Words To That Effect - A literary podcast of the intriguing, the curious, and the unexplored

September 18, 2017September 17, 2017 Conor19th Century Literature, British Literature, History, Literature and Science, Science, Victorian

Episode 7: Overpopulation from Malthus to Manila

7 Billion People 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 read more…

September 17, 2017 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, American Literature, History

Owen Wister and the Fictional American West

Travelling Out West Episode 6 of Words To That Effect (listen here) looked at some of the influences of neurasthenia, a nervous ailment that was ultimately as cultural as it was medical. For men living in large Eastern U.S. cities, one of the frequently advised cures for neurasthenia was a read more…

September 8, 2017 ConorHistory, Literature and Science, Medicine

[Article] Neurasthenia Advertisements

Hurrying and worrying in the struggle for success “Neurasthenia” was the term used in the 19th and early 20th century to classify a broad swathe of illnesses, from anxiety to depression, fatigue to trauma. It was widely used across the world, but particularly in the U.S. For more on how neurasthenia read more…

September 4, 2017September 4, 2017 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, American Literature, Medicine

Episode 6: Neurasthenia, Cowboys, and Feminists

Neurasthenia: The “National Disease of America” 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. Beard didn’t coin the term but read more…

August 30, 2017September 8, 2017 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Science, Science Fiction

[Article] Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom Novels

Barsoom and Mars Life on Mars Percival Lowell’s theory of Martian life and the famous canals of Mars influenced a huge number of science fiction writers. Whether one believed that the canals really were proof of life on the red planet, the theory certainly offered plenty of scope for fiction. read more…

August 20, 2017August 21, 2017 Conor20th Century Literature, Literature and Science, Science, Science Fiction

Episode 5: Canals on Mars

Percival Lowell, Science Fiction, and the Canals on Mars (c) ESO / M. Kornmesser Artist’s impression of Mars about four billion years ago. 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 read more…

August 10, 2017August 10, 2017 Conor20th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Popular Culture

[Article] Genrefication & Popular Literature

“Genrefication”? Did you just make that up? Episode 4 of Words To That Effect (listen here) explores the world of popular and literary fiction. One of the ideas that comes up is that of “genrefication”, the concept that the traditional boundaries between “literary” and “genre” (or popular) fiction are read more…

August 6, 2017August 10, 2017 Conor20th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Popular Culture

Episode 4: Popular Literature

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”), read more…

July 30, 2017 ConorScience Fiction

[Article] How do you define science fiction?

In Episode 3 of Words To That Effect (listen here) I asked a selection of unsuspecting friends a seemingly straightforward question: “what is science fiction?”. I got lots of answers: it’s about the future, about plausibility, about aliens, about science, about technology, about being realistic and not surrealistic. It’s a read more…

July 20, 2017July 23, 2017 Conor19th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Irish Literature, Science Fiction

Episode 3: Irish Science Fiction

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. But then, read more…