From Soylent Green to Slusho!, Okja to Isserley, food is an often central, if not always visible, aspect of SF/F world-building. How human societies feed themselves characterises futures as dystopian or utopian as scarce or abundant, as just or exploitative – imbricating issues of climate change, bioethics, animal rights and the rights of nature, systems of labor and resource distribution. While food and food webs are often associated with structural violence in SF/F, the genre also provides examples of ‘model’ futures through feminist utopias such Woman on the Edge of Time, technological imaginaries such as Star Trek’s replicators, and the various agricultural and societal revolutions posited by an entire genre: solarpunk.
For its 301st issue, the Vector editorial team is seeking contributions that explore the multifaceted and nuanced ways that speculative genres imagine the future of food. As we try to implement technologies that enable us to make food out of air,1 plastic,2 or, more prosaically, algae, as we 3-D print steaks or make ‘beef rice’3 (without a single cow), what role does science fiction play in shaping attitudes or conversations around such technologies? When we try to figure out how to provide for a growing global population in the face of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss (largely driven by agriculture), should we turn to science fiction for help with reimagining food cultures?
Suggested questions / topics Food products of the future Synthetic, lab-grown meat Animal farming and ethics Terraforming for agriculture Growing food in space Eating practices The human body Health Slaughtering practices Imagining post-scarcity futures Eating others
Please submit your proposal by Dec 14, 2024 to vector.submissions@gmail.com, including:
A 150-500 word proposal, including estimated length; Something about yourself, either a 50-100 word bio or a CV.
Articles should be between 1,000 and 8,000 words. Please let us know your estimated 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 March 30th, 2025.
Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats.
I half-jokingly say to anyone who engages me on the topic of science fiction that the 1960s and 1970s were the pinnacle of craft in the genre.
This period, of course, encompasses the New Wave, interpreted by Philip Wegner (cited by our wonderful guest editor, Paul March-Russell) as the moment when science fiction crashes into the modernist sensibilities of Literature-with-a-capital-L, exploding formal and thematic conventions. When science fiction, in Wegner’s words, ‘briefly becomes modernist.’
This is far too brief a space (and far too ignorant an author) to offer anything more than a speculation of the socio-historical forces that brought about this convergence. Perhaps it was the unhappy but generative confluence of decolonization, civil rights struggles, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the resurgence of crises of and about immigration. Science fiction – that bright imaginer of glittering new technology and utopian social formations – suddenly found its joy leached away as the futures it tantalized became manifest in bleaker and, truthfully, mundanely cruel realities. Literature, always seen as a dangerous beast in times of social upheaval, became implicated in countercultural movements, and science fiction was no exception. It was time to throw away the spaceships and oddly familiar aliens, the simpering space damsels (jettison them entirely, they use up far too much oxygen) and dashing colonists. Outer space lost the sheen of adventure and became dull, cold, dead, and empty; Inner space became the place: woman looked out into the cosmos, and saw her own neuroses and hopes and desires staring, baldly, back at her. Doris Lessing defined inner-space fiction best (and possibly first) in the epigraph to her 1972 novel, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: ‘there is never anywhere to go but in.’
Bessie Amelia Emery Head
If the contributors to this special issue ‘tend to cleave to Anglo-European modernisms’, let me, in this remaining space, slice a bracing paper-cut before the cleft (if you will excuse the word-play). Let me make the bold claim that the Botswanan author, Bessie Amelia Emery Head, is one of the landmark figures of twentieth century Anglophone modernism. Let me cite A Question of Power (1974) as a novel that, like its almost-contemporary, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… (1977), writhes not just in a refusal of prevailing cultural norms pertaining to race (on Head’s part), gender (both Russ and Head strangle that particular serpent) and class (likewise), but enacts a sitting-in that space. A discomfort that, like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), is almost, but not quite, deadly. It is almost too much for the English language to bear.
Perhaps the comparison is unfair. Russ’s novel is acceptedly ‘science fiction.’ Head’s is not. I, of course, argue that both should be welcomed into the home-place of genre.
Version 1.0.0
A Question of Power was Head’s third novel, and the second of hers to be published in the Heinemann African Writers’ Series: a bold, vexed, and expansive project that brought writers from the continent of Africa to the United Kingdom, from 1962 to 2003. (Again, here is not the place to transcribe the debates about whether the novel form, a distinctly European technology, was appropriate to writers and artists from primarily oral traditions. The series gave us Head, and Amos Tutuola, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and so many other literary greats). Head herself was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1937 to a white woman and a black father. Much of her life was spent traveling between regions, stateless, illegible to an Apartheid regime. Her mental health, unsurprisingly, suffered. A Question of Power is a largely autobiographical novel that documents one woman’s struggle to make a ‘home-place’ (to repeat Carla Peterson’s human construct) in a country that not only wanted her dead, but that did not recognize her existence. Cruelty abounds within the narrative, but so too does beauty and grace. At times, the narrative falls apart, rupturing as it veers from descriptions of domesticity to mythic terror. Medusa makes an appearance, along with Hitler, Buddha, God Himself and His angelic cohorts, and Priapic demons that torment her with their sexuality. Caligula speaks. Icons of ‘classical’ western education manifest in the novel’s setting of Motabeng, Botswana, reversing the visual iconography of African art that so inspired those venerable European modernists. It is an extraordinary work.
Helen Kapstein writes of the ‘peculiar shuttling movements’ made by Head throughout her life: moving from state to state, inverting violent social norms and turning them back upon themselves, ‘trespassing’ between frameworks of normalcy. Perhaps this is where the modernist subject resides, having ‘reeled towards death’, and then ‘turned and reeled towards life’ (Head, A Question of Power, p. 219). In moving synchrony, it is a trajectory that similarly informs the writing of contemporary Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase. Speaking in a 2023 conversation in World Literature Today about her short story ‘Peeling Time’ (2022), Tsamaase describes it as a journey ‘from oppression to freedom, in conjunction with demonstrating one woman’s agency.’
If I may characterize contemporary SF: it has performed a similar swinging-back-necessarily-to offer stories of hope and adventure, inclusivity and peace: places where, as Tsamaase poignantly remarks in the same interview, the woman ‘does not die.’ The genre begrudgingly agrees, in one voice, to keep the woman on the spaceship, after all, and the modernist subject, in all its mess and complexity, may finally make it to outer space.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, by Molly McGhee (Astra House, forthcoming October 17th, 2023)
I’ve always found fascinating the shifting registers of an author’s ‘voice’ as they move between fiction and non-fiction prose; McGhee’s intimate introduction to her debut novel reads like a novel-in-miniature in its own right, and is utterly captivating. I was mesmerized, in that deliciously unseating way, by the frisson of authorial vulnerability and beautiful writing. From the outset, know that you are in the hands of a Writer with this book. I mean no snobbery by saying that. What I mean is: there is a commitment here to exquisite prose, the assembling of words in unexpected formations, that both heightens and grounds the speculative nature of the story. The introduction is an assurance that McGhee is more than capable of leading you through the crystalline tragedy of Jonathan Abernathy’s life. Of life, period/full stop (delete as you prefer).
‘Jonathan Abernathy you are kind’ is one affirmation of many that the orphaned protagonist invokes for himself to get through the days of his minimum-wage, debt-weighted life. He has no friends. He may be falling in love with his neighbour, Rhoda, and her daughter, Timmy. An offer of salvation comes in the form of encouragement to apply for the job of ‘Dream Auditor,’ to rid himself of debt. The work? Cleaning the dreams of American workers so that their little worker bodies wake, refreshed and ready to give more, give it there all, each and every morning, with minds cleaned of any anxiety.
It is a job that, again, from the outset, we are told Abernathy will not survive. But he will try. He will try very hard. And the trying is this story.
There is a much pleasure as there is terror in these pages – yes, the novel makes a slide into a genre that I wasn’t expecting, but welcomed warmly, regardless – thanks to the gorgeous, surreal dreamscapes that McGhee renders: dreamscapes tempered by precise prose that sketches in, fully, the lives of the novel’s refreshingly small cast. The author’s use of the omniscient narrative voice is startling and original and leaves the denouement, still, as a genuine surprise.
The book has a lot to say about the structures, and systems, and – most importantly – the people we hold ourselves accountable to. As always with these kinds of dystopian speculations, I sincerely hope that no enterprising techie, sometime in the near future, thinks ‘hey! That novel about sucking up bad dreams to make people more productive… now *that’s* a great idea,’ because while SFF does not, should not predict futures, and does not, should not, prescribe them – there is always the danger that dreams and speculations, unleashed, can take on an after-life of their own. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is a road map to empathy. Break open in times of crisis.
Hello, and welcome to an extra-special post from Vector’s new Editor-in-Chief: me!
I had such a wonderful time guest-editing the special issue on Greek SF/F back in Spring 2022, as well as the forthcoming issue on Libraries, Archives, and the Future of Information, with the wonderful Stewart C. Baker, that when I heard on the grapevine that the journal was looking for a new EiC, I just had to throw my hat in the ring. And the Vector gods (aka. Jo and Polina) smiled upon me, and here we are.
A brief introduction: I’m Dr. Phoenix Alexander, Klein Librarian of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the University of California, Riverside. I curate the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy: one of the largest collections of genre literature in the world. Before that, from 2019-2022, I was the Science Fiction Collections Librarian at the University of Liverpool: one of Europe’s largest collections of, yes, genre literature. I hold a Ph.D. in English and African American Studies from Yale University, and an MA and BA from Queen Mary, University of London. Before *that*, there was fashion school… which was just as fantastical as any genre novel. And, of course, the usual “I’ve been reading since I was a wee lad,” and so on. (To this day, I ascribe my… sanguine taste in SF/F to the outrageous, gratuitous works of David Gemmell and Peter F. Hamilton that I read, in hindsight, at far too young an age). Phew. That’s a lot of ‘science fiction’ in one paragraph.
The belaboured point I’m making is that I’ve been immersed in science fiction, and fantasy, and (yes!) horror, my whole life, and feel so fortunate, every day, to work with scholars and artists and writers and creatives of all permutations. I’m also an author of SF/F (well, mostly SF, and horror) myself, and a full member of SFWA and HWA.
As my resume suggests, I’ve had the privilege of moving between geographic locations; I was born in Cyprus, raised in the UK, studied for six years in America, briefly returned to the UK, before settling on the US West Coast. My hope, going forward, is to further strengthen the connections between the scholarly, creative, and fannish communities, not just within the US and the UK, but across the world. Genres of the fantastic bring people together in their passions and eccentricities like no other genre. There can be friction, of course – but there can also be magic.
In the coming months, there are many exciting things to look forward to from ‘Vector’: the aforementioned issue on Libraries, scheduled for late Fall/Winter, reviews and columns from our wonderful (and growing!) list of contributors – both new and familiar faces – with plans to publish even more articles, making Vector, in its physical and online iterations, more vibrant than ever. As always, and most importantly: the journal is a celebration of new fiction, new art, and new scholarship, in and across SFF-nal genres.
In this spirit of celebration, I’ll end by sharing a review (in the next post) of a forthcoming title from debut author Molly McGhee: a title I greatly enjoyed, and that I hope you enjoy, too.
Vector editors are bringing their Communicating Climate Risk: A Toolkit to COP26 in Glasgow. You can register here to watch Jo Lindsay Walton at the launch, live-streamed from the Science Pavilion. We talk about science fiction in a chapter on communicating around the tipping points.
The science of tipping points can lend itself to apocalyptic storytelling. What are some of the pros and cons?
“Are you getting this on camera, that this tornado just came and erased the Hollywood sign? The Hollywood sign is gone, it’s just shredded.”
— Character in The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
From the perspective of climate risk communication, tipping points can be associated with apocalyptic and cataclysmic narratives. The tipping points session at the COP26 Universities Network Climate Risk Summit, late 2021, provides an illustration (Mackie 2021). The session opened with a slide alluding to the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow.Of course, this movie stretches science in ways that are regrettably familiar. “Scenarios that take place over a few days or weeks in the movie would actually require centuries to occur” (National Snow & Ice Data Center 2004). Nonetheless, The Day After Tomorrow does represent a real tipping element: the potential shutdown of AMOC, a large system of ocean currents that conveys warm water from the tropics northwards, which is responsible for the relative warmth of the North Hemisphere.
Movies like The Day After Tomorrow vividly communicate the fragility of human lives — as tornadoes tear apart the Los Angeles skyline and toss cars through the air, as New Yorkers scramble down narrow streets from oncoming tsunami-like waves — in ways that are not always captured by terminology such as “extreme weather events.” In the broader context of climate action, is it useful to tug on the heartstrings in this way? Much of the literature on catastrophic narratives and climate storytelling focuses on a distinction between fear and hope. An overreliance on fear has been quite widely criticised.
[…] some studies suggest that there are better chances to engage an audience by including positive messages in film narratives about environmental risks, especially climate change, rather than adopting the strategy of fear, which would instead distance and disengage them, making them feel overwhelmed and helpless […]
However, one thing we should remember is that apocalypses are about many more emotions than fear and hope. A movie like The Day After Tomorrow showcases a range of emotions including exhilaration, confusion, companionship, desire, curiosity, anger, encounters with the sublime, and even moments of humour, both grim and sweet. As many scriptwriters will tell you, an immersive narrative needs emotional variety, or the audience will introduce variety of their own — they will daydream, feel bored, pick holes in the plot, or find their own things to laugh about. Apocalyptic hearts are full hearts: there is probably no human emotion that cannot find some niche in narratives of disaster and collapse. Indeed, the end of the world can feel alluring. The more dissatisfied people are with their existing lives, the more alluring it may feel. As the recent ASU Apocalyptic Narratives and Climate Change project describes (focusing on the US context):
From infectious disease to war, a broad swath of the public has long interpreted social and environmental crisis through the prism of apocalypse, casting potential catastrophes and their causes in religious and moral terms. These apocalyptic visions are often narrated from the point of view of the survivors (the “elect”), thus reinforcing a sense that the end times need to be survived by remaining among the elect, rather than prevented through pragmatic action.
Alternatively, an apocalyptic or eschatalogical idiom can sometimes make climate change feel like nothing special. When has the world not been ending? “For at least 3,000 years, a fluctuating proportion of the world’s population has believed that the end of the world is imminent” (Garrard 2004). Insofar as apocalyptic framings feel extreme yet in a familiar way, they can be counterproductive, especially with audiences who are already wary. This includes those who are ready to view anthropogenic climate change as a left wing conspiracy (perpetrated by charlatan scientists to secure themselves power and funding, in cahoots with governments that aim to justify increasingly authoritarian, totalitarian, and unjust policies) or as a neocolonialist agenda (perpetrated by the rich countries of the world to impose new forms of domination, indebtedness, and exploitation on the Global South).
De Meyer et al. (2021) offer an intriguing spin on the respective merits of fear, hope, and other emotions: they suggest that current debates on climate communication have exaggerated the role of emotions altogether. Instead they advocate for a focus on practice, by storytelling (and doing other things) to create spaces where new audiences can experience agency in relation to the climate, at many different scales and in many different circumstances. People should be able to see what they can do.
Here, we propose that both place-based, localized action storytelling, and practice-based action storytelling have a role to play in expanding climate agency. As examples of the latter, for creative writers and journalists the required agency would be about knowing how to make action on climate change part of their stories; for architects, how to bring climate change into building design; for teachers, how to teach about climate action within the constraints of the curriculum; for fund managers, how to bring climate risk into their investment decisions; for health professionals, to support the creation of place-based community systems that respond to the health impacts of climate change. These examples of communities of practice provide different opportunities and challenges to expand the notions of climate action beyond the current notions of consumer choice and activism.
De Meyer et al. (2021)
Let’s summarise, then, some approaches to effective climate risk communication. One approach is to focus on information. How can information be clearly expressed and tailored for users to easily incorporate it into their decision-making? A second approach (partly in response to perceived shortcomings of the first) places more emphasis on emotion. What mixture of emotions should be appealed to in order to motivate action? This focus on emotion is also implicitly a focus on moral normativity, an appeal to the heart rather than the head (there is of course a great body of literature deriding this split between reason and emotion, which in reality are always mutually entangled). More recently we are seeing the emergence of a third approach, not strictly supplanting but rather complementing the other two, which focuses on practice.
The distinction between a “practice” focus vs. a focus on “informative and tailored stories” or “stories of hope not fear” is a bit subtle. Of course the three may often overlap. It may be helpful to think about what the “practice” focus means in the longer term. In the longer term, each new representational domain of climate agency will not emerge solely through hopeful portrayals of an agent (e.g. journalist, architect, teacher, fund manager) exemplifying an orthodox version of their role-specific climate action, however cognitively and affectively well-judged. Telling these stories may certainly be the priority in the short term. But what they should hope to kickstart are diverse stories filled with diverse agents, affects, and values: stories which superficially contradict each other in many ways, but whose deeper presuppositions mesh to create fields of imaginable action that can accommodate the particularity and the creativity of real people. “Environmental activist” is a social role that is available for real people to fill precisely because it can be filled in many ways (not just one way) and because it means many contradictory things (not just one thing). The same is true of the figure of the ethical consumer.
Audiences are more likely to engage with stories about the world they live in, than about who they must be in that world. Successful rapid mitigation and adaptation entails shifting to more participatory and equitable societies. Many audiences with centrist or conservative leanings may struggle to see themselves accepted within such societies. They may reject realistic climate narratives as hoaxes, or even welcome the end times: revel in fantasies of courage, ingenuity, largesse and revenge, set amid the ruins of civilisation. More can be done to create narratives that accommodate a range of self-reported aspirational virtues across the political spectrum, in ways that are cohesive with an overall just transition. Storytelling that focuses on multiplying domains of agency also entails interventions beyond representational techniques altogether, transforming the material contexts in which people seek to exercise agency.
Hong Kong is the third largest producer of films in the world after Bollywood and Hollywood, but most people think that its films are concerned only with kung fu. This could not be further from the truth, in fact it offers an enormous diversity of product and includes a large number of fantasy and horror films amongst its many genres. The perception of the output as ‘just’ martial arts presumably comes from the Seventies kung fu marketing boom and the fact that video availability in this country has yet to break away from this traditionally high-selling genre. To the uninitiated the world of Hong Kong cinema can appear bizarre, confusing and strewn with pitfalls. There is the frenetic pace of action, occasionally impenetrable plots, obscure humour and a completely different language (often with cheesy dubbing or minuscule subbing) to contend with. So why bother? The answer is simple. Entertainment. Hong Kong films have a kinetic energy that renders the rest of the world geriatric by comparison. The relentless action, comedy, pathos and range of ideas, and the fact that you never know how the story is going to end, leaves the viewer gasping for breath. Hollywood have latched on to this and in recent years have tried to imitate the Hong Kong formula with limited success. Many HK directors now work in the USA – The Matrix (1999) was choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping, and the pace of the action is derived completely from HK cinema. Hollywood has also begun to approach the task of duplicating several Hong Kong genres; the Heroic Bloodshed genre (guns, cops, gangsters, slo-mo shooting and heavy casualties) has translated reasonably, but lost the emotional depth and characterisation of its Eastern counterpart. Its main innovator John Woo, who directed the sci-fi bloodshed film Face/Off (1998), is now exerting his vision on the Hollywood system with considerable success. The Swordplay genre has fared less well as the efforts generally seem lacklustre, although The Mask of Zorro (1998) was well executed and similarly owes as much to Hong Kong as Errol Flynn. In return Hong Kong has no scruples about raiding film ideas from anywhere – it just does it faster and, normally, better.
Because the market for Hong Kong films is confined predominantly to Asia, its genres are tailored to that market. As a result, there are few pure science fiction films made in Hong Kong and they tend to aim for either the international market (Black Mask, 1997), for the Japanese market (City Hunter, 1993; Wicked City, 1992) or just turn out to be financially unsuccessful (The Heroic Trio, 1993). Generally science fiction elements occur as a peripheral to the main plot or are used as a McGuffin. Far more common is the fantasy film, of which there is an abundance of superior examples. For example: Name three decent Hollywood fantasy films made in the last decade. Okay, name one decent Hollywood fantasy film made in the last decade. Movies such as Moon Warriors (1992), Blade of Fury (1993) and Burning Paradise (1994) are so far in advance of any Hollywood fantasy film as to render English-speaking fare futile. Conan The Barbarian (1982) and Willow (1988) don’t come close and it is only really the Ray Harryhausen films that stand up to scrutiny. There are also abundant numbers of ghost stories and vampire films, which are completely different to their Western counterparts and all the more exciting and stimulating for it. It is impossible to cover all the films served up by HK, so here are a few pointers to hopefully whet your appetite for further Far Eastern dishes.
Wondering where to send your latest short SFF masterpiece?
Ralan.com is a fantastic resource. Don’t be misled by that gorgeous 90s decor: it’s regularly and reliably updated (never change, Ralan!).
Locusis also a great source of industry news, and contains a lot of reviews of short SFF that might give you ideas of where to explore further. Locus also does a regular year-in-review of major SFF magazines.
Submission Grinder is a sort of crowdsourced tool where writers can collectively keep track of publication response times. Duotrope is the other big market listing / submission tracker.
This Facebook group is devoted to posting calls for submissions.
You might also be interested in the Science Fiction Writers’ Association’s list of “qualifying markets”. There’s a note that this list is slated to change in format soon. Qualifying markets must have circulations of 1000+ and pay 8c/word, and meet some other criteria.
For the more academic side of things, the LSFRC (London Science Fiction Research Community) are currently doing an excellent job of scooping up relevant Calls for Papers, notices of conferences, etc.: the LSFRC Facebook group is the best place to follow them. And of course there is the ever-effervescent Science Fiction Research Association (founded way back in 1970).
The following text was written for the 2020 BSFA AGM, held online on 23 August on our Discord server.
Preamble
Jo Lindsay Walton
This is an agenda item about two closely connected matters, the recent and ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, and issues of diversity in the BSFA and UK SFF publishing and fandom more widely. We would like to invite the membership to consider some of the practical steps the BSFA might take. The BSFA is, of course, committed to anti-racism, and in recent months we’ve tried to play our part, for example recently publishing statements of solidarity with BLM in Vector and in the BSFA newsletter. With such statements, we join innumerable other cultural, arts, and community organisations and institutions. Gestures like these do often get a mixed reception from people doing anti-racist work. On the one hand, such gestures are usually both well-intentioned and broadly welcomed. On the other, many anti-racism activists point out that it’s easy to make statements of support, but that these may often be at best hollow, and at worst hypocritical! — contradicted by the actual policies and practices of the institutions in question.
Science fiction has a special connection to the future and, we’d like to think, a special connection to hopeful transformation. We believe it behooves us to ensure that our words are not hollow, but backed up by action. But what actions should those be? One area of focus can be our own SFF communities, fan, academic, and professional. Clarke Award judge Stewart Hotston recently published an article online which pointed out that, of 121 publisher submissions to the award, the total number by British authors of non-white descent was only three. Even more recently, several of this year’s Hugo Award nominees published a letter raising, among other issues, a lack of diversity in the panelling at this year’s virtual WorldCon. More broadly, I’m sure it escapes nobody’s notice that SFF cons in the UK are often very white spaces.
BSFA officers have been thinking about these issues for at least as long as we’ve been editing Vector, and no doubt much much longer, and we’ll continue to do so. Editorially we’ll continue to monitor which authors and books get coverage, and also continue to think about the diversity of our contributors. We’ll continue to be vigilant against racist discourse in our more open public spaces such as the BSFA Facebook page, and try always to ensure that these are spaces where BAME fans can feel respected and safe. And we’ll also try to make sure that there’s regular information shared in such spaces about the work of diversifying and decolonising SFF. In the medium to long term, the BSFA Committee (soon to be Council and Directors, following adoption of the new Constitution) is seriously lacking in diversity, and that needs to be addressed too.
What we would like to do now is suggest a few other possible actions the BSFA might take, and then open things up for a brief initial discussion. Please also consider this an opportunity to canvas who’s interested in actually getting involved in making some of these things happen. We’ll then formally propose some motions one by one.
Diversity and antiracism motions
Jo Lindsay Walton, Polina Levontin, Dev Agarwal, Sue Oke
The editors of Vector, Focus and The BSFA Review with the support of the Chair and the Treasurer are proposing five motions. These motions are flexibly worded, since many of the details would need to be sorted out post the AGM. However, here’s a little more detail, albeit provisional:
(1) Offer support-in-kind to BAME fans of science fiction. This would likely include a waiver on BSFA membership fees within the UK for as long as this is sustainable and necessary. We would also seek to reach out to other organisations, e.g. the British Fantasy Society, to potentially put together a package.
(2) Offer financial support to BAME convention goers. This could for example follow the precedent of Con or Bust, and be offered from a special pot, generated from dedicated fundraising activities.
(3) Pursue consultation with BAME members of the wider SFF community. The consultation would likely be an online anonymised initiative, with questions around the experience and priorities of BAME fans of science fiction, writers, academics and publishers.
(4) Create a role of a Diversity Officer to support these efforts. The role would involve championing diversity of all kinds within the BSFA, as well as helping to administer specific initiatives or events (including, if passed, the motions presented here). It would not involve any additional powers requiring constitutional amendments.
(5) Finally, we suggest that the BSFA make a donation to Black Lives Matter UK.
Motions (1)-(4) were passed by the membership. Motion (5) was amended to “We resolve to make a donation to one or more appropriate anti-racist organisation(s). Preference will be given to a UK-based anti-racist charity associated with SF, if one can be identified,” and was then passed by the membership. Dave Lally also made a personal starting pledge to raise funds for these activities.
Immediately the protesters’ drones start to drop lower, arrows scrolling across their screens to shift the march’s route, and new cues rattling from speakers to realign the chanting.
WHY ARE YOU IN RIOT GEAR?
WE DON’T SEE NO RIOT HERE!
WHY ARE YOU IN RIOT GEAR?
WE DON’T SEE NO RIOT HERE!
Rush spots a couple of cops behind the main line not wearing headgear, senior officers or strategic management agents, and blinks to grab images of them, storing them away to run through image-search algorithms later. Until you can dismantle them, he tells himself, always use the oppressors’ tools against them.
Vector would like to express our solidarity with the anti-racism protests currently occurring in the USA, UK, and around the world. The BSFA Chair will be doing the same, in the newsletter this week, on behalf of the BSFA.
For those of us in the UK who would like to find out more ways of offering practical support, but don’t know where to start, a few useful resources relating to anti-racism, policing, courts, and prisons are:
vector-bsfa.com 