SFRA Awards Presented at the 2024 “Transitions” Conference at The University of Tartu
SFRA Awards Presented at the 2024 “Transitions” Conference at The University of Tartu
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 Vicky Brewster for their paper “Simulated Worlds and Digital Disruptions: Gothic Glitch in The Tenth Girl”
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 David Welch for his “Review of Hades” (SFRA Review 53.1)
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 Mingwei Song, for Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction
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 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock.
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 Rebekah Sheldon for her essay, “Generativity without reserve: Sterility apocalypses and the enclosure of life-itself,” published in Science Fiction Film and Television 16.3 (2023).
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 Lisa Yaszek.
AWARD COMMITTEE STATEMENTS
Student Paper Award, outgoing chair: Kania Greer
Out of this year’s strong field, the committee has selected Vicky Brewster’s “Simulated Worlds and Digital Disruptions: Gothic Glitch in The Tenth Girl” as the winner. The paper offered a sophisticated argument for the incorporation of technology into gothic horror. We were particularly excited about their focus on multiple disciplines including media studies and game studies within the horror genre. The paper brings the classic gothic horror genre together with a modern twist of “a malfunction of digital equipment” leaving the reader with “a sense of unease”. Brewster’s paper firmly plants the glitch into the Gothic. The committee would like to congratulate Brewster on this inspired piece and look forward to seeing more of their scholarship in the future.
Mary Kay Bray Award, outgoing chair: Zeeshan Siddique
With meticulous detail and a discerning critical acumen, David Welch’s review of Hades makes this classics-based video game from Supergiant Games a must-play for audiences. His review captures the game’s various ludo narratological qualities: game design, replayability, and mythological overtones, particularly as embedded within its art direction, music, vocal performances, and writing. Welch’s appreciation for literary and digital craftsmanship alike makes this review especially striking. Moreover, his analysis tackles the popularity of Hades as it relates to classical reception studies and the game’s use of Greek myth. David Welch is worthy of the 2023 Mary Kay Bray Award for such a productive and insightful analysis
Book Award, chair: Chris Pak
This year, we saw an increase from the last in the number of titles that we received, which I take to be an indication that the post-Covid publishing recovery is well on its way. This year’s candidates included a good number of monographs that address sf from around the world. Alongside titles on print sf, film and TV, I was pleased to see a good number of studies focussed on gaming and comics. Utopian scholarship was well-represented, as were studies about climate sf. It was challenging to narrow down on a winner, and I’d just like to thank our two committee members, Sean Guynes and Karen Hellekson, for the impressive work that they committed to throughout the year.
But settle on a winner we did. The committee selected one monograph that represented a major and worthwhile contribution to the field. This work impressed us with its theorisation of an emergent poetics of sf, its timeliness, and its ability to communicate the excitement that comes with expanding our awareness about something utterly important to the future of the field. As one committee member commented, ‘at a time when Chinese science fiction is ascendent in the global sf marketplace, this comes as a welcome study for understanding the political, social, and literary nature of the twenty-first century’s “new wave” of Chinese sf.’
A quote from the book’s prologue imagines Chinese sf as a ‘mysterious weapon’ that’s excavated by an awed future generation: it reads, ‘SF itself, like what it depicts, is the wonder invisible now and here, staying outside the continuum of the perceivable reality’ (8). This year’s SFRA Book Award winner is Mingwei Song, for his monograph Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction.
Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service, outgoing chair: Jonathan P. Lewis
This year the committee recognizes Jeffrey Weinstock of Central Michigan University for his work on the gothic, horror, weird fiction, and particularly conceptions of the monstrous in American culture.
Weinstock received his Ph.D. from George Washington University and joined Central Michigan in 2001; he has since served as horror editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books and has authored and edited more than twenty-five books on the monstrous including works on ghosts and vampires, chief among them Spectral America: Phantoms and the American Imagination (2004), Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (2008), and The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (2012) which won the 2013 International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Lord Ruthven Assembly Award for Best Nonfiction Title.
Additionally, Dr. Weinstock’s interest in pedagogy includes editing such publications as The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkins Gilman‘s “The Yellow Wall-paper” (2003), The Monster Theory Reader, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition (both 2020) and co-editing with Anthony Magistrale Approaches to Teaching Poe’s Prose and Poetry (2009). Notable publications include work on the films of Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, gothic music traditions, and Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale: Podcasting Between Weather and the Void (2018). His interests and publications are often focused on how the monstrous, weird, and otherwise “different” inform our senses of what can and cannot transgress conceptions of what is “normal” and “American” building on the work of such theorists as Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan among others.
One of Jeffries colleagues writes that although Jeffrey has long been involved with the IAFA (especially when he worked as reviews editor for JFA), my closest association with him has been since he stepped in as the associate editor for all things related to horror and the gothic for the speculative fiction team of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Since he joined our team, he has tirelessly worked to curate reviews from brilliant scholars writing about a richly diverse array of horror novels with special attention to authors from underrepresented communities. He’s thoughtful, professional, and a joy to work with — and he’s a truly excellent editor!
Thinking back further, it was also truly special when he helped us bring Jeffrey Jerome Cohen to ICFA as a guest of honor. Cohen and Weinstock are monster scholars of the highest caliber
While another writes, that given the volume of work published under this name, it would be entirely understandable if Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock was, in fact, a pen name for a small but fiercely productive cabal of talented academics. Alas, Jeffrey is one person and the breadth of his knowledge combined with an enviable ease with which he communicates his ideas are absolutely stunning. From vampires and Lovecraft to cult films and Goth music to podcasts and Twin Peaks, he has written it all in the ways which are both illuminating and highly original. There are really few other scholars who have contributed more to the scholarship on the fantastic across genres and media. And he shows no signs of slowing down.
The Clareson Award Committee takes great pleasure in presenting this award to the 2024 winner, Jeffery Weinstock.
Innovative Research Award, chair: John Rieder
First of all, I want to thank my fellow committee members, Hugh O’Connell and Sumeyra Buran, for their hard work reading, evaluating, and judging the many excellent essays nominated for this award. And I want to thank everyone who nominated an essay for their participation in the process. Without that participation this award could not happen. Also I want to emphasize the high quality of the essays overall, and acknowledge the work of the editors of some of the remarkable collections that contained the nominated work. During our discussion, we wished we had a separate prize for them.
We all agreed, however, that one essay stood out from all the rest as deserving this yearʻs Innovative Research Award, Rebekah Sheldon’s “Generativity Without Reserve: Sterility Apocalypses and the Enclosure of Life-itself.”
“Generativity Without Reserve” explores the fantasy behind depictions of sterility in science fiction film and television, focusing on Blade Runner 2049, Orphan Black, and Children of Men. It positions climate change and the extractive logic of racial biocapitalism within an emergent biopolitics of reproduction that seeks to enclose the living labor of the body, not just at the level of the cell or tissue but at the source of generativity itself, figured in these texts as sexual reproduction.
For an essay that is conceptually dense and steeped in complex theory, “Generativity Without Reserve” is not only admirably clear, but truly engaging to read. It is marked by a conversational tone that takes the reader through a series of intellectually deepening twists and turns. Sheldon starts by posing a series of questions about an important speech in the central text, Blade Runner 2049, makes clear why the speech elicits those questions and why the questions matter, and works her way to an answer by a series of readings in which a wealth of theoretical insight is allowed to emerge. These readings combine the economics of biopolitical production, the history of chattel slavery, the figure of miraculous birth, and the genre of the sterility apocalypse, all of which are put to work unravelling the implications of the matrix of religious, agricultural, and colonial tropes in that key speech in Blade Runner 2049. Sheldon’s readings elucidate the way the sterility apocalypse repetitively offers a fantastic solution—which she names the enclosure of reproduction—to the impossible problem posed by capitalism’s reliance on natural increase. The myriad twists and turns—we could even say, the plot twists—of Sheldon’s readings are therefore excellent examples of working one’s way through the hermeneutic circle, shuttling between an understanding of a whole text, or in this case, a whole genre, by analysis of its parts, and the dependency of an understanding of the parts on grasping the significance of the whole.
Sheldon’s essay keeps reaching beyond, resisting each theoretical or narrative closure that it seemingly arrives at. Rather than culminations, such endings are really generative conditions of new problems, as the essay itself suggests. In this sense, what begins as an approach to a common contemporary sf narrative – the sterility apocalypse –ultimately pushes the theory in new directions, revealing surprising connections between capitalist enclosures, sterility, “miraculous” generativity, and the inexorable drive towards commodification. The result is the best kind of cultural criticism, in which the theory and the texts simultaneously transform each other, pushing us toward what Fredric Jameson calls a new problematic, “not a set of propositions about reality, but a set of categories in terms of which reality is analyzed and interrogated.” Rather than an essay to simply be read and digested for its point, it is an essay to think with and through, one that is innovative – and generative – for sf studies, feminist science studies, and critical theory alike.
Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship, outgoing chair: Veronica Hollinger
It is our pleasure and privilege to present the 2024 Award for Lifetime Contributions to Science Fiction Scholarship to Lisa Yaszek, Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech—and a past president of the SFRA. Dr. Yaszek’s research engages a flexible breadth of subject areas with rigorous critical depth and an acute capacity to make connections. Her recent work has contributed to the ongoing development of Afrofuturist theory and criticism; at the same time she has maintained the incisive focus on women, feminism, and gender of her earlier projects.
Lisa has long been invested in the reclamation and celebration of early sf by women writers. In 2005 she won the SFRA Innovative Research Award for her essay “The Women History Doesn’t See: Recovering Midcentury Women’s SF as a Literature of Social Critique.” Her work since has ranged from the eye-opening analysis of her critical monograph, Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008), to her 2016 co-edited (with Patrick Sharp) volume of stories by early women writers, Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, to her more recent work as editor of two volumes of sf stories by women published by the Library of America: The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin (2018) and The Future Is Female! Vol. 2: The 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women (2022). Galactic Suburbia encouraged us to revise our ideas about the kinds of sf women were writing before the feminist explosion of the 1970s. The Future is Female volumes present us with first-hand proof of the quality and diversity of women’s sf from the pulp era through the 1970s.
Lisa is also co-editor—with Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and WG Pearson—of the impressively wide-ranging Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction, which was published last year. Her own contributions to this project—apart from the non-stop work that such a project entails for all concerned—include both the historical introduction that opens the collection and the introduction to the section on theoretical approaches.
Lisa has brought eight books and edited volumes into being, and she has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. Her recent collection Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Isiah Lavender III, is aimed at “imagining futures in full color” (to quote the great title of their introduction). Lisa’s shorter writings range across diverse topics and appear in top-tier journals, bleeding-edge platforms, and in sf reference resources both within and outside of the academic community.
As we recognize Lisa today for her significant contributions to science fiction scholarship, we want to emphasize the dynamic reach of that scholarship into the future. Not surprisingly, Lisa has won awards for her pedagogy (as well as for her service to the profession). Her writing, teaching, and mentoring consistently engage pedagogy, often explicitly. Her inquiries and breakthroughs come bundled with resources for larger collective projects and objectives. Please join us in applauding Dr. Lisa Yaszek for her innovative and influential contributions to the crucial multi-discipline of science fiction.
Awardee Statements:
SFRA Book Award: Mingwei Song
I feel honored and humbled by this award. I am most grateful to the selection committee for choosing my book from so many excellent volumes of scholarly work in the field of science fiction studies. I consider this award not only an acknowledge of my own research, but a recognition of the emerging subfield in Chinese science fiction studies, which has been created by not just me, but all of us, including many colleagues who have made a collective effort to study, promote, and theorize what is new in the genre’s current revival in China and the larger Chinese-speaking world. I feel grateful to the association for recognizing Chinese science fiction’s importance in the field.
Fear of Seeing is a book that I spent more than a decade to write. I was fortunate enough to witness the new wave Chinese SF’s breakthrough in 2010, and my book traces the origin and development of the genre in the context of China’s long twentieth century all the way to its sudden rise in the second decade of the twenty-first century. In this book, I do not only study the thematic and political components of the genre, but try my best to theorize the unique aesthetics created by authors such as Liu Cixin, Han Song and others. I summarize this aesthetics as the poetics of the invisible, which is profoundly relevant to China’s political and cultural context, because the genre makes it possible for some writers to catch the deeper truth that is hided or forbidden by the fabric of a reality produced by mass media and propaganda machine. I admire the courageous pioneers of the new wave who dare to look into the abysmal darkness that is otherwise unspeakable in literature fiction that more or less follows the rules of mimesis. Science fiction, on the other hand, is literarily metafictional by its design of world-building as well as philosophically subversive with its other-worldly speculation. From here, I aspire to take Chinese science fiction as a method to engage the lofty ideas associated with modernity, dismantling dualist thinking and creating thought-provoking holes and folds in the otherwise smooth surface of the fabricated “reality.” In a word, it inspires people to think beyond what is allowed and ready-made. In China, it is a method for resisting the limitations of walls, metaphorically and ideologically.
At the same time, I also try not to read Chinese science fiction only from the political perspective. Liu Cixin and Han Song both illuminate aspects of China’s hideous politics. But I do see in these writers a poetic heart, which, in Liu Cixin’s case, counterbalances the dark forest mind-set that resonates with contemporary political thinking among some Chinese intellectuals, and in Han Song’s case, inspires a wishful transcendence over the endless repetitions of catastrophic events that have happened again and again, like karmic retribution imposed to the entire nation. As Liu Cixin says in his postscript to the English version of The Three-Body Problem, he writes about the worst possible universe, but he also keeps alive the best possible hope for a better world. In current political situation, that hope is not easy to interpret, but I do not think it’s only serving a political interest, but more related to an immensely unsettling imagination that shatters the ground of everything that we are taught to take for granted.
I spent long enough time to write this book, so I finished it during the recent pandemic. By that time, I was able to recognize a newer generation of Chinese and Sinophone science fiction writers, who have, in my mind, made a second breakthrough for the genre by finding a new path toward a nonbinary universe. For these writers, mostly female, the world that was built by theories and systems, such as Cartesian dualism and the Hegelian dialectics, which defined human race’s modern experience, has neared its collapse. For these new authors, mostly still in their twenties and thirties, they are looking beyond the horizon of the monstrous history of the twentieth century. They are imagining new wonders of a nonbinary world that is based on undifferentiated difference. I feel particularly lucky that I could conclude my book at a moment when this new hope emerges, a hope that Liu Cixin and Han Song’s generations were mostly alien to, but so natural for the younger people who lived upon and recognized the ruins of modernity, the failure of ideological wars, and the disasters human have made toward all living creatures on our planet. They are the first generation growing up with planetary consciousness, and to them, the world has unfolded again and showed its unbound newness, like it did to the travelers who first brought stories about strange lands and imaginary creatures back home, in ancient Egypt, Sinhdu, Greece and Rome, Arabia, Maya, Polynesian islands, and the East Asian world. This new generation, like their American, European, and African counterparts, are making history by imagining differently. I hope there will be more attention paid to this generation—those young women and nonbinary writers living in China, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Fear of Seeing has become a less dark book because of them.
Thank you.
Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
To the members of the SFRA: I’m deeply honored to receive this award and sorry that I cannot be with you in person to receive it and participate in the conference.
When Hugh O’Connell emailed me the news about the Clareson award, I was so stunned that I must have sat open-mouthed and teary-eyed for several minutes in front of the computer screen—because the news started me thinking:
As academics, we’re an unruly lot. With a nod toward Monty Python, I’m tempted to say that we’re all non-conformists here. But there is one other thing that we share aside from an independent streak: We are, all of us, on some level, masochists.
We apply for jobs, for fellowships, for postdocs, for grants, for tenure, for promotion, for various awards and recognitions. We submit conference proposals, book proposals, journal articles, and book manuscripts—and then wait, sometimes for many months, for a verdict and often anonymous feedback.
When I was in college, a group of friends had what they called their “wall of shame” where they posted rejection letters resulting from job and graduate school applications—and I think to myself today that I could wallpaper my house with the number of “Thank you but I’m sorry to report…” letters I’ve received over the years.
But that’s not all. Not only are we forced to contend with the dreaded “reviewer #2,” but we must navigate diminishing institutional resources and declining public support for the humanities at the same time, constantly defending the value of what we do and fighting for every cent. Not to mention “student opinion surveys” completed by students we don’t recognize because they haven’t attended all semester and online yelp-like evaluation sites offering venues for anyone with an ax to grind to opine on our teaching.
And let’s not get started on all the uncompensated labor we are expected to perform!
University life certainly has its pleasures—we are in many ways lucky people in that we get to think about and engage deeply with subject matter we find stimulating and important; however, it is often solitary work and the forces aligned against us can seem formidable.
And this is why I was so incredibly moved to get Hugh’s email about this service award from the SFRA. To be recognized by one’s peers means to be part of a community of “like-minded non-conformists.” And it means that one’s efforts have been noticed and valued. I am glad to have had the chance to promote so many deserving books and to shepherd so much excellent scholarship into print—editorial work has been a significant part of my life for a long time. Your recognition here tonight is both humbling and immensely gratifying and takes center stage on my small but important “wall of praise.” Thank you!
Innovative Research Award: Rebekah Sheldon
Thank you, John, and thanks to the SFRA for this surprising but very welcome recognition. As a belated addendum to my first book, this essay was very much the product of conversations with the science fiction studies community – in the reception at the 2018 SFRA where I delivered it as one of the keynote talks, in sharing drafts with Sherryl Vint, David Wittenberg, David Higgins, and other dear friends, and in the helpful comments from the editorial board and reviewers at SFFTV. And here I want to thank Gerry Canavan in particular. I had more or less abandoned the essay as unpublishable after an unhelpful review from a non-SF journals until Gerry nudged me to maybe give it a chance where it belonged to begin with.
Thinking about the way this essay developed and found its path to publication, I am struck by the generosity of our community, the thoughtfulness we show to each other, our ecumenical approach to modes of scholarship, and what I want to call our disdain for (or even constitutional insensitivity to) the kinds of prestige politics that could make something like an award feel different than it does here. In the past, I have been guilty of joking, only semi-humorously, about how we compensate for our history of marginalization by creating ever more conferences, societies, journals, anthologies, and readers. (Seriously, so many.) In some ways, of course, this is just us being enthusiasts, in line with the more encompassing history of SF fandom, the same delightful nerdery and sincere affection that makes a 19-hour trip seem worth it so that we can spend a couple days together. Recently, however, this tendency of ours has appeared differently to me. In light of the mounting obstructions put in the way of our work by the collusion of neoliberal administrators and extremist politicians in the US, I have begun to think of the service work we do as a species of worldbuilding: conferences generate a shared space; anthologies give us a past; journals, a future; awards, a collective memory. Academic infrastructure as communizing. And as things get harder in our professional situations, for those few of us who have professional situations in the university, I want to call on us all to think even more directly about how we might support each other so we can keep doing the work that supports the worlds that support the careful cultivation of our continued kinships. And not just reactively. I want to take seriously the monastic roots of university life and borrow from other models — from convents and communes to guilds and workmen’s halls – that might help us to imagine how to maintain these worlds, if not after the end of the university, then after our own time in it is over.
Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship: Lisa Yaszek
Thank you for the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship (henceforth the LCSFS Award); this really means a lot to me. Some of the people I admire most are past winners of this award. To be recognized alongside the authors and scholars who created science fiction studies is an incredible honor. Of course, I didn’t get here alone.
First, I want to specifically thank the previous LCSFS award winners who have made my work as a feminist science fiction scholar and editor possible. My parents were big fans of New Wave science fiction and our bookshelves were stuffed with the novels of LCSFS award winners Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin—so much so that it was quite a surprise to me when I got older and realized that science fiction was not all written by women and people of color! These authors wrote stories big enough for my imagination and later, when I started reading their nonfiction, they gave me a vocabulary big enough to explain why I was drawn to such stories. Even so, I spent half a decade in graduate school wandering through the postmodern wilderness and only came back to science fiction when I read the work of LCSFS award winners Frederic Jameson and Donna Haraway, both of whom speak passionately and eloquently about science fiction artists as the premiere storytellers of technoscientific modernity. Later, as an aspiring historian and editor of women’s science fiction, I was inspired by LCSFS award winner Pamela Sargent’s Women of Wonder series, and as a young science fiction studies professor I was thrilled to develop a friendship with LCSFS award winner Marleen Barr, whose groundbreaking Future Females! anthologiesintroduced me to feminist science fiction studies. Marleen, once upon a time you told me that someday I’d be giving my own acceptance speech for what we used to call the Pilgrim Award; I was awed by your faith in me then and I’m still blown away right now by the fact that you were right.
Next, I want to recognize my wonderful colleagues at Georgia Tech! I accepted my postdoc in School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Tech in 1999 because I was excited to be part of a school had not one, but two science fiction scholars: feminist technoscience expert Ann Balsamo and early SFRA member Irving “Bud” Foote. At that point I was writing about science fiction, but largely from the perspective of postmodernism. It had never even occurred to me that science fiction studies was its own discipline and that you could do it full time! When I got to Tech, I learned that Bud had retired and Ann had moved on to an IBM think tank, but I am eternally grateful that both generously took time away from their new life adventures to teach me the ways of the SF scholar, and in 2000 I delightedly accepted one of the tenure-line positions left open by their departure. Since then, I’ve been fortunate to work with LMC school chairs Ken Knoespel, Jay Telotte, Richard Utz, and Kelly Ritter, all of whom have been truly committed to fostering science fiction studies at Georgia Tech; with my dear friend Kathy Goonan, our first science fiction professor of the practice at Tech; and with my sisters of tomorrow Amanda Weiss, Ida Yoshinaga, and Susana Morris; together we are building an exciting interdisciplinary science fiction community at Tech and, if I dare say it, keeping the future fabulously female. The other great thing about doing science fiction research at Tech is that it really is a cross-campus labor of love; to that end I want to thank Georgia Tech librarians Mathew Frizzell, Catherine Manci, and Alison Reynolds for managing the speculative fiction resources and events that are essential to our work; IAC communications officer Mike Pearson for always being the first to spread the good word about our community; and all the brilliant students who have helped carry out research projects in the Sci Fi Lab while preparing to become the next generation of science fiction creators and scholars themselves; I am excited to have two of them, Max Mateer and Killian Vetter, with us today. Finally, want to shout out to my dear LMC colleagues Narin Hassan and Aaron Santesso who are also here with us today; they are not science fiction studies people themselves, but most excellent friends and sci-fi-curious allies.
The only place where I feel perhaps an even greater sense of community is in the SFRA itself. In short, you are the best colleagues ever! What other academic group embraces its artists, editors, scholars, and fans with equal passion? Where else can you hold serious debates about the post capitalist values of hope punk while learning risqué filk songs from legendary science fiction artists? What other scholarly organization would have the audacity to co-host a major public event with a “kilt formal” dress code? Where else will you ever have the pleasure of drinking wine and debating science fiction theory in a public fountain at 5 am, even though you know you’ll only have an hour or two to sleep it off before you and all your pals are back in the front row of that 8:30 am panel you absolutely don’t want to miss? Where else can you co-host discussions between scholars and artists that result in award-winning publications for both? In my experience? Nowhere else. There is nothing quite like the SFRA. In fact, when I was pulling together my notes for this speech, I realized that every co-edited project I’ve ever worked on involves members of our community. So, let me express particular appreciation for Karen Hellekson, Craig Jacobson, Patrick Sharp, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, WG Pearson; Sherryl Vint; and of course, my brother from another mother, Isiah Lavender III. I’ve learned so much from all of you and I hope that shows in my own work.
Finally, I want to thank my husband and SFRA colleague Doug Davis. Doug and I started our personal and professional lives together in 2003, when we married and attended our first SFRA conference together in a span of two months. It’s particularly cool to win this award today, because it’s actually our 21st wedding anniversary. I can’t wait to see where the next 21 years takes the two of us—and where it takes the SFRA as a whole.
Thanks again to all of you.
