HEGEMONY AND INTELLECTUALS IN FANTASY

R.F. Kuang, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence (2023)
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1947)
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)

FANTASY, FIGHTING GAMES & CHARACTER ARCHETYPES

Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire (2010)
Adam Millard, The Architect of Games
DBFZ
Deux Ex: Human Revolution

MEMORY & OPPRESSION IN IMPERIAL SCI-FI

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire (2019)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963)
Cedric J. Robinson, Capitalism, Slavery, and Bourgeois Historiography (1987)

Moby-Dick and the Sublime

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014)
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2018)

Hope and the Future in Time Travel Fiction

Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955)
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta (1982)

Nostalgia and Melancholy in The Lord of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers (1954)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (1955)
Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia (2017)

Spoiled for Choice in Apocalypses

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976)

Merging Mystery and Magic

Jim Butcher, Storm Front (2000)
D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (1988)

Oppression through a Telescreen Darkly

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008)
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1975)

The Memories We Never Had

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer (2019)
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience (1996)

When Freedom Hangs on a Word

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)

The Limits of Awareness in Liberation

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning (2016)
Angela Davis, Women, Race, & Class (1981)

The Learned Wizard and the Sorcerer Prodigy

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

Describing the Impossible in Modern Fantasy

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1997)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)

Lunacy in Literature

Isaac Asimov, Nightfall (1941)
Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, Nightfall (1990)
H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

The Duty of Prediction in Science Fiction

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End (1953)
Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man” (1962)

Brighter Futures in Classic Sci-fi

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (1973)

On Constructive Violence

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)