Stratofanatic's Emporium

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...

Abrams, Annie. Shortchanged : How Advanced Placement Cheats Students . Johns Hopkins UP, 2023. Over the summer, I did "assessment" for the AP language & literature test. They had originally contacted me because I'm a Director of Undergraduate Studies for a university English department, and they paid $500 for the labor. Now, granted, this payment is partly for self-advertising purposes; now they can put a "UArizona" faculty member as an assessor on promotional materials. But they did solicit feedback on the quality and fairness of the questions, and overall I didn't think it was a bad exam. These AP tests  are important, too. At the U of A, for example, a score of "4" or "5" allows an incoming freshmen to place out of English 101, so that's a significant savings in terms of tuition. It also improves retention and times to graduation. But I know Advanced Placement also faces a lot of criticism, which is why I just read Annie Abra...

Ah .... so, a nice moment just now. At the awards banquet in Dresden, the Science Fiction Research Association  has just granted me their May Kay Bray award for best review published in 2022 by the SFRA Review . The review itself is on a biography of the SF writer John Wyndham, the guy who did The Day of the Triffids . I'll post my acceptance remarks below -- they'll also be published in the SFRA Review soon -- but if anyone would like to read the review (it's short! ), it's online and open-access. ACCEPTANCE REMARKS Receiving the Mary Kay Bray Award comes as a huge surprise to me, not to mention a great honor. Normally when one writes a review, you do it as service to the field. They’re a nice break from teaching and heavier types of academic writing, and for myself, at least, I often pick subjects on which I have only passing familiarity. Reviews are therefore good excuses for me to dive into little research tangents, and that’s exactly what happened with Amy Binns’s ...

Time for two reviews by me from the SFRA Review ! Belatedly, I only just now realized that I never mentioned my review of Robert Waugh's book, The Tragic Thread of Science Fiction (2019), which SFRA Review published last November. You can find my review here . It's maybe the most negative review I've ever written, but his New Criticism framework -- yes, really, New Criticism (!) -- doesn't hold up much. I'm afraid. I was honestly disappointed .... I'd read some of his Lovecraft criticism a while back, and his article on "The Rats in the Walls" was clearly a notch above what most other Lovecraft fan-scholars were doing. Anyway, my most recent review -- just came out today -- is a highly laudatory review of Amy Binns's biography of novelist John Wyndham, Hidden Wyndham (2019).** Just for giggles, I've managed to make references to Thomas Pynchon, Elena Ferrante, C. S. Lewis, and an extended analogy with A. S. Byatt's novel Possession . Check...

Well, here come a new minor publication from The Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching  ... it's a short personal narrative about what teaching during the pandemic taught me, and written to be as accessible as possible to all audiences. It's called " GoogleDocs and Zoom: A Love Story ." Not a very important publication in the grand scheme of things, but it was a short quick write -- basically did it over a few days when I was on a five-day holiday in California with a few friends last June.

So, after holding my article hostage -- hostage , I tell you -- for four years, the editor of The Baum Bugle , Sarah Crotzer, has finally published it into her most recent issue: “Delving into Nome Man’s Land: Two Traditions in Baum and Tolkien.” Baum Bugle , Autumn 2021, pp. 13–22. Interesting story behind this one. Sarah suggested the original idea to me back when we were in grad school together, maaaaybe right after she became Bugle editor, I don't remember. Anyway, I sat on the idea for a while. Then, in December 2017, tuckered out from my long article on gender violence in Stephen R. Donaldson, and wanting to write something short and spiffy for the CV, I turned to L. Frank Baum. Since I knew this break had been coming up, I'd been reading a whole bunch of Oz books in preparation. So, once the fall semester ended, I plunged into a 5-week writing spree where I wrote two short articles back-to-back -- the first an essay on magic words in fantasy (but especially Baum, of cour...

 Ellard, Donna Beth. Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures . punctum books, 2019. I was reading this book because a blind peer reviewer, who otherwise had offered some very nice suggestions on an article submission, suggested I consult it for the history of Anglo-Saxon/Old English studies. Although I'm not qualified to speak on the ongoing debates about "whiteness" and institutional racism within contemporary medieval studies (a big source of debate in recent Kalamazoo conferences), I can certainly state that this particular book, or at least its first chapter, left me completely under-whelmed. In one sense, I admire Ellard's writing style .... an auto-ethnographic, personal sort of academic style that is becoming increasingly common. A good recent example is Ebony Thomas's The Dark Fantastic , which won a World Fantasy Award last year. Apparently, too, publishers like it because it makes academic writing more readable -- something that I'll always support...

Weird. Apparently James Blish, the SF writer, did his Masters thesis on Ezra Pound .... and actually SOLD it to The Sewanee Review for $375. (And that's in 1950 dollars, folks. Converting that into today's terms, that's around $4,111.)** Anyway, I'm going through it .... and finding that it's eminently readable. Here is Blish, tackling the claim that Pound's poetry is contentless (that is, that his manner is his matter): "To which one might respond that only in the universe of literature is it possible to say 'Nobody has yet found the Mississippi, if there is such a river,' years after it has been found and marked plainly on available maps in its proper location. It should not matter -- but it does -- that ten eminent men and forty parrots have said that there is no such place once these maps have been circulated, and other travelers have been there ....." Which all had me chuckling, I have to admit. ("Ten men and forty parrots!") Ov...

Oooh, this one appeared without me realizing -- my latest article, from Gothic Studies : “ Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Rats in the Walls .’” As usual, I'd like to post the riveting tale of how this article came to be. It originally developed because of the ENGL 160D Monsters course I teach for the University of Arizona ( see my syllabus ). When first offered the class, I knew that there'd be Lovecraft in it .... except I didn't really know much about Lovecraft. So I picked "The Rats in the Walls" and his more famous "The Call of Cthulhu" almost at random, and then began a Lovecraft reading binge to educate myself on why Lovecraft was actually a big deal. My "eureka" moment came after my second semester teaching the course. As one knows, when you teach, you have to break stories down to help your students understand them. Well, when I broke down "The Rats in the Walls,...

My latest open-access publication: " The Hesitation Principle in 'The Rats in the Walls, " in Supernatural Studies . This was originally a section I cut from my article on the same Lovecraft story (forthcoming in Gothic Studies,  due March 2021). Only started revising this piece after GS accepted the main article , but Supernatural Studies was so amazingly quick with peer review and publication -- basically, five weeks overall -- that it's actually appearing a good half-year before my Gothic Studies article. Just one of the quirks of academic publishing. On a personal note, this is officially my 10th peer-reviewed publication .... though five more are forthcoming. Just nice to finally hit double-digits, though.

So, I meant to do this post several weeks ago, after I'd read Stone of Tears and posting about several Goodkind interviews . Then this nutty semester happened, and of course Goodkind himself passed way on September 17th. Yet, now, I'd like to complete about my thoughts .... particularly on Goodkind's  Sword of Truth series, but focused on the one novel ( Stone of Tears ) I read. Violence So ... yeah.  Damn,  there's violence galore. Even ignoring the few hundred pages of sex-torture that Richard survives in Wizard's First Rule , Goodkind apparent reserved a special store of gruesomeness  for  Stone of Tears : more torture, cannibalism (albeit by good guys, the Mud People), characters being flayed alive, gang rape (p. 414), threats of gang rape, genocide .... Goodkind runs the gauntlet of awful things that human beings can do to one another. None of it evokes much real horror, apart perhaps from one character who is flayed alive. Either Goodkind doesn't have the ...

Daaaaaamn . So, I'd somehow gone through my entire life without knowing anything about Terry Goodkind. I read maybe a quarter of Wizard's First Rule back in the early 2000s, but never finished it. Anyway, I started reading his sequel in the Sword of Truth series, Stone of Tears , and I'll comment on that in another blog post. But I looked up some of his GoodReads reviews, and they were brutal . Even more to the point, I also started looking up some of Goodkind's author interviews, and ... . ... oh my god, this dude is  seriously  batshit crazy . He's a complete Ayn Rand Objectivist nut job who doesn't think his novels are fantasy because they're too literary, and Goodkind also believes his novels have forever changed the same fantasy genre that he's too literary to have read himself. Plus, he's offended if someone compares him to Robert Jordan (despite ripping off most of Jordan's world-building). So, for your horrified fascinated, here's a r...

. . . was awful. So, having heard that Netflix was doing this adaptation, I read the first book of Andrzej Sapkowski's series, which the bookstore had, and ordered the rest. The Last Wish (1993) was pretty good --straight-up sword and sorcery, mostly, but a cool interweaving of fairy tales, some fine writing, a few surprisingly moving parts. I especially liked the first short story, "The Witcher." But this Netflix adaptation. Some people complained on Twitter that the plot was bewildering. Thanks to having read The Last Wish , I managed to piece together what was going on The real problems were twofold. First, the acting . Mainly, none of the male actors did it, or even tried doing it. Henry Cavill, who plays Geralt of Rivia, joins Jamie Dornan (the guy from the Fifty Shades of Grey movies) and Joel Kinnaman ( Altered Carbon ) as physically amazing-looking male actors with the expressive range of wooden spoons.** Cavill is especially bad, though, because the director...

In the last month or two, I've been learning to "twitter." The experience has brought one thing home to me: the academic left is truly, honestly radical. For years I've read articles that claimed to be radical, that championed being radical, but somehow never quite grasped how sincerely some writers have meant it. "Revolution" isn't just a metaphor here.  For example, I'm currently reading Mitchum Huehl's After Critique: Twenty-first-century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (Oxford UP, 2016). Not a radical book in itself, but it's part of my recent interest in the topic of postcritique. And, in the book, I was struck by the following passage: "This is why Latour suggests [in Irreductions ] that reformist politicians, always ready to compromise, negotiate, and reconfigure, as opposed to revolutionaries, armed with their righteous critiques and utopian dreams, embody the ideal form of politics, even of existence itself" (Huehls 21). A...

So, I have a total of five entries in TLE -- two on Beagle, two one Stephen R. Donaldson, and one on Le Guin's The Dispossessed . Like most online platorms, too , TLE counts its. The hits for Beagle? Between 60 and 80, which isn't bad for something that came out 2 weeks ago or so. Donaldson? He's been out for over a year, and both entries are in the 400s. Again, respectable. How about Le Guin? So far, there are over 3,000 hits . . .. in under two months . I'm practically dying here.

In less than a week, two book reviews of mine have gone live. The first is a film review for Science Fiction Film and Television on the movie Okja directed by Bong Joon-ho -- alas, it requires a subscription. It was cool writing for SFF&T since I doubt I'll ever write anything else suitable for them, and I'm happy with the review itself, but I also realized that I just don't have the disciplinary background necessary to pull off really first-rate film reviews. Because of that, writing the thing was a real bear. So, that's the last one of those! The second review is more up my alley: Sub-creating Arda , edited by Dimitra Fimi and Thomas Honegger, a book on world-building and J. R. R. Tolkien. That's live now from the open access Journal of Tolkien Research . Interesting, though, how different the publication schedules for different journals can be. The Okja review was written two years ago, right during that limbo summer period between defending my disse...

Well, this one's in the books -- there's a few panels today, but they're in French, so that counts me out. Just completed two days of the The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction and Ethics for the Anthropocene conference here in Paris, the City of Light, and it was pretty awesome, as one might suspect. I'll write up a full conference report for Fafnir later, but here are some preliminary impressions. There was initially some trouble with acoustics -- we were in an old, domed, converted anatomy theater at the Institut du monde anglophone where the echoes were awful, and, until we learned how to deal with them, the first few presentations were unfortunately simply unintelligible. Similarly, the hard wooden benches and tables were extremely uncomfortable, but maybe that's just European?  Anyway, though, once we worked out the echoes, many of the papers were fascinating, and it really hit home that I'm missing a big chunk of Le Guin's career by ...

When L egends: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy appeared in 1998, edited by Robert Silverberg, I remember seeing it in bookstores, but otherwise didn't pay it much mind. Mostly, the novella by Robert Jordan caught my eye. Well, during my final read of Brandon Sanderson's completion of The Wheel of Time , I was waiting around for my amazon copy of the final book to arrive and decided to give that Jordan novella a shot. So I went down to Bookman's, got it (in 3 volumes for the paperback edition), and breezed through the eleven stories. The quality of these novellas, however, varied so widely that I'm now going to grade them for fun. The only novella I skipped was King's, since I'd like to read The Dark Tower first. Otherwise, here goes: Stephen King: "The Little Sisters of Eluria" ( The Dark Tower ) skipped. Terry Goodkind: "Debt of Bones" ( The Sword of Truth ) Grade: C+  Commentary: Not awful, I suppose, but too slick ...

After getting a job interview for post-WWII British Literature (!), I went on a splurge of non-SF&F books related to that time period. Although my diss is in Tolkien, who exactly fits that time period,  American literature has always tended to be more visible for me  -- except for the British modernists, all of whom wrote their main works prior to WWII. Somehow, whenever I encounter modern British authors, I've never really think of them as modern British authors. This holds even more true for the speculative fiction writers; does Pratchett's or Rowling's Englishness really make any difference to anyone? So I thought this was a great opportunity to round out my reading. The recent list of books: Hanif Kurieshi, The Black Album Hanif Kurieshi, Intimacy Zadie Smith, White Teeth Kazuo Ishiguru, The Buried Giant Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies Sarah Waters, Fingersmith Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger Ian McEwing, Amsterdam Zoe Heller, Notes on a Sc...

Academic novels are something of a hobby of mine. . . . but I thinking the following, Trigger Warning , is one that might not make my Christmas wish list this year. It's basically every radical right-wing conspiracy theory about universities combined into one book. Here's the Chronicle's summation: here .