Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

A Definitive Absolutely Accurate Ranking of James Bond Theme Songs

The title says it all. Mostly. It doesn’t tell you why I have decided to put together a ranking of every James Bond theme song. I could tell you that there are great reasons for this, but I would be lying. The real reason: I’ve been watching and re-watching James Bond movies on and off […]

Fan Fiction vs. Tie-In Fiction: A Framework

Every once in a while, fandom is beset upon by a series of somewhat aggressive arguments about the function of accuracy in film/tv adaptations. The best of these follow my own path, which involves assessing the work on its own terms before going back to look at how it functions as an adaptation. The worst […]

An Adventure in Style Over Substance: Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021)

There are times when I turn on a thing and realize it was a mistake. Sometimes it’s a terrible 80s horror film like Edge of the Axe (1988) or a TV series you don’t realize will leave you disappointed until it’s too late (ahem, Jupiter’s Legacy). This time, it’s Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. […]

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 […]

10 Caribbean Books You Should Read At Least Once

As a fan of Caribbean literature who has spent quite a lot of his life reading and thinking about it, it seemed appropriate to finally do one of those “hey, these are the books you should read” lists. And so, I sat down to think about the works I think everyone should read (at least […]