Greetings fellow adventurer. This week, on Invisible Cities, Umapagan Ampikaipakan takes you into the mind of the late great Terry Pratchett and through the bustling streets of the magical city state of Ankh-Morpork.

Invisible Cities is an all new series that seeks to take you on a journey to a different place, to a different time, to a different world, to one of those invisible cities that only exist within the pages of a good book.

Show Notes:

i) In 1983, Terry Pratchett opened his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic with the words: “Fire roared through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork.” Over the years, there have been quite a few attempts to capture Pratchett’s somewhat random descriptions of the twin city of the Discworld in a more static form. Here are a few of them…

Stephen Briggs published The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, The Discworld Mapp, and A Tourist Guide To Lancre: A Discworld Mapp.

There’s The Compleat Ankh-Morpork and The Compleat Discworld Atlas - a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and the Discworld Emporium. 

And if you’re an iOS user, you can navigate the streets of Ankh-Morpork right from your iPad. Check out Discworld: The Ankh-Morpork Map For iPad here. 

ii) Terry Pratchett died in March 2015 after a fighting a brave battle against Alzheimers. Uma pays tribute to his life and work on an episode of Bookmark’s “50 Books in 50 Weeks”. Listen here. 

iii) Here’s a great piece in The Guardian in which Neil Gaiman reminisces about his friend, Terry Pratchett. 

iv) Here’s something unrelated but fun. There was a petition on change.org urging the International Union of Applied Chemistry to name the new element 117 on the periodic table as “Octarine”, with the proposed symbol Oc (pronounced “ook”), in honour of the late Terry Pratchett and his Discworld series of books. You can sign the petition here. 

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Tags:  Bookmark,  invisible cities,  terry pratchett,  discworld,  magic,  reading,  books