The Joy Factory Weekly - Issue #13 (7/14/2021
Alright! You've got your tickets! Let's get to this!
Welp. Another week has come and gone, and here I am trying to figure out what I actually did over the past 7-ish days other than write a little, watch way too much television, and read. I kid. Actually, the summer semester just started up in these parts, and I’ll be neck deep in that until the end of the month. That means a lot of grading and more restricted time. But, hey, when you want to pay off debt and you’re a college teacher, picking up extra classes is the way to go!
On the writing front, I’ve just joined a crit group to get additional feedback on my work. This is the first time I’ve been part of such a thing (proper) in over a decade, and I’m nervous and excited about it. I found this group through Apex Magazine’s Discord Channel, which turns out to be a perfectly lovely place to meet other writers and talk shop! We’ll see how this all turns out! Also: still chugging along on the submission grind! There’s been a lull in rejections for a little over a week, which must mean someone has targeted me via the SFWA space laser or something…
Alright! Now onto the main affair...clickables?
Currently Reading
I just finished The Shining by Stephen King, which I’ve been nursing for almost six months. And let me tell you, it was so freaking good that I’m gonna write about it soon!
Beyond that, here’s what I’ve got going into the brain at the moment:
The Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell
The Best of Dark Terrors edited by Stephen Jones and David A. Sutton
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (Library of America FTW)
The July/August 2021 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
Since I’m writing a lot of short fiction, I’ve shifted my reading accordingly. Expect to see me consuming a lot of anthologies and collections over the next few months!
Currently Watching
This month is a weird month for viewing. For the past week, I’ve been rewatching Rick & Morty for no other reason than “I apparently didn’t watch Season 4…” The length of the episode is also perfect for workouts, so it makes a good deal of sense. I particularly enjoy the show’s approach to SF tropes and its totally absurd treatment of the American nuclear family. Also: a part of me wants to know which of the various and elaborate fan theories is actually correct (I have a favorite).
Beyond that, I’m powering my way through Leverage, which I need to watch in preparation for Redemption, which will be discussed on an episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show this month. Having never seen the show, it’s been a bit of an experience to go back to a style of television I’ve largely abandoned (X of the week). The show is endearing, though I’ll admit that I prefer television that maintains some kind of clear arc over the course of a season. I’m not far enough into Season One to know if that will be the case here.
Lastly, I decided to rewatch the entire Fast and Furious franchise because I’d like to watch the latest film but have forgotten about the various plots of most of the films. Plus, I think there’s something valuable in trying to understand how a franchise got to where it is by thinking differently about the viewing experience. More on that in this issue...
Currently Listening To
I’ve finally worked my way through the sea of psytrance that had occupied my “Discovery Mix” playlist, powered through the electro swing music that followed, and now I’m neck deep in synthwave in its various forms. You can find most of what I’ve listened to (or will listen to) on the 2021 Joy Factory Playlist.
Beyond the electronic stuff, I’ve also been on the lookout for good soundtracks and instrumental albums for writing horror. Thus far, I’ve discovered that Howard Shore’s eXistenZ, John Carpenter’s Halloween, Christine (w/ Alan Howarth) and Halloween III (w/ Alan Howarth), Disasterpiece’s It Follows, Vangelis’ Blade Runner, and Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind’s The Shining are all suitable works. Of course, I’m always on the lookout for more, so if you have any ideas, hit me up!
Currently Writing
The biggest project right now is “The Choir of Whales,” a story inspired by Premee Mohamed involving demonic whales. I’m not settled on the title. If you’re at all curious about it, you can find an excerpt on my Patreon. I’m close to finishing a first draft, after which I’ll turn to something else (something new or a rework of something old).
One thing I’ve noticed in a lot of my current writing is my propensity for inserting my own experiences into characters. I’ve always done that, of course, but most of my recent writing has directly addressed my history with cancer, poverty, abusive family, and so on. And, well, I’m glad this is happening now. I think my writing has actually improved a bit since returning in force earlier this year.
Now let’s turn to the media you should check out!
---
One of the first things I really wanted to share was this tube/underground map of Mordor! It shows the journey different characters took through the universe in subway map form. It’s really dorky and definitely needs to be on a wall one of these days…
In YouTube land, I’ve got several pieces to share. The first three are all interviews. First up is Alec Nevala-Lee’s conversation with Barry N Malzberg. It’s a 2 hour conversation, so there are a lot of topics covered here. The second is AHSS’ interview with Elizabeth Bear, which covers life as an author, surviving in a tough industry, and other survival tips! The last interview comes to us via Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans and features Farah Mendlesohn on her latest book, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein.
The final video is a monster from Maggie Mae Fish on the myth of the auteur. It covers the works of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch in great detail. If you’re at all curious about auteur theory and the central criticism of it, this is a video to watch.
In the podcast world, there’s this fantastic 3-part series from the BBC on the history of visual effects featuring Paul J. Franklin, who most of you know for his work with Christopher Nolan. This is particularly interesting given how important visual effects are to SF/F/H. You can’t imagine cinema today without thinking about the development of genre film! The last non-fiction podcast to share is a new episode from First Person Scholar on queer representation in gaming! Fun fact: one of my students wrote a major project on this subject. :)
There have also been a bunch of fantastic fiction podcasts the last few weeks. These include:
“Red Box (Part 2)” by Tracy Cross (NIGHTLIGHT; there’s also an interview with the author worth checking out)
Cast of Wonders released an interesting story by Osahon Ize-Iyamu called “Just Like the Speeding Heart.”
Over at Escape Pod, you can check out “AirBody” by Sameem Siddiqui and “A Little Bit of Kali (Part 1)” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.
PodCastle dropped “Guardian of the Gods” by Tobi Ogundiran!
Lastly, there’s “The Child Feast of Harridan Sack” by Kaitlyn Zivanovich over at PseudoPod!
And finally, let’s turn to some space goodness! APOD had three particularly gorgeous shots I must share! The first is a stunning image of the Orion Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope! The second gives us a remarkable look at the spiral formation of Messier 99 (all 70,000 light-years of it)! And lastly is this incredibly alien looking shot of the Dumbbell Nebula. I submit that it looks more like an ocean creature than a dumbbell, but so be it…
Now onto...new books?
A couple days ago, I made the glorious decision to rewatch the entirety of the Fast & Furious franchise as preparation for the newest film, F9. Currently, the newest film is climbing up the franchise rankings for box office numbers, resting at $542mil worldwide. Normally, I’d look at the numbers and give you a prediction, but this being the 2nd year of COVID-19, I don’t know that anyone not steeped in studio data can tell you what to expect in box office numbers. All we know is this: it’s already a success.
But how did the franchise get here? When the series started in 2001 with The Fast and the Furious, the new era of the supremacy of the blockbuster franchise had not yet come to fruition, with notable exceptions in long-running series such as Star Wars and James Bond, both of which had relatively successful films released near the turn of the century. Smart people could have predicted the continued success of those two franchises, but you could hardly say that The Fast and the Furious had a shot at turning into a soon-to-be twelve-film franchise ranked behind Jurassic Park / Jurassic World as the 13th most successful franchise in history. Consider, for example, that of all the other major blockbuster franchises emerging at the same time, Fast & Furious had the least name recognition. There was no book or comic series to draw in existing fans. Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the X-Men franchises each had either a famous book, comic series, or ride attached -- and, I think it’s safe to argue that PotC was the only successful ride-based film or film series to come from Disney’s efforts.
So what is it about Fast & Furious that sets it apart from the other franchises of its kind? There are, I’d argue, two things:
The series had enough modest success in the beginning and reasonably bankable stars (years later) to give it the leeway to explore what it needed to be and to justify treading water.
The series pivoted away from its modest roots in street racing culture (and adjacent haunts) through a series of clever audience tests that eventually gave us Fast Five (2011), arguably the official shift in the franchise to a visionary treatment of the stunt-heavy action film.
When you watch the first four films of the franchise, you can get a clear picture of a franchise trying to figure itself out and perfect a “formula.” In The Fast and the Furious (2001), we’re presented the first model for the franchise: a cop-in-deep story in which the criminal element is largely sympathetic and ultimately sways the undercover agent to break the rigid rules of the police code. To the film’s credit, it doesn’t fully resolve this story, which opens the franchise to a retread in which the cop-turned-criminal is sucked back into the world of law enforcement to do almost exactly what he did last time. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) is, quite frankly, a dismal film with some of the worst dialogue of the entire series, but it doesn’t shy away from being a direct continuation of the preceding film’s narrative “cliffhanger.” O’Conner’s (Paul Walker) efforts to redeem himself, escape a direct-to-prison fate, and rekindle old friendships (Roman Pearce played by Tyrese Gibson) are interesting ideas beset upon by truly horrendous direction and script choices. The most notable: Suki’s (Devon Aoki) -- the long-forgotten racer, artist, and supposed love interest of Tej (Ludacris) -- enthusiastic yell of “smack that ass” as her car hurtles over a raised drawbridge.
This story of the former cop trying to find his way is brought to a satisfactory conclusion in Fast & Furious (2009), in which O’Connor and Toretto (Vin Diesel) are reunited by the death of Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). Here, the story focuses on Torreto’s rage and the frayed edges of his once friendship with O’Connor (along with a rekindled romance with Mia (Jordana Brewster). And it draws to conclusion what is effectively the first arc of the franchise, with O’Connor (and, to a degree, Torreto) abandoning his previous way of life.
In the midst of these three films -- and we’re ignoring Tokyo Drift (2006) for a moment here because it is mostly meaningless in the franchise as a whole -- are a progressive movement narratively and visually from “strictly just street races” to increasingly more elaborate and technology-infused stories bordering on outright science fiction. There is a lot of experimentation in the films leading up to Fast Five. While The Fast and the Furious sets the mold for the first arc of films, the next three films slowly shift. We’re introduced to tech gadgets such as a gun which shoots EMP harpoons to shut down cars (2 Fast 2 Furious), elaborate GPS and tunnel systems used to hide illegal shipments (Fast & Furious), and a few other gadgets here or there. Narratively, the films ramp up the tension of their car chases (a natural thing for a franchise) while also injecting narrative flavors of spy thrillers (Fast & Furious), Bad Boys-style shenanigans (all of them), and outright action thrillers (all of them).
What we’re watching is a franchise discovering itself one film at a time. By the time we get to Fast Five, you can almost predict the pivot to come. Fast Five literally makes the franchise, pulling in $600mil+ worldwide and cementing a new format (and arc), one which places greater emphasis on those early experimentations and abandons or reduces the stylistic choices of the preceding four films. Here, we see the franchise go from those race culture stories still indebted to street culture and its excesses to stories of heroes found in the tenuous boundary between cosmopolitan criminality and authoritarian law. The street races are still there, but they are part of greater stories than “for those 10 seconds or less”: chasing bad guys, grand stunt adventures (this is the infamous safe-dragged-through-streets movie), and larger-than-life law enforcement figures who operate in the grey nearly as often as the criminals they hunt.
In a lot of ways, this is an incredible thing to behold. No franchise has been given so much time to stretch its legs, to find itself like the characters of its various stories. Except Fast & Furious. We talk a lot about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe is so unique and unmatched, but we should say the same thing about Fast & Furious, which did not have the benefit of name recognition. This franchise did this with an engine designed by a cast who became, to a degree, a family. And we get to go on this extraordinary journey as the franchise comes to a close in just a few short years.
And I’m going to be right there to see where this goes...
As I do nearly every week, I’ve dug through dozens upon dozens of publisher catalogues and Amazon product pages to find the exciting new books dropping this week! And as always, there are some fantastically fascinating reads for you to check out.
Here are some of the books you should check out this week:
Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism by Paul S. Hirsch (The University of Chicago Press; July 12, 2021)
The Letters of Shirley Jackson edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman (Random House; July 13, 2021)
A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers (Tor.com; July 13, 2021)
Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung (One World; July 13, 2021)
Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge and translated by Jeremy Tiang (Melville House; July 13, 2021)
The Freedom Race by Lucinda Roy (Tor Books; July 13, 2021)
Breeder by Honni Van Rijswijk (Blackstone Publishing; July 13, 2021)
The Stone Face by William Gardner Smith (New York Review of Books; July 13, 2021)
Apocalypse Cinema by Stephen Prince (Rutgers University Press; July 16, 2021)
On the non-fiction side, we’ve got Hirsch’s Pulp Empire, Prince’s Apocalypse Cinema, and a collection of Shirley Jackson’s letters! Pulp Empire is definitely outside my academic wheelhouse, though I have written a bit about the imperialist legacy of Donald Duck (ask me about it). I’m aware that comics have a long history of supporting imperialist dogma, so I’m interested to see what new information Hirsch explores here. Prince’s work also feeds into some of my generalized interests, particularly the role of apocalyptic narratives in U.S. culture. This book seems to take a long historical view of apocalyptic cinema, and I’m curious to see where The Day After fits in. Lastly, I just think Jackson is the bomb, and any book about Jackson is, by definition, the bomb. Shut up. I can say “the bomb” all I want.
On the fiction side, I’ve got a pretty eclectic mix. First up is Chambers’ newest novel, A Psalm for the Wild Built. This starts up a new series for the award-winning author and involves robots, tea monks, and, oh, literally that’s all I need to know. Tea monks? Yes, please! Then there’s Roy’s The Freedom Race, which offers an African American vision of a post-Second Civil War America. The blurb gives the impression that it is one part Hunger Games and one part social critique of the present world. The fact that what it imagines doesn’t seem totally out there is a bit disturbing… Speaking of social commentary: Rijswijk’s new book, Breeder, imagines a future in which people live as part of a giant corporatist state. A full on dystopia, I expect Breeder to get people talking about the way we structure societies and states.
Outside of the genre world, there’s The Stone Face, a re-release of journalist William Gardner Smith’s 1963 novel about the social protests in Paris in 1961. I’ve never read any of his work, but I’m curious to see how the novel makes an argument for anti-colonial protest, as it deals quite extensively with the last years leading to independence of Algeria from France. So, yeah, gonna read this one for sure!
There are also a couple of fantastic books from authors of Chinese descent. First is Fung’s Ghost Forest, which is a story of immigration pulling from memory and oral history and family troubles. It’s not a genre work, per se, but I suspect it’ll pack a punch! Then there’s Ge’s new book, Strange Beasts of China, about cryptozoologists trying to solve a mystery in a fictional Chinese city. Frankly, the book sounds utterly delightful and strange, so sign me right up!
Alright! Now onto...more books!
Every week, I’ll ask my Twitter followers what they’re reading. Here’s what they said:
Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (from @RainbowWar71)
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (from @TruthyFruit)
Repo Virtual by Corey J. White (from @KateSherrod)
Finch by Jeff Vandermeer (from @KateSherrod)
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (from @KateSherrod)
The Outside by Ada Hoffman (from @KateSherrod)
The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox (from @KateSherrod)
Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith (from @Julirose)
The Edda of Burdens by Elizabeth Bear (from @BaneZarne)
Always Look On the Bright Side of Life by Eric Idle (from @BaneZarne)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (from @BaneZarne)
100 Years of Solitude by Garbiel García Márquez (from @carturo222)
Olympus by Geoff Johns, Kris Grimminger, Butch Guice, etc. (from @KaushikKarforma)
The Morris and Chastain Adventures by Justin Gustainis (from @KaushikKarforma)
The Heroine’s Journey by Gail Carriger (from @mikaela_l)
City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty (from @KEdwardK)
The Resilient Farm and Homestead by Ben Falk (from @simonm223)
Lady Henterman’s Wardrobe by Marshall Maresca (from @john_zeleznik)
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik (from @MorgynLin)
Glamour GHoul by Maila Nurmi (from @SciFi_Romance)
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (from @CamestrosF)
Chaos on Catnet by Naomi Kritzer (from @OtterB5)
Square Haunting by Francesca Wade (from @OtterB5)
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang (from @oldscout)
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine (from @oldscout)
The Ashfall Series by Mike Mullin (from @cherylreads)
The Quiet Boy by Ben H. Winters (from @MistyMassey)
The Killing Joke by Chrisa Faust and Gary Phillips (from @virtual_lyzard)
The Protectorate Series by Megan E. O’Keefe (from @FredKiesche)
After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made by Ben Rhodes (from @D_CurrieDC)
Casanova by Laurence Bergreen (from @fabiofernandes)
Star Trek: Discovery -- The Way of the Stars by Una McCormack (from @fabiofernandes)
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century by William H. Patterson Jr. (from @delegar)
The Black Coast by Mike Brooks (from @pdmcguirelaw)
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (from @SteveJWright1)
The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World edited by Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert (from @sharkgirl09)
Wild Sign by Patricia Briggs (from @KathyCybele)
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (from @Marrissavu)
Weave the Lightning by Corry L. Lee (from @stevenhalter)
The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells (from @three_squares)
Hola Papi by John Paul Brammer (from @three_squares)
Ring Shout by P. Djélí Clark (from @three_squares)
Lady Hotspur by Tessa Gratton (from @three_squares)
And there you have it. Follow me on Twitter @shaunduke if you want to share your reads next time!
And so we are at the end. As always, I hope you enjoyed your trip. There is no gift shop at Floo, I’m sad to say. You’ll just have to make do with awkward pictures which may or may not turn out...
Here’s what to expect for the rest of the week:
Two Joy Factory Monthly episodes: one with Alex Jennings on The Immortal Hulkand one with Shiv Ramdas on humor in genre fiction.
Two new episodes of The Skiffy and Fanty Show: a Speculative Dispatch on our expectations for the return to in-person conventions and another on the new season of Leverage (though that might not drop before the next newsletter).
A book review on The Shining by Stephen King.
Maybe something else, but we’ll see how my first critique group session goes!
Alright! I’ll leave you with a trailer for the new Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl game, which looks absolutely bananapants. Powdered Toast Man FTW!
Joyful Transmission Concluded!
Thanks for reading The Joy Factory Weekly newsletter! As always, if you want to support the project or my other work, head over to patreon.com/thejoyfactory. You can find me @shaunduke on Twitter and at shaunduke.net!