Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Science Fiction”

Episode 168: Visions of the Wasteland: On George Miller's 'Mad Max' Films

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 01 May 2024 10:30:00 -0400

There are artists who express the vision of a place, person, or thing so vividly and originally that it sets the bar for all future imaginings. With his four Mad Max films, this is what George Miller did with the image of the Wasteland. No one has been able to capture the stark, raw energy and chaotic beauty of a post-apocalyptic desert quite like Miller. His portrayal not only defines the aesthetic of a cinematic world but also prompts us to think about the meaning of civilization, technology, humanity, and how they intertwine. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss how Mad Max challenges our perception of civilization, and our conception of the human.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

George Miller (dir.), Mad Max
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: The Road Warrior
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdrome
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Fury Road
Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), A Clockwork Orange
Sam Raimi (dir), The Quick and the Dead
Joe Bob Briggs, movie critic
Phil Ford, “The Wanderer”
Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Nomadology
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

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.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue.
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 145: Waiting for the Miracle: On Vanessa Onwuemezi's "Dark Neighbourhood"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 11:30:00 -0400

In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Vanessa Onwuemezi's, "Dark Neighbourhood," a tale of scintillant darkness from her debut collection of the same name. This strangest of strange stories is set in a vast encampment of destitute yet hopeful people whose lives consist entirely of waiting for their turn to step through the iron gates of the Beyond. Living off the dregs of civilization, they seem the last of our kind. They are the ones who, having made it to the front of the line, have the dubious honour of contemplating directly the mystery that awaits us all. Unlike anything we've covered on the show, "Dark Neighbourhood" is a chilling and moving story that elicits interpretation as elegantly as it resists it.

Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue drops on May 1st, 2023!

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

Show Notes.docx

Vanessa Omwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood
Peter Breugel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Weird Studies, Episode 140 on “Spirited Away”
Karl Marx, Capital
Phil Ford, Dig
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
Weird Studies, Episode 98 on “Taboo”
Michael Wadleigh (dir.), Woodstock
Samuel R. Delaney, Dahlgren
Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd
One red paperclip, story of guy who traded a paper clip for a house
Weird Studies, Episode 101 on Tanizaki
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
George Steiner, Real Presences
H. P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlothotep”
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, “Sovereignty and the UFO”
Weird Studies, Episode 144 on Hellraiser
Weird Studies, Episode 29 on Lovecraft

Episode 142: The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 10:30:00 -0400

Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of contemporary cinema's greatest score composers when he passed away in 2018 at the young age of 48. Last and First Men, his enigmatic directorial debut, was released shortly after in 2020. Based on a novel by the same name by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton, the film offers a sustained meditation on the prospect of extinction, the eventuality of humanity's disappearance from the comos. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the images and sounds of the film as they flicker and swell against the backdrop of nonbeing that envelops us all. The conversation touches on the idea of beauty, Brutalist architecture, modernism, and futurity.

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

REFERENCES

Jóhann Jóhannsson, Last and First Men
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, SNL character
Spomeniks, Yugoslavian monuments
Olaf Stapleton, The Last and First Men
Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters
The Last of Us, television show
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Speech
Weird Studies Episode 139 on Art Power
Numenius, Platonist philosopher
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Jia Tolentino, “The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa”
Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Episode 127: Leaving the Mechanical Dollhouse: On Abeba Birhane's "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 10:30:00 -0400

Like Caligula declaring war on Neptune and ordering his troops to charge into the Mediterranean Sea, our technological masters are designing neural networks meant to capture the human soul in all its oceanic complexity. According to the cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane, this is a fool's errand that we undertake at our peril. In her paper "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity," she makes the case for the irremediable fluidity, spontaneity, and relationality of people and societies. She argues that ongoing efforts to subsume the human (and the rest of reality) in predictive algorithms is actually narrowing the human experience, as so many of us are excluded from the system while others are compelled to artificially conform to its idea of the human. Far from paving the way to a better world, the tyranny of automation threatens to cut us off from the Real, ensuring an endless perpetuation of the past with all its errors and injustices. Phil and JF discuss Birhane's essay in this episode.

Header image from via www.vpnsrus.com (cropped). Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

Abebe Birhane, "The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity”
J. F. Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on 2001: A Space Odyssey
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
William James, American philosopher
Midjourney, AI art generator
Rhine Research Center, parapsychology lab
George Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives”
Abebe Birhane, “Descartes was Wrong: A Person is a Person Through Other Persons”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher
J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-Stories”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

Episode 119: Behind the Cosmic Curtain: On Stanislaw Lem's 'The New Cosmogony,' with Meredith Michael

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 10:30:00 -0400

Over the last several centuries, there has been one thing on which science and religion have generally agreed, and that is the fixity of the laws under which the universe came to be. At the moment of the Big Bang or the dawn of the First Day, the underlying principles that govern reality were already set, and they have never changed. But what if the laws of nature were not as chiseled in stone as Western intellectuals on both sides of the magisterial divide have assumed them to be? What if creation was an ongoing process, such that our universe in its beginning might have behaved very differently from how it does at present? This is the central conceit of Stanislaw Lem's story "The New Cosmogony," the capstone of his metafictional collection A Perfect Vacuum, originally published in 1971. In this episode, Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss the metaphysical implications of the idea that nature is an eternal work-in-progress.

Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

REFERENCES

For more information JF's new course, Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, visit Nura Learning.

Stanislaw Lem, “A New Cosmogony” in A Perfect Vacuum
Weird Studies, Episode 118 The Unseen and Unnamed
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice
David Pruett, Reason and Wonder
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris
Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”
Andrew W.K., “No One to Know”

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 116: On 'Blade Runner'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:00:00 -0500

In his 1978 bestseller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described humans as "survival machines" whose sole purpose is the replication of genes. All of culture needed to be understood as a side-effect, if not an epiphenomenon, of that defining function. Four years after Dawkins' book was published, Warner Brothers released Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's dystopian novel Do Androis Dream of Electric Sheep?. Ridley Scott's film presents us with a different kind of survival machine: the replicant, a technology whose sole function is the replication of human beings. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic dimensions of one of the greatest and most prophetic science fiction films of all time.

REFERENCES

Ridley Scott (dir.), Blade Runner

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick, “The Android and the Human”
Philip K. Dick, “Man, Android, and Machine”
Dennis Villeneuve (dir.), Blade Runner 2049
Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune
Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner: BFI Film Classics
Alan Nourse, The Bladerunner
Weird Studies, Episode 115 on Brian Eno
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Weird Studies, Episode 5 on “When Nothing is Cool”
JF Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”
John Carpenter (dir,), The Thing
Beyond Yacht Rock podcast
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”
Orson Welles (dir.), Touch of Evil
George Orwell, 1984

Episode 40: On Jonathan Glazer's 'Under the Skin'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 13:00:00 -0500

In Jonathan Glazer's loose screen adaptation of Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin, a creature of mysterious origin drives around Scotland in a white van, collecting lonely men and spiriting them away to an otherworld where they are turned into food.... or something. Drawing on a deep well of literary, visual, and musical tradition, Glazer (with help from his score composer Mica Levi) create a vivid work of tragedy and horror, masterfully executed for maximal weirdness and unwaveringly true to the auteur's intent to reveal our world from an "alien perspective." In this episode, Phil and JF discuss some themes and ideas they've pried from this exquisite tangle of image and sound. Along the way, they discuss the role that serendipity, coincidence, and fate play in both art-making and scholarship.

REFERENCES

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Other films by Glazer: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004)

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Iannis Xenakis, Greek composer
Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch, 2017)
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016)
Screen shot of "Space Invader" Easter egg in Under the Skin
Weird Studies Episode 37: Entities, with Stuart Davis
John August, American screenwriter
Phil Ford, "The Devil's On Your Side: A Meditation on the Perennially Disreputable Business of Hermeneutics" (unpublished)
Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2013)
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
Interview with Mica Levi, who composed the score for Under the Skin
Atar Arad, American violist
David Caspar Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog