In 2005, the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft was taken over by a virus called Corrupted Blood, and the virtual pandemic in this fantasy world played out remarkably like COVID-19. I talk with epidemiologist and gamer Eric Lofgren, NYU game design instructor Alexander King and longtime player Virginia Wilkerson about the parallels between the pandemic in World of Warcraft the one we’re facing in the real world, and what lessons we can learn by studying how players reacted to a virtual virus.
Also if you want to submit a story for our upcoming toys episode, email us at contact@imaginaryworldspodcast.org
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Fighting a Virtual Pandemic

Imaginary Worlds sounds like what would happen if NPR went to ComicCon and decided that’s all they ever wanted to cover. Host Eric Molinsky spent over a decade working as a public radio reporter and producer, and he uses those skills to create thoughtful, sound-rich episodes about science fiction, fantasy, and other genres of speculative fiction. Every other week, he talks with comic book artists, game designers, novelists, screenwriters, filmmakers, and fans about how they craft their worlds, why we suspend our disbelief, and what happens if the spell is broken. Imaginary worlds may be set on distant planets or parallel dimensions, but they are crafted here on Earth, and they’re always about us and our lived experiences.

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When the writer Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism, she wanted to distinguish sci-fi written about Africa from Afrofuturism, which is focuses on the experiences of Black people in the diaspora. Africanfuturism mixes the traditional with the futuristic in a way that resembles modern life in Africa, and many of these stories grapple with climate change. Although the writer Chinelo Onwualu says cli-fi isn’t a subgenre for African writers. It’s often baked into a lot of Africanfuturism because the continent is already at the forefront of climate emergencies. And the writers Suyi Davies Okungbowa and Wole Talabi explain that Africanfuturist cli-fi isn’t as dystopian as Western cli-fi. These visions of the future may feel daunting but there is often a sense of hope and the solutions are more community focused. The actress Nneka Okoye reads from their stories, and other works by African writers.
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Reading list from this episode:

Works of Nnedi Okorafor


Wole Talabi’s anthology Convergence Problems


Suyi Davies Okungbowa's novella Lost Ark Dreaming


Chinelo Onwualu’s short story Letters to My Mother



Dilman Dila’s story The Leafy Man from the book A Killing in the Sun



Mame Bougouma’s story Lekki Lekki from Africanfuturism: An Anthology


Omenana Magazine


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African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate

Back in 2018, I interviewed language creator David J. Peterson about how he invented Dothraki for Game of Thrones and other fictional languages in fantasy worlds. David and his wife Jessie just finished a huge project – developing the Fremen language for Dune: Part Two. I talk with the couple about their creative process and the challenge of imagining simple English phrases in the Chakobsa language that Frank Herbert imagined in his Dune novels. We also hear my 2018 episode, “Do You Speak Conlang?” where I also talked with Marc Okrand, inventor of the Klingon language, and Robyn Stewart, a language consultant for Star Trek: Discovery. Plus, Jen Usellis -- a.k.a. Klingon Pop Warrior -- will give you a serious case of earworms (not the kind from Wrath of Khan.)
For more episodes about Dune, check out my 2017 episode The Book of Dune, where I talked with Muslim fans of the series about the way Frank Herbert incorporated aspects of Islam into the books. And in 2021, I did an episode called The Ecology of Dune where I looked at the environmental messages in the books and whether Frank Herbert’s environmental sensibilities still hold up today.
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When All Is Said in Dune

The Wizard of Oz is deeply ingrained into our culture. While many people can practically recite the 1939 movie, the original source material isn’t as well known. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was published in 1900. There are a lot of theories as to what inspired Baum – but the answer may be who rather than what. Baum’s mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage was a groundbreaking writer and activist who could’ve been in every high school history textbook if she hadn’t had a falling out with the leaders of the suffrage movement. But her ideas live on in The Land of Oz. I talk with historian Sally Roesch Wagner and UNC-Charlotte professor Dina Massachi about the politics of gender in Gage’s works and Baum’s stories. And I talk with therapist Dr. Gita Dorothy Morena who has a very personal connection to the books.
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Mother-in-Law of Oz

In the previous episode, I interviewed documentary filmmaker Isaac Elliot-Fisher about He-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Isaac had so many great anecdotes about the history of those franchises that I couldn’t fit in. In this bonus episode of outtakes, Isaac explains the history of the term toyetic, the haphazard way He-Man came together, and why the 1990 live action TMNT film was so much darker than the cartoon show.
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Bonus: Turtles and Toys Outtakes

In the final episode of our mini-series Class of '84, we look at two iconic franchises that launched in 1984: Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They came from opposite ends of the business spectrum. Transformers was a top-down marketing synergy between American and Japanese toy companies along with Marvel Comics to compete against He-Man -- another TV toy behemoth. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would eventually rival them in cultural dominance, but it began with two indie comic book creators making a black and white comic as a lark. But Turtles and Transformers both ended up wrestling with similar questions around what happens when you put the cart before the horse in creating content to sell products. Documentary filmmaker Isaac Elliot-Fisher and Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago talk about the incredible rags to riches story of the Turtles creators, and how success changed them. And I talk with Bob Budiansky, who created many of the original Transformers characters for Hasbro and Marvel Comics.
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Fighting a Virtual Pandemic

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