What Mad Universe?!?

Of all the books we've looked at for the podcast, The Shaver Mysteries, by Richard Sharpe Shaver (with an assist by editor Ray Palmer), may be one of the most influential...for all the wrong reasons. A sensation when first published, Shaver's bizarre stories fed into conspiracy theories about flying saucers, ancient civilizations and subterranean terrors that are still with us today. They're also....

Episode Notes Today What Mad Universe?!? takes a trip to Hollywood--and to a movie that never quite existed, Merian C. Cooper's "The War Eagles". A lavish fantasy pulp adventure from the producer and special effects team of "King Kong", this movie almost got made, and might have changed fantasy adventure films forever, but for a quirk of history (well, if you consider World War II a quirk). Eventu...

As we plunge into the history of genre, we're starting to see that the 1920s were a remarkable and important time for fantasy literature, and today's subject, Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, sits right at the crux of this important paradigm shift. This episode sees a wide-ranging discussion about not just the trends in fantasy in the early 20th century but also folklore and mythology more broadl...

EDIT: Sorry about the mix-up! The wrong audio was uploaded this morning. It's been corrected now. In this episode we're hoisting the mizzen mast and swabbing the poop deck to take a look at that staple of adventure stories, the world of piracy--specifically through the lens of Porto Bello Gold, a largely-forgotten pirate novel that happens to be an authorized sequel to the bedrock of pirate fictio...

All things must die...and that includes the planet Earth. In the vastly distant future, under a swollen red sun, mankind still struggles and strives against each other in a world vastly different than ours, yet also alike. The "Dying Earth" subgenre--which is subtly different from the post-apocalyptic genre--has been around for over a century, but the books that give it its name came along in the...

As far as satire goes, there's being of the moment, and there's being way ahead of your time. The short 19th-century comedic SF novel To Venus In Five Seconds ends up parodying a bunch of tropes, from ancient astronauts to technobabble, at a time long before you would have assumed they'd sunk in to pop culture, and on this episode we're diving into it (for longer than five seconds) Adam's Patreon...

Clank Clank, Cheerio, old tops, and welcome to the first of our shows this season delving into the fraught sub-subgenre of steampunk! Anachronism is involved, of course, as this first work officially dubbed "steampunk" is actually a lot later than many other works that were retroactively incorporated into the genre, but it really draws into focus the politics and cultural values that surround it.....

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...

Od's Fish! What Mad Universe?!? welcomes people of the better sort to a fancy episode analyzing the Scarlet Pimpernel, that dashing dandy who saves the wealthy and powerful from the guillotine while looking his best doing it! Have your invite ready and wear your most stylish clothes, or prepare to be jibed mercilessly! Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil'...

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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is powered by Pine...

Say hello once again to the devil you know, on this first What Mad Universe?!? of 2022. Here we're looking at Arthur C. Clarke's book Childhood's End, one of the heavy hitters of post-WWII Sci-Fi and a massive influence on everything going forward. We're also joined by special guest Andrew Hickey of the History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast. Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week...

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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is powered by Pine...

Plug in, log on, and tune out the noise of today's internet as we take a trip back to the early 80s to examine the foundational text of cyberpunk, William Gibson's Neuromancer, with special guest and Gibson expert Costa Koutsoutis! 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...

Well, you knew it was coming, Acolytes of Adventure: the inevitable sixty-ninth episode, which we knew we had to make about something sexy, because we're extremely immature. So immature that we decided to break from our usual format and tackle something that's not only very recent but may barely count as stories at all: the collected works of internet erotic writer and Hugo-nominated author Chuck...

A world...where ape rules man? Well, one ape, anyway. And actually he's more of a Bigfoot. And he becomes the Prime Minister of England. Yes, it's the extremely odd Dwala, by George Calderon, the missing link between political satire and monkey business! 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 Tw...

In a galaxy wracked with crime, only one thing stands between civilization and chaos: a bunch of wise-cracking, genocidal, extremely sexist space cops with magic jewelry! They are the thin shiny line, and they know what's best for the universe, because shut up, they just do. This week we take a look at perhaps the baseline for all post-war space opera, the cheesy but occasionally charming Lensmen...

Happy Halloweeeeeeeeen, attendants of the arcane, and welcome to a spooky new What Mad Universe?!? looking at The Beetle! You know, the smash hit horror novel of 1897? The one that outsold any other fly-by-night horror novels that year, such as (pulls out name at random) "Dracula", by Bram Stoker? Well, the cruel hand of mortality comes for us all, even the most popular stories, I guess!  Support...

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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is powered by Pine...

We're back and madder than ever, acolytes of adventure! Behold our extra-length season three premiere, in which we take a spin across the centuries and around the solar system, checking out stories of exploration from the whimsical satire of Voltaire to the supposedly 'hard' Sci-Fi of Arthur C. Clarke, and in the process look at how science fiction has evolved in parallel with the Enlightenment......

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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is powered by Pine...

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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is powered by Pine...

Support us on Patreon and listen to this special minisode right now! 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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is power...

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) 2021 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators. This podcast is powered by Pine...

Everything comes round again once more, and to everything there is a season...and ours is at an end. For the epic finale of Season Two, we're tackling the seminal 1922 fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros, a tale of epic quests, Shakespearean intrigue, flowery language, and the planet Mercury for some reason. We want to give a big thank you to our listeners and supporters for two great seasons, and he...

As we near the end of the trail for season 2, WMU?!? takes a look away from the fantastical towards another pulp genre: the American western. Emma Ghent Curtis's The Administratrix tells a wild story of 19th century politics, feminism...and eventually, revenge. A cowboy novel written by someone who actually lived in the time and place most western writers have to imagine for themselves, it's a fas...