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:

• 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 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

• Science fiction and literary experiment
• Global modernisms and science fiction
• Modernism and techno-culture
• Modernist utopias/dystopias
• Science fiction and the visual arts
• Science fiction and modernist architecture
• Science fiction and modernist cinema
• Modernism and SF theatre
• Scientific influences on modernism and science fiction
• Language, modernism and science fiction
• Science, modernist poetics and science fiction
• Modernism and Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and other regional futurisms
• Modernism and Indigenous futurisms
• Modernism, science fiction and non-Western knowledges
• Modernism, science fiction and sexual expression
• SF fanzines, modernism and science communication
• Politics, modernism and science fiction
• Coteries in modernism and science fiction

Bibliography