Stratofanatic's Emporium

Once again, GoodReads comes through. Browsing through Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, not because I really need to, but just to get a sense of what it is for an article I'm writing. Anyway, it's not that good as time travel fiction -- almost exactly the same, in fact, despite the nominally different genres (SF and fantasy, respectively), as Pratt and de Camp's Harold Shea short stories for Unknown . Well, reviewer John  has some nuggets that are particularly accurate: The Prose & the Characterization "[ A]a lot of the prose is pretty soporific , lurching haphazardly between a sort of relentless drab utilitarianism, an affected cod-epic poesy, and a clumsy impressionism. . . .Maybe part of the dullness is that, while Anderson gives us great slodges of political and military history, there's almost zero evocation of the various ages in which the stories are set. Since there's no real sensawunda either -- the time cops ride around on their sort...

So, another update about my recent acceptance to Law & Literature , especially now that I've gone through their publishing agreement. The journal itself, as I mentioned, seems like a good venue for me -- reputable editors, a very professional and rigorous peer review process, and strong articles in prior issues of the journal. But the  publishing agreement for Taylor & Francis (the publishing house for Law & Literature ) also raised some . . . . let's call them worries, or at least questions, about accessibility. Exacerbating my worries, too, is the fact that I'm a humanities person. As far as academic publishing for the sciences and social sciences goes, I know very few good things about it, and it's quite strange for me to publish in a journal I've never actually consulted for my own research. So, I did some googling. Here's what I found: Subscription services for Taylor & Francis tend to be very expensive, and thus many libraries d...

Woo-hoo!** I'm very happy to report that an article of mine has just been accepted to the journal Law & Literature . The piece is “The Image of Law in Donaldson’s ‘Reave the Just’: Agency, Blame, and Sexual Assault," and it focuses on the problem of rape in the short story headlining Stephen R. Donaldson's collection, Reave the Just and Other Tales (1999), which won Donaldson a World Fantasy Award in 2000. But yeah, this poor widdle guy had had quite the adventure. I first wrote the article in 2017 as part of my article on feminism and sexed violence in Donaldson's work (published eventually in Extrapolation), but I had to cut the "Reave" section because it turned the piece into a 13,000-word monstrosity. Then I re-vamped "Reave" as a conference paper for ICFA in March 2018 and, by December of that year, converted it into a stand-alone article. All in all, despite feeling rather iffy about the piece, so it goes -- like a sheep I sent it out ...

So I just found the following: a really cool  S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship  that pays a monthly stipend of $2,500 for up to two months of research at the John Hay Library at Brown University. Considering I just got an article on Lovecraft accepted (with minor revisions pending) by Gothic Studies , I'm soooooo tempted to apply for this. But, discipline! After finishing my current two articles, which themselves are coming from my postdoctoral research fellowship from Science Fiction Studies , I really must begin on my monograph. I'm starting to get a bit article'd out, anyway . . . as much as I love the short format, having 6-8 articles "under review" and none of your work for the last 2 years visible does get rather wearying. Books themselves have a long gestation period, of course, but at least they're only one thing to juggle.

So . . . wow. Thanks to an eagle-eyed reviewer, I just realized that I've been misspelling "Fredric Jameson" as Frederic Jameson my entire life. Even the man's damn name is opaque.

Doh! I just received the program draft, and wouldn't you know, my presentation title is misspelled -- it says " Paul Anderson" rather than " Poul Anderson."** Alas, the deadline for submitting changes was about two weeks ago . . . but I never received an initial draft (and my e-mails asking for one went unanswered, alas), so didn't know to request a change. 'Sall right, though. Putting on a conference is hard work and highly stressful, and life's too short to nitpick minor kerfluffles. Plus the division head was exceptionally kind to accept my abstract despite its being two days late (and all my own fault), so this is probably just karma. ------ ** Btw, isn't "Paul Anderson" just the most awful name you ever heard? Amazing what difference a letter makes.