The so-called ‘Sokal Squared’ collective who effectively trolled a series of journals a few years back with spoof articles intended to satirise the methodologies, findings and content of social science journals, have been defending their work.
By way of aide-memoire for anyone who doesn’t recall the ‘Grievance Studies’ debacle, in 2017 and 2018, three academics submitted a range of papers for submission to academic journals primarily dedicated to topics such as cultural, queer, race, sexuality and fat studies. The academics – Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose – contended that the level of scholarly standards in these journals, and indeed in those fields, was low and eroding the reputation of academia generally.
Lindsay and Pluckrose, chuckling over the content of one of their bogus articles
When some of their articles were published, they went public to condemn what they saw as poor academic standards in these fields, and critique what they termed the prioritisation of ‘social grievances’ over rigorous academic scholarship. Their contention was that certain fields were underpinned by the assumption of certain grievances, and the scholarship which took place within those fields amended and adapted theories and findings to reinforce those grievances.
The reaction was varied; they received praise from some quarters, including some of the journal editors themselves, but they were also on the receiving end of serious criticism for what many perceived as unethical behaviour. After the debacle reached the pages of the New York Times, Boghossian was even investigated by his own employer in relation to academic ethics.
This current paper, some years on, in the journal Sociological Methods and Research, suggests that the Sokal Squared authors are still not happy about how their experiment was received. In response to a journal article supporting them last year, they have come out with this latest attempt to explain their methods and motives. I expect likewise that there are many people working in those particular academic disciplines who remain unhappy with the ‘Grievance Studies’ papers experiment in the first place.
Mostly, I’m noting this because I cited most of these papers in one of my own, an article which also aimed to highlight what I perceived as a shoddy corner of academia engaged in dubious practices, which could best be highlighted by actually engaging with the process of submitting a paper.
My target was, I think, much less ambiguous than that of Boghossian et. al. I took aim at the predatory open access journals which have sprung up in recent years, looking to prey on primarily emerging academics and academics from developing nations by charging sky-high article processing fees. In order to highlight that my article was a hoax, I cited not only the Grievance Studies articles which had made it into print, but also Sokal himself, the granddaddy of the practice, whose 1996 spoof of postmodern cultural studies led ultimately to a book, and an argument with Jacques Derrida.
I think I was able to categorically demonstrate the shoddy and debased academic practices, if you can even call them that, of these journals. I’m not entirely convinced that the Sokal Squared team made their case as definitively, but in this latest article, they do manage to convince that theirs was a serious attempt to expose what they felt was of serious concern.
What if academic articles weren’t so long? What if they were like 10% or 15% as long? That’d be easier to read, sure, but equally wouldn’t convey much information. And what if they were published almost instantly? That’d be great, right? No hanging around for months or years after submission?
But what if they eschewed peer review as it is understood, though, and simply published after a couple of people recommended to do so, even if dozens of others had recommended refusal? What if their only criteria was whether it was readable? Would that still sound like a rigorous approach to academic research and publishing? Or blogging under a thin veil of borrowed academic legitimacy?
Recently I have begun receiving spam from Academia.Edu, asking me to peer review papers on a wide range of at best tangentially-related research.
Initially this confused me somewhat, because when Academia began, it presented itself as a kind of social media outlet for academics. However, this soon morphed into a variant of the ResearchGate/Scopus/Orcid model, wherein academics post their research online in the hope of disseminating it more widely.
Academia then introduced a pay-to-play option, which required subscribers to pay a fee to access most of the information which was useful to them, ie statistical information about who was reading their work. At that point, it began losing my interest, and I became less motivated to post my work for free to their site to make them money.
It’s still a useful site, especially for independent researchers, who generally lack affiliation to a university with library subscriptions to the big journal publishers. Like ResearchGate and the others, there’s a chance to find a pre-pub version of an article on Academia quickly when you need to check a citation. But they’re not satisfied with that.
Anyhow, obviously they’ve now decided that the peer-review academic publishing market is hackable, and have gone after it with zeal. What’s interesting is where they’ve positioned themselves.
According to their pitch – for that’s what it is – they’ve launched something called “Academia Letters”, which they bill as “a new experiment in rapid academic publishing.” In practice, this means that micro-articles of 800-1600 words, on ANY topic, are submitted and then immediately sent, IN BATCHES, to potential reviewers. Hence my spam.
An article will be published as soon as two reviewers agree to its publication. There are two issues with this. Literally hundreds could recommend rejection and an article would still be published under this system, entirely defeating the main purpose of peer review. Additionally, the model overtly states that it does not accommodate revisions. It is not possible for a reviewer to recommend that an author revise or improve their work. It must be published as is.
In fact, such is their desire for sausage meat for their academic sausage factory, they openly guide reviewers that, even if they detect a need for improvement, they should still accept it for publication, so long as it is “rigorous and worth reading.”
The deciding factor of whether an article is “worth reading” is something that they set great importance upon. In fact, it’s the only question they want their reviewers to answer. Here is their list of criteria they want reviewers to consider in deciding whether an article is worth reading:
Is the article interesting or thought-provoking?
Is it novel in its methods or conclusions?
Does it counter current thinking?
Is it especially timely?
Does it address a longstanding question or debate in the field?
Would it change thinking on that topic, if it were true?
Is it rigorous and the argument logically sound?
That all sounds good, or at least, it doesn’t immediately raise too many alarms. But an academic article would not ordinarily be published just because it was “timely” or because it stubbornly and crankily ran counter to a consensus of opinion. Worse, Academia manages to lower the bar even further by noting that their site is read by people who include “curious members of the general public”, and hence articles should be assessed for whether ANYONE would want to read it.
In short, here is the dumbing down of peer review, a tragic tribute act run for the profit of a for-profit corporation, and enabled by the free labour of any academic sufficiently gullible, or desperate, to play along, either as author or reviewer.
Academia.Edu want to reduce the length of academic articles to that of the average blog post, replace genuine and fastidious peer review with a single “would anyone read it” criterion for publication, and eradicate the processes of recommendation, revision and resubmission, all in the name of … well, what, exactly? Efficiency? Timeliness? Or their own bottom line as they seek to drive more traffic, and recruit more subscribers?
I really can’t see an upside for academics in getting involved in any of this. It’s a total erosion of all existing standards. And yet, the spam keeps coming…
A friend was complaining about struggling with writing a section of work. I upchucked my maudlin all over their social media and now feel shame, so instead I’m relocating it to my own space for self-indulgence. You’re welcome.
Me, most days.
Writing is truly Sysiphean. You spend literal aeons of your life doing it, and when it’s done all you can see are the errors, lit up like neon.
There’s always something. It doesn’t flow. You missed part of the argument. You didn’t know about that one guy who wrote the thing. There’s always something for Reviewer Number Two (accursed be thy name) to crank on about.
Right now, I’m two weeks late with a draft that is already 3,000 words over, and still half a chapter to go. I’m writing at lightspeed and it still feels like swimming through treacle with all limbs bound.
And when it IS done, I will hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, because of the pain of writing it, and the acute awareness of its flaws. But yet I’ll still be upset when Reviewer Number Two gets going.
And I’ll still want people to read it, though I’ll never want to see it ever again (yet will be destined to, repeatedly, when the rounds of editing commence.)
Sometimes I think I should take up something easier on the soul.
The last post was on options for people seeking review outlets for their publications on SF, or alternatively, looking for outlets for whom they might write such reviews. What it didn’t address was what those reviews actually do.
When you’re slogging through the writing of a book, it can be difficult to remain motivated sometimes, especially if that book is an academic text. Once upon a time, I was a journalist, and I would spend a few hours writing an article I knew literally millions of people would read. Now? I spend years writing something that perhaps measures its readership in the hundreds.
So, you find motivation where you can. Imagining a positive response from that small but focused readership is one way. You may dream, perhaps foolishly, that the book once finished will be truly understood by the few who encounter it. That it might persuade, change their thinking, provoke thoughts of their own.
Sometimes, if you are really very fortunate, your book will find such a reader. If fortune compounds itself positively, they may even be motivated to review it. And then you might have that extraordinary experience of seeing someone engage positively and constructively with your work.
I am thankful therefore to Rhodri Davies for being such a reviewer: critically astute, carefully analytical, and positively engaged in his encounter with my book on Science Fiction and Catholicism. I’m also thankful toFoundation, the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation, for publishing his review.
Unlike reviews of, say popular fiction, which are aimed at either enhancing or eroding sales, reviews of academic studies aren’t going to tilt the dial of books sold, and in any case, no academic ever made their fortune out of book sales. Few make anything at all. Rather, when you see your book reviewed, what you’re hoping for is that someone got what you were saying, whether they agreed or not.
Rhodri got it. I hope you will too, if you choose to read it.
Ok, so now you’ve published your book. It’s out. The beautiful hardcopy is in your hands. You want people to know that it exists. What do you do?
This is a book on SF that I wrote. I’m currently working on obtaining reviews for it. It took five years to write so it’s probably worth a little while attempting to let the world know about it, right?
Well, firstly your publisher should have a publicity department or at least a person who assumes responsibility for that role. Speak with them. In fact, many publishers will be pro-active about this, and request that you provide some suggestions for publicity in your original pitch or proposal document. So by the time you’ve published your book, this is already something that you and your publisher ought to have thought about.
Again, depending on the exact nature of your book, there are potential outlets beyond the SF-specific niche of journals and publications. You know your book best, and should be able to identify some of those publications.
In relation to SF, potential review outlets fall into two broad categories – academic journals and non-academic journals. This is not a quality distinction so much as a technical one. Both will let potential interested readers know about your book. But academic journals will be aggregated in academic journal aggregators, which could trigger citations, which in turn may or may not be an important issue for you. If, for example, you’re trying to make a case for tenure at a university, this may be a big deal.
Anyhow, and as previously this is FAR from exhaustive, here are some potential review outlets for monographs or other books on SF criticism.
Foundation – This has been running since the early Seventies and is an official publication of the Science Fiction Foundation. As of the time of writing (ie January 2021), Paul March-Russell is editor, and Allen Stroud is reviews editor. That’s who to contact and their contact info is here.
Science Fiction Studies is the big SF journal stateside. It’s currently edited by Arthur Evans, who is probably also a good person to contact about your book.
Fafnir is a great little journal published out of Scandinavia. Dennis Wise, who is based in America (and who would like you to know is NOT the former Chelsea footballer!) is the current reviews editor and a good man to contact about your book.
Hélice is another Europe-based journal, and is associated with the excellent Sci-Phi journal. The distinction is that Sci-Phi publishes fiction and essays, whereas Hélice publishes reviews, in Spanish and English. You should look to contact Mariano Martín Rodríguez (martioa@yahoo.com); Sara Martín Alegre (Sara.Martin@uab.cat) or Mikel Peregrina Castaños (peretorian@gmail.com)
Vector is the critical journal of the BSFA and it is currently edited by Polina Levontin and Jo Lindsay Walton, along with occasional guest editors. They are open to submissions on a rolling basis. To query, contact vector.submissions@gmail.com. They don’t have a standing body of reviewers, but it’s a great journal and worth speaking to them in the hope that a review might be able to be arranged.
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts is a well-established stateside journal which looks at SF in all media. Jeffrey A. Weinstock is the current reviews editor, while for reviews of works in languages other than English, it is recommended to contact David Dalton.
MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is relatively recently established and closely associated with the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington DC. The journal’s managing editor, Aisha Matthews, is the best principal contact.
It’s also worth talking to some of the many SF publications out there too of course, and perhaps to other literary and even more general publications, depending on the exact topic and remit of your book.
Many SF publications are happy to review academic texts on SF. Among those who welcome such reviews are Proxima, published in Denmark, and the long-running and well-respected Strange Horizons.
It’s worth considering publications which do not specialise in SF too. For example, the general literary journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books is traditionally friendly to SF as a genre and has published many articles and reviews on SF themes over the years.
As always, do some due diligence by actually reading journals and publications before contacting them cold, and don’t be upset if a) they can’t find a reviewer for your book; b) have too many reviews pending to consider reviewing it or c) the review isn’t exactly what you hoped for. Such is life.
I hope this is of help, and as before, I will amend as I gather new pertinent information and attempt to keep this current.
I was asked this by a colleague who wanted to turn their doctoral thesis into a monograph. That in itself is not a straightforward task, and there are guides elsewhere on the web discussing that process. In short, a thesis is not a book (yet).
Anyhow, once a book is in sight, or at least in the planning, the next question arises as to where to publish it? SF criticism is not as marginalised as it once was, and there are now quite a few academic publishers with specialist series looking at the genre.
I collated the following list, which I emphasise is far from exhaustive, as potential starting points for my colleague. I’m sharing it here after a commenter on the ever excellent London SF research community Facebook page suggested it might be of use to others. If I encounter anything which looks relevant, I may return to edit this and add things later.
Do note that it really ISN’T exhaustive. There are many other options too, depending on the type of book you may have in mind. Biographies of major authors have traction beyond academic publishers for example. Books on popular TV or cinematic SF might do likewise. Even academic critical texts on SF may find a home outside these specialist series. A book on religious futurism for example may well find a home in a series on theology rather than on SF, for example.
Other publishers, such as Oxford UP, Cambridge UP, Bloomsbury and so on will often publish SF criticism without necessarily including it in a specific dedicated series. Bloomsbury for example list over 200 SF-themed texts on their website. So this resource really is just a starting point for someone looking for a place to publish their text.
As always, do your own due diligence, and remember that it’s better to find an editorial team who you like working with and who are supportive of your book than to go with the allegedly prestigious or prolific imprint which may process your book as in a sausage factory, or fail to promote it among a lengthy roster.
(For that very reason, I went with Gylphi for my book on SF and Catholicism, even though they may not be the most prestigious or established of academic publishers, because their small attentive team really prioritised and helped me produce the best possible iteration of my idea, and I felt really supported throughout the whole process.)
And on that note, don’t forget you’ll have to do a lot of promotion of your book yourself these days, including identifying potential review outlets. I believe the LSFRC might be looking at producing a resource on that too, which I for one would welcome.
Without further ado, in no particular order…
Series Name
Publisher
Editors
Sample publication/ additional information
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies
Liverpool University Press
David Seed, Sherryl Vint
A longstanding series – 69 publications to date, many by leading SF scholars – innovative but can take a conservative approach at times.
Wesleyan Science Fiction / Literary Criticism
Wesleyan University Press
Arthur B. Evans
Publish anthologies and early classics editions as well as critical monographs. Closely connected to SF Studies journal.
Modern Masters of Science Fiction
University of Illinois Press
Gary K. Wolfe
Monographs series focusing on individual SF authors. The press also publishes other SF-related texts, including a trilogy of Ray Bradbury biographies
Gylphi SF Storyworlds
Gylphi Press
Paul March-Russell
An innovative and eclectic series of SF monographs and critical essay collections, spanning literature and other media.
World Science Fiction Studies
Peter Lang
Sonja Fritzsche and Gerry Canavan
Relatively new series of monographs focusing on postcolonial and decolonised topics. Be warned, the publisher may seek a payment contribution from the author.
Studies in Global Genre Fiction
Routledge
Taryne Jade Taylor and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay
New series which examines global iterations of genre fictions, open to receiving proposals relating to global SF
Studies in Global Science Fiction
Palgrave Macmillan
Anindita Banerjee, Rachel Haywood Ferreira, and Mark Bould
Rapidly establishing series which focuses on localised iterations of global SF, publishing single author monographs and edited collections.
Ralahine Utopian Studies
Peter Lang
Raffaella Baccolini, Antonis Balasopoulos, Joachim Fischer, Michael J. Griffin, Naomi Jacobs, Michael G. Kelly, Tom Moylan and Phillip E. Wegner
Twenty volumes to date, examining utopian studies in general and not solely in a SF context, though many are reprints of classic utopian studies texts.
Addendum:
Remiss of me to omit McFarland’s longstanding series on ‘Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy’, which has been going for over 15 years now and is one of the most prolific series out there, with over 70 books (most of which are SF.) They cast their net wide, and it inevitably contains a lot of things like mythology and Tolkien which are somewhat distant from SF. Notably open to monographs, edited collections, biographies and even critically edited reprint volumes of neglected works. Edited by Donald Palumbo.
New Dimensions in Science Fiction, eds. Pawel Frelik and Patrick B. Sharp, University of Wales Press, which has published six texts to date, including examinations of Indian SF, early SF feminism and, intriguingly, Plants in SF.
New Suns: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Speculative, eds. Susana M. Morris and Kinitra D. Brooks, Ohio State University Press, which to date has specialised in Afrofuturism criticism but has a remit to look at other forms of (marginalised) identity in SF and cognate fields.
Tentatively adding Routledge’s new series “Studies in Speculative Fiction” which to date has published two quite different texts with more forthcoming, and advertises a remit of “literatures from all around the word that fall within the speculative fiction umbrella, including but not limited to, science fiction, fantasy, horror, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic, utopian/dystopian literatures, and supernatural fiction.” The editors for this series have not been identifiable.
For more options, see Jo Walton’s extensive comment below.
Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like The Sun is a literary tour-de-force, inventing not only the details of the notoriously shadowy Shakespeare’s life, but also recreating Elizabethan prose in a contemporary novel form in which to do so. It is rightfully regarded as one of Burgess’s finest novels.
However, some aspects do tend to confuse some readers. The fact that the novel is technically a nested narrative, Shakespeare’s story as told by an ever more drunken lecturer to his students in Malaysia, is often overlooked by readers, for example. Others struggle with the conclusion of the novel, in which the dying Shakespeare’s last thoughts merge with those of the lecturer, who is falling drunkenly asleep. This is effectively a very obscure list of apparently random elements, and gives the effect of a strange delirium, which was clearly intended by the author.
I once sought to elucidate meaning from this notoriously opaque passage, and managed to do so with some success. What follows below has not previously been published, though it has been of assistance to me and to a number of scholars and translators of Burgess in the past. In the hope it might continue to be of use to others, and that it might even be possible to complete the references, I offer it below:
The allegedly ‘aleatory’ process by which Burgess created the dying delirium of the syphilitic Shakespeare in Nothing Like The Sun is, on surface reading, quite random. Burgess’s typically obtuse choice of adjective (in this case, a musical term implying progression by chance) suggests that the phrases chosen were identified seemingly in a randomised fashion. In his autobiography, Burgess detailed how he generated it:
A magazine called Choice said that the epilogue, ‘Shakespeare’s dying delirium, is writing of the highest order.’ Not quite so, really. I had taught myself the trick of contriving a satisfying coda by what, in music, is termed aleatory means: I flicked through the dictionary and took whatever words leaped from the page. I did this again at the end of my Napoleon novel: the effect is surrealist, oceanic and easily achieved.1
There is, undeniably, an element of induced randomness in the flood of words that conclude Nothing Like The Sun. But unlike the conclusion of Napoleon Symphony, where the chosen phrases (including bellowing gnus, nematode worms and Bengal) appear to have little to do with the subject matter of the novel, there is a significant element of relevance in Burgess’s chosen list of phrases in Nothing Like The Sun. It is worth noting that for Kingdom of the Wicked, Burgess’s tale of the first century of the Christian church, he resurrected the effect but not the random element. Instead, the reader encounters an alphabetic progression of Roman names, all of whom are destined to be destroyed in Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius.
If the list in Napoleon Symphony is, as it seems, genuinely random while the list in Kingdom of the Wicked is obviously carefully constructed to an order, the list that makes up Will’s deathbed delirium lies somewhere in between. Many of the phrases chosen have resonance in the plot of the novel that precede them. It is not possible to take Burgess entirely at his word when he says that he gleaned them all simply by flicking through a dictionary. Even the most comprehensive encyclopedia is unlikely to contain all the elements Burgess includes in his conclusion. It features forgotten nautical novels of the nineteenth century, thrillers from the early twentieth century, B-movies and quotations from obscure Jacobean drama. The only encyclopedia likely to encompass such diverse and remote elements is Burgess’s own mind himself.
It is likely that he did proceed with a certain element of randomness in the choice of phrases he included. A psychoanalytical approach, which I am not qualified to attempt, might even possibly glean why he chose those and not others. However, it is clear is that many of the phrases were carefully included to reinforce the thesis of the novel as presented by its lecturer-narrator, ‘Mr Burgess’ – that Shakespeare had a child by a Malay prostitute and his lineage lived on in the East, though he paid for it by contracting syphilis. Here is the passage in full:
Oaklings, footsticks, cinques, moxibustion, the Maccabees, the Lydian mode (soft, effeminate), the snow-goose or whitebrant, rose-windows, government, the conflagration of citadel and senate-house, Bucephalus, the Antilegomena, Simnel Sunday, the torrid zone, Wapping, my lord’s top-boots, the shoeflower, prostitute boys, dittany, face-ague, cosmic cinefaction, the Antipodes, the Gate of Bab, Fidessa, Rattlin the Reefer, Taliesin, the dead head in alchemy, the bar, dungeons, skylarks, the wind, Thaumast, the dark eyes of London, the fellowship of the frog, Gesta Regum Anglorum, Myrddhin, faithful dealing, A Girle Worth Gold, viticulture, the Queen that’s dead (bee, meadow, chess, Bench, regnant), imposts of arches, pollards, sea-fox and sea-hog and sea-health, the sigmoid curve, cardinals, touchability.2
The biggest clue that Burgess carefully chose the elements that make up this section is that so many of these phrases relate to Malaysia. The shoeflower, for example, sounds suitably Elizabethan, but in fact it is not native to Europe. Also known as Chinese Hibiscus, it is however, the national symbol of Malaysia. Close examination of the rest of the list produces many similar revelations. In fact, the vast majority of the phrases used by Burgess in this passage fall into one of five categories; they either relate to Malaysia, to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era, to love, to sailing or they are obscure British cultural products of the early twentieth century which Burgess himself (or, indeed, his lecturer avatar) might have encountered.
At this point in the novel, the lecturer-narrator ‘Mr Burgess’ is falling into a drunken stupor, having apparently imbibed three bottles of indigenous rice spirit donated to him by his students at the outset of the lecture. He begins to associate himself with Shakespeare, and claims, just prior to this ‘aleatoric’ passage, to be descended from the bard. “He sent his blood out there,” says the sleepy ‘Mr Burgess’. “I am of his blood.”3
His drunken dreaming merges with Shakespeare’s dying delirium and the flood of images that results is the product of both minds. There are the references to Shakespeare’s era, such as ‘A Girle Worth Gold’, which is the subtitle to The Fair Maid of the West, a 1630 comedy in two parts by Thomas Heywood,4 and then there are the references to Burgess’s own era, such as The Fellowship of the Frog, which is a 1923 thriller in which a secret society of criminals commit robberies across London, and which was made in 1960 into a German-backed B-movie. Then there are the images which span both minds, both eras. The “conflagration of the citadel and senate-house”, for example, is a reference to the burning of Troy in the Aeneid, which would no doubt be familiar to both Shakespeare and Burgess, even in his ‘Mr Burgess’ lecturer-avatar guise. Taliesin the poet, Myrddin the mystic, the Maccabees, the Antilegomena (the books excluded from the Bible) and even Bucephalus, Alexander the Great’s horse, all can be considered elements of the cultural sphere with which both Shakespeare (or Will) and Burgess (or ‘Mr Burgess’) were familiar.
Most of the remaining phrases refer either to the East, or love, or to nautical elements or else to crossovers between the five categories. Perhaps these nautical references should be understood as the passage of Shakespeare’s blood line to the East. Equally, we might think of it as the subconscious mind of ‘Mr Burgess’, who sailed to the East where he is delivering his lecture, just as the real Anthony Burgess sailed there, conflating his thesis with the seasick-type nausea of his own drunkenness.
The sailing references are the most obvious. Three terms in a row evoke the sea overtly, and the wind is also mentioned. But there is also Wapping, which is in London’s docklands and was the location where pirates and other seafaring criminals were executed in the Elizabethan era. Rattlin the Reefer is a nineteenth century nautical adventure novel written by Edward Howard and edited by his better known author friend Frederick Marryat. Skylarks are not only birds, but also practical jokes played at sea, the etymology of the term ‘larking around.’ A sea-hog is a porpoise, and sea-health likely simply means the opposite of sea-sickness.
The Shakespearean, or Elizabethan, references are also easy to acknowledge. ‘Footsticks’ were used to delineate a page in the printing industry. The ‘Lydian mode’ is a rising musical scale which slightly differed in Renaissance times. ‘Rose-windows’, then as now, are found in Gothic churches. ‘Faithful dealing’ refers to the spying of Christopher Marlowe, about whom the Privy Council wrote to Cambridge University in 1587 to praise his “faithful dealing” so that he would not be sent down for non-attendance. The ‘Queen that’s dead’ is possibly Mary of Scots or even Elizabeth I, but more likely it is a phrase gleaned from When You See Me, You Know Me, a 1605 Jacobean play by minor playwright Samuel Rowley which is thought to have been a source for Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.5Prostitute boys was a derogatory but not always inaccurate term for the young male actors who played female roles in the Elizabethan theatre.
Similarly, the anachronistic Burgess-era references are relatively simple to spot because they cluster around the early twentieth century in terms of their dates. In addition to The Fellowship of the Frog, there is the ‘dark eyes of London’, which is the title of a horror B-movie starring Bela Lugosi from 1940. Another film released that same year, coincidentally the year in which Burgess was writing his undergraduate thesis on Christopher Marlowe in the shadow of the blitz, was entitled Torrid Zone 6, a phrase which is also clearly a reference to the Tropics. The sea-fox was a World War II era British floatplane used until 1943, also clearly a nautical reference.
Terms relating to Malaysia and the East abound. Moxibustion, for example, is a Chinese medical remedy involving burning mugwort on the skin, which is common among Chinese communities in South-East Asia. Cardinals are obviously senior Catholic clerics, but they may also be birds, specifically a type of bunting found in the Tropics, or, to take a nautical meaning, points of the compass. There are many famous Gates of Bab (meaning door in Arabic) scattered throughout the Muslim world, from Cairo and Morocco to Syria and Yemen. There is likely at least one in Muslim Malaysia too. In the sense that the entrance to any mosque is a gate of bab, there are many, then and now. The Antipodes are the furthest point on Earth away from one’s present position; in Shakespeare’s time, with Australasia yet to be discovered by James Cook, that meant the East Indies, which had, from 1605, been occupied by the Dutch. Fidessa, an old-fashioned Dutch name meaning loyalty, may also be a reference to this period as well as an invocation of fidelity.
The phrases relating to love and lust are the most obscure. Dittany of Crete is a hermaphroditic plant which historically symbolised love, and young men would risk their lives climbing cliffs to harvest it. The plant was believed to be an aphrodisiac, but was also used to heal wounds and to induce menstruation. Snow geese are permanently monogamous, meaning that they mate for life. Face-ague is a somewhat antiquated term for a form of neuralgia which causes convulsive twitching of the face muscles, a known and occasional symptom of syphilis in any of its three stages. Touchability is, simply, the ability to touch, something denied to a syphilitic.
Some of the remaining phrases Burgess used do not fall into any of the categories I have identified, but nevertheless they clearly refer to the plot of the novel that precedes them. Thaumast is an English ‘learned man’ defeated in a challenge by Panurge after they dispute “in signs” over “insoluble problems, both in magic, alchymy, the cabala, geomancy, astrology and philosophy”7 in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, which though written before Shakespeare’s birth was not translated into English until Thomas Urquhart’s version a century later. Taliesin is the early Welsh poet who sang as bard to three kings in the sixth century. Likewise, Gesta Regum Anglorum (the deeds of the kings of England) is the title of William of Malmesbury’s history of the Dark Ages. All of these might be taken as oblique references to Shakespeare or his works, or again as part of the common cultural heritage shared by Will and Mr Burgess.
It is likely that the remaining phrases are similarly allusive. It is possible, though improbable, that they are as random as the list which concludes Napoleon Symphony. While music is present in Nothing Like The Sun, it was not written, as Napoleon Symphony was, to prioritise the musical structure. Burgess was at liberty to subvert literary meaning for integrity to his musical structure in the later novel. In Nothing Like The Sun, he did not permit himself the same freedom to evade meaning in favour of form.
There is sufficient cohesive patterning in the terms of this literary delirium to prove Burgess’s point, made in M/F, that even a denial of structure transpires to be simply a different form of taxonomic structure. Despite his claims to the contrary, there is little randomness (or aleatoricism) in the phrases Burgess used for Will’s dying delirium. Even if we take Burgess at his word in relation to his method for creating this passage, it must be assumed that he was subconsciously drawn to phrases which evoked elements of his novel. However, the sheer unlikelihood of any dictionary or encyclopedia containing all these varied references tends to suggest that, in fact, the majority if not the whole were carefully chosen.
The list evokes not only the Shakespearean era but also the Burgessian one, and furthermore, it hints at the very thesis of the novel; that Will’s lust for a Dark Lady from the East infected him with syphilis but his love for her also bore him a son who sailed back to the Antipodes to sustain the Shakespearean bloodline there.
1You’ve Had Your Time, Anthony Burgess, Heinemann, London, 1990, p. 80.
2Nothing Like The Sun, Anthony Burgess, Heinemann, London, 1964, p. 234.
3Nothing Like The Sun, Anthony Burgess, Heinemann, London, 1964, p. 234.
4 The play features a heroine, Bess, who rises from lowly origins as a barmaid in Plymouth to pirate upon the Spanish and engage in a series of picaresque adventures in Morocco and Italy. The first part is considered representative of Elizabethan era drama, but the second, in which the feisty heroine becomes much more passive and the actors engage in verbal battles of honour, looks forward to the mannered dramas of the Caroline age. In this aspect, it is often considered as an example of the transition from the drama of Shakespeare’s era and the stylised comedies that followed later.
5 In the section of the play where this line occurs, Lord Brandon is briefing Cardinal Wolsley on the mental state of the King. The full quotation runs: “His grace hath taken such an inward grief / With sad remembrance of the queen that’s dead, / That much his highness wrongs his state and person.”
6 The movie was a James Cagney vehicle, in which he is hired by his former enemy as an enforcer to put down revolutionaries who threaten his banana crop in Honduras.
7The Works of Francis Rabelais translated from the French in Four Volumes, François Rabelais, London, 1807, Vol. II, p. 147.
The University of Oslo has a number of fascinating research projects and this latest one is of particular interest to anyone intrigued by religious futurism.
The Mythopolitics project is looking to recruit a doctoral researcher to examine if and how, 2014 onwards, there have been significant effects on popular public opinion and the political culture of India due to shifts in the construct of Hindu identity and Hindu nationalism. The popular media platforms could range from traditional to social media, for example: Bombay cinema, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook.
Applications before January 15th 2021 are invited from candidates with a Master’s degree in visual studies/art history, film studies, culture studies, visual/cultural anthropology or allied disciplines.
This was originally published on LinkedIn. At some point, I will likely decide that I have no real purpose or need of a presence there, hence reproducing it here.
The oceans of knowledge are not a safe place for an unwary early career researcher, or academic from the developing world, who needs to publish their work to gain tenure or promotion.
Here be monsters, shady companies who prey on desperate and ill-advised academics. The scam is simple. There is a drive to open source publishing in academia to make knowledge as freely available as possible. This is because academics tend to produce their work as employees of universities, who are then charged by publishers to access that same work. This too could be considered a little unethical, but it is not new. The system, for those unfamiliar with it, is well described here.
No, I’m talking about a more recent development. With the drive to online, publishers have emerged offering to publish academic work for a fee. This fee, they insist, is to cover things like editorial, proofreading, and layout, as well as online hosting costs. However, the fees requested often run into hundreds or thousands of pounds. Unwary academics, often from developing nations, do not always distinguish these ‘journals’ from more respectable ones, which is how they make their money.
Most academics have been spammed at some point by these journals (the respectable ones don’t need to spam to recruit submissions.). Most academics wearily delete the emails. Some academics dream of spamming them back. Sometimes, academics with a little spare time troll the spammers, publishing nonsense articles to highlight their lack of professional standards. There have been articles published on the use of geese in obstetrics, the existence of midichlorians (the fictional cause of Star Wars’ ‘force’), and even an article simply entitled ‘Stop emailing me’, which consisted of that phrase multiply repeated.
I’ve been on parental leave recently, and as I had a day between writing projects and the baby was behaving himself, I decided to bite on the latest spam from an alleged Journal of Advances in Oceanography and Marine Biology. This too is an indicator of a scam journal, when their topic is very distant from your own speciality subject. Mine is not oceanography. I’m a literary scholar who teaches literature and journalism. So, rising to the challenge, I wrote an article about mermaids, selkies, sea monsters and oceans of lard.
They asked for $979 to publish it. We negotiated, while the article allegedly was out for ‘peer review’. Peer review is a system where other academics read your work blind and offer guidance on whether it should be published. It’s a voluntary quality control system, which moves slowly, because academics aren’t paid to do it, and it’s often at the bottom of their large ‘to-do’ lists. Articles can languish in peer review for months, and sometimes even longer. So it is another indicator of a scam journal when your article completes peer review in ten days, as mine did.
Meanwhile, I had beaten the cost down to $50. They got sticky there, because obviously the sales people on the email line like to make their money and this seems to be their floor. Equally, I didn’t intend to pay at all, and I knew that for the scam to work on others, they needed some content. I gambled that they would publish my article for free to lure others. I also gambled that they hadn’t actually read it, and nor had any peer reviewer. The gamble was correct, and you can read my ridiculous article here (until they read this and delete it.) It’s called Speculative Oceanography.
The Times Literary Supplement is entirely correct to demand a reform of the practice of charging universities for work that they themselves produce. But there is a risk that we may then lurch to an even worse situation, where predatory journals scam desperate academics and researchers with ever more prevalence. A brave librarian in the United States used to maintain a list of such predatory journals and publishers, as a guide for academics to consult, but he and his university were threatened with lawsuits from the deep-pocketed publishers, and now that list is no longer updated, though new journals and publishers pop up daily.
As we move to fully open source academic publishing, we need an international quality control system to prevent predatory journals from preying on the unwary. We need to kill off the sea monsters of academia.