Stratofanatic's Emporium

Turns out I had to rewrite this entry significantly -- one of the perils, alas, of doing additional research. (There must be a moral in that somewhere.) Anyway, I originally wanted to read the GOR novels of John Norman  cuz everyone in SFF scholarship knows the common narrative behind them: Norman's the genre's resident evil, the pinnacle of misogynistic assholery, one of the eventual reasons sword-and-sorcery (S&S) died a rapid death in the 1980s. However, since I'm an instinctive iconoclast who always distrusts received opinion, I had to see for myself. So I finally took the plunge into Gor and selected a novel at random from my local Bookman's. This turned out to be  Priest-Kings of Gor  (Ballantine, 1968), and the sheer strength of its writing quality surprised me deeply. I'm not going to make any two bones about it ... this is a good novel of its kind. So you can only imagine how a-quiver with zeal my grubby little fingers were to rant against Received Opin

 On the first day of ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction, I asked students to name their three favorite fantasy books . Wonderfully, many of them actually had three favorites. We had 30 students overall, so I tallied up the results, including the few who couldn't resist naming videos games or movies. I should that this is hardly a scientific pool, but the results are still interesting.  The Lord of the Rings was the #1 -- Tolkien's still the king! -- but followed closely by Harry Potter at #2. After that there's a significant drop-off, but several books had multiple votes, including Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, and Sarah J. Maas.  Without further ado, here are the results: