Action! Excitement! Horror! Romance! Thrills and Chills! Swords and Sorcery! Rockets and Rayguns! Hosts Adam Prosser and Philip Rice take a journey through the history of SF, Fantasy, horror, and pulp fiction. Every 2 weeks one of us, alternating back and forth, selects a book or book series from the late 18th century up to the present to look back on, discuss, and examine. Some of them have left an indelible mark on pop culture; some of them are forgotten echoes of what might have been...all of them are weird and fascinating. (If you like our work, please support us on Patreon! Adam is at https://patreon.com/user?u=404623 and Phil is at https://www.patreon.com/Spearhafoc .
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episode 111: Chapter One Hundred and Eleven: In Cold Blood!
This is the story of Edwardian-era European explorers traveling to the north pole in an airship, only to find a strange land unknown to mankind, and populated by an alien yet advanced race of intelligent non-human beings. The encounter holds up a mirror to western society, colonialism, and the dark side of human nature, and things go badly for the protagonists. It's such a perfect encapsulation of this "Vernean" subgenre, so self-aware about its tropes, and so much in sync with modern day critiques of classical adventure fiction, that you'd swear it was a modern-day pastiche, but no: the book is The People of the Pole, written in 1907 by Charles Derennes. It's a great lens through which to talk about classic "exploration" SF.
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Engineer/Producer: Alex Ross
Theme song by Jack Feerick
Additional music: "In the Hall Of The Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg
(c) 2023 Adam Prosser and Philip Rice. Music (c) its respective creators.
Used under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution 3.0 International License.