Genre Fantasies: 2025 in Review

Figuring It Out

This past year has been a sea change for me. I’ve spent close to half-a-decade meandering through post-PhD life and building a career in academic publishing as an acquiring editor, all the while hanging on to the vocational drive that initially pushed me into a literary studies PhD—the desire to work as a scholar in sff studies—and floundering in search of just how I wanted to do that.

I didn’t stop participating in the academic world of sff studies during these past few years—I’ve edited books, peer reviewed a great many manuscripts, edited for various journals and book series, co-founded Ancillary Review of Books, went to conferences, served on book award committees, and more—but I agonized over just what I was doing. Whether it was building to something, whether I would eventually complete one of the dozens of projects I’ve outlined in my “Pandora’s Box” document, whether I could someday leave a mark on the field. Silly things, perhaps, but powerfully motivating and absolutely crazy-making, to me, when I can’t figure out what the hell I’m doing with my life, what I can offer the field, and so on. Because while some might be able to put the academic compulsions aside after leaving academia, it’s the scholarship that feels like my real life—not the thing I do to pay the bills, but what I pay the bills to do.

But something clicked at the very end of 2024. A decade of thinking about fantasy and science fiction, and what I wanted to accomplish, as well as a new understanding of just how much time I have in life to work on these things I love (fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc.), all came together in just a few days. Unaccountably, miraculously, but really the labor of thousands of hours of reading and thinking and worrying and second-guessing—I figured it out, so to speak.

The Birth of Genre Fantasies

And so I started Genre Fantasies this year to start down the path of writing a fuller, richer, more expansive history of fantasy in the mass market paperback era, c. 1960s–1990s. I figured, the only way I could really do that, really build to something I felt proud of, would be to go beyond both single-author studies (incredibly valuable, I hope to write at least one, too!) and the typical literary studies monograph that covers a single, focused topic with four or five chapters about a small handful of novels (also important, and I imagine I’ll write one or two of these, in time!), to somehow bridge the gap between, on the one hand, a synthetic overview of fantasy and, on the other, engaging deeply with each novel on its own terms and in its wider contexts.

How best to do that, I thought, than to see the practice of blogging as a legitimate critical, scholarly endeavor, to write about hundreds of novels at great length, such that any book I might write in the future about fantasy will have behind it, available with just a quick search on my blog, many additional thousands of words of criticism that can elaborate the points I make in said book(s) and give each novel its due attention. That is, I had in mind the idea that a reader of any book I should write, would see a passing reference to, a footnote on, or a paragraph or three about a given novel, and know that each novel I reference would also have an essay about it on my website. At the same time, I wanted to be able to go beyond the rather limited scope of sff studies and what we give our attention to, treating each novel as equally worthy of critical attention. Because the odd truth of the matter is, very little has been written about even the most significant sff authors of the past century, and where the field lends its focus, it tends to treat everything else as not really worthy of critical attention (this is often a rhetorical move to distance tenure-seeking scholars from the ridiculous fear that their colleagues will look down on their studying mass market paperbacks with lurid covers, but if they can just assure their colleagues that the stuff they work on is different and respectable…).

Genre Fantasies, then, was created out of hope: for what I might accomplish someday, for what the field could bring into its scope, for breaking down barriers around what “counts” as scholarship, for reimagining the fullness of fantasy fiction’s history as it actually was and not just as we have come to remember it (some of the most lauded recent works in fantasy scholarship seem to have a poor grasp of the genre’s history and repeat misguided claims by earlier critics without asking if those claims about the genre stand up to scrutiny). Genre Fantasies seeks to map the great unread of fantasy fiction, knowing all the while that the scale of the task means the map will always be incomplete, and that that’s OK. But my work doesn’t exist in a vacuum and I hope, too, to bridge academic and popular criticism, to bring together the worlds of sff fan writers and sff scholars, and to keep on working on this crazy idea until I die.

I have in mind several major projects that all of this “process writing” through my blog is building toward, and which will be the work, probably, of decades. Among other things, the dream is a three-volume history of fantasy fiction, with a book each on the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, though I have smaller, more achievable projects in mind, too, such as a literary history of women writers of fantasy in the same period, a book on TSR as a wildly successful independent publisher of sff, and even a project or two on sf. Time will tell what I have the capacity (and energy) to accomplish.

I see my labor, ultimately, as that of a workhorse critic, an archivist keeping the names and works of the great unread however temporarily at the forefront of the conversation—a constant, thorny reminder of the breadth and depth and diversity and complexity of sff in its mass market era. In pursuing that labor, doggedly, I think I’ve made a real if minor success of it in this first year. In 2025 alone I’ve written 30 essays for Genre Fantasies on as many novels, to a total length across those essays of some 200,000 words.

I’ve written about novels as they interested me, meaning that some of my choices have probably seemed a bit random, but I love that! At the same time, I’ve also pursued some rather specific critical goals, namely through my Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series and my work to read through all of Thomas Burnett Swann’s 16 historical fantasy novels. I’ve read obscure books, such as M. Lucie Chin’s Chinese historical fantasy novel The Fairy of Ku-She (1988) or Thaddeus Tuleja’s Tibetan Buddhist fantasy novel Land of Precious Snow (1977) or Adrien Stoutenburg’s cozy post-post-apocalyptic eco sf novel Out There (1971), as well as one of the most popular epic fantasy novels of all time, Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World (1990), and a bestselling, mainstream literary Gothic novel, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) (which I also discussed on an episode of the podcast A Meal of Thorns). And I even published a bibliography of orientalist fantasy fiction as a starting point for scholars, critics, and readers interested in the topic.

This year I also began work on—but have not yet completed—a sort-of-exhaustive list of women sff novelists who published during the 1960s to 1990s. I hope to finish compiling and formatting the list for publication on my website next year. As of this writing, the list currently includes more than 700 women who wrote at least one sff novel published between 1960 and 1999. When published, the list will include links to biographical info as well as information about the numbers of novels published, publication dates, pen names, and more for each author. I hope it will be a useful resource for the sff community, critics, and scholars, and go a step in the direction of demonstrating that women have been a significant part of the sff world since the beginning—and in numbers beyond what many may have realized!

Oh, and I launched a new tumblr adjacent to Genre Fantasies that goes by the same name and is mostly a place for me to try to reach a broader sff fan audience. It also gives me the opportunity to post items from my collection under the #vintage sff book a day tag. Later in 2026 I’ll create a list of everything I’ve put on “A Vintage SFF Book a Day” with links to the tumblr posts, and post it as a separate resource on Genre Fantasies.

What will 2026 bring?

Happily, more of the same! With me working to read just a little bit more and to bring down my essay word counts (the average is c. 4.5k word, with several stretching to 6k, 8k, even 12k words), though I have a feeling I’ll struggle with the latter goal because when you’re really into something, you might as well write about it while the Muse has you!

I will, of course, be continuing with Ballantine Adult Fantasy: A Reading Series. I spent this year reading the “preface” novels to the series, but January starts with the very first novel published in the series proper, Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star (1952, BAF 1969). This second year of the series will see me speed-running some of the biggest names in pre-genre fantasy, including Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, George MacDonald, and, in December, Hope Mirrlees(!!!).

I’ll also be starting another reading series, though I’ll be pursuing it less programmatically, not one book per month, as I do with the BAF reading series, but rather as the whim strikes me. This will be Dungeons & Dragons: A Reading Series, in which I’ll read through D&D tie-in novels published mostly by TSR in the 1980s and 1990s (check out the Let’s Read TSR blog for similar coverage; the author has already covered all of the Forgotten Realms novels but appears, sadly, to have stopped writing in September 2024). In an effort to bring much needed critical reappraisal to some novels that I obsessed over in my middle school years, I’ll be starting where my own fantasy fiction reading journey began more than two decades ago, with R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden and the Icewind Dale and Dark Elf trilogies. Though I’ll likely only get to these two trilogies in 2026, in the coming years I’ll be diving into the Spelljammer hexalogy, Dark Sun’s Prism Pentad, Forgotten Realms’s Moonshae, Finder’s Stone, and Avatar trilogies, Planescape’s Blood Wars trilogy, Mystara’s Penhaligon trilogy, Eberron’s Heirs of Ash trilogy, and even Star*Drive’s Harbinger trilogy (not D&D, but late TSR). Maybe I’ll throw some Dragonlance in there, too.

I’ll also be starting several book series by major women sff authors, such as Andre Norton’s Witch World, Jo Clayton’s Diadem, and Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar. And much more, including the next two books in Anne Logston’s Shadow series, since Shadow was such a joy, and the second novel in Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, since reading The Eye of the World made me ineluctably curious about how the series unfolds in light of the strange reputation these novels have among fantasy scholars. Also, with a biography of Charles R. Saunders coming out in February, and with my very recent acquisition of the first two of his Imaro novels published by DAW in the 1980s, I’ll be taking a look at those novels. So much to read!

I hope you’ll join me on this journey, which you can do most helpfully by subscribing to Genre Fantasies—for free—to get each new essay sent directly to your inbox: