What Mad Universe?!?

Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen and various configurations thereof, to see the spectacular show that is The Circus of Dr. Lao! It's the subject of the latest What Mad Universe?!? and its influenced everyone from Ray Bradbury to Roald Dahl. Dare you enter the tent of mystery and witness the wonders within? Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Adam's Patreon Phil's Patre...

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 very creepy evening to you all, my children, and welcome to the creepy castle for another installment of What Mad Universe?!? This time we're looking at The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, the originator of the gothic novel and, thus, most of the enduring horror and supernatural tropes of the last 250 years. Grab a candlabra, descend the spiral staircase to the cellar, and don't mind the da...

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 .

Ten-Hut, about face, and other such military jazz! This latest episode of What Mad Universe?!? takes a martial bent as we delve into the seminal SF novel Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, loved and loathed in equal measure and a major political flashpoint as well as a key intersection point for post-WWII SF. Also they made a movie you might have heard of. Guest Andrew Hickey helps us find a...

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 once again to take a look at spinoff novelizations, and this time we're joined by Trekspert Dylan Roth to look at the era before the movies, before the Next Generation, when Star Trek was a ragtag multimedia conglomeration held together by fan obsession. The franchise took all kinds of strange and non-canonical turns in those dark days, and one of the biggest ones was The Final Reflectio...

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 .

Are we living at the end of history? Not according to Olaf Stapledon, who conceived of 2 billion years of future history to come in his book Last and First Men. When we talk about the sweeping sprawl of all that could yet be, this is what we're talking about! 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...

We're all bugging out a bit as the quarantine stretches on, so here's a Kafkaesque new What Mad Universe on Spiridon The Mute, an obscure, bizarre story by a "protege" (it's complicated) of Jules Verne. If you've ever wondered if a giant ant could become a successful surgeon, now's your chance to find out! Also, why were you wondering that. Are you ill. Support us on Patreon and listen to the show...

This week's What Mad Universe?!? is so bizarre it BROKE REALITY ITSELF!!! (As in, it wasn't ready early for Patreon subscribers. Subscribe at the links below, though, and you'll hear the complete and unexpurgated full-length version of the show, the one the Nova Mob doesn't want you to hear!) At any rate, this week we tackle a subject that I've been dying to delve into for a while but that I knew...

Because the internet is clearly starved for more Star Wars content (#starwars), this latest chapter of What Mad Universe is about Star Wars! It's the center of the pop cultural solar system, but orbiting around the red giant that is the movies are dozens of tie-in novels, comics, video games, TV shows and all kinds of other spinoffs. Some of these have managed to make their own dent in the popular...

It's a space western! It's a cosmic horror tale! It's a combination space western/cosmic horror tale! The Northwest Smith series by C. L. Moore, one of American pulp's most prominent female authors, is almost too many genres combined into one, and that's BEFORE the fantasy swordmaiden shows up for a crossover! Somehow, though, it works, and we'll delve into them in this installment. Support us on...

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 .

In this newest episode of WMU?!? we take a look at one of Philip's Bete Noirs (literally), a series of French pulp novels from before WWI about adventurer-hero Leo St. Clair, the Nyctalope, and his Sci-Fi adventures. Written with all the care and elegance of a 7th grader with an essay due the next morning, these stories nevertheless reflect a lot of the classic pulp tropes and may even be a stage...

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 .

Let's go back, back, to a time when giants walked the Earth...probably doing something filthy. In this episode of What Mad Universe?!? we look at the oldest story yet to be featured on this podcast, a classic of literature contemporary with Don Quixote and Shakespeare, Francois Rabelais' novels about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. Lots and LOTS of urination jokes follow. The French, they're...

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 .

The news is weird and harsh these days, so why not escape with us to the enchanted land of Poictesme, setting for works of James Branch Cabell's satirical fantasy Jurgen. Though almost forgotten these days, Cabell was very popular for a while in the 1920s, causing a minor scandal with his "indecent" prose, and his work shows that fantasy took very different forms before the likes of J. R. R. Tolki...

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 new era begins, with a new season of What Mad Universe?!? To kick this year's offerings off, we take a look at one of the foundational (ha ha) texts of science fiction, Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Empires will fall, mutants will rise, and psychology will be reduced to mathematical functions, somehow... Support us on Patreon and listen to the show a week early! Phil's Patreon Adam's Patreo...

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 new season of What Mad Universe?!? is on its way March 9th. We take a quick overview of some of the books we're planning to look at, from Rabelais to Burroughs to Star Trek spinoffs. It's a whole gamut! 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 Unive...

What Mad Universe?!? brings season one to a close with this extra-special episode about Richard Bachman, the pen name of the slightly more famous Stephen King. Strange to think of this horror maestro as having an even darker side, but it's on full display in these early stories, collectively known as the Bachman Books, in which placid suburbanites turn violent and the citizens of future dystopia t...

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