Summer 2022
Ian Campbell
Editor, SFRA Review
On 15 October, the person whose flat is two floors directly above ours decided to do some DIY work, and in the process managed to cut our Google Fiber cable, plunging our flat back into the darkness of the twentieth century. Dear readers, it was horrible: a perfect storm of both my wife and me having worked from home for so long that I could no longer do my whole job from the office—and my wife not having even had an office for more than two years—and the “Kafka was taking notes” nightmare of modern corporate customer “service”. It was a full week before the metaphorical lights came back on, whereupon my wife sang “Hallelujah” from the balcony—and someone called the police on her.
Being cut off from the Internet is the twenty-first century form of solitary confinement: you have no idea how many times one of us said “I need/want to…” and then realized we simply could not. I know this complaint sounds picayune—and it is, in comparison to, say, the Supreme Court deciding that American women and girls are rightsless breeding animals, or whatever the next round of horror they might unleash upon us will be. Nevertheless, the Internet, something I graduated from college without and still turned into something that from a very particular angle might have resembled a functioning adult, has become so critical to the very existence of anything like a knowledge-based occupation that we are worse than useless without it. It’s just another part of that future that’s already here, but unequally distributed.
Our issue this quarter is quite short: a raft of papers we intend to publish as a group proved to need too many edits to bring it in under the deadline. Nevertheless, in addition to our usual palette of reviews, we also have our symposium on Alternative Masculinities in SF, which we sincerely hope you will find as interesting and à propos as we do. We do hope you enjoy the images from the James Webb Space Telescope in the PDF edition of the journal.
Martin Luther King once said “the arc of history bends toward justice”, which might sometimes be hard to see in current times, but Steve Bannon is in prison now, and that paragon of the SF community, Theodore Beale aka Vox Day, had a million dollars stolen from him. Beale was trying to produce a film, Rebel’s Run, about a conservative superhero in a Confederate flag bustier, and parked his money with a firm called Ohana Capital Financial, because they were the only ones who would do business with someone with such a well-documented history of racist and sexist statements. Turns out, Ohana was the extremely common multiclass character of cryptocurrency miner and scam artist, and walked away with Beale’s money. Guess old Vox Day is a sad puppy now.
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