chan eil sìth gun cheartas

12. No one online understands the real concept of “the Noble Savage”. It was mostly used as a mirror/foil for Euro society & it had a tragic cast—the tragedy being that Indigenous people are “noble” in some way in spite of the fact that they ARE STILL inferior “savages” doomed to vanish.

it is also in the nature of speculative fiction criticism that a few times a year someone reinvents Tolkien's argument in "On Fairy-Stories", from 1947

Reminder.

Can we please get this Shona → English translation paid for? $2935 to go.

(We're out of time to fundraise for the Kiswahili book (Dunia na Watu Wake), but if anyone has $5000, that would fund it - I could get you in touch!)

still easily one of the best books I've read in the past few years. so fucking good. PLEASE read it.

Blood of the Old Kings (The Bleeding Empire, #1) / an duilleag gheal

lèirmheas air Blood of the Old Kings, le Kim Sung-il, air eadar-theangachadh le Anton Hur: anduilleaggheal.neocities.org/leirmheasan/...

sàr-leabhar fantasachd. mas toil leat idir àrd-fhantasachd no dìreach deagh sgeulachd air fòirneart na h-ìmpireachd, bu chòir dhut a leughadh.

to be honest I'm not sure I'm convinced that Tolkien is actually The Most Influential Fantasy Writer Of All Time, at least in terms of the contemporary configuration of the genre. to the extent that literary inheritance is quantifiable I think it might "actually" be Vance or Howard, by way of D&D.

which is probably another way of saying: how inescapable the influence of Robert E. Howard continues to be in the fantasy genre as such (i.e., the marketing category that developed in the English-speaking world in the late ’60s and was exported elsewhere in the following decades) around the world.

I don't point this out as a criticism — Blood of the Old Kings remains one of my favorite books of the last few years — but to highlight how genuinely inescapable the influence of Celticism and in particular of colonial images of Scottish Gaels is in the fantasy genre around the world.

I think when I say "the fantasy genre would not exist without Ossian" people think I'm exaggerating/being hyperbolic, but the claymore-wielding "barbarian" war-leader in Kim Sung-il's Blood of the Old Kings is named "Griogal" (a Gaelic name best known from the popular lament "Griogal Cridhe")

rereading Blood of the Old Kings in preparation for Blood for the Undying Throne + I am begging everyone to get on this bandwagon. I was worried I'd overhyped it for myself in memory but I absolutely did not

Start Here (2025 Edition) Are you questioning your gender and searching for fiction that’ll help you figure out what a transition might look like? Are you a trans woman or a femmeby who’s never seen herself on the tradition…

After hundreds of hours of reading and research, my 2025 Starter Guide to transfeminine literature is finally live!

No matter your experience level, there's a book for you! 🏳️‍⚧️📚 #transbooks

The list covers a vast range of genres. There are 78 handcrafted recs on this list, and I've read all but two.

A meme of 'Is this an archive?' showing a grid with various classifications of things that might be archives based on their content and structure.

Hoping this helps our colleagues across the industry

we do not yet know Golden Age/pulp science fiction

Black Genre Fiction Reimagined: Review of Black Pulp by Brooks E. Hefner Black Genre Fiction Reimagined: Review of Black Pulp by Brooks E. Hefner Garrett Bridger Gilmore Under Review:Black Pulp. Brooks E. Hefner. University of Minnesota Press, December 2021. In hi…

Re-upping @jgbridgergilmore.bsky.social's review of Brooks E. Hefner's BLACK PULP (@uminnpress.bsky.social); hoping THE MARTIAN TRILOGY leads to more of these genre stories from "Illustrated Feature Section" & other Black serials getting rediscovered!

Very cool news!

on the topic of dick cheney, one thing i’ve always said is that you shouldn’t kill a million people

It’s truly tragic how many of these US war criminals like Cheney never face justice and die in their peacefully in their homes in their 80s and 90s. I want to be happy he is dead but I am not. The million people he killed didnt get the luxury to die how he did.

we shall see....

I'd be especially interested in more far-future, extraterrestrial, and/or secondary world examples — I've been thinking about how icy northern barbarian wastes are so common

anyone have suggestions of southern hemisphere-based sff that makes a specific point of traveling south = colder and traveling north = warmer? aside from The Book of the New Sun.

(the rest of the basis is Unamuno's argument that any orientation towards earthly futurity and reproduction is a turning-away from god — casual sex is fine but if you are having sex intentionally trying to have a child you have lost your way. insane takes for what is ostensibly Catholic apology.)

this — by way of hooks's essay "Eating the Other" — is part of the basis of my likely never-to-be-completed "Unamuno and queer theory" essay which is also sort of a "what is the deal with vore" essay. I'll have to check it out!

I don't know yet what (if anything) to do with this as the basis of a reading of cannibalism in general, especially because I think this assessment is patently wrong and chauvinist in a linguistic context, but I feel like there's Something here in terms of cultural representations of cannibalism.

which superficially lends it to some of the sexual(ized) readings of cannibalism that have been popular, except that Unamuno says this as part of his argument that letting Spanish consume Basque would ultimately be a victory (in death) for Basque, because Spanish would be irrevocably transformed.

[And could there be a more intimate relation than that which is established between the animal that consumes another and the one who is thus consumed, between the devourer and the devoured?]

I am always thinking about Unamuno saying in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida "¿Y hay, acaso, asociación más íntima que la que se traba entre el animal que se come a otro y éste que es por él comido, entre el devorador y el devorado?"

I am also interested in this, and I'm not altogether convinced by the ways cannibalism is often theorized — I'm not entirely sure what's missing, but I think something is.

Palestine - 1 - Stories from the eve of the Nakba | Comma Press £11.99 (Paperback / Anthology) - Mazen Maarouf, Selma Dabbagh, Ahmad Jaber, Anwar Hamed, Mahmoud Shukair and others

Cover reveal day for Palestine -1: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba by Comma Press! I have a story in this one. It launches November 13th. Pre-orders are open at the link below:

commapress.co.uk/books/palest...

this is like. quadruply embarrassing. 1) not knowing this basic thing about how Korean names work. 2) "Kim" is literally the most common Korean surname. 3) his father was named KIM Jong Il. 4) none of his siblings have -un in their names. hello???

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa