Science Fiction Archives - Words To That Effect

January 30, 2020January 30, 2020 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, Science, Science Fiction

Ep 40: Time Travel Tales

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 another way, all fiction is time travel fiction. All stories rely on time read more…

April 23, 2019April 23, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, Detective Fiction, Popular Culture, Science Fiction

Ep 31: Steampunk, Pt 2 (Even Greater London)

Note: Part 1 of this double episode is here 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 read more…

April 9, 2019November 4, 2019 Conor21st Century Literature, Popular Culture, Science Fiction

Ep 30: Steampunk, Pt 1 (Fetch Me My Fighting Trousers)

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 read more…

Four-dimensional space (Words To That Effect Ep29)

March 11, 2019March 11, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, History, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Supernatural

Ep29: Travels in Four-Dimensional Space

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 read more…

February 25, 2019February 25, 2019 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, History, Science Fiction

Ep28: Pulp Fiction (Amazing Stories of the Sisters of Tomorrow)

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 magazines. Argosy, Blue Book, read more…

February 11, 2019February 11, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Science Fiction

Ep 27: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

What Happens after the End of the World? 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, read more…

May 21, 2018May 21, 2018 Conor21st Century Literature, Popular Culture, Science Fiction, Utopia

Episode 19: Utopia, Pt 2 (Climate Change Fiction)

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. Creating read more…

May 7, 2018May 8, 2018 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Science Fiction, Utopia

Episode 18: What is utopia?

Utopian Literature & Utopian Journeys 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 read more…

March 26, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Literature and Science, Popular Culture, Science, Science Fiction

Episode 17: The 10% Brain Myth, from Self-Help to Pulp Fiction to Hollywood

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 read more…

March 12, 2018March 13, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, Science, Science Fiction

Episode 16: Transhumanism, Fiction, and Immortality

Technology, the future, and transhumanism 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 read more…

August 30, 2017January 4, 2018 Conor20th Century Literature, American Literature, Science, Science Fiction

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom Novels [Article]

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, 2017January 25, 2018 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…

July 30, 2017January 9, 2018 ConorScience Fiction

How do you define science fiction? [Article]

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, 2017January 25, 2018 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…

July 17, 2017January 9, 2018 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, British Literature, Science Fiction

Lost World Literature [Article]

Filling in the Blank Spaces In Joseph Conrad’s famous 1899 novella Heart of Darkness the narrator, Marlow, notes that since his childhood the world has become increasingly mapped and explored : “At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly read more…