From the SFRA Review
Spring 2024
Ian Campbell
This is our shortest issue in quite a long time, due to some scheduling conflicts. We will return in August with a much fuller suite of features and articles. The end of the spring semester is a challenge for everyone who’s academic-adjacent, including parents of children in elementary, middle and high schools. My own high-schooler is naturally anxious enough, but with a project or standardized test due every few days, she’s really feeling the burnout so many of us do at this generally beautiful time of year.
My much-beloved parents are venerable enough to be almost a statistical anomaly by this point, and while they’ve been robust all along, time has really begun to catch up with both of them recently. For most of this month, my mother has been in a nursing home seventy miles from us, recovering from a femur broken in a fall, and my father, one of our last living WWII veterans, has been in a hospital fifty miles in a different direction, suffering from digestive issues relating to a bout of food poisoning. Neither has a smartphone, so I’ve spent many an hour going low-tech, with my daughter’s phone in one hand and my own phone in the other, turned upside down so that my parents can speak to each other from their separate beds. I am an organic coupling device. They have been married since the 1950s.
SF enables me to think about what might be right around the corner: part of me would love to jump ahead not that far to the San Junipero universe, where both of them could be free of aches and pains and back to a time when “real people danced with a partner,” in my father’s oft-repeated words. But SF is as much about the social consequences of technological development as it is the tech itself, and that particular episode of Black Mirror needed to focus on the tech and the characters, so it hadn’t the time to do much with the social issues. Imagine two great-great-grandchldren debating whether to stop paying for their ancestor’s subscription. Imagine the digital hells from Iain M. Banks’ Surface Detail. Imagine the world of the story of Miguel Acevedo. I think I’d prefer to stick with San Junipero, because I’ll still be able to talk with them, without needing two phones or a medium. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.
SFRA Review 