PODCAST · arts
Words To That Effect
by Conor Reid
Words To That Effect: Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture. WTTE is a narrative storytelling show, hosted and produced by Conor Reid, that explores the intriguing places where fiction, history, science, and popular culture intersect and inspire. From the Victorian past to utopian futures, dinosaurs to detectives, zombies to mummies, how does literature shape our understanding of popular culture? Find out more at https://wttepodcast.com. WTTE is a part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. Support the show and get bonus episodes and more by joining HeadStuff+ (https://headstuffpodcasts.com/show/words-to-that-effect) .
Episodes
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The Greatest Matter: A Victorian Gothic Crime Tale
This is it, my brand new audiodrama, The Greatest Matter. There's murder and mystery, crime and conspiracy, gothic and ghosts - if you are a fan of Words To That Effect, I think you are going to like this! You can listen to all the episodes and subscribe/follow at TheGreatestMatter.com or by…
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WTTE 2024 Update & Announcing: The Greatest Matter
So it's been a while! Here's a quick update of what's been going on over at WTTE HQ, including an announcement of my brand new audiodrama: The Greatest Matter. You can have a listen to the trailer and, if you like what you here, subscribe to the show wherever you're listening now. All the details...
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WTTE Season 6 Update
Unfortunately there aren't going to be any new episodes for a little while but have a listen to this short update letting you know what's going on at WTTE and where things are heading next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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60: Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons plays a huge part in fiction and popular culture more generally, but it is often overlooked or misunderstood. In this episode I gather together an experienced Dungeon Master and some complete novices (including myself) to play D&D for the first time. Joining me to explore this...
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59: Robin Hood
From medieval ballads to the poetry of John Keats, stage productions to children’s songs, novels to comic books, silent movies to glorious technicolour, Disney classics to Kevin Costner blockbusters to Mel Brooks parodies to gritty reimaginings and lots, lots more, Robin Hood is certainly one of...
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58: The Origins of the Gothic
What does the word "Gothic" mean to you? Gothic cathedrals and castles? Gothic fiction? Teenage goths dressed in black? Horror and the supernatural? This episode explores the origins of the gothic and one man's lasting influence on this most important of genres. Joining me as my gothic guide is...
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A Word To That Effect: Serendipity (Bonus Ep)
A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: serendipity. WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to...
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A Word To That Effect: Cliffhanger (Bonus Ep)
A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: cliffhanger! WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to...
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57: The Sensation Novel
Sensation fiction was a hugely popular genre in the 1860s. The novels were sensationally popular, but they also caused a sensation, with their plots of bigamy and murder, forgery and blackmail. In so many ways the influence of sensation fiction can still be felt today. WTTE is part of the…
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56: Arthurian Romance
Knights in shining armour, damsels in distress, castles, chivalry and courtly love, heroic quests, dragons. King Arthur, Camelot, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail. Think of King Arthur and the medieval romance and a huge number of images and tropes and cliches spring to…
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55: A History of Dragons
Dragons have been around for a very long time. They are one of the very few mythological creatures that have become absolutely central to popular culture; everyone knows what a dragon is. There are other important and well-known mythological creatures, but none are as ubiquitous as dragons, which...
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Season 6 Preview
Words To That Effect is back! Find out what's coming up on Season 6, launching on Jan 25th Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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54: Underwater Worlds
There is a complex and fascinating relationship between humans and the ocean, how people and cultures across the world know and understand the sea, whether through myths and legends, through trade or fishing, exploration or entertainment. This episode explores one particular aspect of all this -...
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53: Fiction & Food
How do we use fiction in food? What does a character's choice of food reveal about them? Do you simply have to go and make a dish when it's described beautifully in a book? On this very special episode, a collaboration with the wonderful Spice Bags podcast, we discuss everything from 17th century...
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52: Gothic Forests
The forest is a place we have very mixed feelings about. Forests can be calm and peaceful, full of ancient and natural beauty. Until they’re not. The forest, in so many ways, is a place we fear. They are dark and dense and overgrown, all too easy to get lost in. They hold secrets and mysteries…
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51: Desert Fictions
How do we imagine and portray the desert? And what does it say about us and our relationship to each other and, crucially, to the planet we live on? In this, the second in a loosely connected series on places in fiction and popular culture, I chat to Dr Aidan Tynan about deserts in fiction and...
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50: Arsene Lupin
In 1905 in Paris, the publisher Pierre Laffite had an idea. His new journal Je Sais Tout had just launched and he was looking for an author who could do for his magazine, what Arthur Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular Sherlock Holmes had done for The Strand magazine, in London. He turned to the...
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49: Robots
Robots as high-tech labour-saving devices, and as usurpers of human jobs. Robots as distinctly Other and as dangerously indistinguishable from humans. Robots as a means of questioning what it is to be human, and highlighting the ethics behind the creation of artificial life. To help me explore…
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Announcement: WTTE & HeadStuff+
A quick update episode on the new HeadStuff membership platform, HeadStuff+ Have a listen to find out more about what's on it and how you can join (although the joining bit is very straightforward - just click here). I'm really excited to be a part of this and I hope if you are a regular listener...
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48: Fictions of Antarctica
The continent of Antarctica was only discovered two centuries ago, even if it had long been theorized. It's a place shrouded in mystery with no human history and no permanent residents. It’s a land of superlatives: the coldest, the windiest, the driest continent. It is a grand scientific...
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47: Alternate History
In one sense alternate history is a very specific kind of story - sometimes seen as a subgenre of science fiction, more often as a genre onto itself. But in a broader sense alternate history is something we are all interested in. We all think about what might have happened differently in our live...
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46: Weird Westerns
In a way it’s maybe strange that the western is such a prominent genre. It's seemingly connected to a very specific time and place: the mid-to-late 19th century American west. And yet we are all so familiar with the many tropes of the western: cowboys and Indians, shootouts and saloons, cattle...
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45: Mashups, Remixes, and Frankenfiction
Remix, mashup, sample, adaptation, parody, homage, knock-off. The lines between these, and so many other similar terms, are not always very clear. In one sense, all culture is a remix, nothing exists in a vacuum. On the other hand, some people may take a dim view of lifting almost the entire text...
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Season 5 Preview
WTTE is back! Season 5 launches on Tuesday 10th November. Find out what's coming up this season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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44: Words Dunnit (WTTE + Shedunnit Live)
Last year Caroline Crampton (of Shedunnit) and I teamed up to create a joint live show, called Words Dunnit: a 200-year history of detective fiction in an hour. We performed the show live at the Dublin Podcast Festival in November 2019, and then again at Pod UK, in Birmingham, in Feb of this…
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43: Lost Books
There are countless great works of literature we have tantalizing glimpses of, works we know existed but are, as far as anyone can tell, lost to history. Huge swathes of ancient Greek literature, for example, or a lost Shakespeare play based on the story of Don Quixote. And then there are the…
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42: The Missing Link
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…
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41: Romance Novels
Mills and Boon to bodice rippers , Johanna Lindsey to Nora Robers (and a little bit of Fabio) Why read romance novels? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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40: Time Travel Tales
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. On this week's episode I chart the…
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39: Edgar Rice Burroughs
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…
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38: Children's Picture Books
Unlike modernist poetry or Shakespearean drama, when it comes to children's literature, everyone has an opinion. Most of us are exposed to kids' books in some shape or form and, crucially, 100% of us have been children. For an academic working with children's literature, this can have its rewards...
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37: The Golden Age of Piracy
Pirates have been around for a very long time. In fact, as far as the historical record seems to show, they have been around for as long as there have been property and boats. What is it that attracts us to pirates and why have we got such a well-developed set of pirate tropes? We all have the…
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36: Blood, Death, and Varney the Vampire
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...
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35: Jekyll & Hyde
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…
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Season 4 Preview
Season 4 returns on Tuesday 15th October. Have a listen to what's in store! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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34: The Art of the Short Story
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…
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33: The Noun of Nouns (The Rise of Modern Fantasy)
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…
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32: 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. It’s so easy to parody this scene because it’s so familiar. It’s Reverend Green in the billiard room with the…
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31: Steampunk, Pt 2 (Even Greater London)
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…
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30: Steampunk, Pt1 (Fetch Me My Fighting Trousers)
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...
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29: Travels in Four-Dimensional Space
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...
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28: Pulp Fiction (Amazing Stories of the Sisters of Tomorrow)
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,...
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27: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction
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…
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26: Unwrapping the Egyptian Mummy
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…
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25: Dinosaurs (Palaeontology to Pyjamas)
In 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...
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Season 3 Preview
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 Words To That Effect is a member of the Headstuff...
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24: WTTE Live at Liberty Hall
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…
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23: Adaptation (How Does a Book Become a Film?)
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...
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Two Announcements and an Update
No episode this week unfortunately, but I do have two exciting announcements. Have a listen and find out! More at wttepodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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22: Book Clubs: Revolution and Politics
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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Words To That Effect: Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture. WTTE is a narrative storytelling show, hosted and produced by Conor Reid, that explores the intriguing places where fiction, history, science, and popular culture intersect and inspire. From the Victorian past to utopian futures, dinosaurs to detectives, zombies to mummies, how does literature shape our understanding of popular culture? Find out more at https://wttepodcast.com. WTTE is a part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. Support the show and get bonus episodes and more by joining HeadStuff+ (https://headstuffpodcasts.com/show/words-to-that-effect) .
HOSTED BY
Conor Reid
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Words To That Effect have?
Words To That Effect currently has 73 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Words To That Effect about?
Words To That Effect: Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture. WTTE is a narrative storytelling show, hosted and produced by Conor Reid, that explores the intriguing places where fiction, history, science, and popular culture intersect and inspire. From the Victorian past to utopian...
How often does Words To That Effect release new episodes?
Words To That Effect has 73 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Words To That Effect?
You can listen to Words To That Effect on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Words To That Effect?
Words To That Effect is created and hosted by Conor Reid.
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