Episode 20 – The Thing Beneath My Wings

For our twentieth episode we finish our first Pratchett series! Elizabeth and Ben are joined by writer Dr Lili Wilkinson to discover the final fate of Masklin, Angalo, Gurder and the rest of the Nomes in the 1990 conclusion to the Bromeliad: Wings! (If you need to catch up, you can find Truckers in episode 9, and Diggers in episode 13.)

When Masklin arrived in the Store, he learned that the Thing - an ancient artefact handed down for thousands of generations - wasn't just a useless box, but could speak. It warned him of the destruction of the Store, helped him escape with all the Store Nomes in a truck to the quarry, and revealed that Nomes came to Earth from a distant star. Masklin knows the Nomes can't run from humans forever. It's time to find a proper home of their own. So with the help of the Abbott Gurder and explorer Angalo, he's going to sneak onto a Concorde and go to Florida to hijack a satellite so the Thing can talk to their starship and fly them to another planet. Not that Masklin understands what most of those words are...

The Book of the Nomes concludes with a rollicking, fast-paced adventure that doesn't shy away from some big questions about identity, religion, philosophy and taking risks to do what's right. Picking up from where we left him at the start of Diggers, Wings follows Masklin, Angalo and Gurder as they travel vast distances, meet their own gods and eventually have a close encounter of the Nome kind. Did you find the ending satisfying? How does the mix of fantasy and sci-fi tropes site with you? Do you wish there'd been more stories of the Nomes? We'd love to hear from you! Use the hashtag #Pratchat20 on social media to join the conversation.

Last month we had to delay the release of our live show from Nullus Anxietas VII, discussing the short story Troll Bridge with author Tansy Rayner-Roberts, but it will be released in between this episode and the next one. And speaking of the next one...in July we're visiting a distant part of the Disc and finally catching up with everyone's* favourite inept wizard, Rincewind, as we'll be joined by David Ryding of Melbourne City of Literature to return to the Discworld series with Interesting Times! Get your questions in via social media using the hashtag #Pratchat21.

* Well...all right. Ben's favourite inept wizard. Though Catweazle, Ergo the Magnificent and Meredith are all up there as well.

Show Notes and Errata:

Dr Lili Wilkinson is an author based in Melbourne. She's written a dozen books for young adults and middle grade readers, including The Boundless Sublime (about a girl who gets sucked into a cult), After the Lights Go Out (in which a girl is prepped for the apocalypse by her Dad...and then it happens), and Green Valentine, a romance featuring shopping trolleys, a lobster costume and a whole lot of gardening. Lili also started insideadog.com.au, an online community for bookish teens, and the Inky Awards, Australia's only reader's choice award for YA fiction. Watch out for her new picture book Clancy the Quokka in October 2019. You can find Lili online at liliwilkinson.com.au and on Twitter at @twitofalili.The supersonic passenger aircraft Concorde was a joint project of the United Kingdom and France, and operated between 1976 and 2003 by Air France and British Airways. With a top speed of over twice the speed of sound, it could cross the Atlantic in half the time of other airlines, and boasted luxury service for its passengers. But it was loud, environmentally unsound, and very expensive, so it was never adopted by other airlines, and the planes were eventually decommissioned. The thing about the gap in the plane was mostly true: due to the heat generated by the extreme speeds, the fuselage would expand by as much as 30 centimetres at top speeds. The design accommodated this, manifesting in a gap in the inner wall between segments of the cockpit. One pilot left his hat in the gap deliberately during the final flight of one o...