Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, a while back, I realized that the U of A had the papers of Evangeline Walton , who spend the last 2/3 of her life in Tucson, and I thought, rather randomly, that someday I might use them for an article or some such. Well, the other day, I discovered the existence of a journal known as the  The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction , so I decided to take the plunge and see if anything interested me in those papers. Alas, not muchthat I could find. There's a pretty lengthy correspondence from John Cowper Powys, with whom EW shared a strong interest in Celtic material, and a few letters from August Derleth of Arkham House (and publishing H. P. Lovecraft) fame. The rest of the materials were manuscripts for several of EW's novels. I was really hoping that I could somehow tie EW to a writer whom I knew -- Tolkien after the 1950s, perhaps, or even the Greyhaven writers, a possibility I realized once I discovered that EW wrote the forward to Paul Edwin Zimmer...

So far, the strangest thing about being a reviews editor for Fafnir is how easy it is to get free books from publishers. You simply contact the publisher's publicity person, say, "Hey, I'm so-and-so, please give me this book for free," and by gum they send you the book. In fact, with about 18 books in the stockpile, not a single publisher has yet to tell me "no," which astonishes me greatly. I suppose they benefit from extra reviews (some academic libraries won't purchase a volume unless it's been reviewed), but still, I'm pleasantly surprised by the whole process. Of course, the sad thing about getting all these free books is that I have to give them away again -- to the reviewers, of course. Cool fact, though: just found out that the U of A offers postage for books sent for academic purposes. That's quite a pleasant surprise as well.  All in all, I'm loving the new position. I really missed editing Scientia et Humanitas , but this i...

So, all my classes have major projects due on Wednesday, and so I had over 2 1/2 hours of discussion during office hours today. The last student was particularly having troubles with his literature review. We got through basic information like thesis and stuff, but he was stumped when it came to the author's methodology and evidence. I told him to work on it and we'd discuss what he found. And you know what he found? He found a "peer reviewed" predatory journal article written --and, apparently, edited by -- non-native English speakers. He was confused by everything in the piece, so when I myself read the abstract, I instantly recognized that this was pay-for-publication journal and a complete load of crap. Of course, I didn't make the student get a new source (it was clearly marked "peer reviewed" in our library database), but I certainly never had a student encounter this problem before!

Day 2 was a little more eventful than Day 1. The first panel had two papers on George R. R. Martin, which was nice, and my second panel was chaired by yours truly. All three presenters were doctoral students who did a fantastic job offering feminist readings of fantasy texts. One of the books discussed was actually Jean Rhys's Wide Saragossa Sea , which isn't really a fantasy novel except that it talks about zombieism, and the other two books were Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls and Marie Brennan's A Natural History of Dragons . I had high hopes of reading all three novels before ICFA began but, alas, only managed to get 80% of the way through Paladin of Souls . Still, the post-presentation discussion went great. Huzzah! And then . . .  And then -- then came my presentation on Stephen R. Donaldson's "Reave the Just." For months, a looming terror has filled my gut that SRD himself would actually appear, since I know he tends to be an ICFA reg...

Day 1 was intense -- four panels attended, and lots of interesting ideas heard. What's intriguing this year (as opposed to last) is how many papers are sticking to the conference theme of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,  which is celebrating it's 200th anniversary this year. There's around 2 panels devoted to her in nearly every time slot. What else is intriguing is how few presentations there are on fantasy fiction . . . a strange thing for a conference on the fantastic in the arts. Instead, there's a lot of science fiction, a lot of work on transmedia storytelling, and a lot of film and television criticism. While that's still all pretty important, however, it does mean that very few of the panels have been as directly related to my own research interests as the ones from last year. Last year, for example, there were a half dozen Tolkien papers, perhaps more, spread throughout the conference. This year there's only three, collected together in one panel. St...

So, speaking as someone who never gets sick, the last week has been a health catastrophe. First, last Monday, Martina and I went hiking to Bear Canyon. Great trek, but I tripped and banged the hell out of my quadriceps. No visible bruise, though it felt like a bruise deep inside, and it took me four days until I got full flexibility back. But, that evening, I started coming down with something. Then the next day, Tuesday, the coming down got worse. Before you knew it, I had the flu -- laid me out for a full six days, and I didn't start better until Saturday night. No major interruptions in my normal activity, though, although I stopped going to the gym that week. Otherwise, my academic work kept up. Through Sunday and yesterday, there was 36 hours of good health. But, after finishing my final Monday class, I started getting the shivers really bad. I trudged along home, knowing that I had some herculean work efforts ahead of me. My ENGL 102 returned their lit review rough drafts...

Just finished Paul Kierney's wonderfully detailed The Ten Thousand  (2008), a fantasy-ish re-telling of the Greek writer Xenophon's famous  Anabasis . The book left me feeling ambivalent -- so here's the good and the bad. GOOD (1) Beautiful writing . Really, truly lovely. The following is a description of the Greek mercenaries on the mark: These watched, amazed, from the highest of the crumbling escarpments, as now a great rash spread over the desert, a river of men, dark under the sun save where the light caught around them, a tawny, leaning giant, a toiling yellow storm bent on blotting out the western sky. It seemed a nation on the march, a whole people set on migrating to a better place. The sparse inhabitants of the Gadinai drew together, old feuds forgotten, and watched in wonder as the great column poured steadily onward, as unstoppable as the course of the sun. It was as grand as some harbinger of the world's end, a spectacle even the gods must see from th...

I've been having a run of reading really good fantasy novels lately -- a side effect, I suppose, of not having kept up with much fantasy since starting college.*** My latest "discovery" is Brandon Sanderson and his Mistborn trilogy. Previously, I only knew him as the guy who completed the final three books of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.***** I don't know why, but that somehow made me skeptical of the dude -- as if any writer willing to put his own work on hold to complete someone else's couldn't be a quality writer. So let me say now, "Man, that was a dumb idea." Anyway, a couple of things to note about Sanderson. (1) His metal-based magic system is really fun. Actually, my first thought was that it sounded like a video game's magic system -- clearly defined rules, able to do tons of cool things, complicated enough that it could motivate several kinds of plot, etc.  But the series has much more depth than most video games. In ...