When Weird Becomes Normal with Kate Marshall

What can weird fiction teach us about navigating a reality shaped by technology, environmental crisis, and the shifting boundaries between human and non-human perspectives?

In this episode of the Tech Humanist Show, the conversation focused on the power of “weirdness” as both a signal from the future and a way to make sense of our rapidly changing world. Special guest Kate Marshall, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and author of Novels by Weird: Tales and the 21st Century, joins to explore how weird fiction, genre hybridity, and non-human narration can offer unique insights into technology, scale, and what it means to stay human as reality grows stranger.

Dive into how stories, genres, and the unexpected “weird” help us make sense of complex systems and imagine better futures.

Topics Covered

• Weirdness as a lens for the future
• The evolution of “weird fiction” and its historical context
• Non-human narration and narrative experiments
• Genre’s role in conceptual thinking
• Scale and the challenge of representing catastrophe
• The reading crisis and cultural shifts in reading
• AI, storytelling, and the transformation of narrative
• Speculative fiction as a thinking tool
• Weirdness as data and a signal from the future
• Balancing melancholy and optimism for the future

Connect with Kate Marshall
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Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century

Episode Chapters
00:00: Introduction to the Tech Humanist Show and the concept of weirdness
01:55: Kate Marshall on taking weirdness seriously
04:40: How 21st-century novels are getting weirder
06:09: The rise of non-human perspectives in contemporary fiction
09:48: Genre as a space for novelists to wrestle with scale
13:54: Genre fragments as creative encounters with societal wreckage
16:00: Scale: Representing catastrophe and individual experience
20:27: Tension between decentering the human and human narration
23:18: How non-human perspectives shift agency and responsibility
25:50: The contemporary crisis in reading and criticism
28:03: AI, large language models, and the future of reading/writing
31:32: Genre, language models, and the future of literary creativity
36:16: Story moves for imagining and building better futures
38:56: Treating weirdness as data, not doom
40:46: Optimism, storytelling, and hope for the future
43:22: Outro and thanks