Month: March 2021

Call for Submissions: Prediction, Innovation, & Futures

Vector and Focus invite proposals from academics of all disciplines, and from industry, policy, and practice backgrounds, on the theme of speculative fiction in relation to prediction, innovation, and futures. Please see here for the full call.

The principal output will be a special issue of Vector, guest edited by Stephen Oram, and relevant proposals will also be considered for publication in Focus (ed. Dev Agarwal), and/or for online publication. Prospective contributors are encouraged to move conversations forward; to challenge received wisdom; to historicise the use of speculative fiction within science communication, policy, foresight, innovation, education, and research contexts; and/or to reflect in detail on your own personal experiences of using speculative fiction. Contributions may take the form of:

  • articles of any length;
  • snapshots / key findings / lightning summaries of your research or activities;
  • methods and tools, and/or reports on their use;
  • interviews, roundtables;
  • other formats — be as innovative and imaginative as you like!

We especially welcome proposals from BIPOC contributors, and/or proposals which connect applied speculative fiction to themes of diversity, decoloniality, and social, environmental, and economic justice. Priority fields of interest include futures studies, innovation studies, Science and Technology Studies, applied ethics, and the history and philosophy of science. Topics might include prediction, modelling, decision analysis and decision support, hacking and makerspaces, speculative design, critical design including Critical Race Design, anthropological futures, design fiction, diegetic prototyping, strategic foresight, wargaming, anticipatory governance, predictive data analytics, algorithmic governmentality, speculative fiction as technology, speculative fiction and aspects of methodology such as reproducibility and validation, user stories as a form of speculative fiction,  science communication, protoscience, exploratory engineering, design futurescaping, experiential futures, serious gaming or participatory scenario workshopping, financial modelling and financial activism, creative disruptions, future fabbing, the use of speculative fiction to engage communities and stakeholders, the ethical obligations of the speculative fiction writer, the use of speculative fiction to facilitate interdisciplinary encounters, the use of speculative fiction to model risk and uncertainty, issues around speculative fiction and Intellectual Property, the sci-fi-industrial complex, Indigenous futurisms, energy futures, education futures, all kinds of futures, and the history and future of the future. 

Submission details

Please submit proposals by 5 September 2021 to vector.submissions@gmail.com. Very early proposals very welcome. A proposal should typically contain:

  • a 150-500 word proposal;
  • an estimated word count; and
  • some information about you, e.g. a 50-100 word bio or a CV.

We seek contributions that are carefully grounded in research, while also being clear, engaging, and suitable for a broad audience (including non-academics). Articles will be due by 1 February 2022.

Links

龙马精神* Dragon Horse Vitality Spirit

* This is a common Lunar New Year greeting

Guest editorial by Yen Ooi. Published as part of Vector 293 exploring Chinese SF.

Chinese science fiction’s (CSF) growth in popularity has followed the rapid development trend of China itself. In his interview with fellow writer Maggie Shen King, Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) highlights that China has over the last four decades achieved the technological and economic advancements that countries in the West achieved in the last century. The speed of modernisation and urbanisation is a remarkable thing to behold, with 100 million people lifted out of poverty just since 2013. China’s rise has been subject to international scrutiny and criticism, which is to be expected. The most unfounded of which plumbed new depths in the past year — 2020 — through the pandemic. While the previous president of the United States of America (among many) used the term “Chinese virus” in his description of Covid-19, East Asian diaspora communities living in Western countries experienced increased instances of racism. What is the connection?

Genres are in general difficult to define, but CSF is especially complicated. Both the terms Chinese and science fiction defy any clear definition, yet are used so commonly that every user has their own pre-assumed definition. One popular assumption in the West is that CSF should always be read in terms of political dissent or complicity with state power. As much as that might be true for some, it is an unhelpful generalisation. After all, we do not assume that British SF is only about Brexit, or American SF only about Trump. In one sense, all storytelling is inherently political, and within Anglophone SF especially, the racist and queerphobic attack on representational diversity is often disguised as a demand to “remove the politics” from our stories. However, the necessarily political nature of storytelling is complicated in the case of the Anglophone reception of CSF. The insistence of many Western readers on interpreting CSF exclusively in relation to government censorship can itself have a paradoxically censoring effect. Some CSF authors have even resisted writing stories set in China, or allowing the translation of their work into English, for fear that readers will ignore its actual aesthetic and intellectual qualities, while using it as material for simplistic speculation: Whose side are you really on? To quote Ken Liu — for what is a publication on CSF without mentioning the writer who, it feels like, has single-handedly brought CSF to Anglo-American readers?  — 

Like writers everywhere, today’s Chinese writers are concerned with humanism; with globalization; with technological advancement; with development and environmental preservation; with history, rights, freedom, and justice; with family and love; with the beauty of expressing sentiment through words; with language play; with the grandeur of science; with the thrill of discovery; with the ultimate meaning of life.

Ken Liu, Invisible Planets, 2016.

Chinese means many things: culture, ethnicity, nationality, language, people, food, celebrations, traditions, dance, art, tea, etc. It is impossible to talk about all things related to CSF, but we hope that we’ve managed to introduce some key ideas and concepts in this issue, and that you’ll find areas that particularly excite you — as a writer, researcher, or reader — to want to learn more.

Continue reading “龙马精神* Dragon Horse Vitality Spirit” →

The Question Mark by Muriel Jaeger and Wild Harbour by Ian MacPherson

Review by L.J. Hurst. This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.

The British Library Classics series began with detective fiction and has extended to Science Fiction. As with the detective stories it has two strands: firstly, collections of golden age short stories (Mike Ashley edits the sf series), and secondly, re-discovered novels. The sf novel series is developing at a slower rate than its crime equivalent, this time we have two novelists and two novels from different decades.

Muriel Jaeger’s The Question Mark was published in 1926. It is the better known of these two classics, as Jaeger is discussed in depth in Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (over thirty years old but still the best reference work on this subject). Apart from the attractive cover it comes with a facsimile of the acceptance letter from Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and an “Introduction” by Dr Mo Moulton, as well as Muriel Jaeger’s “Author’s Introduction”, in which she says her purpose is to “accept the Bellamy-Morris-Wells world in all essentials – with one exception; I do not and cannot accept its inhabitants”. (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward has been in the air this year as it is discussed in Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry Of Truth, as one of the utopias to which Nineteen Eighty-Four is a response). The Question Mark is known as a precursor to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, as it features an outsider discovering the flaws in a world in which there is no physical want, but in which individual psychological need cannot be satisfied, and in which some atavistic tendencies remain (murderous crimes of passion lead to the palace of euthanasia). More striking is Jaeger’s recognition of different classes based on different abilities, though instead of Huxley’s five (alpha to epsilon) she has only two, “Normals” and “Intellectuals”.

The Question Mark Paperback British Library Science Fiction

The story is simple: Guy Martin, a bank clerk from the early twentieth century awakens to discover that he is in the future, fortunately in the house of a great scientist (one of the Intellectuals) which is shared by members of his extended family. Class is not inherited in this world and neither is intellectual ability. Guy is taken out by some of the normal members of the family to explore the new world, where nearly everyone has a power-box which can heat their home or drive their aerocycle. Guy, whose poverty in his old life made relations with women difficult, should be happy that one of his guides is Ena, who likes him tremendously. There is, though, unlike Brave New World, little sexual activity and it becomes clear that Ena is unhappy because there is too much love making and not enough of being “pals” (slang like this is important to the normals). As Guy has difficulty adjusting to his revival, he keeps his distance and Ena thinks this is him being a pal, though not as much of one as she would wish. Brave New World takes this to a tragic end, but The Question Mark ends with a realistic review of Guy’s old life. Who knows what he could make of the new?

Wild Harbour is a very different work: a tale of a future war and a survivor’s narrative. It is also a detailed account of how to hunt, butcher and hang wild deer. Published in 1936, it is written as a broken diary of the months between May and October 1944, as a couple living in the Highlands, who refuse to be part of an unidentified war that has broken out unexpectedly, take to a cave in the Grampians. 

Wild Harbour British Library Paperback Science Fiction

Wild Harbour comes with even more editorial apparatus than The Question Mark including an “Introduction” by Timothy C Baker, original frontispiece, a large map of the area, and finally a magazine article from September 1940 by Macpherson on how he was running his farm after a year of real war (he makes no mention of his novel). The map is useful in following the activities of the couple, along with the railway line running north to south carrying increasing amounts of traffic to who-knows-where. Hugh and his wife Terry stay within a very small area – its smallness indicated by labels on the map such as “berries” and “Hugh stole turnips”. Contrarily, there are other labels, “battle fought here” and “men fought here”, which reveal that within mere months civilisation has broken down so much that small groups are hunting and killing rivals, with never an appearance of a foreign army let alone aircraft.

Given the limited dramatis personae of Wild Harbour, though, there is another reading possible, and that is satire on ‘crisis scuttlers’ (George Orwell’s phrase). The couple’s cave is unready, their tinned and dried foods run out quickly, and generally their new life is nasty and brutish. Macpherson died in 1944 and this is often described as his last novel, but he was not always dour and downbeat, for example co-writing Letters from a Highland Township in 1939 with his wife Elizabeth, a comedy about local government set in the same area as Wild Harbour. 

There is more to The Question Mark, too. Mo Moulton’s introduction looks forward from Jaeger and Huxley to Margaret Atwood, picking up Jaeger’s own references to utopias. Guy Martin cannot time travel back to 1926, however, because of the understated but explicit Frankenstein means of his arrival. What if he is only the first?

Copyright Ian MacPherson. All rights reserved.

The End of the World and Other Catastrophes, edited by Mike Ashley

Reviewed by Graham Andrews. This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.

Donald A. Wollheim once edited an Ace Books anthology entitled The End of the World, in 1955. But he stuck close to genre home with such then modern-day stories as ‘Rescue Party’ (Clarke: 1946), The Year of the Jackpot’ (Heinlein: 1952), and ‘Impostor’ (Dick: 1953). But Mike Ashley has taken a much more wide-ranging and historical approach to the subject here. In his Introduction, he quotes these opening lines from ‘Darkness’, an apocalyptic poem by Lord Byron (first published in 1816): 

“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.”

First up is ‘The End of the World’ (1930), by Helen Sutherland, which “gets us off to a rousing start by covering just about every catastrophe that can afflict mankind in a little over fifteen hundred words.” Ashley speculates that it might have been written by Helen Christian Sutherland (1881-1965), a patron of the arts who has been credited with discovering Pieter Cornelis Mondrian. Another story entitled ‘The End of the World’ (1903), by the astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835-1909), is an anticipation of When Worlds Collide. 

The End of the World and Other Catastrophes Paperback British Library Science Fiction

After that comes a sort-of-trilogy headed THREE DOOMS OF LONDON. ‘London’s Danger’ (1896), by C. J. Cutliffe Hyne, is an early climate-change story. ‘The Freezing of London’ (1908), by Herbert C. Ridout, is – well – self-explanatory. The same thing goes for ‘Days of Darkness’ (1927), by Owen Oliver (i.e. Sir Joshua Albert Flynn). Robert Barr’s ‘Within an Ace of the End of the World’ (1900) is another trenchant climate-change story. What happens when agricultural over-production threatens to strip the world’s atmosphere of nitrogen?

‘The Last American’, by John Ames Mitchell, provides some welcome light relief, using “humour and parody to satirize the American way of life through the viewpoint of a Persian expedition discovering a ruined and desolate United States years after its collapse. The first edition [1889] included many illustrations by the author [several included here].”

As Ashley explains, George Griffiths (1857-1906) was the most prolific and bestselling writer of ‘scientific romances’ in Britain until H. G. Wells came along to steal his literary thunder. He had gained wide popularity with The Angel of the Revolution (1893), in which a new form of flying machine enabled anarchists to take over the United Kingdom, thus pre-empting H. G. Wells himself: When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and The War in the Air (1908). ‘The Great Grenelin Comet’ (1897) shows how the people of Terra – perhaps the first use of that word in science fiction to mean the Earth – deal with the onset of a destructive comet.

Other ‘vintage’ stories are ‘Finis’ (1906), by Frank Lillie Pollock, and ‘The Madness of Professor Pye’ (1934), by Warwick Deeping. Ashley also includes three comparatively recent stories: ‘Two by Two’ (1956: retitled ‘The Windows of Heaven’ in 1965), by John Brunner; ‘Created He Them’ (1955), by Alice Eleanor Jones; ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ (1950), by Ray Bradbury (which became part of The Martian Chronicles/The Silver Locusts).

For me, it seems appropriate to round off this review with the final lines from Byron’s ‘Darkness’:

“The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them – She was the Universe.”

(The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I wonder . . .)

N.B. Companion volumes from the British Library Science Fiction Classics program, so far: Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures (2018); Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet (2018); Menace of the Machine: The Rise of AI in Classic Science Fiction (2019). I wish even more power to your editorial elbow, Mr. Ashley. 

Copyright Graham Andrews. All rights reserved.

Speculative Fiction Studies

Some resources that may be especially of interest to academics studying speculative fiction. Feel free to suggest more.

Databases, Reading Lists, Miscellaneous:

Presses / Series:

There are many many more of course, but …

See this blog post by Jim Clarke for more suggestions.

Journals:

SF Studies adjacent:

‘Lies to children’: From folk to formal science in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld

By Mikaela Springsteen

Paul Kidby, ‘The Faculty’ / Joseph Wright, ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’

Terry Pratchett is known for the incredible intertextuality of his work, especially in his famous Discworld series. He borrows—or steals, as all the best artists do—from the greats of the cultural canon. In fact it is the stories—the literature, fantasy, folk stories, and histories—of our world, of the so-called ‘Round World,’ which quite literally power the Disc. Pratchett’s use, deconstruction, and reconstruction of these stories have all been the topic of study before, but one discourse which Pratchett drew on quite a bit has been somewhat absent from Pratchett Studies thus far: science.

Early in his career Pratchett was a press officer for a nuclear power station; his interest in and fondness for new forms of technology has been well documented; he collaborated with the scientists Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart on four ‘Science of Discworld’ books; and, although he is perhaps best known for the broadly ‘fantasy’ series of the Discworld, Pratchett was also an accomplished science fiction author (The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata, the Long Earth series with Stephen Baxter)—a genre which has both incorporated and inspired scientific advancements. His life-long interest in science is reflected in his fantasy works as well. In the case of the Discworld series, much can be said about the Discworld as creation myth:

Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld.  A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.

Wyrd Sisters
The Great A'Tuin, the world turtle. There are two theories which purport to explain the behavior of the Great A'Tuin: Steady Gait and Big Bang. Inspired by the scientific concepts of astronomy, cosmology, zoology, the steady state model, Big Bang theory

To use a popular fan formulation: from a ‘Doylist’ (or out-of-universe) perspective the Discworld clearly draws on the mytheme of the world turtle. But from a ‘Watsonian’ (or in-universe) perspective, this cosmology is explored and understood scientifically (as in The Color of Magic). Other seemingly far-fetched phenomena on the Disc are similarly explained in a rather rational, even techno-scientific tone, and the series is scattered with references to collective intelligence, time dilation, and the theorized eleven dimensions of the multiverse.

This article explores how Pratchett leads us to think about the practice and culture of science. It begins by taking a look at what science looks like in the context of the Disc, then exploring the two primary groups of Discworld scientists, and finally finishing up with a look at why the use of science in a nominally fantasy world might be worthwhile to explore.

Continue reading “‘Lies to children’: From folk to formal science in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” →

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 edited by Melissa Edmondson

Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller. This review first appeared in The BSFA Review.

Winter is a time for ghost stories, Christmas in particular. M.R. James, the doyen of the English ghost story, traditionally read a new story by candlelight to friends who eagerly gathered in his study on Christmas Eve. But James wasn’t the only one writing ghost stories. During the period covered by this book, there were many women publishing ghost stories that equalled if not surpassed those of James and his male contemporaries. As long as publishers have been producing anthologies of ghost stories, women writers have featured in them: during the 1980s, Virago produced several excellent anthologies of ghost stories by women writers. This latest collection, edited by Melissa Edmundson, is a welcome addition to the shelf. 

Book Cover: Women’s Weird. Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 edited by Melissa Edmundson

I’m sidestepping the ‘Women’s Weird’ of the title for now, for reasons I’ll come back to later in this review. Instead, I turn to the first story, Louisa Baldwin’s ‘The Weird of the Walfords’. It is a conventional example of period ghost story writing – the narrator believes that his family is blighted by a curse attached to an ancestral family bed and destroys it despite being warned not to. It gives away nothing to say that the curse will strike again. What is notable, however, is that the story is narrated by the Squire himself. And this is not the only story with a first-person male narrator: of the thirteen stories, only two first-person narrators are identifiably female, while most of the third-person narratives also use a male viewpoint figure. 

There are many reasons why women might write from a male viewpoint, but it is not difficult to imagine that in some cases it reflects the fact that men often had greater access to the world and its contents, whereas women could follow only in the imagination. In Baldwin’s case, I wonder too if she has not used it as a sly way to comment on how men infantilise women: the narrator refers more than once to his ‘little wife’, as well as blaming her for the death of their son because he acquiesced to her request to turn the room that once held the cursed bed into a nursery.

There are stories here of a woman whose freedom is circumscribed by her husband’s jealousy (Edith Wharton’s ‘Kerfol’), a woman who is drawn into an inexplicable haunting while loyally taking care of a friend’s daughter (E. Nesbit’s ‘The Shadow’), and a more traditional story of a wrong righted when a lost child’s body is finally discovered (‘The Giant Wistaria’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Other stories are more formally experimental, such as May Sinclair’s ‘Where Their Fire is Not Quenched’, where the haunting persists beyond the mortal plane. 

Continue reading “Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940 edited by Melissa Edmondson” →

Fission #1

We are excited to announce the contents of the inaugural issue of Fission, ed. Allen Stroud:

  • ‘The Aminals Marched in Two By Two’ by Syeda Fatima Muhammad
  • ‘A Pall of Moondust’ by Nick Wood
  • ‘Lyonesses’ by So Mayer
  • ‘The Lego Calf’ by Jon Bilbao (trans. from the Spanish)
  • ‘The Witch and the Elderman’ by Peter Haynes
  • ‘The Trip’ by Michael Crouch
  • ‘Etaerio’ by Rosie Oliver
  • ‘The First and Last Safe Place’ by C. John Arthur
  • ‘Here’ by Gene Rowe
  • ‘The Blood Between Us’ by Katherine Franklin
  • ‘Wanderlust’ by Eugen Bacon & E. Don Harp
  • ‘Time Keep’ by Elad Haber
  • ‘Power of Attorney’ by Louis Evans
  • ‘I Love Google Maps / Death to Google Part 1’ by Paul Beacon

So Mayer’s ‘Lyonesses’ will also be translated into Spanish for Celsius.

Fission is an experiment this year, which we plan to turn into an annual event. There will be another submissions window for Fission #2 in late 2021 or early 2022, so watch this space. You may want to follow the BSFA on Twitter, and/or if you’re not already a member, you can join here. For a little more info, see the latest newsletter.

Fission #1

Chen Qiufan: Why did I Write a Science Fiction Novel about E-waste?

Guangzhao Lyu, Angela Chan and Mia Chen Ma. Published as part of Vector 293 exploring Chinese SF. If you’d like to receive the issue, join the BSFA.

This is a transcription of Chen Qiufan’s public talk at Goodenough College, London, invited by London Chinese Science Fiction Group (LCSFG), on 12th August 2019, which is followed by a conversation with Angela Chan and Mia Chen Ma. This was originally published in Chinese on LCSFG’s WeChat account.[1]

The London Chinese Science Fiction Group (LCSFG) is a community for people interested in Chinese languages (sinophone) science and speculative fiction. Since it was founded in April 2019, LCSFG has been organising monthly reading groups focusing on short stories available both in Chinese and English and has been inviting established/emerging Chinese SF writers to participate in online discussions following the pandemic lockdown since March 2020. During our meetings, we explore the story’s themes, literary styles and even translation techniques and choices, as a way to better understand the piece, as well as the evolving field of contemporary Chinese SF.

Chen Qiufan:

Firstly, many thanks to the London Chinese Science Fiction Group for inviting me here, and to Goodenough College for providing such a gorgeous place. Today, I would like to talk about my debut novel, and only novel to date, Waste Tide. And don’t worry, there won’t be any spoilers. Before I discuss the story itself, let me give some general background information and my inspiration, that is, why I wanted to write a science fiction novel about China’s near-future in conjunction with e-waste recycling.

Continue reading “Chen Qiufan: Why did I Write a Science Fiction Novel about E-waste?” →