featherynscale: Schmendrick the magician from The Last Unicorn (Default)
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The Question: In 1965, Terry Pratchett was 16. He published his second short story this year, which contained the line "Brewer has taken to praying a lot. I think he was a fool to volunteer for this trip, but I suppose I can see his reasons.". What was the name of this short story, and what was it about?

The Answers: are below the cut. There is a correct answer among this flock of creative submissions, and voting for it earns you one point. Each vote an incorrect answer gets earns its author one point. Please not to be voting for the answer you submitted - no points for that!


1. The story was titled "In a Handbasket", and it was a story about four men who volunteer to accompany an alien back to his home planet on an interstellar foreign exchange program. While fair enough as sci-fi short stories go, its brilliant moment is a tangential dialogue about marmalade and translation errors.

2. "Johnny and the Carpet People" - In which young Johnny leads a small band of tiny Munrungs across their homeworld, the Carpet, with the Promethean hope of finding the Matchstick of Fire. The band is ever in danger from the mysterious force of "Fray" (being walked on), making this a most dangerous mission. Parts of the story were later expanded into a novel, though the character of Johnny was jettisoned entirely to his own series.

3. "Night Dweller" is a serious science fiction story set on a space craft hurtling away from Earth on the fringes of the solar system. Some un-named evil lurks in wait for them, and their suicide mission is to seek and destroy. The crew have various reasons for going on a mission of certain death - two would otherwise be on Death Row, one is terminally ill and a fourth is a religious man. The story focusses on the psychology of the situation.

4. The name of this story is "Murder Ahoy" and it's a novelization of a movie of the same name (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0058382/). In the movie, Brewer is aptly played by Gerald Cross and the narrator (which did not exist in the movie) follows each character describing the reasons each went on the trip. The big reveal at the end is that the narrator is, in fact, a specter of the initial trustee who is murdered which kicks off the investigation by Miss Marple.

5. The story itself is largely unrelated to the line, being titled "106 Beer Based Recipes." It was a tale of three kids attempting to make various recipes found in a library book. The line appears in the story when the protagonist visits his friend, who was making bootleg beer in his garage. To protect his friend, he only referred to him by his occupation. When he jokingly asked 'Brewer' to join him for Sunday morning church, after a late Saturday beer run, 'Brewer' had agreed, prompting the statement, "Brewer has taken to praying a lot. I think he was a fool to volunteer for this trip, but I suppose I can see his reasons."

6. The story, called "Brewer's Thousands", was an exercise in the elements of what would later make up Pratchett's pantheon of deities for Discworld. Brewer was a college student who went on a trip to India and became the unwitting (and sometimes unwilling) prophet of a local deity, Rammnahan. The following of this deity increased exponentially after Brewer's arrival (not hard when the initial following was approximately 15 people) and he ended up receiving a personal visitation from Rammnahan and changing the lives of the people before the story ended.

7. Title: Mr. Johnson Goes to Washington
Synopsis: Mr. Johnson Goes to Hollywood was originally a required History essay discussing Politics in Hollywood. Mr. Pratchett wrote a poignant yet humorous take on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in which President Johnson takes a trip to Hollywood after being elected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

8. "Quicker Vicar" - It is the story of 6 South End Missionaries sent to covert the Faerie Folk of Ireland.

9. The story is called The Voices inside, and it's largely about the character Brewer, who is actually not praying, but muttering in demonic tongues because he's possessed by, lo- a Demon! He volunteered for the trip to sabotage his comrades and have them sacrificed to the demon's physical form, who, oddly enough (or not, if you're familiar with his work) wears a lot of hats and refers to itself with a lot of (a-hem) royal We's and Us'es. He was satirical even then, if not terribly patriotic.

10. In 1965, Terry Pratchett composed the short story "Brewer's Millions." In this story, he told part of the ongoing story of Henry Brewster, a millionaire who squandered his wealth on outrageous ideas, buying new fantastical inventions and going on ridiculous expeditions. In this story, Brewer joins his friend Joe Materi (the narrator of the story) on a trip in search of Atlantis. A true glimpse of what was to come was shown in this story, as hilarity ensued on this ill-advised adventure. However, this story, with descriptions of ravenous aardvarks, treacherous lava pits and backstabbing cabin boys could not compare to the genius Pratchett later showed in his better known series, Discworld.
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