also coming in 2015
Aha. I saw an early draft of this last year... glad to find it's seeing the light of day.
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/...
Academic Bujold study.
The academic study of fantasy and science fiction is a strange world all its own, but interesting to visit. Wouldn't want to live there, but I'm happy to come up on the porch and chat now and then.
Ta, L.
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/...
Academic Bujold study.
The academic study of fantasy and science fiction is a strange world all its own, but interesting to visit. Wouldn't want to live there, but I'm happy to come up on the porch and chat now and then.
Ta, L.
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Wow! This has been a banner week for Bujold fans. So much to anticipate.
Andrew wrote: "I don't suppose there will be a Kindle edition?LMB: No idea. Not up to me. In general, the market for such works is tiny.
A: The conditional conjugations here confuse me: "What James is particularly good at is placing Bujold in her context in science fiction history: what ... Couldn't the author simply have, like, asked you about your influences?
"
LMB: Academics do a lot of writing about dead authors; perhaps they are out of the habit?
That said, Edward and I did meet at Finncon in... 2012, was it? and had some nice conversations, as well as a formal interview.
Ta, L.
I'm glad academics are joining critics in looking at your work, because it's a good way to gain insights, and for us all to learn and grow from (especially us writers).That said, imputing motives is always dangerous. I suppose there's some place for it with authors in the Great Beyond. But I agree with Andrew: Couldn't he just have asked?
That brings to mind a question for Lois. I'll pose it through the Q&A function.
Lois wrote: "Academics do a lot of writing about dead authors. Perhaps they are out of the habit?"Speaking as an academic--in general, yes. Those academics who have gone before tend to reinforce such non-style choices as the price of admission to the ivory tower, unfortunately. It probably never even occurred to him that he could ask, or if it did, he was probably too afraid of not being published for lack of an "academic tone" to do so. *sigh*
I would like to get an electronic version to search it but I doubt that I would want to read it. I think this relates to C. P. Snow's Two Cultures.I think your books are unusually good for science fiction in terms of character development, but the scarcity of computer use and robots for a future 700 years from now is highly unrealistic.
So we end up with literary versus scientific analysis of the SF. But the people inclined to do this are mostly from the literary side of the fence. They are mostly lousy at evaluating science fiction.
Joanna Russ commented on this subject in 1975:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/...
So on a personal note: How awkward/weird is it to be a subject of Academic Study? Or is it Totally Cool? I should think reading about oneself in that fashion would be a little odd: "Did I REALLY mean that?" "Heavens, what my sub conscious is up to!" Or the ever-relevant "What the Heck?"
MaryL wrote: "So on a personal note: How awkward/weird is it to be a subject of Academic Study? Or is it Totally Cool? I should think reading about oneself in that fashion would be a little odd: "Did I REALLY me..."All of the above. My interests in any Study of Me tend to be orthogonal to those of their writers, I suspect. They are gunning for academic street cred;I'm hoping for more readers for my actual books.
Since it is among the first, this particular study, as I remember, was fairly straightforward, mainly trying to present the broad outline to readers perhaps not familiar with my work. When academic authors can count on an audience very familiar with the work under study, they can skip the preliminaries and get down to meatier issues. None of them ever seem to be allowed as much page space as they want, I have noted, which makes for some rather breathless compression sometimes.
At the moment, old-style psychological studies of the Author seem out of fashion, heading for the waste bin of history along with Freud. Now they are big on Political readings, or readings-in.
Lots of readings-in, depending on the agenda, milieu, and audience of the academic.
The old game of Spot the Sources is still in play, as if they won points for every sentence they could connect to some outside written original, and footnote it. (Footnotes/bibliographies are a requirement of the form.) Since the writers get their points for originality, this can feel a bit grating. The problem is that the academic can only connect the text to something the academic knows, which is usually not all that congruent with what the original author knows/knew, especially if it didn't come from some other findable book. (It's hard to footnote real life.) This can indeed get very what-the-heck.
Keep in mind, any academic choosing to write on F&SF at all is taking a chance, career-wise, out of love for the subject. That's part of why Thomas Shippey's cool books on Tolkien came at the end of his career or after his retirement. Retired academics, if any interest in their subject has survived all its prior beatings, can be a lot of fun to read, because finally they can say what they really think.
Edward James, as I expect both he and I note happily, is newly retired.
Ta, L.
The conditional conjugations here confuse me: "What James is particularly good at is placing Bujold in her context in science fiction history: what authors she would have read growing up, who were her likely influences, what else was being published at the time she started appearing in Astounding", says Janet Brennan Croft...
Couldn't the author simply have, like, asked you about your influences?