Words to That Effect

Words To That Effect is back! Words To That Effect Season 4 kicks off next Tuesday, 15th October. In the meantime, you can have a listen to what's in store in the trailer below. See you on the 15th! Listen to all the WTTE episodes on…

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…

What is Fantasy Literature? What do you think of, when you think of the genre of fantasy? Whether it’s fiction, TV, cinema, games, are there certain elements you need to have for something to be considered fantasy? Well, you might say…

The Mysterious Case of Golden Age Detective Fiction 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.…

Note: Part 1 of this double steampunk episode is here One way of thinking about steampunk is to divide it into two parts: the steam and the punk. https://audioboom.com/posts/7240712-wtte-031-steampunk-pt-2-even-greater-london The…

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…

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…

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…

What Happens after the End of the World? 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…

In the 19th century, a very popular form of entertainment was the mummy unwrapping party. 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…