Author: sfrarev

Features / SFT Universe

The SF in Translation Universe #9

Rachel Cordasco

Welcome back to the SF in Translation Universe! It’s certainly been a hell of a year, but if you’re reading this, that means that you’ve made it through and you can start dreaming about how much better 2021 will be.

Of course, 2020 wasn’t bad at all if you think about it in terms of books and stories, since I’m going to tell you about some fantastic SF in translation that came out between September and the end of the year. It’s certainly been a good fall/winter for collections, including Clelia Farris’s Creative Surgery (tr from the Italian by Rachel Cordasco and Jennifer Delare), Christiane Vadnais’s Fauna (tr from the French by Pablo Straus), The Beast and Other Tales by Jóusè d’Arbaud (tr from the Provençal by Joyce Zonana), Cixin Liu’s To Hold Up the Sky (various translators), Aleksandar Žiljak’s As the Distant Bells Toll (tr from the Croatian by the author), Okamoto Kidō: Master of the Uncanny (tr from the Japanese by Nancy H. Ross), and Jean Ray’s Circles of Dread (tr from the French by Scott Nicolay). That’s right—seven collections, translated from six different source languages, from seven distinct publishers. Ranging from the fantastic and surreal (Fauna, The Beast, and As the Distant Bells Toll), to horror and the uncanny (Okamoto Kidō and Circles of Dread), and finally to intriguing blends of science fiction and surrealism (Creative Surgery, Fauna, and To Hold Up the Sky), these collections will whet any reader’s appetite for more stories by these authors who should be much better known.

The one anthology that came out this season was The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, which includes tales from Spain, Norway, Hungary, Italy, Quebec, Mexico, and everywhere in between. Many of these authors have never appeared in English before, and will greatly enrich our understanding of the modern horror genre, which has been and always will be an international one.

We got two Japanese novels and one Polish novel in October, along with a standalone novella by the great Polish surreal fantasist Bruno Schulz. His story, Undula (originally published in Polish in 1922, tr in 2020 by Frank Garrett) is one of dreams and nostalgia, cockroaches and masochism. Similarly, Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole (tr David Boyd) takes us into a region between reality and dream, where a woman who has recently moved to the countryside falls into a hole that seems to have been made for her (makes me think of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). What follows is a series of strange characters and creatures that destabilize her understanding of her world. Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings (tr Ginny Tapley Takemori) also begins with a character’s shift from the city to the country and her growing belief that she is an alien (with all that that word might mean). Finally, Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Tower of Fools (tr David French) introduces us to a new fantasy world (not connected to the Witcher), in which a magician and healer is caught up in a war and thrown into an asylum filled with people who are either insane or iconoclastic.

Rounding out the year is a short novel that seems to capture the dislocation from reality that many of us have felt in 2020. Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H. G. (tr from the Italian by Frederika Randall) takes as its starting point one man’s realization (after abandoning a suicide attempt) that every single person, except for him, has vanished off the face of the Earth. What follows is a series of philosophical speculations about the place humans had held in the world, what their absence means for animals and the natural landscape, if time and history have any meaning when almost everyone is gone, and what a lone man should do when he has only his memories and human detritus for company. This is a strange, melancholic, yet strikingly touching story, and one I highly recommend.

In terms of short fiction, September and October have brought us a richly diverse group of stories from Bulgaria, Germany, Russia, Korea, Mexico, China, El Salvador, and elsewhere. We have magazines like Clarkesworld, World Literature Today, Samovar, Future Science Fiction Digest, Asimov’s and others to thank for this treasure trove (most of which is freely available online- check the “SFT on the Web” tab on sfintranslation.com).

Thanks for reading, and I’d love to hear what you’re reading now and/or looking forward to: rachel@sfintranslation.com.

Until next time in the SFT Universe!

Meet the Future: An Interview with Nichole Nomura

Features / Meet the Future

Meet the Future: An Interview with Nichole Nomura

Nichole Nomura
PhD Candidate, Stanford University

SFRA Review: Hi, Nichole, could you tell us a bit about yourself? As much (or as little) as you’d like!

Hello! I’m currently a PhD candidate at Stanford English, and I’ve just wrapped up my M.A. in Education from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. I grew up in and did all my schooling in California, and somewhat stereotypically love the beach, the desert, swimming, and any form of being on the water (in all seasons). I collect (not hoard) books, tools, and blazers.

Review: How do you describe yourself professionally?

N: I work and teach in the digital humanities, education, and literary studies in order to study the way science fiction teaches and is taught. I’m a researcher in Stanford’s Literary Lab, a digital humanities (DH) research collective. Being a part of the Lab is such an incredible experience—I love the collaborative structure of project-based inquiry, the chance to explore questions outside my area of expertise, and the way DH methods estrange me from my own work and assumptions—it’s a science-fictional way to work on SF, but that’s not the only reason I use DH methods. DH’s ability to move to different scales is really useful when working on something as massive as science fiction or something as small as syntagmatic spaces between words. My research and teaching in the school of Education gives me the critical tools to see the lesson plans and curricula embedded in SF, and to analyze SF as embedded in lesson plans and curricula. The sociological methods I use, such as qualitative coding, come from my training in the Ed school, and help me approach questions that deal with real readers in ways that I choose for their respect and rigor. And literary studies, perhaps the most traditional home of the SF scholar, provides the theories that are at the core of my research and are the foundation of my personal reading habits and inclinations.

Review: Why does sf matter to you?

N: SF matters to me because people read it. People watch it. People write it and dress up in it and live in it. A lot of people. We would be fools not to study it.

That’s the short version of the manifesto. The longer version is built on a collection of anecdotes—students who have told me my class was the first one where they read books they liked; an engineering student who made his career decision as a kid watching Iron Man suit up for the first time; the way either Picard, Janeway, or Sisko seems to have a quote for any difficult occasion; or the time I watched a 6^th-grader carefully hide a copy of The Hunger Games under his desk while we were watching a documentary. SF matters to me not only because people read it, but because people love it. These stories shape our lives because we choose to let them.

Review: What brought you to sf studies?

N: I got my first dose of SF theory in a creative writing class (specifically, for all you teachers out there, Langer’s “Case Studies in Reading 2: Key Theoretical and Critical Texts in Science Fiction Studies” from The Science Fiction Handbook), and while I had been exposed to some theory elsewhere in my undergraduate program, it had never clicked. For the first time, I understood what other people saw in theory. Somebody had tools for thinking about texts I cared about, in ways that changed how I thought about them—and I could use them as tools, choosing between them, refining them, setting them aside when they didn’t serve me anymore. The clichéd lightbulb turned on, and I don’t think it was a coincidence that it was the science fiction theory that excited me—there’s something special about it. I probably bored all my friends and professors with endless papers and discussion posts on cognitive estrangement, but they were supportive, excellent educators and collaborators who pushed me to read more, deeper, and better.

Review: What project(s) are you working on now, and how did you get there?What question(s) really drive your work?

N: I’m fascinated by the explicitly didactic—by the attempt to convey theoretical information directly in the context of a largely experiential narrative. Much of my work is driven by a desire to account for the giant lecture, the book within a book, or the equations that we commonly dismiss as sloppy worldbuilding or too heavy-handed. This interest in the explicitly didactic comes from a deeper pedagogical interest in what “theory” is and how we distribute it.

My dissertation examines the relationship between didacticism and science fiction. I argue that science fiction has an outsized pedagogical potential compared to that of traditional realist fiction, as a result of its more frequent movement between model and simulation and its investment in models as such. The model, in fiction, is a claim about how a system works—a theory of capitalism, family, physics, politics, biology, school, class, etc.—that the simulation then enacts over narrative time. Taking an interdisciplinary approach—combining traditional literary criticism, digital humanities methods, and qualitative social-science methods—the project seeks to understand how and what science fiction can and does teach.

In the Literary Lab, I’ve been working on a project called “Novel Worldbuilding” with Mark Algee-Hewitt that investigates science-fictional worldbuilding using computational methods. We’re able to detect passages that grammatically resemble scientific writing, using methods developed for the Microgenres project, as well as compare the probabilities of syntagmatic word combinations in SF novels against “real-world” scientific discourses, like that found in Scientific American and medical journals. These two methods proxy very different kinds of worldbuilding—and so the project’s next steps are to explore the relationships between them, as well as their relationship to the relative prestige, award-status, and scientific domain of novels that use them.

Review: What do you envision for the future of sf studies and sf scholars? What do you want to see us accomplish?

N: We’ve spent the last however-many years fighting for the legitimacy of our field—now that a moment has come where SF is no longer relegated to the corners of “nerdy” and “unacademic,” I hope we do not squander it. I hope we guard against gatekeeping of all kinds, both directed at us and facilitated by us.

The line between scholastic and artistic work has always been blurry in SF studies—I hope we can not only keep it blurry, but develop better protocols for working within and across that blurry space. This is a question our field has to come to terms with at a variety of scales, from the citational practices of our own work and teaching to the CFPs we produce and the people we choose to fund. Is “critical” a stance or form? Are you introducing works as “primary” or “secondary” sources? “Theory” or “fiction”? How can we strengthen the critical praxis of SF, across and within this boundary space? How can we train future practitioners that feel equally at ease in critical and creative spaces, and how do we institutionalize and support those interdisciplinary spaces? We’ve already started—I think it’s imperative that we continue, and then share our theories of how to work in the blurry space with our respective home disciplines.

Review: If you could write a dream book, or teach a dream course, what would it/they be?

N: I’m itching to spend time thinking and writing about the way we learn to craft and be crafty through fiction. Dystopian worlds with instructions for survival, Engineering debates in Star Trek, prepper novels with lists of supplies, fantasy swordsmiths and healers, and Little House on the Prairie. Too broad for a dissertation, but I’ve been working on it for fun whenever I find a wonderful example of it.

Although it doesn’t look like a traditional book project or course, I’ve been building a database of SF award winners that allows for digital humanities methods like text-mining to be analyzed alongside qualitative coding methods and metadata like award-status or the pronouns used on an author’s Wikipedia page. The database has been an ongoing project of its own—it definitely started as a part of my dissertation (I just wanted to answer one small question about “hard SF”!) but then quickly became, with the support of undergraduate research assistants in the Literary Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, a project that far exceeds the scope of my dissertation. I’m excited to get to dig into it once the dissertation is done—whether that’s in a (somewhat untraditional) classroom space, a lab space, or as part of a book project remains to be seen. Most likely—all three!

Review: Thank you, Nichole! Your labor and thoughts are valued and appreciated.

The Modern High Fantasy Novel was Born in France: An Essay on Reverse Literary History

Features / Article

The Modern High Fantasy Novel was Born in France: An Essay on Reverse Literary History

Mariano Martín Rodríguez
Independent scholar and co-editor of journal Hélice

Bibliographies, encyclopaedias and literary research by both fans and scholars are increasingly revealing the international wealth of science fiction’s past and present. In contrast, the other great branch of speculative fiction, fantasy, has still a long way to go in this respect. Andrzej Sapkowski’s “Witcher” series is virtually, and exceptionally, the only international fantasy works well known in English. This contention could seem far-fetched if we consider that Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist works, as well Italo Calvino’s post-modern fancies are widely read and praised world-wide, and that Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte, 1983) has previously taken the world by storm. The European “fantastique,” from E. T. A. Hoffmann to the French “Décadents,” not to mention Franz Kafka’s symbolic parables, enjoys high critical consideration. My contention stands, however, if we consider how fantasy, and high fantasy in particular, can be defined. This task of defining is not an idle one even from the historical perspective here adopted. Without exactly knowing what we are talking about, namely the high fantasy novel and its origin in French literature, any contention about this matter would probably lack a solid scientific foundation. A prior specific theoretical description of high fantasy seems, therefore, necessary to escape the vagueness that affects all too often academic approaches to this kind of fiction.

Whereas science fiction is, despite its range of definitions, a clear literary entity, the English word ‘fantasy’ is so all-encompassing that it has virtually lost any taxonomic value. Putting Edgar Allan Poe and J.R.R. Tolkien under the same heading because both use the supernatural amounts to a complete disregard of the specific nature of fantasy, and namely of high fantasy. Faster than light travel is as supernatural as ghosts appearing to the living. Narrative omniscience in the realistic novel looks like a godlike, supernatural power as well. On the other hand, fantasy, especially high fantasy, is a literary species with distinctive fictional features that can be inferred from even a superficial reading of its classics. High fantasy is about the realistically consistent building of a fictional secondary world fully independent from the mundane one (past, present, or rationally anticipated). Whether it is specifically named or not, high fantasy hardly stands intrusions from our world without losing its ontologically autonomous status, if we are to follow the definition of ‘secondary world,’ as it appears in this genre, proposed by Waggoner: “A fantasy world is a secondary reality whose metaphysical premises are different from those of the real world” (4). Using a more precise narratological language, Trębicki contends that fantasy follows:

a strategy aimed at the creation of a secondary world model with its own precisely described spatial and temporal parameters, its own social and ontological order, and its own causality, unusual from the point of view of mimetic reality but perfectly coherent and logical within the fictional universe.
2014: 488

Therefore, I would exclude from high fantasy those works in which modern characters intervene in the secondary world, thus depriving it of the illusion of completeness in its own legendary, far-away setting in place and time, as well as distracting readers from a fully immersive experience. C. S. Lewis’ Narnia is a wide and sophisticated secondary world but the children’s access through a cupboard during World War II implies that it coexists with modernity, instead of remaining impervious to it as it would be the case in the true exercises of sub-creation in the Tolkienian sense. Portal fantasies (Conkan, 2017) such as Lewis’ (and Ende’s), to which one could add the weird awakening of alien gods in modernity in H. P. Lovecraft’s horror stories, are enjoyable in their own right but they cannot be considered genuine high fantasy.

High fantasy eschews implausible contacts between ontologically different kinds of fictional worlds (the mundane and the fantastic) in order to offer the complete result of a speculative process of world building akin to that of science fiction (since it is rationally created on the basis of a particular set of premises). These appear to be scientific in science fiction, as its name implies. They are rather mythical in high fantasy, thus warranting the presence of supernatural beings, magical powers and extraordinary occurrences in the framework of a plausible pagan and pre-technological society.¹ In this kind of imaginary society godlike forces intervene, or are believed to intervene, in human affairs in the same way as they do in the true mythological lore that modern archaeological, philological, and ethnological research have revealed to us using rational methods from the Enlightenment Age onwards. However, unlike mythological and legendary fiction based on existing matter (Greek mythology, Arthurian legends, Arabian Nights, etc.), as well as fairy tales, where narratives follow traditional and stereotyped settings and motives usually borrowed from folklore, high fantasy is ‘created.’ Its worlds are essentially personal artistic inventions by a particular author, although fantasy writers often find inspiration in existing mythologies as well as in ancient history for their creations. As Braga notes, “la littérature fantasy actuelle … est une pseudo-morphose, modelée par l’esprit positiviste et réaliste, par la sensibilité et le goût contemporain, de la littérature magique et féerique traditionnelle” [current fantasy literature … is a pseudo-morphosis, shaped by the positivist and realist spirit, by contemporary sensibility and taste, of the traditional magical and fairy-tale literature (my translation)] (2018: 44).

High fantasy writers, however, treat features borrowed from the ancient lore yet revealed by the modern human sciences as mere elements in their free world building, the consistency of which is internal, and which need not to be externally consistent with previous mythological, ethnographical or historical knowledge. For example, while Robert H. Howard uses names and peoples from the true ancient history of our planet, his work does not constitute archaeological fiction, because his history is invented, as his fictional historiographical account of the Hyborian age shows. Lord Dunsany was probably inspired by Japanese mythology but his mythology of Pegāna was his own.

These features are common to all high fantasy worlds now considered canonical in the Anglosphere, such as Lord Dunsany’s Pegāna, Robert H. Howard’s Hyboria, Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique, Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon, Fletcher Pratt’s Dalarna, L. Sprague de Camp’s Novaria, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and George R. R. Martin’s Westeros. A similar mythopoetic imagination already appears active in William Blake’s narrative poems where his personal mythology is, rather confusedly, presented to the world as an alternative to Christianity. Regarding prose narratives, John Sterling’s short story “The Sons of Iron” (included as an independent narrative in the novel Arthur Coningsby, 1833) explores the customs and history of an ancient race of men made of iron with a sober speculative tone similar to that adopted by later fantasists such as Giovanni Papini and Jorge Luis Borges in their imaginary ethnographies.

Actually, the first high fantasy novels are believed to have appeared relatively late in the 19^th century. If we do not consider the portal fantasies and fairy tale novels by Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, as we should not do if the above descriptive definition of high fantasy stands, the high fantasy novel is to be found fully in Laurence Housman’s “Gods and Their Makers,” published in a collection of the same title in 1897. This appears as the first significant landmark² in a long tradition of high fantasy novel that blossomed in Britain in the interwar period alongside with works such as Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), Margaret Irwin’s These Mortals (1925), Norman Douglas’ In the Beginning (1927) and Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). Together with the high fantasy stories written by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert H. Howard, and published during the same period in the US pulps, these narratives helped to elevate high fantasy to an inescapable feature of the contemporary literary landscape. It is easy to see that high fantasy novels not written in English are conspicuously absent from this list of early acknowledged classics, in the same way as they are hardly to be found in most surveys of fantasy, either in English (for example, Barron, 1990; Mendlesohn and James, 2009; Wolfe, 2011; Moran, 2019) or in other languages (Pech, 1990; Pato, 2019). Why is this so? Do other literatures lack writers who have created their proper speculative fantasy worlds long before Tolkien’s success and his countless global imitators? How is it possible that French, Italian, Spanish, German and Russian scientific romances have already been translated into English and taken into account in histories of world science fiction at this time, but no early continental high fantasy novels seem to exist according to present knowledge on the matter?

In literary history, as in archaeology, one can hardly find anything without looking for it where others have not, for instance in French Literature. Since high fantasy scholars are rarer than science fiction ones even in the Anglosphere, let alone in other cultural areas of the world, it is a small wonder that some of the few hints of the existence of early, pre-Tolkienian high fantasy novel in French has been revealed at all by Brian Stableford, a writer, researcher and translator whose main field of work is science fiction. However, he has also translated other kinds of speculative works. For instance, two novels translated by him, André Lichtenberger’s The Centaurs (Les Centaures, 1904) and Han Ryner’s The Superhumans (Les Surhommes, 1929), are perhaps better understood as high fantasies. The latter is a rhetorically sophisticated work³ of its prospective brand, consisting of fantasies set in a future that looks like a mythic past, including the presence of supernatural entities and the absence of modern technology and science. Following its rediscovery in France thanks to Stableford’s English translation, the former has tentatively been considered there as the first French high fantasy novel.⁴

Stableford has also translated shorter narratives by Remy de Gourmont, Gabriel de Lautrec, Bernard Lazare, Camille Mauclair, Victor-Émile Michelet, Éphraïm Mikhaël and other French Belle Époque authors. Most of these authors wrote in the so-called purple prose typical of Symbolism. French purple prose was widely imitated by British and American high fantasists from the Aesthetic Movement such as Lord Dunsany, Kenneth Morris and Clark Ashton Smith, and its influence can still be seen in Tolkien’s style. Rhetorically at least, modern(ist) high fantasy owes much to French Décadence. This style encompasses the high fantasy tales by those writers, as well as by Marcel Schwob and Remy de Gourmont, just to mention the ones whose work has acquired some canonical status in French literature. Now their contribution to the high fantasy short story should certainly be re-appraised, but it is also to be acknowledged that no high fantasy French novels written in this period or earlier other than Lichtenberger’s The Centaurs seemed to exist, except maybe for a short one by Mauclair entitled Le Poison des pierreries (1903), later collected in his collection L’Amour tragique (Tragic Love, 1908). This is indeed a beautifully decadent and weird high fantasy that was translated by Stableford in 2016 as The Poison of Precious Stones.

French high fantasy novel would seem then to have appeared later than, for example, Housman’s “Gods and Their Makers” (1897) if it were not for a famous mother and her less renowned son. They were Aurore Dupin (1804-1876) and Jean-François Maurice Arnauld (1823-1899), better known as George Sand and Maurice Sand, respectively. The latter inaugurated modern fantasy novels about Atlantis with Le Coq aux cheveux d’or (The Golden-Haired Rooster, 1867 in book form). Although it is set in the mythical ancient city-empire described by Plato, complete with its end by the gods’ wrath, Maurice Sand’s novel reads as a Howardian sword and sorcery story, with its barbarian protagonist, the blond ‘rooster,’ endowed with virtually supernatural strength and panache negotiating his way among the intrigues and decadence of ancient sedentary kingdoms. This hero rescues his romantic interest from her scheming father the king, as well as from her religious and marital duties as high priestess and wife of the volcano god worshipped in Atlantis. He even saves her from the eruption and the deluge that destroy the mythical world of Atlanteans, Scythians and other ancient peoples. These coexist in that legendary place and time without regard for archaeological findings, but according to the artistically controlled freedom of high fantasy. Maurice Sand’s style, with his short sentences and narrative conciseness and dynamism combined with colourful descriptions capable of generating the desired atmosphere of decadence, looks exactly like that of Howard’s Hyborian stories. Having arrived a century too early, Maurice Sand’s novel unfortunately went virtually unnoticed.⁵ Its existence is thus rather an anecdote in the history of (high) fantasy.

By contrast, George Sand’s Évenor et Leucippe (Évenor and Leucippe, 1856), afterwards re-titled Les amours de l’âge d’or: Évenor et Leucippe (Loves of the Golden Age: Évenor and Leucippe, 1861), is arguably the first high fantasy novel, at least the first subject to some academic attention⁶ and re-issued. Its author achieved fame as a writer throughout the Western world. Although this particular work did not enjoy the popularity of her novels of manners, and it was not translated into English, it was known in Anglophone intellectual circles, where French was widely read. This “Légende antédiluvienne” (‘antediluvian legend’) was anonymously commented upon, for example, in April 1862 in The North American Review. The unknown reviewer mentions its models, namely the Biblical account of the fall and the Platonic Atlantis myth, but only as the basis for a fully new mythology created by Sand about the origins of humanity, love and civilization. Both the Hebrew single god and the panoply of Greek deities are absent from the narrative, which tells the life as well as the emotional and philosophical growth of Évenor, a human child living in a balanced primitive society. The seeds of selfishness and evil already exist among humans, however, and the little protagonist is happy to find, after getting lost in the forest, a secluded, paradisiacal valley where he decides to stay. He meets there another child, Leucippe, who is being raised by Téleïa, the last of the ‘dives,’ a species of beings “half humane, half divine, – rather at once divine and human, having the heavenly soul and knowledge, with an earthly body and needs,” according to the American reviewer of the novel (558). The ‘dive’ (name adapted from ‘diva,’ the Latin and Italian word for ‘goddess’) teaches them morality and true love as the main inheritance from her race to this couple of children, then teenagers and married couple, so that they can deliver it to the successor sentient race, the humans. They fail, however, in their mission. Evil has already grown deep roots in human society. Évenor, Leucippe and their followers are forced to escape from their tribe. Only the dive’s supernatural intervention finally saves them from their pursuers, allowing them to return to their paradise in the valley, called Éden. This parts them from their fellow humans and therefore from the course of human history. Their fate is lost in the mist of myth and legend. Despite the echoes of their names and place in later traditions, namely the aforementioned Biblical and Platonic ones, their internally consistent world is a closed one, having nothing to do either with sacred or secular history.

Évenor et Leucippe is not a fictional reconstruction of prehistory as it could have been but rather a symbolic narrative intended to convey, for a grown-up readership, an ethical and philosophical meaning through mythopoesis. The fictional world created there by George Sand fulfils all the requirements of high fantasy. It has “its own precisely described spatial and temporal parameters, its own social and ontological order” (Trębicki, 2014: 488) with its own beliefs and customs, which are all realistically shown. Its characters are individualised, and are radically different from those typified in fairy tales,⁷ as it is its plot, where the folktale motifs inherited by the literary fairy tale are also absent or, at least, they do not define the structure of the novel. Moreover, it has further features usual in later high fantasy literature, such as the presence, as well as the agency, of a supernatural category of beings independent from any previous lore and mythology, the ‘dives.’ Even Sand’s use of expressive invented anthroponyms (Le Guillou, 2013), similar to the ones typical of high fantasy is witness to her pioneering high fantastical approach. Nothing of this sort existed in the European and American novel at that time, at least as far as we know given the current state of research and translations, and there would be virtually nothing similar until the Symbolist/Decadent experiments in creative mythography and ethnography a few decades later. Therefore, unless further comparative research proves it wrong, there are solid grounds to maintain that the modern high fantasy novel to have been born, indeed, in France. It would can be claimed that two women, Mary Shelley and George Sand, invented in the Romantic age, most likely without knowing it, the science fiction and the high fantasy novel, respectively. Shelley has been given her due credit for it. Sand awaits hers.

NOTES

¹Trębickihas proposed a further definition of high fantasy that takes into account the pre-modern technological level of its secondary worlds. Actual supernatural agency is taken for granted in them following a posited pre-modern and pre-scientific world-view: “The basic structure of SWF [secondary world fantasy] is … placing the plot in a world whose technological level is rather low and spatial parameters closed, and which is presented as a reality not connected with the mimetic universe either spatially of temporally” (2011: 45).

² Histories dealing with high fantasy usually mention the late romances by William Morris published in the 1890s as pioneering works. Christian institutions and real place names (for example, Rome) appear in these romances, which have a quest structures borrowed from medieval chivalric narratives. These features trouble their high fantasy status, since Morris’ fictional worlds would not be then full-fledged secondary subcreations in the Tolkienian sense here adopted (Tolkien, 2001). Moreover, they often lack an easily recognizable usual landmark of high fantasy, namely what Lin Carter called ‘neocognomica:’ “In creating an imaginary world with words, the author is thrust into the role of Adam. Everything must be named” (1973: 192-193). What kind of secondary worlds can be the ones in Morris’ chivalric romances when their characters are named Ralph or Arthur?

³ In my essay on this work which accompanies its contemporary edition, I describe it as follows: “Les Surhommes semble être un « monstre narratif », où le roman doit cohabiter avec d’autres genres, comme la poésie (en prose) dans ses manifestations tant sapientielles qu’épiques, ou l’historiographie, faisant fi de l’illusoire psychologie des personnages, collectifs par ailleurs, et des exigences d’une action conventionnelle” (2016: 125). My translation: “The Superhumans appears to be a ‘narrative monster,’ where the novel must cohabit with other genres, such as (prose) poetry in its sapiential as well as epic variants, or historiography, ignoring the illusory psychology of the characters, which are collective for that matter, as well as the demands of conventional action.”

⁴ In the preface to its contemporary edition, Fraysse contends that it could be considered to be the “« premier roman de fantasy français »” (‘first French high fantasy novel’) but with a possible caveat: “mais rêvons plutôt qu’il existe de nombreux textes antérieurs dignes d’endosser ce rôle” (2017: xiii). My translation: “but let us rather dream that there are many earlier texts deserving this consideration.” These earlier French high fantasy novels are precisely the matter of the present essay.

⁵ The most detailed review of this novel was written by his mother (Sand, 1867). In contemporary times, only a book devoted to Maurice Sand briefly comments on it (Bissonnette, 2017: 228-235, 331, 380-381). There is no contemporary edition of this significant work.

⁶ It is to be noted that none of the recent academic studies on this novel that I have been able to read (Gillet, 1977; Le Guillou, 2012, 2013, 2016; Mathias, 2018) clearly mentions its high fantasy features. French academic study of this kind fiction is still in its early infancy, though (Bougon, 2019).

⁷Matthew David Surridge argued in a blog entry from 2010 (https://www.blackgate.com/2010/09/19/worlds-within-worlds-the-first-heroic-fantasy-part-iv/) that Sara Coleridge created in her novel Phantasmion (1837) the first fantasy secondary world. However, this novel’s subtitle, “A Fairy Tale,” is very clear regarding the particular kind of fiction it belongs to. Although the fairy tale is an important predecessor of high fantasy, their secondary worlds are different, even in the many instances, before and after Coleridge, where fairy tale worlds are fully independent from our mundane one. In high fantasy characters are individuals whereas those of the fairy tale are “occupational labels” (Waggoner, 23). Moreover, in the fairy tale magic and supernatural occurrences are taken for granted; in high fantasy they “must be realistically established” (22) following the posited rules of the (sub)created world. Following Tolkien, Nikolaya states that “genuine and skilful fantasy creates Secondary Belief (unlike the Primary Belief of myth or religion), putting the reader in a temporary state of enchantment. As soon as suspension of disbelief is disturbed, the spell is broken” (153) whereas “the addressee of a fairy tale knows that the story is not true” (153). Furthermore, the intrusion in fairy tales of elements from the phenomenological world also disturbs the suspension of disbelief or secondary belief. On the other hand, high fantasy stories “take place in a closed, self-contained Secondary World without any connection with reality. However, unlike fairy tales, they are definitely based on Secondary Belief” (154). Last but not least, ‘fairy-land’ “is a space where things happen, not a place of itself” (Hunt, 12) as Sand’s Éden is.

BIO

Dr. Mariano Martín Rodríguez is a translator and independent scholar based in Brussels (Belgium). He obtained his Ph.D in Philology at the Universidad Complutense (Madrid) in 1994. Since then, he has published numerous studies in different languages related to modern drama, scientific romance, and utopian, speculative (including high fantasy and theological fiction) and science fiction, in Spain and in Europe, as well as several critical editions of translations from different Romance languages and English into Spanish. He has also published several critical editions of Spanish works of utopian, fantastic, speculative and science fiction. He is currently co-editor of the online journal on speculative fiction Hélice (www.revistahelice.com).

WORKS CITED

Anon. “Évenor et Leucippe. Les Amours de l’Âge d’Or. Légende Antédiluvienne. Par George Sand. Paris: N. Lévy Frères. 1861.” The North American Review 94.195 (1862): 557-559.

Barron, Neil (ed.). Fantasy Literature: A Reader’s Guide. New York (NY) and London: Garland Publishing, 1990.

Bissonnette, Lise. Maurice Sand : Une œuvre et son brisant au xix^e siècle. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017.

Bougon, Marie Lucie. “Cosmogonie de la fantasy française : Genèse et émancipation.” Revue de la BNF 59.2 (2019): 38-47.

Braga, Corin. “La littérature « fantasy ».” Pour une morphologie du genre utopique. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. 39-44.

Carter, Lin. “A Local Habitation and a Name: Some Observations on Neocognomica.” Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy. New York (NY): Ballantine Books, 1973. 192-212.

Conkan, Marius. Portalul şi lumile secundare: Tipologii ale spaţiului în literatura fantasy. Bucureşti: Tracus Arte, 2017.

Fraysse, Thierry. “Le conteur homérique.” André Lichtenberger. Les Centaures. Paris: Callidor, 2017. vi-xiv.

Gillet, Jean. “Les Amours de l’âge d’or : l’Éden tourmenté de George Sand.” Romantisme 16 (1977): 46-55.

Hunt, Peter. “Fantasy and Alternative Worlds.” Eds. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz. Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. London and New York (NY): Continuum, 2003. 1-41.

Le Guillou, Claire. “Les Amours de l’âge d’or, une œuvre de la marginalité.” Eds. Pascale Auraix-Jonchière, Simone Bertrand-Grifftiths and Marie Cécile Levet. La Marginalité dans l’œuvre de Goerge Sand. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2012. 434-355.

Le Guillou, Claire. “De l’usage des anthroponymes dans Évenor et Leucippe, Les Amours de l’âge d’or; Légende antédiluvienne de George Sand.” Nouvelle Revue d’Onomastique 55 (2013): 259-268.

Le Guillou, Claire. “Présentation.” George Sand, Œuvres complètes. 1856. Évenor et Leucippe. Paris: Honoré Campion, 2016. 7-24.

Lichtenberger, André. “The Centaurs.” The Centaurs, adaptation and translation by Brian Stableford. Encino (CA): Black Coat Press, 2013. 13-187.

Martín Rodríguez, Mariano. “Foissonnement fictionnel et richesse de discours: Les Surhommes de Han Ryner.” Han Ryner, Les Surhommes. Saint-Martin de Bonfossé: Théolib, 2016. 119-135.

Mathias, Manon. “Pre-Darwinian Species Change: Reincarnation and Transformism in George Sand’s Évenor et Leucippe.” Journal of Literature and Science 11.1 (2018): 33-49. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/148958/1/148958.pdf

Mauclair, Camille. “The Poison of Precious Stones.” The Virgin Orient, adaptation and translation by Brian Stableford. Encino (CA): Black Coat Press, 2016. 349-389.

Mendlesohn, Farah, and Edward James. A Short Story of Fantasy. London: Middlesex University Press, 2009.

Moran, Patrick. The Canons of Fantasy Lands of High Adventure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Nikolayeva, Maria. “Fantasy Literature and Fairy Tales.” The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern, edited by Jack Zipes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 150-154.

Pato, Silvia. Breve historia de la fantasía. Madrid: Nowtilus, 2019.

Pesch, Helmut W. Fantasy: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Passau: Erster Deutsche Fantasy Club, 1990.

Ryner, Han. “The Superhumans.” The Superhumans, adaptation and translation by Brian Stableford. Encino (CA): Black Coat Press, 2011. 181-288.

Sand, George. Évenor et Leucippe. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1856.

Sand, George. “Essais et notices: Le coq aux cheveux d’or, récit des temps fabuleux, par Maurice Sand.” Revue des Deux Mondes 67.4 (1867): 1010-1022.

Sand, Maurice. Le Coq aux cheveux d’or : Récit des temps fabuleux. Paris: A. Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, 1867.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy Stories.” Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001. 1-81.

Trębicki, Grzegorz. “Mythic Elements in Secondary World Fantasy and Exomimetic Literature.” Mityczne scenariusze. Od mitu do fikcji, od fikcji do mitu, edited by Tomasz Ratajczak and Bogdan Trocha. Zielona Góra: Oficyna Wydawnicza Uniwersytetu Zielonogórskiego, 2011. 41-52.

Trębicki, Grzegorz. “Supragenological Types of Fiction versus Contemporary Non-Mimetic Literature.” Science Fiction Studies 41.3 (2014): 481-501.

Waggoner, Diana. “Theory of Fantasy.” The Hills of Faraway: A Guide to Fantasy. New York (NY): Atheneum, 1978. 3-27.

Wolfe, Gary K. “Fantasy from Dryden to Dunsany.” Eds. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 7-20.

From the Vice President

From the SFRA Executive Committee

From the Vice President

Sonja Fritzsche
Michigan State University

The SFRA Support a New Scholar Grant deadline has just closed on November 15, 2020 for the graduate student competition. For those interested in the non-tenure track scholar competition look for that call in the early fall of 2021. Since we weren’t able to host a conference, the Student Paper Award has been suspended for this year. But graduate students who present at our conference in summer 2021 – make sure to submit your paper for consideration for this award in in response to the e-mail call that will go out in fall 2021.

We are excited to be discussing plans for an all virtual conference 2021 hosted by Graham Murphy and Seneca College in Toronto. Dates will be announced soon so keep a look out! This will no doubt be one of our most international conferences yet due to the virtual format.

The SFRA Country Representatives have met twice now since the beginning of the fall and are busy sharing information, ideas, and expanding the global network of scholars working on science fiction. We are still looking for representatives as many countries have yet to be represented so don’t be shy and please e-mail me if you are interest (fritzsc9@msu.edu). The current rep list is: http://www.sfra.org/Country-Reps. The job description is as follows:

A SFRA Country Representative facilitates academic communication on science fiction for their specific country to SFRA members, and also passes on SFRA news/events to their own colleagues in country. Such activities include taking flyers to conferences, posting on SFRA social media (Facebook, Twitter, or Listserve) about conferences, symposia, publishing opportunties, etc. The SFRA News will include a column that will be written by country representatives on rotation. Must be a member of the SFRA.

Look for the information that these country representatives will be sharing so that you can become aware of opportunities near you or on the other side of the globe. The virtual spaces that we occupy now make this type of sharing possible in ways that we could only have imagined just 6 months ago. Our next meeting is in early January 2021. Country representatives will also be writing a contribution for the SFRA Review so look for this new addition to find out a more detailed account of work going on in a particular country. Also don’t forget to pass on information to me if you want me to post an event or cfp for you on Facebook and Twitter. I’m always open to other suggestions and ideas as to how we can help to promote the work of our colleagues in the SFRA.

Namárië (From the Editor)

From the SFRA Review

Namárië

Sean Guynes
Editor, SFRA Review

As the Fellowship departed Lothlórien, Galadriel recited a poem, a song of longing for the home she cannot return to. That poem is “Namárië,” the longest text in The Lord of the Rings written in Tolkien’s Elvish language Quenya. The title comes from a shortening of the Quenya phrase á na márië, or “be well,” a common Elvish greeting and farewell. I invoke it here, now, as farewell to you and the SFRA Review, just as I invoked Klingon in greeting nearly three years ago. Namárië, friends.

Over the past few years, since my first issue in the summer of 2018, things have changed quite a lot—in our geopolitical lives, in my personal life, and here at SFRA Review. New editors have come on and old editors have left. The Review changed format, leveled-up in terms of professional visibility, to look like a real journal: and damn straight, it’s been here for 50 years with scholars young and old contributing reviews, essays, and more. Why not treat it with the respect it deserves? If anything, the authors publishing here deserve to be contributing to a publication that takes itself seriously, I thought. And so I worked hard to professionalize the look of the journal and how things work behind the scenes. Moreover, we transitioned to a more secure digital home, bringing the journal to readers in a way that meets the basic standards of digital distribution for academic scholarship. No longer do Review articles linger in a PDF downloadable from an obscure SFRA webpage. Now, each article has a link, its own home on the web, and is fully text-searchable by search engines, optimizing the work our contributors have done for greater discoverability. Boring, time-consuming, subservient to neoliberal academia’s demands for digital presence? Yes, yes, yes, but necessary. Fight me or sue me, I’m right.

My editors have worked hard and now it’s time for me to move on. I have no doubt that the next editor (not yet chosen) will continue the work we’ve done, and then some. (I’ll be watching you, so don’t screw it up!)

Thanks for all your labor, editors, and for your words, contributors. And, if anyone reads this, thanks for doing so, but surely you’ve got something better to do! In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter (@saguynes) and at my website (www.seanguynes.com). Take care of yourselves, gentlefolk.

Be seeing you! / Namárië!

Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: An Introduction to the Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义) Special Issue

Special Issue: Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义)

Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: An Introduction to the Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义) Special Issue

Virginia L. Conn
Rutgers University / USA

As a mode of global and temporal situatedness, Sinofuturism has largely emerged as a concept applied externally to China by Western observers. By compartmentalizing sociocultural development as a form uniquely tied to the nation-state while also seeking to maintain both distance and otherness, Sinofuturism differs from theorizations such as Afrofuturism (to which it is often compared) through its application to, not development from, the subjects it takes as object. As a result, the very label of “Sinofuturism” developed out of the same Orientalizing impulses that previously relegated China to a space of backwardness and barbarism (Niu, Huang, Roh 2015) and which now attribute to it a projected futurity. Yet this Western label is one that Chinese authors and artists have appropriated and weaponized for their own creative ends, without necessarily sharing unified goals.

Authors of science fiction in China have uniquely grappled with this impulse, especially insofar as digital technologies—such as the growing e-publishing industry and networked media platforms—allow for the proliferation of new voices historically barred from traditional publishing venues. (Xu 2015) Too, contemporary science fiction in China functions as a transnational form that centers a technoscientific process or material object as a means of introducing social change, rendering the aim of science fiction inherently future-oriented even when relying on the past or focused on the present. Because potential future ontologies are expected to be relevant to present extrapolations, they fundamentally rely, to some degree, not only on realistic depictions of possible technologies and circumstantial realism, but also the familiar perceptions of the extant material and digital worlds—a central tenet of Sinofuturism’s omnivorous inclusion of technology, labor, art, and the visions it makes possible. (Lek 2016)

The globalizing effect of the internet and the subsequent rise in wide-scale digital exchange, in particular, has created a space for production in which Chinese authors are writing for an increasingly global audience and shifting their goals correspondingly. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, authors and public reformers in China (such as Liang Qichao, who, in his 1902 unfinished novel The Future of New China, described a utopian 1962 in which China was the dominant global power) were envisioning Sinofutures in which China was preeminent on the world stage. The idea of China as a dominant force in the world yet-to-come continues through much Chinese science fiction today, from standout international sensations such as The Three-Body Problem to anonymously published digital short stories like “Olympic Dream.” For science fiction authors describing the Chinese future (or the future as Chinese), an awareness of the fact that American and Western media largely paints China as a place of repression and censorship is an integral part of the worlds they depict.

To the extent that this is true, publishing regulations in China mean that the internet and other digital forms of publications, such as video games and online message boards, have become increasingly important outlets for science fiction. The Three-Body Problem, for example, was serialized first in the online-only Science Fiction World before being published as a book, and Western publication outlets like Clarkesworld have partnered with China-based Storycom to publish more Chinese science fiction in translation online. Because of the expectation of a global audience that online publication ensures, science fiction is changing as readership expands, yet the balance of global power remains uneven. Noted science fiction authors such as Xia Jia still describe science fiction coming out of China as having the mission of educating Western readers (Xia 2016), while English translators are increasingly burdened with the necessity of explaining historiocultural specificities through lengthy footnotes. (Liu 2014) That is, just as the West applies the term “Sinofuturism” to an entire national development project, Chinese authors are put in the position of responding and catering to Western assumptions in order to be legible on a global scale.

Here is where the specificity of China as a technologicized imaginary, located outside of both space and time, results in a an Orientalizing impulse fundamentally different from the fetishization of a high-tech Japan seen prominently in cyberpunk and the gleamingly sexualized noir adoration of the 80s. Shaped by and reliant on Western projections of Asia as the techne through which to shape a future defined by and created for the West, Sinofuturism not only projects China as a temporal locus for the project of modernity (Niu 2008), but also posits Chinese individuals themselves as resources, not originary producers of cultural or technological capital. Reduced by the West to faceless algorithmic data points, Chinese laborers and producers are commodified in an ideologically reproductive system informed by the racial panic of outsourcing common in the early nineties with the rise of overseas data centers. (Atanasoki and Vora 2015) Chinese science fiction writers are well aware of this and increasingly find themselves in a position to either push back against it or grapple with those fears in order to appear legible to an international readership.

Some authors do this by writing directly to the negative visions of a Chinese future most commonly held by the West: Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide, for example, deals with the physical detritus left behind by the dreams of digital development and the environmental devastation created when those developments are made obsolete and discarded, while Ma Boyong’s “City of Silence” shows both digital message boards and spoken language as subject to the same censorship as physical media, giving lie to the aspirations of online communications as a state of expressive exceptionalism. Other Chinese content producers actively embody the digitizing impulse that seeks to turn human beings into images for consumption: Naomi Wu (Shenzhen’s “sexy cyborg”), for example, has created a 3D scan of her body and uploaded it for the purpose of 3D printing models. These models are marketed alongside 3D models of Major Motoko Kusanagi from the Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell—an explicit juxtaposition of two stylized bodies (one real, one fictional) that, in their respective worlds, represent the future through a conscientious abandonment of the biological for the constructed.

So what, then, does it mean for Chinese science fiction to attempt to depict a Sinofuturist vision in the increasingly globalized space made possible by digital technologies? And what does it mean to produce content within a framework that imagines a techno-utopic future founded on artistic labor while simultaneously reproducing racialized tropes of dehumanization? How is material production changed by an increasing reliance on the digital? In the following essays, various researchers and theorists attempt to grapple with digital imaginaries, production, labor, and futurity across a wide range of topics multiply bound in Sinofuturist space.

The idea for this special issue developed out of a workshop organized by Dino Ge Zhang as part of the WuDaoKou Futurists collective, a collective aimed at decentering Sinofuturism from its Western articulations. The workshop, “Alternative Sinofuturisms,” already presupposes Sinofuturism as a venue for alterity and retains a space for various approaches and understandings of who and what is being foregrounded. Centralized in Beijing but held online with invited speakers from four different continents, the workshop was organized around a series of provocations, most of which are included in this issue. Amy Ireland articulated a view of darkside empathy that positioned Sinofuturist visions as methods of inculcating weaponized empathy, while Gabriele de Seta argued that Sinofuturism functions as a framework for denying the possibility of coevalness to China on the part of the West. I discussed Sinofuturism as an aestheticized projection that fixed images of the country in a perpetual futur antérieur; Vincent Garton, not included here, argued for a reappropriation of the term by Chinese theorists and politicians in order to reconstruct a new world system inclusive of heterogenous futures. The organizer, Dino Ge Zhang (without whom neither the original symposium nor this special issue would be possible), expanded on his concept of Sino-no-futurism to describe a world post-pandemic, which in many ways now reads as a science fictional dream for an American and British audience trapped in the perpetual now of our own countries’ ongoing pandemic-based immiserations.

The papers contained in this special issue respond to these various provocations and the overall concept of Sinofuturism from various angles. While some are supportive, seeing in Sinofuturism an opportunity for alternative epistemologies, others criticize its foreclosure of heterogenous elements and re-centering of global development vis-à-vis the West. What’s more, while Sinofuturism is an explicitly temporal projection, it is not necessarily a science fictional one except insofar as any futurist projection is a work of imagination—as a result, some of the essays contained here do not consider science fiction at all, while still engaging with the concept of how to situate the future on a global scale. By questioning who gets to imagine the future alongside who and what contributes to bringing those visions about, these essays incisively demonstrate that the material is never separate from the conceptual and the real-world consequences of imagining such alternatives.

WORKS CITED

Atanasoski, Neda and Kalindi Vora. “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the Racialized Obsolescence of Labor.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v1i1.28809.

Lek, Lawrence. “Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD).” Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2016, https://zkm.de/en/sinofuturism-1839-2046-ad.

Liu, Cixin. The Three-Body Problem. Translated by Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2014.

Niu, Greta Aiyu. “Techno-Orientalism, Nanotechnology, Posthumans, and Post-Posthumans in Neal Stephenson’s and Linda Nagata’s Science Fiction.” Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, vol. 33, no. 4, 2008, pp. 73-96.

Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Xia Jia. “What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?” Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, edited by Ken Liu, Tor, 2016.

Xu Jing. “’Golden Age’ Dawns for Chinese Web-Writers.” China Daily, 6 September 2015, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2015-06/09/content_20951494_4.htm.

SFRA Innovative Research Award 2019

2019–2020 SFRA Awards

SFRA Innovative Research Award 2019

Susan Ang
Awardee

The SFRA Innovative Research Award (formerly the Pioneer Award) is given to the writer or writers of the best critical essay-length work of the year.

This year’s awardee is Susan Ang for her essay “Triangulating the Dyad: Seen (Orciny) Unseen,” Foundation, vol. 48, no. 132.

Raino Isto received an honorable mention for his essay “‘I Will Speak in Their Own Language’: Yugoslav Socialist Monuments and Science Fiction,” Extrapolation, vol. 60, no. 3.

Committee Statement

Joan Haran (chair), Stefan Rabitsch, Ben Robertson.

From an apparently simple starting point—the ampersand that joins the two cities in the title of China Miéville’s The City & the City—Susan Ang raises questions of profound complexity. These questions not only bear upon the novel in question but also the hidden histories of language and the fraught relationship between epistemology and ontology in weird fiction and the wider literary landscape. As Ang writes, “The City & The City, viewed through the metaphor of the ampersand, becomes readable as an enquiry into the epistemological workings of metaphor as a mechanism or model of productive thought.” As Ang makes clear, this sort of productivity characterizes The City & the City and much of Miéville’s fiction (including Kraken and Embassytown). More importantly, Ang’s essay continues the scholarly inquiry into the larger generic ramifications of Miéville’s work, in which the ampersand and related “meta-metaphors” both create and maintain, on one hand, and undermine and destroy, on the other, the boundaries among science fiction, fantasy, and other generic categories that subtend all such scholarly discussions. In Ang’s words, in both Miéville’s position as a writer and theorist of science fiction, fantasy, and the weird and Tyador Borlu’s position as a member of Breach at the conclusion of The City & the City, “there is an implied need to bide one’s time and maintain the boundaries in order that the boundaries might eventually be worn down.”

For her attention to a seemingly small, perhaps even insignificant detail of this novel and insofar as she demonstrates the importance of that detail to this novel as well as to the scholarly conversations that SFRA cultivates, Susan Ang is well-deserving of this award.

Awardee Statement

Susan Ang
National University of Singapore / Singapore

When I received the email from Gerry Canavan telling me I was the recipient of this year’s SFRA innovative research award, my first instinct was that I must be dreaming. That’s not quite the cliché it sounds like; the email came in about 3 or 4 am Singapore time and the “bing” from my ipad woke me up. I read it, didn’t take it in, and went back to sleep. When I woke up properly, I was sure I must have dreamt it, except that the email was actually in my inbox.

My surprise was mostly because while I quite like the article which the SFRA has so kindly and generously selected for the award, it has a modest history, starting out life as an undergraduate lecture on Mieville’s City & The City for a module on sf, which I then tidied and wondered what to do with. I should explain that I’m terrified of sending off work to journals, and that my work tends to go way over the word limit decreed by most journals which makes the matter all the more difficult. I looked at Foundation, which, if I recall, wanted work no longer than 6000 words; my article at that point weighed in at about 10,000. I apologetically (and somewhat dismally) emailed Paul March-Russell, asking whether he would even be willing to read it at that length, and was resigned to the prospect of being sent off with the proverbial flea in my ear. Paul, however, is the kindest and most generous editor I’ve ever met, and he said “send it on,” and to my surprise, took it, although not without chops and edits.

My most grateful thanks, therefore, go first to Paul, for that generosity of spirit, and for all his editorial guidance. My thanks also to Gerry Canavan for that lovely shocked moment when I realized his kind email wasn’t a dream. I am also tremendously grateful to the judges—not for the award per se—but for the enormous investment of their time and care given to reading through a year’s worth of publications before somehow deciding on mine. I am immensely humbled to have been given this award—with so much being published in the field that is brilliant and incisive, I would never have expected to be in the running at all. This is not rhetoric but fact. I’m just secretly thrilled that people liked the piece. And last but not least, I’d like to thank my students—who inspired the lecture and responded to it; there are some students who spur one on to write lectures that hope not to disappoint, and those, too, whose rigorous arguments which run counter to sections of my own reading push one to find what one hopes will be satisfactory rebuttals. I’d therefore like to add my ex-students Lim Zhan Yi and Shawn Lim to the list of those without whom this article would not have seen the light of day.

In the current situation it seems hubristic to plan any kind of travel. But if COVID is under control, I hope to be able to offer my thanks for this award in person next year. Till then, please keep safe and well.

Mary Kay Bray Award 2019

2019–2020 SFRA Awards

Mary Kay Bray Award 2019

Erin Horáková and Rich Horton
Awardees

The Mary Kay Bray Award is given for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year.

This year’s awardees are Erin Horáková and Rich Horton for their essays “Trekonomics” and “Gene Wolfe,” respectively, both from issue #327.

Committee Statement

Katherine Bishop (chair), Agnieszka Kotwasińska, Jessica FitzPatrick

The Mary Kay Bray Award is given to any interview, essay, or extended review published in the SFRA Review in 2019. We chose from fiction, non-fiction, and media reviews as well as Feature pieces, roundtable submissions, and SF Retrospectives. Given the increasingly wide range of items featured in the Review, we agreed that awarding just one piece would be unfair.Therefore, we chose two winners of merit, ex æquo, in alphabetical order:

Erin Horáková, “Trekonomics,” SFRA Review, no. 327, pp. 69-71.

Horáková employs an engaging and distinct voice as well as very clear organization in this lovely-in-execution negative review. She is respectful, but not overindulgent of, the reviewed text. Attending to matters of race, global economics, and cultural production while drawing upon her wide-ranging acumen to comment upon the matter at hand, Horáková fearlessly takes the author of Trekonomics to task with humor and sensitivity in a review that feels refreshingly honest, bold, bright, and necessary.

Rich Horton, “Gene Wolfe,” SFRA Review, no. 328, pp. 5-7.

The best thing an obituary can do is to bring a glimmer of the deceased back into the world. Horton does this. He celebrates Gene Wolfe’s life without venerating him, deftly reminding the audience of Wolfe’s humor, brilliance, and humanity. Along the way, he adds colorful details such as Wolfe’s part in making Pringles and an anecdote about finding the author paused in humble gratitude in front of his book on a shelf in a mall bookstore.

Thank you to all who contributed to the SFRA Review over the year! Your scholarship is greatly appreciated.

Awardee Statements

Erin Horáková
University of Glasgow / Scotland

Thank you to Sean Guynes for telling me to write the review for which I’m being recognized rather than simply stew in annoyance on a locked Twitter account for an improbable amount of time, like a boeuf bourguignon of regret. Thanks also to the award committee and to SFRA.

Rich Horton
Science Fiction Critic / USA

I cannot readily express the surprise and joy I felt to learn that I had been awarded the 2020 Mary Kay Bray Award. I am humbled to share this award with Erin Horáková, whose essay “Treknomics” is something I can only admire. I wish I could be standing in front of all of you to say this—and I am sure that, leaving aside any consideration of the value of what I might say, all my readers wish that it had been possible for any of us to go to conventions in July!

Finally, on rereading my piece on Gene Wolfe, I realize that the man I really must thank is Gene himself. I feel this way any time someone thanks me for a review of their work—all thanks are due to the writer who inspired me to write a nice review. And doubly, triply, infinitely are thanks due to Gene Wolfe. His writing inspired me to believe that there was value in writing about this science fiction that I love so much. Without writers like Wolfe (and Le Guin, and others) I would not have this avocation—criticism—that is so enjoyable. Do I think my award-winning essay is good? Yes, I do, I admit. But it is good because of its subject—it is good because I had such wonderful work to write about, from a writer who was a model for any writer. I hope only that what I have written might lead to those who loved Gene’s work remembering it the more after his death; and to those who haven’t discovered him yet to discover him now.

In close, I’ll quote the closing words of Gene’s great story “Forlesen” once more, changed a bit: “I want to know if it’s meant anything . . . if it’s been worth it? ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’”

SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship 2019

2019–2020 SFRA Awards