Stratofanatic's Emporium

Well, this one's in the books -- there's a few panels today, but they're in French, so that counts me out. Just completed two days of the The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction and Ethics for the Anthropocene conference here in Paris, the City of Light, and it was pretty awesome, as one might suspect. I'll write up a full conference report for Fafnir later, but here are some preliminary impressions. There was initially some trouble with acoustics -- we were in an old, domed, converted anatomy theater at the Institut du monde anglophone where the echoes were awful, and, until we learned how to deal with them, the first few presentations were unfortunately simply unintelligible. Similarly, the hard wooden benches and tables were extremely uncomfortable, but maybe that's just European?  Anyway, though, once we worked out the echoes, many of the papers were fascinating, and it really hit home that I'm missing a big chunk of Le Guin's career by ...

And here's another link to Robertson's blog, which I'm posting mostly to remind myself of it: his book proposal to Johns Hopkins UP for a really exciting-looking book on genre fantasy. Can't wait for it to come out.

Very good blog post, by Benjamin J. Robertson, on the history of fantasy scholarship . He's also noted elsewhere on his blog how badly the fantasy genre needs theorizing , so I think I'm turning into a major fan. Basically, fantasy criticism has focused on four topics: the literary history of fantasy, its antecedents in folklore, fairy tales, epics, the romance, the pastoral, etc.; the question of the impossible the distinctions and relationships between fantasy and the fantastic the rhetorical strategies through which fantasy achieves its ends. This list is basically a variation of the more Tolkien-focused list of topics that I'll be presenting at Leeds IMC in a month. In addition, fantasy criticism's excessive concern with definition has also been a major hurdle.  And I'm pleased to note that I've read all the books Robertson discusses -- including recent ones by Farah Mendlesohn, Michael T. Saler, Stefan Ekman, Brian Attebery, and Helen Young. Good ...

Well, for the first six months of 2019, my reading hasn't been too skimpy. Alas, about half of this occurred in January and February, when I breezed through the final books of The Wheel of Time . The latter four months I spent much more time reading nonfiction & literary criticism, which isn't included here. Overall, there's 9,250 pages of fiction here (arguably less, since I used the paperback versions of the Jorden/Sanderson). That's an average of about 51 pages per 182 days . That's just a tad less than the final six months of 2018 (viewable here ), and less than the first six months of 2018 (see here ). Alas. Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, The Gathering Storm , 1100 pg Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, The Towers of Midnight , 1200 pg Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, A Memory of Light , 1300 pg Robert Silverberg, ed. Legends 3 , 400 pg. Robert Silverberg, ed. Legends 2 , 350 pg Robert Silverberg, ed. Legends 1 , 300 pg. Glen...

Well, this is a new one for me. I'd sent out an article for review about 3 1/2 months ago. The other day, the editor responds that the article had been rejected, which is fine, but no explanation was given -- and no reader's reports. So I wrote back, asking about them. Since the journal had the article for nearly four months, I assumed such reports existed. The sub-editor wrote back: We leave it to the discretion of our readers and editors whether to include the readers’ reports with the verdict. While it is uncommon that both readers decline to share their reports, it does happen. While I am not privy to the specific circumstances of your case, readers typically decline to share if they think that their anonymity is compromised by their comments. Likewise, if the editors feel that a report is unhelpful—for any number of reasons—for the author, they will not include it. So, huh. For my part, I can't really see why the first reason (compromised anonymity) would apply ...