Category: From the SFRA EC

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SFRA Awards Presented at the 2026 “Into the Slipstream: Watering Futures” Conference at Michigan State University

Student Paper Award
Committee Chair: Yilun Fan

We are delighted to present this year’s Student Paper Award to Franklin Mitchell for “‘I Must Put Things in My Mouth’: Loving Trans Children in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites”.

How might we better understand and care for trans children? And in what ways can science fiction intervene in and illuminate these urgent questions? This paper addresses these concerns through a nuanced and well-developed reading of Butler’s novel, engaging closely with its themes of temporality, autonomy, and care. Bringing together textual analysis and theoretical insight, it foregrounds the concept of chrononormativity and its implications for trans childhood, demonstrating how science fiction can open up alternative frameworks for thinking about these questions.

This paper makes a strong contribution to science fiction studies while also speaking to broader concerns reflected in last year’s SFRA theme. It is both timely and deeply considered. Our hearty congratulations to Franklin Mitchell for this excellent work.

We would also like to recognize Shaoni C. White with an honorable mention for her paper examining the eighteenth-century it-narrative and its significance for contemporary science fiction studies. Her work demonstrates how questions of gender fluidity, material identity, and subject formation were already being explored within early modern literary forms shaped by colonial and capitalist circulation. By tracing these historical foundations, the paper offers an original  analysis that thoughtfully situates itself within current scholarly conversations on speculative fiction and political economy.

Franklin Mitchell’s response: I am deeply grateful to accept this award from such an important organization as SFRA, but more importantly I feel humbled to be honored by such a wonderfully warm and thoughtful community of scholars. I often joke that my job amounts to reading books about aliens and thinking about them so hard that I get headaches, but occasions like the annual SFRA conference are a stark reminder of how important the work we do really is. Gathering with all of the attendees and presenters makes it crystal clear how worth it all of those headaches are. I cannot express how proud I am to be associated with an organization like SFRA that continues to affirm the existence and importance of trans lives now and in the future. I want to thank everyone who was involved in last year’s conference. In a time when transgender people are experiencing organized violence and calls for social death that rise to the level of genocide, every planner, presenter, and attendee coming together to boldly and unequivocally declare that “Trans People are (in) the Future” not only usefully intervenes against that violence, but also fills me with a profound sense of hope as a trans person myself. Thank you all very much.

Lastly, I want to specifically thank Dr. Benjamin Robertson. Ben not only encouraged me to

submit an abstract for last year’s conference, he also urged me to submit my paper for this award. I am lucky to have a mentor like Ben who is so deeply dedicated to demystifying the world of academia and insisting on seeing the value of my work, even when I don’t. Thank you so much Ben, and thank you again to SFRA and the student paper award committee.

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Mary Kay Bray Award
Committee Chair: Dennis Wise

The year 2025 was exceptionally strong in reviews for the SFRA Review, but one that stood out especially was Paromita Sarkar’s review of The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, edited by R.T. Samuel, Rakesh Khanna, and Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, and which appeared in issue 3.  A good review must always describe the item under discussion, but a stellar review does more. It must also, without being obvious about it, display the reviewer’s thorough familiarity with the subject at hand. It must situate the reviewed item into larger conversations possibly unknown to the general reader. Sarkar does that and more with The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF, contextualizing “digital India” for the lay reader as well displaying her familiarity with the work of Blaft Publications. At the same time, from the opening paragraph to Sarkar’s conclusion, her writing style sparkles with liveliness and clarity. For all these reasons, the Mary Kay Bray Committee is proud to select Paromita Sarkar as the 2025 award recipient.

Paromita Sarkar’s response: I am extremely grateful to the SFRA committee for this honor. It truly feels like a full circle moment to have encountered Professor Bray’s writings during my MA thesis on Samuel R. Delany and now, to receive an award bearing her name on my very first review publication. In countless conversations with my peers and my PhD Advisor, Dr. Sami Ahmad Khan, I was quite hesitant about submitting this review to SFRA given the novelty of this research. Dr. Khan and my peers, it turns out, were right to push me. I am grateful they did. Anticaste SF has had a growing presence in South Asia and continues to hold potential for the field at large, making this acknowledgment and recognition of the review special and quite validating. Thank you so much.

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SFRA Book Award
Committee Chair: Sean Guynes

The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF studies published in each calendar year. It’s judged by a committee panel of sff scholars representing a range of research specialties and currently includes Karen Hellekson, Amy Butt, and Sean Guynes (chair).  

In our approach to the SFRA Book Award, we read and consider monographs against the idea that the winner would ideally be considered future required reading for scholars in the field. Our selection should also keep in mind that some of the best sf scholarship moves beyond the field and offers insights for broader critical inquiry. 

Looking back at the relevant books published in the field during 2025, the committee read and considered twelve monographs from six publishers. Each book was the author’s first book-length work in sf studies. There were, of course, many critically exciting and theoretically energizing books on our nominee list that collectively testify to the vibrancy of sf scholarship today.  

The winner of the 2026 SFRA Book Award is Tavia Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World published by the University of California Press as part of the American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present series. The book series is dedicated to scholarship that explores “historical cultures of power and protest” and highlights “the political importance of cultural practices.” Tavia Nyong’o is William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale University and his theoretically rich scholarship focuses on Black queer performance and speculative aesthetics. His first two books were The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018). 

Nyong’o’s Black Apocalypse extends his work in Black queer studies and speculative aesthetics by turning to the increasingly prominent role of Afrofuturism as a cultural practice of resistance, a tool for reading the polycrisis of the present. At the center of Black Apocalypse is the often noted tension between, on the one hand, the historical concerns of Afropessimism and, on the other, the speculative imaginaries of Afrofuturism—two projects that address the fundamental question of anti-Blackness in American and global histories, literatures, and cultures. Nyong’o handles the tension between these two approaches to anti-Blackness by breathing new life into Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement,” suggesting a kind of “Black counter-speculation” whereby the reality that cognitive estrangement extrapolates from is the reality of anti-Blackness. In his critical reading of Black queer theory, Afrofuturist cyberpunk, episodes of Black Mirror, and work by Octavia Butler, Nyong’o shows how Afropessimism is itself an agent of Afrofuturism and they both, together, offer a necessary basis for countering, dismantling, and reimagining an anti-Black world. 

There’s no doubt among the committee members that Nyongo’o’s Black Apocalypse is required reading for the field. It’s a short, snappy, theoretically rich, and necessary challenge to the siloing of sf studies at a time when the work of speculation has never been more important. 

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Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service
Committee Chair: Stina Attebery

The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service is presented for outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations. This year’s committee, Keren Omry, Alison Sperling, and myself, are delighted to be able to present the award to Patrick Sharp. Patrick was a standout in all of the categories the Clareson Award celebrates. Here are only some of the accomplishments we listed when deciding on a winner:

Patrick is an incredibly accomplished scholar and editor in our field. He has published two monographs (most recently Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction), and co-edited three collections (often working with people in this room). He’s the Founding Book Series Co-Editor of New Directions in Science Fiction, and an Editorial Advisory Board Member for Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Science Fiction Film and Television. He’s written 15 articles and book chapters, and numerous reviews for SFRA Review, Extrapolation, the LA Review of Books, and other publications.

Patrick’s teaching and mentorship are also extraordinary contributions to our field. He developed the curriculum for the science fiction minor at Cal State LA. He’s also written A Brief and Practical Guide for Writing Critical Analysis Papers in Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Contexts—a book that is genuinely both brief and practical, and that I regularly use in my own teaching. One of his colleagues at Cal State LA has recently spearheaded a program teaching cultural studies to inmates in the California prison system, so he now divides his teaching time between the college and the prison, teaching science fiction stories to both underserved populations. I had the opportunity to teach part time for Patrick’s department while I was a grad student, which was the first chance I had to develop a course that wasn’t composition, and Patrick was a wonderful resource for figuring out how to structure a class, although his influence has left me with the lingering feeling that I really should start any syllabus with Darwin.

Since 2013, he’s been the Director for Eagle-Con, a convention that connects the diverse student body at Cal State LA with Hollywood industry folks—students get the opportunity to both hear panels from industry professionals working in costuming, special effects, art direction, and other areas, and to present their own academic work. And I believe Patrick has fundraised over $15,000 annual support from the Art Director’s Guild (and other Hollywood guilds) for the event. And if that wasn’t enough work, he also co-organizes the new Speculative Fiction Across Media conference that meets annually in LA.

Patrick Sharp’s response: I want to thank the SFRA and the members of the Thomas D. Clareson Award committee for this amazing honor. My first science fiction conference was a joint SFRA/Eaton event in 1997 that was held on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach. It was interesting. It was weird. And I loved it. Since then, I have attended whenever possible. For the past twenty-five years I have been teaching in East LA, bringing the many things I learn from my SFRA colleagues to my teaching, research, and editing roles here. I was fortunate to serve for the last fourteen years as the faculty director of EagleCon, a student-focused conference devoted to diversity in speculate genres across media on the Cal State LA campus. Many of my SFRA colleagues have come to EagleCon and presented their work to our campus community. More recently, I have worked with some of my SFRA colleagues on the Speculative Fiction Across Media conference, which looks to expand the engagement between SF scholars and the entertainment industry. I have been elated to have so many of my SFRA colleagues – and scholars from across a number of disciplines – come out to join us in LA for these conversations.  

What many of you may not know is that I have also been centrally involved in the Prison Graduation Initiative for the past four years, and teach regularly in the Liberal Studies bachelor’s degree programs at the men’s and women’s prisons in Chino, California (and starting next year, in San Quentin). Teaching the work of my SFRA colleagues to incarcerated students has only reinforced my belief in the transformative potential of the arts and humanities, and the power of science fiction to change people’s perspectives on the past, present, and future. We are living right now in what Josh Pearson calls the stupidest possible timeline, and the attacks we are facing on many fronts can be truly disturbing and disheartening. I am grateful to be part of a community that provides so much intelligence, clarity, and support in the face of such abject stupidity.  

I want to thank my wife Sharon – who has also been a part of many SFRA conferences – for all of her support throughout my career. I also want to thank my many friends and colleagues in this organization for your inspiration and comradery. Reading through the list of previous Clareson awardees is truly humbling: it has so many people I admired when I first came into the field, and also so many great colleagues, collaborators, and friends I have come to know and respect over the past three decades. I am thankful to be counted among them.  

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Innovative Research Award
Committee Chair: Sümeyra Buran

I am Sümeyra Buran, chair of the SFRA Innovative Research Awards committee. Regrettably, due to unforeseen family and health emergencies, neither my fellow committee members nor I are able to attend this year’s conference. We are deeply grateful to Stina for stepping in to read this statement on our behalf.

I want to thank my fellow committee members, Ciarán Kavanagh and Agnieszka Kotwasińska, for their dedicated work in reading, evaluating, and judging the many excellent essays nominated for this award. Thanks also to everyone who nominated an essay; it is your engagement that ensures this award remains a vital recognition of excellence in our field. This year, we were particularly impressed by the caliber of submissions, which led us to not only select a winner but also to recognize three exceptional works with Honorable Mentions.

Our choice for the 2025 Innovative Research Award is Regina Wang’s ”Growth, Resource, Population: The GRP Triangle in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction by Female Writers.”

As the chair of this committee, I found Wang’s work to be a standout example of what this award represents: true innovation in scholarship. Wang’s article is a timely and profound intervention in contemporary Chinese SF scholarship. As the committee highlighted in our review, Wang brings into sharp focus “the often-overlooked Chinese female SF writers who, shaped by China’s demographic policies at socio-economic and psycho-physiological levels, foreground demographic concerns as a central thematic axis of their narratives” (Wang 324). Also, what makes this paper so compelling is how it bridges the gap between sociological data and literary imagination. Wang doesn’t just analyze fiction; she uses it to critique the very structures of our global reality. In my view, her articulation of the ‘GRP Triangle’ serves as a vital intervention, reminding us that science fiction is not just about ‘what if’ but a profound reflection on the material constraints of our world.

This perspective was shared by my colleagues. Agnieszka emphasized the critical acumen with which Wang foregrounds the “embodied, material aspects of literary production,” showing how the lived experiences of female writers who came of age during China’s one-child policy are “crucial for understanding their narratives.” On the methodological side, Ciarán noted that Wang’s combination of “distant reading, industry data, interviews, and gendered environmental critique” is not only contextually rich but “methodologically fresh and intellectually generative.” He observed that the GRP triangle offers SF scholars a new way to consider futures projected not just by literature but by states ascribing to a belief in “permanent, or simply necessary, economic growth.” As Wang herself argues, these narratives “challenge the simplistic masculine pursuit of unlimited growth,” offering instead a nuanced, gendered critique of our current trajectory. In Wang’s own words, this pattern serves as a tool to examine the limits of a “simplistic masculine pursuit of unlimited growth.”

Before I present the main award, the committee also wishes to recognize three scholars with Honorable Mentions for pushing SF scholarship in exciting new directions:

• Kiana T. Murphy, for productively bringing Black girlhood studies into dialogue with SF: “Bending Black girlhood Spacetime travel and the gendered calculus of anti-Blackness in See You Yesterday.”
• Christina Lord, for her vital work in recovering the frequently overlooked influence of Francophone comics on mainstream SF: “Valérian et Laureline and Twentieth-Century Countercultural Shifts.”
• Ali Riza Taskale, for his fruitful merger of SF studies, economics, and urban theory: “Subverting speculative urbanism: Cityscape in New York 2140.”

It is my great honor, as the Chair of this committee, to award Regina Wang the SFRA’s Innovative Research Award for 2025.

Regina Kanyu Wang’s response: It is my great honor to receive the SFRA Innovative Research Award this year for my paper “Growth, Resource, Population: The GRP Triangle in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction by Female Writers”. 

I want to thank the award committee and the SFRA executive committee for this incredible honor, and thank the hosts for organizing the conference this year, though I cannot be there in person. I was among the organizing team back in 2022 when the SFRA conference was held in Norway. Believe me, the behind-the-scenes work is immense, so the committee and hosts deserve a round of applause. 

Looking at the list of past winners, I realize how many of them have actually inspired my own research. I was born in 1990, the same year the award was established. And the very first winner of this award (when it was still named the Pioneer Award) happens to be Veronica Hollinger, the editor of Science Fiction Studies, who worked with me on this paper. My deepest thanks to Veronica, who offered tremendous help with revising and polishing this paper before it was published. My thanks also go to the reviewer (whom I now know is Cara Healey) for all her suggestions, and to Sherryl Vint, who helped during the journal publication process. They are all women scholars whom I deeply admire, and I could not be more delighted to receive this award for a paper on female writers, made possible with their help. 

I also want to thank all my CoFutures crew, without whom none of this research would have been possible. Bodhi, Sami, Jomy, Merve, Bergsveinn, Marta, Patrick, Joel, and Ingri, thanks for all the discussions of ideas, for reading through my drafts, and for making the triangle chart look better. I feel so lucky and proud to be part of this team, and to have had you by my side throughout my PhD years. 

This paper is part of my article-based PhD thesis, so I want to thank the University of Oslo and the ERC as well for supporting my research, and thank all the writers, editors, researchers, and industry practitioners whom I have interviewed for the PhD project. As you can see, interviews and industry data play a big role in this paper. 

I myself am the only child of the family, just like many of the writers I write about in this paper. I want to dedicate this award to my mom, who just passed away last month on Mother’s Day. She endured so much in bringing me into this world and raising me, and she always supported me in pursuing my dreams. She was, and always will be, the best mother in the world. 

If I’m not mistaken, I am the third person from Asia and the first person from China to win this award. Next year, the SFRA conference will come to Asia for the first time in history. I hope to see many of you in Seoul, and I do hope that the conference can travel more in the future. 

As someone who has moved across many disciplines, from business administration to creative writing, and from fan to industry practitioner, I really appreciate that SFRA is inclusive enough to accept my research that does not fall into any traditional disciplines. As someone who writes SF stories, works in the SF industry, does SF research, and has stayed in SF fandom for the majority of my life, I sincerely believe that SF has the power to make our world a better place. And it is the collective efforts of everyone in this community that bring this vision to life. Thank you all, and to our shared CoFutures! 

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SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship
Committee Chair: Steven Shaviro

Award Winner: Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr’s response: Stina’s e-mail to me with the news of this award came as a wonderful surprise. Not only for the honor of joining so many powerful and original predecessors that have been chosen by the SFRA. For me personally, it represents a kind of closure for a career as an editor and scholar that I didn’t have much distance from while it was happening. Since my retirement from teaching in 2020, and as co-editor at Science Fiction Studies in 2025, I have unmoored my boat and drifted off to other shores. In my post-professional rustication, my main connections with sf have been editing my old correspondence with Stanislaw Lem, keeping abreast of the Nerd Reich, and watching daily doses of Angine de Poitrine videos.  But viewed from a greater distance, I’ve never been so immersed in sf – the actually existing kind; as many of us speculated back in the day, social reality and sf have interfused materially to a degree that even we, who used that interfusion as a guiding imaginative trope, did not imagine. 

The honor you are bestowing is also important to me because the course of my career in sf research was completely unforeseen, and even accidental. I came of age in an unlikely environment for it.  I grew up thoroughly bicultural. My parents were not just Hungarian refugees from Communism; they were almost religiously devoted to the high culture of pre-World War II Europe. By day, I attended Virginia public schools, listened to rock and roll that my parents forbade, played sports that my parents didn’t understand, and watched American TV, which my parents restricted mercilessly. At night, when they came home from work, they home-schooled my sister and me in Hungarian, using my father’s old textbooks; in many ways, we endured a more sophisticated education in our living room than in our American schools. In the house, we were forbidden to speak English, we were taught to revere classical literature and art, and to disdain popular culture altogether.  

By the time I got to college, I was more European than American. I studied the classical European literature and philosophy that I was trained to value as the highest forms of culture. What I emphatically was not trained to value was technology, the supposed enemy of idealist aspiration. I entered college basically as a technoscientific illiterate. SF held little interest for me; national and ethnic literatures were my portals to the exotic.  When I got to grad school in 1972, it was in a Comp. Lit. program of a distinctively conservative European sort. 

Then it all changed. In the bowels of the Princeton library’s reading room, I came across an early volume of Science Fiction Studies. Bolts of lightning. The first bolt was seeing Fredric Jameson as a contributor. At the time, Jameson was one of my idols, and here he was, implicitly giving his imprimatur to the genre. Then things picked up speed. In the next few years, through the journal I learned the theoretical underpinnings of the SFS founders – the ideas of Darko Suvin, Peter Fitting, Marc Angenot, Joanna Russ, the New Left and feminist models that SFS never abandoned. And I was also introduced to the writers that shaped my understanding of the heights sf could aspire to reach – Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Russ, Ian Watson, Samuel Delany, and their like – the founders, in my view, of critical sf.  

And most of all, Stanislaw Lem. Lem, whom I knew nothing about before I read his essays in SFS and Suvin’s commentaries, was my gateway drug. A writer of imaginative genius equal to Borges and Calvino, a Central European to boot, familiar with the history and philosophy of science, and respected throughout Europe as Nobel material. I picked up two of his axioms early as guideposts for my own thinking. First, that sf is the philosophical literature of the technological age – even though, as he put it, its potential was hopelessly squandered by commercial pulp. The other: that every history from now on must include a futurology – there can be no valid historical understanding without including histories, philosophies, and models of the future. 

My first attempts to make myself known to the editors of SFS came with translations from Hungarian versions of some of Lem’s essays that had not yet been rendered in English. My advantage through much of my career was that so much of Lem’s work was unavailable in English, while most of it had appeared in the languages of the so-called “fraternal nations” of the Soviet bloc. It was also a fortunate time for the internationalist Suvinian direction of SFS, the period of détente, when many important works of Soviet sf – that great body of sometimes mystical, sometimes discreetly critical sf – were made available in English. 

I was invited to be a consulting editor during the journal’s Montreal years – and basically went to grad school a second time, this time in sf studies. Needless to say, there were no university positions in the genre, and I took a job teaching World Literature and critical theory at DePauw. And then it all changed again. 

When SFS returned to Indiana under Dale Mullen’s head editorship, Dale chose a new editorial board including Art Evans, Veronica Hollinger and myself, soon to be joined by Carol McGuirk, Rob Latham, and Joan Gordon. What evolved was not so much a braintrust, as the most efficient and collegial anarchist collective I have experienced. Almost all functions were equally distributed, mutual aid was freely given. We taught each other – humanities scholars all – about editing, about technoscience, about politics, and about the evolving genre. The internationalist focus that had been established by Suvin and Marc Angenot was massively reinforced. It looked like the urbane New Left, liberationist identity of the journal was assured.  

Up to that point, my bailiwick, such as it was, was mainly Central European and Soviet sf. Then cyberpunk happened, like a bullet through a windshield. Cyberpunk appeared to synthesize vanguard sf, new social understanding, and technoculture that changed the landscape of sf scholarship. The writing was often artistically ambitious, we were young enough to appreciate its visions of culture, and most of all, c-punk seemed to open up new ways of thinking theoretically about both sf and the culture at large. We published and wrote some strong critiques of the new direction, but we—especially I – had a lot to learn. My first frame-breaking project as an editor was a special issue in 1991 on what we called “SF and Postmodernism.” It included contributions by J.G. Ballard, Katherine Hayles, Scott Bukatman, Roger Luckhurst, and others – and an essay by myself on sf ideas in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway, where I tried to identify ways in which some of the most sophisticated contemporary social theorists were beginning to use sf not only to illustrate ideas, but as models for designing visionary theory in a world saturated by digital technologies. Here were Lem’s axioms in practice: sf as philosophy, history as futurology.  

From that point on, the journal’s whole project seemed to coalesce around that conjunction of critical theory, the analysis of the ever-deeper penetration of digital technologies into social life, and cyberpunk’s ambivalent concept of contemporary reality as inconceivable except as sf. None of us believed we had abandoned the journal’s origins – but now we had new critical tools and concepts, in tandem with new forms of sf, influenced by digital technoculture. Sherryl Vint and Lisa Swanstrom, who were especially informed about that technoculture, joined us to help shape that direction. For me personally, still retaining an old-school sensibility, it led to an expansion of the transnational historical perspective. I submerged myself in sf’s role in colonialism and imperialism, and worked especially to emphasize non-European traditions and connections of the genre. That led to, among other projects, the special issue on Japanese sf that eventually became the critical anthology, Robot Ghost and Wired Dreams: Japanese science fiction from Origins to Anime. 

In the midst of all this, my traditionalist, humanist side became anxious that the tsunami of new technologies and theories would sweep away the older perspectives that I loved, and whose language was, essentially, my scholarly mother-tongue. For the first seven, magical years of the 2000s, I worked on my first book, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, which Peter Nicholls in the Encyclopedia of SF accurately calls an “anatomy of the SF megatext.” My education in Comp Lit revered especially the great male, Anglo-European historical synthesizers – Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and most of all, Northrop Frye. I hoped in 7 Beauties to formulate ideas that would help the inclusion of sf into the great literary culture of the world – expanded into our age. In other essays, which I later included in my recent Mutopia, I proposed ideas that would allow folks to see how much science-fictional thinking penetrates not only technoculture, but the physical and social sciences too, and – following Lem’s axioms – even philosophy and religion. 

In the Oxford Dictionary’s special book on sf neologisms, Brave New Words, published in 2007, the editor attributes one of the first uses of the term “science fictionality” to me, which I had defined as a way of perceiving and conceiving reality as if it were a work of sf. (Fwiw, the word was actually first used in print by my friend David Pringle in the UK.) Science fictionality can be active, too, as when sf provides explicit models for how reality should be shaped. In other words, “science fictionalization,” the materialization of fictive science-fictional ideas.   

We now inhabit such a world, and thinkers such as Steven Shaviro and Seo-Young Chu, among others, have articulated how sf has been the main vehicle for making it visible.  It’s a world that poses distinctive challenges for the generations of artists, historians, and critics that are succeeding mine. We live in a world in which sf is no longer treated as an art or an industry, but a grounding discourse, a source of blueprints for quasi-utopian material projects, core structures of business prospectuses, material prophecies inspiring investment strategies, economies, and political projects. I won’t dwell on things you know too well, like the notable adoption of visions from sf like Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Mars fantasies, Thiel’s Palantir and materialized Antichrist, technofascist dreams of immortality, the visions of plutocratic thinners and world devourers evoking Philip Dick’s villains, and the institution of new forms of plantation slavery straight out of Octavia Butler’s Parables. Blueprints drawn from reading sf with what Charlie Stross calls “irony bypass.” Cohorts from now on will have to accommodate sf as an actually existing sf, political realities based on its fictions. 

But there’s another important challenge. My focus throughout my career was first on sf as a kind of art. I like to think of myself as a literary historian in an old-school tradition. When I dealt with sf’s political and social history, I was dealing with the power of an art. Surprisingly, my fields of literary history and theory have not devoted much effective attention to what fiction actually is, its ontology, its specific relationship to the real that it always levitates over. In this time, when the fate of the humanistic and scholarly institutions in general is in crisis, when matters of social justice on a worldwide scale urgently impinge on us, scholars of sf have to understand and explain how sf can lead both to violent distortions of thought, but also to freedom, where the great perspectives of art – irony, play, thought experiment – assert their autonomy from the language of real despots. 

And on that note, allow me to suggest a sneaky hope. As idiotic, reactionary vandals labor to dismantle the humanities in our schools, sf may be the Trojan Horse that can defeat them. SF can be presented as an auxiliary vehicle for critical and humanistic thought in mercenary curriculums. Since sf prefers parable, indirection, and ironic vision to direct ideologizing, many of the concepts being banned by our contemporary barbarians can survive and prosper under the radar. Many folks have thought we could develop whole curriculums out of sf. Never before has that thought been more relevant. 

Thank you again for honoring me with this award, but as you can see, I really should share it with the many brilliant colleagues I have had the privilege to work with along the way. A special shout out is due to the new editors of SFS, who will carry the project in this challenging new age, and especially to Sherryl Vint, who almost single-handedly saved the journal and its project, continuing the work of her predecessors, Dale Mullen and Art Evans, in piloting the ship to shore in troubled waters. 

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SFRA Awards Presented at the 2025
‘‘‘Trans People are (in) the Future’: Queer and Trans Futurity
in Science Fiction” Conference at The University of Rochester

Student Paper Award

The Student Paper Award is presented to the outstanding scholarly essay read at the annual conference of the SFRA by a student.

The winner of the 2024 award is Joanna Kaniewska for “Re-enchanting the future: Witches in Feminist Science Fiction”

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Mary Kay Bray Award

The Mary Kay Bray Award is given for the best review to appear in the SFRA Review in a given year.

This year’s awardee is Mehdi Achouche for “Review of The Wandering Earth II”
(SFRA Review 54.1)

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SFRA Book Award

The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF, in each calendar year.

This year’s winner is Kimberly Cleveland for Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2024).

Honorable Mention: Jordan S. Carroll for Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).

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Thomas D. Clareson Award

The Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service is presented for outstanding service activities-promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations.

This year’s awardee is Keren Omry.

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SFRA Innovative Research Award

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 Virginia L. Conn for “Formal Fictions: ‘Chinese’ ‘Science’ ‘Fiction’ in Translation,” in Chinese Science Fiction: Concepts, Forms, and Histories, edited by Li Hua, Nathaniel Isaacson, and Song Mingwei.

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SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship

Originally the Pilgrim Award, the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship was created in 1970 by the SFRA to honor lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship. The award was first named for J. O. Bailey’s pioneering book, Pilgrims through Space and Time and altered in 2019.

This year’s awardee is Takayuki Tatsumi.

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Student Paper Award, Committee Remarks
Chair: Kathryn Heffner

This committee received many strong papers this year which demonstrated both creative and critical approaches to science fiction. Many of the papers that were received spoke to contemporary issues of disability, class, race, gender, sexuality and the oligarchic conditions in which we live in. However, one paper in particular offered a critical historiography of sf scholarship, an exemplary argument of intersectional feminism in utopic sf, and a charge for scholars to explore ‘witch feminist science fiction.’ The committee is happy to award Joanna Kaniewska’s “Re-enchanting the future: Witches in Feminist Science Fiction.” Kaniewska’s paper deeply interrogated the role of the feminist science fiction in popular culture and drew on scholarly texts from Lisa Yaszek, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, Janet Fiskio, Haraway, and others. “Re-enchanting the future” is an invitation for us to explore the many layered identities of women represented in science fiction.

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Mary Kay Bray Award
Chair: Nora Castle

The Mary K Bray Award Committee has the distinct pleasure tonight of awarding Mehdi Achouche this year’s prize for his review of The Wandering Earth II. Medhi’s review shined with his distinctive authorial voice and his incisive attention to detail. His intermingling of close readings of particular visual moments in the film with his analysis of the sociotechnical, historical, and political background that underpins and is imbued in the film added a richness to his piece from which his readers have greatly benefited. We look forward to reading more of his work, and congratulate him on this excellent achievement!

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SFRA Book Award
Chair: Sean Guynes
Committee: Karen Hellekson, Amy Butt, and Sean Guynes (chair)

The SFRA Book Award is given to the author of the best first scholarly monograph in SF studies published in each calendar year. It’s judged by a committee panel of sff scholars representing a range of research specialties and currently includes Karen Hellekson, Amy Butt, and Sean Guynes (chair).

It is truly a great pleasure to serve on the SFRA Book Award committee and also a daunting responsibility. How does a committee choose just one book? What should that book represent? These are serious challenges for scholars who thrive on multiplicity. In discussions with the committee, I have suggested that our award winner should be chosen based on the significance of the book as an intervention into sf studies broadly. The books that win the award should be considered future required reading for scholars in the field. Our selection should also keep in mind that some of the best sf scholarship moves beyond the field and offers insights for broader critical inquiry.

Looking back at the relevant books published in the field during 2024, the committee read and considered twenty-five monographs from eleven publishers. Each book was the author’s first book-length work in sf studies. There were, of course, many critically exciting and theoretically energizing books on our nominee list that collectively testify to the vibrancy of sf scholarship today.

From among these we selected Jordan Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness, published by Minnesota, as our honorable mention. It appeared in Minnesota’s Forerunners series and offers an important study of the far right’s disturbing speculative imaginaries. Thank you to Jordan for this book.

The winner of the 2025 SFRA Book Award is Kimberly Cleveland’s Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds published by Ohio University Press as part of the Africa in World History series. For those who might not know, OU Press is one of the foremost publishers of work in African Studies and Cleveland’s book is a wonderful representative of their output.

Cleveland’s Africanfuturism is, to say the least, a damn good book. It’s the most recent in a growing body of important, theoretically rigorous, and critically necessary work on African and Afro-diaspora sf and its relationship to the global literary and media landscape. Cleveland’s project undertakes the difficult task of navigating the recent explosion of scholarship on both Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. She delineates both term’s conceptual histories and outlines critiques of Afrofuturism (as a concept) from an African perspective, and more. Cleveland goes well beyond Okorafor’s often cited concerns with Afrofuturism as the label for her own work, and brings in an astounding and admirable range of African and Afro-diaspora critics and texts, moving fluidly across media to offer a wonderfully capacious understanding of Africanfuturism. Crucially, Cleveland reorients discussions in the field to be from Africa and outlines major themes—space and time, (neo)colonialism, worldmaking, technology, religion and spirituality, and myth, among others—that bring a necessary Africanfuturist perspective to sff studies. And Cleveland does this all while resisting the temptation, so common in our scholarship, to reduce Africanfuturism to a singular thing.

There’s no doubt among the committee members that Cleveland’s Africanfuturism is required reading for the field. So thank you for writing this book, Kimberly, and for helping us collectively work through some of the tangled knots at the heart of the field today.

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Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service
Chair: Graham J. Murphy

This year the committee members for the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service —i.e., Graham J. Murphy (outgoing chair), Stina Attebery, and Alison Sperling—are thrilled to recognize this year’s winner, Keren Omry, a scholar whose indefatigable work has benefited not only the academic community but the SFRA organization of which we all belong.

Keren Omry earned her Ph.D. from the University of London, and she has been enriching her students’ lives as a Senior Lecturer with the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Haifa. Her first book, Cross-Rhythms: Jazz Aesthetics in African-American Literature, published by Continuum Press, explores the crucial roles blues and jazz play in such African-American authors as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. While Keren continues to explore the intersections of jazz and African-American literature, including contributions to African American Review, The Explicator, and American Literary History, an early article on cyborg performance, gender, and Octavia Butler for Phoebe: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory and Aesthetics (renamed Praxis: Journal of Gender & Cultural Critiques) perhaps foreshadowed Keren’s future scholarship in Science Fiction Studies. She has since produced sf scholarship on a range of topics, including (but not limited to) alternative futures, the juxtaposition of Nalo Hopkinson and Toni Morrison in post-9/11 global colonialism, the central function of emotional stability in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner: 2049, the role of sympathy and metonymy in Williiam Gibson’s The Peripheral, the musical sf of Beck, Kutiman, Björk, and Amon Tobin, and an overview of Israeli Science Fiction for our very own SFRA Review. Her in-progress work, Slipping Sideways, focuses on slipstream literature and other forms of speculative fiction to address such notions as futurity, historicity, contemporaneity, and utopia. Finally, Keren has served as co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction and, along with her fellow co-editors, has worked to inspire all of us to “put science fictional ideas into practice [… and] inspire us to create both new modes of art and new modes of kinship based on the celebration of communal activity and the politics of affinity rather than conventional ideas of individual excellence and biological identity” (41).

Keren’s commitment to service is no less impressive, particularly when it comes to this organization. She served as SFRA Vice President from 2015 to 2016, president from 2017 to 2019, and chair of the SFRA Book Award from 2019-2023. She is the current Science Fiction Division Head for our sister organization The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Finally, Keren’s legacy in Science Fiction scholarship was arguably secured when she co-founded Palgrave SFF: A New Canon for Palgrave, a book series she co-edited from 2020 to 2023 that has produced 14 volumes since its debut.

In sum, the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service recognizes excellence in science-fiction teaching, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in sf organizations, and Keren Omry is a distinguished recipient of this award. Thus, the Thomas D. Clareson Awards Committee takes great pleasure is presenting this much deserved award to the 2025 winner, Keren Omry.

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Innovative Research Award Speech for SFRA Banquet, 2025
Chair: John Rieder

I want to thank my fellow committee members, Sumeyra Buran and Ciarán Kavanagh, for their hard work reading, evaluating, and judging the many excellent essays nominated for this award. Thanks also to everyone who nominated an essay. Without their participation in the process, this award could not happen. We did receive quite a few more nominations this year than in either of the previous two years when I was on the awards committee, and as in the previous two years, there were numerous high quality essays worthy of special recognition. Indeed, it was not just the sheer number of nominations that made this choice difficult, but the rigorous research, nuance, and argumentation that SF Studies, as a field, is currently enjoying, and which was represented so strongly by the nominated works. Our choice came down at last to Virginia L. Conn’s “Formal Fictions: ‘Chinese’ ‘Science’ ‘Fiction’ in Translation.”

Conn’s incisive argument concerning how Chinese SF is being framed and received in Anglophone literary spaces challenges assumptions about cultural authenticity, translation, and genre identity. Observing the hype generated by Cixin Liu’s winning the Hugo Award for The Three-Body Problem, amid proclamations that Liu “was the first Chinese author to win, that this was the first Chinese novel to win, that this was the first Chinese science fiction to be popular in the West: the first Chinese everything,” Conn asks what exactly do we mean by Chinese science fiction? What does it mean, more precisely, “for a historically contested genre, [science fiction], to be modified by an historically contested –national? ethnic? linguistic?—adjective?” (99)

In answer, Conn’s rigorous scholarship focuses on the problem of translatability between the genre systems and epistemologies of the Chinese and those of the English-speaking world. The way Conn then follows the twists and turns and terminological complexities of early twentieth century Chinese understanding of Western science and the implications of that understanding for ideas about the Chinese nation and its place in modernity (where “China” and “modernity” were definitely just as porous and slippery as “science”) reminded one committee member of the great historicizing work of Raymond Williams. Conn follows this tour de force survey of the history of these ideas in pre-World War II China with a description of the transformation of practices of writing and classifying science fiction under Mao, adopting the social realist policies of the USSR. Here to a certain extent a utopian element tied to fantasy replaces the technological emphasis on achieving modernity prevalent in the earlier period, but the predominant emphasis is on using sf as “a predictive model utilizing realist narratives and unremarkable technologies” (114) in concordance with the revolutionary state’s project of “bring[ing] the masses to the future through literary means” (115).

As we approach the present, understandings of the genealogy and definition of science fiction draw on different elements of this complicated history for different purposes. Overly eager translations of Chinese writing in and about the genre called science fiction in English are in danger of substituting the Anglophone world’s expectations and values for the complex ambiguities attached to its terms and self-understanding in China itself. Conn’s summary of the consequences of the argument in the final paragraph is crystal clear and powerful: “identifying Chinese SF as a specific form is a process that is inextricable from the larger English hegemony that defines literary value and practices of circulation within certain genres, “science fiction” included. Without problematizing any of the adjectives involved—“Chinese,” “science,” or “fiction”—the entire concept of the genre becomes embedded in a [false] presumption of shared vocabulary” (116).”

It is my honor to be able to recognize this important essay by awarding Virginia Conn the SFRA’s Innovative Research Award for 2025.

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SFRA Lifetime Contributions Award 2025
Chair: Andy Hageman

It is a thrill and an honor to present the 2025 Award for Lifetime Contributions to Science Fiction Scholarship to Dr. Takayuki Tatsumi, Professor Emeritus at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. Dr. Tatsumi’s research has explored a formidable range of subjects and made significant contributions to scholarship within Japan and in a global and globalizing context. His work has consistently promoted rigorous critical thinking in intellectual history and literary theory, promoting transnational dialogue through science fiction studies.

Many of us here will know Dr. Tatsumi through his 2006 book, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. The chapters of Full Metal Apache move across creators and media. He investigates the recursive influence loops between Japan and the US in their cyberpunk representations by William Gibson among other notables. Dr. Tatsumi brings queer critique and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” into innovative approaches to J. G. Ballard’s and Richard Calder’s speculative novels. Other chapters dive into fiction by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Edgar Allan Poe. On the latter, Poe has been a consistent through line of Dr. Tatsumi’s critical focus and a key figure in his development of scholarship that addresses multiple audiences with a flexible awareness of how Japanese and non-Japanese scholars may respond to his theoretical insights and arguments.
In addition to his own work as a critic, Dr. Tatsumi has promoted international awareness of science fiction more generally. He co-edited the volume Robot Ghosts And Wired Dreams, which contains essays translated into English by multiple authors on a wide range of Japanese science fictional texts, covering works from the 1930s to the present. He has served on award committees for science fiction writing in both Japan and the United States; for instance, in 2007 he was on the committee that awarded the Otherwise Award (formerly known as the Tiptree Award) for work that expands and explores our understanding of gender. Throughout his career, Dr. Tatsumi has called attention, both in Japan and in the United States, not only to cyberpunk science fiction, but also to feminist science fiction.

Dr. Tatsumi has already gained considerable recognition for his work in science fiction criticism, by receiving a number of previous awards. In 1994, together with Larry McCaffrey, he won the SFRA Innovative Research Award (formerly known as the Pioneer Award) for their jointly-authored article, “Towards the Theoretical Frontiers of Fiction: From Metafiction and Cyberpunk through Avant-Pop”. In 2001, Dr. Tatsumi received the 21st Japan SF Grand Prize for his edited anthology Japanese SF Controversies: 1957-1997. And in 2010, Dr. Tatsumi received the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
Here I have mostly focused upon the work by Dr. Tatsumi that is written in, or that has been translated into, English; but it is important to note that he has a voluminous Japanese-language bibliography. Overall, Dr. Tatsumi has advanced science fiction research in many ways: as a translator, as an editor, as an organizer and featured speaker at international conferences and conventions, and as a scholar who actively promotes collaboration among scholars. He has been a force for introducing science fiction critical theory from around the world into Japan and for infusing science fiction critical theory with Japanese perspectives, voices, and texts. One of our jury members observed the transformational power of Dr. Tatsumi as featured speaker of the 2017 Mechademia Conference at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where he energized the audience with creative arguments that combined sharp insight with connections across borders.

Please join me and the rest of the committee (Andy Hageman and Lisa Yaszek) in congratulating Dr. Takayuki Tatsumi for his lifetime contributions to science fiction scholarship, in works that foster inclusive and pluralistic dialogue and critique, understanding, trust,
and respect.

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Student Paper Award: Joanna Kaniewska

This is going to be a speech of gratitude; I’m just going to say a few “thank yous.” A full list would be very long and probably start around my parents, but I’m going to spare you that. Let’s cut to the chase: I have three big “thank you” to give.
First one goes to the dynamite duo of my supervisors, Agnieszka Kotwasińska and Paweł Frelik. Without them, I would not be standing here. They provide so much support at every step of what I do, and I cannot express my gratitude properly for that. Thank you. Please, applaud them.

The second “thank you” goes to the award committee – I’m really sorry Kathryn cannot hear it in person, but I guess she will read it afterwards… It is my educated guess that, like many people in academia, she and the other members of the committee were thinking: “Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we doing this, on top of everything else that we do?” I want them to know that their work is seen, it is appreciated, and it is important to me and many other people who have gotten this award before or will get it in the future. Please, also applaud them.
And the final “thank you” goes to the entire community of SFRA and to the University of Rochester. It has been said many times over the past few days, but I think it is really important to say it again. One: it is not obvious that we all gathered here. Actually, it is a kind of miracle, and I appreciate it even more after hearing about the struggle with the organization. And the second thing: having a trans-themed conference right now, in the United States, in times of fear of transgender mice and whatnot… It takes resilience, it takes courage, and I think we are all very courageous, so… Thank you for that. And please, applaud yourselves, you deserve it.

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Mary Kay Bray Award: Mehdi Achouche

I am absolutely honored at receiving the Mary Kay Bray Award, and I want to thank the committee for choosing my modest contribution. I also want to thank my editor, Leimar Garcia-Siino, who had great advice for me and helped make the review stronger, leaner and much more to the point. She did a great job. I loved writing this review, and I do believe reviews are and should be seen as a crucial form of academic writing, which can teach a lot to readers but also to their writers. Thank you again.

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The SFRA Book Award: Kimberly Cleveland

It is an honor to be recognized with the SFRA Book Award for Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds (Ohio University Press, 2024). I want to express my gratitude to the Book Award Committee, chaired by Sean Guynes, and to SFRA President Hugh O’Connell. It truly takes a village to bring a publication to fruition. At Ohio University Press, I extend my appreciation to Beth Pratt, Rick Huard, Sally Welch, Tyler Balli, and Africa in World History series editors Betsy Schmidt and Dave Robinson. I also want to thank Ainehi Edoro-Glines for her wonderful foreword, and my colleagues in the School of Art & Design at Georgia State University. Lastly, I am forever grateful to my family for their support.

I did much of the work on this publication during the Covid pandemic when many people around the world were isolated, separated from friends and loved ones, shut in their homes, and uncertain how long the situation was going to last. I found myself thinking a lot about the future, and how speculative expression can help societies meet the challenges of the present and the yet to come. In the first Pan-African anthology of science fiction by African authors, the volume’s editor expressed why it was crucial for African creatives to generate speculative interpretations in light of the continent’s position in the world order: “SciFi is the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our perspective. . . . The value of this envisioning for any third-world country, or in our case continent, cannot be overstated nor negated. If you can’t see and relay an understandable vision of the future, your future will be co-opted by someone else’s vision, one that will not necessarily have your best interests at heart.” Indeed, it is African-oriented real-world possibilities that frequently galvanize African creatives to generate their speculative work and which, consequently, may positively influence audiences going forward. Africanfuturism illuminates Africa’s place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy, and how Africanfuturist work builds on the continent’s own traditions of speculative expression. It was a pleasure to highlight the rich contributions of African intellectuals and creatives in this study. Being recognized with the SFRA Book Award is a great honor, and reaffirms the importance of acknowledging and exploring African visions of future worlds.

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Honorable Mention: Jordan S. Carroll

I am grateful to receive the honorable mention for the SFRA Book Award for Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right. I’d like to thank the SFRA and the award selection committee. Let me also take this opportunity to express my appreciation for my editor Leah Pennywark and everyone else at the University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners Series.

We live in a moment when the far right fights for control over our futures. This means that as science fiction scholars we have two crucial tasks: we must face the long history of fascist elements within the science fiction field, and we must continue to defend the genre’s emancipatory and utopian potential from those who would extinguish it. Thank you all for this recognition, and I hope that this inspires others to take up the struggle against fascism in science fiction culture.

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Innovative Research Award: Virginia L. Conn

Thank you, John, Hugh, and members of the awards committee; and thank you, too, to everyone here tonight, here with us virtually, and here with us in spirit. In many ways, the essay being recognized is about what kinds of communities we build, belong to, and recognize in the first place, and being recognized by a community of such incisive, critical scholars is quite an honor.

In the opening to my essay, I ask: what does it mean to identify a text as “Chinese science fiction” in the first place? Is “Chinese” a linguistic descriptor? An ethnic identification? A national origin? An implication of certain political ideologies? Simply a convenient publishing signifier? It’s certainly true that, no matter how one defines it, something called “Chinese science fiction” is having somewhat of a global moment, but in that very inflection of a literary genre as somehow recognizably othered, we implicitly create dialectical literary and publishing communities that often go unremarked. I want to remark on them here.

We are all of us here tonight part of at least one community—the SFRA. Membership and cohesion within any community requires certain elements, and ours is no exception: shared linguistic forms, shared regulative rules, and shared cultural concepts. If you don’t speak the language, you might say, no one can understand where you’re coming from.

But having a shared point of reference is increasingly difficult in a place and time such as ours, where reality seems to be outpacing fiction in terms of its almost hallucinatory strangeness. Chinese actually has a specific word for this phenomenon: “chaohuan,” typically rendered in English as the “ultra-unreal” The literal meaning of “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal” or “surpassing the imaginary,” and it’s increasingly a feature of modern life no matter which country you’re in. Many of us feel that the world we knew even a year ago no longer exists. Our institutions are in flux. Academia itself is increasingly precarious. The shared points of reference that used to—or at least we imagine used to—define at least national citizenship, if not individual politics, have become increasingly defined by isolationist beliefs and conceptual silos. Where does that lead us as scholars of science fiction?
I don’t want to pretend that all of us here in this room are united in our beliefs. We’re not, and I think that’s a good thing, ultimately. But what I do believe we’re united in is our conviction that science fiction can provide us with the tools to imagine something different. It doesn’t even have to be better! But different.
Being able to imagine alternatives—futures, social or economic or political outcomes, communities—is the first step to making those alternatives actionable. We cannot build what we cannot imagine. By reading, writing, and studying alternatives to our current reality, each of us has already taken the first step towards changing that reality.

Imagining is only the first step, of course. But every change begins with a first step. And as we continue to step forward into the future together, I hope that that journey is one that’s expansive enough to imagine possibilities for trans people, immigrants, the shamefully unnamed victims of genocide, different languages and literary traditions, and I hope we’re brave enough not to flinch in the face of such differences while also being brave enough to see what cuts across community boundaries. Thank you again.

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The Thomas D. Clareson Award: Keren Omry

It’s an incredible honor to be awarded the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service. I’ve been coming to SFRA for 15 years and this has been without question one of the most significant communities I’ve been part of. I’ve held some offices, been on many of the committees, edited some SF volumes, I’ve been the second reader for quite a few of your all’s work, and throughout I am overwhelmed by the generosity, collegiality, professionalism and sense of humour of this SFS community. It’s an ongoing privilege to do what I can to keep it going.

Teaching SF in Israel, advocating for and supervising research in speculative fiction, supporting science fiction events and activities in my region can often feel like a frivolous luxury. Living where I do makes the potential awfulness of reality a very real experience. There’s nothing hypothetical, or abstract, or political about rushing to a bomb shelter at 4:00 in the morning with your kids, again. And mine is a lite version of living in war. But then, later that day – this was during lockdown so everyone was working from home – I would meet my students on zoom and talk about Afrofuturism, or utopian fiction, or time travel. Not everyone realizes this but at the University of Haifa, where I teach, about 47% of the student body are Arab Israelis, Druze, and Palestinians. In the English department, which I chair, it’s more like 75-80% Arabs. This is no accident. For many of my students, most non-native speakers, English language offers a levelling ground which reshuffles the demographic hierarchies, and they all grapple with ideas from a rare but equal footing. Think about this: with missiles flying overhead, people fleeing their homes, hostages, refugees, soldiers and innocents dying around you daily, I get to sit in a classroom with Muslims and Jews and Christians, together, and talk about Earthseed, and Lagoon, and Man in the High Castle. I don’t need to tell you all this but Science Fiction matters. Together my students and I can imagine other possibilities, other ways of being together. Through science fiction my students can talk to one another about the real problems, the fears and aspirations that guide them. This is not always easy. But it is always rewarding. And with each SF seminar paper that I mark or dissertation that I send out to the world, connecting my students to realities outside our lived experience and to you all, your scholarship and your ideas and your professional support, I am reminded that there’s nothing frivolous about promoting speculation around the world.

With deep and humble gratitude thank you the Clareson Committee and to you all.

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The SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship: Takayuki Tatsumi

Acceptance speech is a peculiar literary genre. It is usually considered to be a form of acknowledgment. However, in receiving this special SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship, I feel obliged to begin by describing quite a few coincidences that made possible my long engagement with science fiction as a way of life.

In the early 1960s I started reading science fiction as an elementary school student. The first novel I read as a first grader was The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, originally published in 1912, in which dinosaurs that strode the earth some 170 million years ago are still alive and well now deep in the heart of the amazon rainforest. Without this book I would not have been fascinated with Japanese “kaiju” as represented by Godzilla, as well as a master of fantasy and science fiction Ray Bradbury, whose short story “The Fog Horn” (1951) was a remote origin of today’s monsterverse. While Leslie Fiedler discussed the return of the vanishing American in his magnum opus, I have always speculated on the dramatic return of the vanishing species.

The early 1960s coincided with the Japanese period of High Growth in which the defeated nation experienced a miraculous resurrection. As I recollected in the acknowledgments section of my monograph Full Metal Apache (Duke UP, 2006), as a child in downtown Tokyo I was shocked by the destruction of the Institute for Nature Study in my neighborhood, an incredibly beautiful botanical garden, right in the path of construction for the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway. Civilization destroyed nature. My favorite playground was invaded by the ugly machinery that deformed its original landscape. However, I soon found myself enjoying the in-between atmosphere of the construction, discovering a new playground in the chaotic fusion of the natural forest with the high-tech expressway. It is this primal scene that induced me later to find Leo Marx’s theory of “machine in the garden” and J. G. Ballard’s idea of “technological landscape” very intriguing. The post-apocalyptic Tokyo as described in Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira (1982-90) was my own city. Therefore, majoring in American Renaissance writers in the graduate school in the late 1970s, I kept reading science fiction and cutting-edge critical theories as championed by Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson in Science Fiction Studies.

In 1984, a Fulbright scholarship enabled me to study at Cornell University as a Ph.D. student. It is Dr. Elizabeth Ann Hull, one of the former presidents of the SFRA, who kindly invited me to join the annual SFRA meeting held at Kent State University in the summer of 1985, when that year’s Pilgrim Award was given to Samuel “Chip” Delany, most of whose works I had long perused and admired. Thus, after that first encounter with Chip at Kent State I conducted an interview with him at Novacon in Pennsylvania in the fall of the same year, and showed the transcription to Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr, one of my Cornell teachers whose African-American Literature course reading list included Chip’s The Einstein Intersection. He enthusiastically recommended my Delany interview for publication in Diacritics in 1986 (published in Vol.16, No.3) and Professor Donald “Mac” Hassler of Kent State University generously published the revised version of my term paper on The Einstein Intersection in Extrapolation in 1987 (Vol.28, No.3). The year of 1985 saw the genesis of my SFRA days.

In the meanwhile, 1985 coincided with the rise of the cyberpunk movement, in which I was recruited by Stephen P. Brown, editor-in-chief of the then-new critical magazine Science Fiction Eye. With him as non-academic mentor I interviewed William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Donna Haraway, making every effort to build an interface between western science fiction and Japanese science fiction. I can’t forget the moment I first talked with John Shirley as one of the guest writers of the 1986 annual conference of SFRA held at San Diego State University, together with Veronica Hollinger.

Since the 1990s I have luckily collaborated with a number of academic friends. First, I joined forces with my longest collaborator Professor Larry McCaffery of San Diego State University, the missionary of postmodernism and editor of cyberpunk casebook Storming the Reality Studio (1991), to promote the literary and cultural strategy of Avant-Pop, negotiating between the cutting-edge writers and artists of the US and Japan, as is found in our co-edited New Japanese Fiction issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (2002). Larry and I feel very proud that our collaborated article “Toward the Frontiers of ‘Fiction’: From Metafiction and Cyberpunk, through Avant-Pop,” published in Science Fiction Eye #12 in 1993, was selected as the winner of the 5th SFRA Pioneer Award in 1994. After the award ceremony Joan Gordon generously invited me and my wife Mari to her house in Long Island.

Second, it was in the early 21st century that I co-edited with Christopher Bolton and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay the first-ever textbook of Japanese science fiction entitled Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime in 2007 (U of Minnesota P) including major contributors such as Susan Napier,Livia Monet, Sharalyn Orbaugh, William Gardner, Mari Kotani, Hiroki Azuma and Tamaki Saito. Since the first-ever World Science Fiction Convention in Asia, nicknamed “Nipponcon,” took place also in 2007 in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, I chaired an SF scholarship panel with Bolton and Napier as panelists.

In the 2010s Thomas Lamarre and Frenchy Lunning became new collaborators. Without the friendship with Tom the “Parallel Futures” project (2012~) of the University of Minnesota Press, which published the American editions of the masterpieces of Japanese speculative fiction, that is, Chiaki Kawamata’s Death Sentences, Yoshio Aramaki’s The Sacred Era and Mariko Ohara’s Hybrid Child, would not have been possible. Without the partnership with Frenchy, editor-in-chief of the Mechademia: The Second Arc project, I could not have guest-edited the special Japanese science fiction issue in 2021.

Lastly, I cannot ignore another secret collaborator Professor Darko Suvin, distinguished scholar-critic and one of the founding fathers of Science Fiction Studies. As I disclosed in my own afterword to the anthology Science Fiction Controversies in Japan (2000), the winner of the 21st Japan SF Grand Prize, the Japanese equivalent of Nebula, it was in the early 1990s, when Darko was visiting Japan very often, that he suggested to me that someday we co-edit a collection of legendary but still controversial essays written by Japanese science fiction writers and critics. Without his suggestion I could not have come up with the idea of compiling my own anthology in 2000, which is a small step for me but a giant leap for transnational science fiction; the publication of Science Fiction Controversies in Japan in 2000 invited a number of transnational scholars and students to see and work with me in Japan and/or in the United States. I’m not sure if Darko still remembers what we talked about in Tokyo more than three decades ago. Nonetheless, with the special Science Fictions issue of Mechademia: Second Arc (Fall 2021), featuring a lot of controversial articles, I feel I could partially carry out the promise with Darko.

The science fiction we used to know came to be gradually metamorphosed into something else in the wake of cyberpunkish techno-orientalism coinciding with the discourses of “Japan as No. 1,” “Pax Japonica,” and “Cool Japan” in the past four decades. As fin de siècle Western literature enjoyed the taste of Japonisme around the year of 1900, the new turn of the century saw the rise of the “Asian,” and especially “Japanesque” mode in science fiction, empowering Japanese science fiction as such and transgressing the generic boundaries between prose, manga, anime, and gaming. At this point science fiction critics in Japan are prescient; in his ambitious article “Science Fiction as a Literary and Cultural Strategy” (1963), Takashi Ishikawa defined science fiction as “the literature destabilizing the sense of normalcy” much earlier than Darko Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” defined in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) whereas Yoshio Aramaki completed a history of Euro-American science fiction in the 1968 much earlier than Brian Aldiss’s Billion Year Spree (1973).

In the third decade of the 21st century, it is getting more and more difficult to witness the present of science fiction, not because it covers a variety of literary and cultural representations but because the rapid evolution of AI made it hard for us to distinguish the imaginary worlds science fiction has long described and the mostly science fictional world we are inhabiting now. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that the more paranoid the current president gets, the more poignant science fiction criticism becomes.

I have so far emphasized the significance of collaboration, because in the introduction to my newly co-edited collection of essays with Yoshio Aramaki The Art of Science Fiction Criticism published in 2014 (Takanashi Shobo Publishers), I theorized the “collaborative imagination” since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the archetype of science fiction. Without her conversation with Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John William Polidori she could not have come up with the idea of artificial intelligence. Likewise, without my discussion with SF scholar critics I could not have demonstrated transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America. I strongly hope to further develop my critical collaborations with SFRA. A million thanks for providing me with this prestigious award!

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