I received an email from SFRA Web Director Matthew Holtmeier this afternoon that the new and improved SFRA.org website is now live.  Go here to check it out and find out what the new site can offer you!

Yufang and I are sitting outside a Starbucks enjoying the warm weather–reading magazines and checking email.  We left the Hotel Midtown around noon, saying goodbye to our friends, and we made our way to Norcross to begin our vacation.

During the conference, I was busy making sure the program executed itself with as few memory errors and illegal operations as possible.  It may not have been necessary to do this, because everyone really came through in many different ways to make the conference come off as well as it did, and for that I am thankful to everyone at SFRA 2009.

I didn’t have much time to sit in on full panels, so I don’t have much to report on DynamicSubspace.net.  However, I will report on the major events and those that I was involved in when I can sporatically connect to the Internet over the coming week.  Also, I’m looking forward to reading what other SFRA bloggers have to say about their experiences in Atlanta.  As I find these, I will link to them from here.

Talk to y’all soon about our southern-fried science fiction studies conference!

While my pants were washing in my awesome Frigidaire combo washer and dryer, I rewrote the concluding section of my World of Warcraft essay that I am presenting on Friday morning.  Now, I just need to type it up, but I’m out and about right now, so that will have to wait until later this afternoon when I am back home.

With the conclusion finished (but not yet joined to a shorter length overall essay), I drove back to the Starbucks area in Tucker, and got lunch at the delicious Kochi Sushi and Hibachi.  For only $10, I got a Coke (it’s required in Atlanta) and a bento box full of sushi, tempura, teriyaki chicken, and fried rice along with soup and salad.  There was so much food, I couldn’t eat it all, but I sure did try.  Kochi’s lunch is yummy and highly recommended for the taste and the price!

One more thing–I never complained about my unibody MacBook’s glossy screen, until now.  It is nearly impossible to use this thing outside where I”m sitting on Starbuck’s patio.  My blue IAFA shirt is perfectly reflected on the screen where I am typing this blog post.  Chock one up for matte finish laptop screens.

I didn’t sleep nearly as long as I would have liked to last night, but I do feel more rested than I did yesterday during the twelve hour drive.  Now, I’m sitting in the Tucker, Georgia Starbucks working on shortening my essay for SFRA.  I think I’m going to return home, because there are eight advertising robots arguing and shouting over what surfing is like with analogies taken from the movie Blue Crush for some new campaign.  I could say some nasty things about how their hive mind works, but I think it suffices to say that Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat” comes to mind.

Yufang and I are finishing our packing now, but loading the car will have to wait until tomorrow.  I have put some things in the car, such as the three rotisserie cookers for my folks and Aunt Lettie-Anne and Uncle Doc.  After loading up, I’ll have an approximately 11 hour drive ahead of me to reach Norcross.

I can confidently say that packing and preparing for a long drive is a lot worse than any other aspect of conferencing (including programming).  That’s saying a lot, because I still have to whittle my 31 page monster from the deep essay on how World of Warcraft creates cosmopolitan subjects to 8 pages.  I feel good about the impending revision, but I’m afraid that it will take most of Tuesday with me sitting some place comfy with a steady supply of coffee.

I called the Midtown Hotel tonight, and they said that they only offer wired Internet access (at almost $10/day).  I know there are some places nearby that may have Internet access, but I don’t know what my connection will be like (if at all).  I did want to blog from the conference, but my updates to DynamicSubspace.net may come in fits and spurts.  If I cannot get a reliable connection, I will save my posts and run them all at once the following week.

To Atlanta!

The first draft of the SFRA 2009 Conference Program was completed weeks ago, but I’ve learned that putting together conference scheduling and producing a relatively error free printable program is an arduous task!  Lisa Yaszek and Doug Davis, along with folks attending the conference, provided a lot of feedback and offered corrections to turn it into a finished product.  Here is the full program for your viewing pleasure.  See you in Atlanta in a few days!

It is safe to say that I got shit done today.  I met Professor Raja at Angel Falls Coffee Co. in Akron this afternoon, and we finalized the first issue of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies.  It is an open access journal, so you may go here and read the first issue (or better yet, purchase a print copy so that you can really appreciate my page layout work while supporting the journal).  I had some trouble getting the fonts to embed properly in the PDF of the issue for publication, but I finally ironed out that last remaining snag before we enjoyed a celebratory lunch of hummus and kebab wraps.

After I left Market Square, I drove down Market to The Bookseller and found four useful books:  Science Fiction Discoveries ed. by Carol and Frederik Pohl, Crash by J.G. Ballard (blurb: “A startling off-beat novel of erotic violence”), Radu Florescu’s In Search of Frankenstein (mid-1970s volume on all things Frankenstein), and Jane’s American Fighting Aircraft of the 20th Century (this big book sports two F-104 Starfighters flying over a city port, and I will make good use of this tome when I’m writing my essay for the aircraft film genre essay on The Right Stuff).

When I got back home with some lunch for Yufang, I got back to work on the print version of the SFRA 2009 program.  I worked on that program all damn day, except for a break to enjoy fish and chips and Heroes, but I just finished a rough draft complete with index. I’m very happy with the way the program looks, and I hope that everyone will be happy with the scheduling. Thanks go out to Craig Jacobsen for last year’s program InDesign file, Betsy Gooch for the artwork on the conference flyer that I used for the front cover of the program, and Lisa and Doug for carefully watching over my shoulder as I put the program together.  There will probably be some changes, but I’m estatic that the lion’s share of the program is completed.

Oh, I did take a slightly longer break after dinner than I wrote about above.  In fact, Yufang and I went out for a walk, and we put Miao Miao in a backpack that I wore against my chest so that she could look around while we walked.  She was surprisingly good, but I did have to keep a hand on her to keep her from climbing over me.

It’s only four more weeks until SFRA 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia!  I’m hammering out the finalized program now, and it should be available very soon.  I can tell everyone that there is an exciting lineup of panels, an author reading track, and special dedicated time slot events.  Stay tuned!

I sent the following announcement about a new author “open mike night” slated for the SFRA 2009 Conference in Atlanta, GA to the SFRA Discussion List earlier this evening. If you’re an author, want to share your work, and will be in Atlanta mid-June, please read on for details on how to add your name to the hat:

SFRA welcomes authors to a special event at the 2009 SFRA Conference on “Engineering the Future” and “Southern-Fried Science Fiction” in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday, June 12 from 6:00pm-9:00pm.  The Author Open Mike Night hosted by the SFRA-SFWA liaison Edward Carmien is a new opportunity for authors to read from their work and offer books for sale to conference attendees.  Also, in the spirit of open mikes, we welcome authors to bring guests and invite their fans to attend the event.  If you are interested in joining us at the Hotel Midtown in Atlanta, send your name, contact information, and brief bio to the conference organizers Lisa Yaszek and Doug Davis at <sfra2009@gmail.com> by May 15.  We will schedule readings in the Open Mike Night lineup on a first-come, first-served basis. Reply now to get in line!

We would also like to invite authors to participate in the full conference and guest author events.  If you are interested in attending panels, presenting a paper, organizing a panel discussion about writing, or joining in guest author events, you may send your proposal to <sfra2009@gmail.com>, and then mail your registration form available at the official website <http://www.sfra2009.com/> along with the conference fee to the address on the form.

If you have any questions regarding the Author Open Mike Night or participating in the full SFRA Conference, please don’t hesitate to contact us by email at <sfra2009@gmail.com>.  See you in Atlanta!

Don’t forget that your SFRA 2009 presentation and panel abstracts are due by April 15 to sfra2009@gmail.com.  The lineup is looking great so far, but we really want to add your work to the mix.  Go to http://www.sfra2009.com/ for more information on submissions, registration, and hotel information.  I’m looking forward to seeing y’all in Atlanta!

This originally appeared in SFRA Review No. 287 (Winter 2009) as part of the “101″ series, which seeks to provide a broad contextual overview to various fields of interest to SF scholars. The complete issue is available for download here.

The recent explosion on the Internet of fanlike activity has given fans and fan studies a higher profile. When journalists and media studies scholars speak about fans engaging on the Internet, high school students spending their time on FanFiction.net, or fans of soap operas gathering at an online forum to discuss their favorite plotlines, they are engaging in fan studies, even if they don’t seem to know it. Web 2.0—that is, an interactive, networked Web, not a static, read-only Web—lends itself well to visible fan participation, and thanks to an explosion of copyright-ignoring, music-downloading, remix-happy Gen N–ers, interactivity of fans within and outside communities has generated a lot of journalism and scholarship. Fan studies as a field is still scrambling to catch up. It’s done relevant work on fan-created works and fan communities over the years that is being ignored by current scholars, and those in other fields who tangentially run across fans seem unaware that an entire body of scholarship already exists to study fans and fan artifacts. In a parallel activity, women-dominated, old-style active fans and their contributions are now in the process of being erased by studies of (male) online fandom, although recuperative work is underway to write histories of these fans and preserve their artworks.

To define fan is a fraught activity, but generally, a fan is taken to be someone who engages within a subculture organized around a specific object of study, be it Star Trek, science fiction literature, Sherlock Holmes, anime, comics, gaming, or sports. Fans engage in a range of activities related to their passion: they write derivative literature called fan fiction, they create artworks, they write what’s known as meta (analyses of fandom itself, or analysis of analysis), they play role-playing games, they blog, they make fan vids, and they organize and attend conventions. Not least, they create and pass along a culture, with its attendant rules of behavior and acceptability. Although the study of, say, avid coin collectors may fit the definition of fan, most of the work done in fan studies has focused on media fans and the derivative artworks they create. The two earliest active media fandoms were Star Trek and Man from U.N.C.L.E., thereby cementing fan studies as at least tangentially related to SF, and marking the fan base as primarily comprising women.

Because studies of fan-created artifacts or of fans themselves range so widely, fan studies is a truly interdisciplinary field. The disciplines of English and communication study and interpret fan artifacts, their creation, and the rhetorical strategies they use to make meaning; ethnography analyzes the fan subculture; media, film, and television studies assess the integration of media into fan practice and artworks; psychology studies fans’ pleasure and motivation; and law analyzes the underlying problems related to the derivative nature of the artworks, including concerns related to copyright, parody, and fair use. But fan studies can be usefully divided into two major approaches: study of fans themselves and fan culture, and study of the artifacts fans create.

Foundational fan studies

Important early fan studies texts date from the 1980s into the early 1990s, before the Internet changed the face of the fan world. Constance Penley’s relevant work, published in 1991 and 1992, focuses on feminism and the integration of technology into fan culture. Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (1992) reports on fan practice in a study discussing her ethnographic fieldwork, conducted within a Star Trek fan community. Joanna Russ discusses her uneasy relationship with slash (homoerotic fan fiction) in her 1985 essay, “Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love.” A work well known outside the field of fan studies is Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984), which analyzes a subculture of women romance readers. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diane Veith’s 1986 “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and Star Trek Zines,” like Russ’s essay, attempts to understand why straight women write gay porn—a topic of particular fascination in early fan studies scholarship that deals with fan fiction. The valuable essays collected in Lisa A. Lewis’s edited volume, The Adoring Audience (1992), focus on fans and fandom and range widely in topic.

But the single most important early text contributing to the field now known as fan studies is Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Partcipatory Culture (1992). In this crucial work, Jenkins, himself a fan as well as an academic, engages with fans and explicates fan culture as a response to mass media. Fans, he argues, are not passive consumers. Rather, they are active creators. He uses De Certeau’s notion of textual poaching to inform fans’ cultural production: “Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media” (23). Jenkins thus places fans in opposition to TPTB (The Powers That Be), the owners of the copyrighted text being poached—or, fan studies scholars would argue, being repurposed to fulfill particular cultural needs.

So useful is Jenkins’s study, and so resonant is it with fan experience, that most fan studies scholarship takes Jenkins’s thesis as read. Many published studies apply Jenkins’s theory to a particular fan experience, or they explicate fan practice by studying its inflection. Jenkins has since broadened his research base to participatory culture more generally in two books published in 2006, Convergence Culture and Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. His Weblog (http://www.henryjenkins.org/) is a must-read for media scholars, and he remains friendly to fans.

Post-Internet fan studies

As people flock to the Internet and begin contributing content, they become part of a large, geographically dispersed, international community of people doing exactly the same thing. Fan culture used to be transmitted orally and in person. They would share activities like attending conventions, laboriously using VCRs to make fan vids, or publishing zines. Fan culture is still transmitted that way, although sophisticated editing software is used to create fan vids, and zines are likely to have a CD component along with the hard copy. But it’s far more likely that a crew of like-minded people will get together informally, perhaps through a shared blogosphere, bulletin board, or Yahoo! group, many with no understanding that they are engaging in a culture with a relatively long history, or that their behavior may offend or upset people in other fan communities. To that we can add the number of people who would not describe their engagement as within the old-guard fan realm (and I put in parentheses the names of scholars who have written about these topics): posters at Television Without Pity (Marc Andrejevic); contributors to the original producer-run Buffy the Vampire Slayer bulletin board, the Bronze (Stephanie Tuszynski); and aficianados of Lost spoilers (Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell). Further, the experiences of non-American fans may not parallel those abroad. It also doesn’t do to privilege the Internet too much: many fans don’t have access and thus engage differently with their passion. Nor do fans abandon one technological tool when another comes along: listservs and Yahoo! Groups are still sites for fan interaction, even as the blogosphere—particularly LiveJournal, which is the de facto site for fan-specific blogs—has become active. Some fans are even still on Usenet.

Scholarship was slow to follow along as fans took to the Internet. Fan scholarship assumed the existence of physical fan artifacts—artwork, vids created on VCRs, hard-copy fanzines. What about blogs repurposed as fanfic archives, wikis that gather media source facts, Photoshopped manipulations, file-sharing sites to disseminate TV shows, or that relatively new form of fan artwork, avatar icons? Scholarship on these very topics has lagged behind, although work dealing with these topics can be found in books dedicated not to fan studies but to Web 2.0 and collaborative learning. Research not on fans specifically but on collaborative communities provides valuable insight into fan behavior. Two recent examples: Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’s Wikinomics (rev. ed., 2008) has sections on collaboration and peering that mesh well with fan studies; and Lawrence Lessig’s 2008 volume Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy touches on the problems of megacorporations constraining the activities of fans, even as they attempt to appropriate their work—without compensation, of course.

The volume I coedited with Kristina Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (McFarland 2006), has fan-specific essays that run the gamut from close readings of fan fiction to analyses of machinima to a study of reader as author/collaborator, and one reason it’s a valuable book is that it was among the first to talk about online fan activities and attempt to explicate them. Its introduction provides a literature review and an overview of fan studies, and its bibliography is available online (http://karenhellekson.com/theorize/fanfic-bib.html).

Even as topics in fan studies became more acceptable to write and publish about, copyright concerns blocked scholars from pursuing their interests. Publishers dislike publishing screen captures or dialogue lifted from a TV show or film without explicit permission from the copyright holder, even though such illustrative content, particularly in the context of a scholarly article, falls within fair use. Meanwhile, similar copyright concerns have kept one important fan activity, vidding, long under wraps: vid creators, fearing cease-and-desist letters from copyright holders, often hid their artworks under eyes-only Web sites and password protection, further lowering the artworks’ profile. The advent of vid-sharing sites like YouTube and Imeem has made it easier to watch and disseminate fan vids, although such vids may be blocked by copyright holders, particularly copyright holders of the music, as opposed to the images. An interview published on November 12, 2007, in New York Magazine profiling talented vidder Luminosity notes that the artist’s real name can’t be used, for fear that she will be sued by the copyright holders (http://nymag.com/movies/features/videos/40622/). This respectful article did much to raise the profile of fan vids and vidders. The fear of being sued because one is creating scholarship or transformative artworks can have a chilling effect on creativity, and it also means that important works analyzing our culture might not get written, because book and journal publishers will decline to consider them.

Several projects are underway to recuperate and legitimize fan-created artworks and clear the field to permit forms of criticism—be they creative artworks or scholarly essays—to be created without fear of reprisal. These activities are particularly important because the fan activities being elided tend to be those created by and for women. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed petitions with the U.S. copyright office to permit exemptions for bypassing copyright protection; one suggested exemption is for vidders who rip copyrighted material for fair-use remixes (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/12/remixers-unlockers-jailbreakers-oh-my). The fan advocacy group Organization for Transformative Works (OTW; http://transformativeworks.org/), which I am a member of, is sponsoring two important historical recuperation projects. One is the Open Doors project (http://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/), which seeks to preserve fan works, including hard-copy slash zines. And along with MIT’s Project New Media Literacies, OTW sponsored a video series about vids and vidding, including titles like “Why We Vid” and “What Is Vidding?” (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2008/12/fanvidding.html). In addition, OTW sponsors Transformative Works and Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/), which I coedit with Kristina Busse, an online-only peer-reviewed fan studies journal that, under its reading of fair use, permits screen captures and embedded video as forms of quotation.

In the field of fan studies, one thing is clear: copyright owners’ hold on their properties is loosening as new forms of technology permit ripping, copying, and remixing, and their frantic attempts to regain their grip are forcing us all to rethink our relationship to popular cultural texts. Cohesive groups of self-identified fans have been analyzing and assessing their relationship to media since at least the 1960s, and their insights have much to offer those interested in the culture wars more generally.

Suggested reading

Abercrombie, Nicholas, and Brian Longhurst. Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination. London: Sage, 1998.

Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Jenkins, Henry. Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. http://www.henryjenkins.org/.

———. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.

———. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

———. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Lewis, Lisa A., ed. The Adoring Audience. London: Routledge, 1992.

Porter, David. Internet Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse, eds. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Organization for Transformative Works. http://transformativeworks.org/.

Sanders, Joseph L., ed. Science Fiction Fandom. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Citation

Hellekson, Karen. Fan studies 101. SFRA Review 287 (Winter 2009): 5–7.

Lisa Yaszek, SFRA President, announced the 2009 winners of SFRA’s professional awards on Friday.  Congratulations to this year’s winners:

The Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship goes to Brian Attebery;

The Pioneer Award for the best critical essay-length work of the year goes to Neil Easterbrook for “Giving An Account of Oneself”: Ethics, Alterity, _Air_”;

The Clareson Award for for Distinguished Service to SF and fantasy scholarship goes to Hal Hall;

The Mary Kay Bray Award for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the _SFRA Review_ in the past year goes to Sandor Klapcsik for his review of _Rewired_ (SFRAR #284); and

The Graduate Student Paper Award for the best essay presented at the 2008 SFRA conference:
Dave Higgins for “The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany’s _The Fall of the Towers_.”

Join us in Atlanta, Georgia to congratulate the winners during the award presentations at the 40th annual SFRA Conference with the dual themes of Engineering the Future and Southern-Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy on June 11-14 2009.

An email from Lisa Yaszek announces the 2008 SFRA Awards winners:

The Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship goes to Brian Attebery

The Pioneer Award for the best critical essay-length work of the year goes to Neil Easterbrook for “Giving An Account of Oneself”: Ethics, Alterity, Air”

The Clareson Award for for Distinguished Service to SF and fantasy scholarship goes to Hal Hall

The Mary Kay Bray Award for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the SFRA Review in the past year goes to Sandor Klapcsik for his review of Rewired (SFRAR #284 [pdf])

The Graduate Student Paper Award for the best essay presented at the 2008 SFRA conference [pdf] goes to Dave Higgins for “The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany’s The Fall of the Towers.”

Congratulations to all the winners. Can we have a reprint of Strategies of Fantasy now, please?

In the next issue of SFRA Review, I will have two non-fiction reviews, and one of those is on Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg’s Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader.  As a WoW player and researcher, I found this anthology to be an indispensable body of work on the W0W phenomenon.  I am currently working on a paper in which I use my own digitally mediated definition of cosmopolitanism to demonstrate how a game like WoW can counterintuitively teach players to be more cosmopolitan in the physical world.  Here is a short except from my longer review:

            World of Warcraft (WoW) is the insanely successful fantasy and science fictional massively multiplayer online role-playing game launched by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004.  It continues to break sales records with its expansion packs The Burning Crusade (2007) and Wrath of the Lich King (2008), and it currently supports a worldwide subscribership of 11.5 million players.  The game, already lush with history and lore, has spawned a collectible card game, books, collectable figurines, manga, and comic books.  Furthermore, it has seeped into the cultural archive.  For example, it inspired an Emmy award winning episode of South Park titled “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” and it was featured in a Jeopardy! question.  Also, the game’s fantasy origins do not prohibit it from being a postmodern mash-up of real world history and popular culture.  Obviously, there is something to the World of Warcraft phenomenon that deserves further investigation and critique, but who has the time to study such an extensive and socially demanding rich text?

            Enter The Truants.  The members of The Truants guild are academics who study and play World of Warcraft.  Digital Culture, Play, and Identity:  A World of Warcraft Reader, an anthology of essays edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, is the end result of their in-game and online collaboration as players and scholars.  They simultaneously studied the game and its participants, played the game themselves, and used the game as a place in which to meet and talk (in addition to other online and in-person collaboration work).  Their gamer intensity is tempered by the rigor and attentiveness found in each of the chapters in this collection.

To read the full review, click over to sfra.org and join the oldest, professional organization devoted to the study of Science Fiction.  Also, our 40th annual meeting will be in Atlanta, Georgia in June.  Find out more about the conference here, and join us for author readings, essay presentations, and panels on the dual themes:  Engineering the Future, and Southern Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy. 

In the next issue of SFRA Review, I will have two non-fiction reviews, and one of those is on Rhonda V. Wilcox (co-editor of Slayage, editor of Studies in Popular Culture, and founding editor of Critical Studies in Television) and Tanya R. Cochran’s Investigating Firefly and Serenity:  Science Fiction on the Frontier.  There is a lot of great material on Joss Whedon’s ‘verse in this anthology.  I highly recommend you find a copy even if you’re only tangentially interested in Firefly and Serenity, because this collection will energize you!  Here’s a short excerpt from my full review:

Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran have assembled an amazing collection of superlative essays in I.B. Tauris’ latest offering in the Investigating Cult TV book series titled Investigating Firefly and Serenity:  Science Fiction on the Frontier.  Unlike the series’ earlier SF offering, Investigating Farscape:  Unchartered Territories of Sex and Science Fiction written by Jes Battis and published in 2007, Investigating Firefly is an anthology of essays by an interdisciplinary group of contributors focused on the unifying object of study:  Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity ‘verse.  However, this is not to say that the volume’s chapters are isolated works.  In fact, they are intimately engaged in conversation about Firefly and Serenity.  Furthermore, the essays taken as a whole form an interconnected and cross-referenced unity that many collections cannot attain.  Also, each writer brings an enthusiastic voice to his or her work that reveals how dedicated they are to the source material, while lovingly critiquing, questioning, and challenging that same work. 

To read the full review, click over to sfra.org and join the oldest, professional organization devoted to the study of Science Fiction.  Our 40th annual meeting will be in Atlanta, Georgia in June.  Find out more about the conference here. 

The tenacious and mostly harmless Stacie Hanes started the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) group on Facebook some time ago.  Recently, I signed on as an admin of the group with Stacie after I became SFRA’s Publicity Director.  Now, I would like to ask all SFRA members on Facebook (and there are a whole lot of you out there) to join the group.  It is a terrific way to put faces to the names of folks that you work with professionally, and it is another way in which we can all stay informed and connected about the going-ons of the organization and our fellow members.  Also, the group is not exclusive to SFRA members, so I would like to extend the invitation to curious passersby to find out more about SFRA.  You can find the group by clicking here, or you can search Facebook for “Science Fiction Research Association.”

It’s already the middle of January and SFRA 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia is only five months away!  Remember to get in your paper and panel proposals to sfra2009@gmail.com by 1 April 2009 (no kidding!).  For all of you folks needing early semester confirmation for institutional funding, submit your proposals in the next seven days by 20 January 2009.  

I’m particularly excited about the terrific special author lineup that we have this year.  Our Guest of Honor is Michael Bishop, and the Special Guest Authors are F. Brett Cox, Paul di Filippo, Andy Duncan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jack McDevitt, and Warren Rochelle.  

If you haven’t seen one of the ubiquitous emails that I’ve been sending out as SFRA’s Publicity Director, then see the CFP below for more details.  

SFRA 2009: Engineering the Future and Southern-Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy

June 11-14, Atlanta, GA (Wyndham Midtown Hotel)

Guest of Honor: Michael Bishop

Special Guest Authors: F. Brett Cox, Paul di Filippo, Andy Duncan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jack McDevitt, and Warren Rochelle.

SFRA is currently accepting individual abstracts and panel proposal for its 2009 conference. We welcome paper and panel submissions that explore any aspect of science fiction across history and media and are particularly interested in those that engage one or both of the conference themes, “Engineering the Future” and “Southern-FriedScience Fiction and Fantasy,” or the work of one or more of the conference’s guest authors.

The 2009 conference’s two themes and its selection of guest authors are inspired by the conference’s location in Atlanta and its co-sponsorship by Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. Atlanta, a storied locale in American history, is also in many ways an international city of the future, home to 21st century information, entertainment, technological and military industries, peopled with 21st century demographics, and prone to 21st century situations.

How is the future engineered in science fiction and how has science fiction already engineered our present? The American south has long been well known for its gothic fiction, but it has increasingly figured in works of science fiction and fantasy too. So it is equally fitting to ask, how has the south been an inspiration of science fiction and fantasy and what will its global future in speculative arts and letters be?

The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2009 at midnight EST. Please submit paper and panel proposals by email to sfra2009@gmail.com. Include all text of the proposal in the body of the email (not as an attachment). Please be sure to include full contact information for all panel members and to make all AV requests within each proposal.

For more information, email sfra2009@gmail.com. And be sure to check out www.sfra2009.com for more details!

Adam Frisch, the current Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) President, sent out the results of the SFRA officer elections appropriately enough on Election Day, November 4.  Congratulations to the winners, much respect to all the members who accepted a nomination to run for office, and many thanks to all the members who took the time to vote.  

These are your new SFRA Officers for 2009-2010:

President:  Lisa Yaszek

Vice President: Ritch Calvin

Treasurer: Mack Hassler

Secretary: Shelley Rodrigo

This past weekend I read Benedict Anderson’s seminal work, Imagined Communities (1983, rev. 1991), and I immediately began drawing connections between Anderson’s thesis and the recent conflicts on the SFRA email listserv.  Anderson seeks to theorize the nation, and he argues that the nation is, “an imagined political community–and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6).  His definition for nation has utility in the theorization of SFRA and its online email community.

The Science Fiction Research Association is a professional organization for the promotion of SF scholarship and it is composed of a variety of SF scholars, but how do its members conceptualize the organization?  What is it that makes us a community, and what is viewed as divisive and community breaking?

Anderson’s thesis can be employed to answer the first question on the conception of SFRA community.  The SFRA email list and the SFRA’s quarterly publication, SFRA Review, promote a sense of “imagined political community.”  This is not to say that all SFRA members share a common political ideology in terms of the left or right.  However, it does mean that SFRA is a discursive community concerned with the politics of SF, and the discussion of SF inherently involves some political aspect whether it has to do with the politics within or brought to a particular work, or the political statement of speaking SF in a literary field that, at least in part, resists the inclusion of SF in literature with a capital “L.”  Furthermore, the list and SFRA Review promotes the discussion of a number of viewpoints and those viewpoints and individual voices are explicitly connected with persons in the field.  As a new academic just entering SF discourse, it was an eye-opening experience to first join the listserv and read my first SFRA Review.  At that moment, I realized that I was part of a community with a shared interest in SF scholarship that I could be a part of and contribute to as well.

Sometimes the SFRA “imagined community” gets caught up on personal politics and political attacks aimed at individuals.  This, of course, it not a pervasive syndrome or disease, but it is a localizable infection that recurs from time to time on the organic-like email list.  Also, this occurrence is not emblematic of the SFRA community at large, but rather a symptom of Internet anonymity and online discussion in general.  The common term for such disruption causing individuals is “troll.”  The troll was an instigator on message boards, whose purpose was to reveal “noobs” or new, inexperienced users with baited questions from the more experienced or “l33t” operators.  There is no place for the troll in a scholarly community that is devoted to the discussion of SF and the professionalization of its members.  We are not concerned with who’s a noob and who’s l33t.  We’re all a part of this community for the same reason, and we’re all in this together.  Ours is an exchange of ideas and not a hierarchization of members with hazing in mind. 

Now, the troll has devolved (a staid SF concept, particularly in the scientific romances of Wells) into a prankster or instigator who often fans the flames of personal politics with vicious attack rather than engaging in egalitarian, civil discourse.  The troll decries this normative civility–”where is it written, and who made the rules?”  The answer to this is simple–those who participate in the “imagined community” of SFRA.  There is an official statement concerning listserv behavior, as pointed our recently by SFRA President Adam Frisch (go to www.sfra.org > Memberships > SFRA-L), but the conscientious and dutiful scholar can quickly ascertain the norms of the SFRA “imagined community” easily enough by observing what other members of the community do, and asking other members what they should do to be a part of the community, before selfishly assuming a community resource is their new toy open to their individualized reinterpretation of the scope and focus of that resource.

There are certainly compelling arguments for the free for all hijinks of the recent SFRA multiple persona troll.  I do feel that online listservs and such imagined communities and their resources that facilitate and construct those imagined communities should be anarchistic in nature.  However, anarchy does not mean anything goes.  Instead, anarchy is a form of mutual cooperation based on norms that individuals adhere to rather than pointed to the existing or non-existing explicit rule restraining their behavior.  Anarchy is about individual liberty, but that liberty cannot exceed the liberty of others.  Otherwise, the utopian anarchy shifts into other political realms.  Anarchy, in fact, relies on mutual respect in order not to become an omniarchy.  

Obviously, “imagined communities” are diachronic, and evolve over time.  SFRA and the SFRA listserv will likewise change with its membership and other social and cultural influences.  At almost forty years old, SFRA is relatively young, and the influence of technology is a powerful driving force in its further development, SF aside.  

In closing this post, I would like to share something with all of you that I shared with my first year college writing students the other day.  It’s the image of Earth taken from Voyager I out beyond the orbit of Saturn.  You may see our “pale blue dot” here.  The reason I showed this image to my class, and why I want to share it with you, is to remind us all to put things in perspective before attacking one another about anything.  Sometimes, we have to react, as I did in writing about the recent attacks on my blog.  However, I thought long and hard about this for two weeks before I decided to write what I did.  I think similar reflective practice by community members on the SFRA listserv will focus their arguments on the problem rather than on the person.

Many thanks to Ellen and everyone else who held the ship steady through the asteroid field.  Also, I’d like to remind everyone to keep their escape pods fueled and personal jetpacks handy, because these attacks are endemic to the Internet (and have a history outside electronic media as well) and are not likely to go away.

Make haste and read the officer candidate statements for the upcoming SFRA elections on the official website here.  The candidates for the 2009-2011 term are:

President–Jan Bogstad and Lisa Yaszek

Vice-President–Oscar De Los Santos and Ritch Calvin

Treasurer–Donald “Mack” Hassler and Patrick Sharp

Secretary–Rochelle “Shelley” Rodrigo and Ed Carmien

As you can see, this is a well-qualified group of nominees.  Best of luck to all the candidates, and don’t forget to vote!

[0.0] SFRA 2008 was in Lawrence, Kansas, this year, and I was head of the academic programming. Sadly, I was kept so busy that I only managed to attend paper sessions and roundtables that I was on, but I enjoyed meeting all the people I’d corresponded with. My paper, entitled “SF Fan Wikis: Source, Reference, World,” was really the only fan-oriented paper at SFRA, although one of SFRA’s recent goals is to respond better to the needs of scholars in nonprint media. Meanwhile, here is a short recap of the high points of my talk.

1. Wikis and fans

[1.1] “SF Fan Wikis” discussed fans as one subset of the communities comprising Web 2.0—that is, an interactive web focused on participation and communities, as Tapcott and Williams note in their definition of the old Web versus Web 2.0 in Wikinomics (2008 rev. ed.). It’s important to realize that the reason fan studies is becoming such a hot topic is that interactivity on the Web is now far more mainstream, and is thus attracting more attention, particularly in terms of copyright violation. Much of the scholarly work done on fans is applicable to other groups who are now congregating online, and even if the sense of the word fan doesn’t quite fit my understanding of what they do, it’s clear that they’re engaging in ways that I’d describe as fannish.

[1.2] Much has been written on fans who publish fanfic in zines or on the Internet, and about fans who blog, particularly in the LiveJournal blogsphere. However, less work has been done on fans who engage with their source material via wikis. Wiki collaborative software permits group authorship, usually of a site that organizes factual information. Wikis are useful because they shield users from code but result in a nice product, and it’s easy to cross-reference and hotlink. In addition, wiki software tracks changes, so it’s possible to negotiate edits. Wikipedia is the most famous example of a repository of factual information, and it resonantes beyond its genre: encyclopedias, with its attendant rules about documentation, disinterested author stance, and lack of bias. So ubiquitous is Wikipedia that the look of a wiki immediately implies factual information, which makes parody sites, such as the Fandom Wank Wiki, all the more amusing by the mere juxtaposition of form and content.

[1.3] The essence of the wiki is facts by consensus. This is discussed in Wikinomics (and the authors explain why this actually works), but it was more famously emphasized by Stephen Colbert, whose notions of truthiness (”knowledge ‘from the gut’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual explanation, or facts”) and Wikiality (”together we can create a reality that we all agree on—the reality we just agreed on”) emphasize the slippery nature of truth and the danger of agreeing on something when perhaps it has no basis in fact.

2. How fans use wikis

[2.1] I had hoped to find examples of fans using wikis to create fiction. I envisioned a fabulous shared world, with many authors contributing to a sprawling story that was meant to be read not vertically but horizontally, with hyperlinks taking you from one place to another in a meandering version of a choose your own adventure story, but without explicit cues to jump to a new page. However, I only found a single example of this: P/Virt. Even more disappointingly, the wiki was set up by a hopeful soul in December 2007 and then not populated. One of the people who attended my talk suggested that this might be because there isn’t sole authorship, so people aren’t credited for their work but subsumed into a collective, and thus they are less likely to contribute. To this I’ll add the fact that there aren’t too many hyperlinked stories anyway, so hyperlinking and horizontalness in storytelling may just not appeal.

[2.2] Far more common are fan wikis used to organize factual information. Good examples are the Battlestar Wiki, which gathers together information from both versions of the show; the Stargate Wiki, for which I volunteered under my fan name; and Memory Alpha, the best-known fan wiki in Star Trek fandom. (For those wondering whether an alpha implies a beta, yes: there is also a Memory Beta for licensed Star Trek products, such as games, novels, and comics.)

[2.3] Although the flattening of authority is a mark of wikis, with all contributors treated more or less equally in that all have posting and updating privileges unless they get themselves banned or unless the page is locked, status can still be conferred on posters by contributing excellent articles and usefully updating existing ones, with this information all tracked through the wiki software. Fans whose pages are rarely reverted are reliable posters. Fan wikis will never officially have true authority; only a producer associated with the program will have that. (Some TV shows are now setting up wikis for fans to contribute to; one particularly interesting one, because of the confusing lack of parallelism between truth and fiction, is dedicated to The Tudors.) However, for fan wikis, authority is generated by faithfulness to canon, thus permitting the main criterion for judging the content. A wiki contributor’s depth of canonical knowledge through close readings of the source text will be rewarded.

3. How do wikis fit into fan culture?

[3.1] I have identified three important ways that wikis fit into fan culture. First, of course, is the sheer usefulness of providing canonical information in an easy-to-navigate way. Fanfic writers will use wikis to fact check details of their story, from spellings to the color of someone’s eyes. Second is the privileged place accorded by the community to those who collect factual information about a source text: it’s useful information, and the community will reward it, primarily by visiting the wiki and increasing the hit count, but secondarily by linking to the wiki from their home page or crediting it in a story’s header. And third, providing this information better permits meta (thinking about thinking) to be generated by the community, so it provides a factual base for interpretation, although fan wiki entries themselves rarely engage in interpretation.

[3.2] Wikis have at their core the idea of fact. However, of all the fan wikis I looked at, Memory Alpha is the most interesting because it took this idea of fact and took it one step further, into the realm, I submit, of the creative:

[3.3] Memory Alpha’s primary point of view is that of a character inside the fictional Star Trek universe—an archivist at Memory Alpha, the Federation library planet.

Star Trek universe articles should be written as if the described person, object, or event actually existed or occurred, exactly like in a normal encyclopedia, but with an omniscient writer. Think of Memory Alpha as an encyclopedia that exists in the Star Trek universe. [source]

[3.4] Contributors are thus invited into a future world, one looking back on the events of the Star Trek universe as though they really happened, taking on the point of view of a disinterested observer examining long-dead people and events and reporting on them. By taking this stance, Memory Alpha becomes a far-flung fictive text meant to be read not as a story but as a collection of facts that, taken together, create a world. Maybe instead of seeking fiction in wiki through creation of something wholly new, like in the P/Virt universe, we ought to seek fiction in all wikis through the creation of a set of bits of information presented factually, and as we sort through them, the mental construction of the world by contributors and by readers becomes the creative act.

Lisa Yaszek and Doug Davis have announced the 2009 Science Fiction Research Association 40th annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia.  I’ll be there–will you?

See below for the details!

I hope you’ve enjoyed my serialized wrap-up of the Science Fiction Research Association’s 2008 Conference held in conjunction with the Campbell Conference in Lawrence, Kansas.  My apologies to everyone that didn’t make it into my account–there’s so much that I missed that I wish I could have seen and heard.  Below are links to each individual entry to make catching up a bit easier if you missed an earlier installment.  Thanks for stopping by!

SFRA 2008 in Lawrence = Pure Win

SFRA 2008 – Driving to Lawrence

SFRA 2008 – Thursday

SFRA 2008 – Friday

SFRA 2008 – Friday Awards Ceremony

SFRA 2008 – Saturday

SFRA 2008 – Sunday

With killer headache in hand, I made my way down to the SFRA business meeting on Sunday morning, the last day of the conference.

President Adam Frisch began by saying that SFRA is in “excellent shape.”  Vice-President Lisa Yaszek has worked hard on recruitment measures and we now stand at 344 members strong.  Treasurer Mack Hassler told us how the organization’s finances are in order, and we’re expanding the support a scholar program so that they are now “grants” that must be applied for.  This is good, because there’s more to go around and it will add a valuable line to one’s vita.  The four areas of funding will be travel, membership, research, and organizational grants.

Other important business concerned the transition of the sfra.org website from Virgina Tech’s servers to a private hosting company.  We’re thankful for Virginia Tech’s hosting, but there are limitations to what we can do organizationally and operationally on their servers.  Karen Hellekson, acting as interim Web Director, is facilitating the move and the expansion of SFRA services online.

Another organization matter concerned the addition of a position for Director of Public Relations.  This person will help promote the organization under the direction of the Vice President.  More on this later…

There were some convention updates on current and future SFRA meetings.

Ritch Calvin said that the 2008 SFRA meeting in Lawrence seems to be within budget.

Lisa Yaszek told us about the 2009 meeting in Atlanta, GA and sponsored by Georgia Tech and hosted by Lisa and Doug Davis.  It’s going to be on June 11-14, 2009 at the Wyndham Midtown with the dual themes (one just wasn’t enough!):  “Engineering the Future” and “Southern Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy.”  The Guest of Honor is Michael Bishop, and Guest Authors include F. Brett Cox, Paul di Filippo, Andy Duncan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Jack McDevitt.  I will post a full announcement soon separately.

Craig Jacobsen said that 2010 in Phoenix is on track with the theme, “Points of Contact,” and there’s a venue lined up near the airport for that meeting.

Pawel Frelik said that Poland 2011 (SFRA tries to hold its meeting in Europe every third year, this year was an exception because of the decline of the dollar) is proceeding well.  He has secured institutional support, and Lublin will be a great host city with easy access from the airport to the city center, hotels, and campus.

A final project worth mentioning is that SFRA Review has worked out a deal with the University of South Florida to host back issues of the Review electronically.  If you have old issues, you should drop a line to Karen Hellekson, because they need to patch some holes in their checklist for scanning (it is a destructive process, but the issues will be available to everyone online after being scanned).

In other news, dues will remain the same.

Whew.  Some good-byes later and review books exchanged hands, I checked out, spoke briefly with Veronica Hollinger, and hit the road.  On the way out of Kansas, I lost my toll ticket, but the toll lady was kind enough to believe that I got on the interstate at exit 202.  I hit 75 mph on the way back so I wouldn’t be on the road so long and to see how much it affected my fuel economy (not much–1.5 mpg less to 39 mpg).  On the way home, I saw a large billboard that looked like a green background, white text road sign that simply said “JESUS.”  There’s something science fictional about the religious iconography and messages between Ohio and Kansas.  Also, the worst roads that span an entire state are in Indiana.

When I pulled into Kent late Sunday evening, my odometer showed that I had driven 1,685 miles during the whole trip, and it was a great trip!  Thanks to everyone that was a part of 2008 SFRA in Lawrence, Kansas.  Thanks to Ritch Calvin, Karen Hellekson, and Craig Jacobsen for organizing and pulling it off without a hitch.  Thanks to Kansas University, Center for the Study of Science Fiction, the Campbell Conference, Jim Gunn, and Chris McKitterick for inviting SFRA to Lawrence this summer.  I had a great time, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again at SFRA 2009 in Atlanta, GA!