Stratofanatic's Emporium

Since I know everyone's been clamoring for a review of an early Del Rey fantasy novel nobody's ever heard of, well, I canhardly refuse. But besides pure orneriness, there's a special reason I'm reviewing Clifford D. Simak's  The Fellowship of the Talisman . Granted, this book isn't terribly good ... but that isn't the point. For me, the real question is always one of literary history, and  Fellowship  serves as a fascinating test case for how Del Rey Books (DRB) managed to achieve success in its earliest days. Cuz here's the thing: if you're going to create a popular genre from scratch (as Lester del Rey most definitely did), then a useful item to have in your arsenal is, well,  fantasy authors. Except there weren't any. Not then. Sure, you had Terry Brooks and Stephen R. Donaldson in 1977, but both people fell magically into Lester's lap. They found  him,  not the other way around. Short of sacrifices to the Editorial Gods, however, how'...

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 ...

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% ...

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...

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. 

New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf:  Tolkien the Skald [ Last week, I outlined the shape of Tolkien’s career as an alliterative poet and noted his immense productivity between 1932 and 1934 – the moment he turned to Old Norse meters. Now I’ll tackle specific issues with his two shorter Old Norse poems . ] Click here to read Parts 1 & 2 of this entry. Click here to read Part 4 . Tolkien’s “Lost” Stanzas: The Derelicts If your puppy ever runs away from home, everyone knows what to do. First you search. Then you plaster posters on telephone poles. Then you panic. Though not in that order. Personally, I prefer panic first. But if your poem runs away from home, well, that’s a tougher situation. To be fair, the story behind Tolkien’s dróttkvætt sequence “The Derelicts” doesn’t relate directly to whenever he wrote anything, but the tale’s too good to pass up. These stanzas first came to my attention when researching skaldic meters for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative R...

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...

Turns out I had to rewrite this entry significantly -- one of the perils, alas, of doing additional research. (There must be a moral in that somewhere.) Anyway, I originally wanted to read the GOR novels of John Norman  cuz everyone in SFF scholarship knows the common narrative behind them: Norman's the genre's resident evil, the pinnacle of misogynistic assholery, one of the eventual reasons sword-and-sorcery (S&S) died a rapid death in the 1980s. However, since I'm an instinctive iconoclast who always distrusts received opinion, I had to see for myself. So I finally took the plunge into Gor and selected a novel at random from my local Bookman's. This turned out to be  Priest-Kings of Gor  (Ballantine, 1968), and the sheer strength of its writing quality surprised me deeply. I'm not going to make any two bones about it ... this is a good novel of its kind. So you can only imagine how a-quiver with zeal my grubby little paws were to rant against Received Opinion...

 On the first day of ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction, I asked students to name their three favorite fantasy books . Wonderfully, many of them actually had three favorites. We had 30 students overall, so I tallied up the results, including the few who couldn't resist naming videos games or movies. I should that this is hardly a scientific pool, but the results are still interesting.  The Lord of the Rings was the #1 -- Tolkien's still the king! -- but followed closely by Harry Potter at #2. After that there's a significant drop-off, but several books had multiple votes, including Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, and Sarah J. Maas.  Without further ado, here are the results:

What's the gender of genre fantasy during the 1980s, you might ask? Luckily for you, I've spent the last few weeks researching  exactly that question! So, I've lately been studying Judy-Lynn and Lester del Rey, the founders of Del Rey books, to see how exactly they achieved their extraordinary success. To that end, I've compiled a spreadsheet exhaustively analyzing every fantasy title Del Rey Books published during their hegemony. Of the many things I'm studying, one is gender. Long story short: a large part of mainstreaming genre fantasy relied on the del Reys realizing that, in order to find a mass audience for fantasy fiction, a genre then-current consensus considered unsellable, Lester and Judy-Lynn had to target an audience that was (a) young, and (b) mostly male. Mind you, this isn't necessarily a ground-breaking revelation. Still, it's one thing to appeal to popular perception ... and another thing to draw conclusions based on hard data. And the data ...

If I've never previous heard of David Anthony Durham before this, does that make me a bad fantasy person? Maybe! I did learn about him, though, a few months back after reading an interview by Charles R. Saunders, who mentioned Durham as a good black writer producing recent fantasy. So I ordered  Acadia: The War with the Mein  (2008), and I was deeply impressed with Durham's thematic ambition and his world-building. Notably, it's probably the single most  diverse  fantasy world I've yet encountered .... all kinds of skin colors in the provinces of the "Known World," from white to brown to dark black, and each gets some narrative playing time. The oddest (best?) thing is that you don't know quite whom to root for, at least initially. On one hand, yeah, you root for Emperor Leodan Akaran. While he's not a terribly good ruler, he super loves his kids, who all have distinct personalities and seem like decent chaps, at least for pampered princes and prin...