Category: From the VP

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From the Editor (Fall 2026)

Ian Campbell

In August, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta gave a speech about what he believes is our future. Entitled “The Future is for Everyone,” the transcribed speech begins by stating the need for a philosophy for how to use “superintelligence” to ensure it improves “all of our lives, work, communities, freedom and safety.” At the risk of sustaining injury to my skull from beating my head against a wall, the AI slopping over every aspect of our cultures today is in no way “super”intelligent. It is not intelligent at all. It is a complex, energy- and water-consuming algorithm for producing a response that mimics something an intelligent person might say. The speech, which very much does mimic what a LLM would produce in response to being prompted with the need to fabricate a philosophy, takes as its primary argument:

We propose a philosophy based on individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety.

This is what “looting science fiction” means. We could, in theory, have AI assistants that put everything in MLA 9th edition format so we don’t have to remember where all the commas go. But instead, we’ll get a smooth, seamless avatar that just so subtly directs us to the priorities of the oligarchs. You can all see that “individual empowerment” means “no restrictions on our overlords,” and that “invention” means “instability that the oligarchy can take advantage of to further disempower us”, but it might not be so immediately obvious what “balance of power” means, here. Yet if we continue to read, we encounter:

The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.

In other words, government regulation of AI companies is an extreme concentration of power. This is where we’re at in late 2026, having to draw people’s attention to the fact that our oligarchy is (very nearly) an sbsolute power, and their benevolence is highly dubious.

This is what SF needs to begin to do: to focus on why we shouldn’t build the Torment Nexus, to focus on the human. How do people communicate when Meta can shut off the No Kings account on Instagram and call it a glitch? Oopsie.

Please welcome our new Managing Editor, Michael Pitts, who will begin taking over for me over the course of the next couple of issues. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

I hope you’ve all had a productive and restful summer, as well as a great start to your academic term. As we approach the end of the year I wanted to share with you a reminder about the Support a New Scholar (graduate student track A) award, the deadline for applications of which is the 23^rd November. The Support a New Scholar award is a great way for graduate students to get more involved with the SFRA by covering the costs of membership to the organisation for a period of two years. If you are a graduate student or if you know of or supervise a graduate student who could benefit from the award, please do encourage them to apply.

I would also like to let you know about some news from our Country Representatives, who do a great job of sharing events, publications, releases and other sf-related goings-on happening internationally. The annual RSACS LII International Conference, “Myths of America and Myths about America”, will be taking place from the 8^th–11^th December and is open for registration up till the 10^th November. The Zurich SF Network held their third annual Science Fiction Lecture with Adam Roberts, who presented a paper entitled “Forty Frankensteins”. In September the German Association for Research in the Fantastic (GFF) held their annual conference in Cologne, on the theme “Violence and the Fantastic”. The Third International Science Fiction Symposium at Keio University has been announced for the 18^th and 19^th of April, 2027, with guests including Adrian Tchaikovsky, Stanley Chen and Lavanya Lakshminarayan.

The winners of the German Science Fiction Prize were announced in July, with the award for Best German Short Story going to Uwe Post for “Blumen Für Lisa-9” (Flowers for Lisa-9). Nils Westerboer won the Best German-Language Novel category with the novel Lyneham. The 47^th Japan SF Award nominees have also been announced, with AI stories—some with AI covers—taking a large number of the nominations.

Lastly, Stanley Kubrick’s personal archive will be exhibited at various locations for the remainder of 2026 before being exhibited at Bonhams New Bond Street from the 18^th January 2027, after which it will be auctioned live on the 3^rd February. The collection includes a variety of significant items, including the 2001: A Space Odyssey Star Child and the axe from The Shining.

Thank you to all the Country Representatives for these updates, and I wish you all the best for the rest of 2026.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Greetings all! It has been an incredibly busy and hot summer, but I hope it has been treating you well. We’ve had our amazing SFRA conference at Michigan State University last month and I’d like to thank the organising committee and those who provided support, technical and otherwise, for putting together and running such an engaging and thought-provoking event. My appreciation also goes out to everyone who participated in person and online. I’d also like to take the opportunity to congratulate our 2026 award winners and the recipient of our Support a New Scholar (non-tenure track B) award, Orin Posner. Well done to all of you!

Our next round of the Support a New Scholar award will be open to graduate students. I shall be circulating information about this award in due course but please do consider applying if you are eligible or encourage your graduate students to apply. The award is an opportunity for the SFRA to support outstanding scholars so that they are able to engage more fully with the organisation. To that end I’d love to hear from as many graduate students as possible.

This year’s Vision and Support session involved a discussion about futures thinking and public engagement. One of our panellists, Petranka Malcheva, a policy lead at the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, provided a number of resources about futures thinking and public engagement that I’d like to share with the wider membership. These include links to the work on Culture and the Welsh language by the Future Generations Office, the projects Communities and Climate Change in Future Wales, the Bannau Brycheiniog harnessing futures storytelling, the Engagement Institute’s IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation, and the National Infrastructure Commission Wales’ Toolkit: Engaging Diverse Communities in Climate Adaptation Conversations. Sonja Fritzsche also mentioned that Megan Halpern at Michigan State University runs a community engagement speculative design workshop as part of her Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Collaboration, Learning, and Engagement (CIRCLE). If you find these resources useful or are working on sf, public engagement and policy I would love to hear about it and to correspond to keep the conversations going.

As I mentioned above, it has been a busy summer. I attended the fantastic inaugural symposium of the Zurich SF Network, which was organised by Sarah Lohmann and Simon Spiegel. Our country representatives have also reported on a number of events that have taken place this summer, particularly in Germany, including Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic, the International Symposium of the German Inklings Society, and Metropolcon 2026 (Eurocon 2026). In September the annual Elstercon conference will take place in Leipzeig, while Situating Energy, the forthcoming PetroCultures conference, and “Data↔Worlds” are being held at TU Dresden in September.

With that update, I wish you all the best for the remainder of the summer.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

At the time of writing this column the SFRA 2026 conference is a mere seven weeks away. I’m incredibly excited to be attending via Zoom this year and only wish I could be there in person. The organising committee—Sonja Fritzsche, Eric Aronoff, Rocio Quispe-Agnoli, Blaire Morseau, Jessica Stokes, Michael Stokes and Vered Weiss—has done an incredible job of pulling together an exciting programme and working on all the many details that are required to put together an academic conference such as this. My appreciation and thanks go out to all of them.

This year, for the “Vision and Support” session, I have put together a roundtable on activism, public engagement and policy with Patrick Brock of the University of Oslo, Julian Chambliss of Michigan State University and Petranka Malcheva of the Office for the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. This promises to be an engaging and wide-ranging discussion about the role of the sf academic and creative practitioner in the twenty-first century. The idea for this panel is informed by last year’s discussion during the Vision and Support session about the possibility for running sessions on activist training—which this panel is not quite about but which I do hope to organise something for a future session (and to that end, if anyone would like to discuss possibilities for such a panel please do send me an email). But another point that was raised during that session was a recommendation to engage in dialogue with communities beyond the immediate academic context. This panel explores how we might begin to fold those discussions into our academic and creative practice. Please do come along to the session and contribute to this discussion.

Until the conference, then, all the best!

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

One of the joys of working with the SFRA is the sheer number of projects, events, creative works and public engagements that I hear about as vice-president through our quarterly country representatives meetings. From projects such as the Spanish-language Future Laboratories LabandJessica Imbach’s European Research Council funded project, Sinofantasy, the exciting activity being conducted by the new Zurich Science Fiction Network, chaired by our former SFRA secretary Sarah Lohmann, to the variety of talks and conferences, such as Petrocultures 2026, which is being held at TU Dresden, sf scholarship’s vigour and dynamism is always a delight to hear about. Events such as the Kyoto International Manga Museum’s ongoing exhibition of art from Nyaight of the Living Cat, the 2025 International Science Fiction Festival’s Les Utopialesin Nantes, the 46^th Japan SF Awards, voted for by the SFF Writers of Japan, and the exciting scholarly and creative works published from around the world reaffirm the vitality of the field. It’s a pleasure to share these engagements and creative works through this column but I have also been exploring channels to communicate this information to our wider membership. I will thus be looking to develop ways to use the SFRA website to do so. Of course, if you have any suggestions, please do feel free to reach out to me to let me know of them. If you would like to get more closely involved with the SFRA then I would encourage you to consider becoming a country representative. Take a look at the Country Representatives page to see whether the country you would like to represent already has a liaison and, if so, do reach out to them to join the country network. Otherwise, do consider volunteering—just send me an expression of interest by email.

Plans for our annual conference at Michigan State University are well underway, and more details and conference acceptances will be issued shortly, if you’ve not already received them. Do consider applying for the travel grant. Further details about this grant will be shared along with the acceptance notifications. During this year’s conference we shall be using the ECR panel to explore a new mentorship scheme whereby the organisation shall pair mentees and mentors, who will collaborate to develop a mentorship programme that works for both. If you think you would benefit from being paired with a mentor or if you would like to volunteer to mentor someone during the 2026–2027 period, please do attend the ECR panel and let us know of your interest.

I shall be looking forward to seeing you at this year’s conference, which I shall be attending virtually. Until my next column, I wish you all the best for 2026.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Welcome, all, to the new issue of the SFRA Review. This is a time of change for the SFRA, with positions open for two roles on the executive committee: one for President and one for Secretary. As an organisation we rely heavily on the goodwill of members and volunteers, and voting for our executive committee is one way in which you can have a direct influence on how the SFRA develops in relation to the changing landscapes of higher education internationally. Voting is now open and will close on the 14th November, so please do log in to the SFRA website and submit your vote before the deadline.

Our annual Support a New Scholar award is also open for applications. This year the award will support one non-tenure-track scholar, with a review panel consisting of Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Conrad Scott and Ida Yoshinaga, all of whom are previous recipients of the award. I’d highly encourage you to submit an application if you’re eligible, and to share the news of the award widely through your networks. The application form, eligibility criteria and a list of supporting documents to include with your application can be found on the SFRA website.

The deadline for applications is the 21st November. If you do have any questions please feel free to reach out to me by email at c.a.pak@swansea.ac.uk. The deadline for our 2026 conference at Michigan State University is also fast approaching. The theme of the conference is water and flow: ‘we seek work that examines how imagined worlds are carved by the motion of waters, the transition of power, and the stories we tell.’ The call for papers is available on the SFRA website, and there will be virtual and hybrid presentation options available.

Following this year’s conference at Rochester we held a Vision and Support session to discuss ways in which the SFRA could do more to support our membership. I have been meeting with our Country Representatives and with the EC to discuss the kinds of resources we might make available to our membership, either at the annual conference itself or through our website and other digital means. A lot of information about events, publications and activity happening internationally is shared during our Country Representatives meeting, and we’ve been discussing how we might make this information more accessible to our membership. Discussions are still underway but I am looking forward to sharing some of these developments in the future through this column. As always, if you do have any recommendations or would like to correspond to discuss the kinds of resources and activity that you would like to see or to contribute to the SFRA, please get in touch.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Greetings All! By the time this will be published the SFRA 2025 conference at Rochester will be in full swing. I hope, for all of you who are attending virtually or in-person, that it is a rewarding, thrilling and intellectually challenging and stimulating experience. The annual SFRA conference is so important for bringing us together to share experiences and knowledge, to strengthen our connections and to create a research, pedagogical and creative culture that can sustain us academics, teachers and practitioners throughout our careers. But while the conference happens only once a year we do have other resources available to us: the SFRA Review itself is one of these, as is engagement with our country representatives, who meet quarterly with myself and other representatives to share news and events from around the world. If any of you would like to represent a country not already listed on the Country Representatives page of the SFRA website, please do send me an email. Please liaise, too, with your country representative to keep them abreast of any events or activity that you’d like the wider membership to know about.

During the EC Sponsored DEI panel at the Rochester conference we discussed ways that we could support our membership in light of the attacks on higher education and to vulnerable groups that are occurring in the US. These conversations are ongoing and we would welcome any recommendations or opportunities to explore the terrain that we began to open up during that panel. We would also like to explore using the resources available to us—the SFRA Review, the SFRA website, Listserv and the Social Media channels that are managed by our Outreach Officer Anastasia Klimchynskaya, along with any others—to continue this conversation and to co-ordinate ongoing support. Please do keep in touch with myself if you have any questions, ideas or recommendations for how we can keep developing and realising these discussions.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

It has been a bewildering year. Watching developments in the US from afar throws into relief just how far the norms and expectations that some regarded as stable can be overturned in an incredibly short time. Last month the UK Supreme Court ruling on the definition of biological sex in the UK’s 2010 Equality Act likewise disrupts patterns and norms that have been developing over decades, the repercussions of which are yet to unfold. Given these circumstances, it’s hard to think what the next four years will bring.

It’s in this context that the SFRA 2025 conference at Rochester, New York, draws ever closer. The chance to meet as an organisation to think through the challenges that we as a community of scholars, teachers and practitioners face is crucial, now and in the future. To that end, I will be organising a “Vision and Support” panel to bring us together to hear from you about the challenges that you’re facing now or which you might be anticipating, as well as to collectively think about how best we might respond as an organisation to the multiple crises brought about by the current US administration. I would also encourage you to attend, if possible, the SFRA Business meeting. This is a great way to understand how the organisation works and to contribute to shaping how it will develop in the future.

For those of you who are attending the conference in person, especially from abroad, good luck, and I have no doubt that the event itself will be rewarding as always. I unfortunately will not be able to attend this year’s conference but will be available at the Vision and Support session as well as via email, as always.

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From the Vice President

Chris Pak

Dear members, colleagues, and friends:

Hello all! It’s with great pleasure that I return to writing columns for the SFRA Review, this time not as editor but as vice-president of the organisation. I firstly wanted to thank Ida Yoshinaga for all that she’s managed to accomplish during her tenure as vice-president, and for her support while I’ve begun to settle into this new role—thanks that I’d like to extend to the rest of the executive committee. Opening spaces for the inclusion of more voices and continuing to realise the vision of an international SFRA community are critically important activities, and they become even more so during times of closure such as we’re seeing now. As scholars, artists, performers, creative writers, activists, and committed readers, viewers, listeners and players of science fiction, the SFRA has an important role in fostering the connections between us all, supporting the scholarship and activity of researchers in the field and encouraging new generations of scholars and creatives to think about, work and play with, and make use of sf. To that end, the upcoming SFRA 2025 conference in the US, in Rochester, New York, and its theme, ‘“Trans People are (in) the Future”: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction,’ represents an important reflection on and intervention into the politics of sf and its role in shaping inclusive futurities.

As vice-president I hope to work with you all to continue to realise the SFRA’s commitment to making the organisation diverse, supportive and inclusive. I will work closely with the existing country representatives to learn more about the diversity of our field and to understand more closely how we can best support international sf scholarship. I would also love to hear from any members who have ideas about how they would like to contribute to this work—please do get in touch via email and please do say hi at conferences and other events, should our paths cross. Of course, if you would like to volunteer as a country representative for a currently unrepresented country, please do get in touch.

The SFRA has been central to connecting me to a welcoming academic community and to broader conversations about sf. It has been an invigorating intellectual space that has challenged me to grow into the academic that I hoped to be. I’m looking forward to continuing these conversations and hope that new scholars and creatives will be inspired by the community that we’ve developed over the years.

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

Dear members, colleagues, and friends:

Dear science-fiction studies colleagues,

As a lifelong feminist and supporter of gender equality, I’m excited about 2025’s annual meeting, which Dr. Stefanie Dunning of The Susan B. Anthony Institute (The Program for Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies), and her team at the University of Rochester, are co-sponsoring from July 30-Aug. 3.

With the bold theme, “‘Trans People are (in) the Future’: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction,” Dr. Dunning and The Susan B. Anthony Institute’s conference organizing committee are tackling frightening national and global trends towards fascism, as well as celebrating queer, especially trans, contributions to speculative arts and narrative.

We are thrilled by their courage and political vision which parallels those of organizers of the GATE Global Trans Conference, Columbia U’s Trans Disruptions, Moving Trans History Forward, The Watson Conference, QT Con (A Queer and Trans Conference), and other gatherings which reveal the organizing power of this diverse community while facing unimaginable legislative and institutional violence.

You can still submit a proposal in time for the November 15 deadline (to SFRARochester@gmail.com)

SFRA 2025 Conference

As you know, this is the first SFRA in several years to be held stateside, and the Executive Committee is in conversation to not only cohost another meeting in the continental US for our 2026 gathering, but also to expand our global meetings to new regional venues beyond Europe (while keeping with our hybrid format so as to remain accessible to scholars, researchers, artists, librarians, students, and teachers in a range of economic situations). We will notify you of these arrangements once confirmed.

In the meanwhile, does your institution have the resources to host an annual SFRA conference or even a one-off event? What might that conference/event look like—we would again like to encourage members to think outside of the box in how the organization might evolve going forward to recruit and retain members and creating academic events. For example: If you feel that one of the main purposes of an academic-professional group is networking, then might we consider putting on regular events, semi-formally structured, to offer that opportunity?  [I am thinking of the Society for Media and Cinema Studies’ annual December online meetings held by its various Special Interest Groups and Caucuses.] This need has been expressed by junior faculty and early-career researchers in recent years.

Also, what does it mean that, with several European meetings in the past years, we are now more international than ever? How to build on these regional membership gains in our growing, collective knowledge of speculative/fantastic fiction—the conscientious, artful deployment of which feels so critical at this point in world history?  Let us know, as we expand the core Executive Committee and newer roles and responsibilities for its members.

Please don’t hesitate to contact SFRA President Hugh O’Connell, me, or any member of the EC with your ideas. I will remain your Veep through the end of 2025, after 3 years of service, but hope to help the organization long after.

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