#130 = Volume 43, Part 3 = November 2016
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
R.D. Mullen Fellowship Winners. During their deliberations this spring, the committee—chaired by Sherryl Vint and consisting of Carol McGuirk, Neil Easterbrook, and DeWitt Douglas Kilgore—reviewed a number of excellent applications and settled on the following slate of three winners for 2016-2017:
Jennifer Jodell is a PhD candidate at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her dissertation, Mediating Bodies in Science Fiction, explores the ways in which sf texts represent the body as a medium for various forms of cultural, technological, and intersubjective exchange. Specifically, her project tracks the nineteenth-century trope of the mediating woman/medium through its various mutations in early sf and connects these representations to the later figures of the cyborg and the posthuman. Using a combination of feminist, film, sf, and critical race theory, she hopes to understand how these “mediating bodies” figure in the genre's representations of subjectivity, agency, creativity, sociality, race, and gender. The first stage of the project focuses on pulp short stories in which the body is depicted as mediating the "transmissions" of various types of networks. She will visit The J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at the University of California, Riverside, to examine selected runs of the collection’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror pulps.
Brandon Jones is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation argues that whereas many scientific and political discourses on ecology developed an antagonistic relationship with utopianism after the Second World War, certain genres of speculative and historical American fiction contributed to a rapprochement between ecology and utopia. He will visit the Huntington Library to review variant drafts of Octavia Butler’s unpublished Parable of the Trickster (1989-2006), as well as to examine Butler’s notes and outlines of the two published Parable novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
Anneke Schwob is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, In Situ: Scientific Space in the American Imaginary, explores scientific spaces in American science fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. Authors use scientific practice as a tool to grapple with threatening and indeterminate geography in texts ranging from weird fiction to naturalism to non-fictional expedition memoirs. Texts make sense of these spaces—the Amazon, Death Valley, Antarctica—by depicting them as the site of scientific practice. The turn of the twentieth century is a time when what Michael Houellebecq calls “blanks on the map” are rapidly disappearing at the same time that scientific practice is being codified and institutionalized. Speculative fiction provides particularly fertile ground for reading these scientific epistemologies within a fictional space. Responding to the Antarctica that Eric Wilson has called “the world’s unconscious, a reservoir of its repressed terrors,” these texts make legible—although strange and often horrific—a continent that seems to exist in excess of attempts to tame it scientifically. She will visit the H.P. Lovecraft Collection at Brown University to explore Lovecraft’s correspondence and papers from the period when he was writing At the Mountains of Madness (1936).
We offer our sincere thanks to the members of the committee and our congratulations to all the recipients.—The SFS Editors
Changes to the R.D. Mullen Fellowships: At its annual meeting, the SFS Board decided to expand the scope of its scholarly support through the R.D. Mullen Fellowships to offer awards at all areas of study from undergraduate to postdoctoral research. The new competition, which will begin accepting applications in Spring 2017, will include awards for one postdoctoral fellow (up to $3000), two PhD fellows (up to $1500 each), two MA research awards (up to $1000 each), and two undergraduate research awards (up to $500 each). All awards are in support of archival research for a project that has sf, broadly construed, at its core. Applications for the postdoctoral award must be in support of a new research project, not the transformation of a thesis into a book, and the applicant must have completed his or her PhD two years or less from the date of applying for the award (those who have completed but not yet defended are also eligible; those who hold or are contracted to begin a tenure-track position are not eligible). PhD award applications must be in support of a dissertation largely focused on sf. Applications for the MA research awards are limited to those students completing a research-based MA in a program that does not award the PhD and must be in support of their MA thesis project on an sf topic. Applications for the undergraduate research award are to support upper-division students in writing a research paper on sf, and the application must be supported by a faculty mentor, who will evaluate the paper and also provide a final report on the process and outcome (this requirement can be incorporated into an existing course, or done as an independent study). More details on requirements for applying for the award will be announced in the spring.—The SFS Editors
SFRA 2016 Conference Report. The Science Fiction Research Association’s annual conference returned to the UK for the first time since 2002, hosted by the University of Liverpool on 28-30 June 2016. The university is a major center for speculative fiction research, housing the Science Fiction Foundation collection—the largest in Europe. In addition to this, SFRA 2016 was preceded by the Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF)’s sixth annual postgraduate conference (27 June). Both conferences were tremendous successes, bringing in over a hundred presenting academics, with SFRA boasting twenty-four panels in three to four concurrent streams and three roundtable discussion panels.
The conference’s main theme was “Systems and Knowledge,” but the underlying and repeatedly emphasized theme, other than Brexit (an obligatory conference joke), was: we have not done enough/there is so much we can do. This sentiment was not a negative one but rather suggested excitement over the work ahead. Andy Sawyer (Science Fiction Foundation Librarian, University of Liverpool) opened the conference with a keynote on his current research into Liverpool’s long and rich sf history. Revealing some surprising connections between famous authors and this city, his emphatic point that “we know nothing” when it comes to the lost and still-to-be-unearthed history of sf in Liverpool was an apt start.
Professor Emeritus Andrew Milner (Monash University) similarly drew much-needed attention to the global nature of contemporary sf and how little of it is either produced in countries beyond the usual suspects (US, UK, Japan today; historically Russia, France, and Germany, among others) or reaching us in the Anglophone world. His provocative keynote also highlighted the arduous task of accurately tracing a global intertextual and historical web of influence, readership, and translation, and the vast amount of research still to be conducted in this area.
Dr. Joan Haran (Cardiff University) took her keynote speech from the theoretical and analytical to sf in action for social justice and change. Echoing the call that there is still so much that we do not know, she focused on the adaptation to the screen of ecofeminist and activist Starhawk’s novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) to demonstrate how sf is employed by researchers to support social justice movements.
SFRA 2016 came to a close on Thursday evening with a banquet and awards ceremony. The Association was proud to announce the following award winners: the Pioneer Award, which recognizes the writer(s) of the best critical essay-length work of the year (2015), was given to Scott Selisker for his essay “‘Shutter-Stop Flash-Bulb Strange’: GMOs and the Aesthetics of Scale in Paolo Bacigapuli’s The Windup Girl” (SFS 42.3 [2015]: 500-18); the Pilgrim Award, which honors lifetime contributors to sf and fantasy scholarship, went most deservedly to Mark Bould; and the Thomas D. Clareson Award, which recognizes outstanding service in a variety of sf/fantasy areas of leadership, was received by Farah Mendlesohn. Finally, the Mary Kay Bray Award (for best contribution to the SFRA Newsletter) was given to Amy Ransom; Daglmar Van Engen received the Student Paper Award.—Leimar Garcia-Siino, University of Liverpool
Between Fact and Fiction: Climate Change Fiction. In April, members of the interdisciplinary research program “Fiction Meets Science” (FMS; google for our website) convened a two-day workshop at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Germany. Organizers Emanuel Herold (University of Bremen) and Sina Farzin (University of Hamburg) invited participants to examine how discourses on climate change from the scientific and political spheres have been rearticulated, amplified, and broadened in recent works of fiction.
Novels and stories that explore the ramifications of climate change have been gaining in prominence. The awkward label “cli-fi” has emerged as a descriptor of this phenomenon, which cuts across publishing genres, from literary fiction to mainstream thriller to science fiction—from Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy (2004-2007) to Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004),Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2009),and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009).
Workshop participants included social scientists, literary and cultural- studies scholars, novelists, and one engineer. The utilization of scientific scenarios and fictional speculations as ways to conceive, visualize, and cope with uncertain possible futures was a central topic of discussion. Sascha Dickel (TU Munich) suggested that because fiction need not adhere to the standards of validity and reliability that constrain scientific predictions or forecasts, it can act as a “joker” in public climate change discourse by multiplying and deepening visualizations of possible futures. Jules Buchholtz (University of Gießen) pointed out the ways that scientific scenarios are dramatized in public discourse, using the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006) as example. Alexandra Nikoleris, Johannes Stripple, and Paul Tenngart (Lund University) used Greimas’s actantial narrative schema to compare “cli-fi” novels with the shared socioeconomic pathway models that policy makers use to assess climate change mitigation and adaptation measures; they then identified the political and affective factors inherent in the making of the two kinds of narratives.
The permeable but still substantive boundary between scientific and literary discourses was apparent in Farzin and Herold’s analysis of climate fiction peritexts, which included frequent reference to scientific sources and illustrate the authors’ keen awareness of the controversial nature of the public debates they are entering. Novelist Saci Lloyd (London) talked about how she came to be obsessed with climate change and turned herself into an expert on the subject while writing The Carbon Diaries 2015.
Participants took note of the vast temporal and spatial scope of climate change and the particular challenges it poses to the imagination and for literary representation. Adeline Johns-Putra (University of Surrey) discussed how the trope of the child is employed both as a synecdoche for distant futures and as a means of invoking empathy with and responsibility for the environment. Anna Barcz (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Thorsten Heimann (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space) described how culturally shared knowledge, exemplified by local literary traditions in Poland and Germany, informs different perceptions of vulnerability to the impacts of changing climate patterns. Based on their study of small book clubs, Uwe Schimank and Sonja Fücker (University of Bremen) reported that reading-group discussions of “cli-fi” novels influence readers’ pre-existing understandings of climate change when the novels comply with their conditions for plausible story-telling and tell stories that are embedded in actual societal discourses. Simone Rödder (University of Hamburg) reported that art students working in the laboratories of climate scientists were inspired by the ambiance of the laboratory but not much influenced in their understandings of climate change.
A round-up panel featuring Johns-Putra, Michael Brüggemann (University of Hamburg), and Peter Weingart (University of Bielefeld) reflected on the potentials and limits of “cli-fi” as a means of science communication, noting that science communication and activist agendas on the part of novelists can lead to “information dumps” and didacticism that diminish and undermine the artistic value and power of a work of fiction. They also called attention to the danger that dystopian and apocalyptic narratives could generate political paralysis. There was general agreement that, despite some activists’ claims, climate-change novels have no instrumental or prescriptive value; rather, they create what Johns-Putra called an “affective space” in which the abstractions of complex scientific discourses are opened to critical thinking without the oversimplification and polarization typical of other forms of mass media.—Emanuel Herold, Sina Farzin, and Susan M. Gaines (FMS)
Science Fiction Studio. Imagine a prison where rehabilitation is conducted using virtual reality, a virtual classroom that supports communities of learners in synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, or a device that uses haptic feedback to teach you the latest dance moves. These are just a few of the ideas students at Arizona State University developed as part of a new Science Fiction Studio course. Science Fiction Studio is a project-based course designed to teach students the method of sf prototyping, or diegetic prototyping. This process challenges designers to use sf narratives as a way to develop compelling visions for the near future, grounded in actual research about science, technology, culture, and society. In the course, students worked in interdisciplinary teams to respond to design prompts inspired by “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”—an interactive and context-aware book that appears in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995).
The course consisted of three design “sprints,” each focusing on a different technological innovation that exists in The Diamond Age world. For example, in one sprint, students developed technologies that bond with their users, exhibiting rapport and care. One group proposed a system that interacts with its user through sophisticated speech recognition and dynamically changes the aesthetics and configuration of a virtual room to improve mood and focus. Students developed solutions for the near future, meaning that their work needed to be grounded in today’s technological possibilities, but not all of the technological components needed to be fully realized. For example, one group postulated a future in which hologram technologies are ubiquitous, so that small holograms could be used to teach and mentor students for homework and other class assignments. In addition, students were encouraged to create low-fidelity prototypes rather than fully functioning products. Low-fidelity prototypes enable designers to communicate and receive feedback on their solutions without extensive software or hardware development. For example, by using video sketches or cardboard mock-ups, designers can demonstrate and test the user experience much earlier in the design process.
Each design sprint began with a brainstorming session where students identified a central problem to address. For example, after units on how technologies can create emotional connections with users and on balancing user needs with system needs, the final sprint prompted students to design technologies to improve human-human interaction. Students developed and iterated their solutions, incorporating multiple rounds of feedback from their peers and the instructional team. Students communicated their solutions for each of the three sprints through both low-fidelity prototypes and short sf narratives. These narratives communicated the problem students identified and imagined a concrete solution, played out against the backdrop of an exciting near-future world. At the end of each sprint, a guest speaker delivered a lecture and provided feedback on the students’ prototypes. Our guest speakers represented a variety of technology and design leaders, including people from Google and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Science Fiction Studio is one of a number of courses developed and taught by the Center for Science and the Imagination. The center’s mission is to get people thinking more optimistically and ambitiously about the future. Throughout the semester, students work with an interdisciplinary group of faculty who collaborate to design and implement the course, including Ruth Wylie (assistant research professor, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College), Ed Finn (assistant professor, School of Arts, Media + Engineering and Department of English), and Erin Walker (assistant professor, School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Systems Engineering). The course was directed by Corey Pressman, director of experience strategy at Neologic, a digital agency and innovation lab based in Portland, Oregon. We are currently redesigning Science Fiction Studio to be delivered online, giving us the opportunity to explore how digital learning platforms could be used to teach intensely collaborative, project-based courses at scale.—Ruth Wylie, Arizona State University
Flag Flying Aspidistras and Triffids: John Beynon Harris and Eric Blair Meet. Sister Bede (Marion Tess Barker), a cloistered nun at St. Cecelia’s Abbey, Ryde, Isle of Wight, has been an important source of information for my now essentially completed Trouble with Triffids: The Life and Fiction of John Wyndham. Her father, handicrafts teacher Harry “Biff” Barker, was one of JBH’s (John [Wyndham Parkes Lucas] Beynon Harris’s) best friends. Sister Bede has an excellent memory and recalls much that happened during the many occasions when JBH stayed for prolonged periods at Row Cottage, her parents’ home in Steep, where JBH had happily attended Bedales School. Recently, she has donated her many hand-written “Reminiscences” of JBH to the John Wyndham Archive at the University of Liverpool. This passage, written in 1990, provides what seems to be the only evidence extant that JBH and Eric Blair (George Orwell) met on a number of occasions:
Q. Did Jack know Orwell?
A. Jack gave us Barkers a copy of “1984” [sic], and later we discussed “double-think” and suchlike. If my memory is accurate, Jack and Orwell did not know one another when [Jack and Orwell’s wife, Eileen, were] working at war censorship; but they did meet later. (Either they met by chance at some literary event, or else they were purposely introduced because it was considered they would have much in common. I tend to think they were introduced.) They did then meet several times, swapped experiences, and talked over their pet ideas and viewpoints. But their temperaments were different, and a lasting friendship did not develop. Jack felt Orwell was too sombre, too negative in his outlook. (Emphasis in original)At the first year anniversary celebration of Triffid Alley on 29 May 2016, I read out Sister Bede’s question and answer and gave a copy of my photocopy of the document to Leslie J. Hurst, a member of the Orwell Society who was present, who published “‘We are the Dead’: The Day of the Triffids and Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Vector 113 [Aug/Sep 1986]: 4 -5), suggesting, among other things, that the first paragraph of The Day of the Triffids (1951)—with its confusion of a Wednesday being as silent as a Sunday—had been influenced by the temporal anomaly of a clock striking thirteen, the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). JBH bought a copy of Orwell’s classic novel pretty much on the day it was published, and he revised the opening of Triffids to make it begin with a comparable time anomaly.
I went on to maintain that while there is no reason to doubt Sister Bede’s memory of JBH’s saying that he had met Orwell a number of times, it is probable that her speculations as to how they met are wrong. She did not know in 1990 that “Triffid Alley,” the Hampstead alley off Pond Street which is part of the site of an intricate episode in Chapter 8 of The Day of the Triffids, is only a few yards away from what was Booklovers’ Corner, the mainly second-hand bookshop at the corner of Pond Street and South End Road where Orwell worked part-time from mid-October 1934 to the end of January 1936 (the dates given on the Orwell plaque at the site are a little misleading). During that period and later, JBH would have regularly visited that part of London and that bookshop on his way to see, on the other side of the Heath, one of the two women he thought he should have married had she not met someone more suitable (Mary Cathcart Borer, who lived at 28 and later 21 Langbourne Mansions off Swain’s Lane, Highgate, from 1931-1935), or one of his best friends from Bedales (Bill Sykes, who lived with his wife at 7 Langbourne Mansions from 1933-1936), or his Welsh friend, Howell Davies (the author “Andrew Marvell,” who lived with his wife and eventually two children at 2 Pond Square, Highgate, from 1935 until his death in 1985; see my notes on “Howell Davies and John Wyndham,” SFS [July 2015], and online at <Triffid Alley>).
During a number of the many occasions that JBH browsed in Booklovers’ Corner during the relevant fourteen and a half months, he would, in all likelihood, have chatted with the man who had adopted the pseudonym George Orwell with the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). While working at that bookshop, Eric Blair wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). In order to make full sense of this title and understand its likely influence on JBH’s conception of triffids, it is necessary to recall its deliberate titular evocation of that well-known socialist anthem line “Keep the red flag flying here.”
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is about Gordon Comstock, someone very like Eric Blair, who works in a mainly second-hand bookshop on the same site as Booklovers’ Corner (all page references below will be to the 1989 Penguin edition). The pub clock that strikes half-past two across the street from the Aspidistra bookshop in the novel’s second paragraph still exists today; Blair, who died of TB aged 46, was clearly very conscious of the passage of time. In the first chapter of Aspidistra, Gordon describes nine customer types who frequent his bookshop, including would-be pilferers. One of them, who could be a combination of JBH and Blair, enters at the same time as a couple of “upper middle class ladies”:
Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy young man slipped through the doorway as apologetically as a cat. He was one of the shop’s best customers—a flitting, solitary creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by some strange manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.
Gordon repeated his formula: “Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book?” (17)The grubby, unshaven aspect of this person corresponds to Gordon Comstock/Eric Blair (see 120-22, 215). A couple of pages on, there is a second reference to the same rather particularly characterized individual: “The thin young man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D.H Lawrence’s Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its head buried under its wing” (19). On the next page this young man literally meets the equally young Gordon with the collision of their heads:
The thin young man suddenly realised that he was alone and looked up guiltily. He was an habitué of bookshops, yet never stayed longer than ten minutes in any one shop. A passionate hunger for books, and the fear of being a nuisance, were constantly at war in him. After ten minutes in any shop he would grow uneasy, feel himself de trop, and take to flight, having bought something out of sheer nervousness. Without speaking he held out the copy of Lawrence’s poems and awkwardly extracted three florins from his pocket. In handing them to Gordon he dropped one. Both dived for it simultaneously; their heads bumped against one another. The young man stood back, blushing sallowly.
“I’ll wrap it for you,” said Gordon.
But the shy young man shook his head—he stammered so badly that he never spoke when it was avoidable. He clutched his book to him and slipped out with the air of having committed some disgraceful action. (20)As it happens, “heads together” as a pun can mean “conference”; it is so used as the title of Chapter 8 of JBH’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). “Intensely shy and reserved” is how David C. Maxwell describes JBH on page 12 of The Penn Club Story (London: The Penn Club, 1996). Sister Bede, on the last page of her final “Reminiscences” essay, writes that “he was shy and in some ways a rather ‘private person.’” JBH was reserved and diffident but not as pathologically shy as Gordon depicts his customer. If it were known that JBH did own a copy of the single volume Collected Poems of D.H. Lawrence (1932), that would amount to virtual proof that this customer was indeed JBH. Unfortunately, his and Grace’s personal collection of books has been dispersed without a full inventory being made. The bookshop that Gordon describes does include, along with a lending library, some shelves of “new and nearly new books” (6) where Lawrence’s Collected Poems might well have been displayed in 1934 or 1935.
I understand that the author, bookseller, and bibliographer George Locke, having acquired at a 1992 Sotheby’s auction many of the books that JBH and Grace owned, sold a number of them at book fairs. Before selling any volumes that JBH specifically owned, however, he used JBH’s address stamp (John Beynon Harris / 22, Bedford Place, W.C.1 / London—England) on each book’s opening flyleaf page. I now own one of those stamped books, with “JBH” initialled with the date acquired. At least one of the others, brother Vivian Beynon Harris’s Trouble at Hanard (1948, with Vivian’s inscription to “Jack”), was passed on or sold to the British Library. As for The Collected Poems of D.H. Lawrence, all I can report is that one of the two copies the British Library once owned (not the original 1932 acquisition) is now missing. Did (or does) that one feature JBH’s stamped address (perhaps in addition to his autograph inscription) and is that why someone purloined it?
Nevertheless, given the reasonable assumption that JBH and Eric Blair did meet and speak to one another in Booklovers’ Corner on a number of occasions, it is possible that JBH acquired a copy of Orwell’s first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, from that bookshop. He might have informed Blair about three of his own books: The Secret People (1935), the detective novel Foul Play Suspected (1935), and Stowaway to Mars (published as Planet Plane in 1936). Correspondingly, Blair might have informed JBH of the novel he was working on and surely, in 1936, JBH would have bought a copy of Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
This probable exchange leads to a very important question. Did Blair’s knowledge of JBH’s sf contribute eventually to his interest in writing his own single work of sf, Nineteen Eighty-Four? Much that is important in Orwell’s 1945 fantasy, or “fairy tale,” Animal Farm—in particular the blatant rewriting of history—is realistically incorporated into the sf world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Maybe that is why Animal Farm received an sf award—a posthumous Hugo.
Finally, there is this question: did the word “aspidistra” and that plant’s role as a dire enemy in Orwell’s novel contribute in any way to JBH’s conception of triffids? The Day of the Triffids originated with JBH’s Wonder Stories tale “Spheres of Hell” (October 1933), an editor’s substitution for JBH’s title, “The Puff-Ball Menace.” JBH realized that to turn this story into a successful novel he needed some kind of plant that was more frightening than a puff-ball. The most frightening thing about a triffid is not its size or its zombie-like lurching mobility and need to suck up putrefying flesh; it is its deadly, whip-like stinger. Could JBH’s punning conception of the “asp” part of “aspidistra” have led to that stinger via the image of a venomous snake? Combining the “f”s of the flying flag image implicit in Orwell’s title with the “id” and three or four of the other letters in “aspidistra” provided JBH with all the letters he needed to develop “triids” into “triffids.”—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
CFP: Special Collection on the work of Octavia Butler. Martin Japtok and Rafiki Jenkins invite essays on any aspect of Octavia Butler’s multi-faceted work, from her continued exploration of the topics of domination, slavery, symbiosis, and exploitation, to her ecological vision, to her exploration of gender systems, to genre considerations, etc. Essays from 3000 to 6000 words are recommended, but there is no strict word limit. Please use MLA style. Essays are due to Martin Japtok <mjaptok@palomar.edu> or Rafiki Jenkins <jjenkins@palomar.edu> by 15 December 2016.—Lisa Swanstrom, SFS
CFP: On Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The editors of NANO (New American Notes Online) seek submissions for a special issue on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It is the aim of this special issue of NANO to address the significance of the latest installment of Star Wars by exploring its narrative, characters, media, and event. NANO welcomes multimodal essays of up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, including but not limited to transmedia narrative, media transformation and adaptation, materiality, Star Wars fandom and cosplay, and Star Wars video games. Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Jason Ellis <jellis@citytech.cuny.edu>, Alan Lovegreen <alanlovegreen@yahoo. com>, or Sean Scanlan <sscanlan@citytech.cuny.edu>. Submissions are due by 1 February 2017.—Lisa Swanstrom, SFS
Nineteen Years of Editorial Excellence. In order to focus on his books in progress, Rob Latham, an editor of Science Fiction Studies since November 1997, has resigned. His keen editorial eye, indefatigable work-ethic, and seemingly limitless knowledge of sf and its related genres will be very much missed. During two stints as the journal’s Book Reviews editor (1997-2001 and 2010-2016), he edited hundreds of book reviews, bringing together with seeming ease the divergent styles and subjects of dozens of reviewers, all while delivering his copy well ahead of deadline. He has guided twelve special issues as consulting editor, most recently in March 2016 (“Digital SF”), and he established and coordinated each of the SFS Symposia. Most impressively of all, he has shepherded no fewer than seventy-five articles through the process of revision to their publication. Rob’s contributions to SFS have been invaluable, and we wish him all the best in his future projects.—The SFS Editors
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