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 ...

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...

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...

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 ...

Prepping for ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction has been a rollercoaster ride for two solid months -- I'm doing all my lesson plans ahead of time, but since I'm taking a literary history approach to genre fantasy, I've needed to fill in several gaps in my own knowledge. Partly, that's necessitated an insanely deep dive into sword-and-sorcery (more on which soon). Another part, though, has been a dive into Dungeons & Dragons fantasy fiction. For fantasy readers of a certain age, the D&D novels produced by TSR publications define the essence of "genre fantasy." Even for someone like myself who never really got into the whole D&D thing, avoiding these books simply wasn't possible. Back during the 1980s and 1990s, I still remember walking into Waldenbooks and seeing half the fantasy section -- already much larger than the SF section -- filled with nothing but Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance novels. Trying to learn more background, I discovered a wonderful ...

So, I've been reading lately about Charles R. Saunders, the black author of sword-and-sorcery fiction, and man .... poor guy. If there's been ever a case of someone being born about 30 years too soon, it's Saunders. Usually, when people mention about black S&S authors, they mean Samuel R. Delany. This makes sense. As a queer, Marxist deconstructionist, Delany established his street cred first by writing SF before wading into the "gutters" (ahem) of S&S fantasy. (Sidenote: are there any black fantasy writers except maybe Jemisin who didn't first establish their street cred by writing SF?). Although I personally never much cared for Delany's  writing style or Nevèrÿon books , which are basically what happens when someone who holds a subgenre in contempt decides to write in that subgenre, it is true that academic critics love Delany .... especially critics who hate S&S themselves. So if they mention Saunders at all, which is rare, it's usuall...

I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony ... and even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, you'll still never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, he had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than Anne McCaffrey, the next most frequent bestseller. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  21 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two distinct bo...

 A few weeks ago, I posted a lengthy blog entry on the mysterious colophon implanted by the Del Reys onto their new line of Ballantine fantasy books in 1977. Thanks to reading Anthony's  A Spell for Chameleon,  I thought the colophon a basilisk at first but after consulting with Douglas Anderson, we concluded that it was probably a  cockatrice ...  which I found interesting because Doug, apparently, had always heard the symbol referred to as a griffin, even though griffins aren't two-legged critters. Anyway, after some more digging, I found a few other tidbits. In Piers Anthony's second autobiography, How Precious Was That While,  I found the following passage (p. 134): So, one of the unanswered questions from my original post was, "Why did Lester del Rey apply his signature colophon to certain fantasy novels but not others?" The answer, apparently, turns out to be spite . After checking Donaldson's book covers on the ISFDB, Anthony's story check...