Ai Jiang's I AM AI is a powerful, multi-award-nominated novelette that reawakens the cyberpunk ethos of an earlier sff generation and makes readable a whole host of issues composing our polycrisis, not the least of which is generative AI and its impact on (and abuse of) human creative labor.
Category: Reading…
Reading “Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination” by Jon Greenaway
John Greenaway's Capitalism: A Horror Story is a careful, clever, and thorough work of Marxist and especially Marxist utopian theory, offering a history of the Gothic Marxist intellectual tradition and careful readings of circa two dozens horror films and novels that raises questions about the politics of genre.
Reading “The Hittites” by Damien Stone and “Nubia” by Sarah M. Schellinger (Lost Civilizations)
This essay responds to two recent introductory histories of two fascinating, and very different, ancient civilizations: Damien Stone's The Hittites and Sarah M. Schellinger's Nubia, which published by Reaktion in the Lost Civilizations series. The essay makes the case for why genre studies needs to read ancient history.
Reading “Empire of Ivory” by Naomi Novik (Temeraire 4)
Naomi Noviks’s Empire of Ivory (2007), the fourth novel in the Temeraire series, leads to some reflections on narrative and worldbuilding strategies in alternate history, some concerns about the series's politics (or lack thereof), and prompts the question: when do you give up on a series?
Reading “African History for Beginners” by Herb Boyd
Herb Boyd’s African History for Beginners (1991) may not be an African history worth reading for African history, but it is an important, illustrative, and eccentrically illustrated example of an attempt to create a popular history textbook in the Afrocentric mold for a mass audience.
Reading “Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects” by Marc Olivier
Marc Olivier's Household Horror is a study of the material networks of household objects in the domestic world of more than a dozen horror films, and also an argument for why object-oriented ontology is a terrible and terribly useless theoretical project.
Reading “Linghun” by Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang's Linghun criss-crosses the haunted house genre, subverts expectations about the purpose and mood of the haunted, indexes the suburban hellscape of (post)neoliberalism as the locus of horror, and ruminates nearly constantly on death, dying, grief, and the ties that bind us to the past, to family, to community.
Reading “The Silent War in Tibet” by Lowell Thomas, Jr.
In Lowell Thomas, Jr.'s 1959 book The Silent War in Tibet, Tibet’s turbulent history in the 1950s is told with the pressing excitement of a narrator who wants readers to understand the confluence of local, regional, and global forces at work in the People Republic of China's occupation and annexation of Tibet.
Reading “The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence” by Martin Meredith
Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence is an unparalleled resource for introducing the major issues, figures, and periods of post-independence African history, but is severely marred by its failure to engage the devastating legacies of colonialism on the continent.
Reading “Here Be Dragons” by Sharon Kay Penman (Welsh Princes 1)
Sharon Kay Penman's Here By Dragon is a classic of historical fiction, offering a rich, complex tapestry of medieval Welsh and Anglo-Norman life, with a unique narrative style that decenters the big moments and focuses on domestic life and character psychology, and has a lot to say about medieval women's lives.
Genre Fantasies 