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Vector 301 (Summer 2025)
Cover by HYUNJIN SEO @glejinn
In addition to our regular columns, “Kincaid in Short” by Paul Kincaid, “The Resistance” by Nick Hubble, “Futures Imperfect” by Paul Graham Raven, this issue’s offerings include: “Delicious in Dungeon. Dine or Die with a Pinch of Comedy” by Marta F. Suarez, and “Energy Economies in Science Fiction” by Jo Lindsay Walton, editor at large. Phoenix Alexander, editor-in-chief, interviews Connor Jackson about the ‘Dead Rising’ series and zombie consumers. A discussion on cultivated meat is served by Mahmud El Sayed and James Henstock. A sophisticated final piece, “Ethical Dilemmas in the Imagination of Future Food: A Cross-Temporal Dialogue between Daoist Immortal Tales and Modern Science Fiction,” has been brought to you by XIAO Dana.
Vector 300 (Winter 2024)
Our milestone 300th issue is edited by Phoenix Alexander and Polina Levontin. With contributions by Teika Marija Smits, James Reath, Ibtisam Ahmed, Vladimir Poleganov, Eugen Bacon, and Jo Lindsay Walton, and regular columns from Nick Hubble, Paul Kincaid, Paul Graham Raven, and Dr. Marta Suarez.
Cover art by Tykki; back cover art by Yevgeniya Lapik.
Vector 299 (April 2024)
Guest edited by Paul March-Russell. With contributions by Angela Acosta, Nick Hubble, Paul Kincaid, Nina Allan, Andrew M. Butler and a new regular column by Kat Kourbeti. Includes an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson by Henry Farrell, book reviews, and a tribute to Christopher Priest by Paul March-Russell.
Cover art by James Gillham.
Vector 298 (Nov 2023)
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).
Future issues:
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Back issues:
An index of back issues of Vector can be found at the ISFDB. For availability of individual print issues, please contact us. A couple of issues (e.g. on African SF and on Speculative Economics) are available for purchase.
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