Category: Papers

Horror, Papers, SFF

Transgressive Reproduction in “Évolution”

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) – Transgressive Reproduction” can be found in The Deep, edited by Marko Teodorski and Simon Bacon. It’s one of the Genre Fiction and Film Companions series from Peter Lang, which means it’s basically an excuse for academics to do close readings on their favourite genre films. In this case, genre films connected to the ocean. Anyone who’s ever loved a sea monster will understand the desire to contribute to a book like this!

I saw Simon talking about the book a few years back on Twitter, inviting calls for papers. I do like creepy ocean stories, so I wracked my brain for one that I could pitch a chapter on. I didn’t have to wrack very hard, because I’d recently seen something very weird and very cool. It was Lucile Hadžihalilović’s film Évolution, which was about women who seemed to be part starfish, living on an isolated island with a group of young sons. These sons were adopted, and human, and being used in medical experiments so that their mothers could reproduce in other ways.

The downside was that the film was in French, and while I have schoolgirl French (propped up by daily lessons with Duolingo) it is still very schoolgirl indeed. The upside was that the script was absolutely minimal – for vast swathes of it there was no talking at all – and so I was determined to manage. Partly because the film was weird and cool and I loved it, but partly because the setting struck me as especially interesting. The women and children primarily inhabited the intertidal zone (my marine biology background was excited to be used!) and the navigation of their transgressive biologies could be mapped onto aspects of that environment.

It’s a short paper, but I had fun writing it. If you get a chance to see the film, don’t hesitate! It’s amazing.

Horror, Papers, SFF

Entering the Ecosystem

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Entering the Ecosystem: Human Identity, Biology, and Horror” is in the book Horror and Philosophy: Essays on Their Intersection in Film, Television, and Literature, edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, published by McFarland.

I love eco-horror films, especially the animal horror type. I don’t care if it’s mutant bears or giant crocodiles or experimented-on sharks, I always end up rooting for the monster. Let’s be honest: most of the time they’re not doing anything wrong. They’re just wandering around their natural habitat, acting as bears and crocodiles and sharks do, when along comes this meaty little biped, all excited to interfere with them. Of course they’re going to look at us and think food.

This can be deeply destabilising from the human point of view. Dangerous, too, but beyond the being eaten alive or torn apart or what have you is the sense of identity loss we feel at suddenly being booted a few rungs down the food chain. The vast majority of us are used to thinking of humans as somehow separate from the rest of the animal world. We’re smarter. We have science and opposable thumbs and ways to insulate ourselves from the natural world. Animal horror films remind us that we’re not so removed as we’d like to think. That’s so disturbing to watch, and I love it.

Naturally I had to write about it.

 

Papers, SFF

The Impoverished Landscape

OJ

I have a new paper out! My first 2023 paper, and it’s called “The Impoverished Landscape: Navigating Absence and Ecological Resilience in Speculative Fiction.” You can find it in issue 33 of Hélice: Critical Thinking on Speculative Fiction, which is a special issue on speculative landscapes.

I focus on two texts in the paper: Locust Girl: A Lovesong by Merlinda Bobis, and Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley. Both books are set in what are increasingly impoverished landscapes, as ongoing biodiversity loss produces an environment that is ever more difficult for humans to survive in. As texts, they are both extremely different. Sweet Fruit is a dystopian realistic piece set in the near-future UK, whereas Locust Girl is a dreamy, magical realist fantasy that is no country in particular, being set in an ambiguous and unrecognisable location that is mostly wasteland. They both, however, engage with landscape in complex and interesting ways, and it’s often interesting to approach the same element from very different directions.

Impoverished landscapes like these often can’t provide sufficient resources for the people living in them to have sustainable and reliable food supplies, for instance. The distribution and allocation of these resources is controlled in unfair and exploitative ways, and the landscapes are often associated, therefore, with deprivation. My paper argues that they can also be interpreted as sites of resistance, and of re-imagined relationships between the human and the non-human.

If you’re not very interested in the paper, or in academic writing, please consider reading the books. They’re fantastic!

Papers, SFF

Image and the Tree in Middle-Earth

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Image and the Tree in Middle-Earth” came out in issue 23 of the BFS Journal. Technically it came out a couple of months ago, but it doesn’t quite feel real as the issue, while posted, hasn’t arrived here yet. It takes an age to send things to New Zealand! (When my most recent book came out, and my Canadian publisher sent me copies, they took five months to get here.) I don’t know why the postal system’s so very slow, but I’d like to post this in the same year the paper was published, so here we are.

I actually wrote the paper over a decade ago, I think, in a class on fantasy literature. It stayed, in its school-draft form, on my hard drive for ages before I decided to pull it out and see if I could make it publishable. I sent it off to the good people at BFS Journal, who have published some of my academic work before, and happily they took it – but they also took it before the new Tolkien tv series came out, so if you’re expecting any mention of that in there, don’t.

It was a fun paper to write, in that my primary research was reading Tolkien over and over again (such a chore!) and I do that anyway, so it was killing two birds with one stone. How tree imagery reflects throughout Middle-Earth, and how it reflects historical tree imagery in Europe, is a particularly interesting topic, at least it is for me, so I’m glad to be able to share it.

Papers, SFF

SA After Apocalypse

OJ

I have a new paper out! It’s only the second time I’ve co-written a paper, but this was a particularly easy experience, writing it as I was with Ryn Yee, who is currently a grad student at the Centre for Science Communication at Otago University, which is where I got my PhD. Ryn and I are both big speculative fiction fans, and when we saw that the SFRA Review had a call for papers for a special symposium on sexual violence and science fiction… well, to be honest, I noped out of that one pretty quickly. It’s not a subject matter I was particularly interested in exploring.

But then Ryn and I got chatting, which quickly became ranting, about a shared hatred of that worst of science fiction tropes: repopulating the world after apocalypse. Rarely have I seen this trope handled in an appealing way. More often, it’s used as a narrative “justification” (and I use the term very loosely) to excuse a constant assault on women and girls.

I hate these storylines. Ryn hates them too. If the subject matter didn’t initially inspire us, spite and the opportunity to rip this stupid trope to shreds had us writing a paper that was, I’m happy to say, accepted. The paper, “Sexual Assault After Apocalypse: The Limited Logic of Natural Selection” is free to read with the rest of the symposium articles here. Please read with care, as it’s a horrible topic.

I shall probably never write about it again. Once was enough. I’d happily co-author another paper with Ryn, though, because they were excellent to work with. Thanks, Ryn!