Duke’s Great Book Sale Cause He’s Moving…
It has been an inordinate amount of time since I last posted. It’s been a busy year. New job incoming. New move incoming. Family is growing. Life is wild! Speaking of all those changes, I’m presently offering up for sale over 1500 books from my extensive collection. We’re downsizing because I can’t possibly read all of these AND we need to save up some money for the cost of moving and other family expenses (like, seriously, my life is about to change big time). I’m selling science fiction, fantasy, horror, general fiction, romance, non-fiction (history, writing books, English textbooks, literary criticism, science, and lots of fun reference and military history books), and more. There’s a LOT of stuff here, and I’m willing to ship to folks! You can find the massive spreadsheet right here. The main sheet includes information about the sale (what, how, why, etc.). Please tell your friends about it! Anywhoodles.
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 books and its related list of the 50 best SF/F books of the 2010s.2 I, however, want to look more deeply at why these types of lists and the “de facto” argument are so prevalent in SF discourse AND what efforts have occurred to put together a legitimate canon of SF works. With that in mind, I’d like to turn to two curiosities on the path towards canonization in SF: Robert Silverberg’s The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964 (1970) and Mark R. Hillegas’ “A Draft of the Science-Fiction Canon” (1961; in Vol. 3, Issue 1 of Extrapolation). Two other groups also exist. The first argues that there is a canon — or, at least, that there are classics — and then yells at other people about it. The second hates that the canon — or, at least, the classics — doesn’t much care for that version of the canon and hates being told they have to read that stuff (though some of them may read those things anyway). ↩ For the record, I don’t think general popularity is a good way to form a literary canon. It should be considered, of course, but we must also consider factors such as influence, presentation, representation, etc. More on that another day. ↩
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 it’s essentially tradition. While there may be value in discussing these attitudes of (sometimes racist) rejection in particular terms, I think it’s more fruitful to consider the root assumptions which make these debates even possible.
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 story and tropes were better presented when pilfered by successor novels in the same genre. The first novel in the series follows Mildred Hubble, a first-year at Cackle’s Academy, a boarding school for young witches. The main plot centers on Mildred attempting to teach her new familiar (a cat she names Tabby and which is the only cat that isn’t black) while avoiding the ire of rival student Ethel and potions master Miss Hardbroom and making a fool of the school. Naturally, she mostly fails at all of these things and only avoids an uncomfortable “interview” with headmistress Cackle by uncovering a convenient plot by Cackle’s sister to take over the school. The cat may or may not learn to balance on a broom by the final page…
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 once) from the Caribbean, both in fiction and non-fiction. The list below reflects a combination of my personal interests in Caribbean literature and my academic research in postcolonialism, the Caribbean, and transnational American literature (though not my other academic interests beyond science fiction). This list will, by the limitations of numbers, be incomplete. It will reflect the reading experience of one person. There are hundreds and hundreds of other works of Caribbean literature and criticism and numerous islands not represented here (a list of 10 cannot possibly get them all). Heck, that’s why I included “alternatives” here because there were people left off a list of 10 and it made me sad. Treat this list as a fun starting point of important works. If you’re not familiar with the literature of the reason, this list might help get you started. If you are, maybe it will fill some gaps! And for those who have read all of these, consider leaving a comment letting me know about other works you think folks should read at least once! Here goes:
Holiday Miracles (or, How I Tried Something New and Learned to Enjoy Christmas Novels)
I’ve never read a Christmas novel for adults before. In fact, I never considered reading one until I got bored in my local Target and decided to give one a try for the hell of it. And then I spent about a week reading and livetweeting the experience. If you were to ask me why it has taken this long to actually read a book like Jenny Colgan’s Christmas at the Island Hotel, I might have given you the “it’s not my thing” excuse. In many ways, that’s technically true, but given my love of certain types of Christmas movies, it would be technically wrong, too. So the question remains: What did I think of Christmas at the Island Hotel, and did it change my mind about Christmas novels?