From the SFRA Executive Committee
From the Vice President
Ida Yoshinaga
Aloha, SFRA members,
As we, the networks of Earth, flow towards mid-twenty-first century singularity from a wide spacetime perspective and we enter yet another holiday season from the smaller sense of human affective momentum, I find myself thinking about my own, small-f “futurisms.” Perhaps for the first time ever—very odd for a lifetime learner in science-fiction studies.
The collective that taught me how to think will turn into a “majority-minority” society in another 22 years, so I envision myself in Future Georgia, watching my students from this semester evolve into full persons, enchanting what’s been red and purple into a deep indigo-like blue in another 10.
The collective of my ancestors will spin its centuries of modernist love for artificiality, commerce, and form into a line of pleasingly mannered, sentient and multi-gendered, service workers. They’ll be facing that classical Nipponese dilemma—order and pleasure, or discomforting revolution—in another 80 (crossing into the twenty-second’s threshhold).
And I will labor at my present factory, the STEMmy mothership, tirelessly, relentlessly, until my favorite organ crepes into spotted curtains draped from my elbows and tailbone. I’ll drain my spirit turning human storytelling into one of those new monsters, a growling electrical beast who can generate fables and novels and screenplays autonomously. Like the scientist in the story, I will be shocked when the creature turns on me, on humanity. In another 30.
But mostly, a week before we take out the costumes and for the first time since the virus, join in on the parades…Before our souls homecome to family and community with three rounds of seasonal fantasy make-pretend (ghosts, unpredatory colonial settlers, Klaus)…I’m looking back. As part of my small-f futurism; otherwise, how can one grasp the meaning, the impact, of the flow towards all these someday-presents?
So: Thank you, Jessica Fitzpatrick, for your attention to detail, conscientious and necessary financial work, positive demeanor and imaginative orientation, and for doing what’s probably the second-hardest job (next to Gerry’s) in our Executive Committee.
Thank you, Sean Guynes, whose egoless service to SFRA of course eclipses the minute and diligent secretarial duties you’ve offered up these past years. I see you: your systematic and long-term questions, fixes, quiet administrative contributions.
Mahalo, Keren Omry, who along with Sean and Gerry, ushered me into this association. Global feminist leadership modeled; now the IAFA is fortunate to benefit from your hefty organizational smarts.
Crushingest of kaiju-sized hugs to Gerry Canavan, whose stewardship has honestly felt a little like that of the mythical space captain in that syndicated live-action series I’d watched as a child on Maui in the ‘70s. Intuitive, action-oriented when needs be, thinking always of crew and community. Funny on occasion (albeit not in a Shatneresque way). I know you hate the term praxis, so let’s simply ignore that you’re the embodiment of the best of this. Very glad you’re still on board. I’m here for another few.
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