Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Abominable Snowman. Yeti. The Yowie, the Yeren, the Almas  Ape-men, cave men, wild men.  The Missing Link. The idea of the missing link came about in the mid-19th century, with the rise of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In 1859 Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and it was radical, revolutionary, and highly contentious.  The problem, though, was that the mechanism by which it all worked wasn’t really understood yet,...

Mills and Boon to bodice rippers , Johanna Lindsey to Nora Robers (and a little bit of Fabio) Why read romance novels? 

Time travel fiction is a small subgenre of science fiction. Science fiction is a small subset of all the many genres and types of literature. Time machines and time travellers are a niche interest. And yet, in many ways, all fiction is time travel fiction...

Edgar Rice Burroughs is no longer a familiar name. Like many other authors, the fame of his greatest creation, in his case Tarzan, has long eclipsed his own.  But Burroughs was far more than the creator of Tarzan.  He was an early pioneer of science fiction, a master of the pulp fiction magazines of the early 20th century, an author whose books, across his lifetime and beyond, sold tens of millions of copies. He was also, among a bewildering array of other things, a journalist, a soldier and...

Once upon a time there was an English publisher named John Newbery.  And he changed the history of children's books forever...

What is it that attracts us to pirates and why have we got such a well-developed set of pirate tropes? We all see and hear the same images and sounds when we think of pirates: peg legs and eyepatches, parrots and pirate accents, walking the plank, buried treasure, the jolly roger...

There is no pop culture monster more written about, more critiqued and analysed, more portrayed and adapted and reimagined, than the vampire.  So this episode is not about most vampires. There are no discussions of Dracula or Nosferatu, no True Blood or Twilight or Buffy, no Anne Rice or Stephen King, no Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee.   Instead, there is a single vampire, one you may well never have heard of. A vampire that, in Victorian times, was far more popular than even Charles Dickens...

For most people today, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been reduced to a fairly straightforward allegory of the potential dark side within us all.  But if you read Robert Louis Stevenson’s original tale, a short 80-odd page novella, you immediately realise there is so much to this masterpiece of 19th century fiction. There are so many reasons the story has become embedded in popular culture. It has everything: dreams and reality, psychology and medicine, good and evil, degeneracy and...

Season 4 returns on Tuesday 15th October. Have a listen to what's in store!

There are the celebrated authors: Checkov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro. There are the big questions: “What makes a truly great short story?” “Where does the form originate?” “What can short stories do that other forms of literature can’t?” But before any of this, there’s a question that’s not that easy to answer at all: What is a short story? This week I’m joined by Dr Paul March-Russell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, and author of The Short Story: An Introduction...

What do you think of, when you think of the genre of fantasy? Whether it’s fiction, TV, cinema, or games, are there certain elements you need to have for something to be considered fantasy? Well, you might say fantasy is medieval, or at least set in a time of swords and sorcery. Or that fantasy has to be epic in scale; there are always grand and noble characters.  Or maybe fantasy has to be set in an imaginary world. Or, at the very least, there should be some magic. But, as I...

An English country estate. A detective pacing the room, explaining how they have solved the crime, revealing the solution to a puzzle and the clues which were there all along. It’s so easy to parody this scene because it’s so familiar. It’s Reverend Green in the billiard room with the candlestick. It’s a shocking murder in a cosy English village or the country estate of a well-off family…where everyone is as suspect. It’s the locked room mystery, where the puzzle is always the centre of the...

One way of thinking about steampunk is to divide it into two parts – the steam and the punk. The steam is the Victorian element: the fascination and engagement with the 19th century – whether satirizing or poking fun at Victorian conventions and ideas, dealing with problematic aspects of empire and colonialism, celebrating the people and places, or utterly rethinking the science and technology of the era. The punk, on the other hand, is very much about building collaborative communities...

Note: This episode is Part 1 of a double episode on steampunk. There are cultures, and subcultures, and sub, sub, sub cultures. There’s science fiction, there’s alternative history, there’s steampunk. There’s hip hop and there’s chaphop. There’s an anachronistic Victorian gentleman wearing a pith helmet with an orangutan butler, dissing a fellow chaphop artist for parodying, rather than engaging with, the genre. What, you may quite reasonably ask, is going on? Well, over this...

We have no problem thinking mathematically about four-dimensional space. Where a 3-d cube has 8 vertices, a 4-d hypercube has 16 vertices. Where a cube has 6 faces, like a dice, a 4-d hypercube has 24 faces. The problem is imagining what that actually looks like. We live in a three-dimensional world. We can’t see a fourth dimension. We simply can’t imagine what a 4-D world would look like. However, that doesn’t mean that lots and lots of people haven’t tried to, in a huge variety of...

If you want to understand how we ended up with anything from Star Wars to Star Trek, Superman to Batman, intergalactic travel to microscopic worlds, profound meditations on the nature of being human to thrilling tales about Martian princesses, you have to look at pulp fiction. Argosy, Blue Book, Adventure, Black Mask, Horror Stories, Flying Aces…there was a lot of it. The 1920s and 30s was the age of pulp fiction, the time when genres truly became genres. Science fiction, detective...

What would happen if humanity ceased to exist? Well, assuming, of course, that earth itself has not been destroyed in this hypothetical apocalypse, the world would continue quite happily without us. People have long speculated about what would happen in the weeks, months, and years after the end of humanity. There is an obvious perverse pleasure in seeing the world we have destroyed, and continue to destroy, getting its revenge. There’s a misanthropy in this type of speculation, what’s...

In the 19th century, a very popular form of entertainment was the mummy unwrapping party. Yes, you could go to a private or public event at which an ancient Egyptian mummy would be unrolled and examined. Bandages would be passed around, touched and smelled, ancient jewellery would be admired, and a the dead body of an Egyptian would be revealed at the end. So, how did this bizarre and macabre spectacle come to be? Where did the Victorians get all these mummies? Were they all comfortable with...

1n 1842 a Victorian anatomist looked at some unusual fossils and, noticing they had something in common, he decided we needed a word to describe these strange creatures. He called them dinosaurs. Cut to the present day and there are dinosaur films, TV shows, books, songs, toys, and anything else you can possibly think of. Dinosaurs are beloved by children across the world, they form the centrepieces of internationally renowned museums, and there is nobody who doesn’t have an idea of what a...

Words To That Effect is back! Season 3 kicks off next Monday, Jan 14th. In the meantime, have a listen to a preview of what's in store for the season. The music heard in this episode was "Polydrug" by Forrests. You can check out their music [here](https://forrests.bandcamp.com/) Words To That Effect is a member of the Headstuff Podcast Network. You can listen to previous episodes, and lots of other great podcasts [here](https://www.headstuff.org/words-to-that-effect/).

Words To That Effect is back! Episode 24 is a recording of September's live show for the Dublin Podcast Festival. This episode is a story about a long-forgotten nervous disease. But it’s also a story of science and culture, psychology and mental health, feminism and creativity, war and masculinity. It's about ghost stories, science fiction and cowboy novels... Featuring live music composed and performed by Ken McCabe.

The book is always better than the film. Or so they say. But there are obviously quite a few problems with this, as there tends to be with any sweeping generalisation. For some, the book is always better than the film, because books are just better than films, which is something I would mostly agree with. Fiction creates and draws us into a world entirely inside our own imagination. At its best, fiction is far more immersive and engaging than a film can ever be. But, of course, there...

No episode this week unfortunately, but I do have two exciting announcements. Have a listen and find out! More at wttepodcast.com

The Rick O'Shea Bookclub is Ireland's largest bookclub. It has 17,000 members and is growing fast. Book clubs have never been more popular. But where did they begin, and what role have they played in literary history? Quite a large role, it turns out: culturally, politically, and commercially. In this episode I talk to Rick O'Shea about the success of his bookclub, and to Prof DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Dr Amy Prendergast, two experts in the history of books clubs and reading groups. More...

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 11.04 and, when it arrives, passengers will be clear as what time it is at their destination ...