Pixel Scroll 11/3 Ten Things I Slate About You

(1) Disney has optioned the movie rights to Ursula Vernon’s childrens book Castle Hangnail for an adaptation to be produced by Ellen DeGeneres.

DeGeneres will produce with Jeff Kleeman, her partner at A Very Good Production banner.

The book tells of a 12-year old witch who shows up at a dark castle that needs a master or be decommissioned by the bureaucratic Board of Magic and its many minions, such as a hypochondriac fish and a letter ‘Q’ averse minotaur, dispersed into the world. She projects confidence as she tackles the series of tasks laid forth by the board but underneath lie several simmering secrets, including one of her being an imposter….

DeGeneres and Kleeman are busy in the television world but Hangnail is their second notable move on the movie side and keeps their feet firmly in the fantasy field. Earlier this year the duo set up Uprooted, the novel from Temeraire author Naomi Novik, for Warner Bros.

(2) A magisterial essay by Ursula K. Le Guin at Tin House, “’Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?’”.

American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.

What American critics and teachers call “literature” is still almost wholly restricted to realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, regional, you name it—are dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, doesn’t bother those who live in ivory towers. Magic realism, though—that does bother them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians dancing up in the attic, and they think maybe they should do something about it. Perhaps they should give that fellow who teaches the science fiction course tenure? Oh, surely not.

To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention. I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted (and, incidentally, very puritanical) proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. This has been a genuine popularity, not a matter of academic canonizing. People really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography fine, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the most popular—the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

(3) “The Call of the Sad Whelkfins: The Continued Relevance of How To Suppress Women’s Writing“ by Annalee Flower Horne and Natalie Luhrs in Uncanny Magazine #7 uses Joanna Russ’ text to diagnose some critics’ responses to Ancillary Justice.

I snorted. For the past week, Natalie Luhrs and I had been discussing the book in the context of the ongoing fight for the soul of the science fiction community, most recently played out in the failed attempt to take over the Hugo Awards. In HTSWW, Russ uses an alien species called the whelk–finned Glotolog to illustrate the methods by which human cultures control women’s writing without direct censorship (4). These days, the tactics the so–called “sad puppies” use to paint themselves as the true heirs of science fiction, bravely holding the line against the invading masses, are the very same tactics Joanna Russ ascribed to the whelk–finned Glotolog in 1983…

False Categorizing of the Work She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (HTSWW)

False Categorization is, essentially, bad faith. It allows the critic to shift the focus to something else—usually something trivial in the larger context, so as to dismiss the whole. So once again, we’ll look at the pronouns in Ancillary Justice. By focusing on the pronouns, the sad whelkfins are able to dismiss the entire work as nothing more than a political screed against men, as turgid message fiction that doesn’t even tell a good story.

That’s a massive tell to anyone who has actually read the book—because while the pronouns do take some adjustment, they’re a small part of the novel’s world–building and not a major source of plot or conflict. They just are, the way there is air to breathe and skel to eat.

(4) “Updates on the Chinese Nebula Awards and the Coordinates Awards” at Amazing Stories has the full list of award winners (only two were reported here on the night of the ceremony). Since Steve Davidson is able to reproduce the titles in the original language, all the more reason to refer you there.

(5) Liu Cixin participated in “The Future of China through Chinese Science Fiction” at the University of Sydney on November 3.

(6) Crossed Genres Magazine will close after the December 2015 issue reports Locus Online.

Co-publisher Bart Lieb posted a statement:

Two primary factors led to this decision. First, one of Crossed Genres’ co-publishers, Kay Holt, has been dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for more than two years. It’s made it extremely difficult for her to help with the running of CG, leaving the lion’s share of responsibilities on the other co-publisher, Bart Leib, who’s also working a day job. Magazine co-editor Kelly Jennings, ebook coordinator Casey Seda, and our team of first readers have all been heroic in their volunteer efforts, but we’ve still been unable to keep from falling behind.

The second factor is simply that the magazine has run out of funds to continue. In April 2014 we ran a successful Kickstarter to keep CG Magazine going, but once another year had passed, roughly 90 percent of those who’d pledged to the Kickstarter chose not to renew their memberships….

(7) Today In History

  • November 3, 1956 — On this night in 1956, CBS presented the first broadcast of The Wizard of Oz.  It was a major event for which the network paid MGM a quarter of a million dollars for the rights (over $2,000,000 in today’s dollars.)
  • November 3, 1976 — Brian De Palma’s Carrie is seen for the very first time

(8) Today’s Birthday Monster

  • November 3, 1954 — Godzilla was released in Japanese theaters.

(9) Today’s Belated Birthday

  • Lovecraft’s 125th birthday (in August) was celebrated in many ways in Providence. A new plaque was installed near his birthplace at 454 Angell Street, designed, created, and installed by Gage Prentiss.

(10) Today’s Yodeling Marmot

(11) “Transparent Aluminum: IT’S REAL!” at Treehugger.

Remember Star Trek: The Voyage Home, where Scotty talks into a computer mouse and then instantly figures out keyboards and gives away the formula for transparent Aluminum? And remember Galaxy Quest, where Commander Taggart tells the Justin Long character about the ship: “IT’S REAL!”

Mash those two scenes together and you have Spinel, described by US Naval Research Laboratory scientist Dr. Jas Sanghera as “actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate. The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments—so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.” He likes it for the same reason Scotty did, according to an NRL press release

(12) Arlan Andrews told Facebook friends that Ken Burnside has answered the Alfies.

The Wreck of the Hugo

So, today I received this 3D-printed crashed rocket ship, titled “The Wreck of the Hugo” as created by artist Charles Oines and commissioned by Ken Burnside. Others went to Kary English, Mike Resnick, and Toni Weisskopf. According to Ken Burnside, the official 2015 Hugo voting tallies showed each of us recipients as runners-up to the 2500-vote NO AWARD bloc that wrecked the Hugos this year in many categories. I gratefully accept the gifted award in the spirit in which it was given, and sincerely hope that no future Hugo nominees are ever again voted off the island in such a fashion.

(That last part resonates strangely, at least in my memory, because “I accept this award in the spirit in which it is given” was Norman Spinrad’s answer when handed the Brown Hole Award for Outstanding Professionalism in 1973. And he was right to be suspicious.)

(13) Meanwhile, the curator of the Alfies, George R.R. Martin, is already making recommendations for the Dramatic Presentation categories in “Hugo Thoughts”.

In the past, I have usually made my own Hugo recommendations only after nominations have opened. But in light of what happened last year, it seems useful to begin much sooner. To get talking about the things we like, the things we don’t like. This is especially useful in the case of the lesser known and obscure work. Drawing attention to such earlier in the process is the best way to get more fans looking at them… and unless you are aware of a work, you’re not likely to nominate it, are you? (Well, unless you’re voting a slate, and just ticking off boxes).

Let me start with the Dramatic Presentation category. Long form….

(14) Damien G. Walter does best when the target is as easy to hit as the broad side of a barn. “Gus. A Case Study In Sad Puppy Ignorance”.

Firstly, is Gus actually asking us to believe that Frankenstein : A Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the famed early feminist icon, daughter of philosopher and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of romantic poet and political radical Percy Byshe Shelley, close friend of paramilitary revolutionary Lord Byron, and author of  seven novels (many science fictional) and innumerable other stories, essays and letters, all of them revealing a life of deep engagement with political and social issues of gender, class, sexuality and more, that this same Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein : A Modern Prometheus (a subtitle explicitly invoking the mythical act of stealing fire from the gods as an opening rhetorical reference to the risks of scientific endeavour) as, and I quote, “the sole purpose of…macabre entertainment”? Because I would suggest, on the basis of all available evidence, including every single thing ever written about Frankenstein, that Gus is in a minority on this one. In fact, I will go so far as to say that he is utterly, absurdly and idiotically wrong.

(15) John Thiel’s responses to Steve Davidson’s queries about “trufandom” appear in “The Voices of Fandom” at Amazing Stories.

Steve’s introduction notes –

I posed a series of interview questions to members of the Fan History group on Facebook.  I thought it would be a good place to start because that group is made up entirely of Trufans.

Today, I present the first in a series of responses to those questions and I should point out that, in typical Fannish fashion, the answers are anything but monolithic.  Apparently Fans have as many different ideas about what it means to be a Fan as there are Fans, which just serves to point out how difficult it is to get a handle on this question.

(16) A video interview with Dame Diana Rigg.

Five decades since she first appeared as Emma Peel in The Avengers (1961-1969), fans of the show still approach Dame Diana Rigg to express their gratitude. Rigg joins BFI curator Dick Fiddy to reflect on the influence of Peel on real-life women and acting with Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry.

(17) Jon Michaud reviews Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons in The New Yorker and accuses the biographer of shielding Gygax rather than exploring more deeply the controversial topic of his religious views.

Dr. Thomas Radecki, a founding member of the National Coalition on TV Violence, said, “There is no doubt in my mind that the game Dungeons & Dragons is causing young men to kill themselves and others.” In her book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” Tipper Gore connected the game to satanism and the occult. All of this prompted a “60 Minutes” segment in which Gygax rejected these myriad accusations, calling them “nothing but a witch hunt.”

What was largely unknown or omitted from this brouhaha is that Gygax was an intermittently observant Jehovah’s Witness. This startling fact crops up about halfway through Witwer’s biography, when he notes that Gygax’s “controversial” game, along with his smoking and drinking, had led to a parting of the ways with the local congregation. Up until that point, the matter of Gygax’s faith had gone unmentioned in the biography, and it is barely discussed thereafter. (The book’s index does not have an entry for “Jehovah’s Witness” or “Gygax, Gary—religious beliefs.”) Given the furor that D. & D. caused, the absence of a deeper analysis of Gygax’s faith is a glaring omission. In a recent interview with Tobias Carroll, Witwer acknowledged that Gygax “was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. He would go door-to-door and he would give out pamphlets. He was pretty outspoken about it, as a matter of fact.” The reason for almost completely excluding it from the biography, Witwer says, is that “I couldn’t find it [as] a huge driving force in his life.…I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed with that, because I’m not clear that, especially with his gaming work and even his home life, how big a factor that was on a day-to-day basis. But I do know he was practicing.”

(18) Galactic Journey visits the year 1960 where young Mike Glyer’s favorite TV series, Men Into Space, is still on the air, and there’s even a tie-in novel by Murray Leinster.

men into space cover COMP.jpg

“Men Into Space” consists of short stories following the career of Space Force officer Ed McCauley:

As a lieutenant, McCauley makes the first manned rocket flight.

As a captain, McCauley deals with an injured crewman while piloting the first space-plane.

As a major, McCauley deals with a potentially-fatal construction accident while in charge the building of the first space station.

As a colonel, McCauley deals with a murderous personnel problem while overseeing the establishment of a series of radio relays to the moon’s far side, then deals with a technical problem aboard a rocket to Venus, and another personnel problem on a Mars mission.

Lots of nuts and bolts details about ballistics, rocket fuels, radiation, the van Allen belts, and so forth.  And with each story, McCauley deals with progressively more complex human problems as he moves up in rank.

Although 7-year-old me would have loved the tie-in novel, 35 cents would have been a king’s ransom in my personal economy….

(19) Here’s a photo of the Cosmos Award presentation to Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Planetary Society 35th anniversary celebration on October 24.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (left) accepted The Planetary Society's Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science. Bill Nye (middle) was on stage as Tyson accepted the award from Nichelle Nichols (right), who is best known for playing Lt. Uhura on "Star Trek" (the original series) and who is an advocate for real-world space exploration.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (left) accepted The Planetary Society’s Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science. Bill Nye (middle) was on stage as Tyson accepted the award from Nichelle Nichols (right), who is best known for playing Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek” (the original series) and who is an advocate for real-world space exploration.

Before the award was given to Tyson, Nye reminisced about meeting Tyson through the organization. Nye then showed a photo of what Tyson looked like in 1980, when he was a wrestler (Tyson wrestled in high school and college), and Tyson joked that he kicked some serious butt.

Tyson had come prepared, and showed a photo of Nye in 1980, in a “Coneheads” costume, with a silver ring around his head.

(20) The Red Bull Music Academy website has published David Keenan’s “Reality Is For People Who Can’t Handle Science Fiction”, about the influence of SF on French progressive rock from 1969 through 1985.

In 2014 I interviewed Richard Pinhas of Heldon, still one of the central punk/prog mutants to come out of the French underground. I asked him about the influence of the visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick on his sound and on his worldview. “Philip K. Dick was a prophet to us,” Pinhas explained. “He saw the future.”

It makes sense that a musical and cultural moment that was obsessed with the sound of tomorrow would name a sci-fi writer as its central avatar. Indeed, while the Sex Pistols spat on the British vision of the future dream as a shopping scheme, the French underground projected it off the planet altogether.

When Pinhas formed Heldon in 1974 he named the group in tribute to sci-fi writer Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream, conflating his own vision of a mutant amalgam of Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock and cyborg-styled electronics with Spinrad’s re-writing of history.

(21) At CNN, “Art transforms travel photos with paper cutouts”:

That’s what happened when Londoner Rich McCor began adorning pictures of British landmarks with whimsical paper cutouts and posting the results online.

Originally, the 28-year-old creative agency worker intended the photos for the amusement of himself and friends.

Then he got a lesson on the impact of “viral” when Britain’s “Daily Mail” publicized some of his photos.

 

arc-de-triomphe-paris-jpg-rich-mccor-exlarge-169

 [Thanks to Rob Thornton, Mark-kitteh, Will R., Michael J. Walsh, JJ, Janice Gelb, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]

220 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/3 Ten Things I Slate About You

  1. Do note that the Le Guin essay is actually a “reprint” of a 2000 talk, so it’s 15 years out of date. And I cut UKL a lot of slack since she’s not actively in academia and thus wouldn’t have access to the sort of data about popularity that the MLA index represents–the bibliography still isn’t generally available to non-university folks. Finally, there’s a long way to go for fantasy/SF scholarship and scholars. I teach at a public flagship R-1 school, and it’s pretty clear to me that I would have to spend a lot of blood and treasure to get a graduate seminar on fantasy up and running. Fantasy and SF courses for undergrads as a way of getting butts in seats and thus FTEs? Sure! But my colleagues are not exactly shy about rejecting fantasy and SF as valid dissertation topics, hiring fields, and fodder for grad curricula. We have a grad student who wrote a brilliant dissertation on comics but had to go on the market as a 20th century Americanist because comics is not yet taken seriously as a field across the board. Another student wrote on 19th century automata, but in a stealthy way that let her present as a standard Victorianist instead of the SF/fantasy fan she is.

    The situation is definitely much much better than UKL knows or admits, but lots of work remains to be done.

  2. @Rev. Bob & @Kyra: Thanks, that’s helpful feedback! I’m not sure how the “Golden Age” books dropped off my RADAR (I remember hearing about the first). Time to get the sample (despite my 2015-published-novels focus). I do believe these are up my alley, as a fan of both F/SF and comics/graphic novels.

    @Kyra: Wait, usually you make me aware of books. 😉 Re. the Barzak, I’ve got One for Sorrow, but never read it. (It took me three tries to type his name correctly, despite his latest being open in another tab for reference. Sigh.)

    Okay, time to put all three samples on my iPad soon, ‘cuz, you know, not enough books in the Tower o’ TBR Doom. Or the iPad Sample List o’ Doom.

  3. Well done, Red Wombat. I haven’t read Castle Hangnail yet, but from a brief look, it seems like a good adaptation could be very successful.

  4. My favorite adaptation of Frankenstein was the 1973 “Frankestein: The True Story.”
    The cast was gorgeous — when I checked IMDB just now I was really startled to see some of the names. I did not remember that Tom Baker was in it, but David McCallum, Jane Seymour, and Michael Sarrazin were among those I did remember.

    (Just added it to my Big River wishlist.)

  5. On the subject of the Gygax biography, James Malizewski actually asked Gygax about the question: ” he explained that he felt it unseemly to include anything too explicitly Christian in a mere game, even if he assumed a kind of quasi-Christian or crypto-Christian underpinning for the whole thing.” (http://grognardia.blogspot.ca/2008/12/implicit-christianity-of-early-gaming.html) Malizewski concluded that original D&D had an “implicit Christianity” but the cleric class was actually created by Dave Arneson, not Gygax, and was based more on the Van Helsing character in Dracula, particularly the Hammer Films versions. (That’s a separate article but I don’t want to overlink this comment; the first article links to it.)

  6. I note 3D printers mentioned upthread – to my mind the other option is a CNC machine, I think people were trying to bring to market a tabletop version which would be a bit like the opposite of a 3D printer. So you could roughly shape your object in plaster or suchlike and then the CNC would carve it to precisely the right shape.

  7. @rrede: That wasn’t too long and I did read. Thank you.

    Do you have a feeling for how fast Tolkien studies is growing relative to size of the field as a whole? Is it a growing fraction of the field, or just reflecting an overall growth?

  8. Rob: thanks for noting the essay is a reprint.

    Sure the R1 universities are dire. But there are a lot of other universities that are not R 1 and ignoring us is a problem.

  9. better than UKL knows or admits

    I would suggest that academic analysis would be greatly improved by noticing the date that a speech is given, or an essay is written, and that if anyone has evidence that UKL is deliberately misrepresenting the facts then they should present that evidence before using the word admits.

    Admit is a massively loaded word, used most frequently in the context of criminal wrongdoing; it is completely inappropriate to use it without evidence to support it.

  10. Oh please. This is not a court of law or a scholarly journal, but a web board. And I’ve read enough of UKL’s blogs and speeches over the years to recognize that she has a bit of a chip on her shoulder regarding academia. It would not surprise me to learn that she’s aware of the increased profile fantasy and SF have in universities but is still unable to rid herself of her old gripe about the dismissal of genre. (Which, to be fair, is not as entirely outdated as I imply here, given the points I make above about continued resistance to genre in graduate training and tenure-stream hiring.)

  11. Huzzah for Red Wombat! May the adaptation be better than Wizard of EarthTV!

    You know, most cadets who fly their rockets into the terrain get time in the brig, not a (crummy) statue.

  12. I would be shocked if the word admit was most commonly used in courts of law. For example “I [don’t like Star Trek much], but I have to admit [the episode last week was pretty good]” isn’t exactly an uncommon formulation.

  13. Yeah, LeGuin is overstating the case and a little outdated–only a little, in my experience, if we are talking general attitudes of academic departments, but still. She is also giving a speech to a non-academic, non-scholarly audience, and so I forgive her for both the exaggerating and for the old chip on her shoulder.

    (It may help explain my attitude in this instance that I had yet another, um, slightly heated discussion with an academic colleague, just a few weeks ago, in which my objections to the phrase “that crap with the swords and wizards” featured prominently . . .)

  14. Rob

    All in all, managing to overlook a 15 year gap when criticising the contents by reference to a different time period is unlikely to inspire confidence in the overall thesis. And whilst Mike’s many roles do not, I hope, include conducting a court, the word admit is one which any lawyer profoundly hopes not to hear emerging from his client’s lips. Of course, it might not be criminal wrongdoing; the lawyer prays just as fervently if it’s an allegation of medical negligence, and an insurer feels exactly the same way about car crashes.

    I do, of course, still expect someone who teaches English to know the dictionary definitions of words they use, though it’s comforting to see that you noticed the date; it’s disappointing that you overlooked the significance of the date re Peter Jackson’s films. The Fellowship of the Ring went into cinemas here in the UK on 10th December, 2001, and millions of people who had never even heard of Tolkien suddenly decided that he was utterly amazing, and actually read the book as a make do until the next film came out. Well, that and a lot of fanfic. Any analysis of the recognition given to Tolkien’s work has to include the influence of a series of highly successful films; criticising Ursula Le Guin for her failure in 2000 to predict the future seems nonsensical.

  15. @Laura Resnick:

    But since many languages don’t mirror English in terms of gendered pronouns, and numerous cultures don’t share the perspective, still very prevalent in the US, of strict binary gender, and the book is about a culture very different than contemporary US culture, set in a place many light years from here… It’s hard to see the Puppies’ constant harping on the book as anything other than parochial rage at an sf novelist for envisioning more possibilities than they envision and at her readers for appreciating or enjoying it.

    Yeah, that was pretty much my take on it when I read it. The choice to use the female pronoun, in universe, was essentially arbitrary and meaningless, and presented as such.

    Did Leckie do it to be provocative? I don’t think there’s any question: clearly she did. But she also made it work, perfectly, in universe, and didn’t make it a big deal in the book. The way she handled it was ideal. There wasn’t even a hint of preachiness. It was just presented as a thing. “Here it is, take it or leave it. This makes perfect sense. If you object to it, that says more about you than me.” It was an outstanding example of show-don’t-tell.

    Of course, beyond that, how much you like the books will depend on how much you like classic space opera. I like the genre, but it’s not my favorite. But it is ironic how many of the people who object to AJ claim to be huge fans of books a whole lot like it. If it weren’t for the relatively minor element of language play, it would be exactly the sort of thing they claim we should be voting for.

    @McJulie:

    You know, for SP4, if I were actually a fan of any of these people, I would probably campaign for not trying to get them on the ballot at all, because clearly getting on the ballot and not winning is far worse for them than never getting nominated in the first place.

    Ha! That’s a brilliant point, and one that bears repeating frequently and loudly. 🙂

  16. I have read Frankenstein. Pretty sure Gus has watched the movie instead.

    The Librarians latest episode had a minor plot riff on the difference between movie and book – as you’d expect from a show with that title. They also got in a quip about the lengthy lectures 🙂

    But as a mere consumer of his products, I don’t see what his religion has to do with them. I mean, it’s a game, what’s it got to do with “important” stuff like religion or real life?

    Fred Clark of Slacktivist frequently posts on why evangelicals hate D&D – it’s one of the reasons I’m considering nominating him for Fan Writer.

  17. Some completely personal data points on SF/F (and the other extracanonical literatures) in the academy:

    In 1975, I finished a dissertation on late 19th/early-20th-century supernatural fantasy with nary a whisper of condescension from my committee (which, to be sure, I had selected with some care). I had been training as a medievalist, but my coursework had included Mark Hillegas’s grad seminars on SF/F, the first of which focused on Tolkien, Lewis, Sayers, and Charles Williams. (My seminar paper was on LotR.) When I became senior enough in the grad-assistant ranks to design my own courses, I got the green light for a sophomore-level course on popular literature–SF, mystery, and historical. When I got a more or less real job in 1978 (faculty-spouse level), I encountered no resistance to using SF as the subject matter for the first-year term paper course. And if there was any eyebrow-lifting at my publications in this period (Extrapolation, SFS, Foundation, reviews, a string of reference-book entries), it didn’t register with me. Nor was there any resistance to asking for funding for travel to SFRA and PCA meetings. I was aware of residual resistance to expanding the range of materials worth studying, but it didn’t seem to affect me or many of the mid-career teachers I knew through SFRA and PCA. But then, the fact that I knew them via meetings meant that their institutions or departments were probably not resistant. And many were, like me, retreads whose original focus had been medieval or Victorian or modern American/British lit–my dissertation director, Mark Hillegas, was a Victorian/modern-Brit guy who came to SF/F via utopian studies. The cohort of officially-trained-in-SF/F scholars was a good 5-10 years behind me. And I recall how slowly MLA was to make room for SF/F topics at their annual conference, let alone in the pages of PMLA. (The regional MMLA was much more relaxed.)

    BTW–in 1978, if I recall correctly, Le Guin (along with Brian Aldiss and Ben Bova that I recall personally) was at the SFRA conference in Waterloo, Iowa. That was the same year that University of Kansas hosted the first Campbell Conference, though Jim Gunn had been promoting SF as an academic area for several years before that.

    Le Guin’s comments on the privileged position of realistic fiction in our culture-at-large is a topic for another post, along, perhaps, with meditations on the multiplicity of audiences.

  18. I actually don’t consider the Jackson films to be all that relevant to the academic reception of Tolkien. Yes, they have helped ensure that those of us teaching Tolkien will have full enrollments, but that was the case with the Tolkien courses taught before the release of the films. I never had any trouble filling my fantasy lit courses in the 1990s; I just wasn’t given very many opportunities to teach the genre then. And the Tolkien scholarship boom predates 2001 as well. Of the 2948 hits that “Tolkien” generates in the MLA Index, 1498 of them were published prior to 2002 (the earliest date that any movie-inspired scholarship could have appeared). And the 1450 “Tolkien” items published since 2002 only include 222 items on “Jackson,” suggesting that scholars aren’t all that interested in the movies compared to the books themselves.

    The main point here, though, is that UKL’s stump speech on high culture dismissal of genre was already old in 2000–it was in fact 26 years old at that point (if we go by the 1974 publication date of the “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” essay UKL mentions in the linked article). If UKL is angry about anything new in the linked essay, it’s the ignorance of tradition that allowed for the Harry Potter books to be presented as startlingly original works–but that is not a mistake made by academics teaching fantasy but by journalists and marketers.

    Something similar to UKL’s chip is at work in Shippey’s Author of the Century, published in 2000 and thus contemporaneous with the UKL essay. While I enjoyed the outrage Germaine Greer and other snobs expressed upon the book’s publication (and the release of the Waterstones poll naming Tolkien as the century’s best author), it was also clear to me that Shippey was treating the current academic climate for Tolkien as though it was identical to the one he faced when he started publishing on Tolkien in the 1970s–but that was no longer the case 15 years ago. There was a thriving Tolkien scholarship already in place, and Tolkien undergraduate courses were easy sells.

    I don’t think so little of UKL as to assume that all of this passed her by completely unnoticed (although I’m sure she didn’t have anything like the same picture of the situation as academics working on fantasy did). Instead, I believe that, as in Shippey’s case, the scars of past battles influenced the present (ca. 2000). UKL has continued to beat this old drum well into the current century: e.g., her 2007 piece on “Serious Literature” or her dust-up with Ishiguro earlier this year. I can understand why she does it without endorsing it as an accurate depiction of the culture, either now or in 2000.

  19. To respond to rrede and Russell’s posts, I’ll just agree that there have definitely been universities open to genre literature and genre literature scholars for decades, but that, as they also both point out, that openness tends not to be found as much in the R1 schools at the center of humanities scholarship (and thus running the big national conferences). It’s actually one of the best things about genre literature scholarship: people at all levels of institutions come together to discuss what they love without playing hierarchy games.

  20. @Jamoche, your why-evangelicals-hate-D&D link is broken.

    (And I’m curious to read it, because many-many years ago I briefly played D&D with a small group of mostly-evangelicals. Granted, they were outliers who read SF and fantasy…)

  21. @Mark:

    Naomi Kritzer (of “Cat Pictures, Please”) has another good story in the latest Clarkesworld, this time a novelette. “So Much Cooking” is cleverly told through a series of food-related blog posts as a bird flu outbreak escalates. It could probably be criticised for a lack of SF content, being more of a “5 minutes ahead” setting,….

    Yes, if this story was published as “realistic” fiction I don’t think anyone would blink. Although the epidemic is a bit worse than any the US has seen in living memory, it’s not an apocalypse that changes life as we know it. There is essentially nothing that happens that would be outside an American reader’s ideas of how things work. Two kinds of novelty in science fiction are a new society or an unheard-of crisis that changes society; this story has neither. Can anyone think of other good examples of science fiction stories that contain essentially no innovation like this?

  22. Yay, Ursula!

    On the subject of the Golden Age books, the second one is my favorite Vaughn book so far. I’ve heard a third one is in the works, but I don’t know when it might be released.

  23. When it comes to Hollywood, the two best options seem to be a) property is turned into a huge successful movie/TV show that wins awards and everyone is happy and b) property is never turned into a movie/TV show, but the option keeps getting picked up by various producers who are sure they’ll be the one who somehow gets it made into a huge successful award-winning movie/TV show.

    Somewhere in-between lies LXG.

  24. Congratulations, Ursula!

    (One of my short stories got optioned for a “Twilight-Zone-style-series-for-Fantasy” proposal for a few years. It was from a two-man outfit in Boise, Idaho, so I wasn’t too surprised it never ended up in an actual production. But the checks — the option was renewed a couple of times — were really welcome, and tended to come in at times they were really needed.)

  25. There was a huge drop-off of students majoring in humanities courses during the 1970s

    My sister was in college (briefly) in the early 70s. They were being push to choose academic majors which were ‘relevant’: commercial art instead of fine art, that kind of thing.

  26. On Fred’s posts at Slacktivist: some of them are tagged with ‘D&D’, but not all.

  27. “to the 2500-vote NO AWARD bloc that wrecked the Hugos this year in many categories.”

    That’s an awfully funny way to spell out the phrase “2500 votes that prevented people who cheated their way onto the ballot via slating from winning Hugos with extremely sub par work”. It must be a dialect thing or something

  28. Ian: Do you have a feeling for how fast Tolkien studies is growing relative to size of the field as a whole? Is it a growing fraction of the field, or just reflecting an overall growth?

    Depends on the field–that is, while arguably until fairly recently (in academic term), Tolkien studies was a sub-set of literary studies, that’s no longer the case. Tolkien Studies is now a multi-disciplinary *and* interdiscipinary field that incorporates scholarship not only on Tolkien’s work (and overlaps with Inkling Studies and genre fantasy studies) but can also be considered to include the films (Bakshi as well as Jackson), the games, the fandom, the merchandising (economics scholars!), the tourism industry (in both Britain and New Zealand), and probably some stuff I’m not remembering.

    It’s also a part of the cultural studies movement which (as Dimitra Fimi who wrote THE monograph on Tolkien and Race) changed “literary studies” in major ways that we’re still sorting out (and will be after I retire). One of the most radical shifts in literary studies is that modernists are now paying attention to Tolkien as well as medievalists and some postmodernists (not Postmodernists, mind you–I only know one person who does deconstruction routinely on Tolkien–Nagy).

    And there are still important strains of Tolkien scholarship being done by independent scholars most notably Douglas Anderson, John Rateliff, and Jason Fisher.

    I also don’t have much of a sense of how any academic “field” is growing (since data is damned hard to find, and years out of date by the time it can get circulated)–one of the reason for so much more activity on the presentation and even publication is that graduate students and even undergraduates are often expected to present these days, and there are more and more publications being created, but not necessarily huge numbers more academics. So it’s confusing to try to track. I am fairly well aware of the ‘field’ in feminist sff (growing!), fan studies (ditto) and Tolkien studies, as well as dipping my toes in some areas of digital humanities — but those are all pretty specialized/narrow fields (arguably “literary studies” is made up of a whole lot of specialized sub-fields some of which are bigger/bigger status than others).

  29. Rob Barrett: If UKL is angry about anything new in the linked essay, it’s the ignorance of tradition that allowed for the Harry Potter books to be presented as startlingly original works–but that is not a mistake made by academics teaching fantasy but by journalists and marketers.

    As Terry Pratchett made so very and so brilliantly clear back in the day!

    I actually don’t consider the Jackson films to be all that relevant to the academic reception of Tolkien.

    The Tolkienists I know all say that the films made a difference (as much as they dislike them), in terms of demand for them as speakers, for courses to be developed, and also in terms of student knowledge–granted, many are not happy that the film is uppermost in so many students minds!

    It’s only my personal experience and my friends, but the difference for us was that we didn’t teach fantasy or SF pre-film — and the huge uproar around the films gave us the chance to do so in ways that were new (and that most of us are not in the medieval/literary field as well is part of this). I agree I may be over emphasizing because the films allowed it for me, and I’ve been involved in stuff ever since the films–but I think the impact is real, even if overestimated on my part, and may differ widely in different institutions.

    I’m interested that the issue of critics and academics (and my notes about critics who are not academics) is being sort of elided into academics–though i’m always happy to talk about academia and canonization and other fun stuff.

    was also clear to me that Shippey was treating the current academic climate for Tolkien as though it was identical to the one he faced when he started publishing on Tolkien in the 1970s

    Important to emphasize SHippey is a linguist, a philologist, an Anglo-Saxonist, and I’ve seen him stand up and insult a whole room full of lit people–it’s very fun!

    BUT I’ve also heard from his students that he would not let them do a Tolkien dissertation because they wouldn’t get a job–this ties in to the R1 issue. He was thinking the only “jobs” worth the name are at the tier one and Oxbridge university systems because that’s the system he came from.

    My little Lit and Lang department in rural Texas has a small doctoral program (but growing) and we have 100% placement of our doctoral students into jobs when they graduate — and I’m not the only radical type in my program — the “traditional” canonical literary focus is not the major area in our program for “English” jobs. I also know people who got jobs with dissertations in Tolkien (the ability to teach composition is a whole lot more important than what the diss. topic is at a lot of universities these days).

    Since I know a whole slew of feminist academics on sf and f have deep ties in fandom (and fan cons are routinely scheduling academic tracks), and the internet feminist criticism is long-standing these days, I do find it hard to believe that those aspects of criticism passed LeGuin by.

    And yes it’s true that the subscription databases are locked away, but more and more things like Google Scholar, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate, as well as open access journals and sites make it easier to find what’s being done by academics.

    And LeGuin is in Portland where the University of Oregon (I haz friends there) is which is a flagship university that is totally open to sf.

    I screwed up by not seeing the reprint info, but even in 2000, the claims she was making are not particularly born out because these changes have been developing since the 1970s.

  30. P. J. They were being push to choose academic majors which were ‘relevant’: commercial art instead of fine art, that kind of thing.

    I started university in 1973. I was there. And yep, that push was there too (and comes around routinely!), but it’s also true that majors formerly closed to women were opening up (my Dad was head of a geology department then who removed the “no girlz allowed” rule for geology majors).

    I now have women coming back to get their English degrees after being in business because that was where they were pushed in the 70s!

    There’s also a backlash against all STEM all the time happening because in response to employer demand, the universities have pumped out STEM majors.

    Granted, it’s presented in the most corporate of terms but liberal studies and humanities majors are apparently back in demand.

  31. @rrede: Thanks. Point well taken about the data sources: I was recently prepping a funding talk where I wanted numbers on people in my field, and in the end the only practical approach was to make the list myself, despite all the info that eg AAAS and IOP have.

  32. Someone above suggested that the fact that clerics are the healers was significan

    Honestly, that was meant to be a joke. I put the tongue-in-cheek smiley in there and everything.

    IIRC the origins of clerics have far more to do with Hammer horror films than religion- the healing was very much secondary to the ability to screw over the vampire character.

  33. When I first came to Illinois, we brought Shippey up from St. Louis for a panel on Tolkien (I was the junior faculty member of the panel, and Alf Siewers was the grad student–Alf has obviously gone on to be a Tolkien scholar of some note). And it was clear then to me from talking to Shippey that (a) he is indeed a provocateur (as you point out) and (b) he had difficulty acknowledging the progress that fantasy had made in the academy.

    I suspect you’re totally right about the different levels of the academic market. For example, many of the most interesting people in Robert E Howard studies are independent scholars or working outside of the R1 enclave. There’s an entirely different set of status games where I work: as I mentioned earlier, there are the ridiculous labeling games some of our graduate students had to play to get their dissertations approved and to be competitive at the R1 level. During my pre-tenure period, I was once pulled off our fantasy lit course by a senior administrator because “faculty members are needed for real courses; a grad student can handle the fantasy class.” And as late as 2013, at least two members of the LAS curriculum committee tried to deep-six my comics course proposal because it was a subject beneath the dignity of a public flagship university.

    Overall, though, I think academia as a whole has been more hospitable to genre literature than the mainstream press and the literary establishment. So UKL’s pique in that direction was certainly justified in 2000 and still has relevance today (Ishiguro’s defense of himself as a fantasy reader in response to her complaints hit some very wrong notes, suggesting the limits to his knowledge of the genre.)

  34. Ian: Yeah, I skim stuff in the Chronicle of Higher Education and see some MLA statistics once in a while (https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Career-Resources/Career-and-Job-Market-Information/MLA-Surveys-of-PhD-Placement), but don’t really know enough to say anything.

    THere are however lots and lots of statistics about how universities are hiring administrator types more than faculty types! http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/11/02/university-cost-bloated

    We’ve hired lots and lots of administrators in student services and outsources all our tech support and data stuff, but it’s still impossible to get an answer as to how many majors are in a program………..

  35. Here’s a thing. Puppy nominee Eric S. Raymond has made the rather…dramatic…claim that Women in Tech groups (specifically, but not limited to, The Ada Initiative) have been attempting honey traps against open-source community figures, in which members attempt to engineer times they are alone in order to claim sexual assaults took place. He specifically claims that several attempts have targeted Linus Torvalds.

    Now back to the very interesting academic Tolkein discussion!

  36. Rob: I think Shippey doesn’t “do” fantasy but only Tolkien (which is another whole fascinating debate) (as is the issue of how “science fiction” academia for some time has looked down on “fantasy” academia because sf inherently progressive and fantasy all monarchist!)!

    There’s an entirely different set of status games where I work: as I mentioned earlier, there are the ridiculous labeling games some of our graduate students had to play to get their dissertations approved and to be competitive at the R1 level

    Yeah, I got my Ph.D. at an R1 university, finishing in 1992. Luckily my two feminist committee members were amenable if bemused by the sff stuff (but hey, I found out you can use Foucault to justify sticking anything into a dissertation); my other committee members were a linguist (happy sigh, they don’t give a flying fuck about literary hierarchies), and an Americanist (who told me at the end I should just go write about women and sff because that was clearly where my heart was and he could tell that from the dissertation). And on my job search, I told the interviewing departments I was going to do women and sff and got hired (of course, here are the stats for that: 103 applications, 3 interviews at MLA two for adjunct/ntt instructor positions), 1 phone interview, 3 campus visits, one job offer in gulp Texas). But I could teach critical theory, multicultural literature, composition, creative writing, and technical writing, i.e. all the weird stuff, plus stylistics. (That university has totally changed in recent years I’ve found which is the benefits of being on the west coast!)

    And I didn’t want to work at a R1 university (which really threw my poor advisor who had no idea how to advise me in the job search). I wanted to work at a small university, in a rural area (I got exactly what I wanted–I just didn’t realize it would be in Texas).

    And as late as 2013, at least two members of the LAS curriculum committee tried to deep-six my comics course proposal because it was a subject beneath the dignity of a public flagship university.

    *sigh* Of course it was. My sympathies.

    My main problem came when I had readings by lesbian women of color in “multicultural literature and languages” (“homosexualities does NOT belong in multicultural literature, one senior colleague orated).

    And one senior colleague asked a friend if I was suffering from mental illness when I saw Fellowship 45 times in theatres……*heh good times* (Of course after we got a grant, I became a crazed obsessed academic with a grant which is totes cool with the Powers that Be).

    And I had to fight extra times to get tenure and graduate faculty status because of all of the above, plus being a queer woman (out) probably didn’t help. (Well I wasn’t offically out as queer until after getting tenure, but everybody KNEW because one, what I taught, and two I lived with a woman) .

  37. Well, and here I thought my 9 in-theatre screenings of Fellowship was a bit much. I stand corrected.

    (I do think Shippey is a fairly broad reader of fantasy; his Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories from 1994 has a pretty impressive ToC that goes well beyond the usual suspects to present stories from authors primarily known to fen only.)

  38. #12
    So Burnside is estimating his costs at $200?
    Really?
    Even for half a dozen awards that sounds steep.
    Couldn’t he have just found some very retro model rocket kits, so as to make it look like a broken machine instead of some sort of biological mishap?
    I mean, you can see someone proudly putting their Alfie on display; those things are shiny and witty and all that.
    They seem to communicate pride in achievement, appropriately for an award, however jokey or unofficial.

    This thing, um, not so much.
    This looks more like a kid’s art project that he thought was real cool and gross, and he’s all smirky about getting away with the poo and the limp dick, and how the dumb teacher didn’t call him on it.
    Not something you’d actually, you know, display.

    Were I demented enough to create an “award” to express my impression of puppydom, it might look like that.
    (“Here, here’s the rocket you losers deserve.”)
    But I’m not that far gone, so I wouldn’t, I didn’t.
    Sadly this is friendly fire.

  39. Mark on November 4, 2015 at 2:26 pm said:
    Here’s a thing. Puppy nominee Eric S. Raymond has made the rather…dramatic…claim that Women in Tech groups (specifically, but not limited to, The Ada Initiative) have been attempting honey traps against open-source community figures, in which members attempt to engineer times they are alone in order to claim sexual assaults took place. He specifically claims that several attempts have targeted Linus Torvalds.

    Wow, that is one sick little narrative.

  40. Mark:

    “Here’s a thing. Puppy nominee Eric S. Raymond has made the rather…dramatic…claim that Women in Tech groups (specifically, but not limited to, The Ada Initiative) have been attempting honey traps against open-source community figures, in which members attempt to engineer times they are alone in order to claim sexual assaults took place. He specifically claims that several attempts have targeted Linus Torvalds.”

    The paranoia is strong in this one.

  41. When my young niece and nephew came through town last summer I gave them a stack of File770-recommended works, including “Castle Hangnail”.

    Yay, Ursula Vernon!

  42. And look in the comments! Jay Maynard! Sorry to say, doesn’t surprise me. No wonder he doesn’t feel welcome anywhere with that kind of conspiracy thinking.

  43. @McJulie wrote: “Also, as a writer who has never won a Hugo myself, I’m extremely unsympathetic to the idea that not winning a Hugo is somehow the greatest insult a person could possibly endure.”

    Which made me think: “Hmmm. Most (none?) of ’em haven’t won a Nebula, or a Clarke, or a Skylark, or a Locus or a Seiun or a PKD, or a Sturgeon or a….

    How come they’re not complaining about that?”

    Question is rhetorical.

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