What Mad Universe?!?

Greetings, comrades, and glory to the utopian future glimpsed in our scientifically perfected podcast! Today we tighten our focus onto a subject we've touched on a few times: communism, that spectre that's been haunting Science Fiction almost since the beginning, and the way it intersects with the real-world Soviet Union, in the form of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty. It's an alternate-reality stor...

Here on What Mad Universe?!? we like to examine a subject from all angles, but this week we might be accused of flattening a complex topic. We're looking at Flatland, a 19th century oddity that's resonated with nerds for over a century with its consideration of some big ideas implied by math and science. Try not to damage your brain too badly! Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week ea...

Season Four is here, acolytes of Adventure! We start things off with an epic saga of an episode on the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, featuring special guest star Andre Gordon. It's a sweeping four-book space opera about quests, artificial intelligence, time travel, god and iconic robots with a lot of pointy bits, and appropriately enough it's a special bonus-length edition! Support us on Patreon...

This final episode was available to our Patreon sponsors last year, we've now made it available to everyone! We look at the origins of Red Sonja (or Sonya), a character who was created by Robert E. Howard...or was she? It's a little more complicated than that, as it turns out! Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter P...

We're still on hiatus until May, but we're going to be making these minisodes we made as Patreon bonus content available one at a time until then! Enjoy! Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's Twitter What Mad Universe on Facebook What Mad Universe on Instagram What Mad Universe RSS Feed Enginee...

We're still on hiatus until May, but we're going to be making these minisodes we made as Patreon bonus content available one at a time until then! Enjoy! Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's Twitter What Mad Universe on Facebook What Mad Universe on Instagram What Mad Universe RSS Feed Enginee...

And so the season of What Mad Universe?!? comes to a close...the storm rages outside, the suspects have been brought together in the parlor, and we prepare to name the killer. Was it...our special guest Ing?!? Probably not, but he'll join us for a wide ranging conversation about Edogawa Rampo's novel The Black Lizard, starring the Japanese Sherlock Holmes, Akechi Kogoro, and Japanese pop culture a...

War. War never changes. Everything else changes, though, especially when the war is being waged across millions of light-years, and, thanks to the relativistic effects of near-lightspeed travel, you're aging only a year or so while the rest of the galaxy jumps forward by centuries. This existential conundrum is pursued in The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman, one of the pillars of military Sci-Fi and...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's Twitter What Mad Universe on Facebook What Mad Universe on Instagram What Mad Universe RSS Feed Engineer/Producer: Alex Ross Theme song by Jack Feerick (c) 2022 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. Used under a Creative Commons N...

Episode Notes Notes go here A slayer...a reaver...Dark haired...sullen eyed...gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth...hey, who are we talking about here? Not who you're thinking of! It's Imaro, by Charles Saunders, a response from an African-American writer to the works of fantasy writers like Robert E Howard. Saunders loved the brutal action and fantasy of REH and hated the unvarnished racism...

A deteriorating, violent world struck by a pandemic...humanity isolated from each other and unable to form social bonds...a rogue government agency accruing power to oppress the citizenry...but enough about current events! Ha ha! The latest episode of What Mad Universe?!? looks at Margaret St. Clair's The Sign of the Labrys, a genuinely strange but highly prescient and influential book about post-...

Radio! It's the most high-tech of high-tech gadgets, the wave of the future, the word on everyone's lips! At least it was in 1924, when it provided just the gimmick for a series of planetary romances by a polymath scientist and politician writing under the name Ralph Milne Farley. Radio can do EVERYTHING in these books, starting with transporting a hero to Venus for swashbuckling science-adventure...

What Mad Universe?!? has been suffering some setbacks behind the scenes lately, brethren. Is it just bad luck, or could it be...Satan?!? Given that our latest episode tackles a staple of supernatural Christian fiction, all about the secret spiritual war between angels and demons going on all around us, maybe there are POWERFUL FORCES that don't want you to hear it. Or maybe that's just paranoid de...

Apologies for being away--Adam suffered a personal loss and then got hit by Covid. Clearly, this is the episode the universe doesn't want you to hear. But maybe another universe does? We'll find out when we look at Michael Moorcock's alternate-universe trilogy about the reality-displaced Oswald Bastable. These books are an even earlier bedrock of the steampunk genre, even if that wasn't the word t...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's Twitter What Mad Universe on Facebook What Mad Universe on Instagram What Mad Universe RSS Feed Engineer/Producer: Alex Ross Theme song by Jack Feerick (c) 2022 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. Used under a Creative Commons N...

In times of trouble, a podcast arises, reborn: that's us, and we're here to talk about K. W. Jeter's very odd novel Morlock Night, which really does have a claim to being the first novel to use the Steampunk moniker (but not necessarily the first Steampunk novel--it's complicated).  Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twi...

Gird your loins, acolytes of adventure, for a new What Mad Universe?!? that explores the origins of the classic fiery sword-maiden of pulp fame. C. L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry might be the first example of the trope...but as ever, it's a bit complicated. Fear not, we'll hash it out!  You might also want to check out this bonus minisode we did on a similar topic, referenced in this episode: https://w...

It's new! It's improved! It's the latest sensation! 4 out of 5 dentists agree, What Mad Universe?!? is the podcast that puts spring in your step, makes your whites whiter, and firms, lifts and separates! Our latest episode features guest Andre Gordon as we talk about UBIK, by Philip K. Dick, and try to figure out if it's about god, reality, or product placement, or possibly all three. Support us o...

Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's Twitter What Mad Universe on Facebook What Mad Universe on Instagram What Mad Universe RSS Feed Engineer/Producer: Alex Ross Theme song by Jack Feerick (c) 2022 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. Used under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution 3.0 International License. This p...

Our newest episode looks at The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope, a 19th century work of SF by a writer who's not known for SF. It posits a future society where, once someone has gotten too old to be productive, they're shipped off to a farm upstate, where they can relax and enjoy their leisure time. For one year. Then they're executed. What a crazy concept! Fortunately here in the real world we w...

Continuing our look at the origins of Steampunk, a genre that proves to be a lot harder to nail down than you might suspect, we move on to Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates. This is a  historical fantasy, not SF, and it's technically not set in the Victorian era either. So why is it a pivotal steampunk novel? Well... Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patre...

What Mad Universe?!? takes another trip to the backwoods, and the writings of Robert E. Howard, with a look at the Breckenridge Elkins stories, a series of comical tales about a Hillbilly Hercules and the misadventures his lack of a brain stumbles him into. Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's...

After being delayed by a week (sorry), What Mad Universe?!? re-enters the elusive faerie realms for another link in the chain between classical and modern fantasy. This time it's George MacDonald's Phantastes, a book that inspired a great deal of twentieth century fantasy, and inspires a winding discussion of theology and the evolution of the fantastical in literature. Support us on Patreon and li...

Apologies. Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Phil's Twitter Adam's Twitter What Mad Universe on Facebook What Mad Universe on Instagram What Mad Universe RSS Feed Engineer/Producer: Alex Ross Theme song by Jack Feerick (c) 2022 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. Used under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution 3.0 International Lice...

As long as there have been superheroes, people have been making fun of them, but the deconstructionist satires of superheroes really kicked into gear in the 80s. A precursor to stuff like Watchmen and Squadron Supreme, though, wasn't a comic at all--it was a novel, SUPERFOLKS! by Robert Mayer. In riffing on superheroes and their place in pop culture in the alienated post-Watergate US, it was a wei...