#125 = Volume 42, Part 1 = March 2015
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Israeli SF Anthology. A group of Israel’s leading sf and fantasy editors, writers, translators, publishers, artists, scholars, and critics are planning to publish the world’s first authoritative compendium, in English, of Israeli fantasy and science fiction. On 12 October 2014, we will launch a thirty-day Kickstarter to fund the acquisition of story rights and commission translations for the first of a projected three-part series called Zion’s Fiction: An Anthology of Israeli Fantasy and Science Fiction. If we meet our funding goals, we hope to engage a suitable house in a joint publishing venture.
The first volume will showcase material published since 1978, when the monthly magazine Fantasia 2000 began a six-year run, providing a hothouse for those intent on forging careers within the genre. The second will feature material published since 1948, when hard-won independence gave rise, despite the encompassing constraints of social realism, to literary musings over alternate futures, presents, and pasts. A third will present utopian variants of Jewish statehood, published in Europe and in Palestine from the mid-nineteenth-century onward.
Zion’s Fiction will appeal, we hope, to interlocking constituencies, including fans of international science fiction, readers of Modern Hebrew literature, and observers of Jewish life and letters. Fitted out with survey essays, author bios, thematic overviews, study guides, and annotated bibliographies, the series should prove especially useful to students and scholars interested in pursuing Israeli sf studies.—Sheldon Teitelbaum, Agoura Hills, California
Irradiating the Object and SF/F Now. In the summer of 2014, two conferences organized by Rhys Williams and Mark Bould were hosted at the University of Warwick. Irradiating the Object was a one-day conference on the works of M. John Harrison, which took place on the 21st of August. It was followed on the 22nd and 23rd of August by SF/F Now, which brought together a range of panels and workshops on sf, fantasy, and horror that considered speculative fiction’s relationship to critical and political issues facing our contemporary societies. They were generously supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), the Humanities Research Fund (HRF), the English and Sociology Departments, and the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), all from the University of Warwick, along with Liverpool University Press. The academic arts and humanities publishers Gylphi also sponsored Irradiating the Object.
Forty-six scholars attended Irradiating the Object, which featured three panels, a keynote by Tim Etchells, and a reading of a new short story provisionally titled “The Crisis” by M. John Harrison himself, who offered exciting perspectives on the papers throughout the day. Keynote speaker Fred Botting was unfortunately unable to attend as planned. The papers delivered were of high quality, and their grouping into panels highlighted just how complementary the various investigations into Harrison’s oeuvre were. In the first panel, “All the Way Down,” Paul Kincaid considered how Harrison uses the ephemeral motif of the city as ruin in the Viriconium sequence to explore issues of place, history, and the failures attendant on attempting to re-imagine the city and world. Extending Kincaid’s reflection on the re-imagination of the city Viriconium, Ryan Elliott explored Harrison’s poststructuralist repetition of images and their framing within specific textual contexts as instances of “versioning,” while Nick Prescott applied chaos theory and Lorenz attractors to a reading of Harrison’s re-deployment of images and themes in terms of fractal recursivity.
In the second panel, “Place,” James Machin explored how Harrison establishes a dialogue with Arthur Machen’s work. He contends that Machen shores up the world against thinning through his construction of fantastic worlds, while Harrison’s re-working of Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism jettisons Machen’s great sacramental aspect in favor of the unknowability of the universe. Christina Scholze examined Tarkovsky’s influence on Harrison, especially Stalker (1979), and the way Harrison’s re-patterning of cinematic themes and space through the literary form transforms the mundane into the sublime. Jonathan Barlow considered space and place in “In Autotelia” and “Cave and Julia,” focusing specifically on the issue of estrangement and alienation.
In the third panel, “The Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy,” I explored the sublime and grotesque representation of animal bodies throughout the trilogy, connecting the deliquescence of physical form to the notion of companion species and human-animal hybridity. Vassili Christodoulou coined the term “misanthropic principle”—which alludes to the anthropic principle—to consider Harrison’s often-noted pessimism as an attack on the values of liberal humanism. Timothy Jarvis adopted a Deleuzian perspective on haecceity to explore the deconstruction of materiality as a rending of the veil between worlds.
In his keynote, Etchells explored artistic and theatrical engagements with space, connecting this to Harrison’s own interest in theater. Etchells surveys Vlatka Horvat’s artistic paper projects, which shape the topological space of the page through cuttings, foldings, and bendings into three dimensions according to a prescribed rule, much like the code or virus of Harrison’s Empty Space. Etchells himself engaged in versioning by remixing quotations from Harrison’s work to create a performative reading that extended the logic of transformation implicit in Harrison’s ouevre. An edited collection of the papers presented at this conference is forthcoming from Gylphi.
SF/F Now brought together just under eighty attendees for two days of traditional paper panels and workshops split over two to three streams per day. Papers covered a wide range of topics from sf theory and theories of the fantastic, in panels such as “Futurity and (Im)possibility in SF Culture” and “Anatomies of Fantasy,” to sf’s relation to contemporary culture and politics in “SF in Reality” and “Technologies of Representation.” Given the wide range of topics and texts under discussion, the panel papers were sometimes not as tightly coupled with one another as those presented in the Irradiating the Object conference, yet they were still remarkably complementary. The two-paper panel “Animals and Other Others” that I was scheduled on was perhaps the exception, with my exploration of animals and genetic engineering in terraforming narratives meshing uneasily with Asli Degirmenci’s insightful discussion of the rejection of fantasy in favor of realism in Turkish fiction. She analyzes the use of djinns in Letife Tekin’s debut Dear Shameless Death (1983) as a critique of the abandonment of cultural traditions in the face of modernization in Turkey. In the panel “Werewolves/Shapeshifters,” Matthieu Donner, Kaja Franck, and Leah Philips explored the figure of the werewolf in the context of contagion, the animal body, and hybridity in the film Ginger Snaps (2000), Anne Rice’s The Wolf Gift trilogy (2012-2013), Tamora Pierce’s Immortals quartet (1992-1996), and Alison Croggon’s The Books of Pellinor (2003-2008).
Paweł Frelik, in “(Joy)sticking it to the Man: Fantastic Games and Politics,” explored various games for their political implications. He compared blockbusters such as Bioshock and the conservative Skyrim, with its vast range of mods (modifications that change aspects of the original game, programmed by gamers and available for free download), to independent games such as Papers Please and Oiligarchy, noting how these independent games were especially inventive in their coupling of game design with social and political commentary. In a somewhat different key during the same “Games” panel, Anna MacFarlane considered the “gamification” of social media such as Twitter and military violence in the film Zero Dark Thirty, which she argues is a realist cyberpunk work of the present.
Marie-Madeleine Ozdoba brought her background in architecture to sf in the “Imagining Alternatives” panel, where she explored how the two fields influenced each other during the era of the pulps. While the history of sf illustration is hard to reconstruct because many works were anonymous, pulp artists often shared the same background training as professional architects and, as in the examples of Alexander Leydenfrost and Chelsey Bonestall, worked in both fields. Ozdoba sees architectural renderings as a glimpse of the future, a contract about how a building should be. Such renderings are a space for the realization of the future and thus a kind of sf. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Simon Spiegel presented an overview of his current research into utopian film. Responding to the notion that dramatic plots inevitably call for the presentation of dystopian rather than utopian societies, Spiegel uses the example of The Venus Project’s documentary film, which details a case for the colonization of Venus, to argue that many such non-fictional documentaries can be considered utopian films. Steve Rabitsch considered the new Star Trek films as a parodic alternative to the transatlantic double-consciousness of the various TV series, arguing that Star Trek adapts the romanticized British naval meritocracy of Hornblower to space, while the wild west “wagon train to the stars” motif re-works wild west tropes. In the new films, Rabitsch contends, the alternative Kirk is a cowboy diplomat in the vein of George Bush.
The last panel that I attended was titled “Alternative Histories, Alternative Presents.” Glyn Morgan explored concepts of history and the holocaust in his paper, drawing connections to the modern-day propagandistic use of Nazi symbolism by Russia in connection to the conflict in Crimea before exploring the alternatives presented in Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992). Morgan suggested that propaganda itself could be considered a form of alternative history, one that is not supposed to be recognized as such. Mark Jerng considered the other major historical event that alternative histories return to time and time again, namely the American Civil War. Jerng discussed civil rights in the post-Civil War period in alternative histories such as Steven Barnes’s Lion’s Blood (2002) and Zulu Heart (2003), and argued that the counterfactual has been central in shaping conceptions of racial discrimination and civil rights. Michelle Kent considered the TV series Eureka (2006-2012) as an alternative present that reprises the Gernsback continuum; he outlined the ways the series explores attitudes to scientific research as a profession.
Eight different workshops explored environmental, scientific, and political themes, all with an impressive roster of workshop leaders. With regard to nature and the environment, workshops were run by Tom Tyler and Sherryl Vint on “Animal Studies,” Gerry Canavan and Pablo Mukherjee on the “Environment,” and Graeme MacDonald and Antti E. Salminen on “Energy.” Veronica Hollinger and Patricia MacCormack ran a workshop on “Humanity 2.0,” while Joan Haran and Roger Luckhurst led a workshop on “Science Studies.” With regard to global politics, Mark Fisher and Carl Freedman led the “Crisis and Protest” workshop, Caroline Edwards and Lisa Garforth led the “Utopian Theory and Practice” workshop, while Andrew Milner and Stephen Shapiro explored “World-Systems and World SF.”
The themes of these panels meant that they overlapped significantly, especially with regard to the environment and global politics. The format of the workshops consisted of two talks delivered by the workshop leaders with a ten-minute period for discussion in small groups and a ten-minute feedback period for questions, leading to a wider discussion among the attendees and workshop leaders. Preparatory reading was made available to the participants just over two weeks ahead of the conference.
Sherryl Vint and Tom Tyler used the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) films to explore the question of the human-animal relationship. Dawn, Vint contends, fails to fulfill the promise of the first film, in which the ape-protagonist Caesar is shown simply to internalize the anthropological machine described by Giorgio Agamben in The Open (2003). Tom Tyler opened his talk by considering the independent game Plague Inc. and its Dawn-related expansion, which allows you to engage in play as the virus in the film. Tyler adapts—or perverts, as he prefers—Althusser’s notion of interpellation to show how visual media hail the viewer in ways that prompt them to self-identify in various ways. This hailing, “a somewhat dubious seduction or solicitation,” can be seen in works such as the insect documentary Microcosmos (1996), the film Crash (2004), and in Rise and Dawn. Often, the effect of such hailing is to establish an anthro-normative protocol for reading the text.
Gerry Canavan opened the “Environment” workshop with a compelling reading of the film and comic Snowpiercer (2013) as a way to explore necrocapitalism and necrofuturism in terms of the failure of a life-support system. Reading the train in Snowpiercer as one such system, Canavan explores how the preposterous narrative of the film works to highlight its nature as a closed system, while also connecting the life and death aboard the train to its historical conditions for possibility. Pablo Mukherjee explored these themes through the translated stories of Satyajit Ray, whose fictional Professor Shonku relates in his ironic Diary of a Space Traveller (2009) his exploits as a scientist at the cutting edge of exploration and research. Important in the context of necrocapitalism and the environment, these stories demonstrate how this cutting edge is subject to the limitations of knowledge and character; Professor Shonku is constantly brought up against the unknowable, and his reactions to various episodes illustrate how his pride and limited understanding result in ineffective solutions to imagined problems.
In the “Science Studies” panel, Joan Haran began by exploring Donna Haraway’s work, which sits within the overlapping domains of cultural studies and science. Haran took us through Haraway’s SFRA Pilgrim award acceptance speech, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far” (2011) pointing out that Haraway’s dense prose embeds complexity into the sentence with the effect of training the reader to read and think the complexity of science. Haran’s own work, she explains, is situated at a similar interface. Haran worked as a researcher on a project funded by the Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, where she explored the media representation of genomics with a view to exploring that territory opened up by thinkers such as Sandra Harding and Haraway. Roger Luckhurst took this exploration into the realm of medical ethics, using a 1968 scientific publication, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” to explore that realm described by Canavan and Mukherjee, known variously as thanatopolitics or necropolitics. Luckhurst explored how this text exists as a network, embedded in a dialogue that includes scientific as well as legal and cultural works that explore definitions of death and negotiate for the power to define it. “A Definition of Irreversible Coma” attempts to wrest authority back from the legal domain in the light of technological innovations that offer treatments that would legally be categorized as murder.
In the last workshop that I attended, Stephen Shapiro and Andrew Milner offered two competing articulations of Marco Moretti’s world-systems theory that opened up a different kind of space for discussion than the complementary talks in the previous workshops. Shapiro described Moretti’s world-systems theory as an optic, a perspective rather than a methodology, and surveyed the three central concepts of this model: core, semi-periphery, and periphery. Using a radio metaphor, Shapiro described long and short wave systems that propagate ideas over time. Long waves are specifically capitalist focused, he argued, and while new technologies and resources do not drive long waves, they do support them. Shapiro argued that this metaphor can help explain how the semi-periphery operates as a homeostatic principle that makes the whole of the system circulatory in nature. Genres are intentional, and the function of the genre is to connect. There is no tradition: the appearance of such is simply the re-purposing of motifs to different ends. Milner clearly disagreed with this aspect of Shapiro’s view of the world system, and he provided an extensive survey of the influences between the core and semi-periphery in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century development of sf. He argued that the core shifts in response to various factors, but that there is an influence that can be traced between these writers. The publishing industry and the book trail, Milner argued, was the first modern capitalist system. It is at the semi-periphery that structural compromises such as the adoption, mutation, and innovation of genre occur. Thus, sf can be characterized as a new genre that arose from these developments at the semi-periphery.
These workshops were a particularly effective way of engaging participants and speakers in a dialogue that often extended beyond the confines of each session. The format for each, with its traditional presentation of talks, meant that there was little time to develop an extensive discussion between groups. I found these workshops stimulating and would have liked more time to engage in longer discussions that reached beyond the format of a question-and-answer session between one group and the workshop leader. To this end, some workshops might be structured around a more interactive discussion system with some rotation of participants between groups. Nevertheless, the workshop talks themselves were highly worthwhile explorations of critical theories of increasing importance for speculative fictions of all kinds, and certainly carried the promise of the conference’s title, SF/F Now. For those who would like to explore these papers in more detail, Bould and Williams’s special issue of Paradoxa (26) on “Studies in World Literary Genres” is available for download at <www.paradoxa.com>. This issue will collect some of the papers presented at the workshops, along with a selection from the traditional panel sessions.
Overall, both Irradiating the Object and SF/F Now have set a high standard for conferences. One of the strengths of SF/F Now was its carving out of a space where established academics and younger researchers could meet, interact, and share ideas. The conference was small enough that this meant conversations could be sustained over a longer period and across workshops. The papers themselves were exciting and of a high quality, and as such they made the three days an extremely inspiring academic event.—Chris Pak, University of Birmingham
Call for Papers: Science Fiction and the Subject of South Asia. Science Fiction Studies plans a special issue on the subject of South Asia in science fiction. This includes sf that explores some aspect of South Asia as well as sf by authors from the region. We are interested in both historical and contemporary approaches, explorations of authors who write in English or in other languages, theoretical and analytical articles, examinations of trends in South Asian sf, and the treatment of South Asia in sf, for instance. Strong original critical theses are a must. We welcome submissions from scholars in the region and elsewhere, although submissions must be in English, the language of the journal. Please be advised that all submissions must go through a rigorous peer-reviewed process, show knowledge of sf scholarship, and must conform to SFS submission policy. Complete articles are due by November 2015. Preliminary inquiries may be sent to Joan Gordon at <gorjoan@gmail.com>. —Joan Gordon, SFS
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