#126 = Volume 42, Part 2 = July 2015
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
George Edgar Slusser (1939-2014). An American sf scholar who was both prolific and highly influential in the field, George Slusser died on 4 November 2014. Professor of comparative literature (PhD, Harvard) at the University of California, Riverside, he was co-founder and long-time curator of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection, the largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and utopian literature in the world. For many years, George also organized the annual Eaton Conference at UCR. The papers from this conference appeared in more than twenty critical anthologies—coedited by George, along with Eric S. Rabkin, Gary Westfahl, and others—which ranged from Bridges to Science Fiction (1980) to Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science (2011) and included such titles as Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (1985), Fights of Fancy: Armed Conflict in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1993), and No Cure for the Future: Disease and Medicine in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2002), to name but a few. He also produced several non-Eaton critical anthologies on a variety of sf-related topics: the transformation of utopias, the fantastic, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.G. Wells, and the fantasy genre. George’s monographs on individual sf writers included studies of Robert A. Heinlein, Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delany, Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and most recently Gregory Benford. He received the Pilgrim Award in 1986 for lifetime contributions to sf scholarship. Lastly, George was fluent in French and, with his wife Danièle Chatelain (a literature professor and scholar in her own right), published translations of Honoré de Balzac’s fantastic novel The Centenarian (2005) and of Three Science Fiction Novellas by J.-H. Rosny aîné (2012) in Wesleyan UP’s “Early Classics of Science Fiction” book series.
I first came to know George in the fall of 1987 when we worked together on a special issue of SFS devoted to “Science Fiction in France” (published in March 1988). I found his understanding of early French sf to be impressive and his humanist approach to the genre refreshing. In the years since that time—and especially during the Eaton Conference of May 2009 whose theme was “Jules Verne and Science Fiction”—George again and again proved himself to be a rarity among academic scholars: one whose sf interests were both deep and wide-ranging and whose expertise extended well beyond the Anglo-American. George’s greatest legacy will no doubt continue to be UCR’s wonderful Eaton Collection that he spent much of his life building. But I will always remember him as the incomparable “Renaissance Man” of sf scholarship.—Arthur B. Evans, SFS
ICFA 36. The 2015 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was held from March 18th to the 22nd at the Airport Marriott in Orlando, Florida. The Guests of Honor were writer James Morrow, whose talk addressed scientific and literary thought experiments, and writer and Professor of Microbiology Joan Slonczewski, who spoke about her new novel and her research on microbiological evolution in Antarctica. The Guest Scholar was Colin Milburn, Professor of English, Science and Technology Studies, and Cinema and Technocultural Studies at UC Davis. His talk on “Applied Science Fiction” focused on the simultaneously hilarious and weighty aspects of hacktivism as essentially both protest and asymmetric cyber-warfare rolled into a kind of trickster practice. Other sf luminaries attending including John Kessel, Joe Haldeman, Ted Chiang, and Gary K. Wolfe, as well as an international assortment of bright-eyed and/or jet-lagged scholars, authors, and fans whose research interests ran the gamut from Edward Gorey to H.P. Lovecraft (who was remarkably well represented) to steampunk to gaming theory, among countless other interests broached in what was a relatively large academic conference (with 139 sessions). Zombies featured prominently this year, with at least one entire panel dedicated solely to The Walking Dead. One of the multiple zombie panels featured a particularly noteworthy paper, by Neil Gerlach and Sheryl Hamilton, attempting to outline a new form of “pandemic” narrative arising in a post-risk society that has lost trust in the effectiveness of expert systems (drawing on Giddens, Beck, and Massumi).
As with most conferences, the theme—“The Scientific Imagination”—was more of a suggestion than a strict organizing principle, and thankfully so, because some of the most productive talks were also some of the most divergent. The most interesting talk I attended was on the aesthetic function of boredom in independent video games; it was given by Tom Reiss, a PhD candidate from Germany. Among the many sessions oriented more strictly around the conference theme, the Science Fiction Theory roundtable was a productive exploration of indigenous science in contrast to Western science. A major gripe for attending sf scholars, however, was that this roundtable was scheduled opposite the only other panel at the conference with both “Science Fiction” and “Theory” in the title, creating conflict for attendees with sf and theory as a primary interest. On the final evening there was the usual banquet and award ceremony that was, by all accounts, grand, followed by an evening of drinking around the hotel pool. Drinking and arguing about black metal, academic dialogue as mental masturbation, and the limits of scientific truths in the cool Florida predawn provided some of the stranger and more entertaining moments of the conference, for me at least, although I’m sure everyone left with their own such gems. The topic of ICFA 37 is Folklore and Fairy Tales. More information about ICFA 36 and next year’s ICFA can be found online.—Graham Hall, University of California, Riverside
The Mimetic, Hermetic, and Apocalyptic with Regard to the Mimetic, Paramimetic, and Exomimetic (and Antimimetic and Fantastic). It seems, from Grzegorz Trębicki’s “Supragenological Types of Fiction versus Contemporary Non-Mimetic Literature” (SFS 41.1, 481-501), that in the 1970s both Andrzej Zgorzelski in Poland and I in Canada were working on what might be termed “supragenological” modes (498 n3) of fiction. My overlapping “Mimetic,” “Hermetic,” and “Apocalyptic” gamut taxonomy of the three possible relationships between the world of consensual reality and fictional world possibilities as described in my New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1974) correspond to Zgorzelski’s “Mimetic,” Paramimetic,” and “Exomimetic” modes except for the fact that my “Apocalyptic” also covers his “Antimimetic” and “Fantastic.” What in 1974 I referred to as the “Fantastic” mode or super genre, I now call the “Hermetic” to denote the sealed-off-from-consensual-reality nature of the literal story as distinct from its allegorical and metaphorical translations. I also came to regret my failure in the 1974 book to provide Venn diagrams for my taxonomy, something that would have made that taxonomy much more apparent. For my present thinking, readers may wish to check my “Locating Slipstream” essay (with its error-marred diagrams) in Foundation, number 111 (7-13), supplemented by the corrected Venn diagrams that accompany my essay’s Italian translation in the online Anarres, number 2.
It appears from Zgorzelski’s 1979 article, “Is Science Fiction a Genre of Fantastic Literature?” (SFS 6.3, 296-303), that his current six-mode taxonomy has developed from a three-mode taxonomy. In 1979, he had in mind three categories corresponding to three conventional stages of chronological development: the Mimetic World Model (MWM: realistic or naturalistic fiction), the New (or Novum) World Model (NWM: the fantastic genres), and the confrontation of these two (MWM.NWM: non-fantastic science fiction). These three modes correspond to the Mimetic, the Exomimetic, and the Fantastic in his current six-category scheme; a kind of Exomimetic sf (previously aligned with the NWM) that does not textually confront the MWM is now distinguished from a Fantastic kind of sf that does textually confront the MWM. Zgorzelski is not entirely clear about the answer to his titular question. It appears to be “no,” sf is not a genre of Fantastic literature. In the light of his scheme’s later growth, however, the answer becomes “yes” and “no.” The issue is this: is it of value to distinguish between two “supragenological” types of sf? Zgorzelski does allow in 1979 (and still?) that “confrontation may be undertaken by the reader” (299) but that is not relevant to his purely textual approach. The Apocalyptic sphere in my intersecting three-spheres scheme depends on the MWM.NWM confrontation within the head of the reader.
Consequently, the most innovative aspect of Zgorzelski’s current taxonomy, as described by Trębecki, is “Exomimetic literature” which “presupposes speculation about other possible models of reality either by way of a dreamlike design or by means of rational extrapolation and analogy, presenting these models without any direct textual confrontation between them and the empirical model of the universe” (486). The “or” here allows Zgorzelski to include both science fiction and Lord-of-the-Rings-style secondary-world fantasy in the Exomimetic mode. I would argue that secondary-world fantasy belongs in Zgorzelski’s Paramimetic category involving “allegorical or metaphorical translation” (486) or in my Hermetic category. Lord of the Ring’s (1954-55) relation to consensual reality depends upon its level of metaphorical translation—its quasi-allegory of good and evil. My definition of the Apocalyptic imagination similarly combines disparate genres in and out of accepted time and space: it “is concerned with the creation of other worlds which exist, on the literal level, in a credible relationship (whether on the basis of rational extrapolation and analogy or of religious belief) with the ‘real’ world, thereby causing a metaphorical destruction of that ‘real’ world in the reader’s head” (New Worlds for Old 13; emphasis in original). This definition allows for The Divine Comedy (1308-1320), Paradise Lost (1667), The Time Machine (1895), and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)—arguably a more distinctly metaphorical form of sf than Wells’s novel. I would argue that this definition, while most akin to Zgorzelski’s Exomimetic brand of literature, also encompasses his Paramimetic and Fantastic fellows.
Because Zgorzelski’s scheme while apparently now presupposing the reader’s awareness of consensual reality ultimately excludes it, The Time Machine and The Left Hand of Darkness must be understood as two quite distinct forms of sf, an Antimimetic form which, like The Time Machine (a “scientific romance” which I take to be a style of sf) starts out in the mimetic category and an Exomimetic form, like The Left Hand of Darkness, which does not, on a literal level, contrast the imagined world with the mimetic one known to the reader. For Zgorzelski, every work of sf is either Antimimetic or Exomimetic. My three-model gamut places all sf within the Apocalyptic category. My argument is that, because the reader brings her/his understanding of a consensual reality to an Exomimetic work of sf, the correction of reality that defines the Antimimetic form also defines the Exomimetic work of sf.
The problems involved with enforcing distinctions among Zgorzelski’s Exomimetic, Antimimetic, and Fantastic become increasingly fraught as Trębicki’s essay nears its conclusion. He (momentarily?) confuses the Antimimetic and Fantastic types: “The texts of contemporary [F]antastic fiction are probably the least uniform of all supragenological types; heterogeneity and breaching of conventions seem to be inherent in this mode of fictional world-making. Antimimetic fiction is closely connected with the surrealistic, the oneiric, and the pathological” (495). But less than two pages later, we read that “The [F]antastic mode is most closely related with the surreal, the oneiric, and the pathological and at the same time creates the most heterogeneous and convention-breaking texts” (497). If Trębicki cannot keep Zgorzelski’s not-very-memorable named supragenres apart, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Perhaps the best way of judging the value of a literary taxonomy is to see how it handles an example of “slipstream.” The extraordinary and complex example I have chosen is one that I have just completed reading: Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things (2014). It would seem at first that only three worlds are involved in reading this novel: the world of consensus reality in the reader’s head; a near future Earth where Barclays Bank no longer exists but faster-than-light interstellar travel does; and the lightly inhabited planet Oasis, a strange new world that circles a star other than our Sun. The narrator protagonist, the missionary pastor Peter Leigh (surnamed for Stan Lee of Marvel Comics) has been sent to Oasis to continue the conversion of its mysterious humanoid inhabitants. Because Leigh has become a fervent Christian, the reader must take account of a fourth world in the novel: the spiritual world invoked by the Bible. The Oasan converts (an unknown proportion of the total Oasan population) may instead believe in a fifth strange new world, however: a non-spiritual version of the Bible which they seem to understand as a kind of salvational sf that they insist on calling “The Book of Strange New Things,” a version of utopia in which their tendency to die easily has been overcome. Although the plot and its Oasis setting clearly mark this novel as generic sf, its technique is overpoweringly psychological and naturalistic realism. Its basic theme, the growing distance, in spite of galactic email, of the void between Peter on Oasis and his wife Beatrice (who eventually denies the existence of God) back on an apparently increasingly apocalyptic Earth, is not necessarily science-fictional. This theme and the essentials of its plot exemplification could have been explored in a mimetic novel set in Great Britain and Australia in the nineteenth century at a time when international post was possible and with aborigines in the place of the Oasans.
Given my two Venn diagrams (see the online version of the article), Faber’s disturbing novel is, I believe, best placed in the slipstream category M-A sf2, 1, and 3abc. This means that it belongs in the area where sf (within the Apocalyptic mode or super-genre) intersects with, and is dominated by, the Mimetic mode. It is both the category 2 and 1 kind of sf set mainly in time and space but in a time and space that is understood, according to Leigh’s belief in the context of a Christian eternity, out of space and time. It simultaneously belongs in the category 3 kind of sf that reflects an overall Apocalyptic mode, understanding our world in other terms that relate to (a) the nature of human beings, (b) the nature of reality, and (c) the suspicion or actuality of an outside manipulator. In Zgorzelski’s scheme, as explained by Trębicki, “slipstream” belongs in category 4, that of Fantastic literature: “Works of contemporary fantastic fiction are often perceived by the reading public and critics as mainstream rather than ‘genre’ fiction” (495). So Zgorzelski’s taxonomy tells us that The Book of Strange New Things is “presupposing the confrontation of its order [that of phenomenal reality] with a different one, signalling the presupposition by the presentation of both or more orders within the text. It presents all the orders as models, stressing the strangeness of those it confronts with the known order of the phenomenal reality” (486). The compellingly realistic/naturalistic quality of Faber’s novel cannot be recognized by simultaneously placing it within Zgorzelski’s number 1 category: Mimetic literature. That is because, as Trębicki explains, “It is only characters’ reactions that are valid” for Zgorzelski’s taxonomy (483), the reactions of human beings and Oasans in Faber’s novel; those brought by the reader’s knowledge of phenomenal reality are not.—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
Aesthetics, Artificiality, and Virtuality in SF and Poe’s Arabesque Landscapes and Rooms. Given that Hugo Gernsback includes Edgar Allan Poe in his pedigree for sf, I was surprised that Jonathan Alexander makes no mention of Poe’s artfully constructed arabesque landscapes and rooms in his provocative essay “Aesthetics and Artificiality from Á Rebours to Avatar: Some Varieties of the Virtual since 1884” (SFS 41.3, 502-23). Alexander concludes that “the creation of artificial and virtual spaces in J.K. Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884) and James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) relies on a personal allocation of immense resources that mobilizes technologies to recreate the world” (518). In Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim” (1842), inheriting a vast fortune enables Mr. Ellison to create the stunning arabesque landscape. In Stuart and Susan Levine’s thematically organized edition of The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), “The Domain of Arnheim” is the lead story of their lead category “Unimpeded Visions.” It is followed by these Poe titles in the same category: “The Philosophy of Furniture” (May 1840), “The Island of the Fay” (June 1841), “Landor’s Cottage” (June 1849), and “Morning on the Wissahiccon” (1844). The principles outlined in the “Philosophy of Furniture” essay apply to the synesthetic, fusion-oriented, visionary, transporting arabesque rooms of “The Assignation” (1834) and “Ligeia” (1838). In their useful introductory note on “The Domain of Arnheim,” the Levines point out that the sketch “contains a theoretical explanation of the need for artificiality; earthly ‘nature’ is not quite supernal beauty. The inspired seer-artist, however, can alter it to make it intimate the complex patterns of transcendent vision” (4-5). I submit that the important sf issue that Alexander is discussing should be identified as originating with Poe, an author whom Huysmans much admired.—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
Howell Davies and John Wyndham. On 3 September 1940, writing the fourth of his surviving war letters to his long-time companion and eventual wife Grace Isabel Wilson (letters now part of the University of Liverpool’s John Wyndham Archive as file 10/6/10), John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (henceforth JBH) mentions visiting their friends “Howell & Becky” Davies (Becky’s full maiden name is Enid Margaret Beckett). They lived at 2 Pond Square, Highgate, at the top of Swain’s Lane just north of Highgate Cemetery. During the Blitz, JBH would sometimes stay with the Davies couple and so escape the more-likely-to-be-bombed Bloomsbury Penn Club where he lived for so many years. He kept some spare clothes at 2 Pond Square. Fellow Penn Club resident, the schoolteacher Grace, was evacuated (along with her school) to Wales.
The very Welsh Welshman Howell Davies was a gregarious author and editor (who often wrote scripts for the BBC) and one of JBH’s best and most influential friends. Under the pseudonym “Andrew Marvell” (that metaphysical poet’s cottage was once just south of 2 Pond Square), he published three very interesting Gollancz sf novels: Minimum Man, or Time to be Gone (1938; originally set in 1950, it is set in 1970 in the 1953 subtitle-less Science Fiction Book Club edition; there is also an English spelling US text in Famous Fantastic Mysteries for August 1947; there may also exist an as-yet- unidentified 1938 [or later?] London evening newspaper serial version); Three Men Make a World (1939); and Congratulate the Devil (1939).
The first of the 1939 novels deals with the consequences, largely in London but implicitly everywhere, of a world catastrophe caused by a bacteria which destroys petroleum and thereby has the happy consequence of preventing WWII; the second, set in England (mainly Hampstead) with a side trip to Wales, focuses on the negative consequences for those involved with the discovery of a happiness drug (compare the varied implications of the longevity drug in JBH’s Trouble with Lichen [1960]). All three novels have that persuasive context of everyday realism that characterizes “Wyndham” novels. Three Men Make a World is more interesting than Congratulate the Devil because it suggests that the influence between Davies and Wyndham went both directions. Davies’s focus on the impact of machines may have been inspired by similar discussions in JBH’s Planet Plane (1936), while Davies’s penultimate prophetic-of-the-Blitz catastrophe scenes in London (especially in the vicinity of the British Museum, which was near the Penn Club) combined with the world-wide spread of the anti-petroleum spores anticipates aspects of The Day of the Triffids (1951). Three Men’s conclusion, set seven years later in semi-utopian, southern England, includes the following anticipations of Triffids: University of “Canterbury physicists have discovered a vegetable lubricating oil which is immune to attack”; there are “no more bewildering –isms” (282); and “There are girls at Eton” (285). JBH would have read all three of Howell’s novels as they were published and they all anticipate aspects of his “Wyndham” novels to come.
JBH may have first met Davies around 1938 via the sf world in London with its regular pub meetings. It is more likely that their meeting happened in 1936 via the 1921-23 Bedales School geography teacher Annie Leslie Sargent (known as “Leslie”), who in 1930 became the wife of JBH’s life-long Bedales friend Arthur Thomas Sykes (known as “Bill” Sykes). I am indebted to David Sykes for information about his foster-mother. It is clear in several of JBH’s war letters to Grace that Howell and Becky knew Bill and Leslie. Thanks to a 19 December 2014 phone conversation with Joan, Howell and Becky’s daughter born in 1925, I learned that Becky knew Leslie because they had met at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Joan also informed me that, from the age of eight until she went to Bedales in Steep, she (Joan) had attended its preparatory school Dunhurst. The Sykeses lived in Froxfield just outside Steep and probably introduced JBH, a regular multiple-days guest at their home, to Howell and Becky during Joan’s time at Bedales. Joan’s son and the Davies’ grandson Adrian Dannatt kindly provided me with his mother’s (the artist Joan Dannatt’s) phone number. Adrian (the child star of the 1977 British TV series Just William based on Richmal Crompton’s novels) supplies an invaluable and colorful account of his maternal grandfather (which includes the Highgate address and mentions an evening newspaper serial of Minimum Man) in his Foreword to a Welsh first reprint of Congratulate the Devil (Parthian Books, 2008). Joan would have left Dunhurst and gone up to Bedales at about 11 years of age (1936). This may have prompted her parents to make a special visit to the school. Perhaps they were staying with the Sykeses while JBH was staying (as was also his regular habit) with his other Bedales friends, the Barkers, at Row Cottage in Steep—hence the timeliness of the introduction by Leslie, and the meeting.
The subtitle to Minimum Man—Time to be Gone—signals the next stage of human evolution (the main title should be understood as combining the ideas of Little People and Barely Human) and may have contributed significantly to The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), JBH’s masterpiece. Mysteriously affected by working in a poison gas station, a Mrs. Jones, “the Mother” (295), without being impregnated, gives birth to extremely small twins, one male, one female: “How could there be children without a father?” (1938 edition, 113). JBH largely grew up without a father and might well have wondered about his own paternity. The vague answer to the question is some kind of “asexual or parthenogenic birth” (114). Approximately one-foot tall adults, growing at a speeded-up rate, the twins mate and produce more of their preternaturally fast-moving and intellectually superior telepathic kind. Like Mrs. Jones’s twins, their similarly hobgoblin-like offspring are all the same diminutive height and have no need for clothes. (Joan Dannatt recalled that a number of concerned readers created miniature outfits for these beings that they mailed to Andrew Marvell.) The naked “minimum” people reproduce sexually and incestuously. Mrs. Jones’s female twin, like that twin’s female offspring, is able to give birth three times a year. Their leader explains to a newspaper reporter that to their rational benefit, “we are, like the animals, seasonally sexed, and not continuously like you” (257). Note should be taken of “their eugenic programme” (246; see also 258) and the reference to “Hitler” (228). By 1950 (or 1970 in the revised setting) these variably advanced and accelerated human(?) midgets number around 250 and take over from the dictatorship that, after dissolving the House of Commons, controls Britain; it is assumed that eventually they will totally supplant taller humankind.
The controlling character Zellaby in The Midwich Cuckoos was clearly so named as an acknowledgement on JBH’s part of the Prime Minister character named Jellaby (a fascist dictator and persecutor of Jews) in Minimum Man. Jellaby anticipates Orwell’s Big Brother by a decade. Howell Davies probably derived the name from that of the character in Bleak House (1852-53): Mrs. Jellyby, the unthinking philanthropist.
The minimums take control of Britain by killing the 26 key “party of New Freedom” members (6), including Jellaby, in support of that party’s replacement by the opposition Conservative party, led by an individual named “Gregory.” The fact that Jellaby is known only by his last name, and Gregory only by his apparent first name, underlines the minimums’ view that, because of maximal humankind’s contradictory deficiencies, neither leader is more desirable than the other. Gregory and the near-homonymously-named Jellaby are akin to Tweedledum and Tweedledee; they might as well be one person named Gregory Jellaby, or G. Jellaby. JBH’s Zellaby is a G. Zellaby, the “G” standing for “Gordon.” The minimums’ wise leader, Solomon, arranges with Gregory that once Gregory is Prime Minister, he, Gregory, will be under the control of Solomon and the minimums. Incidentally, the novel’s concluding overthrow of the government approximately revolves around Davies’s Highgate home address—2 Pond Square. Adrian informed me by email (18 December 2014) that his grandfather had personally painted the exterior brickwork of the house pink! That pink paint has since been removed.
John Clute and Brian Stableford’s entry for “Andrew Marvell” in the online third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction mentions, in conclusion, that “Marvell’s novels were professional and engrossing and may have influenced John Wyndham.” Thanks to Jellaby/Zellaby, we can assert with assurance that the first “Marvell” novels most certainly did influence Wyndham. That is not the only reason why Minimum Man must be recognized as an overlooked sf novel, however. It should be reprinted as soon as possible, perhaps under its original (non-gendered) title Time to be Gone. This is the obviously relevant title that appears at the top of every page of the original 1938 text. Whoever publishes a twenty-first century edition (ideally Orion Books) should also consider including the 1947 text’s Virgil Finlay’s dramatic cover illustration and the four internal black-and-white illustrations by Hannes Bok, Austin, and Lawrence. Unlike the 1938 and 1953 editions, the 1947 text inserts ten chapter divisions.
In 1938 and 1939 (and until the 1951 publication of The Day of the Triffids) Howell Davies was a more successful sf author than JBH. Indeed, now it suddenly seems that Davies should be recognized as a significant figure in the history of British sf. We may assume that JBH would have observed that Davies’s sf novels were not marketed as sf but as thrillers. That would become Wyndham’s strategy. JBH was one of the first authors of sf (alongside Ray Bradbury) to attempt to distinguish his work from sf for commercial and other professional reasons. Margaret Atwood is the most famous current example.—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
2015-2016 Mullen Fellowships. I would like to announce the winners of the seventh annual R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship, which is funded by SFS in the name of our late founding editor to support archival research in science fiction. The committee—chaired by me and consisting of Carol McGuirk, Neil Easterbrook, and DeWitt Douglas Kilgore—reviewed a number of excellent applications and settled on a slate of three winners for 2015-16:
Joshua Pearson is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation examines how contradictions and anxieties associated with the shift from industrial to finance capitalism are expressed via gendered subjectivity in science fiction. He will visit Stirling University to examine the recently acquired archive of Iain M. Banks’ papers, with a particular focus on reviewing differences among drafts of The Player of Games (1988), Look to Windward (2000), and Matter (2008).
Walter Shepherd is a PhD student in the Department of English at Stanford University. His dissertation explores the history of the complicated and under-examined relation of African American writers to speculative fiction, focused on specific representational preoccupations that both popular and canonical African-American literatures share. He will visit the Huntington Library to examine its archive of Octavia Butler’s papers and compare variant drafts of Kindred (1979) and Wild Seed (1980), and to read the unpublished novel Blindsight and the out-of-print novel Survivor (1978).
Andrew Uzendoski is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin. His dissertation considers how recent indigenous and chicano/a speculative fiction engages with contemporary discourses about human rights, paying particular attention to responses to NAFTA and to critiques of the global celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages. He will visit the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive at Yale University to review variant drafts of Vizenor’s speculative novels—Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978), Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), and The Heirs of Columbus (1991)—and to review the research materials that Silko gathered while composing Almanac of the Dead (1991).
I am very grateful to my committee for their work in vetting the applications, and my congratulations to the three winners.—Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside
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