The Joy Factory Weekly - Issue #6 (5/17/2021)
Alright! You've got your tickets! Let's get to this!
You might have noticed that there wasn’t a newsletter last week. Why would I deprive you of more delightful content? What kind of monster am I?
Well, I’m not a monster. Revue is a monster. For the second time, Revue has deleted all of my progress on the newsletter, and by the time I got ready to finish last week’s newsletter and discovered that everything was gone, I didn’t have time to put it all together again. Thus, a gap. A whole week without a new update. Sorry…
The good news? This edition is gonna be massive. Supermassive. Like a black hole. Like that Muse song…
In other news, I am officially on summer vacation, which most professors treat as “time to write all those academic projects you didn’t have time for.” For me, summer is time to get to other projects that have been lagging behind. And so, summer shall be a time of new articles, new fun projects, maybe some game streaming, and lots and lots of podcasts! Expect far too much for you to enjoy!
In terms of things I’ve been up to in the last 2 weeks, here are a few of the bits and bobbles you might have missed:
The Skiffy and Fanty Show dropped two magical podcasts: a Screen Scouts discussion on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (myself, Brandon O’Brien, and two guests: Allie Bustion and Faiq Lodhi), another Screen Scouts discussion on Wonder Egg Priority (myself, Brandon O’Brien, Iori Kusano, and special guest Soup)!
The Joy Factory Monthly dropped a new discussion with Premee Mohamed about worldbuilding, infodumps, climate change, and more! Plus, there’s more JFM in the works!
I expect I’ll have more things to share in the coming weeks!
Don't forget to sign up for the Joy Factory Weekly Newsletter! And if you'd like to share your thoughts about social media culture, email me directly at shaunduke.net/contact or send me a tweet @shaunduke!
Make sure to check out The Joy Factory Monthly on your favorite podcatcher. If you enjoy the show, throw up a 5 star review on iTunes AND join me at patreon.com/thejoyfactory!
Show Notes
If you want to learn more about Premee Mohamed's work, check out these delicious links:
The Annual Migration of Clouds (forthcoming)
A Broken Darkness (out now!)
My interview w/ Premee in the Joy Factory Weekly newsletter!
And don't forget to check out Neon Hemlock's new Kickstarter for their 2021 novella season!
See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Clickable Geekery
Over at Fantasy Magazine, C.L. Clark (the very same featured in this newsletter) explores war narratives in fantasy fiction and its connections to wider U.S. culture. This is a particularly compelling piece for the way it draws a line between fantasy’s war-obsessed narratives and the same endless war of U.S. society (and its core literature). In this respect, we’ve apparently learned very little from Haldeman’s Forever War…Speaking of culture, Alex Shvartsman recently dug into the history of Russian SF; it’s brief (obviously), but there’s a lot to be fascinated by here! And then there’s July Blalack’s introduction to Mauritanian literature, which you should read just so you can learn about all the stuff you didn’t know existed!
On a more...horrifying? note, Yahoo! Entertainment’s Ethan Alter offers a glimpse into a prototype from the movie Alien that folks have never seen before. It’s curiously more skeletal in nature, which is an interesting choice. What do y’all think? Then there’s this piece at Tor.com by Alex Brown on the best and worst teen horror movies of the 1990s. I’ve been doing a lot of 90s rewatching lately for some reason, and this piece articulates some of the amusing problems I’ve seen in the horror of that particular decade. And then there’s this great piece on the rise of Afrofuturism in Metastellar by Russell Contreras! You know me. If I see a piece on Afrofuturism, I have to share it!
Turning backwards, there’s this great piece by Simon McNeil on the Matrix sequels, their problematics, and more. There’s some interesting close analysis here of particular scenes and concepts (of time, etc.) found throughout these films. Well worth reading! On a similarly analytical note, Henry Jenkins has started up a conversation with James Paul Gee about what it means to be a human. Also on Jenkins’ site: the second part of Sarena Ulibarri’s solarpunk analysis! Go learn something! On a related note, Film School Rejects has a piece on remix culture, something familiar to fan studies nerds. I’ve taught remix culture in some of my classes! Good times! Also: Polygon recently featured a whole series of articles as part of their Sci-Fi Week event, “Imagining the Next Future.” The article covers a wide range of topics, including utopias!
On the awards front, there have been a couple of big announcements. First, the Ignyte Awards recently announced their finalists for 2021! There are some truly incredible writers, community members, podcasts, and more here. You should read/enjoy literally everything on the list! Similarly, the African Speculative Fiction Society just unveiled the longlist for the 2021 Nommo Awards. Again, there are some truly incredible works here AND a few authors I’ve not heard of before. What is also interesting: there are works here that are typically ignored in SF/F/H circles because they are typically “literary” in form. It’ll be interesting to see who wins in the end!
Lastly, you might want to check out the 29th issue of Salon Futura if you’re looking for more geeky non-fiction to read!
Clickable Factoids
The fine folks over at Psyche take a brief historical look at the life of a pirate during the heyday of the maritime empires. I’ve explored some of this in my academic work, especially with regards to Michel Maxwell Philip, the first Caribbean novelist to use the classical pirate narrative for a black anticolonial/anti-slavery epic. Read Emmanuel Appadocca. Seriously. Read it. On a related historical note, AI researchers from the Netherlands have been analyzing the Dead Sea Scrolls to better understand who wrote them. There’s more in the piece on the field of paleography; read it and you might learn something new! And if you’re looking for the right kind of dress to wear for the dystopia, look no further than this JSTOR Daily article on 19th-century novelists and their predictions of the horrible futures we’d one day experience. Time to wear some leather!
There have also been a number of interesting scientific discoveries over the past week or so. Researchers at the University of Bath, for example, discovered fossils of a giant sea lizard in Morocco, which has folks wondering about the diversity of life before the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs! Also in the fossil world: the discovery of a 18.5 million-year-old vine species! The fossil was found in Panama of all places. There’s even a picture! And one last thing on fossils: the BBC has a neat article about the process of fossilization for human cities. What might they look like in the future? Read on to find out!
Oh, and here’s some good news: Cayman Island sea turtles may be coming back from near extinction (locally rather than globally). The numbers are still pretty low, but the new findings bode well for conservation efforts in the Cayman Islands. I’m super glad to see that we’re moving in the right direction here. Sea turtles are amazing creatures! Speaking of extinction, you may be curious to know that wasps are actually important to the ecosystem! Who knew? The science dorks at UCL and the University of East Anglia, that’s who! I figured they were important for some reason or another even if they’re right assholes. Funny how things work out!
For you space goers, there’s this new piece from Centauri Dreams on more research into the search for technosignatures around Alpha Centauri. We’re still a long ways off from sorting all this, I think, but we just might find aliens one day. Or they’ve quarantined us all. Who knows? Also: the University of Arizona reports that we might have observed active volcanoes on Mars, a find that could change our assumptions about when the planet was last habitable. I don’t know what impact this has on terraforming, but it’s gotta be good, right? And lastly, there’s this oddball supernova whose temperature before explosion has changed our definitions of what is possible. That’s why space science is so cool!
Finally, folks wondering about research on COVID will be pleased to know that a new vaccine from the Duke Human Vaccine Institute recently concluded animal trials which strongly suggest it is capable of blocking COVID-19, its variants, and other coronaviruses. We’ll need to wait for human trials, but this is most promising! Having been unable to see my girlfriend since December 2019, I am very hopeful that we can find a scientific solution that will make travel safe again!
Clickable Writing Advice
Over at Gnome Stew, Bridgett Jeffries ponders the line in horror gaming. While this is focused on game design (TTRPGs particularly), I think some of the advice here applies across the creative spectrum, especially given that analyzing your audience is a pretty fundamental skill anyway.
Additionally, if you’re looking for some tools to help you with your writing, you might find this list of 15 free mind map tools helpful! I’ve played around with mind maps before and have found them interesting for organizing small points of data. Play around and see if the form can help you!
Clickable Fiction
Here is a whole bunch of short stories you should definitely check out this week:
“The Angel of Khan el-Khalili” by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor.com)
“Blood in the Thread” by Cheri Kamei (Tor.com)
“Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Terrory” by Martha Wells (Tor.com)
“The Lay of Lilyfinger” by G.V. Anderson (Tor.com)
“De Abogado” by Oluwadurotimi Adeyemo (Kalahari Review)
“A House is Not a Home” by L. Chan (Clarkesworld)
“Spore” by Tang Fei and translated by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld)
“A Home for Mrs. Biswas” by Amal Singh (Clarkesworld)
“The Force Exerted on the Mass of a Body” by Bo Balder (Clarkesworld)
“Dancing with Ereskigal” by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld)
“Every Breath a Question, Every Heartbeat an Answer” by Cat Rambo (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“Out of the Box” by Nini Kiriki Hoffman (Daily Science Fiction)
“Shadows on a brick wall” by Tais Teng (Daily Science Fiction)
“Look Away” by Marissa Kristine Lingen (Daily Science Fiction)
“This is the Moment, Or One of Them” by Mari Ness (Apex Magazine)
“An Invitation to a Burning” by Kat Howard (Lightspeed Magazine)
“Proof by Induction” by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny Magazine)
“Crooked House” by Nini Kiriki Hoffman (The Dark)
“Of Claw and Bone” by Suzan Palumbo (The Dark)
“Si Shou” by E.A. Xiong (Strange Horizons)
“The Golden Carrot” by K.S. Shere (Strange Horizons)
“Deadlock” by Aimee Ogden (Fireside)
“Green Fingers” by Vernon R.L. Head (Omenana)
“The Future of Saltwater” by Tamara Jerée (Anathema Magazine)
“Heard, Half-Heard, in the Stillness” by Iona Datt Sharma (Anathema Magazine)
“World of the Mad” by Poul Anderson (Project Gutenberg; Imagination)
“Not in the Rules” by Mack Reynolds (Project Gutenberg; Imagination)
“Tourists to Terra” by Mack Reynolds (Project Gutenberg; Imagination)
You might also want to check out the 47th issue and the 48th issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, the 67th issue of Fantasy Magazine, the 8th issue of Arsenika, Issue 329 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Issue 123 of Apex Magazine.
Now on to...an interview?
It’s time for a brand new interview. This week, I’m joined by C.L. Clark to talk about genre fiction, their writing (especially their new book, The Unbroken, out now from Orbit), audio narration, and more.
I hope you enjoy it!
Hello, and welcome to a Joy Factory Interview! Thanks for agreeing to participate in this awesome adventure! To start, we must begin with a slightly evil question: If you could recommend one book not written by you (in any genre) that everyone should read, what would you recommend and why?
Let’s say The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. I’m reading it right now in full (I read excerpts previously in coursework) and I think many people (in particularly white people, especially from Europe and the United States) would understand the root of so many of the world’s difficulties--from social issues (e.g. police brutality) to political issues (e.g. mass migrations) to environmental issues (e.g. climate change). It’s all interconnected, and Fanon succinctly and clearly explains the ways and the resentments of “previously” colonized people. Not a very joyous answer, nor a joyous book, but it’s what I wish people would read.
As a writer of genre fiction, what do you find particularly compelling about SF/F? And what excites you most about writing in general?
My favorite part is getting to imagine myself as people I could never really be. For example, I’m never going to get to slay my enemies with a large sword. I can pretend, and go to sword classes, but if I start killing people, I’ll go to jail. But writing SF/F, I get to imagine new worlds--work my way through problems with cool magic powers that don’t exist, think about what it might feel like to have justice properly served. One of my greatest regrets in life personally is that I’ll (probably) never know what it feels like to fly through the air on a dragon’s back. I write to capture that feeling.
As a fellow academically-inclined nerd, I was intrigued to see that you study post-colonial and war narratives, which also ties into your athletic background by way of your interest in war narratives in the U.S. fitness industry. Just writing that makes the gears in my head shoot into overdrive. So, I gotta know: what is one thing about what you study that you wish more folks knew about?
Oh! Heh, see the above, question number 1. I wish people knew what happens after colonized and enslaved people are “freed”--just signing a peace of paper doesn’t reverse the harm done, or return the economic gains that colonizers and enslavers stole and exploited. So when those countries tell “newly freed” people, “Okay, off you go, we give you your freedom, we’re so noble,” those people are left looking around at their new country whose infrastructure has been gutted, useful resources taken. Or they’re forced to sign new, disadvantageous deals with their previous abusers to have their “help” so that their people don’t starve.
Your first novel is The Unbroken, an epic fantasy released by Orbit in March 2021. There are many things to be excited about by this book, but the post-colonial studies nerd in me is especially interested in this more critical take on empires in a fantasy universe. Can you talk a bit about how you saw yourself engaging with empire in a fantasy setting? Did you see yourself subverting the common political structures of the genre?
What I most wanted to engage with is how the great empires and kingdoms are perceived. So often in epic fantasy, the kingdoms are good guys, or they would be if the right person got on the throne. And I don’t know if subversion is the right word or not, but I definitely wanted to peel back the layers on that and think about things a bit more realistically. The fantasy version of kingdoms is very much the fantasy version of a rose-tinted, benevolent (British?) monarchy, but just like with European history and its tendency to sweep its grander atrocities under the rug, so epic fantasy has often elided the atrocities even the good kings would likely have committed to achieve its riches. And so I’m asking with The Unbroken, or at least I want to try--and with all of my other work, probably--is it possible to have a morally good empire? A good imperial leader? No clear answers, but it’s worth exploring.
As your debut novel, The Unbroken is a heck of an achievement. A 544 page epic that also happens to be the beginning of a new series, the Magic of the Lost Trilogy. What was the most challenging part of writing and finishing a novel for you, especially one you could technically use as a weapon?
Revising it. Multiple times. Hahaha, every time I realized I was going to have to rewrite those 544 pages from the top down, I swear everyone in the city could hear my wail of despair. The sound of ultimate suffering.
You are an author of many hats! One of your hats is audio narration. To date you've narrated 8 or so stories. What first interested you in audio narration? Does this impact your writing at all (in a good way, of course)? (I ask this because I teach college English, and I find that getting students to read their writing out loud can help them improve their writing overall; so, y'know, I'm curious!)
I’ve loved reading stories aloud since I was a kid. I played school by myself and would pretend to be different students with different speaking ticks and voices. Then I got really into acting and accents, and at some point someone got me a dinky little video camera for Christmas and I only used the voice record function and recorded myself reading. I was like, eleven? Twelve? And loads of other stuff in between then and now, including theater and volunteer work. And I think this reading aloud, and the fact that I read aloud in my head (I only recently learned that not everyone does that??? Hears their voice thinking in words???) has a huge impact on my writing. I pay a lot of close attention to sentence rhythm and sonic patterns, and the artistry of that. It’s more noticeable in my short stories, though. Less so in a novel...that’s a lot of sentences.
Thanks for answering these questions. To cap this off, I have a silly question for you! While on a flight across the pond, you awaken to discover that your plane has landed on a mysterious island. The crew and passengers are gone (but they left a note, so they're OK). There are three things on the island with you: one object of your choice, one book of your choice, and one nemesis of your choice. What are your three things?
An axe.
Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen
Someone who’s very attractive and would be open to some sort of enemies-to-lovers situation
(brb, outlining a new book)
C.L. Clark graduated from Indiana University's creative writing MFA. She's been a personal trainer, an English teacher, and an editor, and is some combination thereof as she travels the world. When she's not writing or working, she's learning languages, doing P90something, or reading about war and [post-]colonial history. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, FIYAH, PodCastle and Uncanny. You can find C.L. on Twitter @C_L_Clark or on her website.
I might have been a busy bee over the past month and change, but I did get down to reading and watching a whole lot of stuff! Let’s take a gander, shall we?
Currently Reading:
I’m currently digging through I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories by South Korean author Kim Bo-Young! This follows hot on the heels of finishing David Anthony Durham’s Acacia and precedes my eventually reading of P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn for an interview on The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Bo-Young’s collection is truly incredible, by the way. The first story offers a new spin in the “FTL time delay romance” story and had such an impact on me when I read it over a week ago that I’m still thinking about it. You should absolutely pick it up!
This being summer, I’m hoping to do a lot more reading. So stay tuned here!
Currently Watching:
As the article below makes clear, I’ve rediscovered anime recently. That started with Wonder Egg Priority and has graduated to a rewatch of Cowboy Bebop and Pani Poni Dash, the latter of which is most strange. Beyond those anime series, I’m also devouring the Sons of Sam documentary, rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and getting back on my horror hobby horse with viewings of 1999’s House on Haunted Hill (it’s not good).
Previously, I dug through some comfort viewings, such as Dante’s Peak, which I quite enjoy for reasons I can’t quite explain, and a few others.
In the very near future, I’ll dig into Millennium Actress for a Movie Roulette post. The film has been in my collection for years, but I’ve never seen it! A first time for everything!
Currently Listening To:
For the past week, I’ve been consuming a massive amount of psytrance and goa, both genres that have a tendency to warp my mind in interesting ways. Artists have included Rinkadink, Pragmatix, Ital, Avalon, Alpha Portal, Stereoxide, Imagine Mars, Virtuanoise, Oxidaksi, Tropical Bleyage, Astrix, and many others! This phase will probably die out in the next month, and then I’ll turn to something else. Some kind of Jazz fusion, perhaps?
Speaking of Jazz fusion, I recently discovered the work of Dirty Loops, a Swedish group who merge pop, Jazz, funk, and a lot of other genres into a cacophony of brilliance. You absolutely must check them out! One of my favorite tunes is “Work Shit Out.” You can watch it below:
All of these (and other tunes I’ve enjoyed this year) are collected in the 2021 Joy Factory Playlist on Spotify! Check it out if you dare. There are a lot of good tunes to enjoy.
Currently Writing:
On the writing front, I’m just now getting back into the groove of things. Most of my writing energy over the last few months has gone into my TTRPG actual play project. And, of course, that has been moving slowly for a lot of reasons, most of which have to do with work schedules. But it’s summer vacay, now. That means...time!
One of the things I’m getting back into this week is finishing that horror novel, which I’ve tentatively entitled “The Harbor.” I doubt that title will stick (it’s far too generic for me). Still, I want to get this finished because a lot of its themes are fairly personal to me. I may not have mentioned that I had a pretty in-depth conversation with my mom about what it was liking being a dirt poor single mom. That conversation has had a huge impact on one of the characters I am writing, who is, well, a dirt poor single mom. And now that I have more time to write, I expect to insert a lot more of those personal experiences into the characters of this book, one of whom is somewhat based on me and one of whom is somewhat based on my mom. I think part of what has made horror an interesting turn for my writing is the way it lets me get really personal. I feel weirdly comfortable exploring these things via horror and the supernatural. Wish me luck here!
Once I get that groove going, I might turn my eye back to “That Which Lives After Them in the Nothingness of Their Bones,” a short story / novella which draws on the plantation history of Florida (and the legacy of slavery among descendants of that history). I originally hoped to finish it for submission to Tor’s horror imprint, but I don’t think I’ll have time now. But I do want to finish it because, uh, I really like the story I started putting together. Plus, Florida is weird.
Now on to media you should check out that has absolutely nothing to do with me!
First up, the geekery:
If you’ve ever wanted to take a stab at bullet journaling, WheezyWaiter has a whole video on their experiences with the medium! I’ve never done this myself, but I’m thinking of trying it! Meanwhile, the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature channel has a new lecture from Guy Gavriel Kay on Tolkien, fantasy, and literature. A lot of folks were talking about this the other day, so I figured y’all should see it!
There have also been a handful of really good audio fiction podcasts, including:
Over Nightlight Pod, Tonia Ransom has a new story by Victoria Hutchinson called “Bloodlust.”
Escape Pod has “Electronic Ghosts” by Innocent Chizaram Ilo and “Report of Dr. Hollowmas on the Incident at Jackrabbit Five” by T. Kingfisher!
The folks at Drabblecast have a new story by Cat Rambo called “Hands of Heroes”!
On the science front, there’s this new bit from Cosmoknowledge on the hum of the universe outside our solar system as captured by Voyager 1, which is careening off into interstellar space as we speak! Also: Voyager 1 and 2 have been out there for 43 years. Still sending us data. Still doing their thing! Think about that. It’s incredible!
Speaking of incredible, let’s look at a couple of APOD shots. There’s this one of the aptly named Sombrero Galaxy (M104), which just goes to show that there is nothing that the universe cannot provide to light up the soul. And then there’s this Carina Nebula shot, which I assume is where one performs a Kessel Run or something…
Now on to...books?
This week’s volume is gonna be packed. After losing all of the stuff I had written up last week, I”ve decided there were too many important books to just let fall into the darkness. And so I’ve included them here!
Here are the books published between May 10 and May 23 that you should check out!
Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Orbit; May 11, 2021)
A Master of Djinn by P. Dèlí Clark (Tor Books; May 11, 2021)
Within Without by Jeff Noon (Angry Robot; May 11, 2021)
Black Water Sister by Zen Cho (Ace; May 11, 2021)
The Lady of Zamalek by Ashraf El-Ashmawi and translated by Peter Daniel (Hoopoe; May 11, 2021)
We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker (Berkley; May 11, 2021)
Alien Stories by E.C. Osondu (BOA Editions; May 11, 2021)
The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado (Penguin Books; May 11, 2021)
Cyclopedia Exotica by Aminder Dhaliwal (Drawn & Quarterly; May 11, 2021)
Found in Translation: New People in 20th-Century Chinese Science Fiction by Jing Jiang (Columbia University Press; May 11, 2021)
Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron (Duke University Press; May 14, 2021)
The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens by Matthew David Goodwin (Rutgers University Press; May 14, 2021)
Unbury Our Dead with Song by Mukoma Wa Ngugi (Cassava Republic; May 18, 2021)
Boys of Alabama by Genevieve Hudson (WW Norton; May 18, 2021)
The Whispering Trees by Abubukar Adam Ibrahim (Cassava Republic; May 19, 2021)
The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade (Stelliform Press; May 20, 2021)
The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination by Philip Ball (The University of Chicago Press; May 21, 2021)
The collection of novels added to the library are gonna make keeping up with the rest of the year really hard. Okungbowa’s Son of the Storm is sitting on one of my cat’s scratching posts, screaming at me to read it as soon as possible; the book has been getting a lot of attention lately for its West African-inspired epic fantasy, and I’d be lying if that didn’t immediately grab my attention! Meanwhile, Ngugi’s new novel about larger-than-life Ethiopian musicians playing their version of the blues (Tizita) looks to be a truly imaginative look into the rich cultural history of Ethiopia, Kenya, and African music overall. It might not be genre proper, but if the description is any indicator, the writing may be beautiful enough to drag you out of your surroundings into another world. Then there’s Hudson’s debut, Boys of Alabama, a work being hailed as the next big southern gothic work. This is the big draw for me, as I’ve grown increasingly interested in this particular aesthetic, and Hudson’s book looks to add a lot to the pot.
In addition to these, there’s Octavia Cade’s latest, which not only has one of the best covers of the lot but also explores climate change and extinction from a New Zealand perspective. This is likely to be a critically important work given the Euro-American dominance of climate change discussions. We need these other perspectives! Speaking of perspectives, Zen Cho’s new novel offers a contemporary fantasy set in Malaysia; couple ghosts and family secrets with Cho’s writing and you’ve got a recipe for greatness. In the world of translation, we’ve got El-Ashmawi’s latest book set in Cairo, which purports to offer a sweeping tale of 20th-century Egypt full of murder and webs of secrets and more! Should be fun!
Among some of my most hotly anticipated books is P. Dèlí Clark’s new novel! I had the pleasure to interview him for The Skiffy and Fanty Show for a different book (Ring Shout), and I’ve been waiting for this new book since he mentioned it to us. I don’t even need to know what it is about. Clark is a shockingly good writer, and A Master of Djinn is bound to be incredible. Then there’s Jeff Noon’s book; folks who know me would also know that I got pretty hard into cyberpunk back in my undergraduate days, and Noon’s Vurt was one of the books to send me there. His latest continues to build on those cyberpunk roots and sounds a bit bonkers -- and that’s how, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it! And then there’s Sarah Pinsker’s new book, which I’m going to buy solely on the basis of my love of her work; I’ve nominated a Pinsker short story for a Hugo almost every year for the past 5 years because she’s just that good. We Are Satellites is gonna be amazing!
Meanwhile, the world of short story collections will be pleased to add Osondu’s Alien Stories, whose treatment of SF concepts travels across national boundaries from Osondu’s native Nigeria to the United States. It’s definitely one to keep an eye on! Additionally, there’s Peynado’s The Rock Eaters, which has been positively compared to the work of Carmen Maria Machado and others and brings new fabulism, magical realism, and other genres into an exploration of immigration, xenophobia, and so much more. If I didn’t already have 500,000 books, I’d probably already have this one… Lastly, there’s Ibrahim’s new collection, The Whispering Trees, which features medicine men, witches, magic, myth, and more, all woven with the deft pen of this incredible Nigerian writer. Definitely worth checking out!
Oh, and there’s one graphic story in this lot: Dhaliwal’s Cyclopedia Exotica. Like some of the other works on this list, Dhaliwal’s narrative explores issues of xenophobia and immigration, only here through a metaphor involving a cyclops! The art style looks particularly adorable, and I’m curious to see how the author uses it to explore these things.
In non-fiction, quite a few SF/F-adjacent works have (or will) come out, including Jiang’s critically important Found in Translation, which chronicles Chinese SF’s development in the last century. It also happens to have a gorgeous cover, so you get two levels of awesome here. Then there’s the much more theoretical work in Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism, a work which lines up with some of my current research interests in the anthropocene and the power dynamics at work. Plus, indigenous studies scholars will probably need to pick this one up given the importance of the Métis in Liboiron’s argument.
Some other interesting works include Ball’s The Modern Myths, which offers a new take on some of the major works of proto-genre from the 19th century (Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.). I’m curious to see how Ball draws new connections to our contemporary moment here! And finally, there’s Goodwin’s The Latinx Files, which will undoubtedly become part of my academic collection when I get to working on some of the Latinx SF/F authors for my book project. I’m stoked to see more work go into this particular subset of literature!
And there you have it. Books. Lots and lots of books. Your TBR pile will thank you!
Now on to...anime?
If you’d asked 2000s-me what I thought of anime, I might have screamed something incomprehensible into your ears. Back then, I was one of those 20-something anime dorks who attended anime conventions, downloaded fansubs by the gig, bought manga in droves, and slowly collected anime DVDs and Gundam models. I was a fan. Maybe not as deep into the culture as others who went to conventions like Fanime in San Jose or put together anime clubs at their schools, but when you drop $1,000 on merch, watch entire seasons of fansubbed shows from Japan acquired from Torrents, and find yourself crying over anime storylines, well, you’re probably a bit of an otaku.
But things change, and sometime in the early 2010s, I found myself falling off the anime wagon. Some of that had to do with going to grad school in Florida. Some of that had to do with this weird feeling that I was always behind because I didn’t have the time to dedicate that others had. And some of that had to do with a competing interest in writing SF/F/H. But the big reason: I didn’t really have an anime community to hang with back home; none of my friends were big anime viewers, and my small town really didn’t have much in the way of an anime culture (one friend back in high school did give me Neon Genesis Evangelion manga, though, which may be the thing that set me off down this path in the first place -- that and Gundam Wing). And as a 20s-something new fan, I never quite felt at home in the convention spaces (fun as they often were). I always felt a bit like an outsider.
And so I stopped watching on a regular basis. I stopped going to conventions. I stopped investing in the culture. I went on to do other things, to focus on grad studies. I still watched a thing here or there, but I didn’t have the same investment as I had before. It felt different.
That all changed...last week. On The Skiffy and Fanty Show, my co-host, Brandon O’Brien, coaxed me with minimal effort to record an episode on Wonder Egg Priority, a new anime series about, among other things, teen girls dealing with severe trauma via a fantastical egg metaphor. While the podcast ended up being about the show’s faults -- of which there are many -- the one thing that definitely stuck with me was an impossible-to-ignore fact: the experience of watching Wonder Egg Priority reminded me of similar experiences I had watching some of my first anime or reading some of my first mangas back in the late-90s and early 2000s. An experience of wonder. Of amazement. Of joy.
In the last seven days, I’ve found myself diving headfirst into some of my favorite anime from way back when. Shows like Pani Poni Dash, a truly strange show that probably seems less strange to anime aficionados but continues to bewilder me to this day. And shows like Cowboy Bebop.
It’s the latter of these that has really set me down the path. Before, I was dabbling, but the beauty and wonder of Cowboy Bebop is like a whirlpool sucking me down into the depths of a visually vibrant, explosive, and exciting world of space cowboys, martial arts, cyberpunk aesthetics, and more. Set in 2071, the series follows a crew of misfit bounty hunters (and their dog, Ein) as they traverse a noir-ish and gritty interstellar future seeking any target that will bring a good payday. The morality of the characters are decidedly flexible, but as we learn more about how this future works, we get a glimpse into what made these people who they are, from lost loves to lost memories to traumas and betrayals and more. The show flits casually between determined realism, high octane space western action, and bouts of delightful comedy. It may very well be one of the best anime ever created. It certainly makes my top 10 list.
Rewatching this show has had this wild effect on me. I’ve found myself once more devouring episodes hour after hour. I can’t help but get sucked into this world. The show doesn’t just give us familiar trappings of a spacefaring western-style civilization. The animation (by Sunrise) is jaw dropping. There are entire sequences of well-choreographed gunfights and martial combat, spaceship dogfights, and more. Even the characters are hallmarks of what great anime can do: unique characters with little quirks that help define them as singular entities, such as Spike’s smoking or Ed’s zany attitude. Even side characters are well-designed, even if they’re just one-note figures. Punch and Judy, the hosts of the bounty hunter show Big Shot, are one of a handful of repeat minor characters who have the same schtick -- and who, like other minor characters, get uncovered as something else, this future vision having a constant sense of a facade under which something else lurks. The show is pulpy, sure, but those larger-than-life characters and plots have far more to them than the pulp roots would suggest, and you can rewatch to pick up little things that you might have missed before.
There’s also something else in a work like Cowboy Bebop that makes anime such a compelling form: the quiet spaces. While not all anime utilize dialogue for subtle notes of character or feeling, Cowboy Bebop (and Wonder Egg Priority) do to great effect. I absolutely love the contrast between the high octane action and zany characters and these much quieter moments of reflection. I get sucked into them in a way that Hollywood blockbusters struggle to reproduce. You don’t see this in a lot of Western films -- a production that stops to let the viewer breathe and let themselves be carried by dialogue, character, and feeling.
And there’s more to this newfound love: I adore just how creative anime can be. As an animated form, there are, naturally, things you can do that are less possible in live action mediums. Anime often takes advantage of this (to varying degrees of success, of course). From characters to visual design to plot, the stories in shows like Cowboy Bebop give me something I’ve found missing from a lot of western SF in film and TV. I’ve complained about this before, but I dislike the collapsing of film style in SF/F to the blockbuster model, where “thinky films” get buried in favor of elaborate visuals that don’t necessarily add anything new. Worse, I sometimes think the creativity of the industry has faltered. It’s franchises all over the place, but they’re not franchises taking big risks in design and style. Anime has its problems of course, but it’s hard to watch a show like Cowboy Bebop and not see that there’s something special there. Even more recent shows like Wonder Egg Priority or classics like FLCL or Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi or, you guessed it, Neon Genesis Evangelion have explored unusual visual stylings, truly out-there ideas, and truly strange ways of being. Cowboy Bebop isn’t nearly as “out there” as Evangelion; yet, it is a wildly creative take on the space western genre, one that is endlessly rewatchable.
All of this is to say that I’ve become an anime fan. Again. I’ve rediscovered (nay, rekindled) that love I had when I was younger, and I expect you’ll see me talking more about anime here and elsewhere as I explore some of the stuff I’ve missed over the past decade or so. What interesting and unusual anime are there for me to watch? There’s only one way to find out! Anime world, here we come!
Every week, I’ll ask my Twitter followers what they’re reading. Here’s what they said:
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (from @KateSherrod)
The Brothers Jetstream Leviathan by Zig Zag Claybourne (from @KateSherrod)
The Door Into Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith (from @KateSherrod)
Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (from @coffeemeoften)
Tentacle by Rita Indiana (from @truthyfruit)
Neverness by David Zindell (from @adamcallaways)
Art in the Age of Artifice by JG Martel (from @adamcallaways)
Stargazer by Anne Hillerman (from @PEMatson)
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (from @PEMatson)
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (from @Julirose)
We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker (from @carturo222)
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold (from @ClaireOdell99)
The Way of the House Husband by Kousuke Oono (from @SStaatz)
Obviously Awesome by April Dunford (from @mattdelman)
Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky (from @PrinceJvstin)
Finna by Nino Cipri (from @MistyMassey)
Master of the Revels by Nicole Galland (from @jsundmanus)
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (from @jsundmanus)
Grant by Ron Chernow (from @jsundmanus)
Cujo by Stephen King (from @SteveJWright1)
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders (from @ConstanzeHofma1)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (from @RailWrites)
Archetypes and the Unconscious by Carl Jung (from @RailWrites)
Colours in the Steel by K.J. Parker (from @delagar)
The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard (from @CoraBuhlert)
Excession by Iain M. Banks (from @fabiofernandes)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (from @fabiofernandes)
The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey (from @fabiofernandes)
And there you have it. Follow me on Twitter @shaunduke if you want to share your reads next time!
And there you have it! Another edition has reached its conclusion!
Here are the items on the agenda for this week:
A new episode of The Joy Factory Monthly on the joy of horror with Tonia Ransom! I’m also working on a few other episodes over the coming weeks, including ones on the joy of gaming, the wonders of synthwave, Pete’s Dragon, and more. I’m having a lot of fun with this!
A new episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show on David Anthony Durham’s Acacia with Brent Lambert!
I’m going to try to write a new article this week provided something horrible doesn’t happen to my soul. Most likely, this will be on Millennium Actress, which folks on Twitter selected from a recent poll! Stay tuned!
And there we go! Thanks for sticking around. Tell your friends about this newsletter!
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!