Stratofanatic's Emporium

Well, every blogger is writing about the recent Tolkien biopic, so I might as well get in on the action. I really wanted to like it, especially as several reviews of the film by other Tolkienists have been suspiciously harsh. And there were parts of it that I certainly did enjoy. All the parts with the TCBS, both young actors and older ones, were well written -- funny, witty, charming, precisely the sort of good male companionship I imagine Tolkien cherished. Everything else . . . well, not so much. Most of the problem is simply how hard it is to portray literature and literary men on the silver screen. In order to capture audience attention, you need some sort of physical action or correlate to show, but it's really hard to depict language invention dramatically. There was a dining scene between Tolkien and Edith where the writers and director sure do their darnest to make a discussion of language come alive, and other places as well. For example, Tolkien's mother reads a ...

A bit of good news! Just heard word that I've won a R. D. Mullen Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies .  It's small, only up to $3,000, but it'll fund a 10-day research trip to the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy at UC Riverside. There, I'll be delving into the archives to uncover anything I can about the "pulp" alliterative revival. I discovered that this was a thing when I was looking at Paul Edwin Zimmer's alliterative poetry (published last November in Mythlore ). Zimmer explicitly credited Poul Anderson as well as Tolkien for being his alliterative poetry guru . . . which is interesting cuz I've never heard anyone else mention Anderson as a part of the 20th-century alliterative revival. C. S. Lewis, Auden, and Seamus Heaney are always the people mentioned alongside Tolkien. Even more interestingly, Zimmer also says that he knows (but leaves unnamed) a number of other poets trying to follow in the allitera...

So, our latest project with Fafnir has been retrofitting our new layout and design to our two 2018 issues (i.e., the issues since Laura and I joined the team); part of the job has entailed creating a new -- and the first -- cover design, front matter, plus a Table of Contents template. In addition, I've taken on the self-appointed task of registering Fafnir with the Directory of Open Access Journals in the hopes of raising our academic street cred and visibility. Well, the process has been eye-opening. First off, all due credit to the people who originally founded Fafnir , who prepared much of the information being directly required by the DOAJ. That makes things radically simpler. As I'm going through their lengthy application, though, I'm discovering that there's so many things I had no clue could be a part of academic publishing, especially for open access journals.  For example: The name of our platform or hosting service. (Our what?) any software/spider...

The thing I loathe about our university library is its relentless tendency to put books, absolutely pointlessly, into Special Collections. If an item is relatively rare, sure, fine, of course. Rare items are the special forte of Special Collections -- but the emphasis should be on rare.  Unfortunately, they apparently love putting perfectly normal books in there all the time, which means that they can't be checked out. Not only is this inconvenient (I have to be at the library), but sometimes large volumes must be read in their entirety in their uncomfortable -- and usually excessively chilly -- reading area. What's even more aggravating is that they apply to these perfectly normal, common books the same sort of draconian reading rules, such as treating items as if they might disintegrate into dust at any moment, that should only sensibly apply to one-of-a-kind illuminated medieval manuscripts. Yeah, yeah; I'm whining. First-world scholar problems and all that. Doesn...

So, two months ago, a group of us lecturers had our inaugural SF book club get-together, and it was a rousing success. We tackled Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora , which, although we all disagreed with its main theme vehemently (i.e., focus completely on ecologically self-improvement and waste no time on space exploration), it generated a fantastic discussion. Not so much this iteration's SF selection, C. J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station . On the surface, Cherryh's book looked quite promising. Won a Huge in 1981, shortlisted for a Locus award, nominated as one of the top 50 SF books of all time, and written by an author whom (while I've not read her previously) has been widely praised to the skies by various SF enthusiasts. So, we gave it a go. Unfortunately, out of the 5 of us who attended, none actually finished the book. I came closest at 80% of the way through; no one else came close to that, and a few of us didn't even make it 50 pages in. Most of the p...