Libraries, Archives and the Future of Information

Vector 298 (Nov 2023) is now unsealed: bit.ly/Vector298

As the guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander write in their editorial:

The articles in this issue of Vector work in both directions, teasing out the ways archives and libraries can be informed by SFF works while also exploring the assumptions SFF works make about libraries and archives.

In “The Librarian, The Computer, The Android, and Big Data,” Nichole Nomura and Quinn Dombrowski ask the question of whether librarians exist in the future of Star Trek—certainly a topic of relevance to today’s “AI search” upheavals. In “The Queen a Librarian Dreams of,” Kathryn Yelinek examines the connection between information literacy and restorative justice in the fantasy world of Kristin Cashore’s Bitterblue. 

Next up are a pair of trips through fictional archives. In “Archives, Information, and Fandom,” Tom Ue and James Munday consider how the Halliday Journals from the world of Ready Player One present the impacts of (mis)direction and information surplus on researchers. Grace Catherine Greiner’s “Finding Nothing Can be Finding Something” explores the capital-A Archives in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles, with its interest in medievalisms, access, and “simultaneous bookishness and orality.”

Hopping back to libraries, Guangzhou Lyu’s “Library of Disassembled Past” takes a look at a floating library in China Mieville’s The Scar, exploring how libraries can serve as places of “deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.” In “Magic and Critical Librarianship,” Ellie Campbell interrogates the ways libraries and other memory institutions can institutionalise racism, colonialism, misogyny, and homophobia, as shown in three fantasy short stories. And the last article in the issue, Monica Evans’s “You Are the Library,”considers how digital games can engage players in “library-like mechanics,” drawing on the long history of the value of information and exploration in game design.

Whether you’re a librarian thinking about installing a science fiction reading room, a fantasy novelist looking for worldbuilding nuggets for your next doorstopper about nautical librarians, a SFF academic who’s intrigued by archives concepts in games, or just someone who’s stopped by the information desk of this editorial to ask where the metaphorical toilets are, we hope you’ll enjoy your time with the insightful explorations of libraries, archives, and the future of information that make up this issue of Vector!

Cover by Kalina Winska. Original artwork title: The ethereal and eternal contest, with no winners and no losers, occasional bursts of anger, frustration, and perhaps…shame; waves of humility are often too weak to reach the edge of the world. (graphite, acrylic paint, gouache, and ink on wood panel, 36 x 48 inches, 2020).