About Unseen Academicals: A Discworld and Terry Pratchett Podcast
An intermittent examination of Terry Pratchett's Discworld book series from an academic perspective, hosted by Joshua Bulleid.
Contact: unseenacademicalspod@gmail.com
Support: patreon.com/unseenacademicals
The second episode examining Terry Pratchett's 1992's Discworld novel, Small Gods, examining the role of books and memory in fantasy fiction, comparisons to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun sequence, contemplations of genre and what it means to be a "comedy", and seriously considering whether I even want to do the show anymore.
26 May 2024
15A - Small Gods, Part 1: Consider the Tortoise
The first episode on Terry Pratchett's thirteenth (and best) Discworld novel Small Gods (1992), looking at religious and folkloric depictions of tortoises, the idea that gods need belief to survive as a trope of fantasy literature through influential works like those of Fritz Leiber and the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as the early Dungeons and Dragons handbooks, the use of explicitly religious language in fantasy, comparisons to Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials series and, finally, an examination of religious animal ethics.
4 Apr 2024
14C – Pyramids, Part 2b: Egyptian Representations
The third and final episode tangentially related to Terry Pratchett's 1989 Discworld novel Pyramids, providing a crash course in Egyptian fantasy and science fiction—as in written by Egyptians, rather than simply about them. We go all the way back to the beginning, talking about traditional fantasy precursors and the origins of the modern Egyptian science fiction tradition, talking about its development throughout the later part of the twentieth century and providing some (overly) close analysis of Mustafā Mahmūd's The Spider (1965) and Nihād Sharīf's The Conqueror of Time (1972), before jumping forward to the allegedly more "authentic" post-2011 Egyptian Revolution era and the currently available English translations by Ahmed Khaled Tawfik, Mohammad Rabie and Ahmed Naji, among others.
Contact: unseenacademicalspod@gmail.com
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Apple Podcasts (US)
3.7 / 5
7 ratings
Spotify
3.6 / 5
5 ratings
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