What Is Dead May Never Die: A Word from the Media Review Editor

Abstract

The media review section in this issue of The Incredible Nineteenth-Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale includes Stacey Hoffer’s reflections on a trio of “cozy puzzle” video games whose play mechanics, storylines, and visuals offer gamers lessons in how gender ideology shaped nineteenth-century botany discourse and intensified the unresolved tension between occult and scientific epistemic habits that dually informed Victorian knowledge of plants. Meanwhile, Safiyya Hosein takes readers beyond the familiar Euro-medieval geography of Westeros to visit the “mysterious” city of Pentos in HBO’s series House of the Dragon (2022- ) that is set in the fantasy universe of George R. R. Martin. Hosein notes how so much of Pentos— its spices, architectural forms, harems, and bloodthirsty warriors—faithfully reproduces orientalist tropes that exoticize non-western bodies and settings that might as well have been cribbed from Richard Burton’s illustrated 1885-88 edition of The Arabian Nights. In an age when Anglo-American cultural discourse is shaped by a suspiciously Victorian “separate spheres” worldview as propagated by manosphere and tradwife influencers nostalgic for white Christian nationalism, both Hoffer and Hosein add to our understanding of how zombie forms of nineteenth-century thought and representation are both (un)alive and (un)well in the culture industry of twenty-first-century entertainment media.