#116 = Volume 39, Part 1 = March 2012
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Astounding and World War II. In a recent note in SFS, I challenged a long-standing belief that ideas drawn from E.E. “Doc” Smith influenced the development of a system used during World War II by the US Navy for the management of battle information. According to John W. Campbell, Jr., this system was inspired by Smith’s command ship Directrix, introduced in “Gray Lensman,” a space opera serialized in Astounding Science-Fiction between 1939-40. Working from the history of the Combat Information Center, I was able to show that there are definite problems with Campbell’s claim.
Having considered Campbell’s assertions about Doc Smith’s influence, I turn here to other sf authors and their contributions to the war effort. Chris Hables Gray considers this question in “There Will be War! Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction of the 1980s,” and in the course of presenting my own results I will consider some of his statements. I begin with a postwar letter by Campbell quoted by Sam Moskowitz in a recent special issue of Fantasy Commentator; in the letter, Campbell boasts that “Astounding helped the Navy with more than a dozen vital little systems and gadgets” (148). Although he might refer to systems or gadgets described in sf stories, I believe that this letter refers to suggestions made directly to the Navy by writers associated with Astounding, including Campbell himself.
Robert A. Heinlein was a key figure in the process of passing along suggestions from other sf authors. Retired on a medical discharge from the Navy in 1934 after contracting tuberculosis, Heinlein tried to go back on active status following the attack on Pearl Harbor. While investigating this possibility, he received a letter (dated 14 January 1942) from a friend, Lt. Commander Albert “Buddy” Scoles. He had been two years senior to Heinlein at the Naval Academy and thus not a classmate as stated by Gray, although they had served together on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington. From June of 1939, Scoles was the Assistant Chief Engineer for Materials at the Naval Aircraft Factory, located at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
In his letter Scoles apologizes for not writing sooner and says that he has been reading Heinlein’s stories. He describes some of the technical problems encountered during the NAF’s development of pressure suits for high-altitude flight. Scoles asks Heinlein to publish (in Astounding and possibly in other magazines) an appeal to sf readers asking for any useful ideas. In the final lines, Scoles suggests that Heinlein himself come to work at the Naval Aircraft Factory. While the letter assumes that Heinlein will be allowed to return to active duty, this never happened; it was as a civilian engineer that Heinlein was hired by the NAF in May 1942. His contact with Scoles also resulted in both Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp working at the NAF.
Paul Malmont’s The Astounding, The Amazing, and The Unknown (2011) describes the fictional exploits of these three sf authors during World War II when they all worked at the Philadelphia Navy Yard; the tale also features their spouses, John W. Campbell, Jr., and several others associated with the pulps. Anyone who reads the novel is bound to ask what Heinlein, Asimov, and de Camp actually worked on during the war. Gray covers details of their wartime work (318), which also can be found in other sources. Asimov, working as a chemist, researched seam-sealing compounds and developed marker dyes. Some of de Camp’s work involved hydraulic valves and aircraft windshield de-icers. Heinlein said very little about his wartime work, but it is known that he worked on plastics for cockpit canopies and radomes (radar antenna housings)—hardly the stuff of thrilling fiction.
Even before Heinlein began working at the NAF, he was providing Scoles with suggestions from other authors. In a letter to Scoles in April 1942, he refers to ideas sent to him by Murray Leinster (Will Jenkins):
Enclosed herewith you will find a long memorandum from Will F. Jenkins.... If I understand your original notion in wanting me to dig up science-fiction writers with ideas, this is the sort of memo you have been wanting to get—with the expectation that ninety-nine ideas would be lousy but that the hundredth might prove to be a honey.1
Unfortunately, Leinster’s memo was not preserved along with the letter.
An appeal for possible solutions to Scoles’s pressure-suit problems did appear in Campbell’s column (“In Times to Come”) for the November 1942 issue of Astounding. Campbell spoke of running an unofficial recruiting office for young engineers with a “science-fiction trained imagination.” He made the connection to sf by emphasizing the new challenge presented by higher altitude air battles and presenting the high-altitude pressure suit as virtually the same thing as a space suit. He requested input from readers with an engineering or science degree and possibly some experience, promising to forward any replies through official channels.
At about the same time, Campbell informed Heinlein of Fletcher Pratt’s work on a similar appeal to sf readers, the aim being to describe other Navy problems and to solicit ideas. As the problems were common to all navies, the article itself would not reveal any particular weakness on the part of the US Navy. According to Campbell, Pratt was working with approval from the Navy, but either Pratt was unable to complete it or—more likely—the Navy decided against publication. No such article ever appeared in Astounding.
Additional naval suggestions appear in other letters to Heinlein, many of them from Campbell himself. In one group of letters, Campbell discusses his scheme for using certain chlorofluorocarbon compounds to render fuel noncombustible when stored on an aircraft carrier or transported in a tanker. This idea, forwarded to the NAF, was rejected for technical reasons. Another of Campbell’s ideas was for a magnetic depth charge consisting of a coil of heavy-duty cable and charged condensers. When triggered, discharge of the condensers through the cable would briefly create a powerful magnetic field, expected to induce a degree of magnetism into the hull of the submarine under attack. A degaussing (demagnetizing) process could reverse this effect, but the submarine remained easier to detect until that had been done. Campbell himself was not sure that his idea would work and realized that it would be have to be tested full-scale.
Later in the war, sf writers met to consider solutions to the problem of kamikaze attacks. During most of the war in the Pacific, there had been cases of Japanese pilots, injured or in damaged planes, intentionally crashing into American ships. Organized kamikaze attacks, however, did not begin until the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Gray discusses the organization of sf authors to combat the kamikazes (318-21), using as a chief source Heinlein’s introduction to Theodore Sturgeon’s Godbody (1986):
I had been ordered to round up science-fiction writers for this crash project—the wildest brains I could find, so Ted was a welcome recruit. Some of the others were George O. Smith, John W. Campbell, Jr., Murray Leinster, L. Ron Hubbard, Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt. On Saturday nights and Sundays this group usually gathered at my apartment in downtown Philadelphia. (11)
Gray expresses doubts about Heinlein’s account, de Camp having reported to him in 1991 that while this group of sf authors did meet often, de Camp “never did know what Heinlein was working on” (319). Gray speculates about a connection with Heinlein’s classmate and lifelong friend Caleb Laning, but he mostly relies on statements made by Virginia Heinlein, who thought that Laning might have worked in Naval Intelligence. Gray infers that Laning was involved with an Operations Research (O/R) Group that produced kamikaze reports (319).
My recent Note explores Laning’s naval career and his role in developing (though not originating) the Combat Information Center. After his tour of sea duty as Captain of the destroyer USS Hutchins, Laning was by early 1945 stationed in Washington DC. His duty was in the Radar Section, Electronics Division, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; his primary job was radar development. His service record shows no connection with Naval Intelligence or an O/R group.
Several letters in the Heinlein Archives from spring and summer of 1945 refer to kamikazes. That Laning was indeed involved in evaluating suggestions is shown in a letter he wrote to Heinlein in early July 1945. He refers to the ideas of Heinlein’s sf colleagues but points out that they are flawed by lack of naval knowledge and experience:
You are too good a salesman. They are all pitching in & giving their time. There is a trend that is very significant in their suggestions—but the actual suggestions are (1) In actual effective use (2) Have been tried (3) We have tried and can’t make work for some special reason (4) They don’t know the Japs already have a counter (5) The technical background lags far behind present research findings.... It distresses me to see these excellent minds putting in time without the tools they need. However, their trend is an important influence & stimulation to me. 2
Another letter from Laning describes de Camp’s suggestion for antiaircraft target indication—a keyboard entry system to designate targets, which Laning said showed original thinking. The idea was not practical, however, as an antiaircraft system had to be aimed as quickly as possible. I suggest that this reference to an idea contributed by de Camp calls into question his statement to Gray that he did not know what Heinlein was working on.
I have found no evidence to support any successful implementation of the suggestions made to Scoles at the Naval Aircraft Factory or those made later to Laning. In his letter sending along Murray Leinster’s suggestions, Heinlein predicts a success rate of one in a hundred. Applying a similarly low success rate to all wartime suggestions, it is plain that a very large number would have been needed to result in Campbell’s “more than a dozen vital little systems and gadgets.” Further exploration of other sf authors’ wartime correspondence or memoirs might reveal more details. Nevertheless, expanding upon Gray’s earlier findings, I conclude that despite the apparently negative results of their suggestions, the sf writers associated with Astounding Science-Fiction definitely made use of their imaginations in an effort to help win the war.—Edward Wysocki, Orlando, Florida
NOTES
1. All Heinlein correspondence is from the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Archives <http://www.heinleinarchives.net/>. The letter from Heinlein concerning Will Jenkins is quoted by permission of the Heinlein Prize Trust.
2. The letter from Laning to Heinlein is quoted by permission of Rear Admiral Laning’s daughter Jillian.WORKS CITED
Campbell, John W., Jr. “In Times to Come.” Astounding Science-Fiction (Nov. 1942): 42.
Gray, Chris Hables. “‘There Will be War!’: Future War Fantasies and Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s.” SFS 21.3 (Nov. 1994): 315-36.
Heinlein, Robert A. “Agape and Eros: The Art of Theodore Sturgeon.” Introduction. Godbody. Theodore Sturgeon. New York: Fine, 1986. 7-16.
Moskowitz, Sam. “Inside John W. Campbell.” Fantasy Commentator 11.3-4 (2011): 2-157.
Wysocki, Edward. “John W. Campbell, Jr., E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, and the Combat Information Center.” SFS 38.3 (Nov. 2011): 558-62.
Asimov Versus Robinson. In his characteristically wise and witty review of Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, Eric Rabkin writes, “Carl Freedman suggests that Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels ‘may well constitute the most important trilogy in all of sf’ (10), while John Rieder’s dissection of the virtues and wide influence of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy perhaps suggests otherwise” (SFS 38.3 [Nov. 2011]: 532). Since I am in general agreement with Rieder’s succinct yet valuable essay on Robinson’s sf, it seems worthwhile to clarify some of the ambiguities in the tricky critical term important. I believe that Robinson’s trilogy is a finer work of literature—and in that sense more important—than Asimov’s. But Asimov’s seems to me clearly more important in the sense of having been more widely read and influential. Indeed, the Foundation trilogy is perhaps the most influential representation of a galactic civilization in sf, its impact felt—as I argue in the book under review—in such immensely popular productions of mass culture as the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, yet also in a high-modernist masterpiece like Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. It’s possible, of course, that Asimov’s trilogy has to date been more important in this second sense mainly because it has been before the world for about four decades longer than Robinson’s. Time will tell.—Carl Freedman, Louisiana State University
Exegesis on the Exegesis. On 14 November 2011, the Los Angeles Public Library hosted a panel discussion of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (Houghton, 2011), a new edition of the massive journal that the late sf author maintained during the last decade of his life analyzing a seemingly mystical experience. Joining the volume’s coeditors, Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, were slipstream novelist Steve Erickson and Dick’s oldest daughter, Laura Leslie, with LA Times book critic David L. Ulin serving as moderator. The ninety-minute event was consistently lively. Its highlights included Lethem’s careful tracing of themes of revelation and metamorphosis across Dick’s corpus of novels, Jackson’s disclosure of the difficulties involved in producing a readable volume out of a hermetic mass of fragments never intended for publication, Leslie’s charming insights into the interpersonal dynamics of a very complicated family, and Erickson’s defense of Dick’s critically neglected mainstream novels as works of “suburban surrealism, like Cheever crossed with Borges.” The question and answer session at the end, though brief, featured queries about Dick’s fraught relationship with Stanislaw Lem and a comparison of the Exegesis with another famous attempt to grapple with cosmic perplexities, Carl Jung’s Red Book. An audio podcast is available at <http://events.lapl.org/ podcasts/PodcastView.aspx?pid=517>.—Rob Latham, SFS
Conference Report from Israel. Each fall, Tel Aviv hosts the Icon TLV, a two-week event that is a combined film festival, convention, and academic conference, making it the perfect, all-encompassing sf event. Organized by festival director Uri Aviv, Icon TLV demonstrates how central the sf imagination has become to contemporary consciousness, through a series of screenings, lectures, panel discussions, gaming demonstrations, and art exhibitions that showcase the complexity and heterogeneity of the genre. Events are held in both Hebrew and English, and all film screenings are in English or include English subtitles, making the festival accessible to local residents and international attendees alike. The screenings include feature-length films and shorts, offering an award for best film in each category. The festival also features presentations by special guests, including directors, writers, and a keynote speaker for the academic conference.
The theme for 2011 was “The Future of Humanity: Posthumanism and Transhumanism,” and special guests included sf author Robert Charles Wilson, directors Damir Lukacevic (Transfer) and Conor Hogan (One Hundred Mornings), the DJ group Addicted TV, president of the World Singularity Institute, Michael Vasser, and me. The festival opened with a performance by Addictive TV, whose spectacular audio-visual remixing of sf film and television soundtracks was both a fabulous dance party and a witty commentary on the genre’s history. Other festival events included panel discussions with sf authors, editors, bloggers, and enthusiasts and academic papers presented in both Hebrew and English on topics relevant to the conference theme. Highlights included an interview with guest writer Robert Charles Wilson; a lecture on sf aesthetics by sculptor Reuven Israel, whose joint exhibit with painter Shai Azoulay was on display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and a panel discussion on social justice in the next century. The festival included a full-day gaming conference and concluded with a full-day academic conference at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Organized by Elana Gomel and Ruben Borg, it built on work done in their posthumanism discussion group.
The films were impressive in their range of styles and in the number of countries represented. Awards went to Gareth Edward’s Monsters (best feature film), Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer (special citation), and Shir Comoy’s Impossible Dreams (best Israeli short film). The festival also screened Agnosia (Eugenia Mira), Akira (Katsuhiro Ohtomo), Another Earth (Mike Cahill), Buried (Rodrigo Cortés), Dead Snow (Død snø; Tommy Wirkola), Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener), Love (William Eubank), One Hundred Mornings, Rare Exports (Jalmari Helander), Rubber (Quentin Dupieux), Super (James Gunn), The Good, the Bad, the Weird (Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom; Jee-won Kim), The Last Circus (Balada triste de trompeta; Álex de la Iglesia), Trollhunter (Trolljegeren; André Øvredal), Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (Eli Craig), and Your Highness (David Gordon Green). Although I enjoyed all the screenings, the most impressive film for me—following the two award winners—was Love, whose mise en scène and voice-over narrative are both stunningly beautiful.
Icon TLV was an amazing experience, intellectually and aesthetically. I highly recommend attendance to anyone interested in science fiction.—Sherryl Vint, SFS
Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowship. Science Fiction Studies announces the fourth annual R.D. Mullen Fellowship supporting research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Awards of up to $1500 are available to fund research in the archive during the 2012-13 academic year. Students in good standing in graduate degree-granting programs are eligible to apply. We welcome applications from international students.
The Mullen Fellowship, named in honor of SFS’s founding editor, promotes archival work in the Eaton’s extensive holdings, which include over 100,000 hardcover and paperback books, over 250,000 fanzines, full runs of all major pulp and digest magazines, and the manuscripts of prominent sf writers such as Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Anne McCaffrey. Other noteworthy parts of the Collection include 500 shooting scripts of sf films; 3500 volumes of proto-sf “boy’s books” of the Tom Swift variety; works of sf in numerous foreign languages, including Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish; a large collection of taped fan conventions and taped interviews with American, British, and French writers; reference materials on topics such as applied science, magic, witchcraft, UFOs, and Star Trek; an extensive collection of anime and manga; and the largest holdings of critical materials on science fiction and fantasy in the United States. Further information about the Eaton Collection can be found online at: <http://eaton-collection.ucr.edu/>.
Applications should include a cover letter explaining the candidate’s academic experience and preparation, a curriculum vitae, a 2-3 page proposal outlining a specific and well-developed agenda for research in the Eaton archive, a prospective budget detailing expenses, and two letters of recommendation from individuals familiar with the candidate’s academic work. The deadline for submission is 6 April 2012. Applications will be reviewed by a committee of sf scholars, and successful applicants will be notified in early May. Electronic submission of applications (as RTF or PDF files) is preferred. Applications should be sent to: Professor Rob Latham at <rob.latham@ucr.edu>.—Rob Latham, SFS
Special Issue of American Literature on “Speculative Fictions.” Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald coedited a recent special issue of American Literature (83.2 [June 2011]) focused on sf. Although special sf issues have appeared for some time in non-sf journals—in spring 1986, Modern Fiction Studies published “Science and Fantasy Fiction” and in winter 1993, Genders published “Cyberpunk: Technologies of Cultural Identity”—they have proliferated in the last decade. Between 2002 and 2011, sf received special coverage in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (April 2002), Social Text (June 2002), Language and Literature (August 2003), The Lion and the Unicorn (April 2004), PMLA (May 2004), New Literary History (Spring 2005), Socialism and Democracy (November 2006), Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science (July 2007), Biography (Winter 2007), MELUS (Winter 2008), African Identities (May 2009), World Literature Today{plain (May/June 2010), and (May/June 2010), and
and New Review of Film and Television Studies (January 2011). Over the past decade sf has been of increasing interest to scholars in postcolonial studies, children’s literature, cultural theory, politics, linguistics, African cultural production, Asian American literature, the natural sciences, biography, literary history, media studies, and world literature.The recent special issue of American Literature is an exuberant demonstration of how science fiction serves as a trenchant mode of critical inquiry in American studies. As Canavan and Wald write in their preface, the seven articles can be likened to “seven émigrés” whose voices articulate “ruthless criticisms” of a troubled world whose basic coordinates are under constant flux from eruptions of ecological crisis to the emergence of genomic science, from the global realignments of religious fundamentalism to the changing parameters of liberation theology, from the ongoing unfoldings of antiracist activisms worldwide to the struggle for LGBTQ rights. (247)
Estranged from their native land, these seven émigrés have taken up residence in a state of alterity in order to “make things different” (247). The articles include Mark Chia-Yon Jerng’s “A World of Difference: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and the Protocols of Racial Reading”; Nathaniel Williams’s “Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba: Dime-Novel Technology, U.S. Imperialism, and the ‘American Jules Verne’”; Aaron Bady’s “Tarzan’s White Flights: Terrorism and Fantasy Before and After the Airplane”; David M. Higgins’s “Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction”; Ramzi Fawaz’s “‘Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!’: Mutant Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America”; Robert F. Reid-Pharr’s “Clean: Death and Desire in Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand”; and Everett Hamner’s “The Predisposed Agency of Genomic Fiction.” The essays commonly attempt, in the editors’ words, to “stage the particular imaginative engagements with the elements of world-making—from the most fundamental constituents of communication to the most dramatic geopolitical transformations—that characterize the genre [of science fiction]” (245).
The approaches are compelling and as diverse as the texts and media under examination. Jerng uses nuanced close readings of Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) to map narrative and rhetorical strategies that reconfigure the legibility of racial difference and redefine the role of perception in the process of reading race. Reid-Pharr likewise focuses on Delany’s sf in an inspired manifesto wherein Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) provides a crucial teaching for gay men:
the simple belief that we should be careful to not give up so easily on our dirty prehistory, the lived reality of (sexual) “promiscuity” and experimentation, for the presumably clean uncertainties promised by “the weak light” of “the so-called mainstreams of modern society.” (409)
Chronologically, the texts span the period between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Williams reads Frank Reade, Jr., in Cuba (1895) as a complicated artifact that “celebrates Cuban sovereignty and technocracy ... embodying the Edisonades’ ability to exist on the boundaries of the American imperial imaginary without fully affirming a U.S. imperial agenda” (299). Hamner, covering Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), analyzes questions about genetic determinism and genomic identity in our own day as they intersect with issues of metaphor, narrative, and the nature of fiction.
This is not the most recent special issue on science fiction to be published in a non-sf periodical: in September/October 2011, Foreign Policy published “The Future Issue: An FP Special Report.” More special sf issues are sure to come from other journals. Critical attention to the sf genre is slowly catching up to such bold declarations as that of the legendary editor John W. Campbell Jr., who defined mainstream literature as a “special subgroup of the field of science fiction”: “science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so the literature of here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction” (Introduction to Analog 1 [1963]).—Seo-Young Chu, Queens College, CUNY
CFP: Pow! In The Eye of the Moon! While the deadline for submissions will have passed by the time that this issue of SFS is in readers’ hands, there is a forthcoming conference of special interest on French sf to be held at the University of Regina on 2-3 November 2012. Here is their Call for Papers.
French sf is as old as the French language. Cyrano de Bergerac’s account of a trip to the moon was published in 1657. Jules Verne used the same plot in 1865, this time using scientific hard facts. The first movie depicting a trip to the moon was made by Georges Méliès in 1902. In the comic format, Hergé depicted Tintin walking on the moon in 1954, fifteen years before Neil Armstrong. These are just a few of many unique French contributions to science fiction that deserve to be better known. The conference, recognizing the contribution of French sf to world sf, also seeks to engage in multidisciplinary exchanges. As a genre, sf embraces diverse media. Topics therefore might include, but are not limited to, French sf literature, cinema, television, comics and graphic novels, and the international reception of French sf. Papers presented at the conference will be refereed and published as electronic proceedings. Submissions are welcome in either French or English; proposals should be 250 words maximum and should include a descriptive title. Audio-visual equipment is available upon request. A $25 registration fee will be levied upon acceptance. Proposals must be submitted by email no later than 1 January 2012 to Philippe Mather <philippe.mather@uregina.ca>.—Philippe Mather, Campion College, University of Regina
CFP: Current Research in Speculative Fiction. Now in its second year, the CRSF is a one-day postgraduate conference designed to promote the research of speculative fictions (science fiction, fantasy, and horror), showcasing developments in these dynamic and evolving fields. Last year’s conference attracted an international selection of delegates and provided a platform for postgraduate students to present their current research, encouraging discussion among scholars in related subjects and the construction of crucial networks with fellow researchers. This year we are looking to continue those successes. The University of Liverpool is a leading center for the study of speculative fiction. As the site of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection, it is an ideal venue for fostering the next generation of scholars of the fantastic.
The second meeting will be held Monday, 18 June 2012, and will feature keynote speeches by David Seed (University of Liverpool) and Fred Botting (Kingston University, London). We are seeking abstracts relating to speculative fiction, including but not limited to papers on the following topics: Alternate History, Apocalypse, Body Horror, Eco-criticism, Gaming, (Geo)Politics, Genre, Gender and Sexuality, Graphic Novels, The Grotesque, The Heroic Tradition, Liminal Fantasy, Magic, Meta-Franchises, Morality, Monstrosity, Music and SF, Non-Anglophone SF, Otherness, The Pastoral, Post-Colonialism and Empire, Proto-SF, Psychology and Consciousness, Quests, Realism, Slipstream, Spiritualism, Steampunk, The Supernatural, Technology, TV and Film, Urban Fantasy, Utopia/Dystopia, Virtual Spaces and Environments, Weird Fiction, World-Building, and Young Adult Fiction. Please submit an abstract of 300 words for a 20 minute paper, with a 100-word biography, to <CRSF.team@gmail.com> by 23 March 2012. For further information, email the conference team at the same address.—CRSF Team, University of Liverpool
CFP: ASLE Panel at 2012 SFRA Conference. For the SFRA meeting to be held in Detroit (28 June-1 July 2012), we solicit proposals for a panel on “Environmental Science Fiction and the Non-Urban Scape.” As ecocritic Patrick D. Murphy notes in Farther Afield, “The idea of the land as scape establishes place, whether woods or lake or mountain range, as something separate from human culture.” Proposals are invited that explore how science fiction has addressed this issue. Has science fiction largely supported a conception of the non-urban (“land,” “place,” “nature,” etc.) as escape from culture? If so, what texts maintain the land/culture divide? Or has science fiction done much to challenge this divide with an understanding of nature as something we are always in—as something we cannot escape? What works of sf maintain this more complex view of land and culture, and what do these works contribute to recent efforts to upset conventional notions about “nature” (e.g., in the works of Timothy Morton and Slavoj Žižek)?
This panel is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), a professional affiliate organization of SFRA. Please submit a 200-word proposal in the body of an email to Eric Otto <eotto@fgcu.edu> by Friday, 6 April 2012. See <http://sfradetroit2012. com/> for more information about the conference.—Eric Otto, Ph.D, Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities, Florida Gulf Coast University
CFP: Society for Utopian Studies (4-7 Oct 2012). Our 37th Annual Meeting will be held at the Delta Chelsea Hotel in Toronto. Papers are welcome on all aspects of the utopian tradition, from the earliest utopian visions to the utopian speculations and yearnings of the 21st century. Possible topics include art, architecture, urban and rural planning, literary utopias, dystopian writings, utopian political activism, theories of utopian spaces and ontologies, music, new media, and intentional communities. Please send a 100-250 word abstract by 1 June 2012 to <lyman.sargent@umsl.edu> and please put “sus submission” in the subject line. All specific audiovisual requests must be included in the original abstract submission. Late requests cannot be fulfilled due to conference organizational deadlines. For information about registration, travel, or accommodations, contact the Conference Coordinator, Peter Fitting, at <p.fitting@utoronto.ca>.
There will be two special sessions on 4 October before the start of regular programming at 1:30. (The conference ends at 12:30 on Sunday 7 October.) From 9:00-12:00 there will be a master-class on Architecture and Utopia led by Dr. Nathaniel Coleman, author of Utopias and Architecture (2005) and editor of Imagining and Making the World (2011). Expressions of interest in participating are invited from younger scholars, including PhD candidates. The class will consider the ongoing problematic of architecture and utopia. Special registration is necessary: for further information and registration contact <nathaniel.coleman@newcastle.ac.uk>. There will also be a pre-conference seminar for graduate students and young faculty on paper presentation, publishing, and building a career, to be led by Gregory Claeys, University of London, and Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri-St. Louis. On Friday, October 5, there will be a reception at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy with tours of the collection.
There are two or more grants of $500 each (the Nicole LaRose Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants) with at least one reserved for domestic travel and one for international travel. Please send your paper proposal, budget proposal, and a recent c.v. to the conference program chair, Lyman Tower Sargent <lyman.sargent@umsl.edu> by 1 June 2011.—Lyman Tower Sargent, Professor of Political Science Emeritus, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Call for Contributions: Special Issue of JFA. The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (JFA) invites contributions for a special issue on “Performing the Fantastic.” Performance in this context encompasses any of the performing arts broadly defined, including theater, music, dance, magic, and/or ritual. Articles between 5,000–9,000 words might address, but are by no means limited to, the following: critical analysis of fantastic-influenced production designs of traditional forms of performance (theater, dance, opera) or adaptations of fantastic narratives for the stage; performance analyses of staged productions (theater, music, dance) utilizing fantastic subjects or motifs; fantastic use of performative conventions in non-staged (e.g., literary or interactive) narratives; and use of the fantastic in musical subcultures, including Goth, metal, and neo-folk.
In accordance with the journal’s policy, all contributions will be peer-reviewed and subject to acceptance. JFA follows MLA style as defined in the latest edition of The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. For more details, see our Submission Guidelines at <http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/iafa/ jfa/submission.html> or send an e-mail <jfaeditor@gmail.com> requesting a copy of JFA’s style sheet. Please e-mail your contributions and/or any queries to guest-editors Jen Gunnels <jengunnels@gmail.com> and Isabella van Elferen <i.a.m.vanelferen@uu.nl>; the deadline is 1 August 2012.—Jen Gunnels
CFP: Assocation for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies—2012 Conference. While the deadline of 15 January 2012 will have passed by the time readers will see this notice, we direct attention to three sf panels being scheduled for the ASEEES conference to be held in New Orleans on 15-18 November 2012. Each of the triad of panels will examine post-1917 historical periods within the framework of the interaction of science and scientists with Soviet and post-Soviet literary fiction. The respective panels, scheduled in chronological sequence, will consider pre-revolutionary and early Soviet sf, Cold War sf, and the post-Soviet era.—Matthias Schwartz, Humboldt University, Berlin
SFRA 2012: Urban Apocalypse, Urban Renaissance: Science Fiction and Fantasy Landscapes. The 43rd annual conference of the SFRA will be held in Detroit from 28 June-1 July 2012. Abstracts for papers will be accepted through 23 April 2012.
Detroit is at once an apocalyptic and a Renaissance city. It has suffered immensely in recent years. Its landscape of abandoned buildings, its crime rate, and its loss of close to 300,000 people in the last census have all have made it a symbol of an apocalyptic city. Yet the so-called Renaissance city of the 1970s may now be experiencing a true Renaissance. New venues for the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions, funding obtained by Mayor Bing to raze many of the abandoned buildings, the resurgence of the auto industry and an invitation to the film industry, along with other signs of change, may re-establish Detroit, a city whose urban landscape of constant change is ripe for sf and fantasy literature.
Among suggested topics for papers are apocalyptic landscapes (Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, McCarthy’s The Road ); utopian Renaissance landscapes (More’s Utopia); psychogeography (Valente’s Palimpsest, Miéville’s The City and the City); alien landscapes (Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” Pohl’s Venus in The Space Merchants, Le Guin’s Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness, Robinson’s Mars trilogy, and Vinge’s A Fire upon the Deep).
Other possible topics include landscapes created by terraforming, set design such as Syd Mead’s for the film Blade Runner (based in part on the Detroit skyline of the early 1980s); virtual landscapes in the fiction of Greg Egan, William Gibson, and Charles Stross, as well as films such as The Matrix; and foreign landscapes such as Bacigalupi’s Thailand in The Wind-Up Girl, McDonald’s Istanbul in The Dervish House, and VanderMeer’s Ambergris in Finch. The landscapes in alternate histories are also a possible topic, as are US landscapes (Gaiman’s Minnesota in American Gods, Doctorow’s San Francisco in Little Brother). The effects of pollution or eco-terrorism on landscapes; future landscapes, as in Banks’ Algebraist, Stephenson’s Anathem, or Wilson’s Julian Comstock; and past landscapes as in Butler’s Kindred, Willis’s Doomsday Book, or Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell would also be possible topics. Finally, the space ship and outer space might well be considered as landscapes and there is sf’s fascination with gender landscapes.
Please forward abstracts to <sdberman1121@gmail.com> by 23 April 2012. For general questions about the conference, contact Steve Berman at <sdberman1121@gmail.com> or Deborah Randolph at <DARANDOL@ oaklandcc.edu>. Presenters must be members of the SFRA: to join, see <sfra.org>.—Dr. Steven Berman, Oakland Community College
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