#122 = Volume 41, Part 1 = March 2014
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
UCR Awarded Sawyer Seminar Fellowship. The University of California Riverside has been awarded a Mellon Foundation-supported Sawyer Seminar for the 2015-16 academic year. According to the Foundation’s website, the Sawyer Seminars program “was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.” Our seminar, entitled “Alternative Futurisms,” will bring together scholars and artists who work on the intersections between ethnic identity and futuristic speculation. The various traditions of ethnic futurism—Afrofuturism, Latino futurism, Indigenous futurism, and Asian-American futurism—have emerged from and been shaped by their cultural specificity and historical relationship to technology, yet to date there has been comparatively little communication among them and almost no effort to articulate their areas of shared focus or ongoing opportunities for collaboration. This is precisely the scholarly and cultural gap that “Alternative Futurisms” seeks to fill by enabling these various sites of speculative intervention to exchange ideas and perspectives, to investigate commonalities and differences in their experiences of technologized modernity, and to deepen the knowledge within each tradition about these other sites of engagement and about the core of Western sf that provides a common starting point for their shared goals of cultural resistance and ideological transformation.
The discussions fostered by “Alternative Futurisms” will be important not only for extending our understanding of how diverse ethnic groups produce speculative cultures but also for enabling scholars, artists, and writers to mobilize the perspectives cultivated by the seminar in the creation of diverse possible futures. This seminar will enrich expertise at UCR established in our Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies (SFTS) program by infusing it with work being done in the fields of African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American cultural studies that critiques the connections between systemic racism and the historical role of science and technology in establishing such relations of power.
The $175,000 grant provides funds to hire a one-year postdoctoral fellow and to support two internal graduate fellows, with the remaining funds to be spent on events relevant to the seminar topic, such as lectures, panel discussions, performances, etc. Three main themes will organize events across the three quarters of the grant period, with each quarter underpinned by a graduate course. We will begin in Fall 2015, with conversations on the topic “Why Science Fiction?,” encouraging discussion about how speculative techniques enable critical visions of ethnically diverse futures while also addressing the risks involved in appropriating sf methods and ideas given the genre’s historical relationship to colonial ideologies. We will continue, in Winter 2016, with a series of events exploring the question of “Whose Future?,” which will consider the productive synergies to be found among linked but different experiences of exclusion or oppression within technologized modernity, as well as the more optimistic visions of technologies produced by peoples of color. And we will conclude, in Spring 2016, with a series of conversations organized around the theme of “Critical Ethnic Imaginaries,” ending the seminar with a discussion of opportunities for further intervention into the ongoing production of more inclusive and ethnically diverse futures. Generally speaking, the three themes will move, in a loose trajectory, from constructive critiques of sf and its hegemonic futures towards a more capacious sense of the possibilities for envisioning and constructing diverse futures using the speculative resources the genre makes available to artists and scholars.
As “Alternative Futurisms” will make clear, the cultures of science fiction are undergoing a marked transformation as sf criticism recognizes and explores the genre’s considerable complicity with ideologies of colonialism and racism. Simultaneously, the language and iconography of sf are being embraced across diverse ethnic communities seeking ways to interrogate the material effects of technoscientific discourses on daily life and the concrete futures such discourses help to create. Our seminar is an opportunity for comparative study and critical exchange across these multiple sites of engagement, which we see as essential to fostering a productive alliance emblematic of a twenty-first-century mode of ethnically diverse speculative thought and creation.—Nalo Hopkinson, Rob Latham, and Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
Eaton Collection Receives $3.5 Million Donation. The Eaton SF Collection at the University of California, Riverside has received a record donation of $3.5 million from the late Jay Kay Klein. Klein was a fan photographer who traveled to sf conventions starting in the 1940s, amassing a huge archive of snapshots of authors and fans. Melissa Conway, Director of Special Collections and Archives at UCR’s Rivera Library, contacted Klein in 2009 about the possibility of donating his archive to the Eaton. Preliminary negotiations soon developed into a lasting friendship, and when Klein died in 2012 he left not only his photographs (valued at $1.4 million) but also his entire estate to the Eaton. His will provides that the funds be used solely to support the Eaton Collection, with a top priority being the digitization of his negatives. In these budget-strapped times, the Eaton has many needs that could be addressed via this generous bequest: hiring catalogers to help clear a backlog of materials awaiting processing and shelving, enhancing the Eaton’s acquisitions budget to allow for the purchasing of rare items missing from the Collection, beefing up support for the biennial Eaton SF Conference, providing stipends for scholars and students working with the Klein materials, outfitting an Eaton SF Media Lab where Klein’s photographs, as well as other media-related works, could be conveniently accessed, and more. These possibilities will be debated and pursued with the new library administration, in consultation with UCR’s sf faculty and higher administration.—Rob Latham, University of California, Riverside
Enhanced Mullen Fellowships. Science Fiction Studies is pleased to announce an expansion of the R.D. Mullen Fellowships supporting archival research in science fiction. The program was instituted tohonor Richard Dale Mullen, founder of SFS. For five years the fellowships have supported up to three students annually to work in the Eaton Science Fiction Archive at the University of California, Riverside. Based on the success of this pilot program, SFS is now expandingthe fellowship’s scope. Beginning with the 2015-16 competition, the Mullen Fellowship will offer three stipends of up to $3000 per applicant to support research at any archive that has sf holdings pertinent to the dissertation topic.
Qualified applicants will be PhD students from any accredited doctoral program who are pursuing an approved dissertation topic in which science fiction (broadly defined) is a major emphasis. The research may involve science fiction of any nation or culture and of any era. Applications may propose research in—but need not limit themselves to—specialized sf archives such as the Eaton Collection at UCR, the Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, the Judith Merril Collection in Toronto, or the SF Foundation Collection in Liverpool. Proposals for work in general archives with relevant sf holdings— authors’ papers, for example—are also welcome. For possible research locations, applicants may wish to consult the partial list of sf archives compiled in SFS 37.2 (July 2010): 161-90. This list is also available online at: <http:// sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/files/2010/08/WASF-Teachers-Guide-2Archives.pdf>.
The application should be written in English and should describe the dissertation, clarifying the centrality of science fiction to the project’s overall design. It should show knowledge of the specific holdings and strengths of the archive in which the proposed research will be conducted, and it should provide a work plan and budget. Candidates should clarify why research in this particular archive is crucial to the proposed project. Students who receive awards must submit a brief report at the conclusion of their archival work as well as acknowledge the support provided by SFS’s Mullen Fellowship program in their completed dissertations and in any published work that makes use of research supported by the fellowship.
A complete application consists of a project description (approximately 500 words) with a specific plan of work, current curriculum vitae, itemized budget, and two letters of reference, including one from the faculty supervisor of the dissertation. Applications should be submitted electronically to the chair of the evaluation committee, Sherryl Vint, at <sherryl.vint@gmail.com>. Applications are due no later than 1 April 2015 and awards will be announced on 1 May 2015. The selection committee for 2015-16 consists of Neil Easterbrook and DeWitt Douglas Kilgore (SFS Advisory Board members) and Carol McGuirk and Sherryl Vint, SFS editors.—Sherryl Vint, SFS
R.U.R. The idea of robots that evolve to dominate and extinguish the human race while simultaneously demonstrating greater humanity than their creators is a contemporary theme with roots tracing back nearly a century. On 30 Jun. 2014, Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) and the Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC) organized a staged theatrical reading of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. This performance was part of an ongoing collaboration between CPNAS and the STC in which they organize free staged readings of science-themed plays. A 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek, R.U.R. introduced the word “robot” into languages around the world. The term comes from the Czech word “robota” literally meaning “serf labor” and figuratively meaning “drudgery.” The performance was directed by Samantha K. Wyer, Director of Education at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and featured a cast of 18 actors including John Lescault, Kimberly Gilbert, Rick Foucheux, Harry Winter, Tom Wiggin, and Todd Scofield. More than 350 people attended this lively production of R.U.R., an influential play that helped shape our cultural imagination about our relationship to technology.
The play begins in a factory that mass-produces robots. The robots are lifelike—they are mistaken for humans and can think for themselves—and today they might be described as products of genetic engineering. Initially happy to work for humans, their attitude changes as the play progresses, and they stage a rebellion that ultimately leads to their dominion and the extinction of humans. As the play ends, two robots fall in love, are renamed Adam and Eve, and are warned to avoid the sins of their human predecessors.
Despite being nearly 100 years old, R.U.R. explores many ideas that remain relevant to contemporary life. To provide time for in-depth discussion of the play’s themes, CPNAS organized a DASER (D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous) salon on theater and robots on 19 June 2014. Dennis Jerz, an R.U.R. expert and associate professor of English at Seton Hill University, spoke about the significance and impact of the play. He described how R.U.R. introduced several tropes now ubiquitous in sf: humans tamper in God’s domain, misuse technology, and in the process become less than human; machines are given the gift of life, become self-aware, learn from humans how to hate, and turn on their creators; machines learn how to love each other and become more human than their creators, deserving of a new Eden. According to Jerz, the play’s success was due to its blending of theatrical genres that were popular at the time: comedy, melodrama, and thriller. He pointed out that we do not see the foundation of hard sf in R.U.R., yet the sf themes of the self-aware robot and the blurring of lines between human and machine can be directly traced to this play. A video of Jerz’s presentation is available on YouTube.—Alana Quinn, Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences
New Approaches to Science Fiction Criticism: A Panel Report. This past January, the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association’s Science Fiction and Utopian and Fantastic Literatures Discussion Group presented a panel on New Approaches to Science Fiction Criticism. The intent of this panel was to respond to the cross-disciplinary critique of symptomatic reading practices from the unique perspective of science fiction and sf criticism. This task seemed particularly congenial because sf’s extrapolative defamiliarizations have often been understood as modes of theoretical inquiry—and indeed sf texts and films have proven to be productive tutor texts for scholarly elaborations of new reading practices. The panel thus offered a place for sf critics to bring this broader conversation back to the conventions of sf criticism.
In spite of an inauspicious time-slot on the evening of the first day of the conference, the panel was well-attended and the audience stayed late to continue the lively discussion. Panelists Gerry Canavan, Alexis Lothian, and Clarissa Lee responded to the framing heuristic by diffracting it through a set of urgent contemporary issues. Canavan, in his presentation “SF, Planetary Crisis, and Ecological Humanities,” contended that sf’s imaginations of ecological disaster can no longer be seen as warnings for the future. Instead, such depictions must be understood as realist accounts of the present that allow us to grapple with the new geological and species timescales in which we live. Lothian continued the theme of temporality in “Living in the Future: Science Fiction’s Queer Cultural Politics,” arguing that queer theory, sf, and sf criticism all share a foundational investment in speculative world-building. Pointing to fan production as well as to academic scholarship, Lothian suggested that the partitions between aesthetic objects and critical and theoretical stances are more porous than we might imagine and could be even more so. The final speaker, Lee, extended this line of thought by exploring how sf experiments might provide models for speculative physics and metaphysics in her piece “Gauging Speculative Physics: Ontological Readings as Critical Practice in Fictions of Science.” Altogether these three papers made palpable the indistinction between critical science fictions and sf criticism, both types of speculative fabulation.
Alexis Lothian generously catalogued the tweet stream for this panel. You can find it on her blog, <queergeektheory.org>.—Rebekah Sheldon, Indiana University
French SF Conference. The 41st Convention nationale française de science-fiction [French National Convention of SF] took place in Amiens, France, on 17-20 July in the Cloister de Wailly. The theme of this year’s convention was Jules Verne, and it was appropriately dubbed NEMO 2014. In addition to the many sf booksellers, film viewings, author interviews, and organized visits (e.g., to Jules Verne’s home), several interesting papers were also presented. Among others, noted French Vernian Alexandre Tarrieu wondered “Was Jules Verne a Writer of Science Fiction?”; Wan Yu of Beijing University talked about the presence of French science fiction in China; Ugo Bellagamba, award-winning sf author and professor of law from the Université de Nice, discussed “The Fascination with the Technological Object From Jules Verne to Hugo Gernsback”; sf writer and historian Cristian Teodorescu presented a description of the status of sf in Romania during the totalitarian regime; and French sf scholar Joseph Altairac examined the military descendants of the Nautilus in his paper “Jules Verne and Submarine Warfare.”
Several literary awards are given each year at the French National Convention of SF, notably the Rosny Award and the Cyrano Award (named for early French sf writers: J.-H. Rosny Aîné [pen name for two brothers, Joseph Henri Honoré Boëx and Séraphin Justin François Boëx] and Cyrano de Bergerac). The Rosny Award is given to the best sf novel and short story published in French during the previous year. The 2014 winner for best novel was a tie between Ayerdahl’s Rainbow Warriors and L.L. Kloetzer’s Anamnèse de Lady Star [Lady Star’s Anamnesis], and the Rosny for best short story was awarded to Christian Léourier for his “Le Réveil des hommes blancs” [The Awakening of the White Men]. The Cyrano Award, for lifetime contributions to the field of French sf, was given to Verne scholar and SFS managing editor Arthur B. Evans.—Sherryl Vint, SFS
Joan Gordon Wins 2014 Pilgrim Award. At the 2014 Science Fiction Research Association conference, held in Madison, Wisconsin, in conjunction with WisCon, Joan Gordon received the Pilgrim Award in recognition of her lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship. Her far-ranging and influential analyses of feminism and cyberpunk (“Yin and Yang Duke it Out”), vampire narratives (“Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth: The Vampire in Search of Its Mother”), and presentations of human/(non-human) animal relationships (“Gazing Across the Abyss: The Amborg Gaze in Sheri S. Tepper’s Six Moon Dance”) demonstrate her ongoing ability to deploy an impressive theoretical toolkit in the most insightful and humane ways. In addition to dozens of articles and single-author studies of Gene Wolfe and Joe Haldeman, her work as a contributor to, and co-editor of, Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (1997), Edging Into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (2002), Queer Universes: Sexualities and Science Fiction (2008), and The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010) exemplify a commitment to continued scholarly interrogation of the connection between the personal and the political in science fiction and the fantastic. As an editor of both Science Fiction Studies and Humanimalia, Joan Gordon’s deep understanding of sf and keen critical perspective have helped to shape scholarship in the twenty-first century. In essays such as “Animal Viewpoints in the Contact Zone of Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog,” Gordon explores and expands upon her term “amborg,” which builds upon Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg and Derrida’s “animot” to map changing ideas about human-animal and other cross-species relations in science fiction. This work, taken alongside “Animal Studies 101,” written for the SFRA Review and “Animal Studies” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, highlight an impressive ability to provide deeply revelatory analysis, useful theory, and highly accessible explanation. For this work, and her other many contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship, the SFRA is pleased and proud to name Joan Gordon its 2014 Pilgrim Award winner.—Roger Luckhurst, Lisa Yaszek, and Craig Jacobsen, Pilgrim Award Committee
Edgeland Futurism: Re-imagining the Future of the Southern California Borderland Region. On 7 June 2014, I was a respondent at the culminating Edgeland Futurism event in San Diego, a course created in a collaboration between the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination and Ash Smith, Associate Director for Art and Technology at Sixth College, UC San Diego. Students were drawn from UC San Diego, Autonomous University of Baja California, and High Tech High School: in other words, high school through grad school, across a number of disciplines, including people from Mexico and the US. The course asked participants to reimagine the near future of the southern California borderland region, encouraging interdisciplinary, cross-generational, and trans-border collaboration. The final event, held at Space 4 Art in downtown San Diego, was an art/performance/interactive exhibition featuring collaborative work by the students. There were installations, dance, film, photography, fiction, and more. Respondents were Stuart Candy, a multimedia futurist from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and me.
The work was great. It was clear that the students had put a lot of thought and time into their pieces. As you entered the space, you encountered a booth where adults were required to choose their sex/gender based on a “scientific” taste test, then given a sticker to wear that announced their chosen gender. Posters on the wall re-imagined the future of branding: Hello (Again) Kitty, for example, was a company that cloned dead pets. An interactive computer piece purported to be from a right to death organization in a future where people were, under ordinary circumstances, immortal. You could sign up to die, record your last words, and then go behind a screen where you literally walked towards the light. A dance piece showed robots at a production plant achieving sentience and staging a walkout. The music for this piece was Spanish folk/pop, not the usual techno. That and the fact that the piece had been created on female bodies of color was a skillful way of reframing the science-fiction cliché of the unsexed, deracinated metal robot slaves, an image that erases the reality that it is overwhelmingly women and people of color whose bodies are commodified into the machinery of mass production via globalization. In fact, it was revolutionary that, in an art exhibit organized around the science-fictional principle of imagining the future, many if not most of the student artists were people of color, and many of them were women. One young woman had crafted replaceable body parts, packaged them in styrofoam trays wrapped with Saran wrap, and given them labels and QR codes. They looked discomfortingly real, like raw flesh you would buy at the meat counter in a grocery. She was shy about her English but had dealt brilliantly with the challenge of demonstrating her work; the QR codes could be scanned by cell phones to give a pop-up describing each body part and what it was for: eyes for inserting into disposable brains; replacement male vaginas for facilitating male childbirth, etc. At first she tried not to speak to anyone or make eye contact, but two hours into the evening, I saw her wandering around the other exhibits and asking questions about them.
Some of the ideas could have used more thinking through, but I noticed that having put the work on display was helping the artists to see where the holes were. For example, the creators of the sex-change piece at the front door had supplied perhaps six different choices of sex/gender but hadn’t looked the definitions up or considered that there might be people in the audience who already identified as some of the more non-normative choices. By two hours in, in response to questions from the visitors to their booth, they had at least Googled some of the terms they had used and were better able to explain them.
Anna Nimh of Space 4 Art recorded most of my comments on video (they can be viewed on YouTube). As a respondent, my first viewing of the art was a couple of hours earlier, when I arrived at the gallery. I had to improvise my comments, so please forgive inaccuracies and repetitions.—Nalo Hopkinson, UC Riverside
Exploring the Curious Life and Times of Italian Science Fiction. The 2014 Annual Conference of the American Association for Italian Studies held a long-overdue panel on Italian sf. The success of the call for papers denotes the extent and richness of ongoing research in the field. International readers should be told that within the tradition of Italian studies (especially literary studies) science fiction was (and still is) awaiting full critical recognition—for a series of complex cultural and historical reasons that the panel discussed in part. The genre has always been marginalized within the literary canon and is commonly perceived as a second-class literary form. The panel was interdisciplinary and comparative, collecting contributions on Italian sf across different media, considering critical response, and examining relationships with broader cultural trends and dynamics.
The first session, “The Genre In and Outside the Canon,” opened with a paper by Elio Baldi entitled “Science Fiction and Canon: The Case of Italo Calvino.” Calvino’s reception is an excellent example not only of the difficult relationship between Italian literary criticism and sf, but also of the striking differences between Italian studies in Italy and Italian studies abroad (especially in the US). The paper by Umberto Rossi that followed, entitled “Italian Slipstream: La ragazza di Vajont by Tullio Avoledo,” contextualized Avoledo’s work within a complex set of cultural phenomena and tendencies from slipstream to postmodernism and within the difficuties of the contemporary Italian publishing market.
The second session, “From Rome to Mars: Geographies on the Screen,” featured Silvia Caserta on the presence and use of sf imagery in two Italian films: Totò nella Luna [Toto in the Moon, 1958] and Fascisti su Marte [Fascists on Mars, 2006]. The fact that the two films are comedies is indicative of Italy’s difficult relationship with the technoscientific imaginary. Despite using different frames and narrative strategies, Cavalli argued, both films convey an affectionate image of the Italian people as fundamentally incapable of using technologies. The second paper, by Giulia Iannuzzi, was entitled “Fortunes of American Science Fiction in Italy from the 1950s to the 1960s: Translations and Adaptations between Text and Screen.” I closed the second session with some thoughts on the widespread practice of translating science fiction from English into Italian after WWII. The extent of the phenomenon is evident in the sheer quantity of translations made in those years and the coining in 1952 of the Italian word fantascienza. The paper showed how American works were often adapted to the Italian cultural context and to readerships different from those for which they were originally created. Among the most significant changes noted were unabashed cuts in the original texts to fit the usual number of pages of Italian pulps, deleting of sexual content to appeal to a younger readership, and simplification of technical terms and ideas for readers deemed to have a limited experience of scientific culture.
The dialogue between panelists was helped along by Domenico Gallo, editor and contributor to many Italian magazines and collections, who did a fine job of focusing attention on the key issues: the presence and meaning of sf imagery in “canonical” Italian authors such as Calvino and Primo Levi; the controversial relationship between Italian literary criticism and sf, seen in the broader context of the uneasy relationship between Italian cultural elites and hard sciences, which tend to be regarded as an “inferior” form of knowledge; the contemporary publishing market and its division between small, specialized sf initiatives and the important sf works published as mainstream fiction. A forthcoming SFS special issue on Italian science fiction was announced as a long-awaited new milestone in the field.
Overall, the panel was successful in giving visibility to Italian sf within international Italian studies and adopting a transmedia and multidisciplinary approach. It brought together a fine group of scholars working on Italian science fiction: not only the panelists but also the members of the audience, who made an extremely useful contribution to the debate with numerous questions and observations.—Giulia Iannuzzi, University of Trieste
John Wyndham’s Martian Rover as Illustrated by “Chester.” In my recent note (SFS 41.2 [July 2014]: 473-74), I do not mention that Leo Morey’s cover and internal illustration for John [Wyndham] B. Harris’s “The Lost Machine” in the April 1932 issue of Amazing Stories seriously misrepresent Wyndham’s conception of his planet-exploring rover. His walking coffin-like structure (with its “array of instruments and lenses” at its front end [43]) should be horizontal, not upright. Four years later, the talented illustrator “Chester” (whose surname may be “Told” and whom I am assuming was male) came up with a much more accurate version (more akin to today’s Mars rovers) that Wyndham thought was “by far the better version” (see Walter Gillings, “He’s Converting the Masses!” Scientifiction 1 [Jan. 1937]: 7).
This illustration of a six-legged Martian rover (unlike the current six- wheeled Curiosity rover) appears on page 7 of The Passing Show’s 2 May 1936 first episode of Stowaway to Mars. The rover has two fore and two rear tentacles for “arms,” as described in Stowaway to Mars and its sequel “Sleepers of Mars (1938). The three tentacles in Morey’s illustrations misinterpret what are described as the presumably two “fore-rods” (43, 44, 45, 46, and 47) in “The Lost Machine.” Did Morey’s invention encourage Wyndham to re-imagine his rover’s “rods” as “tentacles”?
Almost nothing is known about “Chester.” Phil Stephensen-Payne in item A60 of the third edition of his bibliography John Wyndham: Creator of the Cosy Catastrophe (2001) gives his last name as “Told” (28), but he now has no recollection of his source (email to author, 22 July 2014). Online indices indicate that the illustrator career of “Chester” (no additional name is given) was confined to the years 1936-37, when his illustrations appeared in The Passing Show and Modern Wonder. Did he die during WWII? Every effort has been made to locate the owner of the copyright of the illustration. If anyone has any information on that ownership, please contact the author of this note via <mellonta1942@mail.com>.—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
Corrigenda. Here are corrections to three reviews that appeared in the July issue. First, in the review-essay covering George Slusser’s book on Gregory Benford, the Galactic Center series was identified as beginning in 1987 (that should be 1977) and consisting of eight novels (that should be six). Second, the byline for Michael Levy’s review of Gary Westfahl’s book on William Gibson listed Mike as teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, when in fact he teaches at UW-Stout. Finally, in David Wittenberg’s review of Allen Everett and Thomas Roman’s Time Travel and Warp Drives, mathematical formulae on pages 446-47 contained formatting glitches and should read: s2 = −(ctʹ)2 + (xʹ)2 = −(ct)2 + (x)2 and (1 − v2 « c2)−1/2; the subtitle for this volume was also given incorrectly (it should be “A Guide to Shortcuts Through Time and Space,” not “Space and Time”), and the publication date should have been 2012, not 2013. I sincerely regret these errors.—Rob Latham, UC Riverside
Variorum Moreau Available. Anyone out there who might be interested in adopting my edition of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau for a course on science fiction? This is a variorum text, the only one for any work of sf, so far as I know. It is especially notable for offering transcriptions of Wells’s early manuscript drafts along with other unique features. When the volume came out twenty years ago, its list price was US$40. My price for quantities of 20 or more is just US$7.50 each, plus shipping. That makes the cost of this 235-page hardbound edition competitive, say, with the 173-page Penguin paperback. If you would like to use this text in your class, please have your bookstore contact me directly. For additional information about this offer, you can reach me at <r.philmus@concordia.ca>. —Robert Philmus, Concordia University
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