Speculative fiction is perhaps our only real hope of transforming those hierarchies, but only when it is willing to grapple with how they actually work in the world.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold follows two Chinese-American children as they wander the American West searching for a place to bury their father, for acceptance and belonging, and for any place or people they can call home.
Despite being marketed as a novel about revenge against the elite class, I frankly did not give a shit about the royal drama once I got there—at that point, I wanted to know what the islanders were up to, as they were far more interesting and better developed than most of the royal characters.
Literature has a capacity to haunt—to pop up unbidden in impossible places in the brain, to radically recontextualize a space, to become an embodiment of history—and the best stories here do just that.
The only thing I really took away from Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture was the desire to create my own monster studies framework to account for the gaps I found in Gloyn’s.
It is undeniable that Tolkien and Lewis had a profound influence on the genre of fantasy; Cecire, however, implies that it is their manipulation of the English curriculum at Oxford that is largely responsible for the subject matter and ideology of the work produced by the so-called Oxford school of authors and their successors.
