Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

SF/F Commentary

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 curious about this for a while, but I’ve never taken the time to do the deep dive because my research has demanded my attention elsewhere (ugh, tenure needs) and there hasn’t been an urgent need to do the work. After all, most people are either pretty satisfied about there being no official SF canon OR perfectly fine with the de facto canon, which we can piece together through a combination of “important anthologies” and aggregating the works people decide are Important™.1 One might, for example, start with NPR’s reader-selected list of the Top 100 SF/F

February 28, 2022 11 Comments

SF/F Commentary

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 more frequently today than before social media. The conversation typically features the following claims: You DON’T need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many) You DO need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many) There are no “classics” for reasons (there are many) I’m not going to list the various reasons offered for all of these. Instead, I’ll note that we usually see two common claims for the first two: 1) that you don’t need to read them because they do not represent where genre is now; and 2) that you

February 21, 2022 8 Comments

SF/F Commentary

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 considerable debate about the nature of Tolkien’s work, the process of adaptation, and, in particular, Amazon’s decision to feature more diversity than we have seen in previous adaptations of Tolkien’s work (or, indeed, in much of the public conversation of his work). The last of these debate topics would be disheartening if it weren’t so utterly predictable — both because it’s a talking point we’ve seen before in this same community and because it’s a talking point that has been used as a response to diversity in basically all media going back long enough that

February 16, 2022 No Comments

SF/F Commentary

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 published somewhere else (even by Mailer’s estate), thereby making the meaning of a “cancellation” rather dubious at best. Can you really be “cancelled” in the lofty meaning that term has now taken (undeserved, really) when you’re both very much dead and your work is otherwise still available? I mean, the presumed offending work, “The White Negro,” is literally right there on the Internet. Google it if you must.1 As far as I can tell, this essay has been legally published online in Dissent since 2007. While I can’t say that all of Mailer’s non-fiction will

February 13, 2022 No Comments

Announcements

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. But I don’t want to do that alone, which is where you come in. For several years, I asked folks to tell me what stories (fiction of all lengths and comics) they particularly enjoyed in the prior year. I then used those suggestions to together a longlist of works I consider worth checking out. This helped me narrow my focus for my nominating ballot and give other folks some insight into my process (and help narrowing their lists, too). So here we are. The comments are open, and I want to know:

January 18, 2022 15 Comments

Book Reviews

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 of a genre of boarding school tales, some of them featuring magic and some of them not. Indeed, one doesn’t have to go far to find obvious influences on the HP series, some of them so blatant that they border on plagiarism (or, in the case of the author claiming they were unaware, incredulity). The Worst Witch (1974) by Jill Murphy preceded the first HP novel by 23 years and is perhaps the most obvious of more popular novel’s influences. It is also an example, if you’ll forgive me saying it, of a book whose

January 7, 2022 No Comments