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We're back for another look at Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, this time focusing on The Watch series. It's a social satire and police procedural in a fantasy setting, which means it has dragons, dwarves, trolls, and police who actually serve the public trust...you know, a fantasy.

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It's interesting to consider which characters fall into obscurity and which remain relevant. Johnston McCulley's most famous creation, Zorro, is of course still a household word. His other creations, Thubway Tham and The Crimson Clown, have been completely forgotten, even though they were nearly as popular in their day. Both thieves, albeit of two very different sorts, the two even met in the crossover novel Thubway Tham Meets the Crimson Clown, and it's that we're looking at today!

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Fandom! The word sends chills up the spine of anyone who's spent any time in Fantasy and Science Fiction spaces...for a pretty wide variety of reasons. But what if fandom turns...to murder? Actually, that seems pretty plausible. Sharyn McCrumb explored this very idea in the murder mystery Bimbos of the Death Sun (published by TSR!) and we're joined in this episode by our pal Filbi to talk about it!

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Langwitch, its syurly a confuzement! Whut wud Inlish luk liek inna thousand yeers? These are the questions asked by Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, a post-apocalyptic meditation on culture, storytelling, religion, and language. It's a tricky read but a fulfilling one.

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This is the story of Edwardian-era European explorers traveling to the north pole in an airship, only to find a strange land unknown to mankind, and populated by an alien yet advanced race of intelligent non-human beings. The encounter holds up a mirror to western society, colonialism, and the dark side of human nature, and things go badly for the protagonists. It's such a perfect encapsulation of this "Vernean" subgenre, so self-aware about its tropes, and so much in sync with modern day critiques of classical adventure fiction, that you'd swear it was a modern-day pastiche, but no: the book is The People of the Pole, written in 1907 by Charles Derennes. It's a great lens through which to talk about classic "exploration" SF.

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In the best of all possible worlds, this podcast would always be on time...but we're not there yet, are we. You know what comes close, though? The Culture, the star-spanning utopia depicted in Iain M. Banks's novels such as Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games. In this episode, Philip and I take a dive into the possibilities of benevolent godlike AI, post-scarcity economies, stellar-level constructs and utopian societies, and ask...can we truly conceive of a better world?

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This week, wayfarers, we go WAY back, to 1666, and the first European work of feminist Science Fiction--in fact, one of the first works of Science Fiction as we know it--Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, a travelogue, pontification, and philosophical potboiler.

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We aten't dead! In fact we're back in 2024 for a new chapter in a series...a series within a series, you might say...on Terry Pratchett's Discworld! In this one we're joined by pal Ing to talk about the Granny Weatherwax books and witchcraft vs. wizardry.

(Update: I'm really sorry, the wrong audio was uploaded for this. It should be fixed now.)

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'Tis darkening days, fair ones, and as we approach the end of the year of our lord 2023, What Mad Universe?!? has been, we confess, erratic of late. But take heed! We return with a look at an obscure but excellent fantasy series from the early 20th century, the Neustrian Cycle by Leslile Barringer. Is it a lost tome, or the wellspring for much later fantasy stories? Harken unto us and all shall be revealed!

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As we all know by now, the WWII period saw the blossoming of ASTOUNDING magazine, which set the pace for the so-called "Golden Age" of Science Fiction, launching the careers of storied names such as Asimov and Heinlein. They also hosted a short series of satirical space westerns about a near-immortal doctor and his staunch companion, the Ole Doc Methuselah stories, penned by an obscure writer named L. Ron Hubbard. I wonder what happened to that guy.

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Swashbuckling adventures in far-flung lands to the east! Geopolitical intrigue! The manly code of the warrior! Dan Tyler Moore's The Terrible Game taps into several veins of pulp action that span several eras...as well as being the source material for one later, hilariously bad movie.

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As Philip points out, if we had a nickel for every time we talked about a book where Buddha fights Jesus in a Sci-Fi setting, we'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right? The subject this time is Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny, and the subject is actually Hinduism more than those other religions, as far-future space colonists use technology to turn themselves into gods. Then Jack Kirby helps them free hostages from Iran, or something? Just listen to the episode, I swear it makes sense. (I am on drugs)

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Sorry about the long delay there, folks, some real world chaos combined with a LOT of pages that had to be read for this episode led to an unplanned couple of week's break. We're back now, looking at Kim Stanley Robinsons' seminal trilogy, Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars, one of the most in-depth hard SF stories of the past few decades. But it's not just a dry scientific hypothetical, it's also an exploration of cultural evolution and political upheaval, in ways that the tech-heads who claim they're going to colonize Mars soon could stand to pay more attention to...

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We've talked about John W Campbell as an editor on this show a few times, which isn't surprising since he oversaw an entire era of 20th century SF. Now we dive in directly to his own best known writing, the novella Who Goes There?, the basis for John Carpenter's The Thing (as well as the 50s movie The Thing From Another World), and talk more about how Campbell really did have a massive impact on our culture, in ways we're still recovering from...

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The newest What Mad Universe?!? looks at one of the earliest progenitors of the space opera, a 19th century French obscurity that delves deeply into world-building, poetry, and, unfortunately, racism. It's STAR, OR, PSI CASSOPEIA by C. I. DeFontenay. We read it before it was cool!

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One hundred episodes! I'm not sure we ever believed it would happen, but it has, thanks to you, acolytes of adventure! A heartfelt tip of our space helmets to all of you, and we hope you enjoy this special 100th episode spectacular! And what better subject for this illustrious episode than a book that touches on both one of the most archetypal and influential pulp characters, AND the later mythological addition that created the basis for decades of nerdy recontextualizations! Yes, it's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life by Philip Jose Farmer, after the original series of novels by "Kenneth Robeson" (i.e. Lester Dent, et al), part of the infamous Wold Newton mythos. It's an episode so huge, nothing will ever be the same!

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Cordwainer Smith isn't one of the more well-known names in Science Fiction, but his influence seems to have extended pretty far into the works of better known writers. In this episode we take a look at his Instrumentality series, one of the first examples of a SF writer crafting a recurring universe for his stories, and his bizarre novel Norstrilia. It tackles the true gravest threat facing Earth in the future: rich Australians!

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Apologies for the week delay (due to vacation). We're just a couple of no-goodniks, I guess, like the subject of this episode, about the galaxy's greatest criminal, Slippery Jim DeGriz, a guy so good at crime they put him in charge of catching all the other criminals. We explore the satirical (and long-running) romp that is the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison.

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Greetings, comrades, and glory to the utopian future glimpsed in our scientifically perfected podcast! Today we tighten our focus onto a subject we've touched on a few times: communism, that spectre that's been haunting Science Fiction almost since the beginning, and the way it intersects with the real-world Soviet Union, in the form of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty. It's an alternate-reality story about a nation that attempted to make science fiction of a sort a reality as well. But the Revolution eats its children...

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Here on What Mad Universe?!? we like to examine a subject from all angles, but this week we might be accused of flattening a complex topic. We're looking at Flatland, a 19th century oddity that's resonated with nerds for over a century with its consideration of some big ideas implied by math and science. Try not to damage your brain too badly!

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Season Four is here, acolytes of Adventure! We start things off with an epic saga of an episode on the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, featuring special guest star Andre Gordon. It's a sweeping four-book space opera about quests, artificial intelligence, time travel, god and iconic robots with a lot of pointy bits, and appropriately enough it's a special bonus-length edition!

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This final episode was available to our Patreon sponsors last year, we've now made it available to everyone! We look at the origins of Red Sonja (or Sonya), a character who was created by Robert E. Howard...or was she? It's a little more complicated than that, as it turns out!

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We're still on hiatus until May, but we're going to be making these minisodes we made as Patreon bonus content available one at a time until then! Enjoy!

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We're still on hiatus until May, but we're going to be making these minisodes we made as Patreon bonus content available one at a time until then! Enjoy!

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And so the season of What Mad Universe?!? comes to a close...the storm rages outside, the suspects have been brought together in the parlor, and we prepare to name the killer. Was it...our special guest Ing?!? Probably not, but he'll join us for a wide ranging conversation about Edogawa Rampo's novel The Black Lizard, starring the Japanese Sherlock Holmes, Akechi Kogoro, and Japanese pop culture and detective fiction more broadly!

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War. War never changes. Everything else changes, though, especially when the war is being waged across millions of light-years, and, thanks to the relativistic effects of near-lightspeed travel, you're aging only a year or so while the rest of the galaxy jumps forward by centuries. This existential conundrum is pursued in The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, one of the pillars of military Sci-Fi and a reminder that the absurdities of war are only going to get more absurd as we get further into the future...

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A slayer...a reaver...Dark haired...sullen eyed...gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth...hey, who are we talking about here? Not who you're thinking of! It's Imaro, by Charles Saunders, a response from an African-American writer to the works of fantasy writers like Robert E Howard. Saunders loved the brutal action and fantasy of REH and hated the unvarnished racism in his stories, and as a result created the genre of "sword and soul", with a secondary-world fantasy Africa and a black version of Conan. It's a worthy successor to Howard's pulp fantasy, and a rip-roaring good time!

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A deteriorating, violent world struck by a pandemic...humanity isolated from each other and unable to form social bonds...a rogue government agency accruing power to oppress the citizenry...but enough about current events! Ha ha! The latest episode of What Mad Universe?!? looks at Margaret St. Clair's The Sign of the Labrys, a genuinely strange but highly prescient and influential book about post-apocalyptic witchcraft. Lots of bonus commentary on Joseph Campbell and magickal rituals!

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Radio! It's the most high-tech of high-tech gadgets, the wave of the future, the word on everyone's lips! At least it was in 1924, when it provided just the gimmick for a series of planetary romances by a polymath scientist and politician writing under the name Ralph Milne Farley. Radio can do EVERYTHING in these books, starting with transporting a hero to Venus for swashbuckling science-adventures, and eventually enabling communication with a race of intelligent insects. Truly, man's greatest breakthrough!

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What Mad Universe?!? has been suffering some setbacks behind the scenes lately, brethren. Is it just bad luck, or could it be...Satan?!? Given that our latest episode tackles a staple of supernatural Christian fiction, all about the secret spiritual war between angels and demons going on all around us, maybe there are POWERFUL FORCES that don't want you to hear it. Or maybe that's just paranoid delusion, which sadly is also a staple of fundamentalist culture. This week we look at This Present Darkness, by Frank E. Peretti, and hold on to your hats for a controversial episode looking at the rise of politically-charged right-wing evangelical culture in the last 40 years...

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Apologies for being away--Adam suffered a personal loss and then got hit by Covid. Clearly, this is the episode the universe doesn't want you to hear. But maybe another universe does? We'll find out when we look at Michael Moorcock's alternate-universe trilogy about the reality-displaced Oswald Bastable. These books are an even earlier bedrock of the steampunk genre, even if that wasn't the word they used for it, and serve as a century-later compliment to the Victorian novel Angel of the Revolution, which we looked at in this episode. What Mad Universe indeed...

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In times of trouble, a podcast arises, reborn: that's us, and we're here to talk about K. W. Jeter's very odd novel Morlock Night, which really does have a claim to being the first novel to use the Steampunk moniker (but not necessarily the first Steampunk novel--it's complicated).

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Gird your loins, acolytes of adventure, for a new What Mad Universe?!? that explores the origins of the classic fiery sword-maiden of pulp fame. C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry might be the first example of the trope...but as ever, it's a bit complicated. Fear not, we'll hash it out!

You might also want to check out this bonus minisode we did on a similar topic, referenced in this episode: https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-mad-3-she-55896277

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Our newest episode looks at The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope, a 19th century work of SF by a writer who's not known for SF. It posits a future society where, once someone has gotten too old to be productive, they're shipped off to a farm upstate, where they can relax and enjoy their leisure time. For one year. Then they're executed. What a crazy concept! Fortunately here in the real world we would never place such an emphasis on productivity over human lives!

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Continuing our look at the origins of Steampunk, a genre that proves to be a lot harder to nail down than you might suspect, we move on to Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates. This is a historical fantasy, not SF, and it's technically not set in the Victorian era either. So why is it a pivotal steampunk novel? Well...

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What Mad Universe?!? takes another trip to the backwoods, and the writings of Robert E. Howard, with a look at the Breckenridge Elkins stories, a series of comical tales about a Hillbilly Hercules and the misadventures his lack of a brain stumbles him into.

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After being delayed by a week (sorry), What Mad Universe?!? re-enters the elusive faerie realms for another link in the chain between classical and modern fantasy. This time it's George MacDonald's Phantastes, a book that inspired a great deal of twentieth century fantasy, and inspires a winding discussion of theology and the evolution of the fantastical in literature.

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Apologies.

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As long as there have been superheroes, people have been making fun of them, but the deconstructionist satires of superheroes really kicked into gear in the 80s. A precursor to stuff like Watchmen and Squadron Supreme, though, wasn't a comic at all--it was a novel, SUPERFOLKS! by Robert Mayer. In riffing on superheroes and their place in pop culture in the alienated post-Watergate US, it was a weird, silly, exuberant, and often tasteless--just like superhero comics themselves.

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Of all the books we've looked at for the podcast, The Shaver Mysteries, by Richard Sharpe Shaver (with an assist by editor Ray Palmer), may be one of the most influential...for all the wrong reasons. A sensation when first published, Shaver's bizarre stories fed into conspiracy theories about flying saucers, ancient civilizations and subterranean terrors that are still with us today. They're also...really, really bad.

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Today What Mad Universe?!? takes a trip to Hollywood--and to a movie that never quite existed, Merian C. Cooper's "The War Eagles". A lavish fantasy pulp adventure from the producer and special effects team of "King Kong", this movie almost got made, and might have changed fantasy adventure films forever, but for a quirk of history (well, if you consider World War II a quirk). Eventually released as a novelization much later, the script remains one of cinema's great might-have-beens.

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As we plunge into the history of genre, we're starting to see that the 1920s were a remarkable and important time for fantasy literature, and today's subject, Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, sits right at the crux of this important paradigm shift. This episode sees a wide-ranging discussion about not just the trends in fantasy in the early 20th century but also folklore and mythology more broadly.

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EDIT: Sorry about the mix-up! The wrong audio was uploaded this morning. It's been corrected now.

In this episode we're hoisting the mizzen mast and swabbing the poop deck to take a look at that staple of adventure stories, the world of piracy--specifically through the lens of Porto Bello Gold, a largely-forgotten pirate novel that happens to be an authorized sequel to the bedrock of pirate fiction, Treasure Island. Turn back now, land lubbers, lest yer ears be assailed by a barrage of salty sea-dog speech...

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All things must die...and that includes the planet Earth. In the vastly distant future, under a swollen red sun, mankind still struggles and strives against each other in a world vastly different than ours, yet also alike. The "Dying Earth" subgenre--which is subtly different from the post-apocalyptic genre--has been around for over a century, but the books that give it its name came along in the 1950s in a series of fix-up novels by Jack Vance. This week we're peering into that dark and brutal future to examine this seminal work that joins together several eras of fantasy and SF.

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As far as satire goes, there's being of the moment, and there's being way ahead of your time. The short 19th-century comedic SF novel To Venus In Five Seconds ends up parodying a bunch of tropes, from ancient astronauts to technobabble, at a time long before you would have assumed they'd sunk in to pop culture, and on this episode we're diving into it (for longer than five seconds)

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Clank Clank, Cheerio, old tops, and welcome to the first of our shows this season delving into the fraught sub-subgenre of steampunk! Anachronism is involved, of course, as this first work officially dubbed "steampunk" is actually a lot later than many other works that were retroactively incorporated into the genre, but it really draws into focus the politics and cultural values that surround it...and that most other steampunk works pointedly ignore.

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Od's Fish! What Mad Universe?!? welcomes people of the better sort to a fancy episode analyzing the Scarlet Pimpernel, that dashing dandy who saves the wealthy and powerful from the guillotine while looking his best doing it! Have your invite ready and wear your most stylish clothes, or prepare to be jibed mercilessly!

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Say hello once again to the devil you know, on this first What Mad Universe?!? of 2022. Here we're looking at Arthur C. Clarke's book Childhood's End, one of the heavy hitters of post-WWII Sci-Fi and a massive influence on everything going forward. We're also joined by special guest Andrew Hickey of the History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast.

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Plug in, log on, and tune out the noise of today's internet as we take a trip back to the early 80s to examine the foundational text of cyberpunk, William Gibson's Neuromancer, with special guest and Gibson expert Costa Koutsoutis!

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Well, you knew it was coming, Acolytes of Adventure: the inevitable sixty-ninth episode, which we knew we had to make about something sexy, because we're extremely immature. So immature that we decided to break from our usual format and tackle something that's not only very recent but may barely count as stories at all: the collected works of internet erotic writer and Hugo-nominated author Chuck Tingle and his fascination with dinosaur and cryptid porn. It's profoundly dumb. But is it also so dumb that it's profound?

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A world...where ape rules man? Well, one ape, anyway. And actually he's more of a Bigfoot. And he becomes the Prime Minister of England. Yes, it's the extremely odd Dwala, by George Calderon, the missing link between political satire and monkey business!

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In a galaxy wracked with crime, only one thing stands between civilization and chaos: a bunch of wise-cracking, genocidal, extremely sexist space cops with magic jewelry! They are the thin shiny line, and they know what's best for the universe, because shut up, they just do.

This week we take a look at perhaps the baseline for all post-war space opera, the cheesy but occasionally charming Lensmen series by E. E. "Doc" Smith. They're loose cannons, dammit, but they get results!

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Happy Halloweeeeeeeeen, attendants of the arcane, and welcome to a spooky new What Mad Universe?!? looking at The Beetle! You know, the smash hit horror novel of 1897? The one that outsold any other fly-by-night horror novels that year, such as (pulls out name at random) "Dracula", by Bram Stoker? Well, the cruel hand of mortality comes for us all, even the most popular stories, I guess!

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We're back and madder than ever, acolytes of adventure! Behold our extra-length season three premiere, in which we take a spin across the centuries and around the solar system, checking out stories of exploration from the whimsical satire of Voltaire to the supposedly 'hard' Sci-Fi of Arthur C. Clarke, and in the process look at how science fiction has evolved in parallel with the Enlightenment...

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Support us on Patreon and listen to this special minisode right now!

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Everything comes round again once more, and to everything there is a season...and ours is at an end. For the epic finale of Season Two, we're tackling the seminal 1922 fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros, a tale of epic quests, Shakespearean intrigue, flowery language, and the planet Mercury for some reason.

We want to give a big thank you to our listeners and supporters for two great seasons, and here's hoping #3 is just as much fun! We'll see you in the fall!

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As we near the end of the trail for season 2, WMU?!? takes a look away from the fantastical towards another pulp genre: the American western. Emma Ghent Curtis's The Administratrix tells a wild story of 19th century politics, feminism...and eventually, revenge. A cowboy novel written by someone who actually lived in the time and place most western writers have to imagine for themselves, it's a fascinating historical milestone.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same...unless you've been genetically altered by aliens, I guess. In this episode we look at the Xenogenesis trilogy, better known these days as Lilith's Brood, by Octavia E. Butler, and gain a unique perspective on colonialism, consent and disability. Or maybe it's just the classiest Hentai ever written.

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Attention, sinners, the lord's justice is upon you today in the form of the dour puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane. Created by Robert E. Howard of Conan and Kull fame, Kane sails the seas and plunges deep into the jungle in his wanderings, sometimes guided by curiosity, sometimes by vengeance. Warning: we talk about racism a LOT in this one...

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Back in our day, kids didn't sit around playing video games and doing the Fortnite dance. They were all genius inventors who were constantly creating astounding, world-changing inventions and heading off to have extremely racist adventures in the various wild frontiers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries! Yes, all of them! We know because of the genre collectively called the Edisonade, of which there are hundreds, all packed with boy geniuses creating super-scientific wonders (at least one of which manifested in the real world). It all begins with The Steam Man Of The Prairies by Edward S. Ellis, our subject this week.

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Sharpen your dueling rapier and grab hold of that chandelier, acolytes of adventure, for today What Mad Universe?!? takes a look at the original swashbuckling tale of romance, palace intrigue, and mistaken identities, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope! While not widely known today, this book had a major impact on pop culture in the first half of the 20th century, in ways that are still popping up today.

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A spooooky new What Mad Universe?!? awaits for skeptics and believers alike, as we explore the stories of Carnacki the Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson. Carnacki is the rare sleuth who both debunks frauds and tangles with genuine supernatural menaces, making him a unique fulcrum to examine the sub-subgenre of late 19th and early 20th century occult detectives. Warning: in this podcast you will encounter...Ţ̴̥̭̞̼͊͛́̈͛̐͜H̴̜̟͚̺͆͋̋̄̏Ȅ̷̙̆̕ ̸̨̯̀̌́͠͝͝H̵̭͎̋̊̾̆́̃͒O̵̢̰̜̺̮̜̘̹̹͓̓̃G̷̘̤̟͙̰͇͕͙͔͉̀ .

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Look! Up in the Sky! It's the latest in our series of bonus-length What Mad Universe?!? episodes about franchise tie-ins! This time we take a look at the Man of Steel himself, Superman, and the novel Miracle Monday by Elliot S! Maggin, published in the wake of the Christopher Reeve movie. Despite these inauspicious origins, the book turned out to be really good, and we're joined by pal, comics critic and Superman megafan Charlotte Finn to talk about it!

This week's episode is another edited-down version of an extra-long episode. If you want to hear the full version, and every episode a week early, subscribe to either or both of our Patreons!

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Hey kids, do you like fantasy stories written by a woman about a kid going to wizard school? Forget the imitators, and join us as we take a look at Ursula K. Le Guin's seminal fantasy series, A Wizard of Earthsea, and the shape of post-Tolkien fantasy in the 20th century!

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It's time to talk about the original Angry Man of science fiction, Harlan Ellison: editor, critic, author of hundreds of stories, comics, and screenplays, strong-willed defender of justice, and raving jerk. We're joined by pal James Reilly-English to discuss his seminal novella A Boy And His Dog, along with much of his other work, and, unavoidably, the domineering personality that is Ellison himself. Lots of profanity in this slightly overlength episode--if you want the unbleeped and extended version, check out our Patreons!

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Once upon a midnight dreary, the fabled titan of American literature Edgar Allen Poe published his first and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Despite its rough and awkward plotting and lack of an ending, this novel captured the imaginations of horror and SF writers for generations to come, and still casts a long shadow over speculative fiction...and its soul from out that shadow shall be lifted...nevermore...

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Sorry about the delay, but WMU?!? is back for 2021 with another installment in our series looking at spinoff books from SF franchises, and this time up it's Doctor Who! Appropriately for a series that's all about finding new variations on its main character, the foundational British SF show came in a lot of different, mutually contradictory iterations during the years after its cancellation in 1989 and before it was brought back. Today we're joined by our friend (and Who spinoff author himself) Andrew Hickey to look at Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, a non-canon "Eighth Doctor" book that's had a tremendous impact on the mythos of Who, including the series itself.

As with our similar shows about Star Wars and Star Trek spinoff books, we had a very substantial and LONG discussion about the franchise in question, leading to an extra-long episode. This publicly-available version has been edited down to just over an hour but we really do recommend the full version with lots more interesting discussion, which you can get by subscribing to either Adam's or Phil's Patreon. Stay subscribed and you get bonus stuff and the ability to listen to the show early, as well as comics, illustrations, prose and more!

Truly, What Mad Universe?!? is the podcast that's bigger on the inside...

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Gather round, children, and hearken to the tale of a talking flea, battling philosophers, and ambulatory thistles, all dictated by a man dying of syphilis! It's our Christmas episode! Ring out 2020 the way it deserves with the year's final WMU?!? episode, and here's hoping for better times to come...

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To reward you for our brief absence, the latest episode of What Mad Universe?!? features both of Adam and Philip's lovely singing voices! It's natural for an episode that ties into Gilbert and Sullivan, which The Innominato, or, The Wizard of the Mountain, certainly does--it was written by W. S. Gilbert's father. A selection of whimsical fables about a sorceror and his dabbling in mortal affairs, this isn't quite as fun as a comic opera but at least it goes out on a high note...

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We've already taken a few trips to the red planet here on What Mad Universe?!? and we find it a different place every time. Now we get a particularly multifaceted look at Mars as we delve into the seminal SF classic The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Is it a novel? A short story collection? Or both? Life on Mars seems to be different things to different people...

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As we lurch towards Halloween here at What Mad Universe?!?, we descend into the vaults to examine a historical mystery: the 1901 novel Powers of Darkness, which just so happens to be the Icelandic translation of Dracula. Except it isn't. In 2014 it was discovered that this book was in fact significantly different from the English text, adding subplots and characters and even a new, intriguing motivation for the vampire count. Is it an early draft of Stoker's? A rogue translator? Something else? We pack our shovels and journey to distant, exotic lands in order to dig up the truth in this latest episode! (Check out our Patreons for the bonus-length episode featuring a discussion of Turkish Dracula, in cast you needed yet another Dracula...)

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We've talked a lot about Frankenstein already here on What Mad Universe?!?--not surprising, as by some lights it's the first SF novel. One of those lights was Brian Aldiss, British New Wave SF writer, who decided to write an elaborate bit of self-insert fanfic involving time-traveling to meet Mary Shelley and do battle with the monster at the end of the universe. It's also set in 2020 as all reality is breaking down. Uh, no comment...

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We're edging into spooky season, acolytes of adventure, so now begins a run of installments looking at the weird and chilling (and obscure, in every sense of the word)! This week it's the awkwardly translated duology (really, one book that was bafflingly published in two installments) The Bloody Doll and A Machine To Kill, by Gaston Leroux, the author of The Phantom of the Opera. A wind up mechanical robot with a murderer's brain apparently isn't enough, so Leroux also threw in a vampire cult, because why not?

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In this episode we're joined once again by Andrew hickey to take a look at A Canticle For Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr., one the seminal post-nuclear apocalypse epics and a deep dive into the big questions of faith vs. science. It's been the subject of a lot of discussion so I hope we can provide some new insight. But if not, it's not the end of the world...

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Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen and various configurations thereof, to see the spectacular show that is The Circus of Dr. Lao! It's the subject of the latest What Mad Universe?!? and its influenced everyone from Ray Bradbury to Roald Dahl. Dare you enter the tent of mystery and witness the wonders within?

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A very creepy evening to you all, my children, and welcome to the creepy castle for another installment of What Mad Universe?!? This time we're looking at The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, the originator of the gothic novel and, thus, most of the enduring horror and supernatural tropes of the last 250 years. Grab a candlabra, descend the spiral staircase to the cellar, and don't mind the dancing skeletons...

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Ten-Hut, about face, and other such military jazz! This latest episode of What Mad Universe?!? takes a martial bent as we delve into the seminal SF novel Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, loved and loathed in equal measure and a major political flashpoint as well as a key intersection point for post-WWII SF. Also they made a movie you might have heard of. Guest Andrew Hickey helps us find a more nuanced take on a book, and an author, that inspires extremes of opinion...

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It's time once again to take a look at spinoff novelizations, and this time we're joined by Trekspert Dylan Roth to look at the era before the movies, before the Next Generation, when Star Trek was a ragtag multimedia conglomeration held together by fan obsession. The franchise took all kinds of strange and non-canonical turns in those dark days, and one of the biggest ones was The Final Reflection, a novel by celebrated SF author John M. Ford that paints a very different view of Star Trek and particularly the Klingon empire, one that diverged from the eventual path Trek took but nevertheless provided a guiding light for years afterwards. As the Vulcans say, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations...

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Are we living at the end of history? Not according to Olaf Stapledon, who conceived of 2 billion years of future history to come in his book Last and First Men. When we talk about the sweeping sprawl of all that could yet be, this is what we're talking about!

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We're all bugging out a bit as the quarantine stretches on, so here's a Kafkaesque new What Mad Universe on Spiridon The Mute, an obscure, bizarre story by a "protege" (it's complicated) of Jules Verne. If you've ever wondered if a giant ant could become a successful surgeon, now's your chance to find out! Also, why were you wondering that. Are you ill.

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This week's What Mad Universe?!? is so bizarre it BROKE REALITY ITSELF!!! (As in, it wasn't ready early for Patreon subscribers. Subscribe at the links below, though, and you'll hear the complete and unexpurgated full-length version of the show, the one the Nova Mob doesn't want you to hear!)

At any rate, this week we tackle a subject that I've been dying to delve into for a while but that I knew would be a bit of an odd fit: William S. Burroughs "Nova Trilogy" of cut-up books. Aggressively experimental, seemingly nonsensical, lacking anything resembling a traditional plot or story, these books have nevertheless had a real impact on pop culture and especially, oddly enough, the realm of SF and genre fiction, as we explore in this episode. Brace yourselves for some sex, drugs, and alien bugs...

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Because the internet is clearly starved for more Star Wars content (#starwars), this latest chapter of What Mad Universe is about Star Wars! It's the center of the pop cultural solar system, but orbiting around the red giant that is the movies are dozens of tie-in novels, comics, video games, TV shows and all kinds of other spinoffs. Some of these have managed to make their own dent in the popular consciousness, and some of them have been forgotten, or even deliberately stricken from the record. It all started with Splinter Of The Mind's Eye, a 1978 novel by Alan Dean Foster, ground zero for the Star Wars expanded universe, and a fascinating look at a parallel pop cultural reality. In this episode we're joined by Starwarsologist and friend of the show Will Staples to take a deep delve into all the minor detritus found circling that galaxy far, far away.

Note: this publicly-available episode has been seriously edited; the original version ran over half an hour longer and featured a discussion on the Star Wars Holiday Special and confusion over whether Princess Leia ever uses a lightsaber. Support either of us on Patreon and you can hear the whole thing, plus listen to the show a week early every time!

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It's a space western! It's a cosmic horror tale! It's a combination space western/cosmic horror tale! The Northwest Smith series by C. L. Moore, one of American pulp's most prominent female authors, is almost too many genres combined into one, and that's BEFORE the fantasy swordmaiden shows up for a crossover! Somehow, though, it works, and we'll delve into them in this installment.

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In this newest episode of WMU?!? we take a look at one of Philip's Bete Noirs (literally), a series of French pulp novels from before WWI about adventurer-hero Leo St. Clair, the Nyctalope, and his Sci-Fi adventures. Written with all the care and elegance of a 7th grader with an essay due the next morning, these stories nevertheless reflect a lot of the classic pulp tropes and may even be a stage in the development of the superhero. Somewhere, Riddick is taking notes (in the dark)...

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Let's go back, back, to a time when giants walked the Earth...probably doing something filthy. In this episode of What Mad Universe?!? we look at the oldest story yet to be featured on this podcast, a classic of literature contemporary with Don Quixote and Shakespeare, Francois Rabelais' novels about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lots and LOTS of urination jokes follow. The French, they're classy, right?

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The news is weird and harsh these days, so why not escape with us to the enchanted land of Poictesme, setting for works of James Branch Cabell's satirical fantasy Jurgen. Though almost forgotten these days, Cabell was very popular for a while in the 1920s, causing a minor scandal with his "indecent" prose, and his work shows that fantasy took very different forms before the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien came along.

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A new era begins, with a new season of What Mad Universe?!? To kick this year's offerings off, we take a look at one of the foundational (ha ha) texts of science fiction, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Empires will fall, mutants will rise, and psychology will be reduced to mathematical functions, somehow...

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A new season of What Mad Universe?!? is on its way March 9th. We take a quick overview of some of the books we're planning to look at, from Rabelais to Burroughs to Star Trek spinoffs. It's a whole gamut!

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What Mad Universe?!? brings season one to a close with this extra-special episode about Richard Bachman, the pen name of the slightly more famous Stephen King. Strange to think of this horror maestro as having an even darker side, but it's on full display in these early stories, collectively known as the Bachman Books, in which placid suburbanites turn violent and the citizens of future dystopia take part in brutal competitions. This episode features special guest Zack Handlen, and we say goodbye to 2019. See you in a few months!

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Because everything must have Star Wars content now, this new episode of WMU?!? does its due diligence with a dive into the planetary romance stories of Eric John Stark by Leigh Brackett, the woman who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and likely inspired George Lucas in the first place.

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Take a trip across the universe with Gully Foyle, a one-man space odyssey on a mad quest for revenge, as we look at Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination!

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No, the laws of reality have not come crashing down! The world has not been thrown into chaos! You ARE getting an episode of What Mad Universe?!? for the second consecutive week! That's just to get us back on schedule after the week-long break.

There was a lot to talk about this time out, with the subject of this episode, famed occult figure Aleister Crowley and his stories of the supernatural detective Simon Iff. In fact, there's so much so that we had to cut down this show by a pretty significant chunk--if you want to hear the full, unedited version, you'll have to subscribe to Adam's Patreon or Philip's! It's worth it (don't forget that also lets you listen to the show a week early!) As Crowley himself would say, "Do As Thou Wilt..."

Other Keywords: Magick, Occult, Tao, Thelema, Somerset Maugham, Alan Moore, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

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This episode looks at a favourite book of Adam's, Gilbert K. Chesterton's The Napoleon Of Notting Hill, a prescient commentary on globalization, imperialism and finding the sublime in the ridiculous.

Other Keywords: Globalization, Cheat the Prophet, C. S. Lewis, 1984, Community, Think Globally Fight Locally, Medieval, Mad king, Nicaragua, cynic, fanatic, cyberpunk, LARP, cosplay

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This chapter deals with Samuel R. "Chip" Delaney's Nova, the New Wave of SF, mythic symbolism, and the artistic process realized as space opera. Heavy, man.

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This episode looks at that famed grand-master of classic science fiction...Adolf Hitler? Actually, it's Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, about an alternate universe in which the rise of the Nazis was entirely confined to the fevered pages of a pulp sci-fi novel. Good thing the genre fans of THIS universe would never embrace anything so reactionary, racist and authoritarian, right?

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In the 70s, high-rise buildings were old hat in the US but still a novelty in the UK. As the urban landscape changed, British, and global, society changed with it. But into what? Could architecture, born out of the human mind, influence that mind in turn? Could a building...haunt us? J. G. Ballard asked that question in his seminal novel High-Rise, and on this episode we're joined by our friend Zack Handlen to gaze into his abyss...conveniently located on the 10th floor, near the food court!

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The writings of H. P. Lovecraft are probably the most hashed-over territory imaginable within the spheres of genre fiction we discuss here at What Mad Universe?!?, but the writers who influenced him are, in some ways, more interesting to us. We already did a show, "All The Gods Save One!" about Lord Dunsany. Now we turn to The Yellow King, the creation of Robert W. Chambers, though owing a debt to Ambrose Bierce, and who's since been picked up and fleshed out by numerous others, even being informally folded into the Cthulhu mythos.

Other keywords: Cosmic horror, play, madness, metafiction, True Detective, Hastur, Carcosa, Hyades, Yellow Sign, Hali, Aldeberan

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We never like to go for the obvious stuff here on What Mad Universe?!?, so even though the latest episode is about J. R. R. Tolkien, we're focusing on one of his obscure stories, Farmer Giles of Ham. It's a story he told to his children which got revamped into something more sophisticated via his academic obsessions, and as such it contains his career in miniature.

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As the 19th Century wound to a close, there was something in the air...or at least, people thought there soon would be. The idea of heavier-than-air flight and the potential military applications haunted SF decades before they became a reality; George Griffith's turn-of-the-century novel Angel of the Revolution imagined this technology falling into the hands of the good (?) guys and becoming the basis for a worldwide uprising in the midst of an apocalyptic war. The book also eerily foreshadowed an amazing number of real-world events that were still to come, including WWI and the Soviet revolution. In this episode we're joined once more by Jess Nevins to look at his novel, in which the Victorian era dreams uneasily of its own demise...

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Of One Blood, by Pauline Hopkins, is a turn-of-the-century novel with all the fantastical genre trappings you could ask for: reincarnation, psychic projections, and a Biblical lost kingdom still thriving in the present. But this book is special: it's written by a black woman and deals specifically with the African-American experience. Jess Nevins joins us once again to look at this interesting signpost in cultural and genre history.

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Get your titanium spurs on and saddle-up your starships, buckaroos, 'cuz it's time to take our first dip into the wild wild world of space westerns! Seems like every generation has its own version of "cosmic cowboys", but there was a time when the genre was an outright cliche. We look at a book from this era, H. Beam Piper and J. Joseph McGuire's A PLANET FOR TEXANS, aka LONE STAR PLANET, which it turns out, isn't two genres mashed into one...it's three! Let's get this wagon train (to the stars) a movin'!

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Since countries other than the US and the UK produce genre fiction too, this week we veer in a new direction to take a look at a famous work of Japanese Sci-Fi, "10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights", by Ryu Mitsuse. Could this book be a seminal influence on Japanese animation? To help us decide we've got guest star Ing--co-host of my other podcast, Destroy All Clickbait--who knows way more about that stuff than we do. Join us as two of mankind's greatest religious figures engage in a billion-year battle to the end of the universe!

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All is revealed as we press on into the second half of our look at Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus Trilogy. Know, O patient listener, that you have passed the threshold into the inner chamber of wisdom, and now we will present to you the REAL truth of what it all means. Or at least we'll take a look at the impact the book has had on pop culture, as well as some of the political and cultural ramifications of this paranoid Discordian manifesto.

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This is a big one, man. I mean it's for real, this is like the one that explains EVERYTHING, like how it's all connected, you picking up what I'm putting down? World governments, secret technologies, the lost continent of Atlantis, drug culture, the significance of the number 5, the whole big master plan to immanentize the eschaton--it's all here, man. It's all connected, and it all makes sense, you dig? But better not listen to this in public--they're listening...

This time around Phil and I are tackling Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's seminal counterculture tome The Illuminatus! Trilogy, ground zero for pop culture paranoia! It's such a fertile subject we had to do it as a two-parter. This one covers the intricate lore the authors wove together as the background for their manifesto, with a second half on its way very soon!

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Terrorists have seized the building! The police are clueless! People are in danger! Only one man can save the day! That man is...Joe Leland.

It's explosive action and political turmoil in this episode of WHAT MAD UNIVERSE?!? as we take a look at NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, the book that was adapted (loosely) into the movie DIE HARD. What, you didn't think 80s action movies were literary?

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There's an energy coming from the underground...it's the strange and wonderful power known as Vril, as documented in the book Vril: A Story of the Coming Race by the infamous Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton's left huge mark on pop culture, and in this episode we sit down with guest Jess Nevins to see whether his reputation doesn't deserve a bit of rehabilitation...

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Automation! The wave of the future! Imagine a world of tireless, artificial workers, uncomplainingly catering to your whims and doing all your hard labour! In 1920, Karol Capek imagined such a world in his play R.U.R. and created the word "Robot" in the process. He also helped instill one of the great neuroses of 20th century SF: the robot rebellion.

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This is probably the weirdest and most obscure book series we've tackled for What Mad Universe?!?., though it's come back into prominence for some reason. It's The Adventures of Little Baron Trump, by Ingersoll Lockwood, author of "The Last President"

Cough.

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In the lost lands of the central sea, a place beyond time, perhaps even existing only in dreams, there is a place where the people have a god they do not worship, lest his waking end the world. Their faith was described in two books and several stories written at the turn of the century by an Irish nobleman that have left a deep mark on the modern fantasy genre, even though he remains obscure outside of genre circles. But Lord Dunsany is likely "your favourite fantasy author's favourite fantasy author". Join us as we explore his Pegana mythos..

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You're getting sleepy...very sleepy...

No, stay alert! A great criminal mastermind is at large, and anyone could fall under his spell. His name is Dr. Mabuse, scientist, mad genius, would-be conqueror, and his eyes and words compel men to do his bidding. Even death doesn't seem to stop him. And as a force of evil arising in Germany in the 1920s, his presence resonates with events to come in ways that are still chilling, nearly a century later...

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Mars may be a lifeless rock in the real world, but it's long been teeming with life in fiction. Ever since astronomers claimed to have seen canals on Mars in the late 19th century, SF writers have been imagining exotic creatures, lost civilizations, and swashbuckling adventures on the red planet.

One of the most notable and iconic of the martian sagas is A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs and its various sequels, which was one of the first pulp stories to combine swashbuckling fantasy with interplanetary SF. In this episode, we sit down with special guest star and pulpologist Jess Nevins to talk about Burroughs' tales and a general overview of fiction set on Mars. Strap on your swords and hoist your radium guns as we psychically project ourselves to a dying world of action and romance!

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The latest chapter delves into the strange case of Venus On The Half-Shell, the book-within-a book with three authors, one of whom is purely fictional. An intergalactic satire that seems to have inspired Douglas Adams and others, this oddball book has been mostly forgotten, even though it lies at the intersection of at least two major literary careers...

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You know his name. Nobody does it better. The man on her majesty's secret service, with a license to kill, the spy who loved every woman from here to Russia (with love).

...Octopussy?

Actually it's Bond, James Bond, as we take a break from the obscure stuff to look at Ian Fleming's original 12 novels and 2 collections of short stories and try to figure out why they've left such a lasting mark on pop culture. He may be a bastard...but he's our bastard.

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Jules Verne: writer of 20,000 Leagues Beneath The Sea and Around The World in 80 Days. One of the fathers of science fiction, author of over 60 novels, the second most frequently translated author after William Shakespeare, and a massive influence on the 20th Century. But no, this show isn't about him. Instead, it's about another, altogether forgotten book from Verne's time, The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, a work that also prefigures modern culture in being a work of fanfiction based on Verne's characters. Whimsical, delightful and weird, Saturnin Farandoul sometimes feels like a modern "steampunk" book rather than an actual work of 19th century science fiction. It's worthy of renewed attention, and so Phil and Adam are here to bring it to you!

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"It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone.”

One of the strangest and most influential pulp heroes of the 20th century, Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone has impacted not just literature but movies, animation, games, music, and even the practice of magic. In this episode we look back on his weird but wide-ranging legacy.

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The man of tomorrow, the ubermensch. The perfection of the human form into something godlike, beyond mere mortality. Since the Enlightenment this dream has taken the place of the myth of the demigod or chosen one...and eventually, it saw its realization in the superhero genre. But before Clark Kent ever stepped into a phone booth, there was a story that gave rise to the superhero, and turned it on its head.

In this chapter we look at Philip Wylie's Gladiator, a book that's at once ground zero for the superhero and a strange path not taken for pop culture.

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Strange things haunt the mountains. Up these hills and down these hollows walks a man with a silver-stringed guitar, singin' the old songs, and doing what justice he can in a frightening world.

In this episode we look at the "Silver John" stories by Manly Wade Wellman, about a humble rover who battles the evils of the backwoods with music in his heart...

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The dead who walk, the drinkers of blood, the shunners of daylight, the ultimate monster--vampires! They've lurked and slithered around the dark edges of popular fiction for over two centuries. And the idea of what exactly a vampire is has shifted shape more than the creatures themselves...

In this episode, Phil digs up (heee hee heeeee!) a very strange 19th century French novel, one that embodies and intersects with many trends in pulp and genre fiction of the time, yet whose concept of the vampire is completely unlike anything else before or since...

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Born a savage in a primordial country...risen to become king of an antediluvian empire...a warrior king battling against wizards, monsters, and the corruption of civilization. No, it's not who you're thinking of!

In this episode we pour over the tales of Robert E. Howard's other barbarian hero, Kull the Conqueror, and consider the twin tropes of lost prehistoric realms and savage barbarian heroes.

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Adventure! Excitement! Lurid chills and thoughtful thrills! The history of genre is a weird and slippery one that ranges from trash to highbrow art (and neither is always in the place you’d expect to find it!) WHAT MAD UNIVERSE?!? is a podcast where Adam Prosser and Philip Rice, two “informed novices”, sit down and try to trace the threads of history through SF and fantasy, pinpointing the possible origins of familiar tropes and flagging firsts in books both classic and obscure.

This “prologue” episode was recorded well into season 2 as a more helpful introduction to new listeners, providing an overview for the show and our thoughts, plus introducing a few characters we’ll be meeting along the way. The original first episode, a proof-of-concept in which we examined the book from which we got our name, Frederic Brown’s What Mad Universe, is now available on our Patreons…it’s fun, but we consider it ephemera, a warm up to the real show.

Anyway, strap yourself into the spaceship, look out for cosmic rays, and let’s blast off…into the future!

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