Category: Nonfiction

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers

Sauna and the Cartography of Swamps

OJ

I have a new chapter out! “The Cartography of Swamps: Making and Breaking Boundaries in Sauna” can be found in Baltic Horror in Film, Gaming and Literature, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and published by the University of Wales Press.

I have to admit that, when I saw the call for papers for this, I didn’t send in an abstract because I knew a great deal about Baltic horror. I actually knew very little. What I did have was unbridled love for the 2008 Finnish film Sauna, directed by Antti-Jussi Annila. Now, a lot of my academic work is just me taking the chance to write about media that I really enjoy – this is my nerdy hobby, after all, and I’m not wasting time on work I don’t like! – so this was my opportunity to talk, at length, about Sauna. Why wouldn’t I take that up?

Sauna, if you haven’t seen it (and you really should) is a historical horror, set in the late sixteenth-century, which follows a map-making expedition along the border of Sweden and Russia. These two countries had just come out of a war, so setting up a mutually-agreed-upon border was a chance to try and limit future conflict. The expedition includes two brothers: one a cartographer, and one a former soldier deeply traumatised by the war. They discover an unmapped village in the centre of a swamp, and if you’ve any exposure at all to wetlands in narratives you’ll be familiar with how they shift and destabilise plot. How can anyone expect a reliable border in a place where land and water are constantly shifting? Answer: they can’t. Of course, given this is horror, geographical boundaries aren’t the only thing to be transgressed, and the brothers find themselves on opposite sides of moral boundaries which really should not be crossed. It’s cartography and ethical behaviour, essentially, and it’s fantastic.

Even if you don’t read my paper, the film is well worth watching. It’s slow, creeping horror and wetlands. What’s not to love?

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers, SFF

Lunar Gothic and Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series

OJ

I have a new chapter out!

To be honest, it’s not really new. It came out last year and I missed it. Oh well, better late than never. “Sterility Across Chasms: Dead Worlds and Technological Imaginations in Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series” is available to read in Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination from Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon.

When I saw the call for papers for this, which really was years ago at this point – academic publishing is notoriously slow – I knew at once that I wanted to submit something. Lunar Gothic? That was too exciting to pass up. There was really only one choice of text for me, too.

I was obsessed with the Darkangel series as a kid. I can’t tell you how many times I took it out of the school library. It was vampires! On the moon! And the central romance fell apart because it turns out it doesn’t matter if you (literally) offer up your heart to a prince, he doesn’t have to love you for it and it doesn’t make him a bad person, it just means you get to transfer your previously rather limited ambitions to (literal) worldbuilding instead. The drama! The imagery! The dead Earth, hanging in the sky while gargoyles roamed a creepy lunar castle and a whole series of brides got their blood drained and hung around afterwards, whining. (To be fair, in their place I’d whine too.) Death! Rebirth! Fantastical creatures and artificial life!

That trilogy was weird as hell and I loved every page of it. Because I mostly write academic papers on my own time – it’s the world’s nerdiest hobby – I end up writing a lot about my favourite things and pieces of media over the years. And why not, I say. Any excuse to reread this series is a good one. And Gothic really can go anywhere…

Nonfiction, SFF

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia

OJ

I have a new book coming out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is due out on the 18th of August, and pre-orders are open now at Luna Press Publishing.

Like many fantasy fans, I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually the first book I remember reading. I got it as a Christmas present and was utterly enthralled. As the years went on I read the rest of the books in the series, and they were all fine… and then I got to The Last Battle, which remains to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across a room in disgust.

The problem was Susan: exiled from Narnia for her disbelief and her liking for nylons, lipstick, and invitations, she was the only one of her entire family to survive the horrendous train crash that sent them all to Aslan’s country. Heaven, supposedly, and they were all so happy to be there, to die in this horrendous way, and I looked at that book – I can’t have been much older than twelve, the age that Susan was went she first went to Narnia – and was deeply, irrevocably, revolted by it.

I have held a grudge about that stupid book for decades. Then I started reading fanfiction, and I came across Narnian fanfiction, and it didn’t take very long after filtering the characters for Susan to discover that there were a lot of other people as repulsed by that storyline as I was. I started bookmarking, and then I started writing about it: how fanfiction authors were re-imagining Susan to give her a better life away from Narnia… and away from Aslan.

Good for them. I like their stories better. And I hope, if you read this, that you do to.

Articles, Nonfiction, Science

Fact, Fiction, and Feeling

OJ

I have a new article out! “Fact, Fiction, and Feeling: Ecological Grief in a Changing World” can be read for free online in the latest issue of Clarkesworld.

A lot of my creative work, over the past several years, has centred around the idea of ecological grief. Climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as other environmental issues, are having increasingly obvious, increasingly visible consequences in the world around us. Often those consequences are marked by absence: species that are disappearing, ecosystems that are altering beyond recognition. When we’re attached to an environment that’s no longer there, or which no longer exists in a way that’s familiar to us… well. It’s a loss, and more and more it’s being recognised as such.

So often, reactions to issues such as climate change are couched in economic or scientific or political terms. These are all valid reactions, but what’s interested me lately is the psychological response: how environmental loss makes us feel. And lately, in both academic and creative literature, that feeling is being explored.

It’s something that I think we’re all going to have to come to terms with eventually.

Articles, Nonfiction, SFF

Unpaid Green

OJ

I have a new article out! “Unpaid Green: Voluntary Conservation Work in Speculative Fiction” can be read for free in the latest issue of Journey Planet. The whole issue’s free to read, which is nice – and it’s a special issue on workers’ rights in SFF.

So much of speculative fiction is imagining different ways to live, and that includes work. When we picture what work will be like in the future, for instance, what kind of things are we prioritising? What are we hoping for, and what are we critical of? Can we even picture a working future reliably? What about the growing influence of technology and AI, or of environmental change and resource management?

It’s a fascinating topic to explore, so when I saw the submissions call I thought “I have to come up with something for that!” And given that most of my creative work is near-future science fiction, generally related to climate or to the environment, it’s no surprise where my focus went.

There’s a lot of work to be done building ecological resilience into the systems around us. This might end up being the most important work of the lot, even. A lot of it’s done by volunteers. What does that say about how much we value their work? Something to think about. That’s what my article focuses on, anyway. Please take a look!