Towards an SF Canon: Curiosities
Due to circumstances beyond my control which involve several people raising interesting ideas in reply to my tweets about my essay “Why the SF Canon Doesn’t Exist,” I’m now neck deep in a massive research project on the formation of literary canons and their placement in SF scholarship (and wider discourse). In reality, I’ve been […]
Why the SF Canon Doesn’t Exist
As is periodically the case in the SFF community, we’re once more in the midst of a conversation about “the classics.” If you’re reading this now, it doesn’t actually matter that I wrote this in 2022; this conversation happens so often that the context above could apply in any given year going back decades, albeit […]
The Unbearable Weight of Fantasy, Tolkien, and Race (or, Eh, Black Elves Are Fine)
The Internet is abuzz about the one fantasy author to rule them all, J.R.R. Tolkien. Over Superbowl weekend, Amazon released the first trailer for their new Tolkien adaptation, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. As with any highly-anticipated media property, the trailer (and the still shots released earlier this year) have sparked […]
Not-So-Cancelled (or, Hey, We’re Still Talking About the Wrong Things)
In a semi-recent piece for The Nation, David Klion discussed what is by now no longer the “latest” bit of Internet “free speech” theater in response to the cancellation of a collection of Norman Mailer’s essays. I shouldn’t say “cancelled,” really. The publisher passed on publishing the book, which means it could very well be […]
2022 Hugo Awards Reading List: What Should I Have Read? Tell Me!
It’s been many years since I’ve done one of these. As I mentioned on my 2022 resolutions post/rant, I want to do a lot more reading and a lot more positive interactions in fandom. The first step: opening myself up to a public conversation about the Hugo Awards, the things I particularly loved, and more. […]
The Cruelty of School-tees: The Worst Witch and the Hogwarts Problem
Like many readers who have a modicum of Internet awareness, I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to find a thing to replace Harry Potter as my go-to “wizard school” series. There are, of course, many to choose from. Ursula Le Guin infamously said of Harry Potter that the work is, to paraphrase, derivative […]