Jean-Paul Garnier interviews Tara Campbell

Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Publication credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Uncharted Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She’s the author of the eco sci-fi novel TreeVolution, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Her sixth book, City of Dancing Gargoyles, was released by Santa Fe Writers Project (SFWP) in September 2024. She teaches creative writing at venues such as Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer’s Center, and Hugo House. Find her at www.taracampbell.com

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, 2024 BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and was the editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine from 2021-2025. He is also the poetry editor of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/

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JPG – CITY OF DANCING GARGOYLES has a really interesting format: it switches between epistolary and more traditional novel narratives. What made you decide to mix these formats to tell your story, and what advantages did it provide you?

TC – Well, I hadn’t actually planned on writing a novel. During COVID I was having a hard time concentrating enough just to read, let alone write, but I was inspired by a novel pre-writing technique by Michael Moorcock that centered on imagery containing deliberate paradoxes. The image he gave as an example was “In the city of screaming statues.” That image created so many questions in my mind: I had to know what the city looked like, what it sounded like, what set these statues off, were they screaming words or just sounds, did they ever stop, etc. I was excited at how many questions that one image created, so I created a writing exercise for myself based on nouns and verbs, putting together words that absolutely do not belong together, like floating wolves and sailing statues and glaring chocolates and all of these things that simply can’t be.

I wound up writing a couple dozen stories, and when I started thinking about how to bring them together in a collection, I created a chart to figure out how to group them, looking at commonalities of theme or tone or perspective or any way they would cohere. Then a writer friend suggested using an element I mentioned in one of the stories—alchemical testing—to imagine all of the stories as part of the same universe.

Once I started thinking in terms of a novel, I had to be more ruthless in how to change or cut stories for the purposes of the narrative. Some of the stories turned into setting or characters instead of self-standing works. But on the other hand, the epistolary sections let certain stories be as weird as they wanted to be in this future US that’s been that’s been altered by climate change and alchemical testing.

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Jean-Paul Garnier interviews A. D. Sui

A.D. Sui is a Ukrainian-born, queer, disabled science fiction writer, and the author of THE DRAGONFLY GAMBIT and the forthcoming Erewhon novel, THE IRON GARDEN SUTRA (2026). She is a failed academic, retired fencer, and coffee enthusiast. Her short fiction has appeared in Augur, Fusion Fragment, HavenSpec, and other venues. When not wrangling her two dogs you can find her on every social media platform as @thesuiway – https://thesuiway.ca/

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/

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JPG – The Dragonfly Gambit has all of the elements of space opera: a big story, politics, empire, worldbuilding, etc., but unlike most modern space operas the book is short – how did you manage to create such a large-scale story in so few words, and what are your feelings on space opera as a sub-genre?

A.D. S – First, thank you so much! I want to say that space opera has a long-running tradition of glorifying empires. They’re almost the natural default government system in far-future science fiction, which positions them as a sort of inevitability. But historically, we know this isn’t true. Empires fall all the time. That’s the whole point. So, I really wanted to focus on a time of an empire falling.

As far as the structure goes, I can’t remember who said it, it might have been one of my agency siblings, but in a novel, each scene fights for its right to exist. In a short story, every sentence does. A novella is somewhere in between, so my editing wasn’t as ruthless as it would have been for a short story, but I was definitely focusing on each sentence delivering either character development or new information, and preferably both. Also, as much as it is a space opera, it also has *one* location where most of the action takes place. So, I could really go into a lot of detail about the world/order of things by describing this one place instead of jumping between locations.

JPG – One of the themes in the book is sacrifice and martyrdom, sacrifice being an arcane tradition to the culture in the book – can you speak about the nature of sacrifice and weighing individual characters against large-scale problems?

A.D. S – It’s a bit of a pipe dream to think that one person can shift the tides of history. I don’t think anyone is that special. It’s one of the reasons why, as a genre, science fiction and fantasy are moving away from, or challenging, the Chosen One narrative. But how often do you see a disabled protagonist who is a woman, in her thirties, and by every marker, a failure, be The Chosen One? That was fun to write, and yes, very self-indulgent.

Now, sacrifice and martyrdom were two themes that felt natural when having a conversation about militaries. Martyrdom is baked into military culture, you can’t escape it. Historically, militaries uphold and immortalize those who lose their lives in combat. We label these people as heroes while simultaneously treating them terribly while they’re still alive or if they remained alive (see the utter lack of any decent veterans’ services). It’s easier to herald someone as a hero than to actually treat them as such. There is a tension in there between the shine of heroism, and the loss of life and the absolute meaninglessness of it while it’s still there.

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Amirah Muhammad reviews ‘Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction’

Edited by Eugen Bacon, Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (2024) is an anthology of award-winning African speculative fiction writers, including Suyi Okingbowa, Cheryl S. Ntumy, and Dilman Dila.

The anthology pushes us to question the genre labels we take for granted – namely, Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and futurism – alongside introducing us to new terms, fusing specificity with inclusivity. Key to the anthology is the concept of the ‘gaze’: of looking in order to name, and the tension between fixity and fluidity that comes from it. With a blend of fiction and nonfiction, Bloomsbury describes the anthology as offering “excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.”

Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism and Afro-centred Futurisms

There are many names for speculative fiction by African writers. The anthology is chiefly concerned with differentiating Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and introduces Afro-centred Futurisms. ‘Afrofuturism’ often refers to Black speculative fiction, although the anthology reminds us of its origins in the United States of America through Mark Dery’s coinage. ‘Africanfuturism’ is Nnedi Okorafor’s invention to describe speculative fiction invested in African histories, presents and futures. ‘Afro-centred Futurisms,’ as Suyi Okungbowa defines it, is a plural term with an “active consciousness and open-armed framework — the privileging of the Afrodescendant self, an investment in timelessness, and an embrace of the spirituality-to-science spectrum” (18).

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Issue 300, ‘Community’— Call for proposals

Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky

Science fiction, for all it encompasses strange new worlds and fantastical creatures, is a literary genre that is built and sustained by human communities. Writers, artists, and creators have imagined new social formations, technologies, economic, ecological, and sociopolitical systems for centuries; indeed, science fiction may be the most nakedly political of all literary genres, as thought-provoking as it is beguiling. Who is present in narratives of futurity? What kinds of technologies enable—or stymie—human connection? How can inter-species communities develop and flourish?

Pre-internet, fanzines and conventions were the spaces where editors, authors, and fans met, shaping the genre in new and exciting ways. Praise and critique and conflict and collaboration were equally already common before social media. Some landmark dates include: the first WorldCon (1939), the first British science fiction convention, Eastercon (1937), the Maleyevka seminars, Nihon SF Taikai (from 1962), and many others, around the globe.

In 2024, the ideologies of ‘community’ are under pressure and scrutiny. Violent geopolitical events shadowplay on smartphone screens, small enough to fit in the palm of our hands, fulfilling the most dystopian dreams of the genre; we venture to fight and commiserate and celebrate with people from all over the world, instantly. Where wealthy industrialists were (and are) once praised as saviors of humanity with the glittering promise of their space programs, now SF tends to show how the relentless logics of capitalism undermine any notions of transcendence. The challenge of space travel was supposed to unite us. What would the pioneers of SF make of the now-straining politics around the International Space Station, scheduled for dismantling by 2030?

In light of these challenges, the Vector team—for the journal’s milestone 300^th issue—invites contributions that reify the notion of ‘community’ as it manifests in speculative cultures. What tools can SF offer us to construct better tomorrows, together? How can we innovate new ways of collaborating, such as the world-building projects of Syllble? What does ‘community’ look like in fiction, non-fiction, conventions, awards, conferences, collaborations, online spaces, and other literary and paraliterary formations?

Suggested questions / topics

history of fandom/conventions
the practice of writing: zines, magazines, letters
science fiction publishing: editors and collaborators on the printed page
utopias and dystopias
terraforming
defining personhood
future societies
sex and sexuality
navigating conflict
political divides, past and present
interspecies alliances
the posthuman
the future of communication
translating SF

Please submit your proposal by June 15th, 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 July 31st, 2024.

Please also feel free to make queries about other formats, e.g. reviews, interviews, curated reading lists, roundtable discussions, unusual / innovative formats.

Electricity as a Speculative Device: The Romanian Modern(ist) SF

By Amalia Cotoi

This article explores how Romanian science fiction novels written between 1899 and 1954 engage with modernity. I am particularly interested in examining how key texts that center around the protagonist’s exploration beyond the familiar realms intersect with a modern development that was a game changer in human history: electric energy. The analysis centers on three novels from the modernist era − Victor Anestin’s pioneering Romanian Sci-Fi novel, În anul 4000 sau o călătorie la Venus [In the Year 4000 or A Trip to Venus] (1899), Henri Stahl’s Un român în lună [A Romanian on the Moon] (1914), and Felix Aderca’s Orașe scufundate [The Submerged Cities] (1937) − and one written and published in the aftermath of WWII − Drum printre aștri [Path Among Stars] (1954), penned by I. M. Ștefan and Radu Nor. If the works written during the interwar period represent initial major forays into the Sci-Fi genre, it wasn’t until the postwar era that the first notable presence of Sci-Fi in Romanian literature, holding institutional significance and capturing general interest, emerged. By including a novel written in the 1950s in this inquiry, I aim to challenge the chronological convention of the modernist era ending with World War II. The emergence of the communist regime, influenced by the Soviet model, signaled an unparalleled drive toward industrial and technological advancement in a European nation that was among the least developed, with a rural population twice the continental average (Murgescu, 140). Such a transition is all the more justifiable in the case of electricity, as the pace of electrification accelerated after World War II, particularly between 1950 and 1970 (Murgescu, 344), witnessing the shift from electricity as a speculative concept to a democratically commodified resource.

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