Studio Ghibli book coming out in Summer 2025!

Kiki’s Delivery Service is one of the adaptations featured in our book.

Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I’ve posted. That’s partly because I’ve been working on a new book. I’m pleased to announce that Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations will be published later this year by Bloomsbury. I adore Studio Ghibli, and I noticed that some of my favorite films were actually adaptations of novels and manga. The book features essays from leading academics about the creative decisions Hayao Miyazaki and other storytellers have taken when translating stories from one medium to the next. It’s been fascinating to see both how Ghibli adaptations veer from the source material and meaningfully engage with it.

The book is available to purchase from Bloomsbury and most traditional booksellers on June 12, 2025 – just in time for Studio Ghibli’s 40th anniversary!

My Studio Ghibli book is published!

My book about Studio Ghibli Animation as Adaptations was published today by Bloomsbury Publishing! It comes just in time for the 40th anniversary of Studio Ghibli on June 15. I’m really happy with the way the book came out, and honored that we received endorsements from top scholars in the field. Please let me know if you read the book and have any feedback.

REVIEW: “A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel”

I adore Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. The first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, arguably invented many core fantasy tropes, such as a wizard ing school and the importance of names, that would later be popularized by Harry Potter. Le Guin’s lyrical writing gives her tales a sense of timelessness nearly 60 years after the book was published. Yet, Earthsea has had terrible luck with adaptations. The Sci-Fi Channel TV miniseries whitewashed Le Guin’s brown-skinned characters. Studio Ghibli later made a movie that combined plot elements from several of the Earthsea novels (covered in my upcoming book). So I was excited to see how this new graphic novel would adapt the story…

REVIEW: “Star Wars: Mask of Fear”

As a political scientist, I’ve always been interested in the depiction of politics in the Star Wars Galaxy. I enjoyed Chris Kempshall’s The History and Politics of Star Wars, and rate Claudia Grey’s Bloodline as one of the best Star Wars novels of the past decade. So, I was understandably excited when I heard about the upcoming Reign of the Empire trilogy, which would focus on politics between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. Alexander Freed, author of the first book in the series, described it as “nuanced stories of ‘ordinary’ citizens—people living inside the machinery of the Empire, still figuring out what’s happened to their government and in violent disagreement over ideas of democracy, resistance, revolution, and complicity.” Freed’s The Mask of Fear fulfills that promise, and then some.

Two New Reviews

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog. I finally have some news. I reviewed two new books about speculative fiction and politics: Chris Kempshall’s The History and Politics of Star Wars and José Maria Miranda Bono’s Law, Government, and Society in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works. I highly recommend both works. You can read my reviews below:

• “Review of The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy,” SFRA Vol. 54(1) (2024).
• “Law, Government, and Society in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Works by José Maria Miranda Boto,” Mallorn, Vol. 63 (2023).

My book on “Dune” is published!

For several years, I’ve been working with N. Trevor Brierly on an academic volume about Dune. The final book, Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert’s Epic Saga, was just published by McFarland last week. My coeditor and I chose 14 essays covering a variety of topics, including eugenics, Byzantine history, environmentalism, and pedagogy (see table of contents).

We were honored to receive a foreword from Tim O’Reilly, the godfather of Dune scholarship, and endorsements from Kara Kennedy and Joshua Pearson, two stars of the next generation of Dune scholarship.

Discovering Dune is an academic text – it went through peer review – but we hope the pricing makes this book accessible to Dune fans everywhere – and not just university libraries. It’s available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, and most other major booksellers.

Let the spice flow!

REVIEW: “How the Force Can Fix the World” by Stephen Kent

I’m a longtime listener of the Beltway Banthas podcast, so I’m familiar with Stephen Kent’s thoughts on the intersection between politics and Star Wars. How the Force Can Fix the World is a distillation of some of his discussions on the podcast. However, it’s probably better to characterize this book as a self-help manual than a political analysis. Howt the Force Can Fix the World does discuss how Star Wars can inform our approach to politics, but more than that it’s about how Star Wars can help us live more mindful lives and become better citizens.

REVIEW: “Dune: Part One” by Denis Villeneuve

A year after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, I finally had a chance to see this latest adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel. Given Villeneuve’s work on Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, I fully expected his Dune – the first of two movies – to look gorgeous and feature excellent acting. Dune is a powerful cinematic experience, best experienced on the big screen (I saw it both on IMAX and HBO). It’s a cinematic epic that combines the majestic deserts of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia with the science fiction otherworldliness of Ridley Scott’s Alien. 

As somebody who has not just read Dune several times but also published academic articles about it,* I can’t help but compare the film to the novel. I feel the loss of the scenes omitted from the film. I know that the book provides more detailed explanations for everything from why soldiers use swords to why nobody uses computers. The book suggests that the Harkonnens have red hair. Yet, despite all this, I also find myself agreeing with most of the film’s adaptation choices. This movie is recognizably Dune – or at least the first half of the novel – even while it is also recognizably a Denis Villeneuve movie. 

As I rewatched Dune this weekend, I began to wonder: Why did Dune work as an adaptation, despite the differences from the book? 

“Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir

Andy Weir’s The Martian was one of my favorite books of the past decade. The focus on smart scientists solving hard science problems was both a welcome throwback to the Golden Age of science fiction and a clever new take on the space-disaster genre. I thought Artemis was a bit of a misfire, largely because Weir seemed to struggle writing a female protagonist. Project Hail Mary retains Weir’s trademark glorification of science and scientists, but also differs from his previous two books. It’s a more emotional story and takes some very unexpected turns.

Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View 2

My favorite Star Wars books as a kid were the “Tales of…” series edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Those books imbued the Galaxy Far, Far Away with the sense that Greedo, Dengar, Bib Fortuna, and the hundreds of minor background characters from the films each had stories of their own. Those books – and the fan hunger for more stories – are a major part of the reason why the Star Wars franchise has been able to grow beyond the Skywalker saga through shows like The Mandalorian.

The “From a Certain Point of View” books continue that tradition – but in both more expansive and limited ways. The first book, released in 2017, celebrated the 40th anniversary of A New Hope by collecting stories from a variety of science fiction and fantasy authors. As the title suggests, the stories are told from the point of background characters. This latest volume does the same for The Empire Strikes Back.