#142 = Volume 47, Part 3 = November 2020
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCERay Bradbury Collection Donated to the University of South Carolina by Anne Farr Hardin. “You usually don’t know you’re collecting until you realize you need more shelves,” says Anne Hardin, decades-long friend of celebrated author Ray Bradbury, whose work shaped the fantasy, sf, horror, and mystery fiction genres. Born 100 years ago (22 August 1920), Bradbury is most known for his novels Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1950), and The Illustrated Man (1951). Hardin’s Bradbury collection, which she recently gifted to the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at University of South Carolina Libraries, grew over the decades. The collection includes rare and one-of-a kind books, artwork, photographs, fanzines, pulps, and more.
Hardin’s friendship with Bradbury began in 1982 when she was editor of the International Trumpet Guild Journal. She wrote to the L.A. Times seeking permission to reprint Bradbury’s poem, “Satchmo Saved,” about Louis Armstrong; the newspaper forwarded her request to Bradbury, who responded directly to Hardin. They continued to correspond for the next 13 years, and many letters included gifts. “Every time I turned around, there was a package in the mail. He sent me special editions or valuable copies of Fahrenheit 451 or The Martian Chronicles just because he wanted me to have them. It was all about our friendship,” she says. After more than a decade of correspondence, a message on her answering machine changed everything. “I came home from work one day when I was a middle-school band director. There were lots of messages on my machine—and one of them was from Ray. I just about fell over,” she says. “He’d sent me a poem, 'Just Gimme That Brass.' He’d had a dream of hearing that poem put to music, and wanted to know if I could have it performed at the Trumpet Guild’s 20th anniversary conference the following year if he could get it set to music.” At the conference the following year, she finally met him face-to-face, along with his guest, Hollywood composer David Raksin, who had set the poem to music. “I tried to act like I wasn’t stunned,” she says.
From 1995 until Bradbury’s death in 2012, Hardin and Bradbury spoke and met regularly. “My husband Jim and I went to L.A. for Christmas in 1997, and at dinner, Ray had a gift for me,” Hardin says. “As soon as I opened it and saw a bit of aluminum, I knew what it was—the aluminum edition of Fahrenheit 451—it’s my favorite gift. He’d rolled it up in Christmas paper and used postage stamps, instead of tape, to secure it,” she says. “At the time, there was no easy way to find special-edition books, and this was a rare, promotional book I didn’t think I would ever have.” Other favorites in Hardin’s collection include the very first off-the-press copy of the first edition of The Martian Chronicles, which Bradbury dedicated to, inscribed, and gave to his wife Marguerite. Another favorite is a first edition of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), which Bradbury inscribed and gave to actor Gene Kelly, and then inscribed a second time to Hardin.
“One of my favorite items showed up in the mail one year. It’s a little Halloween tree that you hang pumpkins and ghosts on. Ray bought a bunch of these trees for his friends that year. You can see the price tag is still on the box. He bought it at Kmart for $6.99. He just loved Halloween,” she says.
One of her fondest memories is Bradbury’s book signing at a DragonCon in Atlanta. The event organizers didn’t have anyone scheduled to help. “I promptly got this large crowd organized and in line, explained the two-item limit, and stood beside Ray and opened each item for him to sign,” she says. “That day we grabbed a hamburger lunch at the hotel and talked like friends—not about the meaning of life, but about his family, my dog, things like that. He was as down to earth as they come.” Hardin became Bradbury’s official “dragon lady,” a title he gave her after becoming overwhelmed by a crowd at the conclusion of a talk he was giving. “I always look for a second exit anywhere I go, and I spotted it in this big room where he was giving this talk,” she says. “When he finished, people started pouring up the aisle toward him. He looked at me and said, ‘Can you get me out of here?’ and I did after firmly telling the security guard at the second exit that he was going to let Ray Bradbury pass through.”
Hardin placed her collection with U of SC Libraries as a gift to the university and the public so future generations can enjoy Bradbury’s vast body of work as much as she has. “Libraries keep stories and authors alive. So the perfect place for my Bradbury collection is at the library,” Hardin says. David Shay, a cataloger at the Irvin Department who is working with Hardin’s collection, says Bradbury is especially relevant today: “Ray said he didn’t write to predict the future, he wrote to prevent the future, and the future he wrote about when he was 20 has come true today.”
The Anne Farr Hardin Collection of Ray Bradbury Books, Fanzines, Pulps, Magazines, Correspondence, Photographs, Memorabilia, and Ephemera is now accessible to University of South Carolina students, faculty, staff, and visiting researchers by appointment with the Irvin Department. An online exhibit, Ray Bradbury Now and Forever: The Anne Farr Hardin Collection at <https://digital. library.sc.edu/exhibits/bradbury/> offers visitors a deep dive into the collection, from Bradbury’s most notable works to obscure and unseen items. A physical exhibit is scheduled to open on August 14, 2021. For more information about the collection, contact Michael Weisenburg at <weisenbu@mailbox.sc.edu> or 803-777-2721.—Michael Weisenburg, University of South Carolina
SFRA Award Winners. Although the Science Fiction Research Association could not meet in person this year, I want to pass along the names of the award winners we normally would have acknowledged at the annual banquet. My thanks go out to all the committees who worked tirelessly to produce the results, and my congratulations go out to this year's honorees. Full recognition, including remarks from the committee chairs and award winners, will appear in an upcoming issue of SFRA Review.
The SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship (originally the Pilgrim Award), was created in 1970. Its original name echoed the title of J.O. Bailey's Pilgrims through Space and Time (1947) and was altered in 2019. This year’s awardee is Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside).
The SFRA Innovative Research Award (formerly the Pioneer Award) is given to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year. This year’s winner is Susan Ang for “Triangulating the Dyad: Seen (Orciny) Unseen,” which appeared in Foundation 48.132. Raino Isto received an honorable mention for “‘I Will Speak in Their Own Language’: Yugoslav Socialist Monuments and Science Fiction,” from Extrapolation 60.3.
The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service acknowledges outstanding service activities, including promotion of sf teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations. This year’s awardee is Wu Yan of Beijing Normal University.
The Mary Kay Bray Award is given for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year. This year’s awardees are Erin Horáková and Rich Horton for their essays “Treknomics” and “Gene Wolfe,” respectively, both from issue #327.
The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student. This year’s awardee is Conrad Scott for “‘Changing Landscapes’: Ecocritical Dystopianism in Contemporary Indigenous SF Literature.” Erin Cheslow received an honorable mention for her paper “The Chow that Can Be Spoken Is Not the True Chow: Relationality and Estrangement in the Animal Gaze.”
The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF in each calendar year. The first winner of this new award is Xiao Liu of McGill University for her Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
The Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize, awarded by the SF and Technoculture Studies program at University of California, Riverside, honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections among popular culture (particularly sf), and the discourses and cultures of technoscience, recognizing groundbreaking contributions to the field. Although not an SFRA prize, it is typically announced at the annual SFRA banquet. This year’s awardees are Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, both at the University of Southern California, for their Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2019). The judges also commended as particularly strong Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and Xiao Liu’s Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).—Gerry Canavan, English Department, Marquette University
New MA in SF and Film Studies. If you are a film buff and the coronavirus pandemic has given you time to reevaluate your life and career, you might want to consider doing a Master’s degree at Richmond, where the American International University in London is located, in 2021. Their exciting new MA in Film, Science Fiction, and Fantasy will launch in January 2021 and will also be available from September next year. This is the only graduate-level film program of its kind in the UK, combining sf and fantasy with film, television, and visual media, in which graduates receive both a UK and US qualification. The program is based near London, a top cultural and film-production capital, and combines theory and practice; students will learn the history and theory of film as well as production and digital storytelling. There will be the option of a research project or a practical project. If you have any questions, do contact the Richmond team at <enquiries@richmond.ac.uk>.—Ceri Schooling, PR and Communications Team, International American University
Post-Utopia in Speculative Fiction: The End of the Future? Announcing a Special Issue of Humanities. Until the current pandemic, it was widely believed that we had entered a period of paralysis in the collective historical imagination. This paralysis was reflected in the inability to imagine a future radically different from the present, which was the prerequisite for the traditional genres of utopia and dystopia. Utopia, a literary depiction of an ideal society, and dystopia, its dark double, postulated a historical teleology toward an extreme social and ontological transformation, whether perceived positively or negatively. But with the spread of globalism, both utopia and dystopia seemed to have faded away, supplanted by post-utopia, presentism, or nostalgia. As Zygmund Bauman described it in his book Retrotopia (2017), contemporary narratives of history are located in “the lost/stolen/abandoned but yet undead past, instead of being tied” to the future (5).
Another factor that contributed to the abandonment of utopian/dystopian paradigm in sf was the Anthropocene and the rise of climate-oriented sf. The “hyperobject” of climate change, as Timothy Morton has described it, exists on a timescale vastly different from that of human history and cannot be represented through the conventional narrative templates of speculative fiction.
With the COVID-19 pandemic and wave of social unrest in the US and elsewhere, the trend toward presentism—being “stuck” in the current historical moment—seems to have been upended. Or has it? As we emerge from this period, are we facing a discursive breakthrough in our narratives of future history, or are we going back to the post-utopian recycling of generic clichés?
The initial deadline for sending an abstract of no more than 300 words with biographical details is October 31; full papers are due by March 31, 2021. Please send abstracts to <egomel@tauex.tau.ac.il>.—Prof. Elana Gomel, School of Languages, Tel Aviv University, and Guest Editor
Call for Submissions: Journal of Posthumanism. The Journal of Posthumanism is an international multilingual peer-reviewed scholarly journal promoting innovative work to transverse disciplinary fields from the social sciences, humanities, and arts to medicine and STEM. In aiming for the creation of a broad network beyond disciplinary boundaries, the journal seeks to explore what it means to be human in this technologically saturated, ecologically damaged world, and to transcend the traditional conception of the human while encouraging philosophical thinking beyond humanism.
With its postcentralized (un)structure, Journal of Posthumanism aims to reconfigure the integral and dynamic multi-scalar relation between the human and more-than-human world, the clear-cut boundaries of which are eroding. Perceiving the human in critical enmeshment with the more-than-human world, the journal aims to deconstruct the long-held but ineffectual hierarchical divide between various species and among different ethnic groups, cultures, sexualities, genders, and worlds, reflecting on their interwoven differences. It also places significant emphasis on breakthroughs in biomedicine, biotechnology, bioengineering, and computer technologies, including humanoid robots and AI, stem-cell technologies, gene-design/editing technologies, reproduction technology, artificial gametes, synthetic drugs, artificial organ transplantation, plastic surgery, body modification and augmentation, xenotransplantation, and animality. All of these technologies change how we understand and interpret the world and help us redescribe the posthuman condition we are living in. The journal additionally responds to the impacts of these developments on various landscapes, dimensions, environments, climates, life forms, and biodiversities. The journal is interested in enriching dialogue among scholars, academics, policymakers, and students working in/with numerous different fields and in encouraging a posthumanist ethos and praxis.
We invite contributions to our first issue, including papers, commentaries, interviews, book reviews, and artistic works investigating the posthuman condition in its diverse modes of being and knowing. The proposed call is open, but contributions might explore the following themes in the framework of posthumanism: philosophy and criticism; theories, methods, and approaches; new materialism(s); mind, consciousness, and memory; bioethics and ethics; posthuman bodies; (bio)politics, (bio)power, and security; Anthropocene/Capitalocene/ Ecocene/Plantationocene/Chthulucene frames of reference; science and medicine; posthumanism in speculative genres; gender and sexuality, queer and trans identities; political economy and ecology; gaming, social media, visual media; posthuman and transhuman worldbuilding; STEM and AI.
The deadline for submissions to our inaugural issue is 22 January 2021. Submissions should follow the latest guidelines of APA style referencing. You are welcome to submit full-length papers (5000-6000 words), commentaries (1000-2000 words), book reviews, interviews, and artistic works. Please direct any queries about the journal to <posthumanism@tplondon.com>.—Sumeyra Buran, Editor, Journal of Posthumanism
Foundation Competition: 2021 Peter Nicholls Prize. We are pleased to announce our competition, open to all post-graduate research students and early career researchers (up to five years beyond PhD completion ) who do not hold a full-time or tenured position. The prize will be publication in the Summer 2021 issue of Foundation. To be considered, submit a 6000-word, previously unpublished article on any topic, period, theme, author, or media genre within the field of sf and its academic study. Submissions should comply with the guidelines on the SF Foundation website <https://www.sf-foundation.org/style-guide>. Only one article per contributor is allowed. Also include a short (fifty-word) biography. Entries will be judged by the editorial team and the winner will be announced in the Spring 2021 issue. For further information, contact <paulmarchrussell@gmail.com>. The deadline is 4 December 2020.—Paul March-Russell, Editor, Foundation
Decolonizing Science Fiction: Special Issue of Foundation. Following the worldwide protests after the killing of George Floyd and the toppling of statues implicated in the legacy of the slave trade, we propose a special issue of Foundation on decolonizing science fiction. As John Rieder and others have argued, the emergence of sf as a genre was embedded in colonial discourses of the late nineteenth century. The pursuit of new frontiers in outer space not only mirrored “the scramble for Africa” but also reflected racialist ideologies of the period. In more recent years, authors such as N.K. Jemisin, Jeannette Ng, and Tade Thompson have sought to confront sf with the racist legacy of its origins. Afrofuturism, expressed popularly in films such as Black Panther (2018) and the music of Janelle Monáe, is only one of the ways that artists of the African diaspora are reimagining sf. Yet the decolonization of sf goes beyond Afrofuturism and necessitates other indigenous futurisms; we need also to consider the work of such texts as Gwyneth Jones’s White Queen (1994), Geoff Ryman’s Air (2004), or Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station (2016), which critique the Anglo-American tradition. Lastly, the intersectionality of critical race studies requires that decolonization be discussed not only in terms of race but also consider intersections with gender, sexuality, class, and the (dis)abled body. Submissions should be approximately 6000 words and follow the style guide <see www.sf-foundation.org/journal>. Deadline for submissions is January 4, 2021; the contact email is <paulmarchrussell@gmail.com>.—Paul March-Russell, Editor, Foundation
Establishment of cyRN. After the success of the virtual CyberPunk Culture Conference (9-10 July 2020), this website will become the platform of cyRN, a loose network of scholars interested in research in cyberpunk culture. The idea is to provide a collection of materials on the various topics of cyberpunk-related research, as well as to organize digital events such as readings, workshops, and talks. Ultimately, the plan is to form a long-lasting relationship between researchers and creatives to foster cyberpunk as a contemporary representation of our digital and social reality. Interested researchers can engage with CyRN through registering at the website (basically by registering you are signing up). The organization’s webpage <http://cyberpunkculture.com/> offers information on the CyberPunk Culture conference and plans to post links to resources for cyberpunk scholarship.—Lars Schmeink, Hans-Bredow-Institut für Medien-forschung
Food Futures: A Special Issue of SFS. This special issue examines food’s multiple registrations across historical and contemporary science fiction. As an element in the problems with as well as the solutions to the climate crisis, the global food system is the nexus of future-oriented concerns around issues such as security, diet, foodways, technologies, population, habitats, consumer cultures, production techniques, energy regimes, and more. The very concept of eating and food as baseline cultural material has been placed under the sign of the future. With a climate-changed world on the horizon, the present food system is threatened, not least because it is one of the most significant contributors to global emissions. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of humanity depends on the development of alternative food cultures, systems, and technologies. This has been acknowledged in research agendas from genetics to horticulture, from architecture to anthropology. Yet the future of food is also a necessary and developing imaginary. So how should science fiction engage with it?
Despite the recent boom in environmentally engaged sf, an exploration of the relationship of humans and non-humans to different food ecosystems (and the cultural lifeworlds those systems produce and sustain) has received insufficient attention in sf studies. The citation of illustrative examples from sf texts is consistently discernible across the published volume of both academic and popular media dealing with food futures outside literary and cultural studies. There is therefore much opportunity to read and re-read sf texts in and against the wider scholarship, particularly with pressurized ecological contexts in mind. How and where, then, does “future food” appear in sf? What is it and how is it made, grown, transported, reproduced, distributed, cultured? How might speculative work critique historical, contemporary (or indeed proposed futuristic) food cultures? Can such work offer potential solutions, counterfactuals, and innovations to unfolding or anticipated modes of crisis?
The special issue seeks to situate future food imaginaries as a significant topic in sf’s environmental turn. The guest editors invite submissions that explore a range of sf food imaginaries as well as foodways in the broadest sense of the term. We welcome engagement with a variety of media, including written texts (novels, short stories, poetry), multimedia or interdisciplinary texts (graphic novels, bio-art), visual and televisual texts (television, film, fine art), and interactive media (videogames, art installations). Send proposals (300 to 500 words) by 1 March 2021 to Graeme Macdonald <g.macdonald@ warwick.ac.uk> and Nora Castle <nora.castle@warwick.ac.uk>. Completed papers (6000-8000 words) are due by 1 July 2021—Graeme Macdonald and Nora Castle, University of Warwick
Announcement: SFS’s R.D. Mullen Research Fellowships. Since 2009, SFS has offered research awards to support scholarly archival work on science fiction. These fellowships provide reimbursement for travel and related expenses incurred while working in sf archives. Most recently, we have supported up to two post-doctoral awards (up to $3000 each), three doctoral student awards (up to $2000 each) and one MA student award (up to $1000). Our most recent competition was in 2019-2020. The 2020-2021 competition was suspended due to COVID-19’s impact on travel.
We will resume the Mullen Research Fellowships as soon feasible. For more information on how to apply and for future updates, see our website at <https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/mullenawards.html>.—SFS Editors
Back to Home