As I write this, the US is well over the 150,000 death mark from the Covid-19 virus, and the rest of the world fares somewhat better or much worse, depending on the quality of leadership. People around the country are being attacked for upholding the value of Black lives, although our own local demonstrations have been incident-free. Yet amid the crises it\u2019s the glorious height of summer, with hot sunny days and cool nights in my part of the mountain West. Everyone\u2019s yard is thriving: quarantine has kept people locked down and gardening is one of the ways to cope. Things are weirdly normal except when they\u2019re not: it\u2019s business as usual but with camouflaged invaders in cities and unprecedented heat in the Arctic and insane claims from politicians and a general breakdown of civility and communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reading feels very strange in these circumstances\u2014rather like getting messages from an alternate timeline in which people still travel, attend plays and concerts, shake hands on meeting, and count on health, employment, and a predictable future. I have been taking advantage of enforced isolation to catch up on fantasies old and new, and every book seems to have a doppelganger, a different version of itself if read in other circumstances. I recently finished Lois McMaster Bujold\u2019s The Physicians of Vilnoc<\/em>, a new novella in her World of the Five Gods, obviously written after the invasion of the virus. What would (a few months ago) have seemed like an exercise in speculative fabulation about medieval plagues now reads as a translation of the headlines into pointed parable. I recently got around to reading Patrick Rothfuss\u2019s The Name of the Wind <\/em>and found myself looking for instances of contagion. Details that now stand out mark virulent ideas or spells passed from community to community. Going back to Philip Pullman\u2019s world of daemons in the first two volumes of the second trilogy The Book of Dust<\/em>, I found myself intensely nostalgic for the Oxford and Arctic of the prior series, His Dark Materials<\/em>, which in an earlier moment seemed almost reachable from our world, just barely distanced bymagic and a different history. I read Naomi Novik\u2019s Spinning Silver <\/em>and was struck mostly by the isolation of the characters as they moved back and forth across the border of a wintry Elfland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The point here is that works of literature are never merely or entirely themselves. They are products of an interaction between text and reader, and the reader\u2019s circumstances are as much a part of the meaning of the story as are the characters and scenes and incidents. That\u2019s why we keep studying literature: the object of our study never stands still. The experience changes; understanding is always just beyond our grasp. But we have to keep trying, because stories are our only way to make sense of the universe and ourselves, and insights are not less valuable for being partial, conditional, and subject to endless revision. I hope to reread at least some of these works under more normal circumstances: to read them in coffee shops and talk about them in person with friends. If so, they will be different books, with the ones I read under quarantine still hovering as ghost texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The articles in this issue were all written, peer-reviewed, and edited before the pandemic. All have new resonances now. I recommend taking a couple of looks at each essay as you think about your own surroundings and the way they influence your reading. What stands out now might not have been visible earlier; new connections might yet emerge. Critical writing is always multiply historical, with the time that produced the original works interacting with that of the critic and intersecting yet again with the moment in which you encounter it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The table of contents here corresponds roughly to the chronology of the subject matter, which represents much of the span of modern fantasy. First up in the issue, Timothy S. Murphy explores one of the foundational writers of the genre, William Morris. In his article, Murphy addresses the seeming contradiction between Morris the nostalgic romancer and Morris the utopian socialist. Rather than viewing Morris through the lens of Tolkien and the religion-based fantasies of the Inklings, Murphy sees him as establishing a mode of materialist, socially critical fantasy that anticipates and influences writers such as Le Guin, Delany, and Mi\u00e9ville.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dennis Wilson Wise next takes up the heroic fantasy of Glen Cook, written from the 1980s to the 2010s. Wise finds in Cook\u2019s sprawling series a double vision grounded in two story structures: epic and picaresque. Readers of the books might likewise be required to utilize a double set of lenses: one looking back to the Vietnam and Cold War circumstances behind their writing, and the other looking ahead to today\u2019s fragmented and infected social landscape. As Wise sums it up: in Cook\u2019s vision, \u201cA better society always therefore exists just over the horizon, and this entails a perpetual dissatisfaction with one\u2019s current society. The self-presence of the contemporaneous is always, partially, dislocated into an as-yet-unrealized future.\u201d This could describe Morris as well as Cook, or, looking to the next article in this issue, China Mi\u00e9ville.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daniel Baker\u2019s essay examines one of Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s less-studied works, The Census-Taker<\/em>. Whereas in much fantasy, political implications remain tacit, in Mi\u00e9ville they are inescapable. Baker\u2019s approach is partly a history of reading fantasy, with nods to theoretical statements from Rosemary Jackson, Kathryn Hume, Farah Mendlesohn, me, Mark Bould, and Mi\u00e9ville himself. Baker finds the form of fantasy itself to be inherently revolutionary, though not all authors allow that potential to be expressed. In his words, \u201cany articulation of such a reality questions, if not rejects, current forms of social authority while offering a reimagination of formation of the subject\u201d and thus, \u201csecondary-world fantasy rejects extratextual reality; imposes its own re-imagining idea of what constitutes reality; sends its heroes into this alternate reality; and, as their battle with the forces of evil ends, produces a new political subject in a new socio-political system.\u201d In Mi\u00e9ville, then, we find the split vision of now and then, past and future, transformed into the very structure of fantastic narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Edward Ardeneaux discusses recent fantastic works in which the social distancing and virtual community that are becoming the new normal were just beginning to emerge in hacker and gamer communities. Daniel Suarez\u2019s two-part novel Daemon <\/em>and Freedom <\/em>posits an artificial intelligence that Suarez describes in an interview as \u201ca transmedia news-reading, human-manipulation engine\u201d\u2014which could also describe certain mislabeled TV \u201cnews\u201d networks. A very different cultural setting and plotline characterize G. Willow Wilson\u2019s Alif the Unseen<\/em>, about a would-be hacker caught up in financial and religious struggles in a city somewhere along the Persian Gulf. What both creations have in common, Ardeneaux points out, is a turn from science fictional extrapolation to mythic fantasy: he calls them both \u201coracular.\u201d Both involve \u201cthe use of the mythological to explain the technological,\u201d but not merely the technological but the techno-capitalistic. To penetrate and resist the power of neoliberal thought requires other mystical forces: Daemons in one case, demons in the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, in a remarkably timely piece, Kim Wickham explores a fantastic creation that seems to encapsulate most of the tensions and transformations of our time: N. K. Jemisin\u2019s Broken Earth trilogy. Wickham looks specifically at Jemisin\u2019s use of second-person narration\u2014a seemingly eccentric technical choice\u2014and shows how the direct address in the novels asks the reader \u201cto experience the connections between identity, memory, and community and to ultimately understand the need to acknowledge the traumas of the past as a step toward forging a more hopeful future.\u201d Like Suarez\u2019s and Wilson\u2019s fictions, Jemisin\u2019s trilogy must be read in more than one way: as post-apocalyptic science fiction, as mythopoetic fantasy, and as transmuted history. Wickham finds hope in Jemisin\u2019s vision; let us all hope that storytelling retains its ability to change readers and thus to change the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Introduction: Book-Love in A Time of Cholera <\/p>\n\n\n\n William Morris and the Counter-Tradition of Fantasy History and Precarity: Glen Cook and the Rise of Picaresque Epic Fantasy Staring into Black: China Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s This Census-Taker<\/em>, the Fantastic, and Perceptual Coding Science Fiction\u2019s Revolutionary Imagination: Hacking beyond Neoliberalism in Daniel Suarez\u2019s Daemon<\/em> and FreedomTM<\/sup><\/em> and G. Willow Wilson\u2019s Alif the Unseen<\/em> Identity, Memory, Slavery: Second-Person Narration in N. K. Jemisin\u2019s The Broken Earth Trilogy The Necessity of Dragons and Fairies Michael M. Levy and Farah Mendlesohn\u2019s Aliens in Popular Culture<\/em> David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu\u2019s Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media<\/em> Dale Knickerbocker\u2019s Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from Around the World<\/em> Dan Golding\u2019s Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy<\/em> Amy J. Ransom\u2019s I Am Legend as American Myth: Race and Masculinity in the Novel and Its Film Adaptations<\/em> Matthew Gibson and Sabine Lenore M\u00fcller\u2019s Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World<\/em> Trace Reddell\u2019s The Sound of Things to Come: An Audible History of the Science Fiction Film<\/em> Ewa Mazierska and Alfredo Suppia\u2019s Marxist Approaches to Science Fiction Cinema<\/em> Alexis Lothian\u2019s Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility<\/em> Isiah Lavender III\u2019s Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction<\/em> Alec Nevala-Lee\u2019s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction<\/em> Ulrike Pesold\u2019s The Other in the School Stories: A Phenomenon in British Children\u2019s Literature<\/em> Philip L. Simpson and Patrick McAleer\u2019s Stephen King\u2019s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror<\/em> Christy Tidwell and Bridgitte Barclay\u2019s Gender and Environment in Science Fiction<\/em> David Annwn Jones\u2019s A Guide to Dark Visibilities<\/em> Introduction: Book-Love in A Time of Cholera As I write this, the US is well over the 150,000 death mark from the Covid-19 virus, and the rest of the world fares somewhat better or much worse, depending on the quality of leadership. People around the country are being attacked for upholding the value of Black […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1793","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1798,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1793\/revisions\/1798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Timothy S. Murphy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dennis Wilson Wise<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Daniel Baker<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Edward Ardeneaux IV<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kim Wickham<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nReview-Essay<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
James Hamby<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nReviews<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Luke Chwala<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Virgina L. Conn<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Daniel Creed<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Jason W. Ellis<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Amanda Firestone<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by James Hamby<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Rob Latham<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Natalija Majsova<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Tommy Mayberry<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Perry Miller<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Andy Sawyer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Megan Suttie<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Jonathan W. Thurston<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Peter Tiernan<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rev. by Jude Wright<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"