What Mad Universe?!?

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...

The more things change, the more they stay the same...unless you've been genetically altered by aliens, I guess. In this episode we look at the Xenogenesis trilogy, better known these days as Lilith's Brood, by Octavia E. Butler, and gain a unique perspective on colonialism, consent and disability. Or maybe it's just the classiest Hentai ever written.  Support us on Patreon and listen to the show...

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...

Attention, sinners, the lord's justice is upon you today in the form of the dour puritan adventurer, Solomon Kane. Created by Robert E. Howard of Conan and Kull fame, Kane sails the seas and plunges deep into the jungle in his wanderings, sometimes guided by curiosity, sometimes by vengeance. Warning: we talk about racism a LOT in this one... Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week ear...

Back in our day, kids didn't sit around playing video games and doing the Fortnite dance. They were all genius inventors who were constantly creating astounding, world-changing inventions and heading off to have extremely racist adventures in the various wild frontiers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries! Yes, all of them! We know because of the genre collectively called the Edisonade, of wh...

Sharpen your dueling rapier and grab hold of that chandelier, acolytes of adventure, for today What Mad Universe?!? takes a look at the original swashbuckling tale of romance, palace intrigue, and mistaken identities, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope! While not widely known today, this book had a major impact on pop culture in the first half of the 20th century, in ways that are still popping...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's Twitter Phil'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 This podcast is powered by Pinecast .

A spooooky new What Mad Universe?!? awaits for skeptics and believers alike, as we explore the stories of Carnacki the Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson. Carnacki is the rare sleuth who both debunks frauds and tangles with genuine supernatural menaces, making him a unique fulcrum to examine the sub-subgenre of late 19th and early 20th century occult detectives. Warning: in this podcast you will...

Look! Up in the Sky! It's the latest in our series of bonus-length What Mad Universe?!? episodes about franchise tie-ins! This time we take a look at the Man of Steel himself, Superman, and the novel Miracle Monday by Elliot S! Maggin, published in the wake of the Christopher Reeve movie. Despite these inauspicious origins, the book turned out to be really good, and we're joined by pal, comics cri...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's Twitter Phil'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 This podcast is powered by Pinecast .

Hey kids, do you like fantasy stories written by a woman about a kid going to wizard school? Forget the imitators, and join us as we take a look at Ursula K. Le Guin's seminal fantasy series, A Wizard of Earthsea, and the shape of post-Tolkien fantasy in the 20th century! Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's Twitter Phil'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 This podcast is powered by Pinecast .

It's time to talk about the original Angry Man of science fiction, Harlan Ellison: editor, critic, author of hundreds of stories, comics, and screenplays, strong-willed defender of justice, and raving jerk. We're joined by pal James Reilly-English to discuss his seminal novella A Boy And His Dog, along with much of his other work, and, unavoidably, the domineering personality that is Ellison himse...

Once upon a midnight dreary, the fabled titan of American literature Edgar Allen Poe published his first and only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Despite its rough and awkward plotting and lack of an ending, this novel captured the imaginations of horror and SF writers for generations to come, and still casts a long shadow over speculative fiction...and its soul from out that shadow sha...

Sorry about the delay, but WMU?!? is back for 2021 with another installment in our series looking at spinoff books from SF franchises, and this time up it's Doctor Who! Appropriately for a series that's all about finding new variations on its main character, the foundational British SF show came in a lot of different, mutually contradictory iterations during the years after its cancellation in 198...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's Twitter Phil'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 This podcast is powered by Pinecast .

Gather round, children, and hearken to the tale of a talking flea, battling philosophers, and ambulatory thistles, all dictated by a man dying of syphilis! It's our Christmas episode! Ring out 2020 the way it deserves with the year's final WMU?!? episode, and here's hoping for better times to come... Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreon What Mad...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's Twitter Phil'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 This podcast is powered by Pinecast .

To reward you for our brief absence, the latest episode of What Mad Universe?!? features both of Adam and Philip's lovely singing voices! It's natural for an episode that ties into Gilbert and Sullivan, which The Innominato, or, The Wizard of the Mountain, certainly does--it was written by W. S. Gilbert's father. A selection of whimsical fables about a sorceror and his dabbling in mortal affairs,...

Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreon What Mad Universe?!? on Twitter Adam's Twitter Phil'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 This podcast is powered by Pinecast .

We've already taken a few trips to the red planet here on What Mad Universe?!? and we find it a different place every time. Now we get a particularly multifaceted look at Mars as we delve into the seminal SF classic The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Is it a novel? A short story collection? Or both? Life on Mars seems to be different things to different people... Support us on Patreon and li...

As we lurch towards Halloween here at What Mad Universe?!?, we descend into the vaults to examine a historical mystery: the 1901 novel Powers of Darkness, which just so happens to be the Icelandic translation of Dracula. Except it isn't. In 2014 it was discovered that this book was in fact significantly different from the English text, adding subplots and characters and even a new, intriguing moti...

We've talked a lot about Frankenstein already here on What Mad Universe?!?--not surprising, as by some lights it's the first SF novel. One of those lights was Brian Aldiss, British New Wave SF writer, who decided to write an elaborate bit of self-insert fanfic involving time-traveling to meet Mary Shelley and do battle with the monster at the end of the universe. It's also set in 2020 as all reali...

We're edging into spooky season, acolytes of adventure, so now begins a run of installments looking at the weird and chilling (and obscure, in every sense of the word)! This week it's the awkwardly translated duology (really, one book that was bafflingly published in two installments) The Bloody Doll and A Machine To Kill, by Gaston Leroux, the author of The Phantom of the Opera. A wind up mechani...

In this episode we're joined once again by Andrew hickey to take a look at A Canticle For Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr., one the seminal post-nuclear apocalypse epics and a deep dive into the big questions of faith vs. science. It's been the subject of a lot of discussion so I hope we can provide some new insight. But if not, it's not the end of the world... Support us on Patreon and listen to th...