Category: From the SFRA Review

Winter 2024

Ian Campbell

I have just been informed that the American right wing has declared “holy war” on Taylor Swift. There’s a part of me that enjoys our cyberpunk-lite unevenly-distributed future; I can’t imagine it will go well for the American right wing; the only thing missing is that Taylor Swift is an actual breathing human being and not a hologram personality analogue driven by AI. That’s set for Winter 2025, I don’t doubt. The sudden and soon to be still more sudden advent of AI appears already to be “disruptive”, which as any cyberpunk fan will know, means that it will funnel still more money and power to the top and leave a great number of knowledge workers with a clear understanding of how they could have fought this when robots came for factory workers.

This issue of the SFRA Review contains a long and marvellous essay by Jo Walton, “Machine Learning in Contemporary Science Fiction.” It is worth reading in its entirety, so I will not spoil it for you save to note that very little in SF that concerns AI has much to do with the hyperreality whose advent has only just begun. It’s the way in which Walton makes this point that’s worth savoring.

Our symposium on socialist SF will appear in the May issue; in this one, we chose to center Walton’s thoughts on AI. We welcome your thoughts on AI and will be pleased to publish well-formed responses to Walton or readings of other works of SF through his framework. The same goes for nearly any other aspect of SF, or reviews of same. Write me at icampbell@gsu.edu.

Fall 2023

Ian Campbell

When I sit here at my desk at home editing and typesetting the Review, with my cats fighting over who gets to sit on the coveted Kitty Towel next to my keyboard, I like to listen to mindless, cheery techno music. Because my daughter always hogs Spotify, I usually just use YouTube for this, but over the past couple of weeks, YouTube has become increasingly aggressive in its absolutely delusional belief that it can order me into turning off any of my half-dozen adblockers, let alone all of them. I’d be willing to put up with thirty seconds of ads at the beginning of a DJ’s set—sure, they have to pay for all those servers and so forth—but intrusive, unskippable ads every few minutes? Yeah, no: especially since it takes basically three ads to go from cat food to Joe Rogan to straight-up fascism. So, now I’m watching an accelerated evolutionary arms race between Google, which has a trillion dollars yet still manages to run every product they create or buy straight into the ground, and the guy who writes the code for uBlock Origin, who does it for free and open source. If I get to amend the US Constitution, it will be to give everyone the right to be free from advertising.

SF long ago predicted the sheer ubiquity and intrusiveness of advertising, beginning in 1952 with Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants. Gibson’s Neuromancer gave us both the first iteration of the Internet and its dominance by all-powerful and unaccountable corporate interests. Recently, Cory Doctorow wrote at length about what he terms “enshittification“: if you have not yet read this, please do, as it explains much about why the internet used to be fun and no longer is. Doctorow’s point is that it’s not even the advertisers that win out—as with nearly everything else, it’s our parasitic oligarchy. Frankly, I miss the Internet That Was, where everyone had to code their own page and people just talked to one another or enjoyed cat pictures.

In this issue, among many other things, we at the Editorial Collective have a conversation about the Nebula nominees for Best Novel, and why a retreat from tech to fantasy seems to be the order of the day. As always, we welcome your participation: feel welcome to submit to our CFP, to review for us, or to send us your thoughts on SF and how it addresses the issues of the day.

The SFRA Review Seeks a Social Media Manager

The Editorial Collective

The SFRA Review seeks a dedicated Social Media Manager to develop and grow the journal’s social media presence and connect more effectively with contemporary scholars and audiences. This is a new position that will work closely with the Managing Editor and Fiction and Nonfiction Editors. Prior social media experience is not essential, but it is desirable.

The Social Media Manager will primarily be responsible for:

• regularly circulating the SFRA Review’s CFPs (both across social media and in SF-specific listservs)
• updating social media platforms in the leadup to new issues and after these issues have been published
• spotlighting individual feature articles
• engaging with readers and followers
• developing a more robust and interconnected online community across various platforms and organizations
• reporting on user engagement regularly to the SFRA Review editorial team

The ideal Social Media Manager will post at least several times (3+) a week across Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, and other social media platforms. Qualified applicants may also create and maintain a Discord server.

The SFRA Review is an open-access journal, published four times a year by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). It is devoted to surveying the contemporary field of speculative fiction, media, and scholarship as it develops, bringing in-depth reviews with each issue, as well as longer critical articles highlighting key conversations in sf studies, regular retrospectives on recently passed authors and scholars, and reports from members of the SFRA Executive Committee. The Social Media Manager will be joining an interdisciplinary volunteer team dedicated to science fiction and speculative scholarship and should, as a result, have a long-standing interest in the field, as well as making speculative scholarship freely available.

To apply for the position of Social Media Manager, interested applicants should send a short statement (~100-200 words) that covers why they are interested in the position and their qualifications, as well as their CV, to the SFRA Review Managing Editor, Virginia L. Conn, by August 31st, 2023, at vconn@stevens.edu.

Summer 2023

Ian Campbell

Welcome to the coolest summer of the rest of our lives. As I write this, doctors in Phoenix, Arizona, have announced new protocols for how to treat burn injuries that result from people falling or lying on the sidewalk; the ocean temperature off the Florida coast is now warmer than a typical hot tub; the Mediterranean is now at its warmest temperature ever; signs have emerged that the thermohaline cycle in the North Atlantic is on the verge of collapse; the Republican Party has called for more fossil fuel burning.

One purpose of SF is to use the future to estrange the present, but the future’s already here, and in no way is it evenly distributed. There are many works of SF that pose future environmental changes as the catalyst for societal changes, but comparatively little that deal directly with our most pressing problem: the vast and powerful oligarchy-controlled media machine that’s still trying to persuade us that this is all just some natural climactic cycle. Nothing to worry about here: get back to pumping up the economy. What’s going to astonish most of us is how quickly the whole thing turns on a dime from “climate change is a hoax” to “climate change is god’s punishment upon us for letting queer people exist”. If you’re sleeping too much and want to give yourself a reason to stay up at night worrying, go look up “effective altruism”, the new philosophical darling of cryptocurrency and tech bros.

Subsequent issues of SFRA Review will likely address the sheer inhumanity of the post-catastrophe future: for now, however, we have the usual palette of reviews and feature articles. But keep in mind that SF is only literature, and the power of literature accrues to the reader, not the writer. There’s only so much we can do about ideas and critique being stolen and repurposed, usually for the benefit of the oligarchy, other than to create more ways to estrange what’s being done to us.

Spring 2023

Ian Campbell

Our unevenly-distributed science fiction future continues to expand with the advent of “AI”, which is of course not AI but merely a well-trained algorithm. I spent a long Friday last week wishing I was outside enjoying spring weather but instead sitting through first a departmental, then a college meeting about how to cope with the effect of AI on student testing. Looks like we’re headed back to pens and bluebooks and oral exams. Left unsaid was the effect this will have on faculty, especially in face of the concerted right-wing assault on higher education.

But I’ll leave aside the doom and gloom and direct your attention to a couple of opportunities. We here at the SFRA Review are looking for some additional editors, both to expand our offerings and also to take the place of some of our current wonderful editors when they decide to rotate off. This is a great opportunity for an early-career scholar, whether they be ABD or a new faculty member. The workload isn’t tremendous, you’ll have plenty of creative freedom and autonomy, and you can (further) establish your bona fides by contributing to the discourse and profession. Please contact me at icampbell@gsu.edu should you be interested, and we’ll talk further.

On a more personal note, I’d also like to plug the CFP for SF in Translation, vol. 2. There have been some impressive submissions for this edited volume, but the overall quantity isn’t where we’d like it to be: two or three more chapters will help this one over the top and bring this valuable scholarship to the general public. This is another great opportunity for an early-career scholar, though in no way would we be displeased to see established experts submit chapters. Please pass the CFP around among your colleagues.

Winter 2023

Ian Campbell
Editor, SFRA Review

I was going to use ChatGPT to write this letter and see whether anyone could tell, but it seemed unethical, and at any rate the site is down. But we should all be very, very worried about the advent of nearly-human-quality AI, whether it be in visual art or text. I have many friends who are professional illustrators: all of them are very worried about how AI is essentially going to price them out of their careers, at least once it manages to get human hands right.

The nature of higher education is going to change profoundly over the next few years: ChatGPT writes plausible-sounding garbage, but so do most students, even many who are actually trying. More elite institutions will find ways to ensure that students’ writing is their own, while cash-strapped state institutions and the small colleges soon to be entirely wiped out by the demographic crash that is the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis will bow to the perceived inevitable and continue to credential students for fear of losing still more funding.

SF gives us plenty of examples with which to frame these developments: if you’re reading this journal, you’ve no doubt already thought of several examples. AI in SF is often transcendent, often malevolent, sometimes benevolent as in the Culture novels. Yet I cannot think of a widely-known example where AI is quite so banal as in our world today. Our AI is neither transcendent nor benevolent it’s something like a wage slave like nearly all of us, played off against human workers for an ever-shrinking slice of pie while the rest is fed to Wall Street. You may expect all those outsourced customer-service jobs to be done by AI any moment now. We can all hope that AI will acquire sentience, if only in that it might go on strike.

This issue of the SFRA Review contains a number of papers from the London SF Research Conference, plus a paper relating to our symposium on masculinity, in addition to our usual palette of reviews of non-fiction, fiction and media. We also have two calls for papers: one for a symposium here on adaptations of SF, and another that is my personal CFP for an edited volume. If you are working on an edited volume about SF and you want to publish it here, we will be happy to do so: please just contact us.

Summer 2022

Ian Campbell
Editor, SFRA Review

On 15 October, the person whose flat is two floors directly above ours decided to do some DIY work, and in the process managed to cut our Google Fiber cable, plunging our flat back into the darkness of the twentieth century. Dear readers, it was horrible: a perfect storm of both my wife and me having worked from home for so long that I could no longer do my whole job from the office—and my wife not having even had an office for more than two years—and the “Kafka was taking notes” nightmare of modern corporate customer “service”. It was a full week before the metaphorical lights came back on, whereupon my wife sang “Hallelujah” from the balcony—and someone called the police on her.

Being cut off from the Internet is the twenty-first century form of solitary confinement: you have no idea how many times one of us said “I need/want to…” and then realized we simply could not. I know this complaint sounds picayune—and it is, in comparison to, say, the Supreme Court deciding that American women and girls are rightsless breeding animals, or whatever the next round of horror they might unleash upon us will be. Nevertheless, the Internet, something I graduated from college without and still turned into something that from a very particular angle might have resembled a functioning adult, has become so critical to the very existence of anything like a knowledge-based occupation that we are worse than useless without it. It’s just another part of that future that’s already here, but unequally distributed.

Our issue this quarter is quite short: a raft of papers we intend to publish as a group proved to need too many edits to bring it in under the deadline. Nevertheless, in addition to our usual palette of reviews, we also have our symposium on Alternative Masculinities in SF, which we sincerely hope you will find as interesting and à propos as we do. We do hope you enjoy the images from the James Webb Space Telescope in the PDF edition of the journal.

Martin Luther King once said “the arc of history bends toward justice”, which might sometimes be hard to see in current times, but Steve Bannon is in prison now, and that paragon of the SF community, Theodore Beale aka Vox Day, had a million dollars stolen from him. Beale was trying to produce a film, Rebel’s Run, about a conservative superhero in a Confederate flag bustier, and parked his money with a firm called Ohana Capital Financial, because they were the only ones who would do business with someone with such a well-documented history of racist and sexist statements. Turns out, Ohana was the extremely common multiclass character of cryptocurrency miner and scam artist, and walked away with Beale’s money. Guess old Vox Day is a sad puppy now.

Summer 2022

Ian Campbell
Editor, SFRA Review

The heat wave that struck Western Europe and killed a couple of thousand people was different from other heat waves, not because of its lethality, and certainly not because of its singularity: heat waves will continue and only grow in intensity. What made this latest heat wave unusual was that it was the first heat wave to be given a name: Zoe. Just like hurricanes/typhoons, heat waves are now such a common part of our lived experience that we have engaged in the oddly human habit of naming them. Easier than overthrowing the oil companies, I suppose. The lived experience of an unevenly-distributed (and unevenly-dystopian) science fictional future/present is something inherently science-fictional, in that our reality is always already estranged by technological distortions, not least among them the algorithmic social media feeds that distort the thoughts of even people well aware of how these algorithms work and why.

In this issue, we have three primary perspectives on SF, in addition to the usual run of reviews of non-fiction, fiction and media. We have a group of short papers on various topics in our Features section. We have a group of papers derived from a conference addressing the medical humanities in the fantastic: perspectives on disability, trauma, autism and multiple embodiments. We also have our frequent contributor Adam McLain’s curated collection of papers on sexual violence in SF. Needless to say, readers of this last collection should be forewarned that some of the papers are likely to trigger or otherwise disturb by virtue of their topic and content, though of course none of them is intended to cause anxiety or suffering.

Please also investigate our call for papers on conservative/right-wing SF. We look forward to reading your perspectives on this all too influential discourse, as the continuing resurgence of right-wing values is one of the most puzzling (and least welcome) aspects of the science-fictionality of our contemporary world. And stay away from Zoe.