#133 = Volume 44, Part 3 = November 2017
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Adam Selene and Robert Heinlein. In Ian Campbell’s persuasive essay “False Gods and Libertarians: Artificial Intelligence and Community in ʽAbd al-Salām al-Baqqāli’s The Blue Flood and Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” (SFS 44.1: 43-64), he states that “Adam Selene is Mike at his most human” (61). He might have underlined the point by noting that Adam Selene is also Heinlein the poet. Three pages earlier (58), Campbell quotes this passage from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress:
Adam Selene’s by-line appeared first in dignified pages of Moonglow over a sombre poem titled “Home.” Was dying thoughts of old transportee, his discovery as he is about to leave that Luna is his beloved home. Language was simple, rhyme scheme unforced, only thing faintly subversive was conclusion on part of dying man that even many wardens he has endured was not too high a price.
Doubt if Moonglow’s editors thought twice. Was good stuff, they published.Here Heinlein is equating “Home” with his own best-known poem, “The Green Hills of Earth,” which (apparently inspired by that song title in C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau” [1933]) appears in his 1947 short story of that title. It too is “good stuff.”—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
Conference Report: “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery”: Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, 20-24 June 2017. It might not come as a surprise that this year’s biennial conference of ASLE, held at Wayne State University in Detroit, offered many convergences between the environmental humanities and the field of sf studies. As the hub of ecocriticism since the mid-1990s, ASLE provides an exceptional forum for the multi- and interdisciplinary engagement with planetary ecologies that sf writers were among the first to characterize in terms of the entanglement between the worlds of humans and nonhumans. The majority of papers, keynote lectures, screenings, and exhibitions featured at ASLE 2017 were either driven by the critical interrogation of what it means to talk about “the human,” “nature,” “culture,” and “technology” or by the pressing concerns of the “Anthropocene,” a term that frequently sparked lively debate as to its discursive usefulness and its residual investment in anthropocentric registers.
Thematically, the conference was exceptionally diverse and yet provided a strong sense of unified purpose. Guided by my own interest in science fiction and as a presenter of a paper on China Miéville, I was delighted to be able to attend a number of exceptionally strong panels devoted to science fiction and weird fiction. I will only mention some high points. Anna Wilson (University of Montana), Laura Shackelford (Rochester Institute of Technology), Louise Economides (University of Montana), and Sydney Lane (University of California, Santa Barbara) shared a panel titled “Weird Ecology: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and Environmental Resistance,” in which VanderMeer was seen as not only the spearhead of an environmental consciousness among writers of the New Weird but also as an avid reader of state-of-the-art contributions in cultural theory, such as Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) and Dark Ecology (2016). Economides raised questions about the “ecological uncanny”; Anna Wilson spoke of an “alien-oriented ontology,” identifying precedents in the work of Stanislaw Lem; Shackelford forged connections between posthumanism and non-Euclidean spaces in VanderMeer’s fiction, and Lane’s reading of the novels’ depiction of material entanglements informed an “eco-phenomenology.” The intersection between ecocriticism and the weird was further explored in the panel “The Many Tentacled Present: Environmental Horror in Film, Literature, and Everyday Life,” in which Andrew McMurray (University of Waterloo), Marcel O’Gorman (University of Waterloo, author of Necromedia [2015]), Patrick Gonder (College of Lake County), and William Major (University of Hartford) considered the Anthropocene through the aesthetics of H.P. Lovecraft, which encouraged productive and critical discussions of the merits and pitfalls of object-oriented ontology (associated with the work of Ian Bogost, Graham Harman, Eugene Thacker, et al.) and how to understand Donna Haraway’s concept of the “Chtulucene” (proposed in her ASLE 2015 keynote lecture). Another author whose work motivated the formation of a particularly evocative panel was Samuel R. Delany. Under the heading “Dhalgren and the Speculative City in the Post-Industrial Age,” Marie Spidahl (University of Minnesota), Leslie Hodgkins (University of Minnesota), and the audiovisual performance duo Kiowa Hammons and Daonne Huff explored the (im)possibilities of mapping the relationship between subjectivities and environments in Dhalgren’s city of Bellona.
To convey a sense of the breadth of explicit engagement with science fiction at ASLE 2017, at least two more panels deserve mentioning: “Resistant Discourses and Strategies of Recovery: Exploring Gender and Environment in Science Fiction” and “Fictions of Climate Apocalypse.” Particularly notable in these were an insightful comparison by Carter Soles (SUNY) between progressive gender politics and energy anxieties in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a discussion by Christie Tidwell (South Dakota School of Mines and Technology) of the parallel representation of women and the natural world under male control in Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2014), a reading by Michelle Yates (Columbia College) of the romantic invocation of Eden in Soylent Green (1971) and WALL-E (2008), and a compelling introduction by Stina Attebery (University of California, Riverside) of “queer intimacies” between humans and nonhumans in Upstream Color (2013). There were also multiple mentions in a number of presentations of novels by Kim Stanley Robinson, J.G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler.
I left ASLE 2017 with the sense that science fiction provides a particularly fertile ground for speculative, cautionary, prophetic, and utopian engagements with environmental complications, not only when it comes to the predicaments of climate change, social environmental justice, and sustainable futures, but especially with regard to the more fundamental question of how to re-evaluate the role of the human within an ecological framework of planetary (and even extra-planetary) proportions. If I were to speculate on future trajectories in this field based on the themes most prominently discussed at this conference, I would point in the direction of indigenous studies (Kyle Powys White gave a thought-provoking keynote titled “Resurgence from within the Rust: Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene”), environmental media studies (e.g., the work of Harold Innis, Jussi Parikka, and John Durham Peters), and the persistence of water and oil as continuing topoi of critical and literary inquiry.—Moritz Ingwersen, Trent University and the University of Cologne
The Chthonopolis Exhibition. Between 5 May and 23 June 2017, the Chthonopolis exhibition was held in London at “The Factory,” a gallery space run by the design company Factory Fifteen. Drawing on my ongoing design research into the relationship of science fiction and architecture, especially to the Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies of a post-scarcity and post-singularity world, Chthonopolis is a speculative design for a futuristic city located in the Thames Estuary fifty miles from London and situated within a vast artificial crater one kilometer across at the top and one kilometer deep. A series of terraces curve around the crater, giving access to a labyrinth of immersive mixed-reality spaces used for a variety of creative purposes. This is a ludic society dedicated to developing gaming systems to engage with scientific and philosophical problems, an emergent intelligent system, and a single computational network where citizens create the labyrinthine spaces as part of their everyday activities.
The centerpiece of the exhibition was a sectional model cut through the crater showing both the complex organization of the terraces and the organization of the labyrinth spaces. The initial work, supported by University research funds, enabled the fabrication of the body of a model created using a variety of CAD/CAM techniques by a commercial fabricator. The main bulk of the model measures 1000 by 500 by 500 millimeters and is made of 84 slices of 6 mm MDF. Additional elements were laser-cut from a variety of materials and printed using 3D printing. Many of these drawings were printed on acetate and suspended from the ceiling of the exhibition space to create an immersive experience as the viewer moved through the gallery.The Chthonopolis takes as its critical points of departure a number of concepts: Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as “novum,” Adam Roberts’s terminology of technology fiction rather science fiction, the idea of Fredric Jameson (following Suvin) that the utopian is a subset of science fiction, Johan Huizinga’s concept of homo ludens, B.F. Skinner’s description of a utopian society based on behavioral conditioning, Donna Haraway’s recent work around kinship, and Iain M. Banks’s space-faring anarcho-libertarian civilization, “The Culture.”
The design draws on the utopian traditions of the early 20th century, particularly the Futurist Antonio Sant Elia’s “La Citta Nuova” (1912-14), the Russian Constructivist Iakov Chernikov’s “architectural fantasies” (1933), and the urban proposals of Le Corbusier’s “Une Ville Contemporaine” (1922) and the “Plan Voisin” (1925). Formally it is inspired by the work of contemporary artist Sarah Sze, the New Babylon project of Constant Niewenhuys (1920-2005), Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (1923-37), and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s imaginary prisons or “Carceri” (1750-61). The project also draws on current ideas around open-source software and the development of “games with a purpose” (GWAPS) such as “foldit.” The project aimed to question the market-led fatalism that pervades contemporary architectural thinking and also to wonder why, given the conceptions of utopia as a subgenre of the wider discourse of sf, the utopian tradition in architecture is not a more recognized part of sf scholarship.1 The scale and scope is based on Le Corbusier’s “Une Ville Contemporaine,” mentioned above, a city of three million people. The decision to locate the city underground was influenced by the computer game “Minecraft” and the idea of an architecture created as much by subtraction as by additive methods.
The central aim of Chthonopolis is to be a provocation, questioning any view of the city overly dominated by the ideologies of neo-liberalism. By positing the project in a world of abundance, contemporary issues around the use of resources are also thrown into question. The project follows a current trend of using sf narratives to explore themes and ideas within non-fictional discourses. Theorists such as Steven Shaviro (Discognition) and Donna Haraway (Staying with the Trouble, 2016) use science fiction as a way to develop theoretical concepts; as Shaviro states: “perhaps we will be able to imagine what we are unable to know” (8). Using science fiction can also help in the dissemination and understanding of ideas to a non-specialist audience. The work in the exhibition is an elaboration on an earlier design project, “The Gold Mine,” exhibited at the 72nd World Science Fiction convention (London, 2014) and selected for the 2015 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.
The Chthonopolis exhibition was commissioned as part of the London Festival of Architecture; some of the drawings were exhibited at the University of Greenwich as part of the Future Cities 6 conference and exhibition. A more conventionally fictional element was exhibited as part of the “The Great War Island Exhibition” in Belgrade in Summer 2017. A detailed article on the utopian ambitions of the project will feature in an upcoming issue of Architectural Design to be published in 2018.—Nic Clear, School of Architecture, University of Greenwich; Designer and Curator, Chthonopolis
NOTE
1. For more on the idea of architecture as sf, see my entry in Latham (277-90).WORKS CITED
Latham, Rob, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 2014.
Shaviro, Steven. Discognition. New York: Repeater, 2016.
SFRA Awards 2017. The Science Fiction Research Association (www.sfra. org) is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s SFRA awards, which were presented at the annual meeting of the organization, held this year in Riverside, CA, from 28 June to 1 July 2017.
The Student Paper Award, which recognizes the best student paper as presented at the previous year’s conference, was awarded to Francis Gene-Rowe for “You Are The Hero: Stephen Mooney’s The Cursory Epic.” Brittany Roberts received an Honorary Mention for “‘The Present Doesn’t Exist’: Music, Animation, and the Rupture of Cultural Memory in Vladimir Tarasov’s ‘The Passage.’”
The Mary Kay Bray Award for best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year was given to A.P. Canavan for his review of Netflix’s Daredevil (2015) and Jessica Jones (2015); the review was subtitled “The Future of Superheroic Storytelling.”
The Pioneer Award, which recognizes the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year (2016), went to Lindsay Thomas for “Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the MARS TRILOGY, and the Management of Climate Change,” which appeared in American Literature 88.1 (March 2016).
The Thomas D. Clareson Award, which recognizes outstanding service activities including sf teaching and study, editing, reviewing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership, was given to Paweł Frelik.
The Pilgrim Award honoring lifetime contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship was awarded to Tom Moylan.
Also at the meeting, the University of California, Riverside presented its Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program Book Award to Steven Shaviro for Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016). Honorary mentions went to Rebekah Sheldon for The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (U of Minnesota P, 2016), and Scott Selisker for Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (U of Minnesota P, 2016). Congratulations to all winners!—Keren Omry, SFRA President
“Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories.” The Huntington Library’s website describes a recent exhibition (8 April-7 August), its first major celebration of its acquisition of the late sf author Octavia E. Butler’s papers. “She was a pioneer, a master storyteller who brought her voice—the voice of a woman of color—to science fiction,” said Natalie Russell, curator of the exhibition.
Octavia Butler, a Pasadena, CA, native, told the New York Times in a 2000 interview that “When I began writing science fiction, when I began reading, heck, I wasn’t in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.” In 1975, she sold her first novel, Patternmaster, to Doubleday, quickly followed by Mind of My Mind (1977) and Survivor (1978); the trio comprise part of her Patternist series. She won her first Hugo award in 1985 for the short story “Speech Sounds,” followed by other awards, including a Locus and Nebula. “Her stories resonate in very powerful ways today,” said Russell. “Perhaps even more so than when they were first published.”
Butler’s papers arrived at The Huntington during 2008 in two file cabinets and 35 large cartons comprising more than 8,000 items. By the time the collection had been processed and catalogued, scholars were clamoring for access. In the past two years, the Butler archive has been used nearly 1300 times—or roughly 15 times per week—making it one of the most actively researched archives at The Huntington. A delightful selection from the materials—marked drafts, character notes, motivational post-it notes, and family photos—that were placed on exhibition may still be found on the Library’s website.—Huntington Library <huntington.org>
CFP: The George Slusser Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy. This will be held at the University of California, Irvine, on 26-29 April 2018. Coordinators are Jonathan Alexander (University of California, Irvine), Gregory Benford (University of California, Irvine), Howard V. Hendrix (California State University, Fresno), and Gary Westfahl (University of La Verne).
Although the late George Slusser (1939–2014) was best known for coordinating academic conferences and editing volumes of essays, he was also a prolific scholar. His work touched upon virtually all aspects of science fiction and fantasy. In such articles as “The Origins of Science Fiction” (2005), he explored how the conditions necessary for the emergence of science fiction first materialized in France and later in England and elsewhere. Seeking early texts that influenced and illuminate science fiction, he focused not only on major writers such as Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells but also on usually overlooked figures such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Benjamin Constant, Thomas De Quincey, Honoré de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, J.-H. Rosny aîné, and J.D. Bernal. His examinations of twentieth-century sf regularly established connections between a range of international authors, as suggested by the title of his 1989 essay “Structures of Apprehension: Lem, Heinlein, and the Strugatskys.” He not only scrutinized classic novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin but also the formulaic ephemera of the sf marketplace. No single paragraph can possibly summarize the full extent of his remarkably adventurous scholarship.
The Slusser Conference seeks to pay tribute to his career by inviting science- fiction scholars, commentators, and writers to contribute papers that build upon some of his groundbreaking ideas; we also welcome suggestions for panels that would address Slusser and his legacy. To assist potential participants in locating and studying Slusser’s works, a conference website will include a comprehensive bibliography of his books, essays, reviews, and introductions. This selective conference will follow the format that Slusser preferred, a single track that allows all attendees to listen to every paper. It is hoped that the best conference papers can be assembled in one volume and published as a formal or informal Festschrift to George Slusser.
Potential contributors should submit by email a 250-word abstract and brief CV to any of the conference coordinators: Jon Alexander (jfalexan@uci.edu), Gregory Benford (xbenford@gmail.com), Howard V. Hendrix (howardh@ csufresno.edu), or Gary Westfahl (Gwwestfahl@yahoo.com). The deadline for submission of abstracts is 31 December 2017; decisions will be forthcoming by mid-January, 2018. Further information about the conference schedule, fee, location, accommodations, and distinguished guests will be provided at the conference website.—Gerry Canavan, Marquette University
CFP: Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, 18-19 May 2018. In response to the popularity of cyberspace disembodiment of the 1980s and 1990s, sf and fantasy are increasingly concerned with exploring the materiality of bodies. SFF literature, film, television, and video games frequently explore how experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and disability inform the construction of identity and influence lived experience; question what it means to be or exceed the human; and consider the agency and nature of nonhuman bodies. This conference will explore the ways in which the body is a focus in SFF, and how the experience and representation of bodies inform how we understand human, posthuman, and nonhuman subjects and their positionality within material and cultural settings. Our keynote speakers are Veronica Hollinger of Science Fiction Studies and Kameron Hurley, Hugo and Locus award-winning author.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, or panels consisting of three 20-minute papers, addressing topics that include but are not limited to the following: gender identity; sexuality; race and ethnicity; representations of disability; body modification; cyborgs, clones; posthuman and nonhuman embodiment; technology and the body; metamorphosis and hybridity; bodily experiences of environmental crisis; bodies, space, and geography; pregnancy, birth, aging, death and dying; bodily containment (in spaceships, for instance, or exo-skeletons); environments as bodies; sentient ecological networks; and bodily manifestations of the soul or spirit. Send inquiries and proposals to <sffembodiment conference2018@gmail.com> by 31 December 2017.—Kristen Shaw, Selena Middleton, Catherine Grisé, McMaster University
Call for Conference Paper Proposals, “The Anthropocene and Beyond,” Hong Kong, 2018. Human society and culture have arrived at a pivotal moment in the production of scientific, economic, psychological, and even artistic and philosophical subjectivity and identity. The different “scales” inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene galvanize both the local and global, inviting academic research to adopt an interdisciplinary approach with unprecedented pace and intensity. The Anthropocene has emerged as the ultimate conceptual horizon of cultural, economic, and political debates, disrupting the whole pattern of our “thought” itself in a radical process of paradigm shift. The complex and interrelated web of overarching significances—biological sciences, ethics, materialism, ecophilosophy, and economics—demand a crucial reframing of academic debates. Paying homage to the “politics of location,” we welcome paper proposals that make local reference to specific perspectives from, say, the first and the third (or fourth) worlds, Eurocentrism and Asia, or South-East Asia, including Hong Kong.
We call for papers in areas that have begun to renew the human and social sciences through a dialogue with the sciences, the arts, politics, and philosophy. Environmental history, natural anthropology, laws and ethics, human/nonhuman ecologies, media culture, and green economics and business are among the possible interdisciplinary intersections. We welcome papers that explore the Anthropocene as conceived and addressed by artists, musicians, graphic and sf novelists, physicists, sociologists, film producers, linguists, and psychologists.
Suggested topics include Anthopocene fiction, sf, new ecocriticism, the human/nonhuman turn, entangled humanism, oppositional politics, environmental politics, international relations and environmental activism, environmental science and the social sciences, nature and society, social stratification and international relations, and new humanities. Other welcome topics might include nature and society; social stratification; human history and Earth’s deep histories; the history of the future; the science of historicity and time; domesticity; ecology and the economy; social media and ecosociology; media and ecological ethics; cyberculture and the future city; ecopsychology and ecolinguistics; and climate change and visual culture. The conference is organized by Hong Kong Shue Yan University, and sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Science Fiction Studies. Please send proposals and brief biographical notes (250 words) by 31 January 2018 to <Anthropocene@hksyu.edu>.—Amy K.S. Chan, Hong Kong Shue Yan University
Mullen Fellowship Winners 2017-2018. This year’s Mullen archival research fellowship for an MA degree candidate was won by Guilio Argenio, a student in Contemporary History at the University of Pisa. His thesis investigates US mass media and its portrayal in sf during the 1950s. The research is centered around Galaxy, a magazine both popular and aware of the changes in society. He will visit the Science Fiction Foundation’s collection at the University of Liverpool to explore and read the vast number of Galaxy’s issues in the archive.
There are three PhD awards this year. Fleur Hopkins is a PhD candidate at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her dissertation seeks to rediscover a forgotten literary genre, the merveilleux-scientifique (a term coined by Maurice Renard). She will visit the Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon, Switzerland, to study rare books by French authors such as Varlet, Couvreur, Thévenin, and La Hire in the Pierre Versins and Brian Stableford collections; and also to collect visual documents from the Andrew Watts collection. Irene Morrison is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation focuses on how Indigenous and non-Western writers—including Native North American, Palestinian, and Afro-Caribbean writers—are transforming the genre. Rather than simply reject the techno-optimism of Western sf, these writers imagine new technologies based in Indigenous philosophies of science. She will visit the Beinecke Library at Yale to study the papers of Gerald Robert Vizenor. The third PhD Mullen Award recipient is Ida Yoshinaga, a PhD Candidate in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English, University of Hawai’i-Mānoa. The Mullen grant will fund research for a dissertation chapter on horror and urban-fantasy television, and she will visit the Bradbury-Albright Collection at Indiana University-Purdue University (Indianapolis) to examine unpublished teleplays and related correspondence from The Ray Bradbury Theater (TRBT, HBO, and USA Network, 1985-1992).
Samuel Cooper, recipient of the post-doctoral Mullen Fellowship grant, has a 2016 PhD in Classics from Princeton and will be investigating the deep history of such sf topoi as the journey into the unknown, the literary utopia, the encounter with the “nonhuman” Other, and the fictionalization and poeticization of “scientific” rhetoric. In part his work investigates how writers such as Olaf Stapledon reconfigure ancient concepts of tragedy and comedy to render meaningful the possible destinies of diverse forms of life. He will visit the Stapledon archive at the University of Liverpool Library to examine Stapledon’s annotated books, manuscripts, lecture notes, and letters.—Sherryl Vint, SFS (Committee Chair, Mullen Research Fellowships)
Remembering David Y. Hughes. I learned of the death of my friend David Hughes from Patrick Parrinder’s informative obituary (SFS 44.1 [Mar. 2017]: 202-03). David and I had not been in contact for about a decade prior to that, not because of a falling out but because his wife’s condition had made communication too painful. (She had developed hydrocephalus; and in her case, for one, it proved untreatable.) He and Jane were very much a devoted couple (they had a kind of in-joke that this was on account of her sharing her name with that by which H.G. Wells’s wife was known); and I imagine that her death hastened his, albeit at age 91 or 92.
David and I met (as one of his letters reminds me) at a conference on “H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction” held at McGill in 1971 and organized by Darko Suvin. The first thing I said to him was something to the effect that I’d already encountered his father. (I had spoken briefly to Merritt Hughes when I was doing research at the Huntington Library for my doctoral dissertation, Into the Unknown.) This was an inference on my part based on David and Merritt’s shared middle initial. But while correct, it could have proved to be an ice maker rather than an ice breaker had I not (for a change) picked up on David’s cue that I drop the subject. Evidently his relationship with his father was somewhat troubled. And ambivalent, in a way inferable from the fact that the son of the best-known modern editor of Milton made it his vocation to edit H.G. Wells, and more narrowly still, The War of the Worlds. An edition of same constituted the dissertation he submitted to get a PhD from the University of Illinois in 1962. I presume that this project had something to do with his Columbia University MA thesis, which I suppose Marjorie Nicolson directed—this on the basis of the fact that he revered her. I don’t know how it happened that he got the English department at Urbana to approve of such a project, but I think it rather incredible that it was allowed. Five years later, when I was being interviewed for my first academic job, a faculty member challenged me to justify giving Wells any serious attention as a literary figure. And that was at San Francisco State, almost within chanting distance of the ongoing revolutionary protests at UC Berkeley that would, among other things, eventuate in the redefinition of the scope and nature of literary studies.
SFS’s founding editor Dale Mullen, at some conference on sf—I’m pretty sure at Penn State, so this must have been the SFRA in 1973, not the McGill Wells symposium two years earlier—informed me that mine was the first doctoral dissertation ever devoted to sf. But I think that honorary distinction (if it be one) belongs to David. David and Dale to my mind deeply resembled one another in three interrelated respects. Both were extremely knowledgeable, albeit about different sectors. Dale had intimate conversance, both extensive and intensive, with American sf through the 1950s (at least), and especially sf magazines and their culture. David was equally well-versed about the literature informed by science—especially, but not only, in the Victorian period. Both were also quite modest about their expertise, and with neither of them was there a trace of affectation in their modesty. Moreover, both were more than willing to share their information, even when that might involve a considerable expense of time. Though I haven’t seen any testimonials on the subject, I suppose that David was a very good teacher. Indeed, he’d have had to be to teach literature to would-be engineers, as I myself found out from having tried it once—not on purpose.
David and I had two particular literary loves in common: H.G. Wells and Thomas Hardy. And having been impressed by his command of relevant and possibly-relevant information, I subsequently invited him to collaborate with me on a collection of Wells’s writings on science and sf. I soon realized that this was a Good Idea: there were various matters, most but not all relating to the certain sectors of pertinent Victorian science, that he was as completely conversant with as I was oblivious of.
H.G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (1975) has proved to be the most enduring of the books that I have had a sole or significant hand in bringing into the world. (The other five have by now achieved that Oblivion which seems to be encroaching on the present with ever-increasing speed.) It also led to David’s getting, finally, a full professorship at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, where he’d been teaching English Literature since 1964. I was touched by his expression of gratitude for my having written a letter in support of a promotion that I thought he well deserved.
I managed, with a bit of arm-twisting, to enlist him in an attempt to put together a new edition of Wells’s entire opus, one that would draw upon the manuscript materials in the Wells Archive at the University of Illinois, Urbana. But we couldn’t get any publisher to sign on, not even after we scaled the project down to four titles. (So far as I know, Urbana’s trove of materials, including many never-published mss., has yet to be exploited to any extent beyond what was the case as of 25+ years ago.)
David’s main interest in that would-be project was a proper critical edition of The War of the Worlds. He’d been quite upset at having been forestalled by Frank McConnell, whose self-styled “critical edition” appeared in 1977. David requested that I license him to review it for SFS, and I agreed, confident that he’d be fair. In my view, he was, though his criticisms were as trenchant as they were witty. Privately, however, he spoke of “the Abominable McConnell,” though always with a smile, by way of a joke.
More than a decade later an opportunity presented itself for David to realize his long-held desire. Harry Geduld invited him to collaborate on a critical edition of The War of the Worlds for a University of Indiana Press series of which Geduld was general editor. I have it in my head (perhaps erroneously) that I played some part in the business. I was working on my edition of Moreau for that same series, and perhaps Geduld recognized that he owed me for having alerted him to the existence of Wells’s hitherto-unpublished preliminary two-page sketch of the future which Geduld then printed in an appendix (said to be the most valuable part of his edition). The Hughes-Geduld edition was well received. (My Moreau by contrast confounded my expectation that it would create quite a stir for being the first—and so far as I know, still the only—variorum edition of an sf text.)
David’s unusually thick eyebrows and gravelly voice could easily give the impression that he was one of those males of the species in need of a crash course in anger management. In reality, however, he was quite mild-mannered, a gentle soul. We could use more people like him, now more than ever. I’m sad that he’s gone.—Robert M. Philmus, Editor of SFS, 1979–91
In Memoriam, Brian W. Aldiss (18 August 1925-19 August 2017). As this issue was going to press, we learned that Brian Wilson Aldiss, longtime friend of SFS, had died the day after his 92nd birthday. He twice was an SFS Editorial Consultant, including an early stint extending from March 1976 (when the journal was entering its third year) to November 1980. Rejoining the consultants in November 1996, he played an active role, contributing articles, essays, comments, book reviews, and anonymous reader reports. He knew the sf field thoroughly and fostered its highest aspirations.
He became prominent in the US as part of the British New Wave, a term coined by P. Schyler Miller in a review column in Analog (Nov. 1961) that mentions Aldiss and John Brunner among others. Christopher Priest later re-contoured “New Wave” to describe the innovative, stylish sf appearing in New Worlds magazine during Michael Moorcock’s stint as editor. It was Brian Aldiss who secured the 1967 UK Arts Council grant that kept the avant-garde but chronically underfunded New Worlds alive.
His work was recognized on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1959 he received a special Hugo Award (the only one ever given) for “most promising new author of the year”; his first regular Hugo was for Hothouse in 1962. The Saliva Tree and Other Strange Growths was co-winner of the Nebula Award in 1965, the first year of the Nebulas. The Helliconia series (1982-1985) received the John W. Campbell Award. At the turn of the millennium in 2000, Aldiss was honored as a Grandmaster by the SF and Fantasy Writers of America; and in 2005 Queen Elizabeth II awarded him the Order of the British Empire (OBE). He was also renowned as a critic, receiving the 1978 Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Science Fiction Research Association and (with David Wingrove) a 1987 Hugo Award for Trillion Year Spree, an update of Billion Year Spree, Aldiss’s 1973 history of the sf genre. In 1986 he was Distinguished Guest Scholar at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, returning to ICFA thereafter for many years as Permanent Special Guest. He was slated to appear at the forthcoming ICFA in March 2018, which will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
It was in Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction that Aldiss first argued for tracing modern sf to the Gothic novel and particularly to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Initially controversial, his proposed new genealogy has been adopted in many subsequent studies. Aldiss’s career in sf produced haunting, wide-ranging speculative fiction as well as groundbreaking critical perspectives. We will remember him for his generous and long-standing commitment to our journal and for his extraordinary contributions, both as author and critic, to the sf field at large.—The Editors, SFS
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