Words To That Effect: Recent Episodes
HeadStuff
Words To That Effect: Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture.
WTTE is a narrative storytelling show, hosted and produced by Conor Reid, that explores the intriguing places where fiction, history, science, and popular culture intersect and inspire. From the Victorian past to utopian futures, dinosaurs to detectives, zombies to mummies, how does literature shape our understanding of popular culture? Find out more at https://wttepodcast.com.
WTTE is a part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. Support the show and get bonus episodes and more by joining HeadStuff+ (https://headstuffpodcasts.com/show/words-to-that-effect) .
Unfortunately there aren't going to be any new episodes for a little while but have a listen to this short update letting you know what's going on at WTTE and where things are heading next.
Dungeons & Dragons plays a huge part in fiction and popular culture more generally, but it is often overlooked or misunderstood. In this episode I gather together an experienced Dungeon Master and some complete novices (including myself) to play D&D for the first time. Joining me to explore this new world is academic, and life-time D&D fan, Professor Curt Carbonell, who has recently published a book on the subject.
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
From medieval ballads to the poetry of John Keats, stage productions to children’s songs, novels to comic books, silent movies to glorious technicolour, Disney classics to Kevin Costner blockbusters to Mel Brooks parodies to gritty reimaginings and lots, lots more,Robin Hood is certainly one of the most recognisable characters in all of western popular culture.
Joining me to explore the legendary outlaw is Prof Valerie Johnson, from the University of Montevallo, Alabama.
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
What does the word "Gothic" mean to you? Gothic cathedrals and castles? Gothic fiction? Teenage goths dressed in black? Horror and the supernatural? This episode explores the origins of the gothic and one man's lasting influence on this most important of genres.
Joining me as my gothic guide is Prof Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature
at Manchester Metropolitan University.
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: serendipity.
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: cliffhanger!
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
Sensation fiction was a hugely popular genre in the 1860s. The novels were sensationally popular, but they also caused a sensation, with their plots of bigamy and murder, forgery and blackmail. In so many ways the influence of sensation fiction can still be felt today.
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
Knights in shining armour, damsels in distress, castles, chivalry and courtly love, heroic quests, dragons.
King Arthur, Camelot, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail.
Think of King Arthur and the medieval romance and a huge number of images and tropes and cliches spring to mind.
Where does all this come from?
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
Dragons have been around for a very long time.
They are one of the very few mythological creatures that have become absolutely central to popular culture; everyoneknows what a dragon is. There are other important and well-known mythological creatures, but none are as ubiquitous as dragons, which can be found in Europe and the Americas, in classical and Biblical traditions, in ancient Indian tales and across Asian mythology.
So where do dragons come from? Why are they so common across cultures, and what do they mean to us today?
I chat to Professor Scott Bruce, author of the recently published Penguin Book of Dragons and an authority on dragons from antiquity to the present day.
WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com
For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com
Words To That Effect is back! Find out what's coming up on Season 6, launching on Jan 25th
There is a complex and fascinating relationship between humans and the ocean, how people and cultures across the world know and understand the sea, whether through myths and legends, through trade or fishing, exploration or entertainment.
This episode explores one particular aspect of all this - our relationship with the undersea, what lies beneath the surface of the oceans. It is the 4th place in a loose miniseries of literary locations: Antarctica, the desert, the forest, and now the undersea.
From early myths and legends to the naturalists of the 19th century; from the first transatlantic cables to the underwater habitats of the 1960s; from scientific attempts at a "homo aquaticus" to science fiction tales of underwater civilizations, there's plenty to explore in the ocean depths.
Joining me on this deep dive episode is Prof Helen Rozwadowski, Professor of History and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut.
How do we use fiction in food? What does a character's choice of food reveal about them? Do you simply have to go and make a dish when it's described beautifully in a book?
On this very special episode, a collaboration with the wonderful Spice Bags podcast, we discuss everything from 17th century Spanish literature to contemporary American horror, Italian detective novels to Japanese magical realism. Grab yourself a glass of Amarone and have a listen!
Support the show and get lots of bonus content by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Find out more at HeadStuffPodcasts.com
The forest is a place we have very mixed feelings about. Forests can be calm and peaceful, full of ancient and natural beauty.
Until they’re not.
The forest, in so many ways, is a place we fear. They are dark and dense and overgrown, all too easy to get lost in. They hold secrets and mysteries, and creatures we’d rather not meet alone, far from home.
And if the monsters of the forest don’t get us, then the forest itself will. The strange, malevolent powers of the trees themselves.
The forest can be a terrifying place.
On this week's episode I'm joined by Dr Elizabeth Parker, who guides us through the deep dark woods.
How do we imagine and portray the desert? And what does it say about us and our relationship to each other and, crucially, to the planet we live on?
In this, the second in a loosely connected series on places in fiction and popular culture, I chat to Dr Aidan Tynan about deserts in fiction and philosophy, from Mad Max to Burning Man, Nietzsche to Baudrillard, Cormac McCarthy to China Miéville.
In 1905 in Paris, the publisher Pierre Laffite had an idea. His new journal Je Sais Tout had just launched and he was looking for an author who could do for his magazine, what Arthur Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular Sherlock Holmes had done for The Strand magazine, in London. He turned to the writer Maurice Leblanc and one of the most memorable and successful characters in French popular fiction was born: the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin.
Lupin is cunning, sophisticated, quick-witted, a master of disguise, always one step ahead of the police, and a thief of humble origins who steals only from the wealthy upper classes.
But why did this gentleman thief achieve such instant and lasting renown? How does he fit into popular crime fiction more widely and how, you may be wondering, did he end up as the basis for one of the most popular shows Netflix has ever made?
Robots as high-tech labour-saving devices, and as usurpers of human jobs. Robots as distinctly Other and as dangerously indistinguishable from humans. Robots as a means of questioning what it is to be human, and highlighting the ethics behind the creation of artificial life.
To help me explore all of this I chatted to a roboticist who also writes about literature, and a literature professor who has worked and published extensively on robotics.
Support WTTE by becoming a member of HeadStuff+
For links, references, full transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com
A quick update episode on the new HeadStuff membership platform, HeadStuff+
Have a listen to find out more about what's on it and how you can join (although the joining bit is very straightforward - just click here).
I'm really excited to be a part of this and I hope if you are a regular listener and would like to support the show, and the network it is a part of, you'll consider becoming a member. Plus you get a load of extra stuff so it's win-win really!
The continent of Antarctica was only discovered two centuries ago, even if it had long been theorized. It's a place shrouded in mystery with no human history and no permanent residents. It’s a land of superlatives: the coldest, the windiest, the driest continent.
It is a grand scientific experiment, a habitat for animals, with spectacular icescapes luring tourists and scientists alike. And it’s somewhere that exists in the popular imagination in a multitude of ways, often contradictory and, it must be said, frequently confused with the Arctic.
There’s a long tradition of gothic and horror stories set in, and inspired by, Antarctica. There are heroic adventure tales from the early 20th century onwards, thrillers and adventure tales, science fiction novels, and crime and detective stories set on this inscrutable continent. Joining me to talk about all these stories and more is Prof Elizabeth Leane.
In one sense alternate history is a very specific kind of story - sometimes seen as a subgenre of science fiction, more often as a genre onto itself. But in a broader sense alternate history is something we are all interested in. We all think about what might have happened differently in our live and in the wider world, we all feel relief and regret.
What if?
In a way it’s maybe strange that the western is such a prominent genre. It's seemingly connected to a very specific time and place: the mid-to-late 19th century American west. And yet we are all so familiar with the many tropes of the western: cowboys and Indians, shootouts and saloons, cattle rustlers and sheriffs, tumbleweed and canyons?
The western has a particular hold on the popular imagination, partly for reasons of historical and cultural influence, but ultimately because of its supreme adaptability, its capacity to mingle and merge with other genres. The weird western is a hybrid genre: space westerns, steampunk westerns, supernatural and horror westerns, time travel westerns, westerns drawing on Afrofuturism and indigenous futurism, and many, many more.
For full transcripts, notes, links, and more head to wttepodcast.com/weirdwestern
Support the show on Patreon for bonus episodes and more!
Remix, mashup, sample, adaptation, parody, homage, knock-off. The lines between these, and so many other similar terms, are not always very clear.
In one sense, all culture is a remix, nothing exists in a vacuum. On the other hand, some people may take a dim view of lifting almost the entire text of Pride & Prejudice and republishing it with additional zombie action. Which is where Seth Grahame-Smith’s best-selling 2009 classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, comes in.
For lots more details, links, transcripts, and more, head to the Words To That Effect website
WTTE is back! Season 5 launches on Tuesday 10th November. Find out what's coming up this season.
Last year Caroline Crampton (of Shedunnit) and I teamed up to create a joint live show, called Words Dunnit: a 200-year history of detective fiction in an hour. We performed the show live at the Dublin Podcast Festival in November 2019, and then again at Pod UK, in Birmingham, in Feb of this year. We had a lot of fun making and performing it, so here it is in full.
For notes, links, pictures and more head to the WTTE website
Support the show on Patreon!
There are countless great works of literature we have tantalizing glimpses of, works we know existed but are, as far as anyone can tell, lost to history. Huge swathes of ancient Greek literature, for example, or a lost Shakespeare play based on the story of Don Quixote.
And then there are the works we rescue. Kate Macdonald, at Handheld Press, specialises in finding and reprinting lost classics, works that have fallen out of print but deserve another chance and a new audience. In this episode I chat to her about lost literature, the intricacies of reprinting old books, and authors who will never go out of print.
Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Abominable Snowman. Yeti. The Yowie, the Yeren, the Almas
Ape-men, cave men, wild men.
The Missing Link.
The idea of the missing link came about in the mid-19th century, with the rise of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In 1859 Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and it was radical, revolutionary, and highly contentious.
The problem, though, was that the mechanism by which it all worked wasn’t really understood yet, and there was a need for some hard evidence that would clinch his theory. If evolution really did work as Darwin described it; if, most controversially of all, humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and other apes all had a common ancestor, it should all be there in the fossil record.
There was a missing link in the theory.
Support WTTE on at patreon.com/wtte and get bonus episodes and more
Mills and Boon to bodice rippers , Johanna Lindsey to Nora Robers (and a little bit of Fabio) Why read romance novels?
Time travel fiction is a small subgenre of science fiction. Science fiction is a small subset of all the many genres and types of literature. Time machines and time travellers are a niche interest.
And yet, in many ways, all fiction is time travel fiction.
On this week's episode I chart the history and development of time travel, with Prof David Wittenberg, from utopia to hot tubs.
Support the show on patreon and get bonus episodes and more
For full show notes, links, transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com
Edgar Rice Burroughs is no longer a familiar name. Like many other authors, the fame of his greatest creation, in his case Tarzan, has long eclipsed his own.
But Burroughs was far more than the creator of Tarzan.
He was an early pioneer of science fiction, a master of the pulp fiction magazines of the early 20th century, an author whose books, across his lifetime and beyond, sold tens of millions of copies. He was also, among a bewildering array of other things, a journalist, a soldier and war correspondent, a businessman, and even a real estate investor: the ranch he bought and developed in the 1920s is, today, the aptly named neighbourhood of Tarzana, California.
So who was Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why were his books so popular? And has his work had any real lasting legacy on our culture today?
For notes, links, transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com/burroughs
Join the WTTE community and support the show at patreon.com/wtte
Unlike modernist poetry or Shakespearean drama, when it comes to children's literature, everyone has an opinion. Most of us are exposed to kids' books in some shape or form and, crucially, 100% of us have been children.
For an academic working with children's literature, this can have its rewards and its frustrations. "Yes! I love that classic childhood book too!". But also: "Sorry, I don't know why your child doesn't like this one particular book"
This week I'm joined by Dr Jane Carroll to chat about the children's picture book. How do text and image work together to create books that can spark wonder and imagination, that young children can completely lose themselves in? What's happening in children's fiction today, and what's the best children's picture book of all time?
Find out how you can support the show and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/wtte
For full show notes head to wttepodcast.com
Pirates have been around for a very long time. In fact, as far as the historical record seems to show, they have been around for as long as there have been property and boats.
What is it that attracts us to pirates and why have we got such a well-developed set of pirate tropes? We all have the same picture when we think of pirates: peg legs and eyepatches, parrots and pirate accents, walking the plank, buried treasure, the jolly roger.
Prof Manushag Powell joins me to discuss the Golden Age of Piracy, pirate literature, and the history behind the pirates of popular culture.
For shownotes, links, transcripts, and more head to wttepodcast.com
Join the WTTE pirate crew and support the show at patreon.com/wtte
There is no pop culture monster more written about, more critiqued and analysed, more portrayed and adapted and reimagined, than the vampire.
So this episode is not about most vampires. There are no discussions of Dracula or Nosferatu, no True Blood or Twilight or Buffy, no Anne Rice or Stephen King, no Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee.
Instead, there is a single vampire, one you may well never have heard of. A vampire that, in Victorian times, was far more popular than even Charles Dickens at the height of his fame. A vampire that established many of the tropes of later vampire mythology and fiction.
His name is Sir Francis Varney.
Varney the Vampire.
Find out how you can support the show and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/wtte
For full show notes head to wttepodcast.com
For most people today, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been reduced to a fairly straightforward allegory of the potential dark side within us all.
But if you read Robert Louis Stevenson’s original tale, a short 80-odd page novella, you immediately realise there is so much to this masterpiece of 19th century fiction. There are so many reasons the story has become embedded in popular culture. It has everything: dreams and reality, psychology and medicine, good and evil, degeneracy and criminality, sexuality and self-identity, blackmail, murder, addiction, religion. Have I missed anything?
For more details, links, and transcripts head to wttepodcast.com
Join the WTTE community and support the show on Patreon!
There are the celebrated authors: Checkov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro. There are the big questions: “What makes a truly great short story?” “Where does the form originate?” “What can short stories do that other forms of literature can’t?”
But before any of this, there’s a question that’s not that easy to answer at all:
What is a short story?
This week I’m joined by Dr Paul March-Russell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, and author of The Short Story: An Introduction and Colin Walsh, an award-winning short story writer from Galway, Ireland.
We discuss whether you can really define what a short story is, some great examples of the form, and what short stories can do that other forms of literature simply can’t.
For more details, links, and transcripts head to wttepodcast.com
Join the WTTE community and support the show on Patreon!
What do you think of, when you think of the genre of fantasy?
Whether it’s fiction, TV, cinema, or games, are there certain elements you need to have for something to be considered fantasy?
Well, you might say fantasy is medieval, or at least set in a time of swords and sorcery.
Or that fantasy has to be epic in scale; there are always grand and noble characters.
Or maybe fantasy has to be set in an imaginary world.
Or, at the very least, there should be some magic.
But, as I explore on this episode. Some, or all, or none of these might be present in a work of fantasy. There's more to fantasy than you might expect.
This week I chat to Dr Gerard Hynes to try to get the core of fantasy. We explore Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and the pop culture behemoth that is fantasy right now. We also look at a hugely diverse array of fantasy that goes far beyond what many people imagine when they think of the genre.
For more details, links, and transcripts head to wttepodcast.com
Join the WTTE community and support the show on Patreon!
An English country estate. A detective pacing the room, explaining how they have solved the crime, revealing the solution to a puzzle and the clues which were there all along.
It’s so easy to parody this scene because it’s so familiar.
It’s Reverend Green in the billiard room with the candlestick.
It’s a shocking murder in a cosy English village or the country estate of a well-off family…where everyone is as suspect.
It’s the locked room mystery, where the puzzle is always the centre of the story.
So, where do all these familiar ideas come from exactly?
What do we mean when we talk about Golden Age Detective Fiction?
And are our assumptions about the tropes and rules of this fiction really all the accurate?
For full transcripts, links, pictures, and more head to the wttepodcast.com
Find out how you can support WTTE at patreon.com/wtte
One way of thinking about steampunk is to divide it into two parts – the steam and the punk.
The steam is the Victorian element: the fascination and engagement with the 19th century – whether satirizing or poking fun at Victorian conventions and ideas, dealing with problematic aspects of empire and colonialism, celebrating the people and places, or utterly rethinking the science and technology of the era.
The punk, on the other hand, is very much about building collaborative communities in resistance to contemporary capitalist consumer culture and technology. It’s about maker culture and a DIY aesthetic, about fan groups, conventions and meetups. There’s a strong connection, as we’ll see, with other non-mainstream areas of performance culture: cosplay, circus arts, street performance, burlesque.
And all of these different areas come together in the rapidly growing number of guests I’ve spoken to about this topic.
For full details, links, transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com
Note: This episode is Part 1 of a double episode on steampunk.
There are cultures, and subcultures, and sub, sub, sub
cultures.
There’s science fiction, there’s alternative history,
there’s steampunk.
There’s hip hop and there’s chaphop.
There’s an anachronistic Victorian gentleman wearing a pith helmet with an orangutan butler, dissing a fellow chaphop artist for parodying, rather than engaging with, the genre.
What, you may quite reasonably ask, is going on?
Well, over this episode, and the next – because this is part one of a double episode - I’m going to take a really, really deep dive into the world of steampunk.
Steampunk is a lot of things: an aesthetic, a genre, a
fashion, a lifestyle. And to really understand it, and to see how influential it is on mainstream popular culture and a whole host of different areas, you need to look at it from several different angles.
Which is why I have some very exciting guests lined up across these two episodes. In this instalment I’ll be talking to two very different professors:
Dr Rachel Bowser is Associate Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, in the U.S. and has written extensively about steampunk.
Professor Elemental is the Victorian gentleman whose music you’ve just heard, the chap in the chaphop. He’s a hiphop musician, performer, and voice-over artist, and he provides a another, very different angle in looking at the world of steampunk.
This podcast tries to answer the question: what, exactly, is steampunk and how has it become so popular?
For links, pictures, transcripts, and more head to wttepodcast.com/steampunk
We have no problem thinking mathematically about four-dimensional space.
Where a 3-d cube has 8 vertices, a 4-d hypercube has 16 vertices.
Where a cube has 6 faces, like a dice, a 4-d hypercube has 24 faces.
The problem is imagining what that actually looks like. We live in a three-dimensional world. We can’t see a fourth dimension. We simply can’t imagine what a 4-D world would look like.
However, that doesn’t mean that lots and lots of people haven’t tried to, in a huge variety of ways: mathematicians and physicists, philosophers and theologians, occultists and mystics, artists, architects, designers, authors.
The fourth dimension, when you start to look for it, is everywhere.
On this week’s episode I’m joined by Professor Christopher White who has just written a book with a fascinating central premise: in the U.S, and in many parts of the Western world, the number of people identifying as Christian has been consistently falling, for about 30 years now. Yet the number of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, people who still believe in a god of some sort, has remained very high.
So, if people believe in spirits or angels, in God or life after death, in heaven or another world of some sort, but not in traditional religious institutions, how are they constructing these supernatural worlds?
Well, in many ways, as Professor White explains, they are relying on science and maths. On other dimensions, multiverses, quantum entanglement, string theory, parallel universes.
There is, and has been for well over a century now, a type of scientific supernatural.
For links, pictures, full transcripts and more, head to wttepodcast.com
If you want to understand how we ended up with anything from Star Wars to Star Trek, Superman to Batman, intergalactic travel to microscopic worlds, profound meditations on the nature of being human to thrilling tales about Martian princesses, you have to look at pulp fiction.
Argosy, Blue Book, Adventure, Black Mask, Horror Stories, Flying Aces…there was a lot of it.
The 1920s and 30s was the age of pulp fiction, the time when genres truly became genres. Science fiction, detective stories, war stories, horror, westerns, fantasy. Everything. All those categories that we use to divide up fiction and film and TV came together in the pulps at this time.
But what I want to do in this episode in particular is to look at some of the commonly held ideas about pulp fiction, and about science fiction more particularly. So here are a few things that we all know:
1: Science fiction was, and continues to be, mostly consumed by men
2: Science fiction is, for the most part, aimed at 12-year-old boys
3: There were very few women writers of science fiction between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the new feminist sf of the 60s and 70s
4: Those few women who did write SF were forced to write under male or androgynous pseudonyms in order to make it in an utterly male-dominated industry
So you can probably guess where I’m going with. Yes, all of these are myths. They’re ideas that are completely, demonstrably false.
This week Professor Lisa Yaszek joins me to discuss the history of the pulps and the many myths around early women’s science fiction.
For links, pictures, full transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com/pulpfiction
What would happen if humanity ceased to exist?
Well, assuming, of course, that earth itself has not been destroyed in this hypothetical apocalypse, the world would continue quite happily without us.
People have long speculated about what would happen in the weeks, months, and years after the end of humanity. There is an obvious perverse pleasure in seeing the world we have destroyed, and continue to destroy, getting its revenge. There’s a misanthropy in this type of speculation, what’s sometimes called “catastrophe porn”, but there’s also a humble recognition that ultimately we are, as humans, largely insignificant in the vast scale of things.
Whatever we feel, we are definitely attracted to exploring the idea; apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction has been around for a long time. We like to imagine the end of the world, but it’s quite hard to write a narrative with no people, so what we also like to do, is to imagine what would happen if just a small number of people remained. Not quite the end of the world, but the end of world as we know it.
Post-apocalyptic stories combine so many fascinating elements: there’s the speculation about the future, the frequent sense of adventure and problem solving in a new and dangerous world, the science fictional world building, the appeal to our curiosity about the future of our species. And the profound, complex questions about us, about our relationship with our planet, and with each other, and the huge societal issues that we face.
In conversation with Professor Heather Hicks, from Villanova University, this episode explores the end of the world, from plagues to nuclear war, drought to zombie hordes, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to the best contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction.
For links, pictures, a full transcript and more head to wttepodcast.com
In the 19th century, a very popular form of entertainment was the mummy unwrapping party. Yes, you could go to a private or public event at which an ancient Egyptian mummy would be unrolled and examined. Bandages would be passed around, touched and smelled, ancient jewellery would be admired, and a the dead body of an Egyptian would be revealed at the end.
So, how did this bizarre and macabre spectacle come to be? Where did the Victorians get all these mummies? Were they all comfortable with this gruesome spectacle?
Are we happy, today, to continue to display these mummies in museums?
And how did all this feed into the enduring fascinating with Egypt – from mummies’ curses to the Tomb of Tutankhamun, mummy fiction to Brendan Fraser romping around Egypt?
For more details, links, transcripts, and more, head to the Words To That Effect Website
In 1842 a Victorian anatomist looked at some unusual fossils and, noticing they had something in common, he decided we needed a word to describe these strange creatures. He called them dinosaurs.
Cut to the present day and there are dinosaur films, TV shows, books, songs, toys, and anything else you can possibly think of. Dinosaurs are beloved by children across the world, they form the centrepieces of internationally renowned museums, and there is nobody who doesn’t have an idea of what a dinosaur looks like.
How did we get here?
Episode 25 of Words To That Effect draws together science and fiction, palaeontology and children’s pyjamas, Jurassic Park and Gertie the Dinosaur, to explore the cultural history of dinosaurs.
Full details, links, pictures, and more at the Words To That Effect website
Words To That Effect is back! Season 3 kicks off next Monday, Jan 14th. In the meantime, have a listen to a preview of what's in store for the season.
The music heard in this episode was "Polydrug" by Forrests. You can check out their music here
Words To That Effect is a member of the Headstuff Podcast Network. You can listen to previous episodes, and lots of other great podcasts here.
Words To That Effect is back! Episode 24 is a recording of September's live show for the Dublin Podcast Festival.
This episode is a story about a long-forgotten nervous disease. But it’s also a story of science and culture, psychology and mental health, feminism and creativity, war and masculinity. It's about ghost stories, science fiction and cowboy novels...
Featuring live music composed and performed by Ken McCabe.
The book is always better than the film.
Or so they say.
But there are obviously quite a few problems with this, as there tends to be with any sweeping generalisation. For some, the book is always better than the film, because books are just better than films, which is something I would mostly agree with. Fiction creates and draws us into a world entirely inside our own imagination. At its best, fiction is far more immersive and engaging than a film can ever be.
But, of course, there are plenty of truly fantastic films adapted from utterly mediocre books. And yet it’s not a competition, even if it can sometimes seem that way. Literature and film are two completely different forms of creative expression, two wholly different ways of telling a story.
But the reason they tend to get placed in opposition so often is precisely because of this. They are two different ways of telling a story, two different ways to reach an audience and, ultimately, two different ways to make money from the same story.
Film producers love literary adaptation. They are constantly looking to fiction for great stories or, better yet, for stories with built-in fan bases. And it’s not one-way traffic. Successful films and TV shows are routinely repackaged as novelizations or extended with the further fictional adventures of popular characters.
Book to screen...and screen to book
So, how exactly does a book become a film, or a TV show? What makes for a great literary adaptation, and how do you go about it? How many times have you read a great novel and thought, how has this author’s work never been adapted?
And what about the other way around. Novelizations and book spin-offs? Where do they fit into all this?
This week, I answer all these questions, and more, in a conversation about literary adaptation with authors Paul FitzSimons and Carmel Harrington.
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No episode this week unfortunately, but I do have two exciting announcements. Have a listen and find out!
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The Rick O'Shea Bookclub is Ireland's largest bookclub. It has 17,000 members and is growing fast. Book clubs have never been more popular. But where did they begin, and what role have they played in literary history?
Quite a large role, it turns out: culturally, politically, and commercially.
In this episode I talk to Rick O'Shea about the success of his bookclub, and to Prof DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Dr Amy Prendergast, two experts in the history of books clubs and reading groups.
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Time, as we understand it today, was only really invented in the Victorian era.
We take it for granted today that our phones and watches and other devices are accurate to the second.
That time zones are clear and fixed – when it’s 3pm in Dublin, it’s also 3pm in London, and 4pm in Paris or 10am in New York. We don’t think twice about the fact that a train can be scheduled to leave at precisely 11.04 and, when it arrives, passengers will be clear as what time it is at their destination
We know that time travel is a trope of science fiction, but not a scientific reality. We are aware that the sun is a star that’s burning through a finite store of hydrogen and will, eventually, burn out and die.
But all of these ideas about time – things we just don’t think very much about today - were not fixed at all in the nineteenth century.
It was in the Victorian era, particularly from the middle of the 19th century onward, that time moved to the forefront of public consciousness.
The concept of time was pondered over, debated, and discussed by everyone, from factory workers to scientists, tradespeople to academics.
Time found its way into novels by the authors of the age – from the renowned and to the long-forgotten
It was investigated and interrogated across scientific disciplines: by geographers, geologists, naturalists, and many others
And it caused fierce debate among those charged with regulating and organising trade, transport, and communications.
All across the world, time was a hugely important facet of life in the Victorian era.
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Why Are There So Many Crime Thrillers With 'Girl' in the Title?
Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive, Final Girls... There's no shortage of crime novels with 'girl' in the title since the huge success of Gillian Flynn's 2012 thriller Gone Girl. But what do these novels have in common, what explains their success, and why are classified as domestic noir?
Domestic Noir is a term first applied to fiction of this type by the author Julia Crouch, and it has stuck. Crime novels concerned with the female experience, with the ordinary lives of women who are faced with danger from within the home or from their own past. Novels which involve murder and mystery, but not of the serial killer and FBI procedural variety.
This episode explores the rise of domestic noir, from the success of Gone Girl onward. In the wake of the recent MeToo movement the focus has somewhat changed, but the subgenre has developed to reflect this.
The episode also looks back at the history of crime novels concerned with very similar themes, going right back to the 19th century.
How does domestic noir reflect the realities of violence against women and our perceptions of female victimhood? Is our cultural perversely preoccupied with the deaths and disappearances of young, pretty, white girls?
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This week's episode continues on from the last episode. So, if you haven't listened to that, head on over to Episode 18 first. From the history of utopia in the last episode, we move to the future of the planet and the climate change fiction that addresses it.
“For me, utopianism is the creative attempt by a group of people to respond to the great challenges of any age and to do so in a way that’s visionary, it’s not limited, it’s not following a set recipe that has an end point, it’s an open ended future”
This episode is about creating utopias, real and imaginary, and the need for utopian thinking as we are faced with the greatest threat to the future of our planet: climate change.
I talk to Prof Peadar Kirby, a member of the Cloughjordan Ecovillage, in Tipperary, Ireland. What is life actually like in a community like this. Is daily life very different from your average life in a small Irish town? How do you join, and does someone decide if you get in or not? And what exactly is ecological about the ecovillage?
We then move from an ecovillage to climate change fiction, or "clifi", a whole subgenre of literature that explores the possibilities of a future affected by climate change. Writers are imagining dystopian futures with water scarcity or rising sea levels, with desertification, agricultural catastrophes or the spread of new diseases. Others are highlighting the utopian thinking needed to mitigate against many of these issues.
With guest Prof Tom Moylan the show travels from Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, and his many utopian works, to Frank Schätzing's best-selling novel The Swarm, to films like The Day After Tomorrow, there are many ways of representing and exploring climate change. What is clear, though, is that this is most certainly an issue that needs to be explored, and climate change fiction is a particularly good way of representing the timescales involved.
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This is a story of three journeys, by three people, in three very different times. But each of the journeys ends in the same area in the west of Ireland. And each journey is founded on a search for a more perfect world, a search for utopia.
Episode 18 (part one of a two-part episode on utopian literature) explores the utopia in fiction and in reality, in the past, present, and future. What is a utopia exactly and why do we create them? Are they idle dreaming, pointless thought experiments, fantasy worlds we can never reach? Or do utopias serve a more functional, political purpose: blueprints for a more perfect future? As this episode explores, utopian literature has taken many forms in its 500-year history, and the journey towards utopia is just as important as the destination itself.
Utopian and Dystopian Fiction
Utopian literature, however, has fallen out of favour in the last century or so. It has been largely abandoned in favour of the dystopia. From novels and TV shows like The Handmaid's Tale or Black Mirror, to Young Adult (YA) fiction such as The Hunger Games, dystopian fiction is a mainstay of popular culture today.
Utopian Literature Today
But there are still plenty of utopias being written today, if you know where to look. This episode takes us from Thomas More's foundational work, Utopia, first published in 1516, all the way to modern-day YA dystopias. From Edward Bellamy's 1888 best-seller Looking Backward to the novels of Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin.
But, of course, the utopia is a call to change the world and in this episode I also explore real-life attempts to create utopian communities: Ralahine, an early 19th-century experiment to establish a socialist co-operative, and the Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Tipperary. This modern-day intentional community is modelling a more co-operative and environmentally conscious way of living, at a time when the earth faces the profound problems associated with climate change.
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Do we use only 10% of our brain capacity? (Hint: No)
“It is estimated that most human beings only use 10% of the brain’s capacity. Imagine if we could access more of our cerebral capacity?" This is the central question of the 2014 Scarlett Johannson film, Lucy. And it is not exactly an original idea. Exploring the extraordinary powers gained by accessing the untapped potential of our brains is a ubiquitous trope in popular culture. It's the premise of the Bradley Cooper film Limitless (and the more recent TV version), and the idea appears in TV shows from Star Trek to Heroes to Fringe and beyond.
This is the 10% brain myth, the idea that we somehow use only 10% of our brain capacity, and that somehow unlocking or accessing the remaining 90% will result in vastly increased mental capacities.
Sometimes the idea is fully believed and earnestly repeated. Sometimes it is very knowingly appropriated for the purposes of a good plot. Sometimes it’s confidently asserted to back up dubious claims of psychic abilities. Either way, the idea is everywhere
So, where did this stubbornly enduring myth come from in the first place? How has it permeated our culture? And what does it say about our understanding of intelligence and the brain?
This week's episode explores the 10% brain myth, tracing its roots in early 20th century science, the self-help movement and following its adoption into popular culture via pulp fiction magazines.
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This is an episode about who we are as humans. And, more importantly, where we are going. About a future in which technology and biology have merged in ways that are in equal part fascinating and terrifying. A future of unparalleled technological ingenuity, but one with deeply problematic ethical concerns.
It’s a future that sounds like science fiction because, in some ways, it is. But it’s a world that’s being designed right now.
Transhumanism is a social movement which aims to use technology to push out the boundaries of the human condition. It aims to move humanity beyond what we are today. It takes in a huge range of ideas: from the wildly speculative, like uploading our consciousness to computers, to the more low tech, like DIY tech implants and biohacking. It's a movement which tries to transcend the human condition and, ultimately, to achieve immortality.
It's also a movement which has been heavily influenced by a century of science fiction writing about these ideas.
In this episode, I talk to Dr Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine, a fascinating new book which explores the world of transhumanism. The book, as its subtitle outlines, is about O'Connell's Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.
I also chat to Dr Thomas Connolly, who helps situate the transhumanist movement in the context of a long history of science fiction writing.
We talk about genetically engineered mice, scifi dystopias, Silicon Valley, immortality, human consciousness, and quite a bit in between.
For more details, links, and more, head to the Words To That Effect website
The Scarlet Pimpernel is a character now long disconnected from his origins in a 1903 novel. The Pimpernel is a mysterious Englishman who uses elaborate disguises to heroically rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. Naming himself after a small red flower, the enigmatic hero's identity is known only to a select few. In reality, he is a wealthy English aristocrat, Sir Percy Blakeney.
The Scarlet Pimpernel has appeared in films, TV series, stage plays, spin-offs and parodies. He is, in fact, the original masked hero - the prototype for Batman, Zorro, the Lone Ranger, or any number of other superheroes with secret identities.
Yet the Scarlet Pimpernel was, originally, the creation of Baroness Orczy, a fascinating figure in literary history. A Hungarian aristocrat who found fame as an English novelist; a conservative who was nevertheless very progressive in her depiction of female characters; a novelist remembered for a single character but who produced a huge body of work.
Orczy was an accomplished writer of detective fiction. Her 'Old Man in the Corner' stories harked back to Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin, while anticipating the Miss Marple tales of Agatha Christie. Orczy was also the creator of Lady Molly, one of the earliest examples of a female detective. Lady Molly is a detective in the Holmesian mould, with her Watson-like sidekick, solving crimes in her capacity as a detective for Scotland Yard.
In this episode I explore the life and writings of Baroness Orczy, following her journey from her childhood home in Hungary to international fame and fortune. I'm joined by Dr Clare Clarke to assess her impact on detective fiction and popular literature more widely. We talk Victorian periodicals, Sherlock Holmes, feminism, and a mysterious murder in Dublin.
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The American writer H.P. Lovecraft wrote weird fiction. His work is both weird, in the conventional sense of the word, and Weird, in a more specific sense. His tales are not typical horror stories, but instead invoke a type of cosmic terror, a slow realization that humanity is an insignificant afterthought in a vast universe of indescribably horrific creatures. Protagonists tend to write their stories on the verge of madness, or just before they commit suicide, having uncovered an unspeakable truth. His writing is all about atmosphere, not plot.
Lovecraft has been enormously influential on the development of genre fiction – science fiction, fantasy, and particularly horror. His is a world, a mythos, in which cosmic entities such as Cthulhu are terrifyingly revealed.
This all may seem incredibly niche, but Lovecraft has permeated popular culture in every form. Lovecraft's work is referenced, supplemented, parodied, critiqued, documented and dissected. Cthulhu, along with a pantheon of other cosmic creatures, is a source of fascination for huge numbers of people, especially online. It’s pretty safe to say the internet is a bit obsessed with HP Lovecraft.
And it is also all a bit, well, weird, if you haven’t really come across it before.
This episode explores the world of Lovecraft, Lovecraftian writing, and weird fiction. My guest is Dr Tim Jarvis, lecturer in English literature at the University of Bedfordshire, and an author of weird fiction himself. The story takes us from early 20th century America to contemporary writers, such as Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville, writing weird fiction today.
A preview of what's to come on Season 2 of Words To That Effect. There will be utopias, immortality, secret superhero identities, weird fiction and lots more...
For a full description and all the links, head to the Words To That Effect website
This week’s episode is a Christmas Special. It’s a collaboration with the disturbingly good horror podcast, Down Below The Reservoir. The result is an episode about the ghost stories of MR James, followed by an audio-drama production of “Lost Hearts”, one of James’ classic tales.
Whether we like it or not, the zombies are coming for us all. Films, books, computer games, comics and TV shows. From historical and mythical zombies to claims to have proven the scientific truth behind zombification. From the gruesome, cannibalistic monsters of horror, to the harmless creatures of children’s playground games. There are zombie flash mobs and parades, zombie cocktails and drinks. There’s zombie capitalism and zombie corporations. And, of course, the zombie apocalypse.
Episode 12 of Words To That Effect explores the complex cultural history of zombies, from the cane fields of Haiti to the Hollywood screen, from the mindless, shuffling undead to the concept of zombie consciousness. I am joined by Prof Roger Luckhurst, author of Zombies: A Cultural History.
Cesare Lombroso was an Italian doctor and psychiatrist and he was one of the first people to really consider “criminality” a subject worthy of scientific study. His ideas were groundbreaking and, despite that the fact that he was unbelievably, spectacularly wrong, he is often referred to as the “father of criminology”.
In this episode I am joined by Prof Christine Ferguson to discuss crime and criminals, science and literature, from Dracula to Jekyll and Hyde. Why were Lombroso’s ideas so appealing? How are they connected to our own views on crime today? What if you really could tell a criminal by his or her outward appearance?
Robinson Crusoe’s influence has been so powerful that this single work of literature has spawned an entire genre: the Robinsonade. This is the name given to those Crusoe-like stories which involve shipwreck, a desert island, and encountering a strange new society or person There are thousands upon thousands of books and films, plays and poems, tv shows and comic books which take up the Robinson theme.
Defoe’s novel has left a lasting, powerful, complicated, and often dangerous myth in the popular imagination.
In this week’s episode I talk to Dr Ian Kinane about Crusoe and the Robinsonade, about egomania and colonialism, 18th-century fiction and reality TV.
Writers make up imaginary countries all the time, and for a variety of reasons. It’s relatively straightforward to slip in a familiar-sounding name into a part of the world your reader or viewer may not be too familiar with.
Livonia, Wallaria, Tazbekistan…They could be countries, right? But there’s one name in particular which stands out. It is the imaginary country, and the inspiration for an entire subgenre. This is the country of Ruritania.
The case of William Edward Hickman went to trial in Los Angeles in 1928. The accused was charged with the gruesome murder of a 12-year-old girl, and he faced the death penalty. The trial was reported all across the U.S. because it was the culmination of a horrific tale of murder and kidnapping which had gripped the entire nation.
This is the story of a murder which encompasses psychiatry, heredity, and a world-famous writer.
A baby girl was born in a hospital in the Philippines, on 30th October, 2011. However, unlike all the other children born that day, the arrival of Danica May Camacho was witnessed by a crowd of photographers and journalists. The world’s media were gathered in a hospital in Manila because this little girl was the 7 billionth person on earth.
“Overpopulation” is a word that gets used and abused in a variety of ways. But while much of the discussion around it may seem like a relatively modern concern, especially given how quickly the world population is currently growing, as a concept overpopulation can actually be traced back to one person: Thomas Malthus.
In this episode I talk to Dr Ruth Doherty, an expert in the cultural and literary representations of overpopulation. We talk misery and vice, Dickens and Dan Brown, London and the world.
In 1881 an American neurologist named George Miller Beard published a hugely influential book: American Nervousness. In it, he laid out the symptoms, cures, and implications of what he called “neurasthenia”, essentially what one might call nervous exhaustion. If you read books or newspapers from the 1880s right through to at least the 1930s you find numerous accounts of neurasthenia. Characters in fiction are constantly suffering from it. Every newspaper ran ads claiming to cure the disease. But what was it exactly, and why was it called the “national disease of America”?
This week I’m joined by Prof Brendan Kelly, a psychiatrist, and Dr Dara Downey, an expert in 19th century women’s writing, to discuss neurasthenia and how this difficult-to-define illness influenced the literature and culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
For as long as humans have been looking at the night sky, the planet Mars has fascinated us. But while astronomers had charted the movements of the planet for hundreds of years, there had never been a chance to see the planet in any detail. Then, in 1877, everything changed.
What is popular literature? Walk into most bookshops and you will find fiction categories like “Crime”, “Science Fiction”, and “Horror”. You will also tend to find a section called “Literature”. But how does a book get placed here? Is there really such a thing as “Literature” (with a capital “L”)?
What is Irish Science Fiction? Ireland is not, it is fair to say, the first country that springs to mind when you think “science fiction”. When aliens land on Earth, we tend to assume they’ll land in New York, or London, or Tokyo. Definitely not Dublin or Cork.
Sherlock Holmes is the most rational and scientific detective of them all. So why did his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, passionately believe in ghosts, fairies, and telepathy? Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur Conan Doyle is now best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, his creation has long taken read more...
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What is invasion fiction? Who was the mysterious William Le Queux? Why did a group of famous British authors secretly meet at the outbreak of World War I? And what did “fake news” look like a century ago? Episode 1 of Words To That Effect explores the power of read more...
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An Introduction and a Preview.
Welcome to Words To That Effect, a new podcast that tells stories of the fiction that shapes popular culture. This is a short introduction to the podcast, telling you a little bit about the format, the guests, and what you can expect...