A Meal of Thorns 04 – PERELANDRA with Taylor Driggers

A Meal of Thorns

Taylor Driggers joins us to talk about the second volume in C.S. Lewis's SPACE TRILOGY. A richly-described and philosophical science fiction story, PERELANDRA has a lot that's interesting and a lot that's pretty weird when you think about it.

A Meal of Thorns is a podcast from the Ancillary Review of Books.

Credits:

• Guest: Taylor Driggers
• Title: Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology by Taylor Driggers
• The Ursula Le Guin Archives
• Laurie Marks’ Elemental Logic novel series
• Philophantast conference
• The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow
• Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman (and our episode on it)
• The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman
• The other two novels in the Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength
• Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia
• The Inklings (wiki link)
• Lewis’s A Grief Observed
• Lewis’s final novel Till We Have Faces
• Ursula Le Guin’s review of Lewis’s The Dark Tower
• Lewis’s The Great Divorce, Pilgrim’s Regress, and The Screwtape Letters
• Stephen Metcalf, “Language and Self-Consciousness: The Making and Breaking of C.S. Lewis’ Personae” in Word and Story in C. S. Lewis: Language and Narrative in Theory and Practice ed. Peter J. Schakel & Charles A. Huttar
• Lewis’s debate with Elizabeth Anscombe
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
• Ridley Scott’s Alien
• “Sehnsucht”, the concept of inconsolable longing
• The Transformers franchise
• Aamer Rahman on defeating Nazis
• Satan (Milton’s version)
• Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and specifically the religion/philosophy of the Handdara
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain
• Casella’s essay on (not) defending science fiction against criticisms of complicity
• Taylor’s seminar for his work with the Le Guin Fellowship on historicizing queerness in fantasy and “queer hiddenness in the archive”, available online this fall/winter.
• Greg Egan’s “Oracle”, available on his site (and in the collections Oceanic and The Best of Greg Egan)

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