Vector editors are supporting a workshop on applied SF at the University of Lagos as part of a larger collaboration with the African Speculative Fiction Society and Aké Arts & Book Festival.
If you are in Lagos, join us: www.africansfs.com/events
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.
The British Science Fiction Association is seeking to appoint new editors to take the helm of Vector.
Vector is the critical journal of the BSFA, established in 1958. It has taken many forms over the years. Currently it caters to a mixed audience of science fiction writers, fans, academics, and others, in print and digital form.
The BSFA expects to appoint several people to the new expanded editorial team. We are looking to fill 2-3 essential roles (an editor-in-chief, an academic editor, and a designer / typesetter).
We are also exploring new arrangements for Vector. For example, if you’re interested in contributing as a regular columnist (alongside Paul Kincaid, and to replace Stephen Baxter), a new arts section editor covering contemporary arts and theatre, a new games review editor, a new film reviews editor, a new interviews editor, and/or a new digital content editor, and/or have ideas for another role, we’d like to hear from you too.
These will be non-elected, non-executive and voluntary roles. The new team will be expected to produce a print edition at least twice per year, and to maintain a digital presence for Vector.
Vector invites invites proposals for articles for a #298, a special issue on speculative fiction and libraries, as well as adjacent themes, e.g. speculative angles on archives, collections, repositories, simulations, antilibraries, catalogues, metadata, preservation, curation, media archaeology, literary publics, open access, search, big data, taxonomies, folksonomies, epistemes, architectures of knowledge, hypomnemata, the history and future of print, oral traditions, embodied knowledge, book stores, index cards, bibliographic management, scholarly apparatuses, indexes, performance archiving, back-ups, more-than-human knowledge systems, data futures, code libraries, toy libraries, tool libraries, etc.
See the full call here for more information.
Abstracts due 30 April 2022. Guest editors Stewart Baker and Phoenix Alexander.
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:
We are excited to announce the contents of the inaugural issue of Fission, ed. Allen Stroud:
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.
Vector continues to publish a broad range of SFF criticism, as well as interviews, reports, and reviews, including both scholarly and fan writing. This year we again published two bumper issues of Vector, #291 (unthemed) and #292 (SFF and contemporary art).
This year, in collaboration with Fanac, we also made sixty years of back issues available digitally. You can explore the archives here (see also this earlier note). Going forward, Vector is likely to be publishing more themed and guest-edited issues, including #293, a special on Chinese SFF guest-edited by Yen Ooi and Regina Kanyu Wang.
The BSFA also continues to publish Focus (for SFF writers, ed. Dev Agarwal) and The BSFA Review (a digital SFF reviews zine, ed. Sue Oke), and has announced a new annual fiction publication, Fission, will be launched in 2021.
We also ran the 2020 Solidarity Salon series, with readings from a variety of wonderful authors, all available here. We don’t currently have firm plans in place for something similar in 2021, although it does seem likely we’ll continue to be doing more things online, so we very much welcome feedback, ideas, and possibilities for collaborations.
The BSFA also adopted a new constitution at our 2020 AGM, and is preparing for a new website launch in (probably early-ish) 2021.
If you’re not currently a member of the BSFA, please consider joining!
In previous years we’ve often done some kind of “Best SFF of the Year” type feature. We won’t be doing that this year exactly, but do check out …
Vector
Thanks to the assistance of yet another layout volunteer, Vector 271, the last issue of 2012, will be coming out in January 2013, along with a guest-edited version of Focus. Vector 272 should follow a month or two later, along with the BSFA Award Booklet.
BSFA Awards Nominations
The deadline for the BSFA Awards Nominations is January 13, 2013. BSFA members should nominate early and often! Works currently nominated are available to peruse here. Don’t take for granted that if your favourite sf book, short story, work of non-fiction, or artwork is on that list that it will receive enough nominations to make the shortlists. Equally, if a work worthy of nomination isn’t on that list, consider it your personal responsibility to nominate it so that it is.
Divine Endurance: Flowerdust Edition
Gwyneth Jones has revised her first sf novel, Divine Endurance, collating it with its companion novel Flowerdust. Divine Endurance was the first novel published under her own name, in 1984. The edited pair are available and, more specifically, available for free today on Amazon.co.uk!
I apologise for recent silence around here. On top of various bits of Life, I was thrown by the resignation of Martin McGrath.
If anyone could have been said to have been doing too much for the BSFA, it was he, inasmuch as he was single-handedly dealing with a good half of the organisation’s day-to-day business, from editing Focus, to storing any extra publication copies, to mailing out new member’s packs, to doing all design and layout for all of the BSFA’s publications and liaising with the printer. (And that’s not all.) It’s far more than any one person should need to do for one organisation, and it’ll take at least three new committee members to replace him!
Insofar as Vector is concerned, his resignation meant that the publication schedule for the next issue (due out in June or early July) was put in doubt, as at least some of its contributors are aware.
The good news is that we now have a volunteer, as a one-off, to do layout for this next issue of Vector: so this issue definitely happening, and on schedule too at this rate! And I’m excited about the contents – this issue has articles from an exciting group of contributors! (To whom I still owe many edits – coming soon, now that the issue is back on track!) (This is no guarantee that the following issue of Vector will be coming out on time, however. That depends on one or more additional, as yet not-found, volunteers.)
However, as a caveat, it’s up to me, as features editor, and any other willing volunteers, to track down, volunteer, and recruit any and all images to be used in this issue, from the cover art to all the interiors. Without imagery, the issue can still go ahead – but it will look notably image-free!
The theme of this forthcoming issue is “London & SF”, as proposed by James Bacon, as a tie-in to the London in 2014 Worldcon bid.
The cover art will be in full colour, but otherwise, reproductions will be in black and white. Do you have drawings, photographs, and paintings you’ve made yourself and can grant permission for their use in this one issue of Vector, whether in print or PDF? Suggestions of artists who might be willing to contribute to this issue? Ideas of other legal and appropriate ways to illustrate this issue?
Can you help?
We’ve gotten a bit behind with plans here at Torque Control. I’ve had a busy end-of-semester, and Niall and Tony both ended up over-committed, which is why you haven’t seen the end (or in one case, beginning) of discussions of Farthing and The Carhullan Army. I can’t tell you when those posts will be along, but I can tell you the following…
I have a special preview of the next Vector for you tomorrow. The issue itself was as waylaid as this blog, but you should still have it before the end of January. In the meantime, tomorrow I’ll be posting an article which will appear in the print issue when it comes out, but which you really need to read much sooner than that: Andrew Butler’s writeup of the John Martin: Apocalypse show which is currently at the Tate in London, but closes January 15th.
Next week, I’ll be posting on Lavinia.
Then, two weeks later, in January, I’ll post about Gwyneth Jones’ Spirit. Shortly after which, you should be receiving the next BSFA mailing, about which much more anon.
vector-bsfa.com 