Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Snakes in SF/F/H (Or, Drumming Up Fear from Ignorance)

As someone who keeps reptiles and still occasionally searches for them in the wild, very few things annoy me more than the way genre films treat snakes. In fact, one of my biggest rants on Torture Cinema concerned the sea snake inaccuracies in Sphere (1998). To this day, I find it difficult to watch films which […]

Academia During a Pandemic: Hunker Down Philosophy 1A

COVID-19 is upon us in the good old United States of America. Like many totally great countries, we are really prepared for a global pandemic involving a virus for which there is no direct treatment and which kills vulnerable populations a tad too easily. We’re super prepared. Mega prepared. So prepared it’s like this country […]

Film Challenge: 10 Underrated SF/F Films (1999-2019)

I have once more (and a very long time ago) been challenged by Ian Sales to join him in our un-named war to come up with the best arbitrary list of films within an equally arbitrarily selected category. You can find previous iterations of this absurdity here, here, here, here, and here. We have, alas, […]

Five Faves: SF/F/M Movies or Shows I Love Because of My Grandma

A little over a year ago, we lost my grandmother, Merle Crawford. She was a quirky and jovial lady. The kind of person who could meet anyone at a grocery store and turn a chance encounter into a meeting between old friends. You can read a bit more about her life in the obituary I […]

All the Star Wars

I was all set to let a blog post slide for the evening. There’s a lot going on today, so it just seemed like a lost cause. And then this happened. What’s that? Here, let me quote it for you: