As usual, my attempts to be a regular correspondent have not survived contact with the semester. It’s been a busy but fun time. I have a lovely office on the fourth floor of the humanities building on campus, with a great view of the courtyard, and I’m having fun developing my lesson plans for an honors writing class on creative nonfiction.
In August, I presented at the Online Midsummer Seminar for the Mythopoeic Society. I was very intimidated by the amount of Tolkien knowledge on display, but our little King Arthur corner of the conference was productive for me. I got lots of good feedback on my discussion of religion and the character of Nimue in Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. The paper will soon be published as part of the conference proceedings. I look forward to going to future conferences!
I attended both the Restore conference and LDSPMA this fall. What can I say? I’m a conference junkie. LDSPMA was particularly productive as I met the team behind the new LDS sci-fi/fantasy magazine Infinite Valley as well as Cole Melanson, the designer behind the always gorgeous Wayfare Magazine. I’ll definitely need their advice as I head into laying out the first issue of Further Light!
Speaking of which, we’ve selected the pieces for the first issue of Further Light magazine. Developmental edits are going well and I’m so excited for you all to get to enjoy them. I’m in the midst of commissioning art for some of the pieces, which is a whole new world for me, so lots to learn. I’ve also been commissioned by BYU to be the new faculty advisor for Leading Edge. This student-run science fiction and fantasy magazine has been running for almost 50 years now, and I’ve argued before that its existence is one of the driving forces behind the huge numbers of LDS SF authors. Now that the magazine is moving back to the English department after its sojourn in linguistics, I’m excited to be part of helping to carry on that legacy.
And if all that wasn’t enough, I’m starting a new podcast! The Storming Journey is the brainchild of El Call, but when she asked me and Adam McLain to cohost, I couldn’t say no. The goal of the podcast is to read The Stormlight Archive as though it were a sacred text. If you’re familiar with Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, you know the vibe to expect. We’re reading chapter by chapter through the series looking for deeper meaning and personal growth. Our third episode released this morning, so if you’re all caught up on Stormlight (spoilers do abound on this podcast) and want to dive deeper into the books, join us on the podcasting platform of your choice!
(Don’t forget Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree which has recent episodes about The Wild Robot, The Good Place, and Cinderella retellings!)
Below are my book reviews from the last three months with a large caveat. I’ve started a project to read through the rest of the Jo Walton books that I haven’t read. I’ve got three more books, I believe, and I’ll be putting my review of her entire corpus into a separate post once I finish. Of course, if you’re dying to know what I thought about things, you can always follow me on Goodreads for more regular updates.
Speculative Fiction
The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis – Listened to this one again, this time while carpooling with my son. Not sure how much went over his head, but for me, Lewis’s work continues to stand up to rereadings. I was even more glad that I reread it when I got the opportunity to see the Fellowship for Performing Arts’ adaptation of this when it came to Salt Lake. They made the really interesting decision to use “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” for the introduction and set up Wormwood as one of the students who is graduating, which gives the letters a bit more narrative throughline than they would otherwise have.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis – After many months of slow progress, I finally finished reading this one to my daughter. Voyage has long been one of my favorite Narnia books (right behind The Silver Chair). The structure of the voyage allows for the various episodic adventures to string together into a whole. It also gives the book an older feel, since travelogue plots have long been out of fashion.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – Returned to this book again for book club. This being my third time around, the book is really growing on me. When you don’t know what’s going on, the elusive style of writing is maddening. But when you know what’s going on, you catch all of the little references which become contemplative. This time I was especially interested in how Ishiguro captures the quality of childhood memories, how things that are unimportant become endowed with all the meaning in the world and how arbitrary the details of the memories are.
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett – This volume was, for my money, even better than the previous one, The Tainted Cup, which won both the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award. The way Bennett mixes magic, science, and spirituality in this novel is compelling. I can’t discuss much of what I mean without giving spoilers, but there are perhaps implications for our hyper-information age, AI, and even academia in these revelations. There’s also a great Prestige-like turn in the novel. The characters of Ana and Din continue to evolve, and though I don’t love where Din went in this novel, his relationship with Ana redeems much of that. I can’t recommend this series enough.
City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett – A book where the death of the gods has caused the world sustained by their power to collapse? Yes, sign me up for that one. Though I like the Ana and Din series better, this book provides some interesting conjectures about how belief shapes reality. And in this case, the death of the gods may be slightly exaggerated. The characters are not as loveable and distinct as Ana and Din are, but the sheer vibes and atmosphere may make up for it.
City of Blades by Robert Jackson Bennett – I was slightly disappointed the new main character; she was not as much my style as in the previous book. However, the divine mystery in this book may be better than the one in the City of Stairs. I like the idea of an afterlife that persists because of a divine covenant between a (dead) goddess and her believers. The eventual resolution was also satisfying in a stronger way than Stairs, though the book is also more gruesome.
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose – This book is a case where a cool idea was destroyed by a lack of skill and too preachy of a message. The idea of exploring the differences in dragon-human relationships between an indigenous people and their colonizers promises to question fantasy tropes and deal with difficult human realities. However, there are problems on both fronts. The author is not a skilled enough worldbuilder to create a believable and self-sustaining magical world. Long passages are devoted to the protagonist’s magical school lessons, which you quickly realize are just the usual school subjects of math and chemistry reskinned with fantasy sounding names. The result is confusing and boring.
Setting the fantasy worldbuilding aside, the message of the book takes over the work of building well-rounded characters. If you know the character’s position in society, you can instantly determine whether they will be likeable with a memorable quirk (anyone who is indigenous, lower class, or in any way othered by society) or a bigoted caricature with no redeeming qualities (anyone wealthy, in power, or of the colonial race). The racial lines of the book are both really clear and extremely unclear, again, a reskin of European nations with little work to develop them beyond the stereotypes of Vikings and Victorians. I ended up stopping this book about halfway through when it became apparent that these weaknesses were not going to get any better.
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – Reread this for the first time in a long time in preparation for speaking about LDS science fiction about AI. The portrayal of the Mind Game relates to the way we are using AI for therapy right now, only adapted to the “play-based” therapy more appropriate to children. The idea that someone with a special mind could push this program beyond its limits and cause it to grow and adapt–that’s exactly what’s happening in people who have religious delusions about AI, or rather what they think is happening. Interesting how well Card predicted this trend, in addition to predicting the influence of the internet and blogs on public discourse.
The novel itself still works for me. I’m much less shocked by the fights, nudity, and language than I was when I first read the book in 8th grade. It does make me wonder what Card’s own childhood was like. The situations are so harsh and bleak: is that just him imagining the military setting? I feel like many of Card’s child characters have this kind of experience though. Things to investigate….
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card – When I first started rereading this one, it felt incredibly harsh. The first few chapters are brutal, just misunderstandings and broken people and broken relationships left and right. There’s definitely a sense of Card-ness here. Ender is wise beyond even the character from Ender’s Game, with almost supernatural insight into human nature. And the family’s recovery under his influence is perhaps too rapid to be realistic. But it’s undeniable that the set-up with the piggies and the buggers is absolutely brilliant science fiction plotting.
As to the AI aspects, the symbiosis between Ender and Jane in interesting and provides an interesting view of the relationship we might develop with AI if it gained sentience. The fact that all of Jane’s access to information means less to her than the personal, embodied, and limited experience she receives by riding along with Ender implies a value to human life that feels very Latter-day Saint to me. This is as far as I got in my reread before the panel, but given that Jane’s eventual destiny in the series, there are implications here for what experience is valuable.
Fiction
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, vols 1-4 by Beth Brower – After all the heavy science fiction and fantasy I’ve been reading, I needed a lighter break, so I decided it was finally time to continue on with the Emma M. Lion series. I was uncertain whether this also belonged in my speculative fiction section, since there are a few aspects of low magic that show up in the series, like ghosts and the mysterious disappearance of items. However, since the overall feel is more regency historical fiction, I decided to stick with the general fiction label.
Emma’s voice really carries this meandering series. If you’re interested in intense plotting, you may not enjoy them. But if you’re someone who loves literature as much as Emma does and who enjoys wacky hijinks, these books (and in particular the new audiobooks) are a perfect companion in your day-to-day activities. I’m already done with volume 5 and will probably finish the rest of the available books by Thanksgiving.
Nonfiction
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt – I have long followed Jonathan Haidt’s work on how technology has affected childhood, along with Lenore Skenazy’s work on free-range childhood and the shrinking level of autonomy we give our kids. So while this book didn’t give me personally a lot of new information, I am extremely grateful to Haidt for making these ideas more well known. It was interesting to read the book during the beginning of the first school year of Utah’s ban on phones in schools. The reason we gave in and bought our oldest a phone at 13 was that his science class at school had students use their personal devices, and he was the only one in the class without one. Now, my third son starts junior high in a completely different environment where all phones are put away during class. It’s certainly a start! I hope the free-range parts of the book see such progress soon.