#122 = Volume 41, Part 1 = March 2014
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Imagining Alternatives. A Graduate Symposium on Speculative Forms was held 18-19 October 2013 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Taking its cue from Le Guin’s statement that fantastic fictions allow for an interrogative “heightening of reality,” Imagining Alternatives invited its panelists to investigate the critical perspectives made possible in speculative texts and our interactions with them. The result was a vigorous conversation that integrated critical readings of fantastic texts with examinations of their social positioning and the fannish practices that (re)make sense of them. In keeping with this mission, keynote speaker Alexis Lothian’s talk “Living in the Future: Speculative Fiction and Queer Time” highlighted how the interplay between speculative texts and fannish practices can unlock alternative possibilities in the fantastic, examining fantastic texts by artists of color, queers, and feminists alongside the fan practice of video remixing. While the conference as a whole was strong, some panels stood out. The diversity of approaches was on display in the Gaming/Game Culture panel, where Kathleen Dobruse’s presentation on players’ choices between romance options in Mass Effect fruitfully combined quantitative analysis with queer theory and fan studies approaches, and Daniella Pavliċ’s nuanced interrogation of (neo)colonialist pedagogy in Tropico took the form of a short film. In terms of rigor, Michelle M. Martinez’s “Woman and/or Worm? The Lair of the White Worm, (D)Evolutionary Geology, and Imaginative Reading” was worthy of note. She used the contemporary discourses of mesmerism and evolutionary geology to uncover a well-developed gender ideology in a novel usually considered chaotic and uneven. Likewise, Inhye Ha’s “Margaret Cavendish’s Singular Utopia: An Imagined Community at the Crossroads of the New Science and Feminism” drew on Cavendish’s biography, early modern material history, and the history of science to index complex tensions in The Blazing World’s portrayal of Utopian possibilities’ imbrication with the gendered limits Cavendish challenged in her life and work. Overall, Imagined Alternatives displayed the flourishing critical engagement with the fantastic in graduate study today, as well as the way that interest in fantastic texts and the critical language of sf theory crosses the lines of specialization (genre, period, canon) graduate study tends to reinforce. Information about the Symposium, including presenter’s abstracts and bios, is available online.—Josh Pearson, University of California, Riverside
ICFA-35. The Thirty-Fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was held in Orlando, Florida, 19-23 March 2014. Although attendance declined slightly from ICFA-34 when Neil Gaiman was Guest of Honor, ICFA-35 certainly qualifies as an unmitigated success: 207 regular members, 142 student members, and 68 invited authors were instrumental in contributing to the four days of thought-provoking, insightful, and entertaining sessions. In addition, all the respective Divisions were quite healthy with over 200 individual papers plus author readings, theory roundtables, and a variety of other special sessions appealing to everyone’s interests. As is routine with ICFA, these lively discussions were not confined to the breakout rooms: favorable Orlando weather contributed to plenty of poolside discussions where the intellectual engagement continued unabated.
This year’s theme, “Fantastic Empires,” was particularly well-suited to the Science Fiction Literature (SF) division: my rough count shows sf representation on nearly forty-one per cent of the panels, although given the growing interest in postcolonial sf it perhaps isn’t surprising sf had such a strong showing this year. The sessions I attended (and the sessions I scanned in the program) all offered a refreshing assortment of papers that strayed away from the usual-suspect authors and highlighted a more diverse sampling of those working in the fields comprising the fantastic, authors whose work often intersected in greater or lesser degrees with the conference theme. On a personal note, I admit to being fascinated, if not confused, by the ongoing popularity of zombies, but if the quality of papers devoted to zombies and zombification at this conference is any indication, this field shows no signs of decay in the near future.As has been the case in the past few years at ICFA, this year’s conference featured two Guests of Honor: Nnedi Okorafor, author of science fiction and fantasy for children, young adults, and adults, whose publications include the World Fantasy Award-winning and Nebula-nominated Who Fears Death (2010), Zahrah (2005), winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, the short story collection Kabu Kabu (2013), and the upcoming sf novel Lagoon, among other titles; and Ian McDonald, sf author of more than a dozen novels and numerous short stories and story collections, including such titles as River of Gods (2004), Brasyl (2007), and The Dervish House (2010), all three of which are BSFA Award-winning and Hugo-nominated novels, as well as the collection Cyberabad Days (2009) and the upcoming Luna, an excerpt from which he read at the Guest of Honor Reading on Thursday night. Finally, the Guest Scholar was Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, whose work, including “Dis-Imagined Communities: Science Fiction and the Future of Nations,” “Science Fiction and Empire,” (2002) and The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008), has been instrumental in thinking about science fiction and the genre’s intersections with empire. In “Science Fiction and the Imperial Audience,” Csicsery-Ronay offered an intimate, provocative, and inspiring speech at the Guest Scholar luncheon about the legacy of empire, culminating in his call for authors and scholars of the fantastic to continue thinking through (and beyond) the borders marked by empires and their long-lasting consequences. Finally, thanks to the technological wonders of the Internet, both Nnedi Okorafor’s Guest of Honor Luncheon speech and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s Guest Scholar Luncheon speech were almost immediately posted to Youtube where they currently reside for anyone who may have missed the events.
Finally, ICFA-35 officially culminated with the IAFA Awards Banquet. As a celiac sufferer, I was repeatedly amazed at the diversity of gluten-free offerings that were also quite delicious, so I must applaud Conference Chair Donald E. Morse who has been working diligently over the past few years to have chefs create diverse food options to suit the dietary needs of the membership. The banquet concluded with the annual awards ceremony. My thanks to IAFA First Vice-President Dale Knickerbocker for the following information:
Distinguished Scholarship Award: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
William Crawford Fantasy Award: Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
Jamie Bishop Memorial Award: Vera Cuntz-Leng (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen/UC Berkeley), “Frodo auf Abwegen: Das queere Potenzial des aktuellen Fantasykinos” [Frodo Gone Astray: The Queer Potential of Fantasy Blockbusters]
Graduate Student Award: Malisa Kurtz (Brock University), “Science Fictional Assemblages”
Dell Award Winner: Rich Larson (University of Alberta), “Nostalgia Calculator”
Lord Ruthven Award for Fiction: Joe Hill, NOS4A2
Lord Ruthven Award for Non-Fiction: Maria Lindgren Leavenworth and Malin Isaksson, Fanged Fan FictionBeginning with ICFA-36 there will be a new award: The Walter James Miller Memorial Award for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic.
And on that closing note, promotion for ICFA-36 ( 18-22 March 2015) has already begun: the theme will be “The Scientific Imagination.” Guests of Honor are James Morrow and Joan Slonczewski and the Guest Scholar is Colin Milburn.—Graham J. Murphy, Seneca College
“Embattled Heavens” Conference. Working at the Freie Universität Berlin, the research group “The Future in the Stars: European Astroculture and Extraterrestrial Life in the Twentieth Century” have been running intensely interdisciplinary events for several years now. In SFS 119, I reported on the “Sounds of Space” workshop, held in December 2012; fourteen months later, on 10-13 April, the group organized a bigger, three-day event entitled “Embattled Heavens: The Militarization of Space in Science, Fiction, and Politics.” With two keynote addresses, here called “feature presentations” to make them more informal, and twenty individual papers, it was almost twice as big as the previous gathering but the spirit remained very much the same. Alexander C.T. Geppert, Daniel Brandau, and Tilmann Siebeneichner, along with a team of graduate students, selected a wide medley of vantage points, grouped them in a way that brought out additional perspectives, and arranged all presentations in a single track with ample time for discussion.
The proceedings launched from the assumption that the history and visions of outer space have been as much about exploration as about war. The fact that so many space-related technologies and solutions, from mission control centers to GPS, have been driven by defense interests and military budgets is fairly common knowledge, but specific developments have been, as usual, far more complex and circuitous. Individual presentations were grouped in panels entitled Angst, Territories, Evolutions, Plots, Infrastructures, Domination, Depictions, Utopias, Strategies, and Surveillance, while the topics ranged from astrobiology and in-space fitness, to the Cold War in space and plans for satellite warfare, to more narrative-centered issues in various media. The readers of SFS will be glad to know that the cause of science fiction was furthered by several sf scholars as well as one of the keynote speakers. There was discussion of Heinlein’s fiction (Starship Troopers [1959] seemed to be name-checked by almost everyone) as well as German sf film and television (including Weltraumschiff 1 startet [1937] and Raumpatrouille Orion [1966]), utopias, and the space-invaders gaming genre of the 1970s and 1980s. Although primarily working in international relations and international security, Michael Sheehan especially emphasized the role of sf in the shaping of various global and local policies. That not all participants fully agreed with this only made for a more interesting discussion.
I would really like to write something new about “Embattled Heavens” that I didn’t say about “Sounds of Space” but there is only one way of saying this: it was an exemplary event whose size, open-mindedness, and interdisci-plinarity can serve as a template for successful academic events that really do lead to the expansion of vistas for all involved. The full program of the conference is available online.—Paweł Frelik, MCSU, Lublin, Poland.
Forgotten Spaces 2013. From 4 October to 10 November 2013, London’s Somerset House, which stretches from the Strand to the Embankment, was home to Forgotten Spaces 2013, an exhibition showcasing the 26 shortlisted (of 147) entries in the Royal Institute of British Architects’ competition of the same name. Located in the Lightwells (the two-meter-wide subterranean passageway that runs between three of the House’s inner walls and the sides of the fountain court) and in the Deadhouse (the tunnels beneath the fountain court where gravestones were relocated during the Georgian rebuilding of the House), it is fairly minimalist: a pair of information boards per entry, including artists’ impressions and, perhaps, photographs of the location as it currently appears or as it used to be fifty or a hundred or more years ago; occasional architects’ models or dioramas; several small installations. It is as if Gibson’s cool hunters raided the Bridge for ideas to commodify but ended up doing school projects instead.
Forgotten Spaces is a rather spectral affair. Ghosts of London’s multiple pasts appear in glimpses; histories that played out differently than expected flicker and flit among the Deadhouse stands; and each display conjures a possible future that, like the dirigible cheekily lofting in the blue evening sky above A Lost World, is never seriously intended to become reality. (Meanwhile, dancing just out of reach are reputation and the possibility of actual commissions.) The exhibition inserts possibility into deeply sedimented urban spacetime. Each entry refuses to accept that a city’s retrofitting must succumb to the dystopianism of Syd Mead’s Blade Runner Los Angeles. But utopian desire is everywhere haunted by the phantasm of corporate co-optation. Neoliberal capital frames every project. Few of them would have any chance without corporate sponsorship, and those that might get by without it—such as Urban Agri-Aqua Culture’s plan to convert an abandoned Kingston Upon Thames sewage works into a fish, fruit, and vegetable farm—cannot hope to escape the inertia of property and the menace of land values.
The scale of the projects varies considerably. Bikebox wants to create a network of emergency cycle repair stations from the iconic K6 red telephone boxes falling into relative disuse across the city, while In the Canopy raises ladders up to treetop perches, opening up new vistas for adults reliving childhood tree-climbing antics. The Lepidopterium is an exotic butterfly house situated on a patch of ground next to a railway line, itself already a haven to native species. Recalling some of London’s earliest streetlights, fueled by methane from the sewers, Hidden Light imagines pipes that slowly telescope up into the air as they fill with sewer gas and, on reaching their full extension, burn it off in a spectacular flare before telescoping down to ground level once more.
Another piece of outmoded gas technology, the gasometer, fascinates entrants. The Gasworks retains the cylindrical lattice that used to frame the gasholder when it was above ground, and decorates it with panels off which light can be bounced, creating the effect of a giant lantern, while the cavernous space below, which held the retracted gasholder, becomes a gallery with a long ramp sweeping down around the outer wall. A Lost World envisions several adjacent gasometers housing a zoo and aquarium, with their anaerobically digested waste sustaining a lake and wetlands. Reclaiming the Canalside has its eye on gasometers as the centerpiece of an urban park, while Sculpture & Sons seems happy merely to have a gasometer visible in the background of its five-storey reconfigurable sculpture park.
Every bit as iconic as a phone box or gasometer is the BT Tower, which (when it was the Post Office Tower and tallest building in London) housed the megalomaniacal WOTAN supercomputer (at least according to Doctor Who’s “The War Machines” [1966]). It once had a revolving restaurant and viewing galleries open to the public, but for more than thirty years public access has been restricted to this monument to the 1960s’ optimism of Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology”. An Aerial View wishes to convert the Tower’s aerial platforms into a public space once more, with multi-story curtains to be pulled back to reveal the city. (Sadly, there is no plan to turn its pinnacle into a mooring mast for A Lost World’s rogue airship.)
Plunging beneath the ground, Museum of Memories is an archive of artifacts situated in the terminus of the old London Necropolis Railway (which, I swear, is, or was, a real thing). With more than a hint of Passport to Pimlico (Cornelius UK 1949) about it, Aldwych Baths is a decommissioned tube station turned swimming baths; Aquadocks is a similar, if rather more up-market, scheme for the airy, columned space beneath the Royal Docks. In contrast, Fleeting Memories wants to bring water above ground, returning the River Fleet to the surface near St. Pancras where, according to the crafty artists’ impression, Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884) will idle away London days; and The Centre for Forgotten Beer wants to recover London’s brewing history and bring long abandoned beers—their flavors and smells—back into circulation.
While some projects prioritize recycled and reusable materials, others seem mostly to harvest buzzwords (“responsive,” “innovative,” “permeable public realm”). Some are difficult to distinguish from the ongoing gentrification of Docklands and other rising boroughs. Many of those that want to recover river and canal banks seem little different—give or take a tree or two, some wetlands, or a strip of garden—to the soulless piazza behind the new Paddington Station development. A number of entries seem to belie their nature as hypermodern spaces by imagining themselves as, in Marc Augé terms, places. Guerrilla gardening and other urban insubordinations are pre-empted by the occasional bed devoted to urban agriculture, and innovation from below becomes draped in the discourse of increasing “food security” against a backdrop of rising global populations (as if produce from an urban fish farm might actually end up on regular folks’ dinner tables rather than the menu of a boutique restaurant).
Other, related dystopianisms lurk in equally plain view. Many entries talk about providing spaces for “the community,” but no one seems even to have consulted with actually existing communities in which these forgotten spaces exist. Has the ideological commitment to neoliberal regeneration reached the point where “the community” is always already in the subjunctive tense? Are incoming hipsters always already gathering, like Hitchcock’s birds? About halfway around the displays, I realized that in all the artists’ impressions there had not been a single person of color, and the only one I subsequently spotted in any of the exhibition’s images was in a “before,” rather than an “after,” picture. Is this the real future of London to be found in Forgotten Spaces 2013?
Artists’ impressions of the 26 shortlisted entries can be seen at the RIBA London website.—Mark Bould, University of the West of England
Science Fiction: New Death. Inspired by the bleak future landscapes depicted by J.G. Ballard, Science Fiction: New Death is an exhibition that asks whether our contemporary world is saturated with technology in ways that would allow us to say that we experience our lives as sf. It is about death, but not in the traditional sense; it asks, rather, how our ideas of ourselves, our identities, are undergoing transformations that amount to a kind of death. Running from 27 March to 22 June 2014, the exhibition is hosted by the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, a media arts centre that also provides a space for film, talks, and other participatory events, all with the aim to inspire and engage the public. Curated by Omar Kholeif and FACT director Mike Stubbs, the exhibition is based on original writing by China Miéville, conceived of as a script around which the exhibition is organized, and “presented as a deconstructed movie set” (FACT). Venya Krutikov and Michael Lill of The Kazimier, described as “experience designers” by “directors” Kholeif and Stubbs, were responsible for designing the gallery spaces.
The launch night was well attended by people of a wide range of ages. That a good number of attendees were in their twenties and thirties points to the appeal of sf explorations of the contemporary moment and the future engaged in by the exhibition, and it demonstrates that the experience of viewing art in a public space is still sought after by a young audience. The exhibition consisted of installations in the FACT atrium and two galleries on the ground and first floors, and a DJ was on hand to provide the event with an aural sf atmosphere. According to the head count FACT volunteers were keeping, gallery one saw 440 entrants, while gallery two saw 350. The atrium featured James Bridle’s Homer Sacer, a reflection on British and international law, Sascha Pohflepp’s Camera Futura, which used trampolines and cameras to create images of people in freefall, and Close and Remote’s Zone, a remapping of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) against the geography of the local Bidston Hill on the Wirral. Also located in the atrium was The Personal Archive, a collection of short films inspired by sf and sf criticism and complemented by a collection of sf paperbacks displayed for their cover images. John Dunning curated the footage for the archive in association with The Science Fiction Foundation Collection at the University of Liverpool.
The environment surrounding the works collected in gallery one on the ground floor was designed as a spaceship’s interior, with rectangular, round-edged portholes through which could be seen cabinets suspiciously resembling mortuary cold chambers. These claustrophobic tunnels were constructed out of plasterboard that made the sense of being in a spaceship strangely uncanny; the dissonance between my expectation of what immersion in such an interior would feel like and my actual experience of the contemporary reality of the limits of such replication was unexpected, to say the least. This space housed the forty-seven minute film Deep State by UK artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler in collaboration with Miéville, who wrote the screenplay. Given how crowded the corridors were, I was not able to see the whole film, but I saw the last ten minutes or so and remember several extreme close-ups of insects, skin, and hair, and an emphasis on confinement and the use of classic horror-cinema sound effects to build tension. Among the elements clearly linking this piece to the recent suppression of legitimate protest in the UK were such spoken lines as “TV and cinema are occupied by the enemy” and “I feel like an occupied territory,” along with images of protest and an address by a young black woman in a mock-spacesuit in various locations, including what I assume to be the student union hall of University College London, bedecked with protest banners. Toward the end of the film another extreme close-up, this time of a Dictaphone with a voice-over discussing the courage of young protestors, underscores how these events function as an indictment of our culture. Further emphasizing this overt political engagement were flyers attached to the walls of the corridor leading to the chamber where this film was displayed. These flyers connected UK protest to the Arab Spring through advice and warnings in both Arabic and English. They also highlighted fears of surveillance by encouraging the distribution of these leaflets “through email, printing and photocopies ONLY! Twitter and facebook are being monitored”—pointing to such revelations as the invasions of privacy conducted by organizations including the NSA and GCHQ; although “email” being an acceptable mode of distribution in this context is certainly a quirky assertion.
UK-based Nathan Jones’ nine-minute audio interpretation of Miéville’s specially commissioned short story “New Death” occupied a single chamber empty except for a ventilation grille in the ceiling. The shadow of some sort of machine passed over the grille in a regular sweep, creating an eerie counterpoint to the level audio in the room. An impressive nine-minute short by Palestinian/UK artist Larissa Sansour, Nation Estate, depicted the journey home of a resident in an enormous arcology that dominates a landscape resembling modern day Palestine. Within the resident’s apartment is a flourishing olive tree growing directly from its cracked floor, an iconic image recalling settler violence associated with Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s sculptural installation environment Hope Springs Eternal, featuring his two shorts Mainsqueeze (10:36 min) and Still Life (Betamale) (9 min), combined clips from a range of Internet based contexts, from tentacle porn to chimerical human-animal forms—clearly people in animal costumes —engaging in various filmed activities. The installation environment contained old computer equipment organized into unlikely configurations, a single-person booth or capsule in which Still Life (Betamale) screened (again, a collection of various Internet-related clips), and, oddly, an artificial cat that was clearly the most shocking item in the room, if the reactions of other gallery-goers are anything to go by. The co-occurrence of animals and technology brought to my mind cyborg relationships a la Haraway. Unfortunately I somehow missed Ryan Trecartin’s Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me, being disoriented and losing my sense of direction within the corridors of the crowded exhibition space.
The space of the second gallery was a little more expansive than the first. It opened onto Croatian/US artist Dario Solman’s Target Orbit, a film organized as a 4:54 minute transition from graphic designs of spaces and structures to a fully realized simulation of the interior of a gliding vessel looking out onto space. Down a corridor, the sound of banging against a wooden partition was the first hint of German/Australian Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders’ installation Accomplice, robots that learnt from visual feedback and experience of their environment, and have been designed to punch a hole into a plasterboard wall of irregular thickness. Underlying this basic orientation, these robots skirt with artificial intelligence through their ongoing experimentation with their environment in order to achieve an objective: a visual beyond the wall, the exhibition-goer, who becomes part of the installation itself. When I asked Saunders whether the robots could be designed to respond to knockings from the other side of the wall, he suggested that they could be, but that rather than shaping their behavior around human desires, these robots direct themselves. This brought home to me one of the ongoing themes of the exhibition, that of narcissism and obsession: why should the robots be designed to respond to humans in that way? It is possible to view the robots through an opening at the side of the partition, operating according to purposes entirely other to the desires of their audience.
The final room of this gallery houses UK-based Mark Leckey’s short, Pearl Vision (3:07 min), a Youtube-like instructional video in which a high definition CGI snare drum fills the screen and stands in for the profile of the artist. Described as a “self-portrait of material and digital obsession,” it attempts to illustrate one way in which we interact with digital media, creating and re-creating our identities and turning over the relationship between simulations and reality. US artist, designer, and entrepreneur Jae Rhim Lee’s The Infinity Burial Project is represented by an artifact involved in the practice of decompliculture, the culture of organisms that decompose organic matter and, in doing so, draw out the toxins that build up within the body. The artifact itself is The Infinity Burial Suit, which uses mushrooms tailored to decompose human bodies specifically in order to offer a new practice of burial that is ecologically sound. Zach Blas’s Facial Weaponisation and, just outside of the gallery, Liverpool-based artist Laurence Payot’s project 1 In A Million You, both take the face as canvas and the mask as tool for the concealment and projection of identity. Blas’ short film responds to technologies for surveillance based on biometric facial recognition by staging a protest using molded masks to conceal the identity of the individual. Payot’s project stops short of complete concealment: the use of a mask made of strips that did not completely hide the face, but which did mark the wearer as either apart, or as a member of a community of other participants, explored ways in which groups and subcultures form, as well as the psychological dynamics of projecting identity through the face.
Four pieces of writing that formed the “script” around which the exhibition was organized are available as a booklet during the event. Reading these days after gave me a chance to think about the exhibition in a different way, to revisit and reframe the other artworks and to reflect on the subjects and themes to which they alluded. These stories are reminiscent of Miéville’s own “Reports of Certain Events in London” and “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia,” in Looking for Jake (2005), and perhaps even Ted Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science” (2000). The story from which the exhibition takes its name, “The Condition of New Death,” proposes a transformation to the way in which dead bodies manifest to observers, an “epochal thanatological shift” (Science Fiction: New Death 4). The absurdity of the piece, coupled with its technical register, generates a capacity for detachment from the context of the story and the application of some of its speculations to issues in our contemporary world. But it does this without our losing sight of the humor of the transformation itself.
In many respects, Science Fiction: New Death is an ideal exhibition for FACT, as both venue and event are positioned at the intersections among art, politics, science, and technology. The range of exhibits, including film, images, environmental installations, and commissioned writing, reflects a wide range of engagements with sf in contemporary society. In some ways the exhibition illustrates just how far from the sf futures we really are, with installations such as Gemeinboeck and Saunders’s Accomplice showing us the limits of contemporary AI. In other ways, however, the very fact that this exploration with the future exists shows us that, if we are not quite living in a sf world, we may be on the cusp of crossing a threshold into such a future. At the same time, with the dystopian aspect of sf firmly in mind, the protest art of Mirza and Butler, Miéville and Sansour, in the first gallery shows us that we may already have crossed this threshold. A quotatioin from Miéville’s “The New Condition of New Death,” printed on the wall to the entrance of the second gallery, offers a coda for the event: “No one is yet clear on why (it) is important; that it is important—that it changes everything—no doubt remains.” This seems to me to stand as a valuable reason for the importance of the exhibition: to grapple with this uncertainty regarding our contemporary moment. The exhibits collected in New Death attempt to do so with both seriousness as well as humor and flair.—Chris Pak, University of Birmingham
New Journal. Deletion is an open access online forum in science fiction studies that publishes written think pieces, videos, and artwork in bimonthly “Episodes.” Each Episode will feature between 6 and 8 contributions from scholars, authors, artists, filmmakers, gamers, and creative researchers involved in all aspects of science fiction studies. Committed to exploring science fiction in all its forms and modes of operation, Deletion invites contributions from those writing about science fiction from a literary, philosophical, artistic, scientific, aural, televisual, games and play, and cinematic context. Deletion also accepts and encourages non-standard submissions such as creative pieces, or think pieces taking the form of 2-3 minute podcasts or video blogs. For submission details please see our website.—Sean Redmond, Deakin University
Corrigenda. Andrew Ferguson’s review-essay in the March 2014 issue referred to a story by John Wyndham, “The Living Lies,” as appearing first in the November 1950 issue of the magazine Other Worlds. In fact, the story was a reprint from New Worlds magazine in the UK, so this was merely its first US appearance. We regret the error.—Rob Latham
John Wyndham’s “The Living Lies” in Ray Palmer’s Other Worlds. Andrew Ferguson’s intriguing review essay, “Unearthing the Shaver Mysteries” (SFS #122), includes this slightly inconsistent sentence: “Palmer [in 1949] also started another fiction magazine, Other Worlds, which included some Shaver material but also published such sf stalwarts as Ray Bradbury, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, and John Wyndham, often allowing them to take on taboo themes such as racial tension or homosexuality” (187). Ferguson implies that those stalwarts’ stories were all published for the first time in Other Worlds. With regard to the John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris instance, “The Living Lies” (which deals with the taboo theme of racism), in Other Worlds Science Stories for November 1950, it was a reprint of a story written in 1939 that had originally been published in October 1946 in the British New Worlds. In both places it appears as by John Beynon. Wyndham’s third American agent, Forrest Ackerman, probably arranged the American reprint. Coincidentally, I have stressed the importance of this little known, as yet never again reprinted story, in my note “Race in SF and John Wyndham’s Color-Schemed Future” (SFS #103, 527-29). A reader who googles “Wyndham The Living Lies” will be able to read the first part of the story on a Czech website. Ackerman was probably also responsible for the first publication of John Beynon Harris’s “Technical Slip” in The Arkham Sampler (a Spring 1949 American magazine) and its reprinted text, as by John Beynon, in December 1950 in Imagination, the companion magazine to Other Worlds that Palmer began in 1950. Wyndham did not publish any other stories in either Other Worlds or Imagination. But he had previously made his “by John Wyndham” world debut in America with “The Eternal Eve” in Amazing Stories (September 1950). Ackerman was definitely responsible for that placement of that first Wyndham story, one that oddly has never been reprinted in the UK except in the December 1950 UK Amazing Stories. —David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
John B. Harris’s Mars Rover on Earth. When a human being first stepped on our moon in the shape of Neil Armstrong and then “Buzz” Aldrin, what forcibly struck many people was that not a single one of the many sf depictions of that historic event had foreseen its appearing in real time on the television sets of the impressed and astounded population of planet Earth. It also seems to be the case that not a single sf story dealing with our current on-the-ground exploration of our closest neighbor planet, Mars, envisaged that a machine, a robot, would be doing it on our behalf. Many of us are now used to virtually walking alongside the Mars rover named Curiosity on the planet’s actual surface (since 2013). We have also walked in the “footsteps” of its predecessor rovers, Spirit (2004-2010) and Opportunity (2004-). The closest sf approximation we have to these robotic surrogates seems to be a short story by John B. Harris (i.e., John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris—henceforth JBH) entitled “The Lost Machine” (Amazing Stories, April 1932, 40-47) in which an exploratory Martian robot roves about on Earth in place of a “human” Martian. This story, JBH’s second American publication, has internal and cover illustrations by Leo Morey.
Previous to this note, “The Lost Machine” has been recognized only as a pioneering robot story that emphasizes the benign and helpful possibilities of a sensitive robot. That accounts for its reprinting in two robot collections: Sam Moskowitz’s The Coming of the Robots (1963) and the Patricia Warrick, Martin Greenberg, and Isaac Asimov’s Machines That Think (1984). The Martian human, named Banuff, and the equal status robot, named Zat, arrive in their space machine on the third planet from the sun, a planet they believe unlikely to harbor intelligent life. Indeed, an unprotected Banuff cannot survive on its surface. The story is narrated by Zat, a two-armed, eight-legged (two extra for Earth’s gravity) robot, who writes: “It had been agreed between us that in such an event [an inhospitable planet] I should perform the exploration and species collection while he examined the neighbourhood from the machine [their spaceship in space]” (42). That is to say, Zat does for Banuff what the rovers Opportunity and Curiosity are currently doing for us. After Zat alights on the third planet’s surface, Banuff takes off in the space machine. When the space machine mysteriously explodes, killing Banuff, Zat becomes an increasingly lonely robot that, after a number of negative experiences, commits suicide by dissolving itself into a puddle of metal. Zat realizes that Earth is too primitive a planet for its human and machine intelligences to benefit from Martian technology.
Zat is not called a rover and the words rove, roved, or roving do not appear in the story but the name Rover in subliminally present. The first sign of ”life” that Zat encounters is what the reader recognizes as a car. If that reader is familiar with the history of British cars (the story takes place somewhere in England) s/he might well assume that car to be a Rover. During Zat’s unfortunate encounter with a dim drunkard named Tom, that representative of humanity on Earth condescends to Zat and addresses the machine as a dog with expressions such as “Goo’ ol’ dog” (45). Rover is, of course, a stereotypical name for a dog.
In short, JBH’s Zat should be recognized not only as a non-threatening robot but also as a startlingly prescient 1932 anticipation of our Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers. Perhaps readers can identify similar examples. To read “The Lost Machine” online, Google “Amazing Stories April 1932.”—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
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