SFFTV: WINTER 2023 OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS AND CALL FOR REVIEWERS (PLUS “WHAT WAS THE MCU?”)

Science Fiction Film and Television invites article submissions on any topics related to sf and visual media; we especially invite articles related to the production economy of the culture industry and to non-US sf, as well as articles that related to possible upcoming special issues on (1) indigenous sf filmmaking and (2) the career of Taika Waititi. We also have a current call for mini-essays for a special section: “What Was the MCU?” (deadline 1/15/24). We also invite proposals from potential guest editors for special issues; please write gerry.canavan@marquette.edu for more information on this process.

SFFTV is edited by Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and Ida Yoshinaga (George Institute of Technology). Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, gaming, other visual media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.

The journal is also seeking reviewers of recent works of sf and sf-adjacent critical theory as well as recent SF visual media. We are welcome to pitches, but we also have the following books available for review:

* Kazue Harada, SEXUALITY, MATERNITY, AND (RE)PRODUCTIVE FUTURES: WOMEN’S SPECULATIVE FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN (Brill)

* Mark Kingwell, SINGULAR CREATURES: ROBOTS, RIGHTS, AND THE POLITICS OF POSTHUMANISM (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

* J. Jesse Ramirez, UN-AMERICAN DREAMS: APOCALYPTIC SCIENCE FICTION, DISIMAGINED COMMUNITY, AND BAD HOPE IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY (Liverpool UP)

* Jesse Russell, THE POLITICAL CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: LIBERALISM AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN VISION (Lexington Books)

* Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, THE CELLULOID SPECIMEN: MOVING IMAGE RESEARCH INTO ANIMAL LIFE (University of California Press)

* Nicole Starosiekski, MEDIA HOT & COLD (Duke UP)

* Joe Street, SILICON VALLEY CINEMA (Edinburgh UP)

* Erik Trump and Jake Parcell, THE ARCHITECTURE OF SURVIVAL: SETTING AND POLITICS IN APOCALYPSE FILMS (Lexington)

* Tom Tyler, GAME: ANIMALS, VIDEO GAMES, AND HUMANITY (University of Minnesota Press)

Reviews typically run 1000-2000 words, or 2000-4000 words in our “review essay” format. Samples of both types of review are available upon request.

For our media in review section, we are now primarily interested in:

* reviewers who are calling attention to things that have gone overlooked in the larger entertainment-media-complex landscape, especially international film;

* reviewers with a specific aesthetic, political, or philosophical “take” on a text, as opposed to a more traditional review that recapitulates the plot at length and advises the potential viewer whether or not they ought to watch it.

This notion of a specific “take” is especially important for blockbuster franchise fare, like the MCU or Star Wars movies; in most cases we would only be interested in a review essay for such a film, discussing it within some larger critical context.

Due to a recent review backlog we have not been actively soliciting reviewers; as a result, much recent SF media is still available for reviewing. If there is a film you are interested in reviewing, please contact gerry.canavan@marquette.edu and let him know the name of the film and what you think you’d like to say about it. Deadlines are quite flexible. We look forward to hearing from you!

SFFTV: Call for Co-Editors

Science Fiction Film and Television is looking for co-editors! See the ad here.

SFFTV call for contributions: “What Was the MCU?”

special section, call for contributions: “What Was the MCU?”
Science Fiction Film and Television (deadline extended to February 1, 2024)

Science Fiction Film and Television invites contributions (no more than 2000 words) to a special section tentatively titled “What Was the MCU?” Since Avengers: Endgame (2019), the once nigh-invulnerable Marvel Cinematic Universe has faced an increasing drumbeat of fan, critical/scholarly, and labor backlash, culminating in the domestic-box-office disappointment of The Marvels (2023), which made only US$47 million in its opening weekend. That The Marvels—starring a diverse, woman-led cast and helmed by the first Black woman director in the franchise—has already become widely recognized in the discourse as the symbol of this decline is unfortunate, as all of the post-Endgame MCU features have been heavily criticized for their increasingly shoddy scripting and effects work, while also having steep box-office drops from earlier franchise features. What accounts for this fall from grace, and what can those of us working in media studies, franchise studies, and science fiction studies learn from this massive shift in the cultural tide? How has the current state of the MCU been inflected by outside pressures like the shift to Disney+; the COVID-19 pandemic; hyperexploitation of writing, directing, editing and VFX staff; the right-wing targeting of “woke” media and of the Disney Corporation in particular; the fracturing of the existing Marvel fanbase; and a rising “Generation Z” that seems to be almost completely uninterested in this sort of franchise production? Is the moment of “the franchise” as the dominant mode of cultural production in the United States nearing its end—or, for that matter, are accounts of the death of the MCU premature? 

Contributions on any aspect of this topic are welcome; please query Gerry Canavan at gerry.canavan@marquette.edu with any questions.

I Know the Site Is in Arrears – The Blog Has Not Been Fed in Years – It’s Even Worse Than It Appears, but It’s All Right

After (literally) almost twenty straight years, I think my silly little habit of blogging links may be well and truly dead; with everything else going on in my life at the moment I have to accept that I just don’t have the time. Still, a few things I wanted to put up as the site fades to black, at least for a bit:

• Science Fiction Film and Television 16.3 was a banger! Check it out! I’ve got a short thing about The Last of Us in there, building on the GSSB episode I was on; let me know if you want to read it and you don’t have access and I can send it along.
• The “Oversights” double issue was super fun too.
• I was in the Washington Post over the summer, ranting about Indiana Jones. I had some book chapters come out, too, if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Uneven Futures has had some great reviews, including this one from LARB, this one from Science Fiction Studies, and this one from H-Net Environment. Ida and Sean and I did a podcast. It was even on the long list for the BSFA. It’s not too late to get your copy!
• The changes to the grad program I helped develop as DGS and then put through as chair got a nice writeup last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Whatever else happens: send your English-curious students to Marquette!
• I’ve been on the news a couple times.
• It’s coming faster than you think: the call for papers for SFRA 2024.
• And I’ll be on the BBC next week for a short show on Parable of the Sower.

We’ll meet again (don’t know where, don’t know when)…

this, to me, is the humanities pic.twitter.com/s7lQV30X9r

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) January 19, 2023

SFFTV: Fall 2023 open call for submissions and call for reviewers

Science Fiction Film and Television invites article submissions on any topics related to sf and visual media; we especially invite articles related to the production economy of the culture industry and to non-US sf, as well as articles that related to possible upcoming special issues on (1) indigenous sf filmmaking and (2) the career of Taika Waititi. We also invite proposals from potential guest editors for special issues; please write gerry.canavan@marquette.edu for more information on this process.

SFFTV is edited by Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and Ida Yoshinaga (George Institute of Technology). Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, gaming, other visual media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.

The journal is also seeking reviewers of recent works of sf and sf-adjacent critical theory as well as recent SF visual media. We are welcome to pitches, but we also have the following books available for review:

* Rebecca Janicker, ed, THE SCIENTIST IN POPULAR CULTURE (Lexington Books)

* Brian J. Robb, MOON (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* Tyler Sage, MR. FREEDOM (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* David Sweeney, THE OA (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadyay, THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF COFUTURISMS (Routledge)

* Jay Telotte, THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF NEW SCIENCE FICTION CINEMAS (Oxford UP)

* Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa, THE CELLULOID SPECIMEN: MOVING IMAGE RESEARCH INTO ANIMAL LIFE (University of California Press)

* Joe Street, SILICON VALLEY CINEMA (Edinburgh UP)

* Harry Warwick, DYSTOPIA AND DISPOSSESSION IN THE HOLLYWOOD SCIENCE-FICTION FILM 1979-2017: THE AESTHETICS OF ENCLOSURE (Liverpool UP)

Reviews typically run 1000-2000 words, or 2000-4000 words in our “review essay” format. Samples of both types of review are available upon request.

For our media in review section, we are now primarily interested in:

* reviewers who are calling attention to things that have gone overlooked in the larger entertainment-media-complex landscape, especially international film;

* reviewers with a specific aesthetic, political, or philosophical “take” on a text, as opposed to a more traditional review that recapitulates the plot at length and advises the potential viewer whether or not they ought to watch it.

This notion of a specific “take” is especially important for blockbuster franchise fare, like the MCU or Star Wars movies; in most cases we would only be interested in a review essay for such a film, discussing it within some larger critical context.

Due to a recent review backlog we have not been actively soliciting reviewers; as a result, much recent SF media is still available for reviewing. If there is a film you are interested in reviewing, please contact gerry.canavan@marquette.edu and let him know the name of the film and what you think you’d like to say about it. Deadlines are quite flexible. We look forward to hearing from you!

Fall 2023 Syllabus: “Environmental Protection”

Just one course for me this fall, due to my somehow still being chair: an update of my “Environmental Protection” Material Cultures class. I moved some of the more hands-on eco humanities stuff into an extended discussion of The Ministry for the Future, so we’ll have to see how that goes.

Here’s the week-by-week schedule…

M	8/28	FIRST DAY OF CLASS
W	8/30	N.K. Jemisin, “Emergency Skin” [D2L]
F	9/1	Charles Stross, “Designing Society for Posterity” (Web)
M	9/4	LABOR DAY—NO CLASS
W	9/6	Johan Rockstrom et. al, “Planetary Boundaries” [D2L] John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology against Capitalism” [D2L] Naomi Klein, “Climate Rage” [Web]
F	9/8	Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” [Web] Responses to Rich from Robinson Meyer, Naomi Klein, Alyssa Battistoni, and Matto Mildenberger and Leah C. Stokes [Web]
M	9/11	Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (first third)
W	9/13	Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (second third)
F	9/15	Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (whole book)
M	9/18	S.B. Banerjee, “Necrocapitalism” [D2L] Vandana Shiva, “Earth Democracy” [Web]
W	9/20	Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, chapters 1-16
F	9/22	The Ministry for the Future, chapters 17-30
M	9/25	The Ministry for the Future, chapters 31-45
W	9/27	The Ministry for the Future, chapters 46-60
F	9/29	The Ministry for the Future, chapters 61-74
M	10/2	The Ministry for the Future, chapters 75-90
W	10/4	The Ministry for the Future, whole book
F	10/6	The Ministry for the Future and responses
M	10/9	FIRST PAPER WORKSHOP
W	10/11	John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” [D2L] Randy Malamud, “Zoo Spectatorship” [D2L] Octavia E. Butler, “Eye Witness” [Web]
F	10/13	Kathy Rudy, “Where the Wild Things Ought to Be: Sanctuaries, Zoos, and Exotic Pets” [D2L] Blackfish (discussion)
M	10/16	Blackfish (discussion continues) Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, “Grief, Sadness, and the Bones of Elephants” [D2L] Sascha Pare, “Orcas have sunk 3 boats in Europe and appear to be teaching others to do the same. But why?” [Web]
W	10/18	Clare Kendall, “A New Law of Nature” [Web] Mihnea Tanasescu, “When a River Is a Person” [Web] Chris McKay, “Does Mars Have Rights?” [D2L] FIRST PAPER DUE
F	10/20	FALL BREAK—NO CLASS
M	10/23	Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” [D2L] McKenzie Wark, “Critical Theory after the Anthropocene” [Web]
W	10/25	Daniel Hartley, “Against the Anthropocene” [Web] Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises” [D2L] Kathryn Yusoff, excerpt from A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None [D2L]
F	10/27	Margaret Atwood, “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet” [Web] Ted Chiang, “The Great Silence” [Web] film: Ramin Bahrani, “Plastic Bag” (in class)
M	10/30	Richard McGuire, Here
W	11/1	Richard McGuire, Here
F	11/3	SECOND PAPER WORKSHOP
M	11/6	99% Invisible, “Ten Thousand Years” [Web] Sarah Zhang, “The Cat Went Over Radioactive Mountain” [Web] Alan Bellows, “This Place Is Not a Place of Honor” [Web] WIPP Exhibit, “Message to 12,000 A.D.” [Web]
W	11/8	Kim Stanley Robinson, introduction to Future Primitive [D2L] Ernest Callenbach, “Chocco” [D2L]
F	11/10	Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: “A First Note,” “The Quail Song,” “Towards an Archaeology of the Future,” and “Stone Telling: Part One”
M	11/13	Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: “The Serpentine Codex” through“Pandora Worrying About What She Is Doing: She Addresses the Reader with Agitation”
W	11/15	Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: “Time and the City” through “Eight Life Stories”
F	11/17	Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: “Some Brief Valley Texts” through “Poems (Fourth Section)”
M	11/20	Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: “The Back of the Book” SECOND PAPER DUE
W	11/22	THANKSGIVING BREAK—NO CLASS
F	11/24	THANKSGIVING BREAK—NO CLASS
M	11/27	FINAL PAPERS/PROJECTS MINI-WORKSHOP
W	11/29	Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, 01
F	12/1	Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, 02
M	12/4	Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, 03
W	12/6	Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, 04
F	12/8	Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, 05 Annihilation (film)
T	12/12	FINAL PROJECT DUE IN D2L DROPBOX BY 10:00 AM

SFFTV open call for submissions and books for review (summer 2023)

Science Fiction Film and Television invites article submissions on any topics related to sf and visual media; we especially invite articles related to the production economy of the culture industry and to non-US sf, as well as articles that related to our current CFPs for special issues and planned special issues on (1) indigenous sf filmmaking and (2) the career of Taika Waititi. 

We also invite proposals from potential guest editors for special issues; please write gerry.canavan@marquette.edu for more information on this process.

SFFTV is edited by Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and Ida Yoshinaga (George Institute of Technology). Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, gaming, other visual media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.

The journal is also seeking reviewers of recent works of sf and sf-adjacent critical theory as well as recent SF visual media. We are always welcome to pitches, but we also have the following books available for review:

* Rebecca Janicker, ed, THE SCIENTIST IN POPULAR CULTURE (Lexington Books) 

* Jesse Russell, THE POLITICAL CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: LIBERALISM AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN VISION (Lexington Books)

* Tyler Sage, MR. FREEDOM (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* David Sweeney, THE OA (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* Joe Street, SILICON VALLEY CINEMA (Edinburgh University Press)

* J.P. Telotte (ed.), THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF NEW SCIENCE FICTION CINEMAS (Oxford UP)

* Keith B. Wagner, Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer, FREDRIC JAMESON AND FILM THEORY: MARXISM, ALLEGORY, AND GEOPOLITICS IN WORLD CINEMA (Rutgers University Press)

Reviews typically run 1000-2000 words, or 2000-4000 words in our “review essay” format. Samples of both types of review are available upon request.

For our media in review section, we are now primarily interested in:

* reviewers who are calling attention to things that have gone overlooked in the larger entertainment-media-complex landscape, especially international film;

* reviewers with a specific aesthetic, political, or philosophical “take” on a text, as opposed to a more traditional review that recapitulates the plot at length and advises the potential viewer whether or not they ought to watch it.

This notion of a specific “take” is especially important for blockbuster franchise fare, like the MCU or Star Wars movies; in most cases we would only be interested in a review essay for such a film, discussing it within some larger critical context.

Due to a recent review backlog we have not been actively soliciting reviewers; as a result, much recent SF media is still available for reviewing. If there is a film you are interested in reviewing, please contact gerry.canavan@marquette.edu and let him know the name of the film and what you think you’d like to say about it. Deadlines are quite flexible. We look forward to hearing from you!

2023 Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Indigenous Studies

Peter Lang Publishing is delighted to announce the 2023 Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Indigenous Studies.

Proposals are invited from emerging scholars in Indigenous Studies for single-author books to be evaluated by a distinguished editorial board. We are particularly welcoming work on Indigenous SF and Indigenous Futurism for consideration in the World Science Fiction Studies series.

Proposals should be submitted to editorial@peterlang.com or via our webform by 31 August 2023 and consist of an abstract (including chapter synopses), a sample chapter (5,000 to 10,000 words in length), a CV, and statement describing how you are an emerging scholar, in separate Microsoft Word documents. Proposals under review elsewhere should not be submitted.

The winner(s) will be offered a Gold Open Access contract for their book. Winning book(s) will be made available for free digital download as part of our efforts to increase accessibility. Planned manuscripts should be from 40,000 to 80,000 words in length and written in English. Authors will be expected to prepare the manuscript in accordance with the style guidelines provided.

Decisions will be made by 1 December 2023 and the winners will be notified shortly thereafter.

For more information, please contact Senior Acquisitions Editor Laurel Plapp (l.plapp@peterlang.com).

SFFTV open call for submissions and special issue proposals, as well as books for review

Science Fiction Film and Television invites article submissions on any topics related to sf and visual media; we especially invite articles related to the production economy of the culture industry and to non-US sf, as well as articles that related to possible upcoming special issues on (1) indigenous sf filmmaking and (2) the career of Taika Waititi. We also invite proposals from potential guest editors for special issues; please write gerry.canavan@marquette.edu for more information on this process.

SFFTV is edited by Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and Ida Yoshinaga (George Institute of Technology). Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, gaming, other visual media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.

The journal is also seeking reviewers of recent works of sf and sf-adjacent critical theory as well as recent SF visual media. We are welcome to pitches, but we also have the following books available for review:

* Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, MUTOPIA: SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASTIC KNOWLEDGE (Liverpool UP)

* Rebecca Janicker, ed, THE SCIENTIST IN POPULAR CULTURE (Lexington Books)

* Tyler Sage, MR. FREEDOM (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* George Slusser, SCIENCE FICTION: TOWARD A WORLD LITERATURE (Lexington Books)

* David Sweeney, THE OA (Constellations in Science Fiction Film and TV series)

* Sherryl Vint and Jonathan Alexander, PROGRAMMING THE FUTURE:POLITICS, RESISTANCE, AND UTOPIA IN CONTEMPORARY SPECULATIVE TV (Columbia UP)

Reviews typically run 1000-2000 words, or 2000-4000 words in our “review essay” format. Samples of both types of review are available upon request.

For our media in review section, we are now primarily interested in:

* reviewers who are calling attention to things that have gone overlooked in the larger entertainment-media-complex landscape, especially international film;

* reviewers with a specific aesthetic, political, or philosophical “take” on a text, as opposed to a more traditional review that recapitulates the plot at length and advises the potential viewer whether or not they ought to watch it.

This notion of a specific “take” is especially important for blockbuster franchise fare, like the MCU or Star Wars movies; in most cases we would only be interested in a review essay for such a film, discussing it within some larger critical context.

Due to a recent review backlog we have not been actively soliciting reviewers; as a result, much recent SF media is still available for reviewing. If there is a film you are interested in reviewing, please contact gerry.canavan@marquette.edu and let him know the name of the film and what you think you’d like to say about it. Deadlines are quite flexible. We look forward to hearing from you!

Revised Game Studies Syllabus for Spring 2023 (“Oops, All Disco Elysium”)!

With my new role as chair, I’ve only got one class this term, but it’s a good one: a upper-division version of my Game Studies class, with this term’s special Disco Elysium focus. Here’s the week by week:

DAY	DATE		ASSIGNMENT
W	Jan 18	START	FIRST DAY OF CLASS
F	Jan 20	NARRATIVE	Game: The Stanley Parable Corey Mohler, Existential Comics: “Candyland and the Nature of the Absurd” Interview with Davey Wreden, Creator of The Stanley Parable
M	Jan 23	ART	Game: Doom Roger Ebert, “Doom,” “Critics vs. Games on Doom,” “Why Did The Chicken Cross the Genders,” “Video Games Can Never Be Art” Ian Bogost, “Art”
W	Jan 25	MEANING	Game: Journey Mäyrä, “What Is Game Studies?” and “Meaning in Games”
F	Jan 27	CHOICE	Game/Film: Black Mirror:Bandersnatch (in-class viewing)
M	Jan 30	DESIGN	Game/Film: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (in-class viewing and discussion) Nele Van de Mosselaer and Stefano Gualeni, “The Implied Designer and the Experience of Gameworlds”
W	Feb 1	FILM	Galloway, “Gamic Action, Four Moments”
F	Feb 3	DISCO!	DE: CHARACTER CREATION SCREEN AND GETTING OUT OF YOUR HOTEL ROOM
M	Feb 6	ROLEPLAY	Game: Dungeons and Dragons  Vox.com, “Dungeons and Dragons, Explained” Aaron Trammell, “From Where Do Dungeons Come?” Aaron Trammell, “Misogyny and the Female Body in Dungeons and Dragons”
W	Feb 8	CRITIQUE	Game: The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild  Gerry Canavan, “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene”
F	Feb 10	DISCO!	DE: Day 1
M	Feb 13	HABIT	Game: Tetris Bogost, “Habituation” Chris Higgins, “Playing to Lose” Sam Anderson, “Just One More Game…” Film excerpts: The Ecstasy of Order
W	Feb 15	ADDICTION	Game: Candy Crush, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap!, etc.  Ramin Shokrizade, “The Top F2P Monetization Tricks” June Thomas, “Sugar Coma” Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman, “The Most Realistic Game Ever” Ian Bogost, “Rage Against the Machines” and Cow Clicker
F	Feb 17	DISCO!	DE: Day 1 (replay)
M	Feb 20	VIOLENCE	Game: Doom revisited, Call of Duty, etc. Galloway, “Origins of the First Person Shooter”and “Social Realism” Ludus Novus, “Why So Few Violent Games?”
W	Feb 22	EMPIRE	Bogost, “Titilation” Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, “Designing Militarized Masculinity: Violence, Gender, and the Bias of Game Experience” Mathieu Triclot, Raphaël Verchère, “Video Game Violence: A Philosophical Conversation with Mathieu Triclot”
F	Feb 24	DISCO!	DE: Day 2
M	Feb 27	SIMULATION	Game: Sid Meier’s Civilization, etc.  Galloway, “Allegories of Control” Kacper Pobłocki, “Becoming-State: The Bio-Cultural Imperialism of Sid Meier’s Civilization”
W	Mar 1	IDEOLOGY	Game: SimCity, etc.  Ava Kofman, “Les Simerables” Mike Sterry, “The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City”
F	Mar 3	DISCO!	DE: Day 3
M	Mar 6	DECEPTION	Game: Werewolf, etc.  Nathan Cutietta, “A Mental Model Approach to Deception in Single Player Games”
W	Mar 8	WORK	Mäyrä, “Preparing for a Game Studies Project”
F	Mar 10	DISCO!	DE: Day 4
M-F	Mar 13-17	PAUSE	SPRING BREAK—NO CLASS
M	Mar 20	ENDGAME 1	Disco Elysium endgame discussion
W	Mar 22	ENDGAME 2	Disco Elysium endgame discussion
F	Mar 24	ENDGAME 3	Disco Elysium endgame discussion
M	Mar 27	CRITICISM	Disco Elysium criticism
W	Mar 29	CRITICISM	Disco Elysium criticism
F	Mar 31	CRITICISM	Disco Elysium criticism
M	Apr 3	SEQUEL	Disco Elysium 2 discussion
W	Apr 5	WORKSHOP	paper/project workshop (in class)
F	Apr 7	DEATH	EASTER BREAK—NO CLASS
M	Apr 10	RESPAWN	EASTER BREAK—NO CLASS
M-F	Apr 12-21	DLC	We will choose the special topics for this part of the class together.
M	Apr 24	FLOW	Stephen Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You(excerpt)  Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken (excerpt) Braxton Soderman, Against Flow (excerpt)
W	Apr 26	RESIST	Countergames: molleindustria.org Galloway, “Countergaming”
F	Apr 28	TUTORIAL	GRAD STUDENT PRESENTATIONS
M-F	May 1-May 5	LEVEL UP	UNDERGRAD PRESENTATIONS
F	May 9	GAME OVER	FINAL PAPER/PROJECT DUE ON D2L BY 10 AM

Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!

• ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”

pic.twitter.com/OsVxEyToqs

— katie kadue (@kukukadoo) December 27, 2022

• 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
• Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
• Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
• “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
• This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.

• It’s still Christmas somewhere.
• Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
• The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
• A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
• China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
• Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
• Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
• Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
• The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
• Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
• Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.

ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want

— Zack Brown (@LuminanceBloom) December 7, 2022

miyazaki of studio ghibli, upon seeing an artificial intelligence presentation- "i strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself". pic.twitter.com/UmOOWvsfjV

— Tofu (@TofuPixel) December 12, 2022

do you ever think people are just going to get sick of half of media being a sports gambling commercial and the other half being influencers selling eating disorder encouragement or is this just how it’s going to be forever

— kate wagner (@mcmansionhell) December 27, 2022

• Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
• Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
• A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
• El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
• The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
• Effective altruism takes an L.
• It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone  from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority. 
• An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
• to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
• Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
• Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
• Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
• The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
• America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
• They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
• Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
• If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
• Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.

Twitter, while bad, was good at doing what it was doing, and now it’s not even good at that

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2022

• Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
• Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
• Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
• Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
• The Dark History of Hysteria.
• Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
• We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
• The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
• Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
• Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
• With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
• If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?

even when reporting on research that finds *conservative policies will kill you* and *liberal policies will save your life,* big news companies can't resist the both-sides-are-the-same framing pic.twitter.com/wNjDQ9DxP5

— Jamison Foser (@jamisonfoser) December 21, 2022

• The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
• So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
• I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
• LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
• Testing LEGO Investments.
• Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
• Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
• Film History According to Tarantino.
• The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
• Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
• It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
• I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Star Wars is the tragic, multigenerational story of how all the smart and competent characters who were good at their jobs and had the vision necessary to both defeat the Empire and to establish a strong and lasting New Republic died immediately before the events of A New Hope

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) December 23, 2022

• A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
• Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
• A Century of Serious Difficulty.
• Is It Art?
• So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
• MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
• I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
• Fitting.
• And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!

Thanksgiving Links!

* It’s been a time: Health experts monitor ‘tri-demic’ as respiratory viruses spread around US. Colorado River conditions are worsening quicker than expected. Competition between respiratory viruses may hold off a ‘tripledemic’ this winter. Children’s hospitals call on Biden to declare emergency in response to ‘unprecedented’ RSV surge. How long COVID ruined my life, from crushing fatigue to brain fog. About 37% of small businesses, which between them employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector, were unable to pay their rent in full in October. Parents are buying fewer baby clothes, a sign of deep financial distress. The world’s baby shortfall is so bad that the labor shortage will last for years, major employment firms predict. Chris Hemsworth ‘Taking Time Off,’ Discovered Genetic Predisposition for Alzheimer’s Disease: ‘I’m Going to Just Simplify.’ Et tu, Coca-Cola? Massive flock of sheep has been walking in a circle for 12 days straight in China. The Problem With Letting Therapy-Speak Invade Everything. Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate. A Quarter of Americans at Risk of Winter Power Blackouts, Grid Emergencies. Stock up on bottled water and canned food, official tells Germans. What if We Cancel the Apocalypse? this comic is almost 14 years old and could have been made yesterday

* I’m giving the last “Tolkien Tuesdays” talk at the Haggerty on next Tuesday, November 28, on Tolkien and pop culture.

* A truly obscene trend in higher ed: How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life.

* ‘A Culture of Disposability’: New School Part-Time Faculty Go On Strike. Never Cross a Picket Line: A Primer for Solidarity in the Academic Workplace. The Academic Wheel of Privilege. The Cruelty of Faculty Churn. The Deadline Dilemma. The gutting of the liberal arts continues.

* Vulture had a nice Octavia Butler cluster this week: The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler. Misreading Octavia Butler. How to Write Like Octavia E. Butler. The Butler Journal Entry I Always Return To. This one at the Times was beautiful, too, in more ways than one: The Visions of Octavia Butler. And just a few weeks away: ‘Kindred’ Trailer: Octavia Butler’s Time Travel Novel Comes to Terrifying Life.

* The new Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on steampunk, cryonics, domestic violence in Tau and Upstream Color, and Marvel’s Agent Carter. I can’t tell for sure, but from where I am access to all issues of SFFTV is free right now. And so is the fall issue of SFRA Review! And Uneven Futures is almost here!

UNEVEN FUTURES coming in just about a month! https://t.co/tLJAceecmY pic.twitter.com/YnXvO87kRS

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 18, 2022

* Marxist Literary Criticism: An Introductory Reading Guide.

* One of last year’s student papers is already out in Games and Culture: “Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II.

* Marvel got trolled into losing one of its best assets to DC permanently. You hate to see it.

* I Don’t Worry About My Oeuvre: A Conversation with John Carpenter.

* I want Picardo back as the Doctor and I don’t really care how they do it. Just don’t let the Picard showrunners anywhere near it and we’re good to go.

* Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art.

* Middle schoolers tackle climate change in a new alternate reality game.

* The Dirt on Pig-Pen.

* The Incredibly Stupid Catastrophe Caused by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. Tumblr Blog Linked to Ex-Alameda CEO Explored Race Science, ‘Imperial Chinese Harem’ Polyamory. Queen Caroline. Every Shady Thing Sam Bankman-Fried Has Confessed or Pseudo-Confessed to Since FTX Collapsed. Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it’s facing a moral reckoning. Crypto Bro Sam Bankman-Fried Was the Perfect Liberal Hero. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself.

* Larry David, Tom Brady, Stephen Curry, Other Celebs Sued Over FTX Crypto Exchange Collapse. Larry David was telling you not to buy, you just didn’t listen…

* Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution.’ Jeff Bezos pledges to donate majority of his $124 billion fortune to fight climate change and unify humanity.

* In the end, Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, just couldn’t run fast enough.

* Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute.

* If you’re keeping score, a guy made a homemade shotgun out of plumbing parts and iced a former PM with it in broad daylight and the Japanese govt is giving him everything he demanded because they realize he had a point. Utterly wild story.

* Federal judge strikes down Biden student debt relief program. What Went Wrong With Biden’s Student Loan Cancellation Plan— And How He Can Make It Right. Joe Biden Is Finally Moving Toward Allowing Bankruptcy to Eliminate Student Debt. Biden Administration Caves To Pressure On Student Debt Bankruptcy.

* ‘A World Cup Built on Modern Slavery’: Stadium Workers Blow the Whistle on Qatar’s ‘Coverup’ of Migrant Deaths and Suffering.

* Thousands were released from prison during covid. The results are shocking.

* The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont.

* Abortion, Every Day.

* New Rules for a New Game.

* Welcome to the Infinite Conversation: an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek.

* ‘I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to be there’: Milwaukee student’s poetry takes her to the White House.

* Elsewhere on the Milwaukee beat: The Landlord & the Tenant.

* The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever.

* what is the crime for which the turkey was sentenced to death & the sentence nullified by the US President? & what guarantee do we have that the turkey won’t be executed anyway, as soon as the cameras are gone.

* It’s that time of year. How to avoid gender bias when writing recommendation letters.

* How ‘Andor’ Drew from… Joseph Stalin? I Can’t Fucking Believe How Good ‘Andor’ Is.

* Multiculturalism in Middle-earth: On Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”

* Yes, but: the comic.

* ‘Doing Nothing’ course helps students build skills to unplug, think deeply.

* Indy’s going to the Moon folks.

* ‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’

* Words Added to the Scrabble Dictionary.

* Might not make my traditional Thanksgiving post this year, so here it is a few days early.

* From the archives: “Utopia, LOL?”

* And in honor of the end of Twitter: one last Twitter roundup.

Elon Musk destroying Twitter for all of us who weren’t strong enough to delete our accounts on our own is basically a shot-for-shot remake of Gollum stealing the Ring from Frodo and falling into Mt. Doom

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 5, 2022

not my white ass walking into Wakanda Forever two minutes into the movie with arms full of snacks

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 14, 2022

English departments ruining the lives and earning potential of even the most successful among us https://t.co/eHEzTlmXVY

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) October 29, 2022

me planning my games class syllabus pic.twitter.com/PP2JRhP2Hl

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2022

it’s-a me pic.twitter.com/SLEYdQizpd

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) October 29, 2022

If they decanonize Old Indy I'm going to lose ithttps://t.co/kYui0lwNvp pic.twitter.com/JWSjwb5pM0

— Gerry Canavan (parody) (@gerrycanavan) November 18, 2022

Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...

• A few of the academic publications I’m associated with have had new issues come out since March: Science Fiction Film and Television 15.1 and 15.2, a special issue on sf and disability; Extrapolation 63.1 and 63.2; SFRA Review 52.3. I’ve written a couple short things online too: “Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years”; “Disney Will Not Save You”; “Morally Depraved Fantasy: House of the Dragon and Rings of Power“; “Essential Worker, Expendable Worker: On Edward Ashton’s Mickey7.” I was on the Left Hand of Le Guin podcast. My contributions to the Routledge Handbook of Star Trek are out now, too. And Uneven Futures drops this December!
• I got a teaching award! I got elected chair of my department effective November 1!
• A fun project at Marquette I’m marginally associated with: “J.R.R. Tolkien: The Art of the Manuscript.”
• Marquette University support program for students with autism celebrates first graduate. 10 Things Faculty Need to Understand About Autism.
• CFPs: Tolkien Society Seminar 2023 – The Mighty and Frail Númenor. The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies. Indigenous peoples in/and videogames. “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Beyond Nancy Drew: U.S. Girls’ Series Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, 1920-1970. Journal of Posthumanism. Found Footage Horror.
• The CoFutures Prizes.
• Building a New Framework of Values for the University.

Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.

• Organizing Against Precarity in Higher Education.
• Marquette had the bones of Father Marquette until last June. Who knew?
• How did Marquette end up playing the Soviets after midnight in 1975? A look back at the weirdest exhibition ever.
• Milwaukee Has Elected Two Socialists, Reviving the City’s Pro-Worker Political Tradition. Milwaukee socialists mark a return to prominence in Wisconsin politics.
• From the archives: How to Improve Your Teaching Evaluations without Improving Your Teaching.
• Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.
• Who Can Live on a Ph.D. Stipend?
• Will Your College Survive the Demographic Cliff?
• Is There a Future for Literary Studies?
• Why Pursue a Career in the Humanities?
• The humanities’ scholarly infrastructure isn’t in disarray — it’s disappearing.
• Love’s Labor, Lost and Found: Academia, “Quit Lit,” and the Great Resignation.
• Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
• Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot in the U.S. News Rankings.
• The origins of student debt. The aging student debtors of America. The Single Most Important Thing to Know About Financial Aid: It’s a Sham.

That judgment: the move to funding education thru debt rather than direct state support is a manifestly failed experiment, the remedy for which is (1) student loan forgiveness of the cohorts that were impacted by the policy failure (2) resumption of state support at prior levels.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2021

Great interview with Wendy Brown. The real threat to academia isn't wokeness but "adjunctification, corporatization and then the rankings-and-rating systems of programs and faculties and individual academics." https://t.co/Lt8JagrhBY

— Talia Schaffer 🌻🇺🇦 (@taliaschaffer1) May 2, 2022

another problem with this new "shrinking humanities" report is that it counts majors, not enrollments. A study I did at UCSB showed a 15% decline in hum majors but no decline at all in enrollments. So underhiring hurts workload and humanities students https://t.co/yudcEXZkuI

— Christopher Newfield (@cnewf) April 29, 2022

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion, in space: The Tie That Binds: Announcing The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar.
• To Boycott or Not? Academic Conferences Face Pressure to Avoid Abortion-Hostile States.
• ‘I didn’t really learn anything’: COVID grads face college.

I think people who don't have a lot of conversations with young people really have no idea just how impossibly, irreparably disruptive it has been to be in high school and college during COVID.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2022

• What an English degree did for me, by Tulip Siddiq, Sarah Waters and more.
• U.S. Patent Office Lets Ohio State Trademark the Word ‘The’.

I had an expense report rejected for being 5 cents off yesterday, but someone with the right position can steal $40M with no one noticing for ten years https://t.co/0iN6QjdNbr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 30, 2022

look I don’t think this is something we should be talking about https://t.co/lzqDW4JLrQ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 13, 2022

• All Eight Episodes of Kindred Adaptation to Premiere December 13th.
• Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice.
• Read an Excerpt from Star Child, Ibi Zoboi’s Portrait of Octavia Butler.
• Washington Middle School Is Officially Renamed for Renowned Pasadena Science Fiction Writer, Octavia E. Butler.

Octavia E. Butler never drove. She was a life-long bus rider & urban hiker. But in her long transits, she paid close attention to details, crafted stories in her head. My piece for @LAParentMag points to some of Butler’s old routes, the places that held meaning & inspiration. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/Wc71Uttwel

— Lynell George (@lynellgeorge) May 6, 2022

• Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, Bojack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.
• The Grand Return of Comics Legend Alan Moore. Alan Moore’s Incredibly Underrated Writing Guide. Teaching Comics: A Syllabus.
• Legally defining Peter Parker.
• Marvel adjective chart.

this is fascinating https://t.co/DYacKZL9v0

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 2, 2022

The spatial layout of Disney World — zones of “fantasy,” “adventure,” “frontier,” and “tomorrow,” with democracy and monarchy orbiting and overlapping each other in the center — is as good a grounding in the fundamentals of American ideology as you’ll find anywhere.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2022

science fiction is LSD, fantasy is Ambien, horror is auto-erotic asphyxiation

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 20, 2022

• Art Is Not Therapy.
• The Short Stories and Too-Short Life of Diane Oliver.
• Sickness, Systems, Solidarity: A Pandemics and Games Essay Jam.
• The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure.
• A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur.
• Asimov’s Empire. Asimov’s Wall. Between Legacy and History: On Peele’s Nope. Everything Everywhere All at Once Is the Most Insane Movie of the Year. The nightmare of working for Marvel. Gonna Leave You All Severed: Initial Reflections on Severance. The Real Reason Matrix Resurrections Bombed. Adrian Tchaikovsky Continues His Epic Series With Children of Memory. The nightmare of having optimism about Picard season three. Star Trek after Socialism. And a glimpse into a better world: This 1970s-Style Star Trek: The Next Generation Animated Series Is Beyond Perfect.
• Violent Acts of Alien Intelligences: On Cixin Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” and Mark Bould’s Climate Criticism.

🎬🧵 What happened to The Movies? I looked at the top 2100 domestic box office films of the last 42 years to find out. Here are some findings.

For one: more sequels & comic book movies.

In 1981, just 16% of Top-25 movies were sequels, spinoffs, or remakes. In 2019, 80% were. pic.twitter.com/ffiYMNnmIu

— eric (@ercjhnkrbs) August 21, 2022

• Chaucer the Rapist? Newly Discovered Documents Suggest Not.
• At N.Y.U., Students Were Failing Organic Chemistry. Who Was to Blame?
• This Danish Political Party Is Led by an AI.
• Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them.
• Retroactive Abortion: Time Travel and the Unborn Baby.
• If Wes Anderson Directed the Sopranos.
• Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader. Andrew Tate shows how fascists recruit online: Men fall victim to the insecurity-to-fascism pipeline.
• Embracer acquires rights to Tolkien-related IP, teases new LOTR films. Take-Two reveals new Lord of the Rings game, promising a ‘different’ time in Middle-earth.
• Fantasy Has Always Been About Race. Of black elves and dwarves: an African take on ‘Rings of Power.’ I actually had a mini-take on this on Twitter.
• The Game: A continually-run D&D campaign, since 1982.
• The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism.
• Colony Collapse: Games like Civilization and The Sims make us into gods and ants simultaneously.
• Video games can help boost children’s intelligence. My plan all along…

good morning
here is Potato, a one page RPG about being a halfling and trying to quietly enjoy your potatoes in a world that refuses to leave you alone pic.twitter.com/PeLZiScT5F

— Oliver Darkshire 🌈 (@deathbybadger) September 7, 2022

oh shit oh shit pic.twitter.com/7TTEDuPS9F

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 27, 2022

• “Car Hitler, Car Stalin, and the Secret History of Pixars Cars Universe.”
• Remember August when it looked like Trump was finally going down? We were such kids!
• Conspiracy-promoting sheriffs claim vast election authority. Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines. Political Violence Is The New American Normal. Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Back to Class.
• Honoring the Dishonorable Part 1: The Dishonorable Dead. Honoring The Dishonorable, Part 2: The Dishonorable Living.
• What happens when one company owns dozens of local news stations.
• Equal population mapper.
• The end of democracy in Wisconsin.
• Congress Found An Easy Way To Fix Child Poverty. Then It Walked Away.
• Baby boomers facing spike in homelessness: “As much as we try, we might be stuck.”

This is the single bluntest assessment of the Democratic Party I've ever seen a liberal make in a major paper. A true must-read from @perrybaconjr. https://t.co/rI0lW4Sta5 pic.twitter.com/te9uJKW8pv

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) June 29, 2022

The part of the Star Wars mythos where the incompetent elites who failed to stop the system from sliding into fascism simply go into hiding and do nothing waiting for a bunch of kids to grow up and fix the problem themselves hits pretty hard right now.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 28, 2022

the next five years of US politics summarized pic.twitter.com/hdjIyNm4iD

— Spooky Musgrave 🪦 🎃 👻 (@profmusgrave) April 11, 2022

• A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease. Two decades of Alzheimer’s research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives.
• The mystifying ride of child suicide. Why American Teens Are So Sad.
• War in the womb: A ferocious biological struggle between mother and baby belies any sentimental ideas we might have about pregnancy.
• When Chess Gets Weird.
• Here is The Batman (2022) but starring Adam West from the 1960s TV series.
• America’s slow but very real decline into a fascist state as told by the post-sitcom careers of its lovable goofballs.
• From the archives: Yellowstone has a 50 square mile “Zone of Death” where you can get away with murder.
• The United States of Abandoned Places.
• A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia.
• An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees. I don’t suppose they would, no.
• An interstellar object exploded over Earth in 2014, declassified government data reveal.
• The UFO sightings that swept the US. Wisconsin UFOs.
• Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
• Time might not exist, according to physicists and philosophers – but that’s okay.
• New Hubble Space Telescope data suggests ‘something weird’ is going with our universe, Nasa says. I’ve been saying this!
• The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It.
• In a Parallel Universe, Another You.

I consider myself an atheist, but I've always really liked the Catholic version of God. There is an all power, all loving entity. Then he created weird little horny apes, and tortures them eternally if they act too weird and horny.

It's a beautiful idea. I just wish it was true.

— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) June 15, 2022

pic.twitter.com/V0tmZsNfrA

— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 17, 2022

We're a modest company with modest goals:
1: sell a quality product at a fair price
2: drain the world's oceans so we can find and kill god

— Stev D (@Stev_D) October 21, 2014

• How Eco-Fiction Became Realer Than Realism.
• Do you want water or not? Make up your minds!
• We built a fake metropolis to show how extreme heat could wreck cities.
• By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south.
• Not a headline you love to see: Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields.
• Americans keep moving to where the water isn’t. Phoenix could soon be uninhabitable — and the poor will be the last to leave.
• Jackson water system is failing, city will be with no or little drinking water indefinitely.
• The water wars hit the suburbs. Tensions Grow in Colorado River Negotiations.
• Decade-long drought turns Chilean lake to desert as global warming changes weather patterns.
• An ‘extreme heat belt’ will impact over 100 million Americans in the next 30 years, study finds.
• As the Planet Cooks, Climate Stalls as a Political Issue. Remaking the Anthropocene. Animal Futurity. “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes.” A Strategy for Ruination.
• As Climate Fears Mount, Some Are Relocating Within the US.
• Proximity to fracking sites associated with risk of childhood cancer.
• Animal populations worldwide have declined nearly 70% in just 50 years, new report says.
• Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias. Kim Stanley Robinson on Solving the Climate Crisis, Buddhism, and the Power of Science Fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Guide to Keeping the Doomsday Glacier Hanging On. Growing Up Fast On Planet Earth, With Kim Stanley Robinson. Kim Stanley Robinson interview at Farsighted magazine: “Mars Is Irrelevant to Us Now.” Science Over Capitalism: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Imperative of Hope. A Weird, Wonderful Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
• Tomorrow Isn’t Over: A Reading List About Brighter Futures.
• The climate is changing. Science fiction is too.
• ‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan.
• The Dawn of the Pandemic Age.
• More than half of Americans alive today were exposed to dangerous levels of lead as kids.
• Hooray! The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Has Become a Thriving Ecosystem, Scientists Say.
• Understanding longtermism. Against longtermism.
• Anthropocene Gothic.
• Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s theory of everything.
• Nuclear war between US, Russia would leave 5 billion dead from hunger, study says. Well, if that’s true, I’m against it.
• Amazon activists mourn death of ‘man of the hole’, last of his tribe.
• It can always get worse.
• They say time is the fire in which we burn.
• How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
• And the arc of history is long, but Rotterdam bridge won’t be dismantled for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht to sail through. We did it, folks.

if you don’t oppose nuclear war when you’re 25, you have no heart. if you’re not in favor of nuclear war by the time you’re 35, you have no head

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 12, 2022

This was too accurate pic.twitter.com/0jWjDmbH5D

— Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) September 6, 2022

The massive power of trains yet confinement to a single path makes them comparable to angels

— ᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟᅟ (@blindlettr) March 25, 2022

from a student, this is my new favorite meme pic.twitter.com/XEZqKD26xJ

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2022

Fall 2022 Syllabi! “J.R.R. Tolkien” and “Histories of Anti-Capitalism”!

My syllabi are up for Fall 2022: a slightly revised version of my J.R.R. Tolkien class that utilizes this semester’s Haggery Museum of Art exhibit, and a brand new grad course titled “Histories of Anti-Capitalism.” Here’s the general plan for the anti-capitalism course, which is going to get finalized in consultation with the students who will be leading discussion each week:

WEEK		THEMES AND ASSIGNMENTS
WEEK 1		What Is Capitalism? What Is Anti-Capitalism? Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” [marxists.org] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (excerpt) [D2L] Existential Comics, “Explaining Capitalism to Aliens”
Sep. 5		LABOR DAY
WEEK 2		Four Futures Peter Frase, Four Futures
WEEK 3		The Luddites and after Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work
WEEK 4		Critique Barbara Foley, Marxist Literary Criticism Today
WEEK 5		Utopia Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” “Utopia as Replication,” and An American Utopia [D2L and YouTube]
WEEK 6		Postcolonalism Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
WEEK 7		Black Marxism C.L.R. James, Cedric Robinson, bell hooks, and Angela Davis [D2L]
WEEK 8		Gender Silvia Federici (wages for housework), Kathi Weeks (abolition of the family) [D2L]
WEEK 9		20th century text we will choose together
WEEK 10		Queer Marxism José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
WEEK 11		Disability disability rights movements, the ADA, Marta Russell and Ravi Malhorta, Sami Schalk, “Neoliberalism and the Commodification of Mental Health” [D2L]
WEEK 12		Ecology John Bellamy Foster (ecology against capitalism), André Gorz (“The Social Ideology of the Motorcar”), Kathryn Yusoff (the Anthropocene), Greta Thunberg [D2L and Web]
WEEK 13		The University How the University Works; student movements; precarious labor and unionization; student debt abolition; state funding [D2L and Web]
		THANKSGIVING BREAK: NO CLASS
WEEK 14		21st century text we will choose together
WEEK 15		PRESENTATIONS
Dec. 16		FINAL PAPERS DUE

SFFTV Open Call for Submissions and Special Issue Proposals, as Well as Books for Review

Science Fiction Film and Television invites article submissions on any topics related to sf and visual media; we especially invite articles related to the production economy of the culture industry and to non-US sf, as well as articles that related to possible upcoming special issues on (1) indigenous sf filmmaking and (2) the career of Taika Waititi. We also invite proposals from potential guest editors for special issues; please write gerry.canavan@marquette.edu for more information on this process.

SFFTV is currently edited by Anindita Banerjee (Cornell University), Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University), and its newest editor, Ida Yoshinaga (George Institute of Technology). Preferred length for articles is approximately 7000-9000 words; all topics related to science fiction film, television, gaming, other visual media will be considered. Typical response time is within three months. Check the journal website at Liverpool University Press for full guidelines for contributors; please direct any individualized queries to gerry.canavan@marquette.edu.

The journal is also seeking reviewers of recent works of sf and sf-adjacent critical theory as well as recent SF visual media. While we accept pitches, we also have the following books available for reviewers:

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO AMERICAN HORROR (edited by Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-american-horror/6112D13AE5342761D59714310C5E54CD

CITIZEN SCIENCE FICTION (Jerome Winter)

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793621481/Citizen-Science-Fiction

CONSTELLATIONS: THE OA (David Sweeney)

https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/series/series-15365/?sort=vol_desc

THE OUTER LIMITS (Joanne Morreale)

https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/outer-limits

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO STAR TREK (edited By Leimar Garcia-Siino, Sabrina Mittermeier, Stefan Rabitsch)

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Star-Trek/Garcia-Siino-Mittermeier-Rabitsch/p/book/9780367366674

STAR WARRIORS OF THE MODERN RAJ: MATERIALITY, MYTHOLOGY, AND TECHNOLOGY OF INDIAN SCIENCE FICTION

Sami Ahmad Khan

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo125520594.html

THE WORLD IS BORN FROM ZERO (Cameron Kunzelman)

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110719451/html?lang=en

Reviews typically run 1000-2000 words, or 2000-4000 words in our “review essay” format. Samples of both types of review are available upon request.

We are currently in the process of shifting the format of our media review section. We are now primarily interested in:

* reviewers who are calling attention to things that have gone overlooked in the larger entertainment-media-complex landscape, especially international film;

* reviewers with a specific aesthetic, political, or philosophical “take” on a text, as opposed to a more traditional review that recapitulates the plot at length and advises the potential viewer whether or not they ought to watch it.

This notion of a specific “take” is especially important for blockbuster franchise fare, like the MCU or Star Wars movies; in most cases we would only be interested in a review essay for such a film, discussing it within some larger critical context.

Due to a recent review backlog we have not been actively soliciting reviewers; as a result, much recent SF media is still available for reviewing. If there is a film you are interested in reviewing, please contact gerry.canavan@marquette.edu and let him know the name of the film and what you think you’d like to say about it. Deadlines are quite flexible. We look forward to hearing from you!