Words To That Effect

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 1...

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 f...

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’...

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 u...

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...

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 worl...

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 aristocra...

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 sto...

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Whether we like it or not, the zombies are coming for us all. Films, books, computer games, comics and TV shows. From historical and mythical zombies to claims to have proven the scientific truth behind zombification. From the gruesome, cannibalistic monsters of horror, to the harmless creatures of children’s playground games. There are zombie flash mobs and parades, zombie cocktails and drinks....

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian doctor and psychiatrist and he was one of the first people to really consider “criminality” a subject worthy of scientific study. His ideas were groundbreaking and, despite that the fact that he was unbelievably, spectacularly wrong, he is often referred to as the “father of criminology”. In this episode I am joined by Prof Christine Ferguson to discuss crime and cri...

Robinson Crusoe’s influence has been so powerful that this single work of literature has spawned an entire genre: the Robinsonade. This is the name given to those Crusoe-like stories which involve shipwreck, a desert island, and encountering a strange new society or person There are thousands upon thousands of books and films, plays and poems, tv shows and comic books which take up the Robinson th...

Writers make up imaginary countries all the time, and for a variety of reasons. It’s relatively straightforward to slip in a familiar-sounding name into a part of the world your reader or viewer may not be too familiar with. Livonia, Wallaria, Tazbekistan…They could be countries, right? But there’s one name in particular which stands out. It is the imaginary country, and the inspiration for an ent...

 The case of William Edward Hickman went to trial in Los Angeles in 1928. The accused was charged with the gruesome murder of a 12-year-old girl, and he faced the death penalty. The trial was reported all across the U.S. because it was the culmination of a horrific tale of murder and kidnapping which had gripped the entire nation.  This is the story of a murder which encompasses psychiatry, heredi...

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 hospital in Manila because this little girl was the 7 billionth person on earth.  “Overpopulation” is a word that gets used and abused in...

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. If you read books or newspapers from the 1880s right through to at least the 1930s you find numerous accounts of neurasthenia. Characters in...

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 the planet for hundreds of years, there had never been a chance to see the planet in any detail. Then, in 1877, everything changed.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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”)? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sherlock Holmes is the most rational and scientific detective of them all. So why did his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, passionately believe in ghosts, fairies, and telepathy?   Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur Conan Doyle is now best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, his creation has long taken read more... The post Episode 2: Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and Spiritualism app...

What is invasion fiction? Who was the mysterious William Le Queux? Why did a group of famous British authors secretly meet at the outbreak of World War I? And what did “fake news” look like a century ago?   Episode 1 of Words To That Effect explores the power of read more... The post Episode 1: Invasion Fiction, William Le Queux, and Fake News appeared first on Words To That Effect. Learn more abo...

An Introduction and a Preview.  Welcome to Words To That Effect, a new podcast that tells stories of the fiction that shapes popular culture. This is a short introduction to the podcast, telling you a little bit about the format, the guests, and what you can expect... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices