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About this blog

Always Halloween and Never Thanksgiving

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New Dark Academia Presentation

I am very happy to report that I will be presenting my paper “Missing Students and Their Fictional Afterlives: True Crime, Crime Fiction, and Dark Academia” at the Guilty Pleasures: Examining Crime in Popular Culture conference (May 2-3, 2024) sponsored by the Popular Culture Research Network. This talk is related to my current work-in-progress book project. I’m looking forward to it!
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Now in paperback!

I’m delighted to share that both of my co-edited academic anthologies with Vernon Press are now available in hardback, ebook, and (new!) paperback format: STAR TREK: ESSAYS EXPLORING THE FINAL FRONTIER and STAR WARS: ESSAYS EXPLORING A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY. More information is here. ALTALT
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It’s wonderful to hear Martine G. Ræstad on this episode of Women At Warp discussing how the…

It’s wonderful to hear Martine G. Ræstad on this episode of Women At Warp discussing how the Federation’s economy works. Martine contributed the excellent essay “The Future Burning Brightly: The Dual Impact of Energy in Star Trek’s Post-Scarcity Universe” to our new Vernon Press anthology Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier. Episode 234: How Does the Federation Economy Work? Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier
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Visit Hill House with me in October 2024!

Just in case you’d like your October to be extra haunted, I’ll be back in SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education) online with Signum University. Voting is now open for my October module, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Early voters will determine when our live discussions will meet online. I had so much fun with this before, we’re doing it all over again! More information is here.
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Happy Star Trek Day!

On this Star Trek Day, as Trek turns 58, I feel tremendous gratitude for the many years of joy I’ve had teaching, writing about, and being inspired by Star Trek and the Trek community. ALT ALT ALT ALT
2024’s STAR TREK DAY Kicks Off a Global Charity Awareness Campaign
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

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New Star Trek Interview!

It was a joy to join my co-editor Emily Strand to talk about our new book Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier with the New Books Network podcast! Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis, “Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier” (Vernon Press, 2023) - New Books Network
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

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Radium Age

My latest “Looking Back on Genre History” segment is now available on Episode 741 of the StarShipSofa podcast. I discuss the Radium Age imprint of reissued science fiction classics from 1900-1935 published by MIT Press. ALT ALT ALT
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

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New essay on the Vorkosigan saga!

I am very happy to share that my essay “‘Lifting Old Curses’: The mirror dance of The Flowers of Vashnoi and The Mountains of Mourning” has been published in Short But Concentrated #2: a second essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold, edited by the brilliant @unamccormack. The ebook version is free for download here. ALT
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

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It’s almost October, which means it’s almost time to start my annual re-reading of one of my…

ALT It’s almost October, which means it’s almost time to start my annual re-reading of one of my all-time favorite books, A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. With 31 chapters, one for each day of the month, it is a fantastic mash-up of creepy seasonal goodness wrapped into a compelling story, a kind of literary advent calendar for Halloween.
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eldritchhobbit

eldritchhobbit

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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 1

Halloween season is here! Since 2005, I’ve been observing a Halloween countdown on whatever social media I was using at the time with a daily post throughout October. These days I am primarily on Mastodon (so if you’re in the Fediverse, or connected to it via Threads or some other means, please say hi!), but I also post on Tumblr, my Goodreads blog, and Dreamwidth, among other places.  I look forward to sharing October with you! Happy Countdown to Halloween 2024! This year I will focus on Halloween-friendly texts (long and short) available for free online. I will try to lean away from the usual suspects and, I hope, bring you some treats that you will enjoy! This countdown will have several separate parts. The first part is inspired by Bridget M. Marshall’s excellent 2021 work Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature. In her book, Marshall notes that dark and dreadful Gothic novels were very popular with the “mill girls” who worked in 19th-century factories. I’d like to start the countdown by recommending some of the shiver-inducing texts these women reported reading and savoring. ALT Here begins the Day 1 post! One of the most popular titles with women working in factories in Manchester and Lancashire, UK, was Mysteries of London (1844-1845) by G.W.M. Reynolds. Read it here. Quote: “Perhaps there is no other cry in the world, save that of ‘fire!’ more calculated to spread terror and dismay, when falling suddenly and unexpectedly upon the ears of a party of revellers, than that of ‘A corpse! a corpse!’”
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 2

Another Gothic title very popular with women working in 19th-century factories in Manchester and Lancashire, UK, was The String of Pearls; or The Barber of Fleet Street (aka Sweeney Todd)  (1846-1847) by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. Read it here. Quote: “How still everything was in those vaults of old St. Dunstan’s. Were there no spirits from another world—spirits of the murdered, to flit in horrible palpability before the eyes of that man who had cut short their thread of life? Surely if ever a visitant from another world could have been expected, it would have been to appear to Todd to convince him that there was more beyond the grave than a forgotten name and a mouldering skeleton.” ALT
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 3

We have even more evidence of which Gothic novels the women who worked in 19th-century mills in Lowell, Massachusetts read and enjoyed. The next few posts will highlight these titles. ALT One of the most popular titles was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764). Read it here. Quote:  …and then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl. “Angels of peace protect me!” cried Frederic, recoiling. “Deserve their protection!” said the spectre.
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Halloween Countdown 2024, Day 4

Because we mentioned The Castle of Otranto yesterday, let’s show some love for the dark reimagining of Walpole’s novel by Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778). Reeve called it Otranto’s “literary offspring.” Read it here. Quote: …he thought he saw a glimmering light upon a staircase before him. “If,” said he, “this apartment is haunted, I will use my endeavours to discover the cause of it; and if the spirit appears visibly, I will speak to it.” He was preparing to descend the staircase, when he heard several knocks at the door by which he first entered the room; and, stepping backward, the door was clapped to with great violence. Again fear attacked him, but he resisted it, and boldly cried out, “Who is there?” ALT
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