Stratofanatic's Emporium

A friend just sent me a youtube video "guaranteed to piss me off" (as he says) ... and boy oh boy, was he right. Now, I don't wanna dunk too hard on a random, passionate, sincere fantasy fan with a youtube channel. Since I'm writing a book on this exact topic, though, it's worth spelling out the myriad things problematic with " This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings ", a 30-minute hit job on Del Rey Books by a young youtuber whose handle is "The Second Story" (hereafter "SS"). First, though, let me state for the record I think SS does a relatively solid job at research, at least for a non-academic. For the most part, she gets historical facts right, and she clearly put some legwork into tracking down sources. (She even briefly screenshots my article on Judy-Lynn , albeit without addressing my arguments.) Nonetheless, how SS interprets her historical facts -- that is, the story she tells -- is what should raise red flags fo...

The perils of research! So, I just spent the last hour browsing a website called SLEAZE , which specializes on pornographic books from the 1960s. It has listings, covers, and all that good bibliographic information. My foray really is  research, too. One of the Futurians who never much amounted to anything, John Michel, wrote several porn books   in the early 1960s under the name "Louis Richard". They had titles like And Sex is the Payoff (Beacon, 1962) and Artist's Woman (Beacon, 1963). According to  Damon Knight in The Futurians , Michel got this gig through the Scott Meredith Literary Agency (SMLA). That's important because SMLA is the most important agency to ever represent sciene-fiction writers. And according to Barry Malzberg's Breakfast in the Ruins , the FBI even started investigating Meredith for his role in the porn trade (pornography then being illegal). Except they didn't have a picture of Meredith, so he told his employees to lie about him being ...

Exciting news from the world of the Modern Alliterative Revival! So, the poetry of Pat Masson , who died in 1994, was re-discovered by Paul Deane, who subsequently published all her alliterative poetry -- much of it for the first time -- in his online journal Forgotten Ground Regained . He only discovered her because of something he'd seen in  Withywinde, a journal for the Old English Companions. Then after scouring the internet (one of Paul's specialties), he eventually dug up a scan of a booklet her mother had put together for her funeral containing all poetry and short stories on ancestry.com, where one of Masson's relatives posted it. Most had never before been published.  The only other comparable story is Ron Snow , a SCA poet who passed away in 1997. He never had any of his alliterative poems published during his lifetime, but I'd tracked down his widow, who gave me his unpublished collected poetry, including his long drapa "Blardrengir Saga", which end...

So, what's the REAL difference between mainstream academic literary critics, and scholars who focus on fantasy literature? Let me hereby propose the RONA JAFFE test, which I've discovered from recently reading (way too much) traditional literary criticism on postwar American literature. If you hear Jaffe's name and think about her best-selling 1958 novel, The Best of Everything , well then, you're a traditional mainstream literary criti. But if you think, "Wait, you mean that opportunistic nut-job who contributed to the mid-80s Satanic panic with Mazes and Monsters in 1981?", your fantasy credentials are assured.

Well, shucks ... if this ain't a nice thing to wake up to in the morning! About a year back, I reviewed an article for Science Fiction Film & Television .... and just this morning, Liverpool University Press (who publishes SFF&T ) send me an email, letting me know that the journal's editors nominated me for their 2024 Awards for Outstanding Journal Reviewers . Now, this isn't an exclusive honor, mind you. Each LUP journal apparently has two awardees each, but still, each journal sends out a lot of articles for review, and it's still an honor. Plus these unexpectedly surprises are always the best. Much like my Mary Kay Bray award from SFRA Review two years back, I didn't even realize this one existed.  Moreover, when one agrees to do a review, you agree just because you ought to, but it's really cool to see a random mark of appreciation like this.

I'm a big believer in using data to improve teaching, and, having just finished the midterm for my World-building class, ENGL 178 , I was curious to see, among other things, how much of the assigned reading my students did. So I created an anonymous survey. Here are some results. So this .... wasn't quite as bad as I feared, actually. According to one study, only about 20-30% students do the required reading . My students did a good deal better than that. Now, granted, there's a selection bias here. Only students who attended class today took the survey, and one might suppose non-attenders would, on the whole, tend to be non-readers as well. So I'll mentally subtract 10% from each book. At the same, my linked study studies a different population ("hospitality and tourism" majors), and I don't know how that would compare to students taking a 100-level General Education course. DISCUSSION Some positive results. Out of 65 respondents, 72% read The Hobbit. To ...