97: The Time Machine
How much cosmic imagination and speculative social history can fit in a pulp-adventure framework? Why do science fiction and modernism emerge at the same literary-historical moment? Does the future belong to giant crabs? The Sometime Seminar discusses the work of…
91: Algernon Blackwood
What’s so scary about trees, shrubs and untamed landscapes? How come so many turn-of-the-20th-century weird fiction writers were reactionary bigots? And why are they now being summoned from the crypts of genre history and niche publication to walk the earth…
88: The Last Man
It’s the end of the world as we know it! It’s the end of good writing as even the 1820s knew it! But we feel fine: it’s the beginning of science fiction. The Sometime Seminar discusses The Last Man (1826), a…
84: The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
How does a primitivist power fantasy become the kernel of a fleshed-out fictional world? How do you write an interesting story about an invulnerable hero? (Hint: giant snakes.) And when a pulp classic gets the full authorial-originalist textual-editing treatment, is…
82: Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Sometime Seminar discusses Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), a mysterious novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay which was adapted into a film directed by Peter Weir (1975). Download this episode
59: The Colour out of Space
How much repetition-with-variation does it take to turn a schtick into a genre? What elevates trashy horror pulp to the stature of GREAT trashy horror pulp? And if we know that the thing behind the door is an eldritch horror…
50: Autobiography of a Corpse
Connoisseurs of negation, travelers from the land of pure being, Stygian toads that know they don’t exist, and a literary gift on the order of Kafka or Borges—wonders abound as the Sometime Seminar discusses Autobiography of a Corpse, a collection of…
49: The White People
The Sometime Seminar discusses the fantastic, in both senses, horror story “The White People” (1899) by Arthur Machen, along with other stories: “The Great God Pan” (1890), “A Fragment of Life” (1904), “The Great Return” (1915). Apart from “The Great God…
48: The Slynx
Puns, pratfalls, mutants, peasants, mutant peasants, existential dread, verbal invention, narrative non-invention, and a perhaps excessive dose of Cold-War-liberal-dissident nostalgia. Plus the tragic tale of the Gingerbread Man! The Sometime Seminar discusses The Slynx (Russian 2000/English 2003), a bleakly comic post-apocalyptic story…
46: eXistenZ
Mysterious assassins, grisly excrescences, metacinematic reflexivity, and metaphysical doubt as paranoid comedy–all this and a heaping bowl of mutated amphibians as the Sometime Seminar discusses eXistenZ (1999), a science-fiction film written and directed by David Cronenberg. Download this episode
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