Free Thinking: Wells' Women
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2016
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
H G Wells -- the man, his women and his writing. Matthew Sweet chairs a discussion about the father of science fiction to open the London Liteature Festival at South Bank Centre. Joining him for the event are Louisa Treger, Mark Blacklock, Joanna Kavenna and Christopher Priest.
Louisa Treger's novel The Lodger was inspired by Dorothy Richardson, one of the key women in Wells’ life. Christopher Priest's books include The Space Machine and his latest, The Gradual which explores ideas about time. He 's Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. Joanna Kavenna's latest novel is called A Field Guide to Reality. Mark Blacklock teaches science fiction at Birkbeck College and is the author of The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siecle.
More information about anniversary events to mark 150 years since the birth of HG Wells are found at http://hgwellssociety.com/ .
Sound Frontiers: BBC Radio 3 live at Southbank Centre. Celebrating 7 decades of pioneering music and culture.
Producer: Zahid Warley.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Welcome to the arts and ideas download from the free-thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:37.5 | A programme that marks the 150th birthday of HG Wells |
| 0:42.3 | should start by establishing its bearings in time and space. |
| 0:46.7 | So I'm speaking to you from about 6.30pm on the 5th of October 2016. |
| 0:52.9 | As you can hear, there's an audience here at London South Bank, |
| 0:56.2 | its members are binocular, bipedal, with a posable digits. |
| 1:00.4 | But there will also be an audience beyond this room |
| 1:03.0 | listening just a few hours after the programme was recorded, |
| 1:06.9 | and another more distant from this point in time |
| 1:09.7 | who'll hear it on the eye player or as a podcast |
| 1:12.4 | or on some yet as uninvented format and if any giant crabs or strange pale moths are |
| 1:19.5 | listening to this on a desolate beach on the moonless night in the year 30 million hello good |
| 1:25.9 | evening and welcome i think that this will be particularly interesting to |
| 1:30.8 | you because we're going to talk about the worlds of HG Wells and you occupy one of them. And we're also |
| 1:36.5 | going to talk about the love life of HG Wells and being insects and crustaceans, that ought to have a |
| 1:41.8 | certain novelty value. Beings of the year 30 million, |
| 1:45.2 | the phrase, HG Wells and women may mean nothing to you, but I ask you to bear with us. You'll be |
| 1:50.2 | able to work it out from the context. So let me introduce you to my guests. The novelist, |
| 1:55.5 | Chris Priest, is vice president of the HG. Well society. His latest novel is called The Gradual, but his book, |
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