Raritania
Monday, July 22, 2019
James Bond and Britain's Small Wars
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Studying the Bond series for my books I found myself increasingly researching post-war Britain--to the point that I wound up writing two boo...
Monday, July 15, 2019
Paramilitary Fiction and the Military Techno-thriller: The Question of Social Class
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In one of the comparatively few scholarly articles written about the military techno-thriller, "Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Nove...
Friday, July 12, 2019
A Genre of Flying Stories?
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Looking back at the military techno-thriller, it seems worth remarking that not all combat arms or weapons systems were equally popular wit...
On Being an "Adult"
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Cultural commentators have always inflicted on the world a great deal of inanity about the younger generation not measuring up to their sati...
Home Improvement
: Nostalgic From the Start
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Running into the odd Home Improvement rerun on cable, I am time and again struck by how backward-looking that superficially contemporary sh...
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
The Delay of Bond 25
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The latest word about "Bond 25" is that it will start hitting theaters in April 2020. Assuming the franchise keeps to the schedu...
Saturday, June 29, 2019
The Historiography of Paramilitary Fiction
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I have been reading and thinking and writing a great deal about spy fiction and military techno-thrillers. It is not really possible to do...
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Science Fiction's Side Stories?
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Most of this who dig into the history of science fiction in any systematic way quickly encounter a particular outline of that history, or at...
Science Fiction as Chivalric Literature?
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The chivalric tale of the Middle Ages and after glorified and flattered the feudal warrior-aristocracy. Likewise science fiction has glorifi...
Counterfactuals as Wish-Fulfillment
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In considering the historical counterfactual E.H. Carr argued in his classic What is History? that when facing a major turning point in the...
Monday, June 24, 2019
The Evolution of the Thriller
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Last year I published a pair of papers over at SSRN about the declining presence on the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly bestsel...
Why Nothing Ever Seems to Go Viral
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As Hit Makers author Derek Thompson explained in an interview with Forbes , for something to go viral means the product or idea in question...
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Reflections on Erich Maria Remarque's A
ll Quiet on the Western Front
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I recently revisited Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . The book is not a sprawling epic in the manner of War and P...
Monday, June 17, 2019
Rewatching the '90s?
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I recently had occasion to think about how we never left the '80s in the really important things--in our economics and politics, the rig...
Thursday, June 6, 2019
The End of High Concept Comedy?
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Recently running into a commercial for the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly vehicle Holmes & Watson on On Demand I was surprised that I didn...
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