Stratofanatic's Emporium

My friend Doug Anderson, who manages the blog Wormwoodiana  on old forgotten fantasy texts, just informed me about an interesting new alliterative development: fantasy author Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance trilogy, is coming out with a long alliterative poem called  The Book of Remembrance . It's being funded on Kickstarter , apparently, and will feature seven "in-world" texts on "seven of the major battles throughout the history of Alagaësia." The alliterative poem will cover the fourth battle, "The Ambush at Stavarosk." Although I've never read Paolini, I know he's most famous for publishing  Eragon (2002) when only 19 years old. But much like Terry Brooks, I'm sure he's matured from his early efforts -- dude's been around for over two decades now! Either way,  any long new alliterative poem is bound to set my whiskers a-quiver. Here's an tidbit posted by Paolini on Twitter ( here and here ): So. When our gran...

It's a new year .... so time for the my reading-list recap for 2025. The majority of this cycle's books were Del Rey SF/F novels from the 1980s. (The special surprise was Clifford D. Simak's Mastodonia , which is by far my favorite by him.) I read a few other period-relevant texts, such as Tad Williams's first novel, but yeah, given my deep immersion in researching Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, that was my wheelhouse last year. Otherwise, my non-project related reading was relatively sparse. I read one long nonfiction book, A Civil Action , for my Law & Literature class that was cancelled. I read a few books for the ENGL 380: Literary Analysis class that replaced it. And I finally did Percival Everett's novel Erasure, and although some might find this sacrilegious, it's still true: the movie was better. FINAL STATS : Altogether, I read 9175 pages  (or 31 books) this semester. So, that's about the same as my total from last year . As per usual, except for...

Apparently, Elon Musk has just launched Grokipedia , based off GenAI, as a way to compete with wikipedia (which it's probably plagiarizing). But given that the Modern Alliterative Revival is a hobby of mine, I decided to check out Grokky's entry on Alliterative Verse , particularly its sections on the Modern Revival. Everyone knows GenAI is prone to hallucations, so I wanted to see how well it did with something I know well. MY VERDICT : Grokipedia is ... surprising accurate ... but also dangerously  almost  accurate . Solely as a predictive algorithm, Grokipedia said many true things about the Modern Alliterative Revival. (Unsurprisingly, it cites my work frequently, not to mention Paul Deane's website Forgotten Ground Regained. ) In fact, it says enough true things that if Wikipedia were to disappear tomorrow, any lay person might even find Grokky helpful. Nor did I find any outright GenAI hallucinations. I checked every passage of poetry from Tolkien, Lewis, and Auden th...

Last week -- September 1st, to be exact -- saw a  very  successful conference completed, " New Perspectives on Alliteration in Poetry and Cultural History ." Many of the  Forgotten Ground Regained   crew were there, including Paul Deane, who reviewed his recent researches into the Modern Revival, plus Joe Hoffman, a digital humanities guy who also studies Tolkien. As an example of his work, he just posted his conference paper, " The Hunt for Alliterative Melody " (it's very readable), plus a more general  conference report . For yours truly, in honor of my book,  Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival ,  which came out in paperback last week, I presented my new discovery: i.e, we've been reading one of Tolkien's alliterative poems wrongly for the last 70 years. Since my article's still out for review, mum's the word, but keep your eyes peeled. But before getting to Tolkien's honorary membership in the Icelandic Literary Societ...

So I'm going through several old 1980s fantasy novels, primarily from Del Rey Books (DRB), and wanted to jot down thoughts on a few. Here, we'll be tackling three different books: one surprisingly good, one surprisingly real  good, and one terrible awful bad  book that could have used a few more rewrites. 1983 Del Rey Edition So which is which? For that, my friends, read on. The Surprisingly Good Katherine Kurtz, High Deryni (1973). Okay, this one's cheating slightly: Kurtz was discovered by Betty Ballantine, not Lester del Rey. But he inherited Kurtz, and her line of non-mythopoeic high fantasy certainly aligned with his editorial tastes. For my part, I wasn't quite sure what to expect with High Deryni . Back as a kid, I read either  Camber of Culdi (1976) or Saint Camber (1978), but it didn't leave much impression. Later, I remember Kurtz being politely criticized for her pedestrian prose by Ursula K. Le Guin in "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" .... and ex...

So yeah .... although embarrassing, this is my first fiction reading list since, um, 2021 . And, granted, this is my 2024 books, and we're already eight months into the new year. But I'm posting because, basically, this is the first time I've read enough fiction to qualify for a good "fiction reading list" in over three years. Sure, I read tons of non-fiction during that time. But fiction? Alas, not so much. Mainly it was an issue of research and writing. But it was also due to my duties as Director of Undergraduate Studies, which, during my final year of that ordeal, was truly terrible. Regardless, my fantasy fiction class, ENGL 378, bolstered my 2024 stats significantly. I did oodles of reading in prep for that course, covering holes and gaps in my knowledge and so on. Also, I've included poetry books in my reading list, although, as per usual, non-fiction has been excluded. (I do read constantly, even if these numbers don't quite reflect that!) FINAL ST...