Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall...

I earned a pretty hefty honor last Friday -- the SBS Outstanding Service award . As you might imagine, this is an award for service above and beyond the call of duty, and it's especially meaningful because it's college-wide, not departmental. Particularly with how nasty the last academic year has gone, with contentious in-fighting concerning such basic concepts as labor equity in teaching loads, sort of recognition from the university means a lot. Anyway, since I put excessive time and energy into crafting this self-nomination letter, I'm sharing with you all.

Thanks to Andoni Cossio scouring the University of Leeds's Tolkien-Gordon collection, we have now discovered a new alliterative poem by C. S. Lewis: "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg"! This is the problem with research: I just published a whole anthology containing  all of Lewis's known alliterative poems, and now another one has been found! Grump grump. It's a pretty interesting poem, though ... Andoni actually showed it to me prior to publication, and we talked about its dating. The title refers to Beowulf , in particular the evil queen Modthryth ( although this isn't a proper name in Old English; Lewis sees the word instead as "Mood of Thyrth"). Despite the title, this 12-line text was written as a thank-you note to Eric and Ida Gordon, two philologists at Leeds, after having stayed at their home for a few days. According to Andoni, a poem by Tolkien dated June 26, 1935 references Lewis's earlier stay, which therefore puts "Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg" to earl...

In the opening paragraph of my metrical appendix to Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival , I raised a conundrum: how do revivalists today officially arrive at an alliterative meter? The question’s a good one. In every case known to me, at least in English, revivalists never “grow up” with alliterative poetics. They don’t – they cannot – know the meter on an intuitive cultural knowledge, not as medieval skalds or scopas did. In other words, the meter has been moribund for centuries, and if young poets today – those crazy kids – experiment with alliteration at all, it is only of the ornamental variety. That’s what tongue twisters teach you: the rum-ram-ruf of sounds jingle-jangling together. Accordingly, if revivalists know what they are doing at all, they deploy a poetic form learned only as an adult. Someday, though, I hope to eat those words – or at least chew them slowly. The parties responsible are author Zach Weinersmith and the artist Boulet, the creators of a w...

When talking about original fan works of the Modern Revival, no discussion is complete without Paul Douglas Deane. If you’ve heard of him before, it’s no doubt thanks to his website founded in 1999, Forgotten Ground Regained – the largest and best collection of alliterative verse on the interwebz. Originally, Deane envisioned his site as a combination blog, fanzine, and content index, running things on that model for about a decade before life (as they say) intervened. But then Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival appeared, and this event motivated Deane to give his website a major overhaul. Now the layout is sleeker and snazzier than ever before, and Deane’s talent for finding new alliterative poets has been on full display. In the last few months alone, he’s discovered several new revivalists, and a few of them – Lancelot Schaubert, Amit Majmudar, Susan Edwards – have already been discussed in this series. The thing is, Forgotten Ground Regained – as important a...

I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, he had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than Anne McCaffrey, the next most frequent bestseller. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  21 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" nine.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distinct...

Last week, when comparing medieval retellings of the Trojan War to contemporary fan fiction, my reason involved more than there simply being folks like M. Wendy Hennequin around, people for whom medievalism and creative fan activity are deeply entwined. My other reason is that the Middle Ages can seem so distant to my students. Popular culture helps them grasp some aspects of medieval life and culture, albeit often in distorted form, for instance feudalism and chivalry, but otherwise? The instinctive concern for rank, the holy awe of kingship, the ubiquity of religion in daily life … all these things tend to be beyond the everyday experience of college students in the 21 st century. As a teacher, you have to find a bridge. Calling stories about the Trojan War or King Arthur “fanfic” therefore breaks down a historical barrier. Students know what fan fiction is. They understand the conventions. So while it’s easy to be intimidated by a syllabus that contains Dante’s Inferno with the gho...