Liz Busby | Writer - writing and reading sci-fi, fantasy, and nonfiction

What I Read: April 2024

I thought that it would get easier to keep up with blogging when the semester ended, but I guess things just keep on piling on. I finished up two really good papers–one on teaching students with dysgraphia in first-year writing and another using C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves as a lens to interpret Fatima Mirza’s novel A Place for Us–and all of my grading, and promptly collapsed.

Then I got back up again and promptly made up for my lack of mom-hours during the semester by chaperoning my daughter’s field trip the zoo and running all the last-minute errands for various school projects. My husband and I also ran a 5K at our local tulip festival with my teenagers, who we’ve been forcing to run all year. I don’t think they enjoyed it as much as I did.

In writing news this month, my short story “Birthright” was published as part of an anthology called Tales of Mystery: Dead for a Spell. The collection features detective stories with a fantasy twist, while the companion volume, Tales of Mystery: The Gravity of Death, is science-fiction themed. My story features a reluctant detective forced to take a case from a dangerous magical family. If you pay attention to the biblical allusions in the story, you may get a hint as to whodunit. I feel honored to be included in the collection along with some other really wonderful writers (including one who wrote one of the books reviewed below).

I had hoped to do more creative writing during the summer, but looks like academia has other ideas. I’m currently working on a paper about memory in dystopian novels by LDS authors for the Association for Mormon Letters conference in July. And in April, my podcast co-host Carl Cranney and I received a conditional acceptance for a paper on The Mandalorian and religious clothing for a possible edited collection, so now I am being forced to rewatch the show for research purposes. Oh, the hard life of the speculative fiction literary critic. 🙂

Speaking of the podcast, this month’s release is a short conversation about The Most Reluctant Convert, a film about C.S. Lewis’s conversion based on his memoir Surprised by Joy. I can’t believe it took me 42 episodes to get a legitimate Lewis episode into the podcast. The film is very short and really faithful to the book. Highly recommend for Lewis fans.

And now onto book reviews, of which 4/5 are rereads. It’s interesting (to me, at least) to see how my perspective on a book has changed over time. I hope the reevaluations you see below are an indication that I’m growing over time.

A Healthy Church Patriotism

One of my favorite sections in C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves is not actually one of the titular four loves at all. In the introductory chapter “Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human,” Lewis includes a perceptive discussion on the nature of patriotism. He delineates what he calls five ingredients of patriotism, but I think they are more productively thought of as stages because they seem to proceed from natural to unhealthy to destructive.

I find this section very useful in light of modern American politics. Over the last decade, we have seen what damage has been caused by both the abandonment of patriotism and the overindulgence in what Lewis calls “demoniac patriotism.” Like many loves, patriotism is both the sustaining force of a relationship (in this case, the unity of a nation) and also the force which may tip it into unhealthy nationalism and jingoism.

But Lewis’s arguments don’t have to apply just to a nation; they can apply just as well to any kind of in-group, out-group loyalty. This time through the book, I thought about the application of Lewis’s arguments to our identity as members of a church. Since I have called in a previous post for Latter-day Saints to re-embrace church culture, I think it’s important to clarify what I mean (and what I don’t mean), and Lewis’s stages of patriotism provide a clear framework for doing just that.

Religion as a Technology

I’m currently watching the Netflix adaptation of The Three Body Problem (or 3 Body Problem, as they have styled the title). The dialogue and exposition writing is so much better than the recent Avatar: The Last Airbender that I could cry. I finished episode six last night, and it’s taking a lot of my willpower bandwidth to continue working on schoolwork instead of finishing the final two episodes. It’s been a while since I read Liu Cixin’s book, and I have not read the other two books in the series, though with the amount of enjoyment I am getting from the show, they may move to the top of my summer reading list.

With all those caveats on my own ignorance in place, I’ve noticed an interesting religious theme in the show. In the first episode, Vera, a scientist who’s shortly going to commit suicide, asks another, “Do you believe in God?” This question is seemingly related to the fact that the particle accelerator they both work at is spitting out “Alice in Wonderland”-type results, like all the other colliders in the world. This implies that the only reason to consider religion is because you encounter things that don’t make sense.

Revelations in the show make it seem likely that Vera, like another protagonist, has also encountered a mysterious human who tells her that “the Lord” will take care of her if she stops her research and perhaps force her to commit suicide if she doesn’t. Later, it becomes clear what this group of fanatics refer to as “the Lord” is actually a group of technologically advanced aliens. This is a common enough science fiction explanation for God, but what makes this framing interesting to me is that these humans know that their Lord is a group of aliens. They are under no illusions that anything supernatural is going on. All of the aliens’ marvelous capabilities are scientific in their minds, and yet they still frame the aliens as a god, one who cares deeply about humanity’s best interests, and worship them accordingly.

What I Read: March 2024

I’ll keep this summary short since it’s April and all the grad school papers are due in a couple of weeks. During March, I presented at both the BYU English Symposium and the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. You can read my notes about ICFA over here.

Since I was already in Florida, I also took the chance to slip away by myself to Epcot without kids. I ate way too many snacks at the Flower and Garden Festival and spent my time in line listening to books for class on headphones, but a break is a break!

Obligatory picture with the giant golf ball at Epcot

Results for the various creative writing contests that BYU runs have also been trickling out. My essay “Growing Up L’Engle,” which reflects on the various times I have read A Wrinkle in Time, was the second place winner of the Elsie C. Carroll Informal Essay contest. And my story about a robot nanny, “Insufficient Memory,” won the specialty short story category in the Vera Hinkley Mayhew Student Creative Arts Contest. I’m hoping that I’ll find a place to publish both of these someday.

Over on the podcast, I highly encourage you to check out our exploration of Pride and Prejudice adaptations featuring the wonderful Katherine Cowley, author of The Secret Life of Mary Bennet mystery series. We’re hard at work on some fun episodes that should come out with greater frequency once winter semester ends.

And now, onto the book reviews!

ICFA 45 Debrief: Notes from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

I’ve recently returned from the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Since I’m an introvert and have to push myself to network, I set a goal before the conference to talk to three new people each day and have at least one interesting conversation. Well, that goal was absolutely an underestimate of how much fun I had talking to all these wonderful scholars and creatives. It was an absolute dream to attend. When you want to study fantasy and science fiction, there are a lot of people in English departments who won’t take you seriously. Being in a place where everyone else is also interested in what speculative fiction has to say was so refreshing.

My presentation was part of a panel of two papers on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It was a fascinating panel in that my co-presenter and I came to exactly opposite conclusions about whether the novel supported or denied the idea of Escape into the fantastic, as theorized by Tolkien. John Pennington (whose work on George McDonald I’m going to have to look into when I finally get around to reading Phantasties) framed the novel as rejecting the premise of a secondary world in favor of a world that is deeply intertwined with, and even formed from, the primary world. He also cited a lot of postsecular theorists in his discussion, which gave me a whole different way to understand the book that I’m going to need to spend some time working on.

My paper, “‘The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable’: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic,” took an opposite tack. I looked at the relationship of the protagonist to the artistic and symbolic world he lived in as representative of our relationship with speculative fiction, coming to the conclusion that the book demonstrates how Tolkien’s idea of constructive Escape functions. I tied in the public reaction to the book when it was published in the early pandemic as well as my own experiences using media to cope with 2020.

I was blown away by the discussion which brought up ideas that could spark at least 3-4 other papers about the novel. (Edited collection on Piranesi, anyone?) It was an honor to be in a panel with such an intelligent audience. I felt like I finally experienced the purpose of an academic conference: getting feedback on your ideas from people who really care about the subject.

David G Hartwell Award co-winners, Liz Busby and Sasha Bailyn

I guess the people running the conference also liked my paper, because at the closing banquet, I received the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, along with Sasha Bailyn, whose interesting publication Inglenook Lit combines creative nonfiction and speculative fiction which blows my mind. I’m really honored by this award; it gives me real validation and encouragement for my crazy desire to spend the rest of my career focused on speculative fiction.

Below are some comments and notes on my favorite papers and panels that I attended. (There were so many good panels that I didn’t get a chance to attend as well!)

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