74. Science Fiction and Arthur Conan Doyle, with Anastasia Klimchynskaya

Professor Challenger, drawn by Herbert M. Stoops, in 'When the World Screamed' (Liberty, 1928)

This month, we are delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr Anastasia Klimchynskaya to talk all things Arthur Conan Doyle and Science Fiction.

You can listen to the episode here:

The show notes can be accessed at https://bit.ly/DOD74sn (for all show notes, just replace ‘74’ with the episode number in question).

The episode will shortly be posted to our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@doingsofdoyle. Please like and subscribe! 

Anastasia Klimchynskaya

Anastasia is a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, particularly science fiction, and is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University in the USA. She has presented widely on Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, Frankenstein, and science fiction, and contributed to the Rosenbach Museum and Library's Sherlock Monthly webinar series. She is also the author of Science Fiction and the Modern World, a sweeping study of the emergence of science fiction in the nineteenth century, which has just been published by Liverpool University Press. https://www.anaklimchy.com/ 

Books by Anastasia:

Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Science Fiction and the Modern World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2026) - https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781836244905 

Forthcoming: 

Anastasia Klimchynskaya (ed.), From the Earth to the Moon, Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553865/from-the-earth-to-the-moon/ 

Useful links

Darko Suvin, who talks about "estrangement" as a key feature of scifi in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: https://www.amazon.com/Metamorphoses-Science-Fiction-Literary-Ralahine/dp/3034319487 

Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870)

Albert Robida, The Twentieth Century https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Classics-Science-Fiction/dp/0819566802 

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (where he talks about scifi as a "Family Resemblance") https://www.weslpress.org/9780819568748/colonialism-and-the-emergence-of-science-fiction/ 

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895)

Next time on Doings of Doyle…

For our 75th episode, we cover one of Conan Doyle’s most important early stories, ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (1884). You can read the story here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/wiki/J._Habakuk_Jephson%27s_Statement 

Acknowledgements 

Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com), and our supporters on Patreon and Paypal.

Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.

Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ 

YouTube video created by @headlinerapp.