Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

SF/F Commentary

It Didn’t Happen Like That: On the Dimensions of Historical Accuracy

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If you’d asked me a year ago if I cared all that much for historical accuracy in fiction, I might have told you that it didn’t much matter to me at all. Historical accuracy, I might have said, is an argument too often used to complain about creating more inclusive television programming — complaints that are themselves often historically inaccurate or overly focused on racial or gender assumptions rather than the stories themselves. Today, that still largely holds true. I still think too many people use the phrase to complain about diversity initiatives, and I still think our primary interest as everyday consumers of fiction should be the narratives instead of obsessive hyperfocus on how perfectly a series presents its designated period. However, the more I find myself immersed in period dramas in television and film, the more I’ve begun to nuance my perspective of historical accuracy. I blame part of this on my tendency to look up historical information as I watch. Frequently, this leads me to the knowledge that what I’m watching likely doesn’t resemble the real history. In the worst of cases, it has filled me with annoyance because often the fictional history is far less compelling than the actual history. In the best of cases, it renews my curiosity in human history, which leads me to buying new books to read.

Book Reviews

Book Review: The Witches by Roald Dahl

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If Dahl were alive today, he might be particularly bothered by the fact that the 1990 adaptation of his 1983 novel, The Witches, has had the same (or, more probably, slightly more) cultural staying power than the novel it loosely adapts. Indeed, Dahl is on record as having called the adaptation “utterly appalling,” yet for a disturbing interpretation to his work, the film remains a cultural touchstone. Until now, my only knowledge of The Witches was my early experiences with the film, a product more deeply terrifying than its quirky and twisted literary predecessor. And, so, like many readers of Dahl’s works, I have a different experience of this particular work, moving backwards from adaptation to the original with a clear sense of bias towards the former. The Witches is a curious work, both quirky and a tad twisted. The novel follows an unnamed English boy who falls under the care of his Norwegian grandmother after the untimely death of his parents. The grandmother regales her newfound charge with all sorts of tales, the favorite of which are her stories about being a retired witch hunter. When his grandmother falls ill, they vacation in a fancy hotel in Southern England to promote her recovery, which turns out to be the location for the annual meeting of witches. The boy, naturally, stumbles upon the witches, discovers their dastardly plot to rid England of all the pesky children, and suffers a tragic fate that drags his grandmother out of retirement. It’s a story of evil witches and myth, children turned into mice, and the unwavering stupidity of English high society.

SF/F Commentary

I Will Ignore Time: Long Distance Relationships in the Time of Corona

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In the best of circumstances, long distance relationships are hard. If you’re lucky, you live within reasonable driving distance where the largest inconvenience is that you might spend most of the week apart. If you’re less lucky, you might live far enough that a flight every other month is the best way to be together. And if you’re even less lucky, you’re separated by an entire ocean on two different continents, and a mere two weeks before one of you visits the other, a pandemic hits and shuts everything down. I’m in the less lucky category, and I’m writing this post because my girlfriend wanted me to share my thoughts on long distance relationships and pandemics (hey, babe, this is for you!). I’m not a relationship expert (and never will be); I’m just a guy who happens to be in a long distance relationship and has opinions. Take them or leave them. Since summer 2019, I’ve been in a relationship with a lovely woman from Vietnam, who I had the fortune to visit in December 2019. We’re separated by a vast ocean, with my shiny butt living in northern Minnesota and her delightful self in Ho Chi Minh City. Already, that distance makes things difficult, and more so given the relationship of the United States to Vietnam, which requires far less paperwork for my travel than it does for my girlfriend. Throw in a pandemic, and you can imagine how much more difficult this all is.

Anime Reviews, Film Reviews, SF/F Commentary

A Tale of First Series: Heroism and Binaries in Record of Lodoss War

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Heroism is something I find myself coming back to a lot in these especially trying times. After all, we hear about heroes from time to time, and yet so few of the stories we see are about heroic people. The hopelessness of that reality is hard to fathom even as I sit here contemplating a TV show that has little interest either in the ambiguous and oft-hidden heroisms of reality or the gritty heroisms of fantasy. Record of Lodoss War just isn’t that kind of show. For those that don’t know, the 13-episode OVA (original video animation) Record of Lodoss War (1990-1991) is the first anime adaptation of Ryo Mizuno’s novels of the same name, themselves based on transcripts (or “replays”) of RPG sessions created by the Japanese gaming company, Group SNE (co-founded by Mizuno). This particular anime production generally follows the plot of the first novel and loosely borrows elements from several others (primarily in its final five episodes). A later anime series (subtitled as Chronicles of the Heroic Knight) ran for double the first series’ length and attempted to retell the story through a more faithful adaptation. This background should give you an idea of the kind of story you’re walking into when you pop in those delicious RLW DVDs (or VHS tapes, if you’re so lucky to own them).

On Politics, Random Stuff

Podcasting in the Time of Corona

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We’re 40+ days into social isolation here in the grand northern territory of Bemidji. Life continues unabated. There have been a mere handful of COVID-19 infections, everyone is supposed to wear masks, and online classes are expected to continue, making those 40+ days of isolation into 7 or 8 months without normal social interaction, friends coming to your office door to chat about something mundane, or the musings of students in out-of-date classrooms. All hail coronavirus for its may gifts of disruption and death (76,000 and counting in the U.S.). It is, of course, hard to look at the world around us under almost any circumstance. We’re witnessing in unexpected, undesirable, and exceptionally disturbing ways the influence the political system can have on our ability to live, whether in the literal sense of working for life or in the more fanciful manner of extracurricular whatsit that makes life enjoyable. Not in the sense of restricting movement, mind, but in its ability to deprive us of the resources for survival during a legitimate medical emergency and to use the political system to forcibly remove access of those resources, giving so many the choice between bankruptcy or the risk of death for themselves, loved ones, or strangers. As an academic, I’ve always had a keen sense of the impact of the political process on our lives, especially now. We have always faced what we will likely see in the near future: state budget cuts and other funding decreases that will see many of our friends and colleagues on the streets, salaries slashed, programs destroyed, etc. That awareness is clear in the halls of academia, in brief face-to-face meetings with your next door neighbor, in meetings, and at social gatherings. The political is inescapable there — as it is for many people outside of those privileged halls. And it is now clearer than ever as we read the news about our profession that the future we face is not the one we had hoped for.

...in the Histories of the United States, Announcements, Finding Hope

Project Announcement: Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States

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Hope is hard to come by these days. The pandemic continues to take lives by the thousands, the U.S. political system is (at best) totally broken, Americans left and right hate one another and seem frequently incapable of agreeing on even the most agreeable things, and the various aspects of Civil Rights have not been realized. For many Americans, it all seems…hopeless. These are the same feelings I’ve experienced since 2016 on an almost daily basis. There’s this never ending sense that we live in a dystopian nightmare for which there is no end in sight. This is not helped by endless news cycles of terror and apathy and political punditry, by our social media cycles of misery, or even at the local level of politics. Hell, my small town made the news for being one of the first cities to vote to ban refugee resettlements. But is it really that hopeless? Is hope truly dead, or is there a a trend of hope throughout U.S. history that we’re ignoring? I’d like to find out.

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