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 Antho...

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...