Season 1 2017 - 2018

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein launched the entire genre of science fiction. What made it unique? What did Shelley create, and how did her view of the possibilities of science shape the way we imagine our world even today?

Industrialization and the Age of Reason benefitted society in many ways, but also created an atmosphere of dehumanizing mass production. The Romantic literary movement rose up to assert the value of emotion in a modern world, and praised science as a marvel whose discoveries bounded on magic made real.

Frankenstein's monster discovered three books that shaped his understanding of the world, including the Sorrows of Young Werther. Werther's unrequited love for a woman eventually leads him to commit suicide. Frankenstein's monster wants to experience love as well, but Mary Shelley has her own critique of this idea of love.

Mary Shelley drew heavily from the style of biography first pioneered by Plutarch, creating characters like Victor Frankenstein and the monster whose lives parallel each other, but whose differing circumstances lead them to embody very different values.

Paradise Lost told the story of Satan, a creation who rejected his creator just like Frankenstein's monster did. But even Satan had a loving creator, beauty, and friends. The monster had nothing, and his life in Mary Shelley's eyes was not a horror story, but a tragedy.

What draws us to Frankenstein, and to sci fi as a whole? As the novel wraps up and our time with its characters draws to an end, Mary Shelley lays out the final theme which shaped the identity of science fiction as a genre: radical alienation and the search for a place to belong.

After Star Wars, the science fiction genre suddenly became a pop culture darling, and a flood of schlocky imitations followed. William Gibson led the charge to reclaim space in the genre for his concept of future history - one that, in turn, eventually launched cyberpunk.

Ways that we dream about the world sometimes create a shared vision that we start to believe is real. When William Gibson first explored these "semiotic ghosts" of a pristine American future in the Gernsback Continuum, he showed how these visions of modern technology can separate us from our own reality and the personal meaning our world should hold for us.

Would you give up what made you unique in order to fit in everywhere? This is the question posed by William Gibson's short story, The Belonging Kind, where an awkward professor finds himself drawn into the mystery of a young woman who seems like a perfect fit everywhere she goes.

The Canals of Mars ignited so many imaginations, especially in science fiction stories, but they never really existed. What made us believe in them? And why did so many writers keep dreaming about them even after the theory had been disproved?

We're diving into Ray Bradbury's short stories about life on Mars--and how that life reacts when it encounters human life, and what their reaction says about American society in the Cold War era.

The second half of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles can be described as "the human cycle"--a reflection on humanity's seemingly insatiable need to conquer and consume every last bit of our own culture.

Ray Bradbury's last Martian story, "The Million Year Picnic," offers a much more optimistic look at humanity. We have proven ourselves very capable destroyers, but we also have the capacity to improve and learn from our mistakes.

Let's start our journey to the center of hard science fiction: the works of Jules Verne, who imagined the technological wonders humanity could--and would--create in the twentieth century.

H.G. Wells brought his socialist perspective to science fiction, creating great works that really ask us to look at where the human condition will take us hundreds of years from now.

The turn of the 20th century brought a lot of new ideas and inventions to the world. Suddenly, nature's laws were not quite what they seemed. Thus, many folks drifted into explorations of the occult, which directly influenced 19th and 20th century science fiction.

This week, we explore the obscure authors from the turn of the 20th century whose weird and wacky stories impacted our modern-day sci fi consciousness and inspired works from authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett.

We're gonna dive into the TRULY wacky and wild stories of early science fiction, including a Czech play that invented the word "robot."

Dunsany is arguably the "father of fantasy," bringing to life the classic worldbuilding tropes that inspired so many authors, from H.P. Lovecraft to Ursula K. Le Guin. But his short stories and novels have sadly fallen out of memory...

Sci fi "pulp" stories sometimes have a reputation for being cheesy and over-dramatic, but they were extremely important for building up the sci fi genre as something anyone could write for AND get paid for--not just famous authors.

Weird Tales was a pulp magazine that started out as a collection of detective stories before getting taken over by writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, whose fantastic tales instilled both good and bad tropes that we still see in modern sci fi.

Many sci fi writers, especially in the United States, had backgrounds in reading and writing detective stories. They introduced to the sci-fi genre the action hero--no longer just scientific or philosophical protagonists.

Writer-turned-famous-editor of Astounding Stories, John W. Campbell helped usher in the golden age of science fiction, driven by a new authorial understanding of real science and real psychology.