Stratofanatic's Emporium

Although I've now a decent among of published articles for an early career academic, considering the glacial pace of academic publishing, it takes quite a while for anyone's ideas to disseminate widely enough to be cited by other scholars. My only essay out long enough for citation is my first, an article on Stephen R. Donaldson and the idea of genre. By a stroke a great good fortune, the director of my undergraduate senior thesis, Dr. Donald "Mack" Hassler, was compiling a volume of essays with Clyde Wilcox called New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction and, well, to make a long story short, he threw a young protege a bone, and gave me my first publication. Anyway, you can imagine my excitement when I recently saw that someone had cited me. Actually, tbh, I've been cited once before to my knowledge -- way back in 2011 or so, a scholar named Patricia Kennon quoted from me in a contribution to  Irish Children's Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on ...

So, some random coolness. Browsing through our U of A Special Collections, I realized that we have the papers for Evangeline Walton, a relatively well-known American fantasy writer, pre-Tolkien. She did a number of books based off Welsh legend and the Mabinogion trilogy. I bought a number of her books from a used bookstore last fall, intending to read her, but never quite got around to it. Anyway, apparently she spent the last part of her life in Tucson, so gave her papers to the university. If I ever get some time or the opportunity, I might try taking advantage of that collection for an article, perhaps.

When I recently got the editorial comments back for my review of Okja (dir. Bong Joon-ho) for Science Fiction Film and Television, the only tweak they required was some clarification on the A.L.F. (Animal Liberation Front). My review, they said, made it sound as if Bong had simply created the group for the film, when in fact it is a very real, clandestine, leadership, world organization for animal rights. Yeah well, er, um. . . . I won't admit this to THEM, but I actually had no idea that it was real. Somehow, despite all my background research on the film, it never once occurred to me that Bong might be using a real organization to help his protagonist. (*embarassed*) Anyway, after some quick googling, I tweaked the review accordingly. During the course of this googling, however, I stumbled upon something called "the GANDALF trial" from the U.K. in 1997.  Now, no need to panic -- everyone's favorite wizard is by no means guilty of any high crimes or misdemeanors....

So, Stephen R. Donaldson's one of my favorite writers, someone on whom I did my undergrad senior thesis. (I went to Kent State, where he got a MA, and they have a nifty SRD special collections.) Well, recently there was a volume asking for articles on the aliens in the work of various writers/tv shows/movies. The story of this volume is rather interesting. Mike Levy, a quite well-known sf and fantasy critic, tragically passed away recently, and his widow asked the fantasy scholar Farah Mendlesohn to take over this book he'd been contracted to write. (Together, Levy and Mendlesohn recently wrote a fantastic book on Children's fantasy literature; the cover itself should win an award.) Well, Dr. Mendlesohn wasn't that much familiar with aliens, according to her own admission, so she outsourced the writing of many of the essays and individual encyclopedia articles. I volunteered to write an article on aliens in SRD, and she just green lighted me. I'm excited about thi...

If life is inherently random, the academic life is randomness squared. With parts of Texas (including half of Houston) underwater because of Hurricane Harvey, and the same with Floria due to Hurricane Irma, it's hard to avoid thinking about the fact that half the academic jobs for which I applied last year were in either Texas or Florida. I actually had two job interviews in Texas, one in Tyler and another in Houston. Had fate brought me to Houston in particular, I'd be an evacuee right now. As it is, in the desert it's been weeks since I've seen rain. Best wishes to everyone weathering the storm(s).

Okay, okay, technically, the print version of the journal came out several months ago. Yet, due to various technical foibles, the online open access version has just been put up here. Okay, technically, the print version has been up for a few weeks, at least the full pdf version and the individual articles . . . but lacking the editor's introduction. Now, though, everything's fine and dandy. Issue 7 can be found here . I'm very excited about this issue. Not only was this my first tenure as editor in chief, overseeing all aspects of production, but we had a quite nice mix of authors this year -- see my editor's introduction here for more details. Included in this year's issue: "Corpus Christi, Superstar? Decoding the Enigma of the York Mystery Cycle" by  Hillary K. Yeager , grad, English "Self-Leadership Strategies and Performance Perspectives Within Student Aviation Teams" by  Christopher R. Bearden , undergrad, psychology "Doe...

Looks like my abstract has just been accepted for the 53rd International Congress in Medieval Studies, held in Kalamazoo, MI. Even though I'm not a medievalist, I'm super excited about this. This conference always has a large number of Tolkien panels, and I have the great good fortune to share panel honors with not one but two Tolkien scholars with whose work I'm familiar. First is Jane Chance, certainly in the top 5 of All-Time Tolkien scholars, and the person who's largely responsible, so I gather, for the large Tolkien presence in this conference over the years. The other is Andrew Higgins, who co-edited the scholarly edition of A Secret Vice with Dimitra Fimi -- a book that I reviewed for JFA not too long ago. My review was strongly positive, of course (they did a good job), but the expectation of meeting a person whose work I reviewed is somewhat nerve-wracking! Anyway, this conference is still a good long ways away -- May 10th-13th, 2018. That'll just be aft...

So, a whiles back during the writing of an article on Glen Cook (a personal favorite), I realized that I just didn't know much about fantasy lit written post-1980s and -1990s. Which makes sense -- that's around when my reading habits greatly diversified. Still, it was hard to make a case for Cook's uniqueness when I hadn't read several of the most recent writers he's been compared to, so I recently made a foray into Joe Abercrombie, known for writing a "grimdark" type of military fantasy. Anyway, reading Mr. Abercrombie has caused me a severe case of eye rolling. I've read Before They are Hanged (2007), the second novel in his First Law trilogy, and half of The Heroes (2011), a stand-alone novel set in the same universe. That was enough for me to get a sense of his style and literary character. My thoughts: BASIC ETHOS OF HIS WORLD : Sometimes, a writer simply tries too hard to be sardonic, cynical, and world-wise, and that's the impression ...