The Joy Factory Weekly - Issue #9 (6/7/2021)
Alright! You've got your tickets! Let's get to this!
Welcome to June, where the weather is unnecessarily hot, the Vietnamese restaurants are still too far away from me (*sob*), and I’m weeks away from teaching a summer class that will suck out my soul! Thanks for sticking around and putting up with my silly nonsense!
The past week has been a good one despite the arrival of a massive heat wave. First, I took my friend Larry on a birthday trip to Duluth, MN. There, we enjoyed the wonders of Lake Superior, ate some good food, drank some good alcoholic beverages, and generally had a grand old time! Second, I decided it was high time to get lawn equipment and plant some new stuff. Got a good deal on a new lawn mower, string trimmer, and blower gizmo, and I planted a variety of pretty flowers whose names I’ve already forgotten and potted up some herbs (rosemary, cilantro, catnip, and sweet mint). The latter of this will eventually come in the house for winter, though the cilantro might come inside sooner depending on how it weathers the heat over the next few days.
Beyond that, I’m inches away from starting up a writing channel on The Skiffy and Fanty Show Discord so I can start engaging in writing sprints with David Annandale and others. I need to get that fiction writing engine churning. I especially need to figure out how to actually finish things so I can start submitting again...
Speaking of fiction, I will have some news about the actual play project in the next couple months. We made some big decisions over the last 10 days, including a name for the project, some formatting choices, and more. I can’t talk about them yet...more when we’re close to launch!
Outside of all of that, here are some of the things I was up to this week that you can check out:
Over at The Joy Factory Monthly, I had a delightful conversation with Iori Kusano about the wonders of video games! We had a blast!
On the Joy Factory Patreon, I shared a few pictures from my carefully-isolated trip to Duluth AND wrote a top 5 list of my favorite horror soundtracks!
On The Skiffy and Fanty Show, Alex Acks, Becca Evans, and myself discussed John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001) for the monthly Torture Cinema episode. We had quite a few laughs in this one, and I’m told by listeners that the laughs were justified!
Alright! Now onto the main affair...clickables?
Clickable Geekery
Over at The Irish Times, Brian J. Showers offers some thoughts on how to understand horror. This is in response to the oft-stated “that didn’t scare me” criticism, which I also agree is not necessarily the only function of a horror story. More importantly, I think seeking only the raw scare makes the experience too subjective and, thus, less useful as a criticism. Maybe more on that another day! On a related subject: a new article in Horror Homeroom looks at Midsommar and the psychological (and academic) underpinnings of its themes. I’ve yet to see this movie, but reading this article makes me want to plug it in soon! And the last piece on the horror train is a new one from Horrified on the role of the BBC in the creation of Hammer (you know...the famous horror studio). I’m sure longtime horror fans already knew some of this, but it was quite compelling to read about that period of cinematic history as someone really digging the horror experience of late!
On the pulpy side, G.W. Thomas has another fantastic article about SF/F from yesteryear. This one looks at some of the various giant ape monsters found throughout the genre, from John Carter to Edgar Allan Poe and beyond! You gotta love those classic tropes! Thomas also has a piece on werewolves in DC’s Bronze Age comics. Also on the subject of tropes and the past: this new piece from Classics in Science Fiction which considers Jack Vance’s Dying Earth and the current of fairy tale writing that exists within SF. I particularly appreciate the shared literary history of the Golden Age of SF (here, Oz books).
Speaking of fantastic critters and what not: Carrie Sessarego dropped an article with Clarkesworld which looks at the depiction of fungi in fiction. Sessarego breaks down the common patterns and looks at several high profile examples here. Good stuff!
If you hadn’t heard, the Lambda Literary Award winners were just announce! The middle grade award went to Kacen Callender for King of the Dragonflies, and the SF/F/H award went to Julian K. Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel. See the full list for other great works to check out! Related to this is a new JSTOR Daily post that looks at the intersection of video games and LGBTQ+ folks. Really interesting stuff!
Also in Awards Land: the 2020 Nebula Award winners were announced last week! I’m particularly pleased to see P. Djèlí Clark, Sarah Pinsker, and John Wiswell as winners here! There are, of course, many other fantastic nominees and winners, so do check out the full list!
On a super happy note, a new report out of The Washington Post says that indie bookstores in the U.S. fared pretty well during the pandemic. In fact, the American Booksellers Association saw an increase in members and closures were, in fact, far less pronounced than folks thought! This is not to suggest that everything is perfectly happy. The article notes that federal loans played a role in this and remains honest about the difficulty indie bookstores have in “making it.” Still, the fact that 2020-2021 hasn’t been a total disaster for indie stores is a good thing!
And for folks looking for new works in SF/F/H criticism, you might want to check out the 30th issue of Salon Futura, Cheryl Morgan’s fanzine. There are reviews of A Master of Djinn and The Vanished Birds and a whole host of other content! I remain jealous because I keep dreaming of making a little fanzine of my own...
Clickable Fiction
Here are just a few of the online works of fiction worth checking out:
“Embracing the Movement” by Cristina Jurado and translated by Sue Burke (Clarkesworld)
“The Shroud for the Mourners” by Yukimi Ogawa (Clarkesworld)
“Face Changing” by Jiang Bo and translated by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld)
“Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld)
“Little Animals” by Nancy Kress (Clarkesworld)
“Before Whom Evil Trembles” by Nhamo (Anathema Magazine)
“A Blind Eye” by M.H. Ayinde (Daily Science Fiction)
“Final Warnings in Open Fields” by Xander Odell (Daily Science Fiction)
“The Urn” by Frances Ogamba (The Dark)
“The Nation of the Sick” by Sam J. Miller (Lightspeed Magazine)
You might also want to check out Issue #331 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies!
For this week’s interview, I’m joined by the fabulously wonderful Adri Joy. Here, we talk about some silly genre topics, the wild world of book reviewing, geekery, and so much more.
Here goes:
Hello, and welcome to a Joy Factory Interview! Thanks for agreeing to participate in this awesome adventure! To start, we must begin with a totally evil question that I am not at all ashamed to ask: If you could recommend one book (in any genre) that everyone should read, what would you recommend and why?
Hi Shaun! Wow, thanks for getting us started with such an unabashedly evil question. I hate the idea of "universal" books, or of boiling down my ideas about a canon of literature into one single title that encompasses everything. And while I've got quite a few non-fiction favourites, none of them hit the right cocktail of universal and accessible that I would want to offer up as an answer to this question. So instead, I'm going to recommend an adventure that I think everyone can enjoy: Kwame Mbalia's Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. Our hero Tristan is dealing with the weight of grief and expectations in the real world when a mysterious theft causes him to accidentally punch his way into the land of MidPass, a world filled with African and African American folklore and mythology. Now Tristan has to figure out how to save the world he's accidentally put in danger, and get himself back home in the process. Like all good portal-mythology mashups, I learned a lot from the worldbuilding, and it's a really timeless, thoughtful, fun quest story. So go pick that up.
Since you're a giant SF/F/H dork like me, I have to ask: What continues to excite you about genre fiction today? What keeps you coming back for more, story after story, book after book, movie after movie?
Funnily enough, I had to come up with an answer to this in a day job professional development session recently (yes, I am lucky enough to work in a job where everyone knows I am a huge nerd). Like a lot of fans, I'm extremely interested in politics and justice in our own world, and I think that speculative fiction in all its forms is one of humanity's best creative tools for grappling with those questions. Most of my favourite works of SFF are those that combine meaningful thinking about big questions with lots of satisfying adventure and character growth.
I also really like to travel, and learn new things, and the increasing diversity of genre fiction available to me as an English reader is a huge privilege. Especially for the past 15 months, as I've gone from someone who had their passport number and expiry date memorised for all occasions to not even knowing which drawer I've left it in, fiction which draws on different cultures to create new secondary worlds or far-flung planetary systems is even more of a lifeline. I'm happy that mainstream publishing is (for now) taking notice of diverse storytelling, and I'm super grateful to everyone who shouts about more under-the-radar small press and short fiction work and helps me bring that into my TBR too.
As a longtime reviewer, what do you consider to be the place of SF/F/H reviews and criticism in the community as a whole? What makes it, for you, such a crucial part of the field?
On a personal level, I review for other fans: to help people find books that they will love and appreciate, and to share my feelings about what I read to help other people articulate or add to how they reacted to a work. I also love seeking out other people's reviews when I'm considering a book, or when I've finished, to help me contextualise my own feelings about it. Good reviews help bring work to readers' attention, as well as giving people who have already read it another perspective to consider - one that might change our interpretation of events or elements in the story, or reaffirm how we responded to something, or give us context or a way to put our own thoughts into words.
I also think, no matter how impartial an individual reviewer is, it's impossible to separate out the role reviewers play as critics, and the role we play as publicists - and that a lot of that publicity is based on what is being marketed at us. Much of what we review at Nerds of a Feather is shaped by the advance copies our flock receive (either directly or sent as e-copies to our editors and then shared to a reviewer) and that, in turn, is shaped by which publishers have us on their lists and what they want to bring to our attention. Of course, because it's exciting to be the first to read something, and to be part of general excitement for a specific book, there can be a lot of pressure to hit those big titles - or, if you're not among the lucky few to have access, to review enough other things the publisher is putting out and charm the publicist enough to get on the list for the next release.
I'm not pointing this out to be grumpy or suggest that reviewers need to extricate themselves from the demands of publishing capitalism and strive for purity. Hype can be amazing, and all the advance titles I've read this year have been well worth the marketing it took to get them into my hands. But I think reviewers' choices around the books that we promote have a big impact on what the community sees as worthy of attention, and that we have a responsibility to at least be aware of the factors that influence those decisions. For my part, I'm very distracted by shiny things! But I also try to make sure a significant amount of my reviewing involves work by marginalised authors from smaller publishers, or backlist books that I think have been overlooked. Individually, whether or not I review a title doesn't make much difference, but it's important to me that I contribute to the conversation beyond the books that don't need my help to be talked about.
Reviewing is a notoriously subjective and complex process, with every reviewer approaching a work with a different set of goals, criteria, and so on. What about you? How do you approach the process of constructing a review (what you evaluate, etc.)? And how has that changed for you as you gained more experience?
In mechanical terms, I am normally a review "pantser". I will read a book, maybe throw a few sentences into a document as an immediate reaction, and chew it over in my head for a while. Then when I have the inclination to do the full review - normally a few days later - I'll come back and ignore those pre-written sentences in favour of a big splurge of new feelings. I often don't do much cross referencing of the text in the initial writing, so I'll end up with various placeholders of [xxxx] in the middle of paragraphs where I know I need to reference a specific character or event but I've forgotten the exact details. Once I've got the shape of everything down, I'll go back and cross check my references - making sure they support my gut argument and reconsidering it if they don't - and then put my finger in the air to divine a numerical rating if I need to and it's done. The exceptions to that are books where I want to respond to a specific element, especially if it's something other reviewers have flagged, like the treatment of race in Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education; or when I'm writing something longer than the 1,200 word length my reviews usually land at, in which case I'll generally spend more time thinking about structure and looking things up as I go.
As to goals: my aim is to portray a work in a way which accurately displays my reactions, and helps it to find its readers. I am very much of the opinion that objectivity in reviewing is impossible and that pursuing it is a waste of time*, so I try to be as upfront as I can about my biases and quirks as a reader, and to make it clear when something's not working for me as opposed to when I think something is just... bad. That said, I have evolved to be more careful about how I write critical pieces, especially when it's a work that relies on knowledge or experiences I might not have. I really admire the work of Charles Payseur in writing insightful, generous critique that seeks what's good in each story he reviews even when it's not a story that personally worked for him - that approach to critical positivity, accepting that all stories have value to the right readers and that a good critic is there to make that match rather than score points dunking on stories they don't personally like, really influences how I try to think about my own more critical reviews.
*this is technically at odds with the Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together review policy, which was developed before I came on as co-editor, but... we're all friends here
As a fairly active member of the SF/F/H fan universe, I'm curious how you've managed to keep your motivation up to keep pushing out new content on a relatively frequent basis. What keeps you going? How do you find that energy even when you're just exhausted (as many of us probably have been since March 2020)?
Well, on some level it's because the regular work I do - keeping our schedule full and our posts reasonably well edited at Nerds of a Feather, and writing my own content - is ingrained in me at a point where it's not really about "motivation". I just do it, because that's a thing I do at weekends or evenings and my "to review" ebook folder isn't going to empty itself. The exact energy does ebb and flow somewhat - I am quite a seasonal person so I always get more done in summer than winter - but I've been lucky in that my personal situation, and my physical and mental health, have been stable enough that I haven't had to stop the treadmill at any point. I suspect that if I had stopped reviewing or engaging, it would have been much harder to start back up again.
I'm also really lucky to work with such a great, dedicated team of reviewers and writers at Nerds of a Feather, not to mention the rest of our editorial team, where we can all pick up the slack for each other and keep the site going even when individuals have to drop off to take care of themselves and fulfil other obligations. I am not good at keeping to personal schedules so I'm always in awe of bloggers who keep their individual blogs going with different content on different days: NoaF means that, as long as I can average a post every week and find some time for editing, I don't have to worry about putting things out on specific days or having a lot of writing energy one week and not a lot the next.
Having reviewed many books over the years, you've probably had a few "brain blown" experiences. What is one work from, say, the last 5 years that blew your mind? Why? Tell me about your joyful brain experience!
Harrow the Ninth. I know it was quite divisive compared to its predecessor (although still beloved enough to be on the Best Hugo ballot!), but Tamsyn Muir smashed it out of the park with weird confusing nonsense and I loved every excruciatingly batshit second of it. Plus, even more so than the first novel, the influence of webcomic/animation/game/thing Homestuck (a name that will be familiar to most people who were around the youth culture internet of 2008 - 2013) felt really evident, and I love that we now have highly regarded, genre-mainstream literature that feels so in conversation with weird, experimental internet storytelling. Harrow is a book for people who are happy to sit through a subplot where characters work through the same events of the first novel, but with different time-y death-y shenanigans going on, because having a coherent understanding of what the heck this timeline is and who is alive in it is a less interesting question than what this particular configuration of characters is going to get up to. It's absolutely ridiculous and I love it. Plus, I followed Homestuck for a few years and Muir wrote some of my favourite fanfiction, so it's super exciting to transfer all my feelings about alternate universe stories that never got finished and stick them on a trilogy that has a definitive end date in sight.
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?
I feel like the answer to this question really depends on where "across the pond" I was flying, because if I am stuck on the equivalent of St Helena or another Mid Atlantic island that's quite a different prospect to, say, a nice cosy tropical locale. But let's assume the plane dropped me off in a nice tropical spot. My chosen book would be the Tor.com anthology Worlds Seen in Passing, which is a fantastic collection of some of the site's best stories. The object would be a snorkeling set, because if I'm stranded in the tropics I want to ensure I get some good swimming out of it. And for a nemesis, I'd choose someone like Bear Grylls or another vaguely insufferable survivalist type. They'd be constantly haranguing me about "oh you've got to do this and that to feed and shelter yourself in the wilderness, stop being lazy and start learning about the true potential of the human animal", and it would be really irritating when all I want to do is snorkel and read, but in the process I imagine they would be quite useful for actually producing food and shelter which would be worth the emotional cost of having them around.
Adri Joy is a co-editor at Nerds of a Feather (a multi-Hugo Award finalist), reviewer for the same and Strange Horizons, and probably a professional mermaid. You can find her work at Nerds of a Feather and on Twitter @AdriJj.
According to the Internet, Kirk Douglas once said that “in order to achieve anything, you must be brave enough to fail.” I don’t know if he actually said that, but it seems plausible enough, and it helps me get to my amendment: “in order to achieve anything, you can’t do some lazy bullshit.” Jupiter’s Legacy is, well, lazy bullshit. Likely the victim of the Netflix model -- which sometimes seems to treat single seasons as pilots for continuations rather than contained narratives -- Jupiter’s Legacy falls painfully short on nearly every measure despite having, I’d argue, one of the most compelling “quest” stories outside of traditional epic fantasy.
Jupiter’s Legacy is split into two major narratives: the first explores what happens when the values of a Justice League-esque union of graying superheroes are challenged by a younger order of supers and a violent conspiracy plot which takes the lives of several supers; the second takes us back to the Great Depression and the journey the original supers had to complete in order to gain their powers (and, thus, pass them on to their children). There are numerous side plots, most of which center on the children of the original supers dealing with what amounts to a series of problems with one’s parents. Most of this doesn’t really matter to the story, but it’s there to distract you…
Overall, Jupiter’s Legacy is a prime example of a wasted opportunity. The second major plot (the “quest” narrative) is the most compelling part of the story, but that is owed almost entirely to the fact that it is actually completed during the course of the season. Nearly nothing else receives the same treatment. Worse, the show decides to use the final episode to throw in an out-of-nowhere twist ending in a brutal cliffhanger we now know will never be resolved. None of the super kids find peace or a resolution to their problems -- some, in fact, end up worse off or dead.
Much of this is frustrating for the viewer. While the “quest” narrative proceeds through the Great Depression, madness leading to grand and possibly cosmic discovery, and the resolution of tensions between most of the original supers, this is hamstrung by the story’s need to unveil grand mysteries in the present, part of which, upon the final reveal, completely undermines the “quest” story’s resolution. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the show were spread out over more space, but for reasons that are incomprehensible to me, we’re given eight episodes to resolve the kind of plot and character elements it takes most shows at least three seasons to address. Here, the writers (and actors) are forced forward as if they were hikers dumped in the middle of the desert. Find your way back to civilization, but you’ve only got water for three days! Good luck!
Set against this are a myriad of unearned character moments, most of them centered on the super children. Nearly all of them have significant baggage with regards to their parents, yet at no point does Jupiter’s Legacy show us where this baggage comes from. The original supers do have baggage of their own, but we’re given half an episode showing us why; that same courtesy is not afforded to the younger characters. We do get one scene with the Utopian teaching his kids a lesson about power and responsibility before shooting off to save someone, but I did not find this sufficient to rest an entire story in which one of your main super kids has such a contentious relationship with the Utopian (a.k.a. Her father) that it has led her to drug abuse and destructive behavior. We’re simply meant to accept it as “a thing that happens.” Naturally, the analogue here is the children of celebrities, but that level of detail is virtually absent from the show.
Even Jupiter’s Legacy’s central argument about whether super people should use lethal force is given weak treatment here. The question is compelling. As younger super people deal with increasingly more dangerous threats -- or, at least, that’s what we’re told -- and lose their lives, it creates a rift between and amongst the original supers, who have held on to a set of codes that includes “no killing” and “don’t get involved in politics.” Can you really maintain such rigid ideals in an increasingly gray world? The first season mostly punts the answer to your imagination even as specific characters offer answers of their own (often through action, thankfully). Yet, I can’t help but imagine what a story like this would be like if it could focus on that question from start to finish rather than telling other stories? There’s almost no real engagement here. People question it. The Utopian says “no, we gotta do it.” And that’s it. The question doesn’t get to breathe, and the show’s moral ethos seems to avoid having to suggest to us what the right answer might be.
There’s this overwhelming sense that this was a show written entirely as an audience and Netflix enticement. “Watch me so we can justify continuing this story,” however, is hardly a recipe for strong narrative television. As much as I enjoyed the “quest” narrative, watching all of this unravel itself in the final episode with almost no substantial foreshadowing left me speechless in the end. Why hamstring your writers and actors in this way? Why play this game where you must get enough viewers to create more just to ensure that your story makes sense?
It’s unfortunate, to say the least, that a show with so much potential could flop so painfully. Now that we know a second season will never come, we’re left with a paint can spilled across the hardwood floor. A mess we can’t fix. A mess that can only be a mess and nothing more.
This feature is an interesting one for me. You can learn a lot about my literary tastes by what I pick for Ship Library Editions. Eclectic. Strange. All over the place in terms of genre. This week is no different!
Here are just a few of the books worth checking out this week!
The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri (Orbit; June 8, 2021)
Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead Books; June 8, 2021)
Slipping by Mohamed Kheir and translated by Robin Moger (Center for the Art of Translation; June 8, 2021)
The Unraveling by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Erewhon Books; June 8, 2021)
Literary Devices for Coping by Soramimi Hanarejima (Rebel Satori Press; June 8, 2021)
All the Blues Come Through by Metra Farrari (Wise Ink Creative Publishing; June 11, 2021)
Suri’s The Jasmine Throne is very likely to turn some heads this year. Another entry in a trend of epic fantasies which are deeply critical of empire, this one has been praised as gorgeously written and brimming with the potential for influence. While I don’t read as much epic fantasy these days as I did as a younger dork, seeing more work really dig into how empires function, how they fall, and what all this means in a universe of magic is really exciting! Meanwhile, I have to say that whatever is in the water over at Erewhon Books, it must be good. Everything they’ve released thus far has, at a bare minimum, made me go “oooooooooooo want.” Rosenbaum’s upcoming novel, The Unraveling, is no different. Rosenbaum is, of course, an exceptional writer known primarily for short fiction; here, he turns to the novel, one of biotech and explorations of gender and all the goodies one wants in social science fiction. I am 100% going to buy this immediately and read it upon arrival.
The other three works of fiction deserve a bit more attention than they’re likely to get. Kheir’s Slipping, translated from Arabic, offers a fantastical love letter to Egypt past, present, and future, full of love and beauty and trauma and wonder. The blurb definitely fits the praise that calls it “enchanting.” Meanwhile, Lastly, Hanarejima’s Literary Devices of Coping sounds like a collection of experimental genre stories, something which greatly interests me as someone who really enjoys when folks break the rules. The stories seem to oscillate between almost PKD-ish concepts to intense social science fiction. I’m here for it. And lastly, Ferrari’s All the Blues Come Through turns to the Ancient Greeks with a fantastical tale of ancient (and magical) botanists. What else do you really need to know? Sounds a bit bananas, but that’s exactly how I like it!
Finally, there is one work of non-fiction here: Akwaeke Emezi’s provocative memoir, Dear Senthuran. Most folks know Emezi for works like Pet and The Death of Vivek Oji. Here, the author explores their life, from discovering themselves (as human, as body, as gender) to developing a creative spirit. It sounds like a fascinating read, and I really hope folks give it the chance it deserves!
And on that note, it’s time to turn to...more books?
Every week, I’ll ask my Twitter followers what they’re reading. Here’s what they said:
The Iliad by Homer (from @SithHounds)
Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (from @RainbowWar71)
A Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar (from @KateSherrod)
Chances of a Lifetime by Eleanor Lansing Dulles (from @KateSherrod)
Wool by Hugh Howey (from @KateSherrod)
The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk (from @RobTomshany)
The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus by Michael Swanwick (from @RobTomshany)
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross (from @RobTomshany)
My Nerdy Valentine by Vicki Lewis Thompson (from @SStaatz)
The House of Always by Jenn Lyons (from @KeithAManuel)
We’re Here Because You Were There by Ian Sanjay Patel (from @realbenlowe)
The Last Camel Died at Noon by Barbara Mertz (from @SueBursztynski)
Shadow Show edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle (from @CPANJGamble)
Stockings and Spells by Nancy Warren (from @cherylreads)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (from @timata87)
The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty (from @redheadedfemme)
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (from @monboddo777)
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin (from @ericforste)
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer (from @templetongate)
City of the Plague God by Sarwat Chadda (from @Bookworm604)
Valkyrie’s Song by M.D. Lachlan (from @ian_sales)
The Unbroken by C.L. Clark (from @abetterjulie)
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (from @abetterjulie)
Justine by Lawrence Durrell (from @fabiofernandes)
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (from @_not_liz)
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (from @SteveJWright1)
Modern Times 2.0 by Michael Moorcock (from @jaymiejmoore)
Calculated Risks by Seanan McGuire (from @jaymiejmoore)
Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel (from @PrinceJvstin)
The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard (from @CoraBuhlert)
Chaos Vector by Megan O’Keefe (from @DanielleGembala)
The Ship of Stolen Words by Fran Wilde (from @DanielleGembala)
The Black Song by Anthony Ryan (from @dpsells)
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders (from @WordsBecomeYou)
The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin (from @stromulus)
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (from @Not_A_Sentence)
Shark Infested Custard by Charles Willeford (from @Not_A_Sentence)
The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons (from @Stephen_GM)
Swamp Thing by Alan Moore (from @MattDoyleSmit)
Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater (from @mme_hardy)
Machinehood by S.B. Divya (from @toliver)
Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin (from @AMan4AllSaisons)
Persephone Station by Stina Leicht (from @JMMcDermott)
And there you have it. Follow me on Twitter @shaunduke if you want to share your reads next time!
Thanks again for sticking around for another issue of the newsletter! You rock!
This week should be a light one for me with exception to the blasted heat, which is increasing my heating bill and making the outdoors utterly miserable. I’d say “oh, well, today will be cooler,” but 91 vs. 96 is hardly something to write home about (that’s about 32.8 to 35.5 for folks using C). But, hey, at least I’m not dead and I’ve got a whole rosemary plant that will be turned into a massive rosemary bush! Yeah!
OK...here’s what to expect this week:
A new episode of The Joy Factory Monthly with Andy of Geek Salad fame. We’ll be discussing Batman Returns (1992). Is it the best Batman movie? You’ll have to listen to find out!
A new episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Brandon O’Brien and I interviewed P. Djèlí Clark about A Master of Djinn! Read the book. You won’t regret it.
I’m going to work my way through the Joy Factory Ideas List, which collects all the things I’ve wanted to do for this project over the past 6 months. There’s a lot, y’all!
More pictures on the Patreon page! I’ve got a lot of perty pictures to share!
And there you have it!
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!