Stratofanatic's Emporium

As I was updating my CV for the upcoming academic jobs season, I came to a stunning realization.** Currently, I have nine articles published (7 refereed, 2 non-refereed) . . . and nine articles pending. In other words, exactly half of my finished work, over two years of pencil-breaking effort, still isn't available publicly to other scholars. Two are forthcoming, and the others are a mix of "under review" or "revise & submit." And the main culprit, of course, is the drastic slowness of academic publishing. One of pending pieces, for example, was listed as "accepted and forthcoming" for three years before I finally pulled it and submitted it elsewhere, where it's now under review again. Both my currently forthcoming articles were written for the Baum Bugle two years ago, but the editor has been holding on them.*** Another article has been in circulation for a year. I still have faith in it, though, since it was passed over by three different...

Well, here it is -- Fafnir: A Nordic Journal of SFF Research is now officially on the Directory of Open Access Journals ! Apparently, we've been a member since July 19th. I filled out the application last April or early may; a rep contacted me with some questions in mid-July, but I though we'd get a confirmation e-mail of acceptance or something. Nope. So we've been a member for two months, but I've only just noticed.  Still, this is pretty cool. The DOAJ is a good, volunteer-run directory for journals who follow good practice in open access publishing, and it's nice that we have that academic cachet now. Next step: the DOAJ Seal of Approval , which is awarded to OA journals that follow best practice in open-access publishing. That'll take some added steps, including deep archiving and some changes to our copyright policy, which'll probably require approval by the editorial board, but we'll make it.

. . . and by "on" SRD's website, I mean that I personally am on his website ! So, a cool thing that happened. I know SRD, slightly, from ICFA 39 -- he goes every year, and in 2018 I foolishly gave a paper on him during the conference. He came, of course, and we chatted briefly afterward. Although Martina insists that I didn't embarrass myself, I'm less sure. It certainly felt incredibly weird to actually talk with someone whose books have been a mainstay of my life since the 7th grade,*** and I'm not good with normal chit-chat, so I exited the situation perhaps too hurriedly. Yet he, personally, was quite the gentleman -- and "gentleman" is certainly the right word here; I've rarely encountered who radiated courtesy in quite the same way. At any rate, before I chickened out, he gave me his e-mail, we exchanged a few messages, and that was that for a while. Then, last August, my article on SRD, feminism, and sexed violence was published in Ext...

If you've been wondering when FAFNIR (vol. 6.1, 2019) would be published, well, it's out! There's 155 pages of academic SF&F goodness.  We have material from Adam Roberts and Stefen Ekman, plus peer-reviewed research on Ray Bradbury, C. M. Kornblurth, Hayao Miyazaki, Knights of Sidonia, Lovecraft, Tolkien, and comic book Golems. There's also two conference reports -- one by Paul Williams on ICFA 40 , and another by myself on the Ursula K. Le Conference held in Paris from June 19th-21st. Rounding out the issue are four book reviews: Audrey Taylor's Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building Dale Knickerbocker's (ed.) Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from Around the World   J.P. Telotte's Animating the Science Fiction Imagination   William Davies's (ed.) Economic Science Fictions Lot of hard work went into this issue and, I gotta say, this is my third issue, but it seems like Fafnir is getting better all the time. Congrats...

My blog post title gives me a vague feeling of guilt. I know, I know -- we're supposed to like Delany. He's a prominent black author when at a time when SFF desperate needed the diversity, and even more importantly, he's probably the most theory-orientated major writer of SFF out there. Thus there's just oodles of material in his writings that causes literary theorists to salivate. Still, my intense dislike for Delany's fiction is hard to express -- only slightly alleviated, I must admit, by Delany owning one of the all-time great beards.  à à à Case in point. I recently forced myself to digest the first two books in his S&S fantasy series, Return to Nevèrÿon . I entered into these books with mixed hopes. On one hand, it's virtually the only S&S -- thanks to Delany's Marxist, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist leanings -- to get serious academic respect. On the other , I have encountered Delany before. Several years ago, I read Triton (197...