critic and cultural historian of fantasy, sf, horror + senior acquiring editor, Lever Press (@leverpress.bsky.social) + read more: seanguynes.com
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In ep 4 of Alien: Earth, Kavalier misattributes the idea "any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" to Asimov, but it was Clarke (his third "law"). I think this was a purposeful reference to Covenant, when the morally fucked up android David misattributes "Ozymandias" to Byron.
Oooo curious
Ugh, totally true! And as an aside your review of Red Sonja made me NOT want to see it lol so you're doing the good work, and I found your description of its vision of fantasy versus the older, campy sword and sorcery movies really useful.
Ah, thanks! I suppose the danger of saying these thoughts out loud is that people might compliment you, but that's not what I mean here. But it is kind to hear that I'm being rigorous. Overwritten, I would have thought lol
Absolutely no idea! Perhaps one day I will know. I just have this strong drive to do what I do, and feel somewhat bereft without it, but it feels like a cycle that creates itself rather than gives me a sense of pride. And I don't really feel like what I do ends up being a useful contribution.
Yeah, I totally get that, and I actually like how slow a lot of the film feels, I just sort of find everything to do with the actual shark really blah lol
Blah blah blah the perennial crisis of the academic, I suppose! But it would be nice to firmly believe "What I'm trying to do here, with all this time and effort I put in, is meaningful!"
Anyway, just something I've been wrestling with lately, wondering why I can't just read stuff, think about it, and move on, rather than try to *do* something with what I've read, to write criticism, since it doesn't seem I'm producing it for anyone's benefit except to tell myself I've done it?
I'll keep writing, maybe keep working to a book or two, but idk if this really means anything? I don't know if I have anything super valuable to add to our understanding of fantasy/horror/sf, since best I seem to say is "not sure this critical approach is right but I got nothing better" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's so much energy, it's so much work, and at the same time I genuinely don't know if I am contributing anything useful or worthwhile to the field. I'm not convinced I have anything to say that couldn't be said by anyone else (and probably better). And I think that's OK!
Lately I've been wrestling with whether what I do matters. Not my day job, ironically, because my day job is pretty awesome and it means I get to help dozens of people publish their books, forward their careers, etc. But trying to be a "scholar" or critic on the side.
My god I loved EMPIRE OF THE SUN... rewatched JAWS recently and for whatever reason I found myself mostly bored with the last 30-45 mins.
Almost gave up on this, since I've been doing it for six years and it's quite a lot of work, but then I realized how often I go back to these to find things I vaguely remember or when I think, "hey, I want to read about X" and whaddaya know, I got a book on that listed!
woah, totally forgot about that!
Sean does invaluable work with these round ups, and it’s also worth going back to the older ones.
While many people point out that this is a shocking over-reaction to a childhood prank, I'd go further. I think this man owned guns because he REALLY wanted to kill someone. This was just the best opportunity he'd encountered. Anyone who shoots and kills a child running away WANTS to kill someone.
Just in time for lots of fall sales and later holidays, my list of Fall 2025 recommendations of 100+ new titles from dozens of university presses and related academic publishers, ranging widely across the humanities with specialties in American studies, literary/media studies, and sff studies.
Thanks, I was able to get a copy, which I think actually comes by virtue of you in any case! So thanks for your copying labor!
Shows I want pitches for: Desperate Housewives Dawson‘s Creek Grey‘s Anatomy Fresh Prince of Bel Air CSI NCIS Living Single American Idol The Big Bang Theory Downton Abbey Fleabag The Simpsons Marvelous Mrs Maisel Parks & Recreation Saturday Night Live The Muppet Show Brooklyn-99 Girls NYPD Blue ER
I enjoy being in a community where we're all friendly, if not whatever "friends" means in the age of social media, but also wildly disagree.
somebody page me when it becomes trendy to be photo'd with a copy of Arthur Machen's Great God Pan instead
Always happy to be frustrated -- that's really all being a scholar of sf, fantasy, and horror is, really: always frustrated by the state of the convo lol
Oh that's awesome, thanks for the tip! I heard a colleague reference Darkening Garden at a conference and was like "how the hell did he get it?!" and now I get it. (Though a big part of me does want to see it as a separate, physical book still...)
holy shit... these are gorgeous!
Oh, wow, the whole book is included in the collection?
“What’s your argument against generative AI?” Do you mean the environmental, economic, social, ethical, cognitive, creative, or practical argument? Because I feel like any one of those, even in isolation from one another, makes using it a non-starter.
One John Clute I'm anxious to read is The Darkening Garden. A Short Lexicon of Horror, which appeared only in a small-run edition in 2014 and is now c. $300 on the used market. Hell, I'd love to reprint the damn book in my capacity as acquiring editor just so I can read the damn thing!
Interesting... Forms of the novella. I'll check that out.
I love the smell of consequences in the morning. Thank you, @dragoncon.org
“Planets of Multicolored Suns”, postcards by G. Kurnin (1981)
I wonder too! It seems the kind of thing that Walpole likely would have read.
Sorry, so many typos, it's late
Oooh Nava Semel write an alt history novel about that guy actually creating his Isreal in New York, "Isra Isle"
That is certainly an interesting comparison to the frame narrative in the emerging novel tradition of early modern Europe!
Got good answers down thread, so thanks for all your collective brilliance, folks!
Oh I've read about Amadis of Gaul! Thanks for pointing out the frame narrative here. Very helpful!
Awesome, that makes so much sense! (Someday I'll read Quixote)
Yeah, I think this is probably the best case here, it sort of predates the rise of historical antiquarianism that gives the frame narrative more rhetorical power in, say, the 18th century but this is a great, solid antecedent!
Oh, Don Quixote does this? To some extent?
Earliest I know is Walpole's Otranto in 1764
Its not particularly exciting, just "I'm a guy who found this old manuscript from the 1500s but it was probably written earlier in the 1300s" and has the effect of questionimg the emerging practice of non-Romantic historical writing (really good stuff on this in the Cambridge History of the Gothic)
Hmm, yeah, I think in this case I'm curious about the explicit antiquarian framing of "this is a thing from history"
Yes, the audience is essentially clued in. I'm thinking here of explicitly literary narratives, not forgeries, though the presence of forgeries (Ossian being the most famous?) no doubt influenced this in fiction. The earliest I know is Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764).
Well after Walpole's Otranto (1764) but haven't read Hawthorne so good to know!
Anyone have an idea of what the first novel was to use an antiquarian, "found manuscript" frame, i.e. to use the fiction that the novel we're reading is a manuscript from an earlier period? Common in early Gothic fiction but not sure where/when this literary framing strategy first emerged.
I *finally* finished Peake's Gormenghast (novel, not the whole trilogy yet). Yes, Peake was a fucking genius. Kind of wild that like 350-400 of the 568 pages is pretty boring sutff, but the whole of it is brilliant and it's never anything but lushly, gorgeously written. Essay to come soon.
Although the website Stop, You're Killing Me! is a good resource for very basic info and allows you to search for mysteries by author, series, time period, location, and a few others, but it doesn't have fine-grained publication into like ISFDB, sadly, and mostly just links out to Amazon.
Although sadly it doesn't cover Gothic romance very thoroughly! I keep collecting novels that it has no info on from the 60s/70s Gothic romance boom.
Every once in a while I'll want detailed publication history on some mystery novel and then I'm reminded what a massive shame it is that ISFDB exists only for sff and horror.
I have done multiple puzzles in this series and feel no shame!
Very excited about the next couple days of my life.
Yoshitaka Amano, Black Cat
I saw & made fun of the 'Gender didn't exist in 1998 as it was invented in by Herman Gender in 2015, the exact year I watched some Youtubes and started getting upset about it' post earlier today but had no idea it was in response to someone watching Mulan
Does not meet the largely arbitrary Suvin standard? Reactionary tosh!
I think I wrote rather snarkily in a review of a largely good book about horror films and capitalism, but which turned hard into the "these films can liberate us" territory, that we've had supposedly liberatory texts for decades and they haven't changed a thing. Nor have our readings of those texts.
Last couple of days on here have me imagining The Giver but it's about telling one special kid about pre-2015 science fiction lol
This whole thing is great but the highlighted bit made me laugh out loud. 😂 Marlon on Snoop:
Oh it totally know and found it funny that people immediately offered definitive claims lol
The constant referral back to definition discourse in the sff fandom will be the death of me. It would be cool if it came from a place or historical/sociological curiosity about the texts themselves and not a priori impositions of external ideas or individual tastes.
But the definition trap is almost always very fun to watch play out because people really think they "solved" it.
Unfortunately, most folks willing to offer their own definition are making definitive statements because they figure they've solved it. One could aggregate folks' definitions and make some interesting arguments about the assumptions behind our definitions (and still not get nearer a definition).
Even paid, I'm not sure I'd re-read it. It's not the worst thing, just don't want to spend my time on it haha
I agree so much! Alas... Ugh. I'm glad that at least most of our books at Lever Press are free as ebooks and affordable in print!
Judith Moffett (1942-) was born on this day. Bibliography: www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.c... L, Bryn Barnard, 1987; R, Gary Freeman, 1988 #scifi #sciencefiction #books
*Seo-Young Chu has entered the chat*
Excellent thread on the question of "is sf dying?"
Cyberpunk was famously very optimistic about the future.
Why can modern SF authors not provide us with the happy shiny futures we saw in such Disco-era books as Malevil, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, The Exile Waiting, The Iron Dream, The Pugilist, Jem, Dying of the Light, The Genocides, The Last Caesar, and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
Or their reading is really contemporary and, again, they still stick with just a handful of writers in their critical work. This has upsides, of course, but the downside is that the field has a really shallow understanding of sff history.
Right?! I read the first Chanur novel and was like this is Someone. But I think re: the field it's largely because sff scholars (and sorry to anyone reading this) don't read very deeply or widely. They/we tend to choose a small number of texts, focus on theory, and stay with that handful.
Agreed. Horror studies is 90% horror film studies. And I wonder, though I haven't thought too deeply about it, how that is effecting our theorizing of horror fiction.
Coming back to this, I've been thinking about how brilliant Michael McDowell is and how much I love Blackwater. It's a shame that horror studies is so film centric and that there's so little scholarship on horror fiction outside of earlier Gothic lit, Jackson, and King.
one of the great conservative moves over the past decade has been to make themselves so unpleasant that their own family members are forced to cut them off, and then use that fact to argue that *liberals* are too uncivil
This is a good example of how people pick their own interpretation of polling questions because conservatives obviously happily approve of cutting off *children* (e.g., for being queer) but they hate the idea children can cut them off in return (e.g. for being bigots).
Ok I think /this/ is where I'm getting stuck. I do not think SF's worth is defined by its relationship with the SF of the past, or with the necessity of identity as "within SF"? In fact to some extent, isn't the evidence of vitality the cross-pollination and /not/ just riffing on what's come before?
Anyway I’m finishing a thing where I write very explicitly about how, as an editor, it’s clear to me that scholars and publishers continue to invest—intellectually and financially—in the very fields from which unis are eagerly disinvesting. The work doesn’t stop—at least it hasn’t yet.
Let me know if you need a PDF
yeah, fair
Your narrative of fantasy moving from strength to strength and building new subgenres/audiences, some might read as fantasy being a commercial powerhouse and having little literary merit. I was tying that growth in subgenre and market to the convo in the 1990s, which may be at angle to your point.
Yeah, no, I get that. I simply meant that, in terms of the genres' market histories, there's has long strong sense that fantasy is the commercial thing crowding out sf and that it has been for decades (regardless of better written, etc.). I get what you're saying about post-sf and it's provocative.
There definitely seems to be a precognition of what you're getting at in this thread in the response of folks like Hartwell to the fantasy bestsellers of the 90s, where they paint fantasy as a commercial monstrosity crowding out "good" writing (i.e. sf).
Would love you to write an essay about this!
And I mean, explicitly framed as such, not "looks kinda like it" or "inspired by it," but actually "I wanted to rethink X aspect of the novel so I wrote Y"
Speaking of intertextuality, has anyone written (modern) retellings of Walpole's Castle of Otranto or Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho?
I mean, it could go on until the end, but the suggestion was merely to give a clear limit that might *feel* achievable.
Absolutely unhinged podcast idea: Reading Weird Tales. Two hosts read the pulp magazine Weird Tales in chronological order through the end of Wright's editorship (1940). Hosts discuss the cover stories and take turns with the rest of each issue's content.
I've read so much dislike for Titus Alone that I instinctually *want* to like it before having started it. But I'm pretty excited for the new direction it takes and sorting through the editorial weirdness of a posthumous manuscript (really curious about Titus Awakes, too).
Agreed, definitely.
I can definitely agree with you on that framing, since I'm completely uninterested in literary genius, though I'd rather see the discussion move to iteration and a deconstruction of literary genius, rather than this specific claim being made about fanfic (even if I *get* it as a popular rhetoric).
If I ever get to it I'll take a look at Burrow's book, though likely for my needs your discussion of iteration is more than sufficient! And thanks for saying that about the Peake piece; will be writing about the other two Gorm. novels shortly, just need to finish them...
I think that's certainly true about what fanfic is doing uniquely with regard to intertextuality. And if I recall you make a similar argument in your book (which I recently cited at length in a discussion about Robert Jordan and "the value of iteration").
Awesome list of resources about recent sff. Hadn't discovered this before today and I'm glad to know it now.
I feel so frustrated any time a post goes around suggesting that it's mean to criticize art because art is hard to make. there are two ways to read the word "criticism" here, and whichever one this most recent post means, I ardently disagree with it. 1/
Yeah, these are essentially my thoughts. You *can* make the move to say it's fanfic, but it's not particularly useful since there's greater difference than similarity to more contextually appropriate/relevant texts/forms/genres, in the same way it's not useful/interesting to say the Lucian wrote sf.
*I* need to reread that because it's been probably a decade and you've convinced me it's worth me re-considering Delany's sff criticism.
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This move reminds me a lot of people trying to argue that whatever genre they like or study is actually timeliness or ancient or has antecedents in XYZ famous, canonical work, as a way to assert its value. That was never the right rhetorical move for sff criticism.
To put it another way, fanfic emerges from particular social, historic, and technological relations and their communities of practice (or social field) that, yes, evolved with changing circumstances, but fanfic it is is not generalizable to, say, "retellings" generally across time and space.