A year ago today I published my essay on Thaddeus Tuleja's Tibetan historical fantasy(?) novel LAND OF PRECIOUS SNOW (1977). It's obscure as hell, pretty fascinating, and I even tracked Tad down and interviewed him about this book!

A year ago today I published my essay on Thaddeus Tuleja's Tibetan historical fantasy(?) novel LAND OF PRECIOUS SNOW (1977). It's obscure as hell, pretty fascinating, and I even tracked Tad down and interviewed him about this book!

post a banger that's not in English Sally Yeh, 祝福 (1988) -- I do not speak Chinese (Cantonese in this case?) but this song makes me wish with all my heart that I did!

please stop it. be normal. park normal.

I can't recommend the 2023 animated film Mars Express strongly enough in this regard. The title is misleading. It's a deep and beautiful meditation on robots, intelligence, slavery, and freedom.

Staging a half-assed battle so the Klingons can "win" is such a ridiculously bad plot point and it shows how absolutely silly the Klingons are as an idea but also how dumb Starfleet (and the writers) thinks they are. Yeesh. Still, it's the best episode in an annoyingly bad show.

who called it Heated Rivalry and not Fuck Ice

Great thread on Cooper, who I actually quite like and agree that he's too little read today. One of my favorite courses in grad school was an early American lit course that ended with Cooper and The Pioneers.

I would love to see a meta-discussion of all the "origins of race" books there are out there, which collectively locate the origins of race in just about every historical period from antiquity to the present. But I haven't seen anything that synthesizes these accounts and discusses the...

It's a huge bummer how many recent shows from the major streaming services are not available on physical media. Like, come on, I want to own Righteous Gemstones -- I'll pay for physical copies of all 4 seasons. I'm willing! Please exploit me in this way!

Super cool when you're scrolling through upcoming UP book releases and you see a book by someone you went to grad school with on the very topic you spent hours discussing! I'm so happy for Mitch and so glad to see his book on Southern "Grit Lit" coming out in April!

Today's the one year anniversary of my essay on M. Lucie Chin's ONLY novel, 1988's Chinese mythic historical fantasy THE FAIRY OF KU-SHE, an expansive, imaginative, emotional story of gods, "fairies," motherhood, and climate catastrophe. It's a shame Chin didn't continue writing. She was great!

you know none of the people actually like kid rock or his music they are literally just vibing to racism

hell fucking yeah pre-order this book

Something affecting us in book publishing world: book club scams! They obviously target desperate authors and while these might be easier to spot for folks in the fiction world, who see lots of scams, these book clubs are now heavily targeting authors of UP books. So be wary!

I wrote a piece on Corey's THE MERCY OF GODS for @typebarmagazine.bsky.social a year or two ago that I'm still pretty happy with, about this pernicious fantasy of "internal resistance" to evil. More and more obvious that it's external, explicit resistance that we need.

"lame" lol

It's issue 10's cover! Illustrated by @smuggerby.bsky.social 💀TIMEWORN TERRA🌏️ is our special issue of tales set in futures so far they feel ancient, where magic & technology blur together, and Earth's days are short yet still we lust & laugh! Learn more here👉️ www.backerkit.com/c/projects/b...

Haven't used one of these in a quarter of a century and yet I'm still sad?

The Ancillary Review of Books anti-billionaire promise:

Out today! An extensive edited collection on the topic of triggers warnings in the college classroom, which takes a number of angles and perspectives:

Lots of good SF books (and books about speculative fiction & related topics) coming out this spring: check out our latest call for reviews & essays!

Many--maybe even most--of my favorite authors were horrible people. The good thing for me is..... They're all dead! That's the only time you get a pass to support a monster who made beauty. When you aren't putting any coins in their pockets. Because their pockets have rotted away under the earth.

Occasional reminder that I sell books and similar stuff on eBay. Link to my store is below. Just reached 4100+ items for the first time. So there are categories and internal search in the storefront, which might help a bit. www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

Ah yes, that thing that you can definitely do in theatres, buy tickets for the standing room

This reminds me of that time the cinema was so packed I had to stand for the entire 3 hours of Avatar: Way of Water. An old lady fainted from the crowd. People were trampled. I wish they'd make shorter movies.

"Reject productivity!" I said to myself and the Internet, while worrying incessantly about the fact that I've accomplished so little in life.

Can't now find it but there's a classic old tweet which said something like "Every time we're on the verge of achieving class consciousness in America a CIA sleeper agent activates and, their eyes glowing red, they just tweet out "John Brown was a white saviour"" and I think about it often.

Dick Heads: a podcast that reads through the works of PKD in chronological order

Seems like a bad/pointless test... Seinfeld would make plots of all tech? They made a plot about waiting in line for Chinese food! Everything is a "plot" for Seinfeld.

This is a great question. I think for me it is about teaching them to handle experiences of boredom, frustration, and confusion. Sitting with uncertainty, finding your way through an opaque image, letting go of your need to be better than the film, etc., are all skills that can be taught.

Sydney Sweeney: 👁️ 👄 👁️ Giancarlo Esposito: And for me, I have to speak out. If the whole world showed up... they’d kill 500 or 50 million or however [many], but the rest of us would survive with a new [world]. This is time for a revolution, and they don’t even know that’s what they’re starting.

Adam Kotsko roped me into becoming a poster on his Star Trek blog. First post: "Trek and/as Boomerslop." latestartrek.substack.com/p/trek-andas...

This is such a cool idea: the celebratory 15th anniversary issue of SFFTV invited papers to focus on media that had been overlooked, forgotten, or ignored by past issues, and there's some really interesting papers in this bunch! I'm particularly stoked that there's an essay on Stargate SG-1.

Always cool to see something I did a decade ago still being used. I just wish that the thing I initially published with a UP hadn't been bought up by Routledge! More to come from me on Star Wars... Soon...?

From yesterday, my essay on THE GODS ABIDE -- a 1976 historical fantasy about the tragic destruction of queer paganism at the hands of a violent, masculinized, woman-hating Christianity during the late Roman empire.

Approaching the end of my read of Thomas Burnett Swann's 16 fantasy novels with this essay on his third-to-last novel, THE GODS ABIDE (1976). It was his 5th novel in 1976, published 6 months after his death, and tells a compelling story about the violence of Christianity's rise in late Roman empire.

This is how to convert from a for-profit Big Deal to an equitable, but professionalised, diamond OA system! @theblochian.bsky.social and I dreamed of this scale when we launched @openlibhums.org Now, she has done it. Consortial funding, at scale. Now over to the library community to support it.

I really appreciate that Bookpilled stays on the "Cixin Liu is dull af" train because, yes, Cixin Liu is dull af.

Annihilation / Authority / Acceptance / Absolution Thank you Illumicrate, Yas, and Jeff Vandermeer for having me on this project <3

I haven't really felt personally sad about any of them, but it was surprising/shocking to discover the allegations against James Edward Olmos when we recently started our rewatch of Battlestar Galactica.

this is a very smart piece by @chloroformtea.bsky.social ab genre definitions &their shortcomings "SF today might be an agglomeration of subgenres that in ten years will have no relevance at all, displaced instead by new modes we haven’t dreamt up yet. So mono-definition may be doomed to failure."

One of my favorite critics talking about the rhetorics of genre definitions in the sff space.

Approaching the end of my read of Thomas Burnett Swann's 16 fantasy novels with this essay on his third-to-last novel, THE GODS ABIDE (1976). It was his 5th novel in 1976, published 6 months after his death, and tells a compelling story about the violence of Christianity's rise in late Roman empire.

like, Chloe Zhao made The Eternals and had to deal with a million studio notes and a huge carapace of admin and marketing etc. And after she was like "I bet SHAKESPEARE never had to do this! Back THEN, when art was REAL, you could just fall in love and then write a play about it!!!!"

I think the refusal, in modern films about him, to see Shakespeare's work as any way being the product of industrial processes (rather than as individual autobiographical expression) actually has to do with the modern studio system / people inside of it longing for a (fake) nostalgic alternative

Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...

The Plastic Utility of Genre: @sebsp.bsky.social reviews Jeremy Rosen's GENRE BENDING (@stanfordpress.bsky.social)

Ask about production processes, ask about the use of AI on the production side, ask recent authors about their experiences, and do you research on the press. But please know that very few presses will actually amend their contracts to include these on a contact level.