Author name: shaunduke

Dr. Shaun Duke is an instructor at DMACC and the Director of the Portolan Project at the Speculative Literature Foundation. He received his M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He studies science fiction, digital fan cultures, Caribbean literature, literary canons, postcolonialism, and digital rhetoric. In addition to his academic work, he wears many hats. He is a writer of genre fiction and a freelance editor at The Duke of Editing. His fiction has appeared in Curiouser Magazine, Stupefying Stories, and elsewhere. He also hosts and produces The Skiffy and Fanty Show, a four-time Hugo Award finalist podcast dedicated to examining the literary, cinematic, and cultural world of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His podcast work has sent him around the world to participate in conventions, conduct interviews, and more. When he's not podcasting, he can be found on his Twitch channel, AlphabetStreams, or Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, and other social media places.

Blog Posts

Adventures in Teaching: Trauma and Realism in (Some) Weird Novels

/

Today was the last day of teaching for my survey course in American Literature.  As with all my literature courses, I included quite a few works of SF/F on the reading list, from “classic” SF like Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War to contemporary weirdness like Flight by Sherman Alexie.  This year, I realized there were a few unintentional trends in the works I’d selected.  First, almost every text I had my students read directly or indirectly addressed sex.  I’m not going to talk about that today, except to say that my students and I were quite amused that our small representation of American Literature seemed to suggest that all American Literature will talk about sex at some point.  That’s probably not true, but it’s amusing nonetheless. The more interesting unintentional theme is that of trauma and its representation through weirdness / magical realism / anti-realism.  This became apparent only recently, when we finished reading Flight by Sherman Alexie, a definitively non-realist novel about a time traveling / body-switching Native American foster kid who must discover himself through a myriad of other people’s experiences.  As the last novel for the course, it resonated quite well with several of the other recent texts, something I hadn’t expected at the time.  The angst and blunt honesty of the main character, Zits, on

Blog Posts

LitBits: The Politics of Author/Work Separation

/

I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot recently, firstly for some obvious reasons (a certain movie) and secondly because of some of the things I’ve been discussing with my students in my American Literature course.  And one of the questions that keeps coming up for me is this:  how do we know when we have crossed the line by holding a writer accountable for the controversial things they write? As an example, I am currently teaching Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and Bully Burgers.  This particular novel is not all that controversial, though it certainly has its issues, but her later book, Blu’s Hanging, was the cause of much controversy in 1997/1998.  The Asian American Studies National Book Award she received was later annulled after public outcry; many critics and academics have written about the incident since.[1]  One of the problems Asian American (and other) critics had with the book was its representation of Filipinos in Hawai’i (they are dirty, morally questionable, violent, and/or pedophiles) and the complete absence of indigenous Hawaiians in the novel.  Effectively, critics charged Yamanaka with failing to self-censor herself in a stereotypical context; in

Blog Posts

Out-Brutalling the Last Guy: “Grim and gritty, yes … but make sure it’s doing some honest work” by K.V. Johansen

/

I’ve written some reasonably grim stuff. The hero of Blackdog does tend to go for the throat on the battlefield and the assassin hero in my forthcoming series, Marakand, has a past that is decidedly Not Nice (his present just gets worse). Violence, horror, fear, pain, death — these are all part of epic fantasy, which almost by definition is going to deal with war at some point along the way and will certainly throw its characters into nasty situations, both as active doers of deeds and as suffering victims. Sometimes detailed physical description is what you need to do what the story needs done. Sometimes it isn’t. When it is, the detailed physical description alone shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. I was talking about this just last night with the Spouse, and then, while procrastinating on Twitter this morning, I wandered into a conversation with Juliet E. McKenna and Tom Lloyd that touched on the same ideas. This led me to wonder if, as we see the increased brutality inflicted in books praised as some kind of standard that is supposed to be achieved, we fantasy writers don’t sometimes get the feeling that we’d

Blog Posts

Recommended Reads for October 2013

/

Recommended Reads is a monthly feature in which the Skiffy and Fanty crew tell you about one thing they recently read that they think you might like too. Here are their picks: Shaun Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit Books:  Oct. 2013) To say that a lot of people are talking about this book is an understatement.  Yet, the amount of buzz Leckie has received for Ancillary Justice, her debut novel, is deserved.  This is the kind of military SF / space opera a lot of us have been waiting for.  From the first pages, the novel tears down our comfortable notions of self and gender, pulls apart language to display its arbitrary construction in relation to culture, and shoves us right smack dab in the middle of a sprawling, reminiscent empire.  It’s the kind of novel that my geek side can squee about without end…oh, hell, my academic side is doing that too.  If you’re looking for

Blog Posts

Genrelogues: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Episodes 1-4)

/

Genrelogues Shaun and Jen’s new column about new and old SF/F television, film, and literature.  This week, Shaun and Jen tackle the first four episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., airing every Tuesday (8/7c) on ABC.  Though we will try not to ruin whatever we’re talking about with a lot of detail, you should be warned that spoilers are inevitable.  Read with care. If you have any thoughts about the show or what we’ve got to say below, leave a comment! ———————————————————————— Shaun:  Since this is our first Genrelogue, I want to start off by talking about the issue of anticipation in relation to this particular product.  There are a couple things I think are worth exploring here.  First, the simple fact that this is another attempt on the part of Joss Whedon to successfully capture the genre TV market, which we all know he hasn’t been all that successful at in recent years (the early cancellation of Firefly, by many accounts a classic, and the poor showing of Dollhouse, which got off on a bad foot the second the studios nerfed his original beginning).  Since his success with The Avengers, my guess is Marvel expects AoS to be their “in” to the TV market.  And since they’re on a major network — ABC — they will have the benefit of a much larger audience than their competitor, DC, whose only major live-action show, Arrow, appears on the CW — which, though successful within that particular network, does not benefit from

Blog Posts

Confessions of a Comics Junkie: The Racial Politics of Mutations (or, Mutant Passing)

/

One of the reasons I have always preferred Marvel over DC is the fact that it’s world, however absurd at times, at least tries to explore what might happen if a bunch of people with extraordinary powers popped up in our neighborhoods.  In short, humans have a tendency to freak out.  In a weird, unexpected way, the Marvel Universe (Earth 616, not the other versions, which I’m not currently following) is an exploration of evolutionary change, the likes of which we haven’t seen because the last major change in our species “group,” as far as we know, was before written records.  I’m talking about the Neanderthals.[1]  We’ll never know exactly how humans reacted to those funny-looking humanoids, though we’re pretty sure there was some violence, some sex, and probably some group hugging in certain parts of the world.  And in a similar way, we don’t know exactly how humans would react to the rise of mutants; instead, we

Scroll to Top