Stratofanatic's Emporium

Just finished this one, and it's one of the few books that's simultaneously provoked a "wow, cool!" and a "meh" response. The book has Charlton's magic system to thank for its Cool Factor. Basically, all spells are written in language that has taken tangible form -- size, weight, color, the works. As such, there's a ton of fun puns and concepts in here. For example, the main character casts a spell in a purple-tinted magical language, which opens him to the accusation -- made quite seriously, mind you -- of engaging in "adolescent purple prose." To "censure" a magician prevents them from casting spells. Ghostwriting is when a spellwright casts a spell to create his own ghost. Likewise, a subtext is a spell that no one can see. Just as fun for rhetoric nerds like myself, one of Charlton's spellwrights can tell another's identity by the high frequency of double appositives in their magical prose. My favorite reference,...

 . . . is one of the best ways to get a lot of reading done. In the last 8 days, I've managed to get through four novels: The Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley (350 pg) The Spell Sword by Bradley (150 pg) The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs (150 pg) Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (650 pg) Ever since I started college, I thought authors who wrote long novels (i.e., 500 pg+) were guilty of bad manners against poor, time-constrained scholars, but by gosh if I didn't breeze through that Sanderson. (Of course, prior to formally re-starting school in 2003, I loved  excessively long novels -- re-read them multiple times, even.) So, 1300 pages in 8 days is a pretty good rate for me nowadays, especially as its mid-semester and I'm still teaching.  My all-time record, as far as I can remember, was during my MA comps, when I read 1600 pages in 8 days -- both Elliot's  Middlemarch and Thackeray's Vanity Fair . At 200 pages a day, reading maybe 40 pages an...

So, I just double-checked Marion's introduction to her brother in the Greyhaven anthology -- the place where she gives him credit for helping with The Spell Sword . (The detailed blog post on Paul Edwin Zimmer's author credits can be found here .) On one hand, she says Paul wrote completed "chapters" of text and that she splits royalties from the book evenly with him. That seems to suggest that PEZ deserves a (secondary) author credit for the book.  That "chapters" bit, though, seems like an exaggeration. At best, though only about 10-15 pages of The Spell Sword  (out of 160 total) are devoted to fight scenes that would have required PEZ's expertise. And we also have the fact that, whereas Marion explicitly states that PEZ deserves an author credit for  Hunters of the Red Moon , she's silent about The Spell Sword. Surely, if she felt he deserved credit on the Darkover novel, she would have said so? Especially as Marion isn't the sort of begru...

Sad news -- Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the classiest ladies in sf&f, just passed away this evening. She instantly catapulted into one of my top 10 favorite authors after I first read The Dispossessed in one sitting almost two decades ago, and her literary sensibility and poise has always truck me with awe. Long may her works prosper.

So, one of the research questions I've been pondering is, "Why isn't Marion Zimmer Bradley a bigger academic deal?"   On one hand, her career ticks off many of the major "canon" points that commonly help the reputation of speculative fiction writers: Signature series ? Darkover -- check. Signature best-selling book ? The Mists of Avalon --  check. Part of a literary circle ? The Greyhaven writers (Diana L. Paxson, Paul Edwin Zimmer, Jon Decles, and a few more) -- check. Significant influence on other writers ? Check. Bradley initiated the Swords and Sorceress anthology series, now in its 32nd volume (!!), and she lent her name to an important publishing venue for fantasy writers, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine . In fact, you can tell just how proud MZB was to have provided the first publication to many important fantasy writers. Cornerstone themes ? Check -- tons of feminism, a fair engagement (post-Stonewall) with homosexual themes and...

This shouldn't be a tough question, one would think, but it is. For this problem we have his many collaborations and the demands of the publishing industry to thank. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database clearly lists eight novels in total. But PEZ's brother, Marion Zimmer Bradley, also says that Zimmer wrote nine novels in her introduction to his story in Sword and Sorceress XV , and she would know, right?  Problem is, I'm having a hard time getting my math to add up. So here goes . . . .  The novels that unquestionably belong to PEZ are, of course, those books with his name on the cover. But even these aren't that simple. Let's start with his solo works: #1 & #2 :   The Dark Border , vol. 1 & vol. 2 The Lost Prince (1982) King Chondos' Ride   (1982) #3 :  A Gathering of Heroes   (1987) #4 :  Ingulf the Mad   (1989) These are all PEZ's Dark Border novels, and technically we got 4 books here. The tricky part is that T...

As part of my research on Paul Edwin Zimmer, whose Dark Border was my favorite book as a teenager before encountering  The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant , I've been tracking down all his published writings. Much of this isn't easy. Decades have lapsed since much of it last saw print, but Amazon is brilliant for finding out-of-the-way short stories collections and novels. This entry, though, is about the miracles of interlibrary loan. Zimmer's first published solo prose work was a chapbook called Woman of the Elfmounds (1979). After an unusual several week delay, the U of A library got it for me just the other day, and I quickly saw what took so long. Basically, they had to import it from Canada -- the University of Alberta, to be precise). Well, Elfmounds was published by Triskell Press in a series edited by the Canadian paragon of urban fantasy, Charles de Lint. According to the front matter, Woman was actually Triskell's first book in that series. Nice little volu...

Egads. Well, just spent an obscene amount of money for my upcoming trip to the 2018 ICFA (International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts). I went last year  and had one of my best times ever at an academic event; it came one week after my dissertation defense, and Martina and I capped it off with the trip to Disney World. This year, though, I'm a bit floored by the sticker shock. Part of that is that I no longer qualify for student registration rates -- another part that U of A grants no funding to lecturers for conference travel, which surprises me. A third part, admittedly, is that M. and I are splurging a bit. This year we're spending two nights at the conference hotel, which is about twice as pricey as the hotel we got last year, just three miles away. The hike, though, is a bit much for Martina; she's also had a rough year so deserves a bit of pampering. All that, combined with a few other odds & ends, means this might be my last ICFA for a while. These c...

After working manically on research and writing over Winter Break (more on that in a later post), the start of the spring semester really took me by surprise. I was originally assigned 3 sections of English 102, our research- & argument-orientated class in the sequence, but ended up accepting another English 101 because of some unexpected student demand.  Have to say that, while the extra income will certainly be useful (and I still think of money in impoverished "grad student" terms), I was looking forward to the reduced workload, especially with all my writing projects in the pipeline. Still, given the general insecurity of living year-to-year on one-year contracts, I couldn't in good conscience refuse. Plus, I still do have an ideal schedule -- all four of my classes are back-to-back on a MWF. So anyway, given that the semester snuck up on me -- and that I got that 4th class two days before the semester started -- you could imagine how I've been scrambling....

One of my students from last semester just e-mailed me, asking if I could be his "scholar interview" that he needs for ENGL 102 (i.e., the course he has to take after passing mine). I was, of course, happy to oblige. On the off chance any of my answers might be interesting, I post them here. - --- What kinds of writing do scholars in your field do? Writing in my field (English literature) can be split into "scholarship" and "literary criticism." Scholarship is largely concerned with finding out new historical, biographical, or textual facts about a particular author or literary movements. (By "textual facts" I mean new critical editions of a work, and so forth.) Literary criticism is mostly what I do -- it's concerned with reading authors in new ways and coming up with new interpretations of authors and literary movements.   What writing conventions are specific to and important to your field? How did you learn those conventions? Probably ...

The Washington Post did a story on my hometown . . . except the story could have made a unicorn depressed. Nationwide, 2017 was the year of the "retail apocalypse," with over 500 retail outlets closing down,*** and the WP thought my hometown mall made a pretty good example of that larger trend. When I last visited Hermitage in May for my high school reunion, the mall's state shocked me -- about half of it stood empty. That mall used to be the main thing about Hermitage. We're one-third of three interconnected cities in Western Pennsylvania -- Sharon and Farrell being the other two. (There's two smaller connected towns, Sharpsvile and Wheatland, but the latter is basically only a steel mill -- doesn't even have its own post office.) Between the three of us, Hermitage has always been the wealthiest by virtue of its high property values and, of course, the mall. Sharon at least has a downtown, but never competed with the Hermitage mall in any serious way. As a ...