Fanfic is Booming While the World’s On Lockdown: Critical Linking, April 26, 2020

Critical Linking is a daily roundup of the most interesting bookish links from around the web sponsored by

“She’s not alone. With many parts of the world on lockdown or reeling from the effects of it, fanfiction is booming, even in China, where the government has banned access to the non-profit Archive Of Our Own (AO3), the top website for readers and writers of fanfiction, in part because of the sexual content in the stories, Zhang says. AO3 announced “emergency measures” at the end of March after weekly page views rose to 298 million over two weeks and, on April 7, the no-frills site recorded an all-time daily high of 51.4 million views with readership rising about 20% month-over-month. Visits are on pace for 1.5 billion, 60% higher than April 2019.”
Get yours, fanfic.

“It’s a strange world out there, and it’s getting stranger by the second. There are endless things to distract ourselves with in quarantine—streaming shows, puzzles, board games—but if you’re the type who enjoys slipping into an even deeper endless nightmare, serialized fiction podcasts are the way to go. There’s something almost serene about getting lost in a horror fable; it’s a weird way of compartmentalizing all of the real-world terror we can’t control.

With that in mind, we rounded up 10 of our favorite serialized horror fiction podcasts. These strange tales get into topics like government conspiracy, extraterrestrial life, hauntings, monsters, and more. Let reality and surreality blur as you immerse yourself in hours of horror fantasy for free. To make it even easier, we ranked the series by episode count, from shortest to longest.”
Starting to understand the “horror as comfort” thing these days.

“There is certainly no shortage of books on the subject. You might be interested in the great resource that is 365 books to jump start your climate change library over on Lit Hub, broken into four helpful sections: the classics, the science, fiction and poetry, and big ideas. As climate change becomes a bigger threat, climate fiction becomes a bigger genre. If you want to read a particularly timely work of climate change fiction, might I direct you to this list of 10 cli-fi novels for the dark days ahead?
Note that none of the titles gathered here specifically tackle the threats facing our planet (for that, please read the science). Rather this is a list of books in which the natural world becomes a character. These are books that make the Earth feel alive. Happy Earth Day, everyone.”
Now let’s keep the earth alive!