It’s that time again!
We’re crowdsourcing a list of recommendations for this year’s awards. Please do add to this list with some of your favorite texts that were published in 2023. You don’t need to be a BSFA member: anyone can send their recommendations, so do share widely.
We look forward to celebrating another year of science fiction excellence!
Hoa Pham is the author of eight books and a play. Her last book Empathy is also out with Gold SF. Her first novel Vixen won the Best Young Writer Award from the Sydney Morning Herald and was shortlisted for the Best Fantasy Novel Aurealis Award. Her novella Wave was translated into Vietnamese. Her play Silence was on the VCE Drama List. More about her work can be found at www.hoapham.net.
Spoiler alert: for the end of The Other Shore
Does your novel The Other Shore have an origin story, what inspired the book?
The Other Shore was inspired by the existence of a Vietnamese government psychic bureau who reunited the remains of the war dead with their descendants. A BBC documentary was made about it in 1996 – so it must be true. I haven’t seen the documentary so I have been free to make up my own world of psychics and spirits. To me the very existence of the bureau poses interesting questions about the Communist government, when they first came to power they denounced all ancestral worship and Buddhism as being contrary to the creed of the new nation. However this stance has softened as it has become evident that the spirituality of the Vietnamese people is not easily oppressed. There is now state sanctioned Buddhist monasteries and other religions are tolerated such as the Cao Dai and Christianity. The government has done a U turn, inviting formerly exiled Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh to teach on pilgrimage in the country in 2007, in order to be admitted to the UN security council- they could not be seen to be oppressing religious activities.
How are the wishes of the dead taken into account? Is it always clear who wants to be reunited with whom?
My questions in the novella revolved around a single premise- how can you reconcile the ethics of the dead where there are no sides, with working for the communist government as a psychic? The stance of the Vietnamese government regarding the Vietnam/American War is complex, they have made peace with the Americans but have not laid aside enmity towards the South Vietnamese war veterans that fought alongside them-the so called Imperial puppet forces. So if a government employed psychic came across the remains of the Southern dead what is s/he to do? All ghosts wish to be reunited with their descendants so they can look out for them and receive offerings in the cosmology of the novella.
It is interesting that the story is told from the perspective of the mediator, please tell us more about her.
I made my protagonist Kim a young girl of 16, naïve to Vietnam’s recent history to navigate through this ethical minefield. Her guides include Ba- her grandmother, and Buddhist abbots and abbesses that she meets through her work as a psychic. She chooses to reunite the Southern Vietnamese war dead with their descendants against her orders and she ends up defecting to America with an American “missing in action” team including a Vietnamese-American psychic. Finding the remains of the American soldiers “missing in action” issue is also a live one for the US administration today.
Defecting in the actual or to the psychic America? Is the psychic world as divided as the real one?
I built the psychic world drawing heavily from “Ghosts of war in Vietnam” by Henrik Kwon a Korean anthropologist who spent two years researching war ghosts in villages. He ascertained that the war dead did not hold sides in Central Vietnam where he investigated, and emphasised the importance of the war dead remains to be reunited with their descendants where possible. With the existence of mass graves holding bodies from all sides of the conflict, local domestic shrines in people’s homes also have altars for wandering ghosts to receive offerings and some measure of peace.
That is a moving image of hospitality. Are there no fears that ghosts seeking revenge might show up?
Ghosts seeking revenge are termed “hungry ghosts” and there is a special day for them in mid August where people give offerings to the restless undead.
What of the Buddhism in the book? What philosophy underlies the narrative?
The philosophy of the Buddhists in the story come from Thich Nhat Hanh teachings (called Thay meaning teacher), the Zen Buddhist Master I follow. Thay teaches that mankind are not the enemy, fear and anger are the enemy. He travelled to America in the sixties to lobby for peace in Vietnam and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. His pilgrimage in 2007 included Great Ceremonies of Mourning for all those who have suffered in the war. He has said that the Vietnam/American War was a war of ideology pitting brother against brother. He has established monasteries of practice around the world including in America.
The protagonist is responsible for guiding others through a very complicated terrain, what about her own journey?
Kim undergoes an awakening in the book to the possibilities of being a psychic in a democratic country and her potential as a woman. At the beginning of the book she is defined by what she doesn’t have, good looks or a boyfriend. Her sister is getting married and that seems to be Kim’s destiny too. But being a psychic complicates this future She discovers her Buddhist spiritual heritage through her grandmother and the Buddhist abbot she comes into contact with while working for the Communist government. She chooses a Buddhist ethical way to practice as a psychic but it goes against the government orders she has. She ends up marrying a Vietnamese American psychic for her defection to America rather than for love.
You allude to the role of storytelling in Buddhism, how would you position your novel in relation to Buddhism?
The Other Shore aims to be an exploration of ethics and the spiritual, pragmaticism and Buddhism. It is a tale whose second edition is dedicated to Thich Nhat Hanh who passed away in 2022 in Hue at his root temple in Vietnam.
Ghosts are conventionally transparent – you can walk through them – but they’re also opaque because they are radically Other to our lived experience. How did you try to capture that tension of creating characters that are human and yet not entirely knowable?
The benign ghosts I write about are archetypal the wise woman, the maiden etc They all have knowledge of the spiritual realm that Kim as a naive protagonist does not have (and one assumes the reader does not have). In the cosmology that I write from ancestral ghosts are their human selves except they are on the other shore in the spiritual realm. I do not explain every manifestation, Kim takes it on faith and I ask the reader to as well.
Your “breakout” book was Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora. Can you tell us how that came about?
Zelda Knight, my co-editor, reached out to me, after publishing my short story “Ife-Iyoku” in their short fiction mag, Selene Quarterly. They wanted to do the anthology and asked if I would like to contribute a story or co-edit. I chose both, and the rest is history.
You also edited Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations On Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature In a Pandemic. How does editing non-fiction compare with editing fiction?
It’s interesting. More work I believe, as fiction comes naturally to me. I automatically know and have a feel for what I want in fiction. But non-fiction in my experience requires more to get it to say the things it wants to in the ways that’s most fitting. Still as rewarding though.
Do you see the two works as complementary, or separate, efforts?
I believe they are complementary, like one stream that flows into another. One fed into the other. Naturally, after reading stories by African writers, I felt we needed to hear the story of the storytellers. The story behind the story.
As well as an editor, you’re also a writer of short fiction. Can you talk about how the two fit in with each other in your life?
I have more of a sense of stories since I started editing. What might work and be needed, in addition to what I want to write. It broadens one’s horizons.
Do you think you might try writing longer fiction in the future? If so, what?
Yes. Definitely. I have already written and am working on more of those: a novel, and a bunch of novellas. And looking to go on sub after several more drafts.
You trained as a lawyer. Do you feel like your professional background influences your fiction (and/or non-fiction)?
Yes. It definitely does. Case laws exposed me to so many scenarios and how stories unfold in real life. Legal reasoning meanwhile allows you to be able to parse your thoughts in a manner that’s very helpful with non-fiction.
What does Nigeria, as a writing scene, bring to the SFF world?
As the largest Black nation on earth, with over 200 million people of hundreds of languages and ethnic groups, a wealth and beauty of diversity, Blackness and the African continent.
Africa, and Nigeria in particular, seems to be breaking out on the genre scene. Why now, and what can the SF writing community do to sustain this breakout?
I would say it’s a combination of the culmination of the work done consistently over decades to build some sort of structures, like the Nommo award, African speculative fiction society, and the hard work of writers coming today.
Continue reading “Fiona Moore interviews Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki”
At face value, this collection of essays may not seem to be of immediate interest to the sf reader. It is primarily concerned with the development of Animal Studies – a sub-discipline that has already been significantly explored in relation to sf in the work of Sherryl Vint, Joan Gordon, and others – with reference to literary modernism, a diverse movement already noted for its challenge to traditional notions of identity and individual autonomy. The potential, though, for creative overlaps between modernism, sf and Animal Studies is already indicated by the fact that one of the co-editors, Alex Goody, was a keynote speaker at the 2019 Corroding the Now conference at Birkbeck College, London. Seen through a science-fictional lens, the encounter between human and non-human animals, the slippages between them, and their mutual affinities and kinships immediately invoke the First Contacts and uncanny relations between humans and aliens which are the stuff of genre sf. As the introduction’s reference to Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Eckersley’s chapter on Leonora Carrington make clear, imagined bestiaries are common to both Animal Studies and speculative fiction.
Without seeking to be a guide, the introduction nonetheless touches upon many of the key moments in the evolution of Animal Theory: from Peter Singer’s pioneering Animal Liberation (1975) and Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg manifesto’ (1985) to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming animal’ (1982) and Jacques Derrida’s pivotal essay ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (2002). The introduction also registers many of the other posthuman thinkers whose ideas have contributed both to Animal Studies and this volume in particular; from Giorgio Agamben and Rosi Braidotti to Michel Foucault and Cary Wolfe. The editors however, beginning their account with an exchange between Djuna Barnes and James Joyce (two modernists in exile, both of whom would flit between the centres and margins of the modernist canon), emphasise the affinities between Animal Studies, the revaluation of women’s writing and the decolonising of the curriculum. All such practices foreground and deconstruct the historic imposition of borders, the arbitrary gatekeeping that has characterised academic protocols and the maintenance of cultural shibboleths. To that end, the editors also note the collapsing boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, an elision that not only permits the entry of sf into the conversation, but which would also have appealed to such modernists as Barnes (boxing fan and purveyor of crime fiction) and Joyce (publican’s son, cineaste, and Anita Loos devotee).
Continue reading “Beastly Modernisms reviewed by Paul March-Russell”
Phoenix Alexander (he/him) is the Jay Kay and Doris Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside, where he curates one of the world’s largest collections of catalogued science fiction.
He completed his Ph.D. in the departments of English and African American Studies at Yale University, where he also worked as a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for three years. Prior to coming to UCR he was the Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool.
Phoenix is a queer, Greek-Cypriot scholar and writer of science fiction himself. His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Black Static, Safundi: the Journal of South African and American Studies, and Science Fiction Studies. He is a full member of the Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA), and served as a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 2021 and 2022.
We live in a golden age for speculative fiction. Futurist novels, shows, and movies have achieved a cultural saturation which would have been difficult to foresee just a couple decades ago, largely thanks to our increasingly unpredictable and perilous world. But rather than simply doling out temporary escapist relief, speculative stories help us comprehend our own cultures and their problems. Often, contemporary issues are approached via one side of a binary: either they’re exaggerated, showing us their destructive potential via a dystopia, or else they’re understood via their solution, producing a utopia.
So far, so obvious. But why are utopia and dystopia the genres we use to exaggerate and comprehend our own societies? Human communities are not structured according to a simplistic binary, instead being dependent on ever-changing laws, ideas, and social conventions. We know that truth ultimately lies in shades of grey, so why do black and white narratives still predominate in speculative fiction? Is this binary still useful as we wade deeper into the 21st century? What alternatives are out there?
Binary Problems
A few years ago the speculative writer Laurie Penny and I were interviewed on the subject of utopia. Penny, who is also a prominent journalist, posited a serious problem with utopias: namely, that the desire to create an idealised society has been used to justify numerous atrocities throughout our own history. Considering the many massacres committed in the name of a perfect world – theocratic, eugenicist, nationalist, agrarian, or Communist – it’s a difficult point to argue with. In Penny’s words, “true utopia is fascism”, underscored by a rigid set of idealised rules, unable to ever truly change or adapt; at best stagnant, and at worst, totalitarian.
Continue reading “Ambitopia: Futures Beyond the Binary”
“Beautiful tragedy” might seem like an oxymoronic statement, but one that holds multitudes of truth for Western aesthetics, from the inclusion of Little Nell’s malady in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop as synonymous with her beauty and purity, to the recent trend of “Sick-Lit” Young Adult novels that blend medical drama narratives with teen romance themes. What emerges from these depictions is a distorted mirror image of the reader both seeking and being subjected to, the social power of being a medical spectacle. Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature film Sick of Myself comments on the trend of reflexive voyeurism-exhibitionism by countering the notion of a Romantic affliction with grotesqueness and a liberal dose of body horror. Scathing in commentary and relentless in gore, Sick of Myself (2022) provides a riotous narrative layered with a critique on postmodern loneliness, the economy of sympathy, and the mirage of corporate inclusivity.
Sick… follows 20-something Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and her tragi-comedic attempts to eclipse her boyfriend’s artistic success by attracting sympathy through medically induced self-harm. Sick premiered on May 22nd, 2022 at the 75th Annual Cannes Film Festival but would not receive a global release until 2023, to largely positive, albeit polarising, reviews.
Opening with a scene of Signe and her boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) at an upscale restaurant competing for attention with their respective techniques – Signe, pretending it is her birthday, and Thomas, pretending he is rich and successful – the film’s premise is set. The up-the-stakes dynamics of the plot is affirmed when Thomas flees the restaurant, with a stolen $1000 bottle of wine in hand, and is chased by their waiter. Later, Signe witnesses a near-fatal dog attack and overcomes the Bystander Effect to call an ambulance and care for the woman’s wounds until the ambulance arrives. During her walk home, when onlookers see her covered in blood and assume she is the victim, she realises she can receive far more attention from sympathy than gratitude. The narrative escalates, much like how an untreated dog bite festers.
Continue reading “Sick of Myself: a Manic Satire on Spectatorship, Vomiting Blood, and the Icarian Limits of Identity Politics”
Before we dive into the myriad wonders of the first-ever collected volume on plants in SF, let me signpost by saying this article is not intended as a straightforward book review, more a subjective-entangled way into an intense and highly transformative text. As an Artist, Ecologist, Healer and dyspraxic my approach might be perceived as that of a fuzzy set, so named by Brian Attlebury, that is ‘affiliated with other texts that might seem to belong to other…terrains’ and tending to spy unexpected connections and join unexpected dots. I draw attention to this method as the unconventional, multidisciplinary approaches might be the essence of what this book points to, namely an urgent need for ‘cross-species intimacy, or inter-kingdom intimacy’. My hope is that bridging the separate islands on which different academics tend to reside will foster such closeness.
Vector invites proposals for articles on speculative modernisms, exploring modernist, experimental, and avant-garde literary and artistic traditions in relation to science fiction, fantasy, and cognate genres and modes.
The inspiration for this topic arises from Nina Allan’s nomination, in Strange Horizons, of Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY as her favourite novel of 2017. As Allan writes, the ‘profound’ and ‘unsettling’ experience of reading Barker’s experimental text is ‘inextricably bound up in the novel’s innovative use of form’. Although the apex of science fiction’s interaction with literary modernism is often identified with Michael Moorcock’s tenureship of New Worlds, we argue that not only is there a more sustained relationship but that modernism was not confined solely to the literary. In its political guises, modernism also imagined new social and technological regimes in ways that complemented, utilised and informed SF’s utopian visions. As Ali Smith has proposed, modernism ‘broke everything up and everything could start all over again. So you could understand both reality and books from a new angle, a renewed angle’. Disruption, novelty, estrangement, defamiliarization – these too are often regarded as characteristics of science fiction. As Virginia Woolf wrote to Olaf Stapledon, on receipt of Star Maker (1937), ‘it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction.’ Woolf, like Stapledon, was fascinated by discoveries in physics and biology that fundamentally changed our understanding of reality, as well as its artistic representation. From H.G. Wells’s influence on the European avant-garde to contemporary slipstream novels, such as Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022), we can see that ongoing interaction. ‘Speculative modernisms’, though, are not confined solely to literature – they can also be found in art, architecture, film, music, design and photography. As the critical focus on postmodernism wanes, we perhaps now have ‘a renewed angle’ on a half-buried history of modernism and SFF.
We are open to submissions from academics from any discipline and at any career stage, from independent scholars, as well as from SFF writers, fans, and others. We especially welcome voices from marginalized groups. All contributions will automatically be considered for publication in a special issue of Vector (guest-edited by Paul March-Russell) as well as Vector’s digital platform.
Please submit your proposal by 4 September 2023 to vector.submissions@gmail.com, including:
Articles should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. Please let us know your intended word count. We seek articles that are carefully grounded in scholarly research, while also being clear, engaging, and suitable for a broad audience (including non-academics). Articles will be due by 29 January 2024.
Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats.
Suggested questions / topics
Bibliography
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Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (BBC Books, 1994)
Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (Harvard University Press, 2010)
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James Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (ELS Editions, 2018)
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—– Science Fiction (Polity, 2005)
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—– ‘Science Fiction, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde’, in Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, eds. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (CUP, 2019)
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