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.

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. 

Well well well! So, it seems that my article on Judy-Lynn del Rey for The Conversation , " The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due ," has now climbed to over 150,000+ (EDIT: now 250,000+) pageviews ... which means that I've now "gone viral," as the kids say. I'd originally written the article almost spur of the moment, realizing that the PBS documentary on which I served as a research consultant, " Judy-Lynn del Rey: The Galaxy Gal ," was going to premiere on October 1st. So I wanted to create some publicity for that , and just happened to know about The Conversation .  I've gotten a lot of extremely positive feedback about the article, too, and it's all very bemusing, especially for someone used to spending months on research articles that might garner one or two dozen readers, tops. Anyway, here's a few random reflections on going viral: Nobody looks at the writer's byline. One friend of mine post...

I've been meaning to blog about Brian Murphy's brilliant  Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery for literally two months now .... but life happens. Better late than never, though! Anyway, I can't recommend this excellent book highly enough. Given how greatly S&S has influenced modern non-Tolkienian fantasy, including folks like George R. R. Martin and Glen Cook, it's surprisingly hard to find good discussions of the subgenre. Fantasy literature tends to be marginalized anyway , but S&S is so pulpish -- so full of icky "-isms" -- that, frankly, most fantasy scholars in academia are ideologically ill-equipped to understand why normal or decent people might love this kind of fantasy at all. A ridiculously cool cover. Artist: Tom Barber That's obviously a problem for scholars. If you can't read a literature with sympathy, your critiques of -isms  in that literature will always risk being toothless or superficial. It also means you wo...

One thing that's occurred to me: many ECRs and grad students have probably never seen a good response from an author to an editor over a peer review. It's not a genre of writing commonly shared. So this message (see below) is something I just submitted to a journal editor. The peer reviewer was thoughtful and considerate one -- believe it or not, these are more common than the other kind! -- but I wasn't thrilled with the direction the reviewer was suggesting I go. This is a successful example, too ... the journal editor was cool with this proposal, and I suspect most journal editors would have been: they just want to see a sincere engagement by authors with their reader reports. Btw, nota bene: when I'm doing a blind peer review, I personally don't necessarily expect authors to follow my suggestions. As a reviewer (and as with teaching), you offer authors/students suggestions in order to jumpstart their thinking. The important thing, as I suggested above, is that ...

I'm not saying this is the reason academic journals are having a tough time finding qualified peer reviewers for their articles, but it certainly doesn't help: the sheer impersonality of things. Recently, one journal sent me a request (a form letter) through their automated system. I did the review in a few days, which is lightning fast in academia .... and all I got was a form letter "thank you" in response. No human interaction  at all, and considering that I gave free but high quality labor, the experience was highly alienating. Another journal,  Gothic Studies , does a similar thing: it simply sends out a list of 10 or 15 articles that need reviewing to everyone whom the journal has previously published. Nothing personalized. Basically just this: "Dear Mr. X, please do free labor for us. Thank you." Then, when I did once review for this journal, it took them two weeks to even acknowledge receipt of my review. That irritated the hell out of me, and I have...

That's a wrap, folk. Our latest issue of Fafnir, volume 9, number 2 , has just been published, and that's officially my last horrah with the journal. It's been a pretty rewarding time overall . Over the course of the last five years , I've had the opportunity to work with some fantastic editors and, of course, reviewers. In fact, it's probably been working with the reviewers themselves that I'll remember best about this experience. Although I'm closing out my tenure with relief -- the burnout was starting to get to me -- I'm still immensely proud of everything we've managed to accomplish these past five years. Anyway, here are the highlights and personal accomplishments: Developing the reviews section from scratch.  We went from having 0-1 reviews per issue to about 6-11 per issue under my tenure. Ushering almost 100 reviews to publication, oftentimes through several drafts. Many reviews were from graduate students and Early Career Researchers.  Wor...

 So, a prospective replacement for me at Fafnir  just asked me some questions about the position, and I ended up writing a too-long email. Since I haven't posted anything in a while, I'm deciding to share here: --------------------------------------------------------------- Hi _____, Great to hear from you. Yeah, when I started as reviews editor, I was in the same boat -- absolutely  no  idea what to expect. So I don't mind talking about this at all. I'll go through a list of topics in order: Start time . Yes, you'd be officially reviews editor for 1_2023, and your name would appear on the front matter for that issue. However, we currently have a backlog of about six reviews for looking at, so a new editor would informally start whenever, since those are the submissions that would appear in 1_2023. In my view, best practice is staying about one issue ahead in terms of reviews ready to go. This means that there's never a last-minute scramble for content, or that ...

Recently, a book reviewer for Fafnir  approached me with a problem. His first draft was vague and meandering, but that isn't necessarily unusual, as  most of our reviews need revision. Still, this fellow was a good academic, and it turns out his first draft was messy for a reason. Namely, he was floundering on the ethics of critically reviewing a book whose politics he so ardently supported. Although there  were  criticisms that he considered valid concerning the book's structure, he didn't feel right about expressing them. I appreciated his reaching out to me. I'm a relatively chatty kind of editor, though of course many don't have the time. And the ethics of book reviewing is a real thing. My own viewpoint is slightly different from James Gifford's , who among other good advice nonetheless recommends Books that fulfill career requirements simply cannot be read the same way as those that come after tenure and therefore without the same material demands on the a...

YES!!! So, my two contributor's copies from the most recent issue of Tolkien Studies  have just arrived .... my article is " Depth, Globalization, and the Domestic Hero: The Postmodern Transformation of Tolkien’s Bard in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Films ," and I think it'll be a highly useful application of neo-Straussian and Marxist theory to Tolkien Studies as a field. Here's a quick recap of the argument. Afterward, though, I'll spend this entry discussing the absolutely tortured publication path my brave little article had to follow. ARGUMENT : Does anyone remember the scene from The Battle of The Five Armies when Alfrid Lickspittle asks Bard, “The Master’s mantle was there for the taking, but you threw it all away. And for what?” Bard doesn't answer, but Jackson, who's not really known for his subtlety, quickly pans the camera to Bard's children, thereby implying that family (duh!)  is important. Anyway, that's Jackson in a nutshell. He takes...

So, I recently had (for another context) to articulate my basic philosophy of being a book reviews editor, so thought I'd shared that here.  Basically, my view of what a good book review entails appears in Fafnir's book review guidelines . Long story short, this is what I expect: The reviewer should assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses. . . .  If a book has more strengths than weaknesses, or vice versa, please let that be reflected in your structure. We consider it a standard convention of the review genre, however, that even highly laudatory reviews contain some critique, even if a minor one; likewise, even highly negative reviews should contain some elements of praise. In terms of unwritten policies, I return all submissions -- with comments -- to the reviewers within 24 hours. Besides expediting the total publication process, this is a form of practicing compassion for contingent labor and the busy workloads of all our reviewers. About 80% of our reviews re...

So, I was reading an article on quality peer reviewing (cuz I'm a geek like that), and I discovered that there is a community out there devoted to recognizing quality peer reviewers .... normally, a thankless task that conveys no professional benefits to the reviewers. This community is called Publons . I only browsed the website briefly, so I'm posting about it here partly to remind myself that I should later check it out more fully . It's also geared more to peer reviewers of scientific articles, who I gather tend to get more requests than humanities scholars. Still, given that my MLA presentation last January suggested a need to somehow recognize peer review within the academic community, I found this discovery of Publons quite intriguing!

Well, there it is -- my first MLA completed. Despite the unfortunateness of an online-only conference, I'm glad I participated .... although, granted, MLA doesn't have much to offer a scholar of SF and fantasy, as there was virtually nothing worthwhile about those topics there. (The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts will always be better!) All in all, I attended two panels on Fredric Jameson,* and all the CEJL (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) panels about academic publishing. My own panel, "Publishing While Precarious," was a CEJL panel, in fact. So, since I'm unlikely to ever publish an article out of this presentation, here's my conference paper that I presented at MLA 2021: “ Treating Contingent Labor with Compassion: Strategies in Journal Publishing for Reducing Wait Times ”. At least a few people really liked it ... and one respondent, too, really appreciated the point made between wait times and academic "Quit Lit."...

Back in October, a cool journal asked me to review one of their submissions. Of course, I said! But this was back when I was getting swamped with my five classes, and anticipated having to design a new online Film & Literature course that I eventually ended up not getting. Plus, I would have had to order and read the two novels discussed by the submission. Thus I pre-emptively ordered the two novels ... but mentioned that I might need until December to complete the review. Although I normally complete academic work like this quickly, my work schedule and my "how quickly can I read this books?" had me sppooked. Anyway, that December date was only a three-month turnaround, which is normally pretty acceptable for academic journals, but a few days later my contact told me that the journal was hoping for a quicker turnaround, so they offered the review to someone else. No problem, I replied .... despite ordering two (now) unnecessary novels, I highly applaud journals who striv...

I'm pleased -- ecstatic! -- to report that Fafnir: Nordic Journal of SFF Research has just won a World Fantasy Award. Couldn't be happier about this achievement. For the last three years, I've been Fafnir's (inaugural) reviews editors, and in that time the journal has undergone several major improvements from an already solid foundation. Although neither my name nor Jaana's will go on the actual award**, it's been a team effort all-around, and I'm so incredibly proud of my colleagues. I'm also incredibly proud of all our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members for their immense contributions, which is the real reason the journal has achieved anything over the last six years. This award is also an important coup for open-access publication. As far as we can tell,  Fafnir is only the second academic journal to be nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and the first to win. Adding a special flavor to this achievement is that our sponsoring organizati...

So, after sending back the proofs of a recently accepted article within 8 hours of receipt, the editor wrote to me: Wow, that is the quickest turnaround where we know you actually looked at the proofs in journal history. :) Which, of course, is nice!  I do try, after all. But it also makes me reflect that, really, there's no real reason any stage of the academic publishing process has to take so long (besides the writing and revision stages.) When I receive reviews for Fafnir , I return commentary within 24 hours. And my peer reviews are finished in a week -- not the months it normally takes others -- unless I need to consult some special hard-to-get source. It's just a matter of staying on tops of things. No wonder academics are so stressed all the time.

It still hasn't really sunk in yet, but our academic journal, Fafnir , has just been nominated as a finalist for the 2020 World Fantasy Award in the "Special Award: Non-Professional" category! I'm just blown away by this nomination. Sure, we've worked hard the last three years to professionalize Fafnir, and there's been tons of improvements. But . . . honestly, as an academic, it just never even occurred to me that I'd be engaged in something that falls under the World Fantasy Award umbrella. So, needless to say, I'm still processing -- but in a good way.  ;)

So my good friend (and fellow editor at Fafnir) Laura E. Goodin agreed to look over an article I was currently laying out for publication in JTR, and she took exception to the following sentence: "Since Strauss is best known for his thesis on esoteric writing, it cannot avoid mention." This was her marginalia response: "[ the phrase] 'cannot avoid' assumes agency on the part of the thesis, which is a neat trick." That comment led to the following email exchange, formatted for clarity. DENNIS: Wait, I'm going through your comments, and ARE YOU SAYING THAT MY THESIS CAN'T ASSUME AGENCY? I think you just made my poor widdle thesis start to tear up a little. LAURA: Tell your thesis to grow a pair of ovaries and toughen up. LAURA: Really, you coddle them, Dennis. You do. LAURA: Also, I just spotted a typo in one of my comments ("implicity"). Oh, the mortification; oh, the irony. DENNIS: I'm just saying, someday maybe you'll turn around...

So, another update about my recent acceptance to Law & Literature , especially now that I've gone through their publishing agreement. The journal itself, as I mentioned, seems like a good venue for me -- reputable editors, a very professional and rigorous peer review process, and strong articles in prior issues of the journal. But the  publishing agreement for Taylor & Francis (the publishing house for Law & Literature ) also raised some . . . . let's call them worries, or at least questions, about accessibility. Exacerbating my worries, too, is the fact that I'm a humanities person. As far as academic publishing for the sciences and social sciences goes, I know very few good things about it, and it's quite strange for me to publish in a journal I've never actually consulted for my own research. So, I did some googling. Here's what I found: Subscription services for Taylor & Francis tend to be very expensive, and thus many libraries d...