Stratofanatic's Emporium

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 ...

If I haven't mentioned it before, my 100-seat General Education course on world-building is going gang-busters. For my opening day, I created an awesome opening sequence , based on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , using Adobe Premier Pro, and afterwards this adorable little fella became my course mascot. But before having my students start creating their Legendarium artifacts in Module 2, however, we're doing a cultural history of dragons and elves in Module 1. The basic idea is  (a) they're both really cool, and  (b) since most artists model their imaginary worlds on real-world history and cultures, we follow suit with the same -- basically, source studies into several medieval traditions. Well, in preparation for talking about Dragons in particular (to which I owe Daniel Ogden's fantastically thorough book, Dragons in the West , a debt), I had my students take a survey on the dragons they knew best.  The results out of 85 respondents: Toothless – 96% Smaug – 76% ...

For poetry fans, the NPR program The Academic Minute  just featured my research on the Modern Alliterative Revival on an episode. Basically, The Academic  highlights a new academic every day for brief, 2-minute long episodes. At the very least, it's a good way of spreading the word about one movement in speculative verse. Since I can't bear the sound of my own voice, I only made it through the first 30 seconds, but they seem to have done a good job with it.

Blown away that my Los Angeles Review of Books review, " Tolkien Criticism Today, Revisited ," has made a top ten list of notable critical works in 2024, as compiled by the Ancillary Review of Books . Their full article is here: " ARB’s 2024 Notable Criticism ." Here's what they said: Wise’s analysis of insularity in specialized fields is a warning that speculative critics, in our genres and subgenres, would do well to consider. So, so much good work is being done. This is a true honor. 

Just read John Holmes's lengthy "review" (actually, a 40-page critical essay!) on The Collected Poems of J. R. R.. Tolkien , edited by Cristina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, and all praise where praise is due -- this is one of the most lucid and enlightening articles I've ever encountered on Tolkien's verse. It's extraordinarily well-written and, at times, even funny. It's charitable yet also appropriately critical -- personally, I get overly impatient with the vapid "thank you for existing" kinds of reviews, but Holmes provides a much-needed discussion on modern textual editing practices as well as the history of textual editing for Tolkien in particular. This review also demonstrates a remarkable knowledgeable of medieval poetry and the history of poetry, which is a critical must for anyone trying to grasp Tolkien's verse, but something most academics are increasingly less likely to have nowadays. This is definitely a text I'll be r...