My guide to the work of fantasy author Thomas Burnett Swann (1928-1976), with links to my essays about every novel and short story collection, as well as other resources for curious readers, critics, and scholars.
Category: Other Essays
Genre Fantasies: 2025 in Review
A brief recap of 2025 on the Genre Fantasies blog.
Orientalist Fantasy Novels, 1970s–1990s: A Bibliography
A bibliography of orientalist fantasies published in the genre fantasy market c. 1970s–1990s.
What Was “World Science Fiction”?
A very thorough (and probably pedantic) answer to the question of a major Cold War-era science fiction anthology's purported global reach, and whether it could rightfully be called World's Best SF, complete with charts and quantitative data.
Afrofuturism’s Specter: Alternate History, Racial Capitalism, and Nisi Shawl’s “Everfair”
This is the text of a paper about Nisi Shawl's Everfair originally presented at the Worlding SF conference in Graz, Austria in December 2018.
Sexual Violence in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Toward an Interpretation
This is the text of a paper about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed written in 2015 for a graduate-level academic conference. It is roughly a decade old and the work of a scholar in his first year of graduate school.
Genre Fantasies 