Words To That Effect

By Conor ReidSociety & Culture Documentary Arts Books History

Words To That Effect episodes

June 18, 2018 21: The Invention of Time
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.

For full shownotes, links and more visit wttepodcast.com/time

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20 min
June 04, 2018 20: Domestic Noir
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?

For links and more head to wttepodcast.com/noir

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27 min
May 21, 2018 19: Climate Change Fiction (Utopia, Pt2)
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.

For more, head to wttepodcast.com/utopia2

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26 min
May 07, 2018 18: What Is Utopia? (Utopia, Pt 1)
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.

For more, visit wttepodcast.com

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31 min
March 26, 2018 17: The 10% Brain Myth
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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Check out the show notes for this, and every, episode at wttepodcast.com

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18 min
March 12, 2018 16: Transhumanism, Fiction, and Immortality
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

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33 min
February 26, 2018 15: The Scarlet Pimpernel & Baroness Orczy
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.
For shownotes, links, and more, head to wttepodcast.com

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26 min
February 12, 2018 14: Weird Fiction & HP Lovecraft
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.

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27 min
February 06, 2018 Season 2 Preview
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

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4 min
December 18, 2017 13: The Ghost Stories of MR James
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.

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33 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,…