Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Fantasy”

Episode 187: The Affirmation of Imagination: On John Crowley's 'Little, Big,' with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 10:30:00 -0400

John Crowley’s Little, Big is, at once, a family saga, a fairy tale, an occult thriller, an idyll, a dystopia, as well as a meditation on myth and history, the real and the fantasy, memory and imagination. Little, Big is also a book that JF and Phil have been planning to discuss for as long as Weird Studies has existed. In this episode, they are joined by writer and scholar Erik Davis to explore the enduring charms and mysteries of one of the greatest—and most underrated—American novels of the late twentieth century.

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REFERENCES

John Crowley, Little, Big
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Eric Davis, interview with Neil Gaiman and Rachel Pollack
David Lynch (dir.), Lost Highway
America, “The Last Unicorn”
John Cooper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance
J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality
Lord Dunsany, Irish novelist
Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 23:00:00 -0400

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is without a doubt one of the weirdest entries in the annals of weird fiction. Set in the earth's distant future, after the sun has gone out and the planet has been cleaved in two by an unspecified disaster, a telepathic scientist dons his armour and weapons to brave the monster-haunted yet strangely monotonous wastes that engirdle the massive pyramid in which the last humans took refuge, hundreds of thousands of years earlier. If Samuel Beckett tripped hard on ayahuasca, he might have come up with something like Hodgson's genre-defying novel, which reads more like a report to committee of 17th-century heretics than a piece of speculative fiction from the early twentieth century.

MIT Press recently released a (blessedly) abridged edition of The Night Land as part of their Radium Series. Journalist, scholar, and lecturer Erik Davis, who penned a brilliant foreword for the new edition, was kind enough to join Phil and JF to discuss this underrated masterpiece.

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Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

SHOW NOTES

William Hope Hodgeson, The Night Land
Weird Studies, Episode 37 with Stuart Davis
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
William Hope Hodgeson, House on the Borderland
Samuel Beckett, Molloy
Sumptuary Laws
Arcosanti, arcology
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men
Pierre Schaeffer, “Traité des objets musicaux”
Schitzophonia
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine Special Guest: Erik Davis.

Episode 118: The Unseen and the Unnamed, with Meredith Michael

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 11:30:00 -0400

In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by music scholar and Weird Studies assistant Meredith Michael to discuss two strange and unsettling short stories: J.G. Ballard's "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" (1964) and Ursula K. Le Guin's "She Unnames Them" (1985). Their plan was to talk about three stories, but they never got to Phil's pick, which will be the focus of episode 119. The reason is that Le Guin and Ballard's stories share surprising resonances that merited close discussion. From opposite perspectives, both tales put words to a region of reality that resists discursive description, a borderland where that which is named reveals its unnamed facet, and that which must remain unseen reveals itself to the inner eye.

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REFERENCES

J. G. Ballard, “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon,” from The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
Ursula K. Le Guin, "She Unnames Them," from The Real and the Uneal
Alfred Hitchcock (dir.), The Birds
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
Ursula K. Le Guin, “She Unnames Them” in The Real and the Unreal
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
M. C .Richards, Centering
Weird Studies, Episode 35 on Centering
Weird Studies, Episode 81 on The Course of the Heart
Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress
Linguistically deprived children
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's thoughts on on imagination and fancy can be found in Biographia Literaria Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 111: What Is Best in Life: On "Conan the Barbarian"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 11:15:00 -0500

A wish-fulfilment fantasy for pubescent boys of all ages, or a subtle disquisition on the ethics of a sorcerous world? John Milius' Conan the Barbarian (1982) manages to be both, although one may be easy to overlook. In this episode, JF and Phil leave the heights of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game with a headlong dive to the trash stratum. Their wager: that Conan the Barbarian, a film without a hint of irony, is a spiritual statement that is equal parts empowering and disquieting, and a prime of example of how fantasy is sometimes the straightest way to the heart of reality.

REFERENCES

John Milus (dir.), Conan the Barbarian (1982)
Richard Fleischer (dir.), Conan the Destroyer (1984)
Robert E. Howard, American writer, author of the Conan stories
Jack Smith, "On the Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Weird Studies #3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Fritz Leiber, American writer
Weird Studies #95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child
Dungeons & Dragons
Weird Studies #20: The Trash Stratum (part 1, part 2)
Masaki Kobayashi (dir.), Kwaidan
Jerry Zucker (dir.), Ghost (1990)
Roget's Thesarus of English Words and Phrases
Maria Montez, Dominican-American actress

Episode 64: Dreams and Shadows: On Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 10:30:00 -0500

In her National Book Award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin intimated that, far from being superseded by digital technology, fantastic fiction has never been more important than it is about to become. Soon, she prophesied, "we will need writers who can remember freedom -- poets, visionaries, realists of a larger reality." In this episode, Phil and JF plumb the prophetic depths of one of her most famous books, A Wizard of Earthsea. A discussion of the novel's style and lore leads us into the politics and metaphysics of fantasy as developed by Le Guin and her predecessor, J. R. R. Tolkien. In the end, we realize that fantasy is not the literary ghetto it's been made out to be, but the sine qua non of all fiction.

SHOW NOTES

John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Heidegger, "On the Origin of the Work of Art"
Beowulf, An Anglo-Saxon epic poem
Weird Studies, episode 41 -- On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin
Weird Studies, episode 61 -- Evil and Ecstasy: On 'The Silence of the Lambs'
Weird Studies, episode 62: Like 'The Shining,' But With Nuns: On 'Black Narcissus'
The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes (translated by J.F.'s mentor, David Staines)
Sir Thomas Malory, La Morte d'Arthur
Lewis Carroll, British fantasist
Ursula K. Le Guin's acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, 2014
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature

Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 10:30:00 -0500

Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror. The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous [Teeming Brain](www.teemingbrain.com), wrote a chapter for the book focusing on the books and films of the Sixties and Seventies. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil to discuss the kinship of horror and fantasy, the modern ghettoization of mythopoeic art, the prophetic reach of speculative fiction, and the "cauldron of cultural transformation" that was the Sixties and Seventies.

Header Image by Moralist, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror
Matt Cardin's website
The Teeming Brain

American literary critic S. T. Joshi
British writer and scholar Roger Luckhurst
Neil Gaiman, introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death
The concept of "folk psychology"
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
James Curcio, Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice (forthcoming)
American author Thomas Ligotti
British author Arthur Machen
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Ian McEwen, Enduring Love
Weird Studies, Episode 36: On Hyperstition
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara
Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
The Lord of the Rings animated film (Ralph Bakshi, 1978)
Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game (Chaosium)
Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978)
William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History
Interview with Twilight Zone luminary George Clayton Johnson
The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)
The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976)
Stephen King, Salem's Lot
Special Guest: Matt Cardin.

Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 10:00:00 -0400

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy.

Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons)

WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game

Critical Role web series

Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast

Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (documentary)

Chessboxing!

Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America

Peter Fischli, The Way Things Go

Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom

Lawrence Schick, ed., Deities & Demigods: Cyclopedia of Gods and Heroes from Myth and Legend

Article on Mazes and Monsters, a movie that came out of the D&D moral panic of the 1980s

Phil Ford, “Xenorationality”

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture

John Sinclair, [Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party](https://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Army-Revolution-White-Panther/dp/1934170003)