Timothy S. Miller
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timothysmiller.bsky.social
Timothy S. Miller
@timothysmiller.bsky.social

fantasy, science fiction, medieval studies, plants
he/him
unicorn book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-53425-6
Earthsea book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-24640-1

History 40%
Art 15%

Very disturbing to see that Grammarly itself now offers an "AI Humanizer" as one of its core services. Our university provides Grammarly subscriptions to students...

"Anyone with perfect posture was faking it, overcompensating for entrenched trauma."

There was a time when JSTOR even sold merch: hats, mugs, and whatever else.

Did kids these days still know about CliffsNotes? When I say "It's like the Cliffsnotes version of X," should I be saying something like "It's like the AI summary version of X"?

This is such a huge problem: I'm googling a quotation to find a page number, and the AI overview confidently produces total nonsense that would mislead students and others. (This is of course a quotation from noted Jung distiller China Miéville speaking to the subject of "Marxism and Fantasy.")

It was possibly a mistake to assign the entire Tales of Nevèrÿon, because now I just want to spend the entire semester talking about the series.

(An advertisement I was served for a different, better way to cheat.)

What is going on in the world?

I would give a copy of this book to everyone in my neighborhood but I think they already hate us enough:

www.bloomsbury.com/us/lawn-9798...
Lawn
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.A quintessential feature in Western gardens and landsc…
www.bloomsbury.com

Very cool!!

Reposted by Timothy S. Miller

A new experience: an undergraduate sending me a request for an article I never wrote based off a fake AI citation.
Beautiful new medieval-themed issue of our UoM undergrad English Literature journal, with a foreword by me (doing my best to explain why medieval literature is worth studying): www.polyphonyjournal.com
Home | Polyphony
Polypghony
www.polyphonyjournal.com
After the brutal reality of dealing with student papers in the ChatGPT era finally hit me, here are a few tactics that I've found at least somewhat effective in getting students to do their own writing: 🧵

Classes are done: we're closing so many browser tabs today.

I still think it's funny that we both review the book quite positively, but you say that the discussion of Terry Brooks is one of your favorite parts of it, and in my review I say it's one of my least favorite...!

Can it be true that the audiobook of @alexpheby.bsky.social 's Mordew doesn't include the glossary? Unconscionable! I almost want to write a journal article on the glossary by itself.

Reposted by Timothy S. Miller

The latest issue of EXTRAPOLATION has a bunch of great reviews, including my review of Matthew Sanger's AN INTRODUCTION TO FANTASY.

Check it out (or, if you don't have access, DM me for a copy!).
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/...
Reviews of Books | Extrapolation
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk

Reposted by Timothy S. Miller

edinburghuniversitypress.com

Reposted by Timothy S. Miller

You have two weeks left to nominate books for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction!

Nominations close March 31st.

Which books will join those shortlisted the last three years? (Yes, we fit them all in this picture.)

www.ursulakleguin.com/prize-nomina...

"...it was less that they were two separate people and more that they were a single person with two different ways of being in the world, each of which both knew."

As a consequence of my desire to avoid doomscrolling lately, I feel I've only really been using this site when I'm self-promoting. So, to counter that trend, here is an out-of-context passage from a novel, which is how I used to post in the good old days of social media...

Here is my own essay reflecting on teaching her interactive fiction The Road to Canterbury: escholarship.org/uc/item/1vv9... .

And you can play/read the thing itself here: www.choiceofgames.com/road-to-cant....
Choice of Chaucers: Teaching Kate Heartfield’s Interactive Novel The Road to Canterbury
Author(s): Miller, Timothy S. | Abstract: Kate Heartfield’s 2018 interactive novel invites a contemporary audience to join Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. This te...
escholarship.org

Thank you so much again! They really enjoyed it.

It also provided students with an important reminder that sometimes an author's response to "Why did you decide to do _________ this way?" has to be "You know, I can't remember."

My Chaucer course just had a lovely visit with author Kate Heartfield @kateheartfield.com. What better way to talk about interactive fiction than interacting with the author?

I don't really know why (and when) my Wizard of Earthsea book sometimes costs much less, but the ebook version appears to be only $16.99 right now: link.springer.com/book/10.1007...
Ursula K. Le Guin’s
This introduction to Ursula K. LeGuin's
link.springer.com

Very excited to be part of the launch issue of the new journal UKL: The Journal of Ursula K. Le Guin Studies, with an article on her 1980 novel The Beginning Place: scholarworks.uni.edu/ukl/vol1/iss...
Returning to The Beginning Place: Le Guin’s Forgotten Anti-fantasy Four Decades On
Ursula K. Le Guin's 1980 portal fantasy The Beginning Place has received a fraction of the critical attention that most of her other novels have attracted over the years. This short book's many enigma...
scholarworks.uni.edu

Reposted by Timothy S. Miller

/postmedieval/ is launching a new mentorship programme to facilitate publication for scholars whose first language is not English.

👇 find all the details here 👇
sites.google.com/view/postmed...

New publication: "Speculative Fiction and the Contemporary Novel" in The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants: www.cambridge.org/core/books/a....
Speculative Fiction and the Contemporary Novel (Chapter 10) - The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants
The Cambridge Handbook of Literature and Plants - February 2025
www.cambridge.org

That time in the semester when you have a to-do list with the item "make a real to-do list" on it.