepared for any trap besides kung isn't a human world company rip runs thin down there he'll duck and weave and we'll lose him she said you have a duty you can't let a menace like him run around loose just to satisfy your curiosity she answered why not which i think is one motivation to start a book with yes i greatly enjoy why the devil not i think yours a little

more profound is it not yeah maybe kin is on the ship and thinking as they're heading to the platter she thought of how attitudes to aliens got stereotyped kung were paranoid blood thirsty and superstitious shandy were calm blood thirsty and sometimes eight people shandy and kung thought humans were blood thirsty full hearty and proud everyone thought f's were funny and no one knew what f's thought about anyone dot dot dot we dismiss each other with a few cliches she thought it's the only way we can live with one another we have to think of aliens as humans in a different skin even though we've all been hammered by different gravities on the angles of strange worlds and it's a nice early thought here that i'm going to go into a lot more than we talk about the

back half of the book because the thought gets expanded into yeah okay cool yeah i think that's going to be a fun yes the nature of discussion aliens and humans yes yeah we touched on it in the last book didn't we but i think this this book has a better realization of what practice was clearly thinking about yeah the last book we means dark side and sun not yeah actually the nature of how species and things relate to each other yeah i'm just just crackling on my mic they're just me flailing my head around too much okay yeah you're flailing uh so yeah on to characters characters so we start with kin protagonist yes kin kin who i'm trying not to say kin yeah she's definitely kin not kin uh there's a very good quote from a friend of the pod slash

oraclette mark burrows about kin oh yeah um the book central protagonist kin arid is a woman in her prime sardonic controlled and quite sexual the blurb for the paperback edition even describes her as hot blooded terrible she is a universe away can we add that on to we absolutely can she's a universe away from the man who created her uh perhaps you would get better at writing outgoing confident women but his skills weren't yet up to the job of reaching so far outside of his experience kin has not only come of age she's been of age for a few hundred years she's not flawed enough to be interesting and not developed enough to be relatable kin is basically too cool for someone as fundamentally oddball the nerdiest 30 year

old pratchett to handle some misjudge cracks about sexual favours and if you fnirf nurse niggers don't help matters either okay first of all the newer edition i must say has gotten rid of hot blooded i noticed so that's nice yes i don't have the energy to get up and get my other copy and see if it's still on there yeah um other i have a feeling you mainly agree with mark on this one i i think it's a little harsh um i i definitely get what are you saying in the she isn't as like fleshed out or not even fleshed out not as believable a character as a lot of practice protagonists but i i don't know i didn't the bar might be on the floor here yeah the bar is low i just feel like considering the genre oh yeah most men right most men in this kind of space

right women are a lot worse like yeah mark does uh sorry let me just find the page again but mark does go on to make the point uh this sort of mishandling of strong women and sexuality was fairly common in the world of her sci-fi that practically grown up with and he can hardly be blamed for inheriting the problems of a wider genre yeah i don't know i didn't i think she's a good character i think having a female-led sci-fi at all is excellent yeah again the bar is on the floor this book passes the back deltas which a lot of discworld books don't i think i would probably agree with mark more if we were later in our read through of the discworld but as it is we're still early enough that we haven't had a lot of really strongly realized female characters

outside of the witches so kin does feel she needs more development so does every character this is someone's third novel yeah there's lots of room for improvement in general so i agree with mark and i don't if that makes sense yes but i do think she is weirdly sexualized that's interesting because as i read it i was thinking how this is weirdly unsexualized for the genre so he mentions like the naked having naked a few times as you've mentioned uh in the plan but it's never like lingered upon male gazey oh yeah it's not like gross overall uh bad descriptions of breasts she's not breasting boobly everywhere there's just a kind of as we've got a woman in this place we're going to put her naked because

of course she's using that and you know more so in the latter part of the book yeah silver makes lots of comments saying well you can just offer sex to get out of things it is more she's unnecessarily naked uh there's a line on i think it's actually it's the page after my quote so it's page 77 at least in my edition where after she's been lying in bed thinking about what she's going to do and then she padded naked down the equatorial corridor you literally you could just take the word naked out of that sentence there is absolutely no need for to be naked and as there's she then goes and has a conversation with marco as there's no bit in the book that mentions her putting clothes on she's just naked for the entire next scene and like if nothing else she must be chilly

i guess i mean yeah i don't know i it's not a giant criticism it's not a this makes the book bad for me no i don't know i just think it's a weird detail i kind of read it at the time as in i'm maybe T generous just as it and this is how little she gives a fuck about stuff like being naked because like the entire body at this point is constructed and changes all the time and well yeah i mean also she's 200 years old she can change her skin and hair color whatever she wants which also yeah i i think when you combine it with looking at the josh kirby illustration that's what i was going to say i feel like if you come into it without looking at that cover it's a lot easier to she's less we generous with it perhaps yeah she's not weirdly sexualized in the book she

has a sexual history and that's actually you know we've that's good writing of a female character rather than no mcdonnell horseshit going on no not at all and you know she's also not tanned and blonde which is a nice change for black pratchett in fact her skin is still dyed black i think for most of the book it goes from black to silver and then possibly back to black she calls herself an ethiopian princess at one point so i'm assuming that yeah i i feel like it was a detail project put in and then didn't think much about as he edited but yeah no i know but then to draw just oh yeah no no what i mean is like i think there's some like when did you flick between skin colors again fits in yeah but yeah but then to stick a bog standard sci-fi cliche boobs in eight dimensions

yeah yeah but i mean like that's that that was i just feel like the kind of in joke wasn't it with pratching kirby or whatever i don't know it's it's just it is a part of it i just don't quite grok and that's that's probably fine oh yeah i do not like the cover and the other cover the um no kirby one is much worse so yes mark burrows tweeted us another one of the covers and it is also ridiculous i'm not sure it's like less realistic in the boob department but it is far more this just looks like soft porn yeah at least with kirby it's very stylized yeah and you've got the aliens no one's getting off to that was it tits and filigree yeah yeah yeah none of these criticisms are like an army cancelling 30-year-old terry pratchett no i know it's all right i'm not

having a go i just i read it slightly differently as well you know i can't take even the slightest bit of criticism without collapsing on to them i can't take this i can't see who else we've got we've got jago jago jailo jago jailo jago jailo the terminus probe pilot who has returned with news of the flatter who is there's nice little details like he's clearly kind of a dick he threatens everyone with a pistol he's weirdly speciesist in a way that i think is meant to highlight he's old-fashioned because he's not dealt with people for a thousand years yeah yeah like he's pissed off that he's accidentally ended up with two aliens he wanted a human only crew yeah although say that i read that speciesist but looking at what the disc is like it may have

just meant he didn't want to take non-humanoids there because the people on the disc couldn't cope with it well he was very rude about it but he was a dick about it um but yeah he sort of feels weirdly underdeveloped like his whole motivation seems to be having lots of money to live off or days or whatever yeah i said uh yes and i thought it was interesting to take him out at that point yeah i like that he's taken out because i like the story of three people who don't know where they're going or what they're expecting yeah a lot more than i like the story of here's the leader of the band yeah yeah there's a nice uh kind of there's a nice heist movie vibe to the all three of them yeah yeah i can almost sort of hear them going oh you son of a bitch i'm in

not much more to say about him in this part is that no i think we'll get into him a bit more in the second half we'll definitely discuss him again okay we've got beyond chang and the settlers excellent band name uh the people who come to settle the new planet oh yeah yeah yeah and i just sort of i liked this idea in this moment at this one very grizzled sort of yeah no i know how to get a planet going yeah making them go for a 10 mile walk we're going for a 10 mile walk so we can see who stepped on poisonous spiders mm i liked him as the kind of little uh set up as quite an authority-ish figure and then the kind of he was the first source of this little drop of information that the company might be in trouble

i thought that was quite clever yeah and then going on to uh joel her one of her many ex-husbands with his uh neanderthal face who goes into more detail about the uh potential trouble of the company yeah interesting that the watcher thing i thought was quite interesting and it feels like that's from something that i couldn't place a reference yeah i just because it wasn't really expanded upon much more than you know some cryogenic freezing thing uh just like when we went through dark side of the sun i don't know enough about 70s hard sci-fi to spot every reference i i found myself a few times in the like i've read a bit more than me but nothing compared to jack so i found myself a few times saying hey what's this and either he'd be like has from this

book or i think he made that one up thank you but i like the idea that kin is horrified by the frozen thing like she can't think of anything worse than being frozen for that long yeah it is interesting yeah having lived for over 200 years herself and this is sort of weird thing of uh like i'm sure you're going to want to talk about immortality quite a lot as we talked through these two books because that's this idea uh life is currency yeah she only wants to keep living for so long on the basis that she is living yeah not just for the sake of it yeah she doesn't want to put off her living until the future i think this is partly why i'm a little less critical than i would be of her character just because i i really like her like internal conversations about the immortality

or the longevity thing and even even as i say that i realize it's just kind of practically using that as a narration space rather than any part of her yeah well it is a part of her character only i would say that is her like inner conflicts bit but like it's not really a flaw is it so i like her inner conflict i do like her inner conflict and i like it there's less of a uh i'd argue with with the discord books there's a certain amount of omniscient third person narration that drops into various people's heads whereas this book is all from kin's point of view yeah oh except for that one bit where it flicks between the three so we can do the little the clutter bit of kin throwing out the wallet oh yeah i like that that was like a little uh

cups and balls thing yeah that i enjoyed that um but i like the line about uh when kin sort of horrified that Joel wants to do this thing and she's like well but you've never been bored you spent two years learning how to make a wooden cartwheel uh you said you've never learned to spear a seal or cast copper you said you were going to write the definitive work on robot pornography and you haven't yet and this is exactly what you and i would be like if we both had like an endless number of years yeah well it's kind of what we're like now it's just you know we know that we're in terrible trouble in the long term yeah yeah just want to learn how to do everything is that so much but i also don't want to put too much effort into learning and if i can't

master it in five minutes then i'm giving up yeah yeah there are a precious few things that i've managed to get past that first bit with uh it's getting past the hurdle of i've learned just enough to realize i know nothing yes yeah exactly yeah if i can get past that hurdle i will stick to something for at least a day good and then we've got obviously rip van the vine and the whole terminus project yeah which is an interesting thing of way back in the past when spacefaring was a lot smaller these people went on these thousand year voyages and were kept alive and now they're now the technology exists to bring them home or wake them up or find them this guy has insisted that uh they are sent out to do everything other than be woken up

yeah the last what is it one or two that are left yeah yeah um the i thought it was a cool little bit a bit dark the the guy who woke up it was dropped off somewhere where humans had already been for centuries and like yeah he didn't need to expand on it but you can imagine the kind of sense of well what the fuck was that for then yeah why did i waste so much of my life in yeah it's yeah it's yeah and like i gave up literally my life yeah and you know there's a part of it where you'd be like oh well you know now i at least get to experience the future and not in a way where i have to like colonize mars kind of thing but um on the yeah on the other hand it'd be like well fucking waste of time that was all right yeah i can i can understand the sort of

weird joy and depression of what he went through and why he said like don't wake them up let them sleep like the extreme version of the the explorer is getting to the north pole second yeah so i think it's part of it is i was going to be the one to do this yeah and then bring back this glory to earth and that's kind of interesting because then that's kind of jailo is the one who has made this big discovery and actually brought something glorious back in his very specific way self-serving way yeah yeah very self-serving so he's lived to like nearly a thousand hasn't he so i guess the you kind of start putting yourself first at something yeah he probably just turned into a dick after of it i'm in print i'm a self-centered dickhead now and i'm only 28 uh and then well

marco farfara yes we're on to our sort of core three gang or the other two members of marco farfara who is a naturalized human being that looks like a cung gonna sound like an insult when he said like that i didn't mean it like that i'm very happy to marco regardless of his species a lovely bit of nature versus nature debate kind of sewn into his character isn't there yeah he insists that he's human but has to constantly fight his base not base but his natural cung instincts yes and his whole sort of i've got four arms and i keep accidentally starting massive fights yeah uh and then you've got silver the other uh yes dangerous crew member silver is a shandy with massive tusks although hers are unscruable yes which is a bit taboo not done kind of thing

yeah it's um fangirla shandy were usually children or condemned criminals yeah but shandy has chosen to have hers removed so that she can be a good linguist yeah which is an impressive state of i have devoted this is like a shandy thing that they'll pick things and decide to be very obsessed with them yeah can't relate to any dedication to the cause absolutely dedication to the cause and the actual shandy culture which is they basically like cannibalism yeah oh like have to do cannibalism i guess because they can't digest anything else and these dumb way to things are able to create pretty much the only food they can eat yeah so now they have the game which is too shandy basically fighting each other to the death so one can eat the other it's an interesting

concept it is an interesting they're very for a short book the and i think we'll talk about well building nature and we said this with ducks over some well he manages to establish an entire culture in not many lines yeah yeah and it is very cleverly done and then not really a character but the the previous race the spindles who built sort of the big terraform type things that they're now using to build planets yeah yeah who uh they weren't gods but they too until god showed up and they were these sort of huge massive thing three meters tall but weighed 90 pounds uh all telepaths and claustrophobic couldn't have more than a few on a planet because the brain noise would get too much

yeah again it's very very clever building this entire concept yeah for sure yeah yeah and then it's just kind of dropped casually in and then they went extinct like half a million years ago or something whatever yeah yeah it sounds like it was very recent right up until he says that yeah it's just very known or apparently known uh and who do we have that oh yeah irickson irickson irickson who is leading the sort of Norse hoards on the flat earth which appears to be a historical parallel of real earth that is missing things like the new world yes unfortunately for them yeah i won't go into a massive history lesson what is it she says in the year 322 Ericsson sailed the ocean blue obviously our Ericsson in this book is meant to

be a parallel of the of the round world one who uh leaf Ericsson was thought to be the first Norse man to reach North America there's a settlement called the Vinland that is spoken of in the old sagas and it's believed that was actually North America uh Ericsson it's a family name in that it's a patronomic as in he was the son of Eric specifically Joanna not going into a history lesson i just really like it it's Ericsson isn't the son of Eric and he was specifically the son of Eric the red who was the first uh who founded the first settlement on Greenland so some of the history does work obviously the book goes into this whole idea of how the world took place historically and how it's paralleling to this flatter that is missing half of the land

yes yeah but some of the actual evidence for how we know about things like Ericsson and Eric the red uh and the actual historical north sagas opposed to the mythological north sagas it's very interesting because it was more than just a tradition of oral storytelling there were lots of ways in which these stories were shared and remembered and if you are interested in more of that i will once again direct you to your dead to me they've got a very good episode on the north sagas oh cool i would like to listen to that yeah so it's awesome the woman who they have on as a historian is clearly just like deeply deeply passionate and cannot and so excited to talk about it it's great oh i love that stuff cool yeah all right i'll listen to that later thank you yeah i did

a bit of digging for the for the obscure reference finial on some of this so i did a brief bit of reading on some of the north's explorations and we'd very much like to learn more about it now so yes excellent love a bit of north history and then yeah locations we don't go to many places we've also got considering we've got the wits and breadth and depths of the universe at our grubby little fingertips yeah who are you calling grubby uh these guys oh okay yeah that's so we've got kong marco's home planet yeah very damp little bit of a practice clearly kind of into very damp worlds like the the last what was it called dark side of the sun home planet very damp we went on about it for a while we did can't remember what it's called

for the love of me anyway very damp yeah kong has an over-large moon and a cool close sun so nightmare times vegetation was either fungal or it was resigned to a semi-submerged life yeah line top is hovering above kong isn't it yeah and the idea is these are sort of like almost like airports yeah and seems quite angmorporky yes it's halfway between the city and neville they're like these big transportation hub type things that most planets have and at line top there is a pub and the pub is called the broken drum it's currently broken currently broken for those keeping track but it's nice to see it pop up as early and have the joke explain to me because it never occurred to me why it's called the broken drum because you can't beat it

but oh wait no you can't can't do the rimshot way so i'm glad we finally learned that i mean it probably could have occurred to me and i'm sure it has occurred to many of our listeners and it's actually quite an old joke but no thoughts head empty and uh then the disc yes the brief stop off on original earth oh yes earth earth but uh not really enough detail there at the moment to go into yeah we do sort of hear more about earth earth and the various earths because it's earth yeah kin is from earth you know that one that one and we're sorry the disc yeah i like he's he's almost put a lot more thought into it here than with the disc world where it's just like our disc world the physics just kind of works and

there's a lot of magic but here because i think it's to its to its benefit oh yeah yeah the disc has the one half page footnote explaining how the eight seasons worked and then it's never gone into again and that's fine but in sci-fi things have to work yeah yeah or at least have a little dalliance with reality vague logic somewhere so there's like a big sort of glass spherical dome around it uh with fake planets in it probably not glass but yeah well okay yeah i don't space glass space glass i love the description it's like a plate full of continents a coin tossed into the air by an indecisive god yes practically well into his good descriptive files now yeah um with a polar cap hugging one side as opposed to the disc where

it's uh sort of warmer as you go towards the outskirts and the hub is a big tower of ice yes um which again i think has tried like he's tried to logic it in this one hasn't he rather than yeah there's a sort of bunch of detail about how it could work and why there's a sun and the moon wobbling on its axis for the sake of tides and how it's clearly not working which goes into this whole idea of matter transport which they're obviously all very interested in as one would be uh but yeah missing a new world which i think the idea that the people who are curious enough to explore and try and find a new world end up sailing off the edge yes there's something odd about that yeah there's some kind of inbuilt instinct in them to want to

see what else is out there and then go out i'm glad there's a nice big fence around the room the disc world well yeah even if it's mainly for kidnapping purposes mild kidnappings and it's only a bit of the disc it's got there i'm sure there are other safety measures around other edges of the disc oh i'm sure yes very up on the health and safety the average disc world denizen yep anyway that's all i have to say what is a denizen etymology as opposed to citizen i don't know is it something to do with the word designated maybe let's look into that denizen cool uh yes is that all uh i think that's all the ones i feel relevant to yeah our discussion yeah all right cool uh should we go get a coffee

good idea you can look up denizen a denizen uh comes from latin originally and basically meant from within citizen was based on the latin civitas uh city obviously and was probably altered to closer match denizen due to the similarities in definition ah that's that fun etymology lesson for the day i like it right stretch so little bits little bits that we liked oh did we like some little bits i like lots of little bits in this but you like lots of little bits all very close together it did is a very funny book yeah i think it's got lots of nice little funny moments along yeah so it's not really it's not really got any laughy bits so has it like discord it's not

got full belly laugh moments but it's got bits that made me smile including the early prank kin is chastising two young builders in her office for planting a uh pleosaur with a placard holding placard that says end nuclear testing now yes i did like that that's exactly the sort of thing i would do if i was building a planet and then slightly later on in similar section kin is among other things wrote a book called continuous creation because she'd done everything else so she decided to write a book and i just love the line the actual writing hadn't been difficult the real problem had been learning how to make paper i'm going to write a book i'm going to write a book there's something about uh books and paper and printing have all fallen out of

society now but someone decides to write one so has to invent paper and a printing press to do so it's good it's good it's got very um this task was meant to take two minutes vibes but on the large scale this task was meant to take two minutes and now i've had to reinstall everything on my computer and it meant paper so it reminds me quite a lot of uh franzenes transcribing uh yeah that's going well so decided to invent a podcast specific shorthand to assist with it wow that's not shorthand so much as a very long ahk script but but yes that's the that's the idea behind it but then i got distracted and tried to learn actual shorthand yeah um but then i realized i picked a shorthand which was like a hundred years

old and only really used by clergy and so then i gave up and now i need to just get back to doing the transcript big inventing paper to write a book energy i don't remember what i was intending to do with the shorthand it wasn't the transcript i think you wanted to get one of the little stenography machines i did briefly look at that and i'm glad i didn't that was very nearly an impulse purchase because now i've lost interest in that now so that would have been a very quick regret this is like near the beginning of lockdown where i nearly bought myself a loom oh yeah well then i'm not buying a loom i'm pretty sure i was firmly against that i'm often supportive in your hobbies but i was pretty sure you didn't want to

loom in your heart of hearts i still kind of want a loom i'm putting it in the same category as the bird don't don't get it take the bird don't get a loom they scream they need a lot of attention what looms yeah little nine fact it's why the industrial revolution was so good uh speaking of industrial revolution uh robots morris dancing nice yeah that was a nice little uh preview of practice interesting obsession with morris dancing an obsession with morris dancing and its purpose of uh protecting the earth and bringing in the seasons and generally having purpose yeah i like to pretend it does have that much purpose for when i have to explain morris dancing to my non-british friends

but this is this is when we go back to the original earth and kin is remembering as a child that these morris morris dancing must take place and so the robots dance the caretaker morris because there aren't enough people to spare to do things like learning how to dance so they've taught the robots to do it because it has to be danced nice little trope inversion of usually when robots become intelligent enough to be useful they hinder the human race somehow whereas this one they are literally just being yeah helpful they are and this is where kin decides that people should not go extinct and it's the robots that have helped people to not go extinct yes uh i'm not entirely sure why morris dancing would lead one to believe that the human shouldn't

become extinct but each to each to their own personally morris dancing is my main reason for wanting the destruction of the entire human race in my supermint for the monologue no offense to any actual morris dances listening we deeply respect you um i i like morris dancing partly because of rapture and partly because my ex-boyfriend really hated morris dances for some reason oh yeah so for the same reason i've got a bit of a grudge against star wars i liked i like morris dances by default it's amazing how many opinions we fought based on being contrary yeah i really i've got to stop taking the piss out of you for me contrary actually um yeah uh so metaphors yes metaphors uh i you your little description

your little description you're you're pointing out a practice description of the disc was one i didn't notice actually um but i think pratcha is starting to oh he did in the last book actually flexes metaphorical metaphorical muscles there was an old kung story said marco softly his voice like the currents in quicksand oh anyway that was the one i pointed out but just wanted to point out that throughout there are some very nice uh metaphors and similes yeah very nice turns of phrase that's what i'm just trying to say how about talking points big things bigger things uh should we start about should we start on parody versus doing the thing dash non-problematic edition yes we've talked in the past about the difference between uh satire or parody and just

doing the thing and in the past it's come up in kind of problematic contexts and is in is are we just being sexist or similar um it usually comes up in the context of women breasting boobly yeah yeah as as as they do of course and so many sci-fi writers beautifully depict but in this case i and i think i touched on it in the dark side of the sun as well is i find it hard to distinguish myself enjoying this book and enjoying another short sci-fi book um and that i think it's a good sci-fi story and although it's perhaps a little more tongue-in-cheeks than most of them i'm not sure when something stops and and obviously it's got so many heavy-handed references to ring world that it is yeah indisputably a parody but i'm not i'm not sure when

when you start enjoying it just for itself or whether it matters or you know there's this whole gray area in the genre i think especially in this first half because we're setting up so much i think a bit of the denouement definitely falls more into parody as he starts playing with especially some fantasy tropes yeah yeah uh but in this section yeah it's it's a good sci-fi story i think dark side of the sun was a bit more on the parody side uh yes it almost tried to be you know reference reference joke joke joke reference yeah it's a bit more like color of magic in that respect is yeah i see what you did but i see what you did that yeah i'd say like if dark side of the sun is to color of magic as this is to maybe one of the witch's books where it's settled into the

genre put it uncomfortably and now can just exist nicely in it shuffle around in it yeah very good yes yeah it's it's clearly a love letter to the genre it is yeah and there's so many little nods in there that leave you without doubt that he's read just an insane amount of sci-fi for any let's say 30 year old man to have read but considering how much fantasy he's also clearly read yeah and folklore and history there's so much in it i got two months later i'm 13 i've got to catch up something i i didn't look up but i'm assuming there is a folkloric equivalent of the barometer story that marco tells i think you mentioned the metaphor but as he goes into that story uh a king had a tower and he said yes yes yes people could have untold

riches if they could tell him exactly how tall the tower was and someone eventually you know people were doing all this complicated master check and someone eventually gives the barometer to the master builder and says how tall was the tower i think it's it's probably that one about the the uh the king who has fields only says if you can remember if you if you do this for me then you can get as many as much land as you can outline with this or whatever and you did some fractal bullshit yeah there's lots of stories yeah yeah i wonder if it's a specific one actually now i say that that's not the parallels i thought it was going to be when i started trying to remember and talk at the same time always a good idea thinking and speaking at the same time is something we

both do incredibly well so good at it uh what a great idea to do a scripted an unscripted podcast together um sorry yeah that's your point anyway yeah so it's just in such stark contrast to something like uh board of the rings for instance which again we bitched about before um yeah but it's yeah this it's just a really i really enjoyed it as like a you know uh yep there's a good segue actually into your talking point which is world building i think it's yeah i think that's probably what makes it so enjoyable is the very it's a very good world building very good it's very good isn't good it's thorough considering it's so concise i'd say yeah yeah i mean it's a short book you know like the original smaller version of the paperback i've got is literally

about 200 pages it's not a big epic sprawling space opera except it kind of is just told very told very neatly but it establishes so much of the universe it establishes so much of how humans are how they exist what they want what motivates people then it establishes these other races very comfortably and very clearly you have the kong you have the shandy you have i get the f's are a bit of a side joke and they did make me giggle flapping about these little tentacles i like his voice box i like his voice box so for those listeners you can see the video i did an excellent tentacle dance there it was beautiful i worked hard on that um but also the literal world building oh yes literal world building they are they are literally building worlds

and right in that early section where kin is berating the pranksters and one of them tries to quote her own words back at her and this idea of what a planet is a planet is not a world a planet is a ball of rock a world is a four-dimensional wonder let there be bottomless lakes peopled with antique monsters green ruins in englandless jung endless jungles bells beneath the sea echo valleys and cities of gold this is the yeast in the planetary crust without which the imagination of men will not rise i'm glad you managed to get that in there yeah that was nearly my quote and then i decided i actually have more to say about it than just having it as my quote yeah okay it's always always good to hear you read aloud the beautiful bits thank you and good voice

well done duana and that's why we did a podcast the theory uh kin's theory in her book um this idea that there were the spindles who built these worlds and put these fossils into the crust and then eventually the spindles realized they weren't the originators and they were creators before them the wheelers and then before the wheelers there were something else that i didn't write down so i can't remember the name of yeah the almost inconceivable uh concept of some kind of half mile long sphere wasn't it and the yeah but the idea that the universe has always been a made thing there was never any chaos there was never any randomness it was always a generation of gods leaving something for the next generation of gods and she ends at the end result of this

yes it is this was the theory that races arose and changed the universe to suit themselves and died and then other races arose in the ruins changed the universe to suit themselves and died and so on and i love that and i love that what the humans are doing to change the universe to suit themselves is to plant imagination yeah it's kind of seeding seeding the kind of ground that they grew from yes i think it's really fascinating and making the ground yeah and then if you look and you look at the world that Pratchett has built in a few pages that contains all of this human condition all of the human longing for immortality and becoming of gods uh all of the theories about creation and taking away the round of the universe and making it something that bigger gods made

before leaving to sub gods and demigods yeah there's something really really marvellous in that in it in a 250 page book yeah that you can establish all of that and also a race called the cung you have forearms and can't not get into a fight absolutely yes yes it is as the kids say a real page turner i'm really glad i've got my glasses on for this video i'm going to peer over the top of them and i've got my hair drying and these curls things so just generally extremely old right now i feel ancient just being new oh thank you and yeah as it's a very well built cipher world there's a lot of incredible sci-fi tech yeah uh i'm gonna regret putting this down as a thing because you know how good i am at just explaining science um but first of all i would like a little

shout out to the Proto Roomba yes and i think Pratchett's estate should sue Roomba for clearly sealing the idea here of the the tiny little hoe about that comes out of the wall that and gleams up as a little side note before somebody teleports in yeah i really want a Roomba yes which uh speaking of the world building actually the four runners with the ancient tech is quite of a sci-fi trope yeah um and a fancy trope actually uh if you think of like Robin Hobbs dragons is my favorite the what do you call them dragonkin the elderlings elderlings thank you um going on my fancy world is confused but yes ancient tech from another civilization left to be discovered exploited and probably misused by the new civilization

which is usually humans uh i thought that was done particularly well here even though it was so vague and probably because it was so vague because if there's one thing that puts me off getting more into hard sci-fi or reading more high sci-fi is when you kind of turn the page and see three pages of what you now know to be in correction outdated physics physics yeah i've got to read this to understand what you think is yeah yeah which is the other thing i like about Pratchett writing sci-fi is that he kind of says this is a bit of tech and it does this anyway yes all my story but yeah but even so he manages to reference things like the oldest and disc which um again is ringwell thing and that's when you squish together all of the planets in

this old system and make a big old planet with us in the middle uh which is very much in the speculative uh science side of things because we don't have any kind of material that could make that happen yeah um yeah molecule strand travel i thought was rather neat idea i was kind of imagining like a subway map almost oh yeah of um different stations and then having to wander off london uh freestyle when you have to go to these other places yeah and finally i thought the uh the invisibility cloak was particularly interesting because he's referencing what what we now call metamaterial cloaking uh which is the distortion of the light spectrum to cause the invisibility effect basically yeah which is what he described in

slightly different terms but that didn't come to be called that until early this century and what i didn't manage to find out in my brief digging was how far into the research we'd gotten by the 80s when it was written um or whether this was just a reference to star trek's kind of cloaking device which was the same thing you know it was bending light around i think the idea has existed for in sci-fi uh a lot longer than the scientific research has progressed that was a bad sentence that's not what i meant no i know what you mean yeah i'm not saying sci-fi gave scientists the idea i'm saying the idea existed a lot of times i need to say i didn't see it true a lot of times ideas exist in sci-fi because someone who doesn't have the scientific knowledge

to start the research goes oh but i bet science could probably eventually yeah and then science probably eventually yes sci-fi also is often predict or comment on things which then become a lot more coming into reality but i thought it was quite interesting because the protagonist kin is very shocked by this technology in this very high tech society and so it's clearly moved along in the real world much faster than was predicted yeah in the 80s well that's interesting uh and possibly so have some of these other concepts that i know less about but um probably not molecule strand travel to know to know whether what that was rooted in oh but we can hope oh we can hope oh i don't know what there's so much to do here i really do need

this immortality alongside the uh space travel if i'm going to do that she says with all the confidence of someone who's surely going to be picked to be an astronaut despite the lack of physical fitness and scientific knowledge yeah we'd make perfect astronauts if you ignore all of the factors that would make us terrible astronauts yeah um yeah i think that's pretty much all i have to say on the tech for now uh probably because i want to talk about all the longevity stuff next week so all the gene therapy and all that kind of side of it is going to be yes we are going to delve into immortality which is something like us we never talk about never talk about wanting to be immortal i'm never going to die but along with these seeds

of early sci-fi and obviously things that have come into the tunnel and we have the seeds of future patchity ideas and i'm really looking for these in the early ones i had fun with them with dark side of the sun as well and dark side of the sun had the similar thing of of ancient tech from previous oh yes of course yeah yeah although slightly more fantasy oriented that wasn't it almost it was it was almost actual gods and there was a lot more mystery there was a lot more mystery to it in dark side of the sun yes a big part of the plot was chasing the mystery whereas yeah this one it was kind of that he drew out the kind of information release in quite a satisfying way but it wasn't the the point of the yeah it's another thing the world building does

really well actually is um not info dumping yes yes it's unlike yeah dark side of the sun did a bit of an info dump right to the beginning didn't it i remember yeah pitching about that it's given to you as it becomes relevant to the story yes and not an annoying drawn out mystery way yeah uh yeah but sort of proto-pratchety stuff this is our proto-pratchet season proto-pratchety obviously big flat disc world is is kind of i wonder what that could have led to a disc world you say yes a disc a world that is a disc it's got a room it's got a hub i actually in uh a few i read a few reviews as well and there are a few reviews written after color of magic of life fantastic come out and sort of a lot of them talked about this is

this is in a way the first disc world novel yeah yeah it really sets the stage for the concept yes even even though it is so very different even though it is so very different there is even a specific line from silver some humans used to believe the world was flat and rested on the back of four elephants of silver and kin asked what did the elephant stand on and silver explains the giant turtles swimming endlessly through space kin tasted the idea stupid i like tasted the idea actually i love tasted the idea but i like uh pratchett writing off will become over four of his books is a stupid idea but it is and he acknowledges it through windswind often yeah well it's also it's nice because he's tied to the sci-fi setting here like i was saying

earlier he's also tied to making sure the disc works whereas in the fantasy setting of disc world proper yeah it doesn't really need to work there's a turtle there's some elephants and now let's crack on with the nonsense yes uh but some of the other thieves planted i really annoyed as you're going back to bjorn and the settlers which uh my entry for Eurovision next year yeah it's definitely like a Scandinavian 60s band doesn't it yeah very much possibly 70s yeah or uh something in the spirit of the Viking dance from the georgia nicholson books anyway sorry sorry deep cuts there deep cuts i got this this idea of a new group of people showing up to colonize colonize a new planet

and people it and their immortality being living on and having children as opposed to gene therapy and things yeah and one person going with them he knows what he's doing it all really really reminded me of i think a seeds planted there for the long earth series which oh yeah for sure yeah there's a lot of i think there's this this very there's this pioneer part of fracture that is lives deep in there and it's just like oh i really want to just find a neat fucking planet yeah can we start again and this idea of lots of new earths and then then being pioneered and learning what works best and criticising the idiots who built a church first and then all started in winter i really can't wait to get on to longer yeah i really want to

reread them don't want to waste my time away here none of this is major spoilers if we've got listeners who haven't read long earth by the way it's just it's just it's on the blurb but they're fun books and we are going to talk about them because they are i love them and then the other idea it's a throwaway line in good in good omens but this whole thing of fossils being planted oh yeah yeah and in good omens it's it's a joke like the earth actually is only this old and the fossils are a joke the paleontologists haven't got yet but here it's really beautiful um uh this idea of the spindles pro planting um fossils of things that never existed and part of it was they needed this fossil strata beneath them because their nature

and telepathic and they needed stuff under the ground grounding yeah they needed grounding um but she talks about it you know it was their art they didn't know if anyone would see it but they went ahead and did it and i think that's a really lovely thought yeah absolutely and and actually kin's kind of um thoughts on world building literal world building and how all these details are necessary to make humankind yeah they are the east of imagination thing we were talking about earlier yeah yeah um is kind of hinted at again here isn't it in some of this alternate history or bit where they're saying what if venus didn't have its visible moon orbiting and yeah um what if uh the vikings hadn't managed to conquer the rest of europe

kind of thing yeah what would they have done instead yeah yeah and it's like we're living it yay that's the the speculative part of the speculative fiction except it's speculating in the opposite direction yeah yeah unspectacular no i don't know what happens when thing happens workshop that yes well i think that's that's all i can ramble on about vaguely uh do you have an obscure reference video for me uh yeah i thought i'd go very earth based as we were so spacey oh um kin when she's kind of working out that this is an earth parallel place says something along the lines of um well if if these vikings are trying to find the new world we should be around like climatic optimum um whereas in actual fact the sea seems to be doing its own

thing but so i was like i've never heard of that so i looked it up uh the the kind of the base thing you get when you look for a climatic climatic not climactic i've trained myself to say climactic so now trying to say yes yes uh was a few thousand years ago so i think we can assume we mean the little climatic optimum which was uh 900 ad to 1300 ad which was indeed concurrent with uh the kind of prosperity in europe which possibly led to north people settling uh iceland and greenland eric's red and exploring the new world leaf ericsson um it is a little controversial as to whether this little brief period of warming actually happened and whether if it did if it was uh just the northern hemisphere or whether it was a

worldwide thing um but there definitely were a lot of like good periods of harvest around this time a lot of cropped diversification and it did coincide with with this north's attempted expansion um and then at the end it went downhill pretty fast um say 1300 onwards was a bit shit bad summers bammons all that and then the the little ice age set in around 1400 so just kind of putting into inhabitable greenland for a few centuries um and i'm not i can't i'm not sure what did for the viking settlement uh in vindland uh probably cold i don't know but it was it was quite normal it wasn't going to be any colder than uh home was it i don't know i can't there were probably actual reasons for this that have been written down to my but i know that they

possibly they uh the remains are there to be looked at um so i've never i'd never i didn't even notice the phrase climatic optimum within this climatic optimum and yes i noticed it because i was like oh that's a nice little neat thing i wonder what that is marvelous took me back to vikings excellent everything leads back to vikings always leads back to vikings i think that's we haven't even talked about the crow did raven i mentioned him yeah i know but let's let me mention a little bit more there's a nice little mystery yes i do enjoy the the raven has a little background mystery clearly very intelligent mocking us slightly with his uh lack of motive so far but we shall see we shall see we shall see i might get my cuddly to a raven out to do the

next book with us close to raven oh you should never do that anymore so right i think that's everything yeah yeah sorry i think i'm i think i'm out of interruptions so feel free to see us out i am out of absolute bollocks to talk we'll be back next week with part two of strata which starts on page 139 in my edition with they circled the thing in the water carefully was it alive can wondered was it just that the waves made it appear so oh and we'll be going through to the end because we're only doing two episodes for this book yes and then a third episode on bonus nonsense bonus nonsense yes for the 25th yes possibly talking about some essays from the slip of the keyboard yeah anyway in mean time thank you very much for listening to the true shaman keyfret

you can follow us on instagram at the true shaman keyfret on twitter at me keyfret pod on facebook at the true shaman keyfret you can join our subreddit r slash gtsmyf you can email us your thoughts queries castles ravens and snacks at the true shaman keyfret pod at gmail.com and if you want to support us you can go to patreon.com or slash the true shaman keyfret and exchange some hard-earned pennies for extra bonus nonsense or even soft-earned pennies we're not pussy about the pennies i don't care how you got the pennies just give them to us and in the meantime dear listener don't let us detain you i can't just agree with you on everything otherwise we won't have a podcast

i know but now i've got to go and faint dramatically for 10 minutes all right all