Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - The History of Fiction

Episode Date: April 17, 2022

Darius and Ketho are joined by Elias (@aPebbleInTheSky) to talk about the origins of fiction as a genre. We talk about the intertwined nature of Fantasy, Scifi, and Horror, the development of each, and the scientific disenchantment of our world.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre, fiction. As always, I'm Darius and finally rejoining us after doing, I don't know, life stuff. It's Ketho. Welcome back, Ketho. I'm back.

And today with us, we have a guest. We have Elias with us. How's it going? Hello. Joining us all the way from Sweden. Today, we're doing another sort of off-book topical episode. We're going to be talking about the history of fiction sort of as a genre, like where it came from and how we got to what we think of now as, you know, fantasy novels, science science fiction novels and that sort of thing so we're gonna do a little trip through time where lias talks to us about things and i pretended that

i also did background research make it sound like you know what i'm talking about so yeah i mean fair uh so where we're gonna start that's what to start is what you've tentatively labeled sort of the pre-novel era. It's like before we had the concept of a novel. So where are you starting this? Well, I think first we have to set up, I guess, the barrier of when the novel starts. And that is a complicated thing Because that is basically an argument. That is like in all literary theory. It's like which was the first novel.

But I'm going to be nice to us. To just place it around like 17th century. We like to put. We like to take complicated debates. And definitively make an opinion on them. So let's pick one. So we say it around like 17th century and like it's not to say that there were things before that that couldn't be called a novel and stuff afterwards that weren't

just continuations of what happened before but it's just like the 17th century in europe right and the reason for this is because we have to simplify the conversation because like again if we look in china for example we have the notion of like the four classics which is journey to the west romans of the free kingdoms border margins and the third one that i never remember what it is called but it came like centuries after the other three i don't really feel so they have like their own literary tradition dream of the red chamber is the other one dream of the red chamber and it came out like at least three centuries after the other three that's fine so and i'm not saying that it's a classic i'm just saying like

it's clearly like but they were like oh crap we need a fourth thing like so this is just like it has three is not a good number every tradition and since we're talking about like science fiction fantasy horror like fiction i feel like we need to like limit it a bit to west even though we don't want to be eurocentric or whatever but the reason why is that otherwise the subject becomes like too fucking too broad yeah it becomes too broad i think and i'm not saying that we can't discuss and contrast with like Asia or stuff like that. Obviously the Americas, but I just want to say that. So like when I, what I call pre-novel is like, I mean, you can take the example of like the prose Eddas is a example, but they are much more complicated because even though they are literature, they are much more retellings of oral traditions and stories. That's what they're meant to be.

And so they have their own genre on its own. And it's not just the prose eddas. There's everything. There's the Mabinjong in Welsh mythology, if we can take as an example. There is the Celtic stories. Beowulf is a real example of that. The Beowulf, we do have, unlike the prose eddas, that we can take as an example there is the celtic stories they will say would they will be kind of example we do have like unlike the pros eddas because the pros eddas are written in

12th century iceland which is at least a century after iceland christianized no wait it's actually 13th century so it's two centuries after the christianized so it is like much more looking past and probably oral tradition that survived until his day whereas beowulf is written in i think the eighth century in i mean it's it's old and i know it's for like pre-norman invasion so centuries before it was written down it's just like we have it written down from roughly the time period we know it was a story in. And this is also one of the things that you have to talk about when you're talking about older literature,

which is like all of these things, all of these stories, they're oral. Like even Beowulf, even it's written down was meant to be read to people. It was not meant to be read as a book as we think today. Is that sort of like the delineation then? Is like the difference between, aside from like actually having things in like print, is today. Is that sort of like the delineation then? Is like the difference between,

aside from like actually having things in like print, is that delineation sort of wherever that changeover is from a thing that is written down, but is meant to be performed orally for a group of people versus one that is intended for you to like sit and read in your little parlor on your own? Yeah, I think that's very important because the most important thing that we have to place when we talk about like what became the novel is the printing press

because before that reproduction of books which i do want to emphasize reproduction of books was a massive enterprise across continents in all over europe north africa the middle east central asia and stuff like all of them were part of this like interconnected web that produced texts of a wide variety of degree and extents and translations and stuff like that and you therefore you have to understand that like when you owned a book it may have been one of your most because that would have been a pain that exists not just something yeah because it's not only a pain to write but it's like like it's a pain to reproduce on a massive scale and then you have to think about translating it from like yeah i mean either it's from latin to greek or it could be from arabic to greek to latin you have to think about

like a lot of these things are like even when we have like even if we're going to go into a more of social history which is like legal documents when they were first written down they were just written down versions of what used to be like just an oral agreement between two people between people in a community because it's not just two people it's a community like agreement well that's how we know ian is here had garbage like how contracts were born in i mean that is kind of how it works and it is one of those things but like like i come from sweden we are like written traditions is relatively young like we start writing things down so did, we start writing things down...

So did you not start writing things down really until roughly around the time of, like, Christianization, more or less? Yeah, more or less. And even then, it's, you know, it's kind of fascinating because we clearly had rune language that is a written language on its own,

but we didn't write books and we didn't write it down. It wasn't just Christianization that made't write it down it wasn't just christianization that made us write things down though that was obviously a big thing because with christianization came the fucking literature making me learn how to write from southern europe to northern europe then comes like what i personally think is actually the most important literary development if we're gonna say it which is medieval romances and now we're not talking necessarily about like modern romance like chuck tingle books literature mass market paperbacks we're talking nightly courtly romances

we're talking like king arthur and the mythology around him is like one of, in Europe, medieval Europe, one of the biggest literary developments that exist. You can make an argument that without King Arthur being written down, becoming popular and performed and stuff like that, you don't really get later literature. Because it is this major thing, and for us who are genre fiction nerds the king arthur stories are obviously to our modern eyes fantasy there is ideas and notions that these were real people but people who wrote king arthur stories they clearly knew he they weren't writing a history of king arthur they were writing fiction they were writing made-up stories but when you get down to the fantastical of it you know the witches the magic the holy grail then you start getting into much more iffy thing which i'm gonna also get into a bit later when we start seeing which is like

because to these people these things were probably more real than it is to us. For us, if someone writes a story about a witch, we don't really think that that witch or magic is real, right? Yeah, I think we actually – well, we actually talked about that a little bit. We talked about it when we were talking about – I forget which episode we mentioned it in. It was in the episode where we talked about Tolkien's – Macbeth. On fairy stories because it was about the witches and Macbeth. Yeah, the idea that like to them, Tolkien said.

It wasn't necessarily fantasy because a lot of people, especially Macbeth, at least had some belief that witches existed. Macbeth witches is kind of a great example. Like Shakespeare, we're going to talk about him they are clearly a reference to the classical Greek notion of three fates and they name Hecate

the Greek goddess of magic I think she is and stuff like that he's clearly like doing a literary reference a meta reference but again like he probably did think that like i mean witches and magic and stuff like that was real to some extent and then we also get into and i'm not gonna get into it here but it is a fascinating like offshoot which is like because you can argue that like medieval people's notion of magic was

also much much more practical than we think of it which is like to them the act of writing could have been perceived as magic well i mean that just sort of that sort of leads into like the famous quote that you know any technology sufficiently advanced is magic so like to them there's a lot of things that would have been magical you know what i mean well well i'm more like to them the language of technology that we have to describe things wasn't present yet so they just did it through more like they they applied it to more mystical yeah terms even though i think their general perception of writing you know for example not being like how we would see magic as like a supernatural like beyond human force it's more like just this is just how the world yeah i mean

that's absolutely and it's one of those things that is like in research about these things i especially encountered it because i studied uh last year in the spring i studied a course on monsters and you encountered the concept of enchantment and disenchantment and this concept of enchantment was that like you know prior to modernity the world was enchanted it was magical it was filled with mysteries and wonder to an extent that like modernity with its science and its mechanics and its mechanisms destroyed it is disenchanted the world and i'm gonna get into this a bit later because like you could argue that horror science fiction uh fantasy fiction are a fictional way to re-enchant the world to make it magical and mystery mystery uh despite our disenchantment in the modern world because i do think that's important i was about to

say like the only things i mean it makes sense if you think about it because now so much stuff is standardized to the point of um and and like science very specifically wants to know and does know a pretty decent amount of things enough to make people think they know how the world works fundamentally. And which I think, I mean, we, it's probably a good thing, probably,

but that people know how the world works, but at the same time, do people really know? So like, but then you think about like, think about some of the, some of the most mythical type places, things like the bottom of the ocean,

things like space that you still get a ton of enchantment. And I think it's, it's, I think because of how small the world is small in quotation marks, the world has gotten like, if you think about the way that we think about our space and like the vastness and like kind of terrifying emptiness of it. The woods.

I feel like that's kind of how people would have felt about just the world beyond what they knew. At least early on. I do agree with that and it's very important. You can also get into a very like hating on the past which like oh they were fucking dumb. They were afraid of the forest.

But then you get like, yeah, but like imagine that you don't have any electric lights. Yeah, have you been in the actual woods at night? That shit's scary. I mean, whether or not they were... Yeah! I was about to say, shut down all the things we have now,

we'd all be scared too. So it's like, I'm not like... It's one of those things where like, it is the whole thing. Good or bad. Like I personally would argue that like a lot of it, now we get into like more off topic and a bit more complicated, but like,

whether this like disenchantment is good or not, you could argue that like the reification and the thingification of the world and us that that's very bad but obviously i don't think the pursuit of knowledge necessarily is bad i'm fighting my inherent contrarian nature to just declare that the disenchantment of the world was bad and that we need to go back to not knowing things because it was better. Look like I know that's, I know there's obviously very complicated arguments and it's very messy issue,

but like my inherent contrarian opinion is I want to just declare definitively that I want a world that is less explained and more magical. And I think, I think that is probably what's drawn me to fantasy for my entire life, is the fact that part of me inside wants a world that is at least to some degree unexplained. And I do think though, I was making this connection as you were talking, that that's why basically all science fiction in the modern era is basically all in space. Because that's the only place there's still mystery.

Yeah, like, I think that's a... I think that it necessarily... It is the final frontier. And it's going to be endless because we ain't never getting out there. It inherently has to be in space, by and large, because that's the only place where there's enchantment left, is out there somewhere.

Yeah, I also feel like we're going to get into this a bit later when we talk about weird fiction. Because the bottom of the ocean, Ryloth, great example. But I want to get into that a bit later. When you get into weird fiction, like Lovecraft, you get into a lot of re-enchantment stuff. I was about to say,

because in Lovecraft's stuff, you can see in the stuff he's writing the sort of scientific journals that would have been released three months prior to then, and why he's now terrified. The color out of space is just like, that would have been released like three months prior to them and why he's now terrified like like the color out of space is just like oh there were reports about how butter he was terrified literally everything the color of space um so let's let's circle let's go back then we have

gotten a little let's go back then to the first when we finally got a novel so what was the first novel? Tell me definitively. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I know. There's no answer to that question. There's no answer to that, but I think if I'm going to be a bit nerdy here, I feel like Mikhail Bakhtin

makes a really good argument that I'm just going to say so that I don't say it wrong now that the first novel or one of the first novels was called Gantuan and the life of the life of Gantuan and of Pantacruel

which was no it was basically PentaCruel. Which was... No. It was... Basically... It's like one of the first. But then you have another argument that's obviously like Don Quixote. Don Quixote.

If you want the safe choice for the first novel, Don Quixote. Which is really fascinating because Don Quixote is obviously a commentary on it's almost commenting on what we talked about before which was which it's like a it's like a sort of a satire of the king arthur it's satire oh my god that's exactly what they are it's a it's like it's like is that is that not the most human thing you've ever heard in your life where it's like the first officially in quotation marks officially printed novel was uh a response to a bunch of things that

weren't really novels but that we don't really call novels but they kind of were and like obviously it's like the first it's like it's like the first movie ever made was a joke and it kind of was yeah that's kind of what that would be like is if like Dickens or something yeah if it was just like film making fun of like stage theater

like it was a video of a film making fun of a movie because you see the sets like in Blazing Saddles you which is clearly a parody of a movie because you see the sets. Like in Blazing Saddles, you see that the town is a set, and at the end of the movie, they just go on to other movie sets. So basically, if Blazing Saddles was the first movie, that's kind of what we have with Don Quixote as the first novel. Yeah, sure. I've been simplistic. Come is yeah but i mean i do also think like the the mel brooks one is i mean it's not the worst example it's it's a bit like if the first long long form film was just a bunch of shit was just a bunch of shit talking the former short story films that existed before it.

It was like a Mel Brooks version of those short films of the train arriving, the factory workers leaving, and it's just nothing but parodies of that. That's a bit, you know... But that's a bit of it. Don Quixote is usually the best bet

for the first novel. And obviously, it is more complicated than that, because it always is. Like, there's always stories before that and afterwards. I'm going to get a bit sidetracked here, just because I want for a short moment, because, like, I don't necessarily know, like,

the etymology of the English word novel, but the Swedish word for novel is roman. Oh, okay. So it actually comes from the word for romance. Okay. Are you looking up the definition there, Ketha?

I just... That is... Well, yeah, the definition, I'm going to see if there's... Also, fun fact, on Google, if you look up the life of Gargantua and Pentagruel, the other thing that's recommended to search for is Don Quixote. So clearly that's like people talking about what's first and that sort of thing. century they're written and published in the middle of the 16th century they are some of the first novels some of the first books that were like mass printed by the printing press so like well so the word like this is actually i don't know why this didn't immediately click in my head yeah some some it's something unique if something is novel it means something unique. If something is novel, it means something is unique. It was turned into the term of a book.

It's something like new, unique. And then I look at the thing, and it's got the same exact root in Indo-European language, like early Indo-European. So it's literally just like, this is a new thing. So it's just... Pretty much. It's like, this is a new thing you printed it in this fancy press here you go but i would argue like still we don't really have like even though you have like the novel you don't really have genre fiction yet because it's weird it's strange like i mean gargantuan and panda cruel are about two giants like there you already have one of the first novels was a fantasy fiction

if you really but i think that that's too broad because in my opinion if you're really going to get down to it like the first genre that like separated itself from just literature. And this is very complicated because genre as a concept in and of itself always exists. And every single thing you write is part of it. Can I take a quick second? I want to point out that like the other that Gargantua and Pantacruel, is also technically listed as satire, which means that the two options for earliest novel are both satirical works. I just wanted to point that out.

Anyway, so... We just can't help it. Anyway, you're talking about the idea that everything we do is in a genre of some kind. Yeah. It is not everything we do, but you write essentially like you know like daniel defoe's that's because i've forgotten it ah god daniel defoe robinson crusoe right like it is part of the genre of like the lost man you know the western european who gets stuck somewhere and

like that was a genre for a while that was very popular like virtually every single piece of literature is part of a genre in one way or another so like when i say genre i'm so i'm gonna start trying to say like science fiction fantasy and horror like become becomes connected but i want to say that. But those things, even though I would argue that, like, obviously the fantastical exists. Obviously there can be magic and ghosts and even technology that is, like, farther developed than us. science fiction fantasy or horror because it's still not necessarily like its own thing codified in and of itself it's always a part of something else and the first true genre that is like the mother of science fiction fantasy and horror is is mary shelley gothic fiction in the 18th century. Mary Shelley is a good example of it.

Like she obviously, Frankenstein's, Frankenstein's, her Frankenstein book, obviously the first science fiction book. And it's a pretty good example of it. But you also have earlier with the Gothic fiction, you have in the middle of the 18th century you have i think it's called vafec by william beckford which was a book about a

middle eastern oriental kingdom of like fantastic fantastical magic and so things now we're starting that the thing that kind of sort of is a part of fantasy genre right which is like a bit of the othering like it is not our world it's something else just like for him it was the arab world And obviously he is fantastical and like it's it is orientalist but it's you know it's fantastical because it isn't real Arab world. It's the idea of like going to

Ferry, going to the other place. Going to the other place, going to another world. It is its own fantastical world and that's you start seeing it and vafec is massively influential on lovecraft uh edgar allen poe uh a lot of others are like hugely taken and influenced by vafec as a. And now you start seeing that,

and this is like why I call gothic fiction like the mother genre of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It's because like, yeah, it is horror, but it's also fantasy. But it's also like, it can also be science fiction at times. So like, you can even see like a late gothic story from the 1820s

called Melmoth, Melmoth the Wanderer I think it's called yeah, Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin and it's like it's heroic fantasy, you know like Moorcock's Elric stories

clearly inspired by it and we know so much because Michael Moorcock's elric stories clearly inspired by it and we know so much because michael moorcock has said someone we have to cover pretty soon on this show michael moorcock and yeah i mean yeah yeah yeah it seems like a like a natural thing for us to cover. He feels like a pretty important dude. But like, so that's like really an important development in like gothic fiction is like all of this. You know, like it's from gothic fiction we have vampire fiction. I mean, Dracula is a much later example and he's not gothic fiction even. He's just his own thing but like earlier vampires i've forgotten carmilla and a lot of the early vampire stories are like 1810s 1820s there's even a vampire story

from haiti written in the 1820s about a black vampire i think it's i've forgotten it now but it is like really interesting as a thing that was a short story so like that's gothic fiction is huge development in my opinion for genre fiction because now you start seeing this thing where like they're very clearly not believing that this is like the world has now we're not talking 18th 19th century the world has become disenchanted to some extent the world is not magical anymore you have to look this is supposed to dust the well ruins is a good example uh the ancient the the ancient far east or

eastern europe or stuff like that like those become much more the area in which the fantastic like kind of sort of gets its expression it's not really because another important development that happens

after the gothic fiction really is in the 19th century is pop culture develops via, for example, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but Penny Dressels. fictions like sheep easy to produce quite a lot of trash grand grand grugan all stories are published throughout like middle to late and early late 19th centuries are these things that just spread these ideas out into the general public you know like it's it's from there quite a lot of people would develop another example of like an early proto fantasy science fiction you know is in the mid in the early to mid 18th century you have the genre of city mysteries which is more or less conspiracy fiction quite a lot of it is anti-semitic unfortunately but there's a lot of interesting and good examples of fiction that isn't because quite a lot of it was also written by like socialists uh which is you know like the corruption of the cities uh but then were then

mixed in with you know fantastical concepts especially in science fiction you can see a similar example of this is like techno thrillers and obviously one of the things that we start seeing like the separation of and this is like again why i call gothic fiction the mother genre so to speak it's like now we have novels we have all of these things and the reason why i call gothic fiction like the mother genre is because after gothic fiction stops becoming like popular in the 1820s and 30s you start seeing pop culture and you start seeing a splintering of it so for example in science fiction what do we have in the 1840s and 50s jules verne and we might not want to necessarily call it science fiction inherently. It might be scientific romances.

And Jules Verne is obviously, like, he gets a lot of focus. He's not the only one. There is quite a lot of other authors in a similar time span who is either influenced by Jules Ver van or writes other similar takes and stories Edgar Allan Poe is also mid-18th century he's obviously a bit more emphasized on the gothic he's more explicitly influenced by gothic fiction but he's also obviously much more horror right like I wouldn't I wouldn't like there wouldn't. Like. There's some scientific. Science fiction. You could argue.

That Edgar Allan Poe has written. But like. His focus is clearly horror. He's the horror icon. You could argue. If you want. That he is the. He's the father of modern horror.

In every single way. That you can argue. That Jules Verne. Is the father of modern science fiction. That's really. And it's. But. The interesting part here. Is that I haven't mentioned fantasy fiction. You have

father of horror, you have father of science fiction. So who's the father of fantasy fiction? Fantasy fiction, in my opinion, and the person who actually should be seen as like the most central figure is a person who every single socialist should love. Is that William Morris?

Which is William Morris. William Morris, because what William Morris wanted to do, more or less, is he wanted to write medieval knightly romances. And that's what he did. With his fantasy fiction. So he placed it in. A world that is entirely.

Disconnected from ours. It has its own history. Its own culture. It's not connected to ours in any way. Except him writing in ours. It's not a traveler from another world. Traveling in there. It is just a story. a self-contained world that is set.

The first like, to act like high fantasy or to act like sub creation of a new world. The first high fantasy. Yeah. So like, that's where you have it. And this is like, we'll say this straightforwardly here.

Why I quite feminously disagree with the idea that Tolkien should ever be seen as some kind of father of modern fantasy fiction. Because Tolkien ultimately was just an adaptation of, and a modernization in the 1950s, of William Morris. There is nothing Morris wrote that you can't really find in Tolkien and vice versa. Mirkwood, for example, in Tolkien is a forest that exists in William Morris' fiction.

The idea of traveling for a journey to find a hidden ring, also find that in a William Morris book. Well, I'm reading here, I'm reading some about him. If you read what his influences were, they could also be the same influence section that some would have listed under Tolkien's biography, right? Where it's like, oh, he went to school

and studied medievalism and the classics. And then he went and took a trip to Iceland where he was inspired by the Icelandic sagas. And you know what I mean? Like it's all the same stuff. And it's also one of those things where like, in my opinion, one of the most things that is understated the most about Tolkien, because quite a lot is emphasized on Tolkien, the fact that he was an educated linguist, that he wrote quite a lot on medieval literature, which is absolutely

true. Not enough is focused on the fact that we know Tolkien read and loved William Morris. Like, his fantasy books were the biggest inspiration for Tolkien to write his own fantasy books. And here is the thing.

William Morris was a libertarian socialist. Yeah, he wrote utopian socialist fiction. He was friends with Kropotkin. He was friends with kropotkin he was friends with kropotkin he's one of those that were like he the only reason he wasn't an anarchist was because like incredible quibbles and him insisting that he wasn't an anarchist despite the fact that he agreed with everything anarchist did like he's literally one of those people like he joined a marxist party then left the marxist party because the marxist party supported being in elections and he was like no fuck the state

the state should be destroyed i'm a libertarian socialist not an interest though no no no i mean there's plenty of people now that use that term instead of calling him a socialist. It's him bad-mouthing anarchists. It's quite weird. But it's one of those things. Because his fantasy fiction reflected his politics. Unlike Tolkien, for example, William Morris never wrote about the good king coming to save the world

I mean to be fair Tolkien's writing was a reflection of his politics yeah that's what I mean that's what I mean that's kind of my point Tolkien's writing was absolutely a reflection of his politics which is like why he wrote that

William Morris an actual radical wrote in an entirely different way because that was his politics like for example one of the examples of his fantasy fiction that he wrote in was like focus on like discussions of folk moods like which is like if you don't know what folk mode is it's essentially a community is that when like the community comes together to have a meeting to like decide on things or something it's a self-governing a self-organization that exists that okay i'm not getting into another thing but like a quick brief here self-organization is much more common in history than people generally think of course like prior to 1850s and even later in some places the vast majority of the communities

85 percent of their lives were organized and done by themselves the state only came into like forced taxation or forced labor or stuff like that that's that most of the other things yeah that's the sort of stuff that talks about mutually complicated and i'm not gonna say like everyone was free in the past because i don't mean to say that i really do mean it like 70 85 percent like the other 30 to 15 percent is like why they were unfree quite a lot but it's very important to emphasize that and william morris like the dedicated socialist he was obviously wrote about it because that's what he wanted people to be inspired by in his fiction this one i think it's called like wolf brothers something like that the way he wrote about it writes about it quite extensively because their their like call for adventure is explicitly like from the

folk moat and not like from a king or anything oh okay and it's very it's very fascinating but so like for so for me he is and i actually like i've used this concept of like the fathers of x to mainly simplify things because again it is much more complicated than this yeah yeah like especially actually in terms of fantasy because like fantasy or horror because while william morris was writing at the same time like plenty of other english gentlemen in the 1890s and 10s were writing works that were similar to him or were different the reason why i focus specifically on william morris is because number one his connection to hulkian and number two because he is the first person who like genuinely wrote a novel set in a world that had no connection

whatsoever yeah that was entirely, it was entirely independent. It was entirely independent. It's so strange to me that it took until the 1800s for that to happen. It does seem weird that it took until then for someone to have a story that just didn't take place

on Earth. But I guess if you think about it, the disenchantment thing holds really strong it's like if there's a lot of stuff here on earth that you don't know you're going to speculate about what it is which is kind of the whole point of the term speculative fiction i think you know so it's like this idea that william morris wanted to write medieval romances but he didn't want to set it in history. He didn't want to write historical fiction.

So what do you do? Well, you write fantasy fiction. You just make up a world similar to the one we had. You make it up. Yeah. How long it took for someone to go, huh, I can just make it up. Because whilst all of these things are happening, in other parts of literature, you see the development of realism and naturalism.

This focus on, you should write about in detail the culture that exists now, and life as it is. I don't want to know anything about british culture in the 1890s i don't why william morris like william morris like if you don't if you don't know it walter scott is a pretty important figure because he wrote like some of the first proper historical novels what i mean by that is like he's not he's not like lying or anything else it's like using the best of his knowledge he's also inventing a lot of shit like there's a lot of misconception about the middle ages people have from walter scott but he wrote his fiction and I think part of that is like this. He has his realist fiction that he wrote,

and William Morris didn't want to write that. He wanted to write medieval romances with witches and goblets and magical artifacts and dragons. So yeah, you just invent shit. So you just invent a different world to do it in. Because previously to that, I think that the boundaries between like, the boundaries between reality and magic, because it wasn't really as strong as later realist fiction insisted, right? It meant that it didn't really. thing for me about realist fiction is that like like a good example is like honoré bolsac is a writer a french writer who wrote realist fiction in the early to mid 20 18 19th century marx really

loved bolsac he mentions him quite a lot in his writings it's really fascinating he also wrote ghost stories quite a lot like horror and another very famous french realist writer naturalist writer is guillermo passant who also wrote ghost stories i'm just imagining karl marx sitting around reading ghost stories i mean karl marx hey the man couldn't be boring all the time make an argument that capital is is a vampire well well if you think about it what that like that was kind of maybe maybe the the people who initially created the well vampires have a long you know mythological history to an extent like a like a world tradition but like in terms of the first written novel i don't know how explicitly the original people who were writing that down were like this is a metaphor

for how like royalty suckers off of everybody else. But it is kind of a class thing. The vampire. Dracula is sadly not anti-aristocratic. It's much more like the foreigners

coming to seduce and destroy our virgin victorian ladies. to seduce and destroy our virgin Victorian lands. Yeah, yeah. I mean, just like the original interpretation and reason that there was mythological concepts of vampires was kind of like a very anti-elite

thing. Yeah, because they're gross as hell. Yeah, it is. But like, so like, here we have like the development and I wouldn't say that like we're finished because

fiction never finished developing, right? But like, but now by the early 20th century we have like, what I would argue is like at least skeletons of both genres. Of all three genres I mean

especially horror like horror has always been like a bit more I don't know developed like well it sort of it sort of it came into its own sooner yeah I think it came into its own well even if you go back to that gothic fiction well even if you go back to the gothic like gothic fiction an important part of it is kind of that unsettling uneasiness that then if someone was like, I, I'm going to take this further. And, you know, it, I mean, it developed enough to the point where it started, like that sort of unsettling uneasiness started getting slipped into, like actual modernist fiction, like things like gothic like southern gothic good example like why you know of these three genres the genre that like a naturalist like more person could write about was like horror yeah because it was a bit more because i think they because i think it's like reality more like the horror is much more obviously metaphorical. Like, I mean,

really, when you're thinking about it, Middle Earth, it's not a fucking metaphor. It's just a different world. Accept it. That's just it. Like, whereas, like, if you have a ghost... Yeah, the suspension of disbelief is like... Well, what does this ghost

represent? What is it in an idea what is the theme of it yeah i mean if we we reference i don't remember if it was before he started recording out we talked about like charles dickens i mean if you're talking like a christmas carol there's ghosts but the ghosts are like i am a metaphor for things you know what i mean like yeah yeah while they're doing that they're begging you to look at the metaphor again You know what I mean? Yeah. While they're doing that, you have someone again, like Tolkien, who is like, I don't do allegory.

Shut up. It's also like, even if you go science fiction and you go Jules Verne, what the fuck is the metaphor for Captain Nemo's submarine? It's not a fucking metaphor. It's just a submarine, submarine? It's not a fucking metaphor. It's just a submarine, man.

It's just a cool story. Yeah. Rule of cool has always been important in science fiction and fantasy. I would argue the singular most important person in the history of science fiction shows up, which is H.G. Wells.

H.G. Wells is truly one of those people in my opinion because like with jules verne you can talk about like that like in sweden there's a different like jules verne is very very important all over the world but like there is like german writer roughly at the same time who is like the father of german science fiction there is x y and z and like now we're not even outside of europe yeah more complex but like e.g wells is everywhere yeah like he is the singular figure that virtually every single strand of science fiction around the world just goes like yeah he he's he's an influence like that's what he is and what i think is fascinating about a.g wells that i haven't really brought up until now is utopian fiction because

that's kind of a speculative genre isn't it like and that goes even further back and i don't even want to get into that i feel yeah but say i feel like utopian almost might be that's what it is right in a lot of ways like a sub genre i would argue its own genre in and of itself because it has its own very specific history that is both outside of the novel era but inside of the novel era so to speak it's also honestly like it's a it's a space of fiction that doesn't get a lot of attention at least not for what it is there is so much about utopian fiction because it is

when you start to think about it one of the most fascinating ones well yeah it's one of the ones that is deeply it's analyzable really like like deeply deeply analyzable when you think about the fact that because anyone who's presenting a utopia has to be presenting it from what their own view of what a utopia might be and same thing with dystopia but like so there's so much interpretation that can be done like we talked a bit like the developed into it was a bit great man theory there with like the big feet the big

men but like if you look at like the more material developments in the 19th century you have like the labor movement shows up quite a lot anti-colonial movements and those are quite inspired by again like the popular culture you know either as a reaction to where a lot of like villains are radicals who are trying to destroy the world or the monster in a fiction is you know like again bram Stoker the monster is a eastern European gentleman who's destroying our virginal British women virginal Victorian ladies

and it is those things that also develop underneath the surface that develop all of this and that's also why A.G. Wells is such a good example of it because like he truly made science fiction his own because it isn't just scientific romances that is like because when you're thinking about it like jules verne set his own stories very much in his present you know like nautilus is not a few years

in the future it is like no no 1860s there's a fucking there's a major submarine underneath the ocean runs around but h.e wells he's the one who talks about the future yeah who talks about going to other planets and stuff like that you know yeah he well he i guess in a in in if we use le guin's definition he's one of the first ones to use science fiction as at least aside from somebody like Mary Shelley or something because that's obviously a thought experiment. It's like Jules Verne. I don't know how much of a thought

experiment. Where H.G. Wells is like, here's a thought experiment. Here's a thought experiment about what if we go three million years into the future and class divisions still exist. H.G. Wells is much more like, let's have a thought experiment. It's also a bit like H.G. Wells. It's like, let's use the imagination to talk about contemporary issues. I mean, the time traveler is a good example.

Yeah, which is like... Things like the time traveler aren't... It's not about like 10,000 years in the future about class society. It's much more like class society is shit, isn't it? Yeah. It's an abstraction of class society

so you can see it in a more metaphor but it's screaming at you this is a metaphor that exposes it as being awful and it's one of those things that fascinates me quite a lot like my favorite uh agl story is gonna see if i can remember it now so while you're looking it up i was was discovering that I actually, I didn't know this, that H.G. Wells described himself as a socialist for like his entire life. And that like that, and like his works were meant to be sort of progressive and sort of socialist utopian. He was obviously a futurist. Weirdly though, one of the great people that said they really loved his books the most was Winston Churchill. So, you know, showing you that even early on you could read a

book and entirely miss the point yeah it's also it's also like a.g wells notion of socialism is really like he is a person who has like his fiction is the best when either he is doing a criticism of capitalism or something else like island of dr moreau is a criticism of like divisection destruction of the natural world and stuff and so on because like his utopian fiction is very fascinating but it's also authoritarian as fuck well yeah because his idea of like a good socialist state is like where the state does everything. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Wait, we can't put this out there because the fucking Twitter tankies are going to like appropriate HG Wells. He had a weird relationship with USSR as well. It's quite fascinating because he was very much a Fabian socialist. Yeah, he was part of the Fabian society yeah which uh not the best group but he but he is that so like my favorite agl story is i think called the sleeper awakes which is about like a person in his own time time period i think the 1910s who wakes up like a century or two later and he's obviously become

rich because of like how interest works and bullshit like it's a bit like fry from futurama when he notices like oh my god i'm a billionaire because of like my hundred bucks in my his compounding interest compounding it it's taken the futurama storyline is probably taken from there because that was one of the first but it is one of those things where like he's that book is making such a great and ingoing constant criticism of capitalism of class society but then you read what his suggestion is and it's like you're just making a class society with extra steps. Like, come on, man. Like, his book, A Modern Utopia, has weird orientalist bullshit also, because it's like, this class of bureaucrats who's supposed to lead the world, who's supposed to lead his world government. Because that's a huge thing he was into, was like, a world government.

It's like, they're called samurai and i'm like what weeb if she wells so you're telling me, if he was on Twitter now, he'd have an anime PFP. I mean, he might. I don't know.

E.G. Wells today would be a fucking nightmare. He'd suck. He'd be a right-wing socialist at this point. Well, I mean, that's just... I'm just going off of the trajectory

of the Fabians, but... He would be a democratic socialist who, like, talks about, like... Would he be the one saying that America needed to follow the Scandinavian model? Constant reform. Like, it's real weird to talk about him like that

because, like, it's one of those things where, like weird to talk about him like because like it's one of those things where like people talk about like x person would be this on twitter it's a bit like that's my version of a stupid thought experiment ag will's politics is like too much pre-world war ii yeah socialism yeah for it to make sense because like yeah yeah i was about to say it's easy to sit there and be like well like like say somebody like bookchin would be like absolutely fucking awful on twitter like it's easy to say that because he was alive like 20 years his anarchism you know it ages incredibly well but i mean like a like, A.G. Wells is like... I mean, I would probably wager that he would

still be left-wing even today. He would probably adjust his politics in that way. But also, like... Well, I mean, again, if you follow the politics of the Fabian Society, you become like a democratic socialist who does, like, you know, like, reformist, like, voting blocs and stuff.

Well, yeah, like, reformist stuff with blocks and stuff well yeah like reformist stuff reformist stuff with weird links to the conservative party like i don't know like i don't know jeremy corbyn yeah not jeremy clarkson i was gonna say that i was just like that's wrong the wrong jazza probably been a huge fan of jeremybyn. But again, it's way too pre-world. Yeah, this is pure nonsensical speculation. These are the important questions that we get to on this podcast. Would HG Wells be a twitter poster like what then like i think like an important what i would argue an important development is weird fiction and when you hear

that term it sounds weird because it's weird fiction but it's also like because in the 1910s 10s and 20 especially the 20s and 30s in especially in america but also elsewhere the explosion of magazines of yeah basically is you know hugo gurn's back like there's a reason why he's occasionally called the father of modern science fiction because he was the one who published the magazines that science fiction became a genre in properly so to speak and i don't want to say because it is not just science fiction fantasy fiction because of the immense focus on Tolkien often gets forgotten that like it's actually in these journals where fantasy fiction and horror actually develops the most as a genre. This is where Conan the Barbarian becomes a thing. the beginning of conan because if i can that is topical for us because the the subgenre of fantasy that conan gets attributed to is called sword and sorcery which might that is where i got the name clearly for this podcast is the subgenre of sword and sorcery, which is specifically what Conan is now grouped in

with. It's also occasionally called heroic fantasy. It's occasionally called, like, I think Moorcock wanted to name it like epic fantasy or something. It was... It's himbo fantasy. It's like the big guy with a sword and there's magic

and there's fighting and there's like... I mean, yeah. It's a power fantasy. There's elements of Conan that makes him incredibly contemporary in the 1920s and 30s with existentialism. Because when you're thinking about it, Conan in the books don't have a destiny.

Like, yeah, sure, because of how the stories were set up with like him being an old man which is also one of those fascinating early magazine science fantasy genre fiction thing which is like because the early conan stories were kind of based around an earlier character who didn't take off. It was called like Kroll the Conqueror or something like that. It was an Atlantean. And Conan later became, so like Conan's first story, he was Kingin. But every single other Conan story, he's not King because it's earlier Conan.

So the first story is like Conan now and all the other stories are like this is conan before he became king yeah kinda that's how it worked that's how it became and conan has like a very cool line where he says like uh i forgot what it's called but it is it's a very existential line because it is like i have no destiny i have no purpose all i want to do is just like live fight and fuck which is like is that is that oh my god is that what we should have read before talking about the witcher um well honestly because obviously gerald is like Well, honestly, the real commentary on that is the color of magic when you talk about what the fuck's his name. Terry Pratchett, absolutely, 100%. Froon. Froon the Barbarian is just that guy.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, Froon the Barbarian. Yeah. He's just, I just want to fight. I want to find magic thing. I want to fuck bitch. That's all I want. Because again, there's like, there's no destiny.

There's no big power magic fantasy. There is like, no, it is just like, dude with a sword. Well, I think part of the- Running into adventures and like, that's it. Yeah, I think one of the definitions, what separates sword and sorcery from like high fantasy is that the tale is about just individual personal battles as opposed to world-ending threats or some sort of giant overriding morality. It's more like, what's this guy doing?

Yeah, that's more or less how it is. Because when you're talking about – Wow, it's like fantasy realism. In that 1920s, you're talking about mainly free writers, which is Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and then my favorite, which is Clark Ashton Smith. Clark Ashton Smith is always the forgotten bastard child, so I will take him to last.

But Howard wrote, obviously, Conan stories. he also wrote quite a lot of other action adventure stories he also created like solomon kane and stuff and it was in these like these the reason why it's called weird fiction is because the magazines were called like weird fantasy weird science which is like weird and then something afterwards. And then you have H.P. Lovecraft, which is... Oh, boy. Well, Lovecraft is one of those people where it's like you can tell he's drawing a lot from, say, Edgar Allan Poe, a lot from early Gothic horror horror but it's also super

contemporary for the time in terms of the things he's reacting to he more than anyone is a perfect example of this whole like where he is turning around various signifiers to re-enchant the world

yeah math, mathematics goes from being a very cold calculating thing where you just know the facts Yeah, I mean he's kind of I mean he's actually afraid of the disenchantment. It's also, yeah,

he's afraid of it. I was going to say, the story is for the most part boiled down to if you keep disenchanting things, this is the sort of horror you will awaken. Like, if you think about it. Like, Lovecraft is a deeply, deeply complicated and problematic figure for a lot of different reasons. Because a lot of it is, like, yeah, he's very afraid of the other. He's very afraid of his own urges.

Yeah, he's very afraid of the other. He's very afraid of his own urges. Because it's one of the things that not really, in my opinion, discussed when you talk about Lovecraft's problematic things, is like, he was very afraid of his own sexuality. Like, it's not just other people's sexuality. It's his own sexuality. Yes.

A big reason why that is, is because, like, he married a Jewish woman, which is fascinating, in my opinion yeah and by all accounts he loved her like yes they had a marriage until his like aunt forced him to move back home and divorce her because she was a jewish woman and he came from good new england stock yeah good new eng stock. That made him even more terrible. And then proceeded to die alone in misery. Yeah, I was

fucking stupid for being a racist ass. Well, yeah. Well, he went from being oh, I was stupid for being a racist. I'll just say that poor people suck in general. Yeah, for... Who knows? Weird.

I don't even want to say... When I see someone as problematic as H.P. Lovecraft, even for his time period, I see someone who's more mentally and emotionally abused than someone who is outright malicious because it's like it's like there are plenty of there are plenty of people where i feel like it it seems like their issues stem from like a personal choice whereas someone who's as extreme as lovecraft seems like someone who's just incredibly mentally unstable.

We have enough KKK and neo-Nazi leaders who are absolutely worse than Lovecraft today and they have not suffered abuse. But I think the way he was, the things that he was, was in a very passive way.

It's like the way he expressed it lived a couple of more years in new york city with his jewish wife he probably would have become like a more well rounded human being but that didn't happen so he like you know like that's fine yeah i mean he is very much and i just i just think he's a really interesting character study of just a person fascinating character study because robert e howard was a person who was bullied quite a lot when he was a kid he was unlike lovecraft who were you know good new england stock robert e howard lived his entire life in like western texas and he was quite sympathetic to like native america to like indigenous people he was still sympathetic to indigenous people.

He was still racist towards them. I do want to emphasize that. Quite sympathetic for him not being a racist. Because he was. But he was also bullied quite a lot as a child. He had immense mother issues. He actually, unlike Lovecraft, who I think died from an illness or something, probably shot himself. In like 1934,34 i think it was something like that shot himself in the head because he

suffered depression and stuff his entire life but one of the things about robert howard also which i think kind of gets into the type of stories that he wrote quite a lot which is that he loved boxing and talked at length how accelerated he got when he was in a fight, which I think is really fascinating if you read. Because I do just want to say this, like, those old Conan stories, they are also very problematic with its racial descriptions and its Orientalism. But he still has, in my opinion, one of the best descriptions of fights any writer ever has it is like it all makes sense i don't have to like imagine something entirely incomprehensible it is very clear very cut and you feel the excitement of it and i think that's supremely fascinating if you start thinking about it anyway

now i'm gonna move on to the third one which is clark aspen smith which we don't have to talk that much about because unlike the other two he was incredibly normal which is very funny because he was friends and wrote with the other two like he wasn't normal normal because he was like because he was like a person who in the 1910s was a sculptor who became a weird fiction writer and lived until i think like the 1950s so like he wasn't normal but like compared to the other two like yeah he was was normal like his his works are like relatively racist but like not as bad as the other two to be fair that's a pretty low bar yeah but he also had all of the things that the other two had he wrote as a low bar to clear but sword and sorcery fiction he wrote uh lovecraftian type horror he has a fantastic fantastic short story that is set like

on mars the way he depicts it is really really fascinating because he depicts it to some extent like very much like a 1920 like colonial thing uh which is like a horror story about uh mummies from mars i don't know how to i don't can't remember the name i could find it but i'm not gonna check it out i can recommend it afterwards like and it is supremely fascinating because it is this like it's much more concretely science fiction because like lovecraft one of the things that is with him is like is it fantasy is it science fiction right it's probably a bit of both but for that story it's like yeah it's science fiction it's a science fiction horror story but it's written in the 1920s and it's about like being on mars and it's it's not like you know john carter of mars

which i haven't even planned to bring up Edgar Rice Burroughs, because that dude deserves an episode entirely on his own. Yeah. That person. The mix. You know? Now we're up to golden age of science fiction.

And fantasy. And horror. I don't know how much I've managed to make clear but like this is like where we have tolkien so like tolkien should be accurately seen as one of the people who is the most who is the most influential in modern times yeah but i personally also feel like you have to understand that tolkien to a large extent didn't invent anything. Like even if you go with like his fantasy races, not only can you find it like,

I mean, elves, dwarves, stuff like that already existed. Yeah. Oh yeah. Not just in because of earlier mythology, but in earlier stories.

I mean like, well, I mean, to my knowledge, to be fair, he never like claimed to have invented elves or dwarves or anything like that. That's more of a thing that modern readers have put on him. Let's make this clear. None of this is on Tolkien himself.

This is purely the issue I have with modern people who frame it as if tolkien is like the originator of fantasy because even if you go with like high fantasy er edison wrote high fantasy in the 1920s and 30s and i recommend not necessarily reading him that enjoyable it is very fascinating, though. I think that's the thing about somebody like Tolkien. It's kind of like, this is going to be me going off on a not too long tangent, but it's kind of like how people perceive the Beatles to popular music, where the Beatles were super influential. They were very important. They were very good at what they did.

But what they did was they took ideas that others had touched before and made it popular you know they made it acceptable and open to a wider audience than the original people who had designed the stuff like you know they did music concrete they did a bunch of weird wacky stuff but it was condensed into a more digestible package than the people who were experimenting with it 10 years this is the thing i think a lot of people don't pay attention to nowadays which is like lord of the rings did not sell well until the 1960s yeah i know it wasn't the hobbit was way more popular so at the time one of the things people don't really pay attention to is the fact that, like, I hadn't really planned on bringing this up, but, like... No, spicy takes. Let's go.

When new wave science fiction happens, and especially, and I do want to emphasize this, when Michael Moorcock explodes quite quickly with his Elric stories, it is roughly a bit earlier than tolkien starts selling lord of the rings proper and it's not just michael moorcock here it's quite a lot of other fantasy writers and science fiction writers in the 50s like fritz lieber with his gray mouser and buffered is a great example of this. Like, they were really popular. And they were much popular in the 50s than Tolkien's fantasy stories ever was. Like, the Elric stories became really, really popular and other fantasy stories in the 60s. Like, 60s was a huge boom for science fiction and fantasy fiction. Also horror, but especially science fiction and fantasy fiction. Like, a huge boom.

Like, part of that was also the new wave that allowed, especially science fiction, but even fantasy, greater experimentation. Ursula K. Le Guin got her start in the 60s. Samuel R. Delaney got his start in the 60s. Plenty of like, Joanna Russ was a feminist author who also got her start in the 60s. uh joanna russ was a feminist author who also got her start in the 60s like there's quite a lot of things that just exploded in the 1960s and i kind of think the truth is is that tolkien only got popular because of these other things i mean that's possible yeah and that's why it is one of those things because i don't really want to deny the immense impact that Tolkien has had. But for example, let's go with this one here.

Michael Moorcock, in my opinion, is a vastly more influential author than Tolkien, when you start to think about it. Let's just go with a very simple thing here. Dungeons and Dragons, which influenced it more? It's Moorkok. Or Tolkien. It's going to be Morkok. Morkok by a fucking much. I mean, I'd say

D&D is much influenced by like Morkok and Conan. Morkok and actually not Jules Verne, Jack Vance. Yeah, well Vance obviously because Vance is where you get the entire, like, magic system for, like, AD&D. It's Vancy and magic.

They still call it that. Like, well... I was about to say, I... I was about to say, like, I was at least primarily under the impression that Gary Gygax openly talked about how much

he liked Michael Moore. It you liked one of those things that has been hidden or anything else it's just like time moves on and what people remember the most it's like oh well this is obviously based on tolkien because look at the various races you can be yeah but like melnebonians are also elves when you really think about it yeah yeah i think part of like obviously there there have been decades of people thinking attributing a lot to tolkien but i feel like especially in the past 20 years especially since the films that it has gotten to that point and i i think like there are plenty of moments where like classic fantasy authors are either emulating or responding to tolkien like i think of something like earthsea seems pretty

directly in a way a response to something like the lord of the rings it's like there's and and in general that sort of fantasy space that it occupied, I feel like people didn't extremely overemphasize it until after the films. Because Lord of the Rings became the first big high fantasy film franchise that was presented. Listen to the bonus episode. I'm like, Star Wars. But at the very least, it was the first big, big high fantasy adaptation film to ever be nominated for something like an Oscar. You know, it's like it was enormous when it came out. When people have their head.

So that definitely. Oh, yeah. Nine times out of ten. They're not actually thinking of any book. They're thinking of Lord of the Rings movies. Which, I'll be honest, even me, myself, as someone who read them, I think, before I saw the first film, it is occasionally difficult, you know what I mean, to stop and remind myself certain things which were like, you know,

creation by Peter Jackson versus something that came from the books you know what i mean like just when i'm sitting and thinking about obviously i reread i do reread lord of the rings with probably some regularity it's like i have to think about it but it is i think for someone who isn't constantly doing that it's very easy to think of the films and just be like that's what it is you know what i mean yeah i mean but i also think that's also the whole thing especially since so many other fantasy yeah they ever adaptations didn't uh like do anything pretty hard i mean i do agree with that quite a lot that it has expanded like the past two decades it's like when tolkien has like exploded so much and like it's not to say that it wasn't a thing earlier but I do think like if you look at fantasy fiction from the 70s and 60s

and if you look really hard and trying to discover their influences yeah Tolkien will be there but Robert E. Howard Michael Moorcock will be there as much. And it's one of those things, I think, especially like, let's go with like Le Guin and Earthsea. Like from what I know, Ursula K. Le Guin, like she liked Lord of the Rings. She felt that it was an influence. There were things she liked about it quite a lot. Like, I don't think Earthsea is so much a reaction to

Lord of the Rings or anything else i do think that it is a reaction against certain types of stories that she wanted to like react against she said part of it was a reaction to the sort of like the glorification of war and violence that she saw in a lot of fantasy stories where like the most heroic thing you could do was grab a sword and kill someone and so she was specifically yeah racial coding and the glorification of violence were two things that she was specifically writing against

which is one of those things where like there's so much of it and it's also one of those things where I personally think like today it's very hard also to like go back and think about the type of fantasy fiction that was popular in the 60s because like sure Michael Moorcock was popular like so was other right-wing fantasy fiction quite a bit more popular like Michael Moorcock was always a big

thing but like there were other writers who were more, especially not to our tastes, that have kind of gone by the wayside, but they were really, really popular in their day. I think this is one of the things that people don't really get. Like the fantasy versions of Heinlein? I mean, yeah, absolutely fantasy versions of Heinlein. There's quite a lot of it. I mean, there's a reason why Michael Moorcock wrote what's he called? Stormtroopers and... We can look it up. Well, I mean, he literally invented the Chaos Star.

Okay, sure, but he wrote... It was an essay that was like a criticism of especially science fiction. Oh, yeah. Michael Moorcock made music? What the? With Hawkwind? What? And Blue Oyster Cult?

He wrote quite a lot of their... Sorry, that's hilarious. He wrote quite a lot. But he wrote several of their, like, texts. Or their lyrics. Yeah, Starship Stormtroopers is the one I'm thinking about he also wrote Epic Poo which is his takedown of Tolkien

which I actually do recommend it is much more complicated than people give him credit for because some people go just like certain things he has said in interviews about like how he thinks that the morality is simplistic and stuff like that whereas in Epic Poo quite a lot of his criticisms are like the pros of by the way sorry this is epic

poo as in p-o-h as in winnie the pooh because he compared he compared tolkien's novels to winnie the pooh yes he compared tolkien's with it not extraments like yeah i'm sorry i would forget you know this is like an audio medium and i wanted to make that clear absolutely clear then he wrote starship troopers which is not as like a directed essay but it is like pointing out like how quite a lot of especially science fiction but also fantasy fiction are written by pretty far-right people in the 60s and 70s. Yeah, but it says right here, I'm reading like the brief, like the synopsis of Starship Stormtroopers, where he's criticizing a lot of writers for their shitty political agendas. He includes, you know, a number of people,

specifically previously mentioned Heinlein and Lovecraft, highlighting sort of authoritarian fiction and people for having anti-Semitic, misogynistic and racist viewpoints. He also brings up John W. Campbell. He brings up Larry Niven. He brings up, what's the lady called? She who wrote like Dragons of Pern or something.

Anne McCaffrey. Yeah, I think he brings her up too. Really? Interesting. Because she supported the vietnam war don't learn anything about your heroes people not that she was my hero not that she was my hero but i did enjoy her books i mean that's that's kind of and that is actually one of the fascinating things at least for me because like i will admit straightforwardly part of me learning about anarchism and becoming an anarchist is michael moorcock and alan moore like yeah finding out that both of those people were

anarchists made me go like well what is this thing like yeah yeah for me for me it was the same thing with lewin is that too i'm gonna check this out which is which is like one of the things you know that's how it is people really really, really underestimate the, I think, the kind of power of radical fiction. It can be commodified really easily. It can be commodified really easily. It can also be overemphasized by us quite a lot, which is like, you know, like all of these writers were radical left-wing people but then you're forgetting like either the people who were really really popular in their own time who haven't survived the test of time or who are just popular in other nerd cult in other nerd circles that you are not a part of like yeah we tend to like it's yes it's like one of the worst things about nerd culture becoming the main culture of popular culture

is like people have forgotten that nerd culture was never homogenous in the way of like everyone read or liked the same things. And a lot of them suck. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But like... I mean, that's just the way of it all. The 99-1, that's just that's just the way of it the 90 99.1

that's how you it's 99.1 90% is mediocre to bad 9% is good 1% is great that's it he had a conversation

if you don't know who he is, he's a golden age science fiction writer. One of the best. I do recommend him. He wrote mainly short stories. Really good dude. He had a conversation with a literary critic who said, well, 90%

of science fiction is crap. In response to Theodore Sturgeon pointing out well this story is good and this story is good and this literally science fiction is crap for your decision responded by saying well 90 of everything is crap like how it is like i've read quite a lot and i go like i mean as much of that is shifts as the nerd shits it's just like I will admit straightforwardly the nerd shit especially in terms of films absolutely can have a lot of like higher degree of

like watching pretty high yeah if it's not like if you're talking like a drama my bar for watching it is kind is pretty high like it has to be great or good or i am not sticking around for that a shitty science fiction film that is just bad watch it entirely through no problem that's about to say it's not that hard to sit there and watch like valerian and city of a Thousand Planets because even though it's terrible, you're like, wow, look at the visuals, I guess. Honestly,

I also think that when fantasy or science fiction is done poorly in media, it's way easier to riff on than a lot of dramas. A lot of dramas, if they're bad, they're just boring. It's also one of those things, especially film, a medium, makes it easy.

I also think comics are also really easy. Oh yeah, film is just an easy thing to sit there and shit on. If it's a bad book, I have a hard time paying attention and keep reading it. If it's a bad comic, I will just laugh when you see someone

going like... Who is that god who is that one comic with the marvel authors who drew everyone all the dudes and like that super what yeah it was layfield yeah it was layfield rob layfield and layfield yeah who's just like every every drawing he did you're like what, what the fuck? Nobody looks like that. Yes. Who's the one who did all the hands? Everyone is super buff, but the legs are super tiny. He sure can.

Well, he couldn't draw women's body postures, ever. He's the one that popularized, partly popularized, like the female hero pose, where their ass is to the camera and their tits partly popularized at like the female hero pose where like their ass is to the camera and their tits are to the camera at the same time. You know, where they're like doing this somehow. And you're like, no one can bend that way. That's Rob Liefeld.

Like that's... There's quite a lot of... I yeah like 90s comics he knew his audience yeah that's not what i tried that's not what i tried to do i was trying to just like copy like the link to i'm just to one of the Captain America pictures. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Here, just for now. Google Rob Liefeld. It's L-I-E-F-E-L-D.

Captain America. his chest is a fucking shelf oh that one oh my goodness i forgot about that one i knew that one no it's i don't even know how he was meant it doesn't look like a human being that's some kind of error like i i genuinely think he made an error somewhere and then he couldn't correct it so i think our some bad editor's distraction but anyone if you haven't looked up rob blyfield's like yeah i feel like I feel like if the editor had just kind of like pulled the head in and like gotten rid of some of the back. In that image, it would be fine. His head is just too far back.

His head needs to be. So I said this. So, like, I think we've sort of taken this history sort of into where we find it in the in the modern era. Right. this history sort of into where we find it in the in the modern era right because we've touched on essentially making it to what we what you sort of called like the golden age of this sort of thing like there's or like i want to say the first sort of major popularization of fantasy specifically in the era where you've got like people that everybody knows like tolkien c.s lewis stuff like that c.s lewis who is a whole can of worms that we're going to talk about eventually.

I just bought the Scootie Players. Oh jeez. I've forgotten his actual name but there is a fantasy author early 20th century who genuinely his title that he's most famous for is

like Lord Dunsany. Yeah, Lord Dunsany. Yeah. Who was a genuine lord. And he's also actually really influential. Like Lovecraft is actually, Lovecraft's entire mythology is actually heavily based around Scott something.

So it's the right Honorable Lord Dunsany Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett. God, I love the British so much. He was also a World War I veteran. Yeah, I mean, he looks like it. I mean, yeah, he was

an officer, but he apparently saw some proper combat, so I'm a bit more respectful to him than, like, Churchill. Churchill can't just go, fuck off, that fucker. Anyway. But he wrote quite a lot. And then it's also, like, Arthur Mashen is also really important. There was quite a lot of figures earlier that I feel is, like,

too forgotten a bit. Also, we haven't brought up enough, but that's also because we've already gone on an hour and a half. If I had brought up them, I would have not only had to explain what they wrote, but like gone into it. But there is, so there's quite a lot. And I do think like, it's up here.

If you want, we can take it another time when we discuss like new wave science fiction yeah because then after that you get in yeah to like a whole another wave of science fiction that we sort of mentioned at the beginning i think that sort of comes in like the 50s and 60s and like especially 60s and 70s uh 50s is still largely within quotation marks golden age because obviously there is never like a clear cut like you breaks it off and then becomes but yeah it's generally one because it's also in the 60s and 70s but like a lot of the younger offers again like Le Guin, like Moorcock it's because I've forgotten them all mine is a blank

but that's where quite a lot of them becomes and they become I was about to say for the most part this podcast is covered a lot yeah but there is that's where a lot of our biggest influences come from if I were to do it then I would want to talk a bit more,

because there especially politics become quite a heavy thing. Because, yeah, sure, absolutely, politics infects everything you write, whatever. There it becomes much more explicit. As we already discussed a bit when we talked about Moorcock and Star Trek Stormtroopers, it becomes a bit more of this flag in the sand, where it's like, you need to take a position here. Which is fascinating on its own.

I mean, that's probably mostly because so long was spent ignoring that. It was like, the politics were always even if people didn't realize they were there they were always there but you know it was kept quiet for the most part it's the idea that you don't have to write about politics or it's the idea that you should avoid writing about politics but not realizing that well every act of writing is politics that

that is basically sort of a synopsis for what i'm trying to do in this show is that like even when you don't think you're doing politics you are that's what i'm talking about sort of that's what we talk about the surface and the hidden sort of politics in these works even when authors don't think they're doing it they are still doing it and and it's like i've gotten i've gotten into bigger arguments um and gotten dog piled oh that was who was it takes than i have for anything else i could i could get on i could get on there i could get on there and yell about about youth liberation or something that is super controversial and not get any attention, but then when I say actually everything you do is politics,

I get dog-eyed. What fandom was that that came after you? It was the Warhammer. It was the Warhammer people when you told them. Which is the worst. Warhammer started as an anti-fascist, anti-Thatcher thing. Because if you read it, it's late 70s and early 80s British comics.

Especially like 2000 AD. Which is not only as anti-Thatcher as you can get. Most of those people were anarchists. Absolutely. they were absolutely a bit too what i would call like masculinist like a bit too boys being boys but well it's it's that and then over the past like 30 ish years they've gotten more and more into the position of gearing things towards like the colonial marines being cruel the comics the comics that then inspired the warhammer people but like their visions had quite a lot of explicit political

messages and like the warhammer thing and this is a thing that i think is very important which is like when you're thinking about that community specifically it's like it's a perfect example of like i guess let's see if i used to say the right word here but like recuperating right they recuperated a lot of these radical imagery radical stories from comics into a into a game that very much commodified and made the radicalism an aesthetic. Because that's why I personally am a bit like... I personally don't think Warhammer has ever really been anti-fascist. I always think that it's always just used anti-fascism to sell it. Like, the difference is that for a while at least,

they were very aware of it. But by the 2000s selling shit and then it became a lot it's it's like when they started giving excuses to the empire to be imperial which the imperium is roughly a carbon copy of uh the human empire from uh pat mills i think it's warlock stories just gonna wait no nemesis nemesis the warlock of the human empire from Pat Mills. I think it's Warlock Stories. Just going to wait. No, Nemesis.

Nemesis, the Warlock Stories, which is an explicitly genocidal empire who are the bad guys. They are the villains. Look, I think, I love this, but I think this is a discussion for a whole other episode is a discussion of the idea of what I call of like two.

There's two topics here. That's what I do. That sort of go together that I think deserve a whole separate episode, which the idea of like what you guys were talking about, sort of using like recouping sort of revolutionary stuff as media, which then gets commodified, which removes some of its revolutionary potential. stuff as media which then gets commodified which removes some of its revolutionary potential and one of my things which is like right-wingers don't give a shit if something's supposed to be satire or not and they will just take it at face value and like it anyway which comes back which circles back to us when you're talking about the example i always that springs my mind a lot is when you're talking about starship troopers so highin was a piece of shit and the book is a piece of shit, right?

Like the politics of it, like the, the, the politics of it. I bought it for a dollar from my library. He, he satirized it. He satirized the politics of starship troopers to show you how stupid it is.

But the same right-wingers still like the movie because satire is lost on them or is sort of useless against them. And you get this sort of thing in like Warhammer when you have people glorifying the Imperium because they find excuses for it and suddenly the thing that was supposed to be a satire of a bad thing is now good again. And I think that's like a whole

separate discussion. I just want to say this for the hot take which is just like Starship Troopers is a shit book. Yeah, politics is shit, but among the Highland books, it is one of his worst in terms of writing.

I mean, I've always sort of been to the understanding that if you actually want to read Highland where his writing is actually kind of good, you should read The Moon is a Horace Mistress or something. Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land. I mean, Stranger has

a weird, misogynistic orgy thingy going on in it. That's such a nice timeline. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's like there's no Heinlein novel that you'll be able to read and be like, okay, there's at least a few parts that you're like that's a little problematic like Lazarus Longbook

which is incredibly misogynist and like look I think yeah a lot of popular culture has been incredibly misogynist um so I think for a very long time to wrap it up here i think so i think the lessons to draw from here is number one the history of like fiction and these genres is way more is way longer and more complex than people typically like to think particularly when you like look at like history of the things before sort of the novel there's you know the lack of distinction between what is a fantasy and what is just a story that you there's, you know, the lack of distinction between what is a fantasy and what is just a story that you're telling, then, you know what I mean? Because

you could, you talk about what were essentially sort of religious or moral tales from all sorts of ancient cultures across time. Then you get into, you know, your novelization and the fact that there are so many more authors out there that influence the developments of these genres. And I think a couple things we've learned specifically i or at least i have i say we it could be just me because i'm dumb picking up on the fact that like the more close connection of horror to the two things to the fantasy and sci-fi that we talk about because like when we started the podcast i didn't even think about considering like horror in with like you know the two sort of genres that we cover a lot. I

didn't even think about including horror because horror is not really my thing. Like I'm not a big horror guy. I don't particularly enjoy being scared. Like it's not, it's not a genre for me particularly, but you're right, Elias, in pointing out that like, it's, it is sort of intricately tied to these other two because they developed a lot from the same place. It just horror has sort of branched off into maturity sooner than the other two. And what I would call like sort of mainstream acceptance faster than the other two.

And I think that is sort of. Or at least it is mainstream proliferation. Mainstream proliferation. I think it sort of ended up cleaving it from the other two in a way where like sci-fi and fantasy stayed sort of together for a little bit, for a bit longer. That's very accurate. But I also think it's important to kind of sort of think about like how the genres themselves are actually very recent

developments like they are just yeah the idea of delineating them into genres like the concepts and the ideas existed earlier but like the genres themselves are like very new like i didn't even go into it but you can make a whole thing i about how science fiction is only possible in a capitalist world because of the chantment and stuff like that. There's quite a lot of it. Yeah. The other thing I think we do need to take away from this is that even though I was slightly ahead of the ball

because I just said this to Ketho last week, was that it was probably due time for us to talk about more cock but like you know check the dms i was talking about before today but i think this has sort of reinforced the idea that we need to dive a little bit more into some of these other like you know early popular authors you know what i mean to like get into some more of the roots like we need to talk about more cock and stuff like that. And that we should be reference. We need to read him so we can more accurately attribute his references. And Morris.

Yeah. Morris. Like, so we can more accurately when we're, when, when we're reading later things and sort of attributing, you know, themes or tropes or whatever,

we can more accurately attribute them to where they came from, as opposed to being like, it's high fantasy, baby. You know what I mean? Like we need to, we need to be more thorough and sort of having our background knowledge. So I can actually like attribute things properly.

May I also recommend an episode, which is going to make it even harder for you. Like Fritz Lieber, uh, gray mouse and Paffin, because like, Fritz Lieber, Grey Mouse and Paffin,

because, like, I can make an argument that that is the singular thing virtually all modern epic or high fantasy at least traces some of its trope from. Like, if you ever see, like, a major city in fantasy fiction,

it will probably be Lankmare from Grey Mouse and Rumpfafn but with a different name it's I just want to say I will gladly return

for any episode I've read so little science fiction and fantasy fiction since I started university because I read so much. That was the thing that ruined me. I read so much in high school, and then when I went to college, I just stopped. The only time I started back up was because of this podcast and i mean i started up because i had a job that allowed me to find i had a job you know starting like four years ago or three years ago that allowed me to listen to audiobooks

while i was at work and i was like i started piling back through books again and i was like damn i need to talk to somebody about this bullshit because it's making me think about stuff no but i mean that's kind of how it works. Like, I tend to actually read quite a lot. I've started lately to read quite a lot of comics again. Because like, I don't know, I can separate it a bit from like, reading a lot of history books. It's like, that's what I do nowadays. I like read books about the Middle Ages or stuff like that. or stuff like that. Well, I think we've also from this episode gotten quite a few ideas for, you know, some upcoming bonus episodes like, I don't know, Warhammer or like these other things that sort of take in these, you know, aspects.

I feel like we probably do a bonus on just the lost meaning of satire. Yeah. So thank you everyone for, for sticking through listening to this one. I think this is honestly probably one of our most actually informative episodes we've ever done, like episodes with actual information in it as opposed to simply my opinions about things.

So thank you, Elias, for giving us actual factual stuff to talk about for one no problem i hope it worked i don't know thank you everyone for listening as we mentioned we do have patreon if you want to listen to bonus episodes about why star wars is fantasy and not sci-fi and a bunch of things that we've talked about today that will be coming out soon. As always, our social media links are going to be in the description. We'll put Elias' handle in the description if you want so more people can follow you on Twitter for your hot takes.

And thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bro. Are you fucking real man come on