Stratofanatic's Emporium

After gaining some good traction on how Del Rey Books brilliantly marketed a so-so fantasy novel, I’ve figured out that blog posts on long forgotten novels are the key to internet fame. So, let's milk this cow dry! Today's entry: Dr. George L. Knapp and  The Scales of Justice  (1910) . For the record, this is not an SFF novel ... but, naturally, it has a heavy biographical connection to fantasy. You see, George Knapp was uncle to Lester del Rey -- and a hugely influential uncle, at that. In 1931, Uncle George offered to finance his nephew's education at George Washington University, even putting the kid up in his own house, despite (probably) never having met Lester in person. Nor was George Knapp especially close to his half-brother, Lester's father Wright, either. (**If you're wondering at the names, Lester was originally "Leonard Knapp.") But Uncle George wasn't just extremely generous. During his time, Dr. Knapp was a highly prominent public fig...

Since I know everyone's been clamoring for a review of an early Del Rey fantasy novel nobody has ever heard of, well, I could hardly refuse. Besides pure orneriness, though, there's a special reason I'm reviewing  The Fellowship of the Talisman  by Clifford D. Simak. Granted, this book isn't terribly good ... but that isn't the point. For me, the real question is always one of literary history, and  Fellowship  serves as a fascinating test case for how Del Rey Books (DRB) managed to achieve success in its earliest days. Cuz here's the thing: if you're going to create a popular genre from scratch (as Lester del Rey most definitely did), then a useful item to have in your arsenal is, well,  fantasy authors. Except there weren't any. Not then. Sure, you had Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson in 1977, but both people fell magically into Lester's lap. They found  him,  not the other way around. Short of sacrifices to the Editorial Gods, however...

A friend just sent me a youtube video "guaranteed to piss me off" (as he says) ... and boy oh boy, was he right. Now, I don't wanna dunk too hard on a random, passionate, sincere fantasy fan with a youtube channel. Since I'm writing a book on this exact topic, though, it's worth spelling out the myriad things problematic with " This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings ", a 30-minute hit job on Del Rey Books by a young youtuber whose handle is "The Second Story" (hereafter "SS"). First, though, let me state for the record I think SS does a relatively solid job at research, at least for a non-academic. For the most part, she gets historical facts right, and she clearly put some legwork into tracking down sources. (She even briefly screenshots my article on Judy-Lynn , albeit without addressing my arguments.) Nonetheless, how SS interprets her historical facts -- that is, the story she tells -- is what should raise red flags fo...

The perils of research! So, I just spent the last hour browsing a website called SLEAZE , which specializes on pornographic books from the 1960s. It has listings, covers, and all that good bibliographic information. My foray really is  research, too. One of the Futurians who never much amounted to anything, John Michel, wrote several porn books   in the early 1960s under the name "Louis Richard". They had titles like And Sex is the Payoff (Beacon, 1962) and Artist's Woman (Beacon, 1963). According to  Damon Knight in The Futurians , Michel got this gig through the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (SMLA). That's important because SMLA is the most important agency to ever represent sciene-fiction writers. And according to Barry Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins , the FBI even started investigating Meredith for his role in the porn trade (pornography then being illegal). Except they didn't have a picture of Meredith, so he told his employees to lie about him being ...

Exciting news from the world of the Modern Alliterative Revival! So, the poetry of Pat Masson , who died in 1994, was re-discovered by Paul Deane, who subsequently published all her alliterative poetry -- much of it for the first time -- in his online journal Forgotten Ground Regained . He only discovered her because of something he'd seen in  Withywinde, a journal for the Old English Companions. Then after scouring the internet (one of Paul's specialties), he eventually dug up a scan of a booklet her mother had put together for her funeral containing all poetry and short stories on ancestry.com, where one of Masson's relatives posted it. Most had never before been published.  The only other comparable story is Ron Snow , a SCA poet who passed away in 1997. He never had any of his alliterative poems published during his lifetime, but I'd tracked down his widow, who gave me his unpublished collected poetry, including his long drapa "Blardrengir Saga", which end...

So, what's the REAL difference between mainstream academic literary critics, and scholars who focus on fantasy literature? Let me hereby propose the RONA JAFFE test, which I've discovered from recently reading (way too much) traditional literary criticism on postwar American literature. If you hear Jaffe's name and think about her best-selling 1958 novel, The Best of Everything , well then, you're a traditional mainstream literary criti. But if you think, "Wait, you mean that opportunistic nut-job who contributed to the mid-80s Satanic panic with Mazes and Monsters in 1981?", your fantasy credentials are assured.