Stratofanatic's Emporium

Back in October, a cool journal asked me to review one of their submissions. Of course, I said! But this was back when I was getting swamped with my five classes, and anticipated having to design a new online Film & Literature course that I eventually ended up not getting. Plus, I would have had to order and read the two novels discussed by the submission. Thus I pre-emptively ordered the two novels ... but mentioned that I might need until December to complete the review. Although I normally complete academic work like this quickly, my work schedule and my "how quickly can I read this books?" had me sppooked. Anyway, that December date was only a three-month turnaround, which is normally pretty acceptable for academic journals, but a few days later my contact told me that the journal was hoping for a quicker turnaround, so they offered the review to someone else. No problem, I replied .... despite ordering two (now) unnecessary novels, I highly applaud journals who striv

As per my usual policy, I'm excluding the academic titles I've read -- just fiction here. For this latter six months, I've managed to get through 8,250 pages over 184 days, or 44.8 pages per day. (If you're interested, counts for 2019 can be found  here  and  here ; counts for 2018  here  and  here .) So, how did I do for the year? (The first half-year  found here .) FINAL STATS FOR 2020 : 16,550 pages (or 41 books) over 366 days, which averages out to about 45.2 pages per day. July - December 2020 Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World , 700 pg. Saladin Ahmed, The Throne of the Crescent Moon , 350 pg. Steph Swainston, Our Year of the War , 300 pg. Terry Goodkind, Stone of Tears , 1000 pg. David Farland, The Runelords , 600 pg. Brandon Sanderson, Elantris , 600 pg. Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon , 350 pg Piers Anthony, The Source of Magic , 350 pg Piers Anthony, Castle Roogna , 350 pg. Piers Anthony, How Precious Was that While , 300 pg. Piers Anthony, Bio of an Ogre

Just did a fun podcast where Dr. Ben Basset interviews me about the field of Tolkien Studies, how Leo Strauss might be relevant to it, plus other topics like SF, Chip Delany, the Silmarillion, and metafiction. For some background, he found me because he really liked an article I published in Journal of Tolkien Research right before COVID hit, " On Ways of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward a Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism ." For my part, I was just fascinated to be talking with this subject with someone like Ben, who's an Aussie archaeologist but a major Tolkien fan as well. Anyway, if you're interested, it's about 71 minutes long. Find it here --  Reading Tolkien: An Interview with Dennis Wise . Check it out!

And that's a wrap, folk -- final grades posted for all my courses. Overall, I taught 5 courses this semester (4 different preps, including one grad course), wrote one article, revised two others, did normal Fafnir stuff, and made some desultory progress on the monograph. Outlining, an awful rough draft of the introduction, etc. This last task makes me kinda blah on this semester -- I *know* I could have done better, but just couldn't. Still, everyone's saying how you can't judge this semester like normal semesters, and, even though I don't really believe that in my heart, I'll go with that for now.

This is it .... the final installment in my re-assessment of Piers Anthony. After reading the initial trilogy in his Xanth series , I wanted to delve more deeply into his other major non-fantasy fiction: Macroscope (1969), his best-known SF novel; Firefly (1990), a horror thriller about sexual abuse and domestic violence;  Tatham Mound (1991), a historical novel about Native Americans. I ended up having so much to say about Firefly that it got its own post. Now, it's time for my remaining chosen Anthony novels. All in all, they are.... good. Like, really good. Granted, none are masterpieces. The prose simply isn't vivid enough for that, although it's serviceable, and Anthony's work arguably never achieves that essential deep emotional impact that readers crave, and which certainly made me fall in love with writers like Harlan Ellison, Stephen R. Donaldson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Joyce Carol Oates. But these novels are all well-plotted, well-paced, and interesting read

And now, with official peer-reviewed publications in Extrapolation, Tolkien Studies , and JFA all under my belt, I feel like I've finally earned my Academic Big Boy Pants™.  :)  The article in question is " History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic Fantasy ." Alongside my two other articles, " On Ways of Studying Tolkien " and " Feminism and Sexed Violence in Stephen R. Donaldson ," this article ranks among my most ambitious and theoretically demanding, so you can imagine I'm pretty chuffed about it finally appearing. It's also the first article (to my knowledge) to discuss "totality" as a concept meaningful for epic fantasy. Anyway, if anyone's interested, here's the history behind "History and Precarity." If nothing else, it's a useful marker for the long and troubled road all peer reviewed research must travel. 2016 . I wrote an early version of this article, sending it off to Journal o

After reading the initial trilogy in Piers Anthony 's Xanth series , I really wanted a more thorough exploration of his work ... something to help me understand just how badly underappreciated he has been. So, for this project, I wanted to avoid fantasy as "been there, done that." I also wanted to avoid novels that I'd read as a teenager. Eventually I settled on the three notable titles: Macroscope (1969), his best-known SF novel Firefly (1990), a horror thriller about sexual abuse and domestic violence Tatham Mound (1991), a historical novel about Native Americans that Anthony considers his best. Basically, for someone who's written 150+ novels, it seems like a sad stroke of misfortune that critics -- usually hostile critics -- seemingly know only Xanth , which Anthony himself dismisses as popular entertainment. Overall, critics have simply never made the same transition for Anthony that they afforded Michael Moorcock, who began as a pulp author who ended writin

Seems like both Richard C. West, a respected Tolkien scholar, and Ben Bova, a well-known SF writer and two-time past president of the SFWA, both passed away on November 29th from complications due to COVID-19. I know very little about Bova, and, honestly, not much about West. Like many other prestigious Tolkienists, I know him primarily from his scholarship. So, I can claim no friendship, certainly not like what I've been seeing in several Tolkien circles online.  Still, let me mention two nice things about West. First, he published a conference paper of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword sometimes in the 1960s or 1970s that I found quite helpful for my own work. Second, he actually refereed a book chapter of mine for a potential McFarland collection of essays. That fell through (or, rather, I pulled my essay after losing faith in its editor), but I still remember my pleasant surprise when I saw West's name on the peer review.*** ----------------------- *** As a sign of thing

In my quest to avoid working on my monograph, I've recently wandered down a Piers Anthony-sized rabbit hole. At some point, I might comment on his two fascinating autobiographies, but for now let me focus on his first Xanth "trilogy" -- A Spell for Chameleon (1977), The Source of Magic (1979), and Castle Roogna (1979). Of course, these three books are no more a trilogy than my cat, Sawyer, is a trilogy. That designation was a Del Rey/Ballantine marketing ploy, pure and simple, and today nobody would question that Xanth constitutes an open-ended series with stand-alone novels that feature, especially after Bink and Dor, brand-new protagonists for each new book. Still, last month I accidentally re-read these first three book as a cluster, so let me mention some general thoughts on this "trilogy" before offering more specific commentary on the books.** General Remarks -- Xanth, Oz, and World-building As a teen, I never realized how closely the world-building betwee

I'm pleased -- ecstatic! -- to report that Fafnir: Nordic Journal of SFF Research has just won a World Fantasy Award. Couldn't be happier about this achievement. For the last three years, I've been Fafnir's (inaugural) reviews editors, and in that time the journal has undergone several major improvements from an already solid foundation. Although neither my name nor Jaana's will go on the actual award**, it's been a team effort all-around, and I'm so incredibly proud of my colleagues. I'm also incredibly proud of all our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members for their immense contributions, which is the real reason the journal has achieved anything over the last six years. This award is also an important coup for open-access publication. As far as we can tell,  Fafnir is only the second academic journal to be nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and the first to win. Adding a special flavor to this achievement is that our sponsoring organizati

Ah, good news. My general education course, ENGL 160D: Nonhuman Subjects: Monsters, Ghosts, Aliens, and Others , has now been designated as meeting Quality Matters Internal Review Standards for online course design excellence. I don't get nothing for it, but it's a nice little perk. The designation is also a total bear to get -- besides doing a two-week online training earlier this summer on how to apply the QM rubric, the rubric is just a bastard to actually apply. There's 42 criteria, many of them involving "aligning" your course content with course-level and module-level Student Learning Outcomes, and much of it is admin-centered rather than student-centered. (That is, students never care or read these SLOs, but they're useful from an admin perspective.) If you miss even one of the essential criteria, you have to revise the course. Luckily, despite a 25-page review document, I only missed one of the 42 criteria, so revision wasn't that bad. All in all,

 A few weeks ago, I posted a lengthy blog entry on the mysterious colophon implanted by the Del Reys onto their new line of Ballantine fantasy books in 1977. Thanks to reading Anthony's  A Spell for Chameleon,  I thought the colophon a basilisk at first but after consulting with Douglas Anderson, we concluded that it was probably a  cockatrice ...  which I found interesting because Doug, apparently, had always heard the symbol referred to as a griffin, even though griffins aren't two-legged critters. Anyway, after some more digging, I found a few other tidbits. In Piers Anthony's second autobiography, How Precious Was That While,  I found the following passage (p. 134): So, one of the unanswered questions from my original post was, "Why did Lester del Rey apply his signature colophon to certain fantasy novels but not others?" The answer, apparently, turns out to be spite . After checking Donaldson's book covers on the ISFDB, Anthony's story checks out --

My latest open-access publication: " The Hesitation Principle in 'The Rats in the Walls, " in Supernatural Studies . This was originally a section I cut from my article on the same Lovecraft story (forthcoming in Gothic Studies,  due March 2021). Only started revising this piece after GS accepted the main article , but Supernatural Studies was so amazingly quick with peer review and publication -- basically, five weeks overall -- that it's actually appearing a good half-year before my Gothic Studies article. Just one of the quirks of academic publishing. On a personal note, this is officially my 10th peer-reviewed publication .... though five more are forthcoming. Just nice to finally hit double-digits, though.

So, I meant to do this post several weeks ago, after I'd read Stone of Tears and posting about several Goodkind interviews . Then this nutty semester happened, and of course Goodkind himself passed way on September 17th. Yet, now, I'd like to complete about my thoughts .... particularly on Goodkind's  Sword of Truth series, but focused on the one novel ( Stone of Tears ) I read. Violence So ... yeah.  Damn,  there's violence galore. Even ignoring the few hundred pages of sex-torture that Richard survives in Wizard's First Rule , Goodkind apparent reserved a special store of gruesomeness  for  Stone of Tears : more torture, cannibalism (albeit by good guys, the Mud People), characters being flayed alive, gang rape (p. 414), threats of gang rape, genocide .... Goodkind runs the gauntlet of awful things that human beings can do to one another. None of it evokes much real horror, apart perhaps from the character who gets flayed alive. Either Goodkind doesn't have th

So, during my re-read of Piers Anthony's A Spell for Chameleon , I noticed the odd little colophon in the book's corner. It's pretty clearly aping the famous Unicorn's Head colophon from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, and it's signalling the new fantasy line that Ballantine/Del Rey was starting under Lester del Rey in 1977. The question, though, is "What the hell kind of creature is it?  For a while, I was thinking basilisk. That's mostly because of  A Spell for Chameleon, which features a basilisk -- a rare enough creature in fantasy that I thought Anthony's book might have actually inspired the colophon. (Similarly, I suspect that Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn inspired the Unicorn's Head colophon, but there's no knowing for sure.) Then I asked Douglas Anderson , who's pretty savvy with this sort of thing. He's always heard it called a gryphon colophon -- which is odd, since griffins are four-legged beasties, and this cri

Reposted from my social media : In my early teens, I read a lot of Piers Anthony. For fantasy fans of my age group, most of us did.  A Spell for Chameleon was the first "adult" novel I ever read, and I would have been 11 or so at the time. Even by the time I outgrew his novels a few years later, though, I retained a lingering affection for the "Author's Notes" that would conclude most of his books. They were, for the most part, honest and chatty commentaries on Anthony's own life, and I enjoyed them. Sometimes, since he mostly just discussed his life in these Author's Notes, he would occasionally mention his daughters. The oldest, Penny, was about a decade older than me. I then forgot all about Piers Anthony and his books for 20-some years, until very recently, when I was browsing through his biography, I saw that his daughter Penny had died in 2009 from complications from skin cancer. Anthony himself remained alive and well, which means that he had si

So, I started getting tired of reading critical theory for my book proposal, so, almost by accident, I started writing something about A Spell for Chameleon and the different possible ways of reading a text. (I'm viewing this as a reflection on our habits of reading, both through "innocent" or "reparative" readings against critical readings.)  Browsing through the commentary on Anthony, though, and there's a lot of overviews and summaries and so forth. Plus, I saw a few book chapters, mostly from the 1980s, one peer-reviewed article from 1975 in the then-nascent  Science Fiction Studies , and even one short introductory book by Michael R. Collins from 1983. Judging from what I've been reading, I suspect that Anthony -- particularly as his reputation has shifted over the last five decades -- might have been rated higher as an author had he *never* written a Xanth novel. Or even, perhaps, had he even stopped at only one or two. Some of this early commenta

Daaaaaamn . So, I'd somehow gone through my entire life without knowing anything about Terry Goodkind. I read maybe a quarter of Wizard's First Rule back in the early 2000s, but never finished it. Anyway, I started reading his sequel in the Sword of Truth series, Stone of Tears , and I'll comment on that in another blog post. But I looked up some of his GoodReads reviews, and they were brutal . Even more to the point, I also started looking up some of Goodkind's author interviews, and ... . ... oh my god, this dude is  seriously  batshit crazy . He's a complete Ayn Rand Objectivist nut job who doesn't think his novels are fantasy because they're too literary, and Goodkind also believes his novels have forever changed the same fantasy genre that he's too literary to have read himself. Plus, he's offended if someone compares him to Robert Jordan (despite ripping off most of Jordan's world-building). So, for your horrified fascinated, here's a r

Although I'm used to working everyday, this summer has been especially crazy in terms of teaching: Directed Self-placement Advising through May and June Three weeks in late June revising my online Monsters module actually teaching that online Monsters module in July and August GAT Orientation and Preceptorship in August plus various professional development workshops. Plus, there was all my other writing/research activities . . . finishing up on long essay in May, writing two encyclopedia entries in June, and thus spending July and August writing and research my research proposal for Specters of Tolkien: History, Totality, and Thymos at the Beginning of Epic Fantasy . (This last one is still ongoing.) Now, though, I've just submitted final grades for my Monsters class . . . on the first day of Fall semester. Thus, I'm about to embark on a luxurious 4-hour summer vacation before going back to the grind. Wouldn't trade academia for the world, though.

So, after sending back the proofs of a recently accepted article within 8 hours of receipt, the editor wrote to me: Wow, that is the quickest turnaround where we know you actually looked at the proofs in journal history. :) Which, of course, is nice!  I do try, after all. But it also makes me reflect that, really, there's no real reason any stage of the academic publishing process has to take so long (besides the writing and revision stages.) When I receive reviews for Fafnir , I return commentary within 24 hours. And my peer reviews are finished in a week -- not the months it normally takes others -- unless I need to consult some special hard-to-get source. It's just a matter of staying on tops of things. No wonder academics are so stressed all the time.

So, the website academia.edu tends to be highly panned by real academics -- it's free to upload your papers, but the website's attempts to get people to buy subscriptions are pretty desperate. (For instance, their myriad notifications that "Someone just viewed your paper X in an academia.edu search" give a misleading impression that more people are reading your work than truly are.) But one nice feature they have: if you download a paper, you can leave a note to the author explaining your reason for downloading. And I just received the following note: I am taking a class about The Hobbit at my local bookstore in DC with Verilyn Flieger and she recommended this article. Which is amazing that Dr. Flieger actually knows the article and recommend it to someone -- a lay reader, no less.** That really bucks me up. The essay in question is " Unraveling The Hobbit’s Strange Publication History: A Look at Possible Worlds, Modality, and Accessibility Relations ,"

Well! I applied for -- and received -- a preceptorship from the U of A Writing Program to help train and mentor incoming graduate students, who will teach English 101 and English 102 online. Initially, I didn't even think of applying. More than enough things currently on my plate, you know, including teaching sections of Honors module for incoming freshman in the Fall, but I applied when our WP director suggested the idea to me. Overall, since our GTAs will be teaching the program's pre-designed online courses, which I know inside and out, I was pretty sure that I'd get the position. Still, it's quite nice . . . and I'm slowly growing more excited about the prospect.** So, for the rest of August, I'll help prepare our Orientation Week for graduate teaching assistants -- the first time, in fact, I've ever been on the other side of one of these things. Teaching everything through Zoom, though, is disappointing. I'd love the energy of meeting all our ne

It still hasn't really sunk in yet, but our academic journal, Fafnir , has just been nominated as a finalist for the 2020 World Fantasy Award in the "Special Award: Non-Professional" category! I'm just blown away by this nomination. Sure, we've worked hard the last three years to professionalize Fafnir, and there's been tons of improvements. But . . . honestly, as an academic, it just never even occurred to me that I'd be engaged in something that falls under the World Fantasy Award umbrella. So, needless to say, I'm still processing -- but in a good way.  ;)

As usual, I'm not counting the non-fiction I've read -- just the made-up stuff. Final stats: 8,300 pages over 182 days, or 46.1 pages per days . Counts for 2019 can be found here and here ; counts for 2018 here and here . All and all, not the worst I've done (that would have been the prior six months span), but still not fantastic . . . at least I had the Patrick Rothfuss books upping this term's count a bit. THE LIST (Jan. - June 20202) Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker , 650 pg. Gail Z. Martin, The Summoner , 300 pg (DNF). Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic , 300 pg. Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind , 700 pg. Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear , 1100 pg. Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor , 500 pg. Fletcher Pratt and De Camp, "The Wall of Serpents," 100 pg. Peter S. Beagle, Summerlong , 250 pg. Laura E. Goodin, After the Bloodwood Staff , 300 pg. John Myers Myers, Silverlock & Reader's Companio n, 300 pg (DNF). Clive Barker,

We all know that he first published the novel in 1954 . . . but when did he write it? The question came up because my two latest entries for The Literary Encyclopedia , a biographical entry of Poul Anderson and an account of his best fantasy novel , just went online a few days ago. There, I mentioned that Anderson began and completed The Broken Sword in 1948. Well, no sooner did that happen than another scholar sent me a message asking for my source. And, wouldn't you know, I can't find it now. The issue's seriously bugging me.  It's pretty well established that The Broken Sword is Anderson's earliest written novel, which he wrote before  Vault of the Ages  (1952). Vault was composed in the 1951-1952 range; it uses an idea similar to one that appeared in "Tiger by the Tail" (1951). Likewise, Anderson mentions in his Foreword to the [January] 1971 revised edition of The Broken Sword that he wrote the original novel "twenty-odd years ago"