The final conference in my post-graduation gauntlet of conferences was the Mormon History Association conference in Ogden. I presented my research on Orson Scott Card’s 1987 rewrite of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which I’ve had a ton of fun researching. A few things about the presentation are still tied up in permissions, but if I get that straightened out, I hope to publish it someday.
I was shocked how much literature-related content has grown at MHA since the Bushmans introduced the idea at the 2022 conference. Whereas I’m usually struggling to find literary panels, this year there were several panels relating to the upcoming volume on Mormon rhetoric, a paper about a Harlem renaissance poet who joined the church, and a panel each on Nephi Anderson and Bernard Devoto, just naming a few. We got together the AML crowd for a nice lunch one day, and I got to watch Burgindie’s two outstanding short films, The Angel and Java Jive—both highly recommended. My only disappointment was that Emma Tueller Stone’s paper on Orson Scott Card and Heavenly Mother was scheduled for the same time as my paper on Card. (Which reminds me that I need to send her an email to get a copy…)
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Later in June, I also spoke on a panel for The Compass Gallery’s exhibit of religious fantasy art with two of my favorite people, Chanel Earl and Steven Peck. We had a great time bouncing ideas off each other about the significance of imagination for building and practicing faith. Wayfare is currently serializing Chanel’s book about fairy tales and the atonement. The introduction and piece on Snow White are available now: both are excellent examples of how fantasy and faith can collide in interesting ways.
Over on Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, we released a double-length short episode on two recent Catholic films, Conclave and The Two Popes. Carl and I had an excellent discussion about the similarities and differences between Catholic and LDS leadership and succession and how Hollywood doesn’t seem to really understand either. We’re hoping to release at least one episode a month during the summer, then return to a regular biweekly schedule in the fall.
I’m taking a short break from presentations in July, but I’ll be back right at the beginning of August presenting at the Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midyear Seminar. My presentation is about Lev Grossman’s Arthurian retelling The Bright Sword, but there’s a whole track of Tolkien presentations as well. The conference is not very expensive and obviously online, so if you’re interested in these things, I’d love to see you (virtually) there!
This month continues my Hugo (and other fantasy awards) reading, so there’s a lot of new spec fic reviews below. Enjoy!
Speculative Fiction
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky – For some reason, this book puts me in mind of The Murderbot Diaries, which is strange because the tone is almost entirely different. Whereas Murderbot is sarcastic and ironic, UnCharles is sincere and straightforward. But what they share is being robots/constructs that want to deny their humanity, even though the reader can clearly see it’s there. I quickly fell in love with the narrative style of avoiding attributing emotion to the robot by describing what it would be feeling *if* anyone was stupid enough to build a robot with feelings, which they wouldn’t.
While the characters are charming, the plot of the book leaves something to be desired. It’s very episodic: we stop at one place after another, displaying how the robots have gone wrong in each place via the very mechanisms which were supposed to make them more efficient. Service Model reads like a strong commentary on contemporary constrained LLMs, which makes it worth the slight tedium. The ending is a bit sudden but resolves several things well. Worth a read if you need to laugh before you cry about AI.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher – I was hesitant about this one, given the cover and my general feelings about horror. Indeed, this book made me genuinely unsettled while also being absolutely compelling. As a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, you know it’s going to end badly for the Ushers. This isn’t the kind of book where you expect plot surprises; it’s the kind where you can see the horrible ending coming from a million miles off and you still remain glued to it like a trainwreck. If you’re up for skin-crawling body horror, it’s worth a read.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – This will be my fourth review of Piranesi in only five years since it’s come out. So suffice to say, I think this book is here to stay as part of my life. I continue to discover new parts and pieces to it each time I read. This time, my focus was on what Clarke is saying about academia and the way it warps people, and how there might be other, better ways of deep knowing. (Should I write a paper on academia in speculative fiction? It seems to be trending…) Please, please, do yourself a favor and read this book. Preferably without knowing anything about where the book is going. You will be rewarded.
The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler – The concept of this book was interesting, but that’s really all it is: a concept. The book poses many interesting questions but provides no answers. No one acts, just reflects on past action. I expected characters to come into conflict over the morality of bringing back mammoths, the morality of getting funding by controlled harvesting of ivory to bring back mammoths, the morality of putting someone’s brain into a mammoth in order to . . . bring back mammoths. But no, everyone just seems to feel really ambiguous about things and then just continue on with the same course of life. I really just can’t recommend this one.
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo – Another one that disappointed me, which I finished only because the audio book was so short and it keeps popping up on award finalist lists. This book fits into the apparently growing genre where an angel and a demon become uneasy friends, like Good Omens or When the Angels Left the Old Country. The problem was that this book is almost entirely vibes. For a book that’s advertised as building an epic fantasy city, everything remains very nebulous. It’s unclear what type of culture the city has–at various points I thought we were in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, maybe even Africa. There’s nothing consistent or real about the worldbuilding, which is only there to give the two main characters things to vibe over in their will-they-wont-they enemies-to-lovers plot. There are hints that there could be really cool magic or a world behind all this, but it’s left completely undeveloped. For me, this book was like one of those Japanese plastic food models in the window of a restaurant: perfectly suited from a distance, but lacking nourishment up close.
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett – This one is billed as a “fantasy Sherlock Holmes,” and the beginning chapter is almost too on the nose. Our detective is living for the thrill of the next mystery, plays a stringed instrument, and tries to get the Watson-character to buy them some drugs to cut through the boredom. Luckily, the book soon moves beyond this color-by-numbers rewrite and brings in some really interesting magical worldbuilding and details. I enjoyed the simultaneous unfolding of a strange world with the methodical unraveling of the mystery. The magic is sufficiently explained for the eventual way it is used in the payoff, but less clear than a Sanderson-style hard magic. I also really enjoyed how the Watson-character’s learning disability was incorporated into the plot, as well as the extra little twist about the detective at the end. This book works well as a standalone, but I will absolutely pick up the next in the series.
Nonfiction
Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities by Gregory M. Colon Semenza – Even though the references to keeping everything on paper make this book a bit dated, it’s still the most comprehensive guide I’ve found to seeking an academic career in the humanities. Much of what you find online about grad school is geared towards STEM or social science fields, which operate very differently than the humanities. The individual chapters can be read individually as needed, but they also operate together as a whole. I look forward to applying this approach in my future endeavors.
Abroad in Japan: Ten Years in the Land of the Rising Sun by Chris Broad – I didn’t realize how early in his career I had started follow Chris Broad’s YouTube channel. As a result, I already knew many of the stories of this book. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see how they fit together. However, you don’t really read this book for the content so much as Broad’s fantastic voice–and I mean that literally, since he narrates the audiobook in a slightly toned-down version of his YouTube persona. If you’re interested in the experience of living long-term as a foreigner in Japan, beyond the starry-eyed gushing of many travel books, this is the one you should pick up. Broad doesn’t shy away from the bad parts of life in Japan as well as the anime-fueled dream many of us have been sold. A really fun read before my own journey to Japan.