sean guynes

Swann's fantasies were vaguely feminist (at least for the 1970s), very queer, and clear about the violence and ideological force of patriarchy. Here, he argues that Christianity's original vision of loving kindness was manipulated by men to attain power, suppress women, and end queerness. Big stuff.

Reading “The Gods Abide” by Thomas Burnett Swann Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Gods Abide (1976) is the author’s fourteenth novel and explores the violence of the rise of Christianity in Roman Italia and Britannia.

Approaching the end of my read of Thomas Burnett Swann's 16 fantasy novels with this essay on his third-to-last novel, THE GODS ABIDE (1976). It was his 5th novel in 1976, published 6 months after his death, and tells a compelling story about the violence of Christianity's rise in late Roman empire.

Swann's fantasies were vaguely feminist (at least for the 1970s), very queer, and clear about the violence and ideological force of patriarchy. Here, he argues that Christianity's original vision of loving kindness was manipulated by men to attain power, suppress women, and end queerness. Big stuff.

Reading “The Gods Abide” by Thomas Burnett Swann Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Gods Abide (1976) is the author’s fourteenth novel and explores the violence of the rise of Christianity in Roman Italia and Britannia.

Approaching the end of my read of Thomas Burnett Swann's 16 fantasy novels with this essay on his third-to-last novel, THE GODS ABIDE (1976). It was his 5th novel in 1976, published 6 months after his death, and tells a compelling story about the violence of Christianity's rise in late Roman empire.

Humor is hard as hell. I did surprisingly enjoy The Orville (at least the one season I watched), which felt like they pitched it as Star Trek parody then mostly just wrote a good ST show.

haha I'm in this EXACT same boat

like, Chloe Zhao made The Eternals and had to deal with a million studio notes and a huge carapace of admin and marketing etc. And after she was like "I bet SHAKESPEARE never had to do this! Back THEN, when art was REAL, you could just fall in love and then write a play about it!!!!"

I think the refusal, in modern films about him, to see Shakespeare's work as any way being the product of industrial processes (rather than as individual autobiographical expression) actually has to do with the modern studio system / people inside of it longing for a (fake) nostalgic alternative

But you're right here saying smart shit!

Opinion | Is ‘Literary Fiction’ Just Another Genre Now? There is no real middlebrow any more.

Another turn on the Genre Turn (and a review of Jeremy Rosen’s excellent Genre Bending). www.chronicle.com/article/is-l...

The Plastic Utility of Genre: Review of Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending Sebastian Sparrevohn Under Review:Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction. Jeremy Rosen. Stanford University Press, December 2025. Jeremy Rosen’s Genre Bending: The P…

The Plastic Utility of Genre: @sebsp.bsky.social reviews Jeremy Rosen's GENRE BENDING (@stanfordpress.bsky.social)

So do your research, ask questions, be an advocate for yourself and your work. But also know what a press can and can't do, and learn that by talking to people and asking questions.

And it should be obvious that if you're publishing with Routledge, Palgrave, De Gruyter, etc. (any of the corporate behemoths), then you're not getting anything you want lol and your stuff is absolutely going to be AI fodder. Even Oxford UP is using AI copyediting!

I think it's excellent advice to be diligent and ask questions, but you should also know that most presses have boilerplate contracts and most of us will not alter that language. The best of us will, however, be 100% transparent about our processes and will explain everything.

Ask about production processes, ask about the use of AI on the production side, ask recent authors about their experiences, and do you research on the press.

But please know that very few presses will actually amend their contracts to include these on a contact level.

We also read Dhalgren in that class (in one week, no less -- and sorry to say I did not enjoy it at all). It was a pretty odd reading list that was mostly "provocations" at the idea of the weird

Yeah, that's the one I'll read if I read nothing else, since I know your feelings about it well!

I read Intuitionist in a grad course on the weird, of all things!

You're probably right! Years since I read those essays but you have inspired me several times already to have those higher on my list of re-reads (honestly, though, I'm not very smart and have little tolerance for "theory," so it'll probably be awhile)

Good point! I hadn't thought of how delimited the use of the term is, probably because I use it way more broadly, but I think you're right.

Project V STEMinist mecha fantasy meets reality television in this high-stakes novel from the author of A Magical Girl Retires—a wildly imaginative tale of sibling bo...

Is it just me or does the description of this forthcoming "STEMinist mecha fantasy" have, like, a *way* too cozy/cutesy description? Or am I just broken because I want my mecha fantasies to be dystopian as hell?

LARB piece on this forthcoming when?!

One thing I've noticed, now that I'm rebuilding my physical media collection and sourcing stuff from thrift stores: "dude movie" DVDs tend to be way more scratched up and fingerprinty than "girl movie" DVDs. Take care of your shit, dudes!

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

in response to Hamnet I’m going to write a movie about how Chloe Zhao made Marvel’s “The Eternals” to process her feelings about the time she had to fight supervillain aliens in an exploding volcano

Then again, I had to read a ton of the novels Rosen discusses in grad school, b/c I had several profs who were the "contemporary literature" kind, and I pretty much hated all of them.

...industrially, aesthetically, and historically delimited field that is not the same as "fiction" generally. Some do, yes, but then make a habit of writing as though they're talking about all fiction anyway, while ignoring the vast majority of actual fiction. Idk, literary studies annoys me.

I felt similarly of his book on "minor characters," which was purely about literary fiction and I kept thinking... my guy, this phenomenon is HUGE and OLD and you could say so much more. I suppose it's fair to focus on literary fiction, but I wish more scholars would identify that it's a tightly...

...of genre fiction, especially sff (I had him on a panel I organized at MLA a decade ago when he was first conceiving this project), but for whatever reason he doesn't study genre-bending generally, so that his book isn't really a theory of genre-bending, is it? Which is a bummer, I think.

..."historical turn" in "fiction" because, well, historical fiction has long been one of the most popular and pervasive forms of fiction, but because he delimited his field of survey so greatly, he talks about almost none of the broad swatch of fiction that is historical. Rosen, I know, is aware...