49 episodes
Unseen Academicals: A Discworld and Terry Pratchett Podcast Joshua Bulleid
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3.5 • 8 Ratings
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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
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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 -
14B – Pyramids, Part 2a: Mummy Madness
Tangential mini(ish) episode, inspired by Pyramids (1989), examining mummy fiction and Western representations of Egypt from their nineteenth-century literary origins through twentieth-century film renditions and ultimate assimilation by stupid sexy vampires.
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14A – Pyramids, Part 1: Progress and Prejudice
We push the pop-filter to the limit this week, ptalking about Pterry Pratchett's seventh, unaffiliated, Discworld novel, Pyramids (1989), discussing the novel's critical reception along with its portrayals of plumbing, progress, pupils, personal identity, pyramids and polders, among other pthings.
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Worst Books in 2023
Josh counts down the worst books he read for the first time in 2023.
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Best Books in 2023
Josh counts down the best books he read for the first time in 2023.
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Best Albums of 2023
Josh, Eden and Karlo from Heavy Blog is Heavy count down their favourite albums of 2023.
Customer Reviews
Excellent, fun and accessible
This is my new favourite podcast - partly because I did a literature degree and grew up reading Discworld novels, but more because Josh and Alice have a great dynamic, make pretty heavy intellectual topics (postmodernism, the history of witchcraft, etc) fun and accessible. I now know roughly what a Satanic hero is. The amount of research and thought they put into this free podcast is so incredible I joined the Patreon.
Impenetrable twaddle bumping around a cave
A measure of how this podcast leaps around Sir Terry’s writings, this pot plunges in close to the end of the series: we are treated to a description of how Pratchett portrays dwarves, but then says there’s several of the books that people need to read to understand the progress of this portrayal. As yet none of the other books have been covered, despite numerous digressions. Indeed where Sir Terry elegantly used foot notes, this podcast plunges down caves of unconnected, dense expositions.
As someone with a Master’s Degree, I’ve plowed through many academic tomes that flow better than this discussion. They usually help also at some point begin to help illuminate a subject! Maybe this podcast set out to be an academic analysis of STP’s work, but ends up as a jumble of disjointed theories seemingly designed not to hold the listener’s interest.