SPOILERS WARNING: This post deals with the nine Expanse novels and discusses the series’ ending. The Expanse is a series of nine space opera novels—Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), Abaddon’s Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon’s Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) and Leviathan Falls (2021)—accompanied by a short […]
My post today is inspired by Daniel Soufi’s article for El País “Salvar el mundo por no jubilarse: los héroes de más de 60 años llenan las pantallas de cine” [Saving the World to Avoid Retirement: Over-60 Heroes Fill the Cinema Screens]. Soufi wonders why ageing male actors are still playing action heroes and names […]
I’m returning to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, which I discussed two posts ago, this time to reflect on the strategies required to face such a long read for academic purposes. Whereas mainstream and literary novels are usually published as stand-alone volumes, series abound in genre fiction. They are sometimes bound by the presence […]
The Expanse (2011-2021) is a nine-volume space opera series by James S.A. Corey (the joint penname of the duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), or a ten-volume series if you take into account the book gathering the associated short fiction. The novels have been adapted as a TV series, first by SyFy and later by […]
[WARNING: THIS POST DISCUSSES EPISODE 8, “ALLOYED”, OF AMAZON’S SERIES THE RINGS OF POWER] I’ve been watching with a mixture of boredom and annoyance Amazon’s The Rings of Power, telling myself there was no point in writing about it to vent my indignation as a Tolkien reader (though not a big fan). I agree with […]
Next semester I will teaching an MA subject on popular music and masculinity as a sort of sequel to the BA course I taught last year which led to the publication of the collective e-book by the students Songs of Empowerment: Women in 21st Century Popular Music (downloadable for free). I wrote a post presenting […]
The one who should be writing this post today is my PhD student Pascal Lemaire since he has chosen to deal with the technothriller as his topic of research. However, I am myself curious about some of the points he is raising about this genre, so here I am. Back in 2014 Pascal published in […]
One of experts interviewed in the collective volume edited by psychologist Jean-François Marmion, The Psychology of Stupidity (2020; originally Psychologie de la Connerie, 2018; trans. Liesl Schillinger), to which I devoted my post of 4 March, was moral philosopher Aaron James. Having now read his splendid monograph Assholes: A Theory (2012), I would like to […]
As I write, the Russian nuclear armament is ready to strike anywhere in, probably, the whole world and both the media and the social media are debating whether Russian President Vladimir Putin might eventually order a strike, and against whom. To the world’s amazement, the Ukrainians are still resisting and Kyiv has not fallen down […]
This is the ten-minute talk I gave last week at the international conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, of which I spoke in my last post. Since we had been given such a short time, I used no secondary sources and focused directly on the two novels I discuss. I was a bit nervous […]