Words To That Effect

By Conor ReidSociety & Culture Documentary Arts Books History

Words To That Effect episodes

March 11, 2019 29: 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 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

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28 min
February 25, 2019 28: 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.
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

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27 min
February 11, 2019 27: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
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

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31 min
January 28, 2019 26: Unwrapping the Egyptian Mummy
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

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26 min
January 14, 2019 25: Dinosaurs (Palaeontology to Pyjamas)
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

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26 min
January 10, 2019 Season 3 Preview
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.

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3 min
December 31, 2018 24: WTTE Live at Liberty Hall
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.

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36 min
July 30, 2018 23: Adaptation (How Does a Book Become a Film?)
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.

Find out more at wttepodcast.com

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27 min
July 16, 2018 Two Announcements and an Update
No episode this week unfortunately, but I do have two exciting announcements. Have a listen and find out!

More at wttepodcast.com

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4 min
July 02, 2018 22: Book Clubs: Revolution and Politics
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.

More at wttepodcast.com/bookclub

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32 min

About Words To That Effect

From the publisher's feed

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,…