Episode 41: On Speculative Fiction, with Matt Cardin

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2019

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Neil Gaiman wrote, "If literature is the world, then fantasy and horror are twin cities, divided by a river of black water." Flame Tree Publishing underwrites this claim with their recent publication, The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror. The book is a veritable gazetteer of these two cities in the heartland of the imaginal world. Writer and scholar Matt Cardin, founding editor of the marvellous [Teeming Brain](www.teemingbrain.com), wrote a chapter for the book focusing on the books and films of the Sixties and Seventies. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil to discuss the kinship of horror and fantasy, the modern ghettoization of mythopoeic art, the prophetic reach of speculative fiction, and the "cauldron of cultural transformation" that was the Sixties and Seventies. Header Image by Moralist, Wikimedia Commons REFERENCES The Astounding Illustrated History of Fantasy and Horror Matt Cardin's website The Teeming Brain American literary critic S. T. Joshi British writer and scholar Roger Luckhurst Neil Gaiman, introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death The concept of "folk psychology" H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" H. P. Lovecraft, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" James Curcio, Masks: Bowie and the Artists of Artifice (forthcoming) American author Thomas Ligotti British author Arthur Machen Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Ian McEwen, Enduring Love Weird Studies, Episode 36: On Hyperstition J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) The Lord of the Rings animated film (Ralph Bakshi, 1978) Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time The Call of Cthulhu Role-Playing Game (Chaosium) Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978) William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History Interview with Twilight Zone luminary George Clayton Johnson The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) Stephen King, Salem's Lot Special Guest: Matt Cardin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst. This is J.F. Martel.
0:53.0	Matt Cardin is a writer, editor, musician, and college
0:56.1	professor living in North Texas. His first collection of supernatural horror stories, Divinations
1:02.1	of the Deep, was published in 2002. It was followed eight years later by Dark Awakenings,
1:07.9	a book that's unique in its mixture of horror fiction and what can only be called
1:12.0	horror nonfiction. Most notably for me, Dark Awakening's includes an essay, arguing that the
1:18.7	Book of Isaiah from the Old Testament bears all the hallmarks of a true-to-form horror tale.
1:24.2	And that thesis really captures the vision that Matt seems to convey through a lot of his writing,
1:30.4	namely that what we call speculative fiction has a prophetic dimension.
1:34.9	As he says in the conversation you're about to hear, it gives us a vocabulary for dealing
1:39.8	with parts of ourselves and the world that are the farthest thing from imaginary.
1:45.1	In recent years, Matt has edited a number of single-volume encyclopedias on mummies,
1:49.3	the paranormal, and horror literature for the academic publisher ABC Clio.
1:54.5	In 2015, he earned a World Fantasy Award nomination for editing Born to Fear, interviews
2:00.2	with Thomas Legati.
2:03.1	In this episode, we discuss a chapter Matt wrote for the newly published astounding illustrated
2:08.1	history of fantasy and horror from Fire Tree Publishing in the UK.
2:13.0	We wanted to discuss these genres in a general sense, and more specifically, we wanted to see how they
2:18.6	pertain to the periodist chapter deals with, the 60s and 70s. How does the speculative imagination
	...

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