NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Flossie E. Hardart, Unheralded SF Writer. On or about 13 May 1913, Flossie Elizabeth Hardart was born in Akron, Ohio, to John A. Hardart and Gladys (Mossholder) Hardart, German-born Americans. As a child she showed a creative side with interests in art and dance; she also was an avid reader and the valedictorian of her high-school class. After high school, she was involved in an auto accident as well as a short marriage that ended in a bout of amnesia and a hard-fought divorce case. When the divorce was settled, she left Akron and in 1939 made her first appearance in sf history. She and her second husband (Arthur J. Murphy, an itinerant draftsman and mechanic) are both listed by Sam Moskowitz as attendees of the first World Science Fiction Convention, held in New York City in 1939 (Moskowitz 8, 10).
Hardart’s visibility in the sf world of the 1930s and early 1940s made her something of a rarity. Jane Donawerth has identified some women writers from 1926 to 1930 who followed their male contemporaries in using male narrators, adopting a “romanticized” view of “science and technology” (138), and offering a more skeptical portrayal of male heroes. Evidently some women felt pressured to be “one of the boys” (146), however, and the number of women writers active in the genre actually declined during the late 1930s (Donawerth and Kolmerten 9). Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp report that women made up only 16 per cent of the sf writing community between 1926 and 1945 (xvii). They often were drawn to sf because they loved speculation and science (xx-xxi) and because “SF ... offered the opportunity for meaningful paid labor in a relatively egalitarian environment” where they were often seen as “equals in the workplace” (xxii). Yet equality had limits. Sarah Lefanu notes that women writers who continued into the 1930s and 1940s often “assumed a male voice and non gender-specific names to avoid prejudice on the part of editors and readers alike”—C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett are key examples (2). Flossie Hardart began with gender-neutral initials in signing her sf; but after she left the genre, she assumed leadership roles in almost every one of her future fields. Hardart eventually was among the first women members of the American Society for Mechanical Engineering, yet she received mixed notices (and messages) about her involvement in science fiction.
She published six letters, three stories, and one non-fiction article in sf periodicals between June 1939 and July 1941. To camouflage her identity, she often gave her address as a post office box in Poughkeepsie, New York, rather than her home address. The letters, one signed as “Mrs. A.J. Murphy” and five as “F.E. Hardart,” shared many characteristics. She commented in detail on most stories published, praising those that were original and plausible, not merely “a typical space yarn with nothing to differentiate itself from the rest” (“The August Number” 103). She preferred short stories to novels (“Likes Human Interest” 66-67) and editors who chose work that inspired “excellent ideas for plots for more” (“Why Amazing Leads” 139). She appreciated the difficulty of preparing illustrations within the limits of the printing technologies of the time (“F.E. Hardart Types” 22). But she also had her eye on the masculine world she was inhabiting, calling editors to account for not publishing enough stories by women (“Dear Editor” 124), complaining about excess profanity in some stories (“F.E. Hardart Types” 22), and arguing that “sex just has no place in a science-fiction magazine” as she lobbied against provocative cover illustrations, saying “nudity is out” (“Likes Human Interest” 66-67).
Her letters were well received, but Hardart’s non-fiction article “Early Science Fiction Stories” led one reader to question her identity and authorship. An anonymous contributor to Science Fiction Weekly in April 1940 argued that Flossie Hardart was a pseudonym for Sam Moskowitz, who had “upon occasion, submitted his writings under the names of friends.” The writer wondered whether Moskowitz was “the greater part of the author known as F.E. Hardart” (“City Desk” 4). Sam Moskowitz did know Flossie Hardart, as seen in his mention of her as an attendee of the New York Worldcon; and Moskowitz was known to use pseudonyms; a Golden Atom article in 1940 listed Hardart among those (Hall 140; “Fan Pseudonyms” 14). Yet Hardart herself indignantly denied the charge, writing that she found it “amusing” that anyone thought “I had collaborated with Sam Moskowitz, or he with me.” She called this “a ridiculous supposition” and assumed that Sam, “being a gentleman,” would write a quick denial, “ending the debate before it has all begun.” Editor Robert Lowndes responded that the anonymous claim challenging her authorship was just speculative, but he did add that “to date, no denial or comment has been forthcoming from ... Mr. Moskowitz” (“F.E. Hardart Writes” 3).
As F.E. Hardart, she published three sf stories. “The Devil’s Pocket” (1940) features a largely unnamed crew from the nearly bankrupt Douglas-Kramer Space Lines; they sail into uncharted space, where many vessels have been lost, to recover corpses from the Anteres. Two crew members board the ship and find themselves in a battle with the seemingly reanimated dead passengers, with a tractor beam from the abandoned ship, and later with two stowaways, including a “dead girl ... [who] stood before the control panel manipulating the levers.... Her white soft fingers were changing the course of our vessel, heading it back towards the Devil’s Pocket, back towards that hellish passenger ship from which we had last escaped” (42). The passengers and the stowaways are manipulated by phosphorus-based “intelligent lights” that can only inhabit the bodies of the dead. Eventually the brave captain defeats the stowaways, the man disintegrates into ash, and the lifeless body of the girl is thrown out the airlock into space. “I felt like a murderer,” the captain relates, “it still seemed impossible that the struggling lithe body of that lovely girl could have been dead” (42). Weeks later, a fleet of ships, “equipped with compressed-air sprays, entered the Devil’s Pocket and the other similar clouds in space, and in a blazing conflagration wiped out all those alien, dangerous beings.” The ensuing salvage “was more than enough to put our company back on its feet” (43). That the ship is briefly taken over by a “girl” may be a metaphor for Flossie’s storming of the bastions of male-dominated science fiction.
In September 1940 she followed this with her only piece of fan fiction, “The Hypnohorse.” This space western features Bull Darrow, who escapes from Earth to Venus and steals a horse from the Interplanetary Police Force to go into the radium ore fields and mine enough “to keep him rich the rest of his life” (8). In the process of his escape to Venus, he has inadvertently killed a man, and the uncanny steed on which he makes his getaway manages to conjure up the dead man, his mother, and finally the devil himself merely by thinking about them. A chastened Darrow surrenders to the police next morning. Sally the horse “has the strange ability of catching the mental image thoughts produce in human brains ... and can project these thought patterns before the eyes of a human, making him believe he sees what he is thinking” (9-10). Sally ends the story obediently waiting for her reward of alum while Darrow is imprisoned (10).
Hardart’s last sf story was “The Beast in Space” (1941). This features prospector Nat Starrett and his telepathic space hound Digger, who respond to a distress call from a girl held prisoner on an asteroid. The “girl” is apparently a robot, and both she and her broadcasting device are manipulated by an intelligent “mineral creature” that has lured several ships to their doom by posing as the asteroid. This beast employs “small bowling-ball like things” that emit seductive music and a “dull bluish light” before deploying tentacles to seize life-forms that it leisurely devours (84-85). Starrett and Digger eventually locate a “locked door ... firmly cemented into the natural opening of the cave” (86). Within, they find the half-eaten body of Captain Helmar Swenson; his handwritten note tells them that he and his daughter were lured here but that he was able to lock her safely in another room. Starrett manages to blast his way into the room, finds the girl barely alive—and then she opens fire on him, sending “bolt after bolt straight ahead, her eyes wide and staring” (87). Eventually she tires, and Starrett can complete his rescue. He returns to the cave and starts to activate all of the lost ships in sequence in order to create an explosion to destroy the beast. Then he realizes that the asteroid is made out of a rare and precious metal called Zirconia, “one of the compounds he’d intended prospecting for on the moons of Saturn” (89). He thinks about calling off his explosion to preserve the metal, but the beast has begun to fight back, attempting to use its stomach’s acid to envelop him, and Starrett has to flee. His ship escapes just before “he saw the small planetoid lurch suddenly, bounding off its orbit at almost a right angle. The sudden combined force of all of the rockets within the cave had sent it hurtling away like a rocket itself” (89) to shatter into fragments as it bounces off the other asteroids in the group. The story ends with Starrett, Digger, and the girl heading through the asteroid belt to pick up stray bits of Zirconia to sell back on Earth. Starrett gets the girl and his fortune (89). F.E. Hardart’s career in science fiction appears to have ended with this story.
Donawerth notes that male narrators in feminist sf are often “non-normal” and generally “outside of their societies” (147-48). Jim Villiani has posited that women writers tend to emphasize “non-heroic” male protagonists, antiheroes who caricature the traditional epic hero (21-23). Hardart’s heroes follow Villiani’s characterization of the hero as “bumbling interlocutor and as delegate, not as power broker,” caught in a world where the tension is “between discretion and mistake, rather than a simplistic war between good and evil.” These flawed heroes are prone to “uncertainty, vacillation and indecisiveness” (25-26). The unnamed captain and his crew in “The Devil’s Pocket,” Nat Starrett of “The Beast in Space,” and hapless Bull Darrow of “The Hypnohorse” all satisfy these criteria and conform to Villiani’s picture of “relatively lonely, isolated individuals condemned to solitude,” “obsessed with their initial goals and then by what they perceive as their failures” (27). Villiani also convincingly postulates that sexual disruption frequents this kind of story (28): the crew in “The Devil’s Pocket” almost lose their spaceship to a reanimated female corpse; Nat Starrett is duped by a female robot and then nearly killed in a gun-battle with a dying woman; and Darrow falls in with a female who not only is better than he is but who is also a horse. These characters all meet Villiani’s criteria of male heroes depicted in a way “consistent with a modern feminist perspective that questions the assumptions underlying patriarchal structure” (30). Sadly, Hardart herself left no notes to back up this reading—only speaking of her desire to “write stories of this type every bit as interesting and as exciting” as stories written by men (“Dear Editor” 124).
In 1941 Hardart published field notes on the distillation of birch oil in Pennsylvania in Nature (“Oil From Birches”); it was significant enough to be cited in one of the major compendia of research on essential oils (Guenther 12). Evidently her switch to hard science allowed her to leave both A.J. Murphy and the sf community behind. As Flossie Jordan (and later Flossie Sheehan), she would pursue a career in mechanical engineering and mineralogy. She held teaching positions in six universities in the southwest and western United States and designed pipe for the US Army in Morocco. She designed prototype spacecraft for Lockheed Martin and worked as a technical writer. In many of these positions, she was the only woman at work, or one of just a few. She was a proponent of female independence in her brief career as a member and public speaker for the American Association of University Women, speaking then and later about her solo travels throughout Asia and Africa. She was a party to two further divorce cases, although she decided to stay with her fourth husband. She made one utopian political gesture, signing a 1969 declaration that scientists and engineers should show social responsibility toward their world due to the “harmful impact of technology on environments, culture and values” (Santa Clara Conference 241). She died on 4 April 1992 in San Lorenzo, California, “after a long illness” (“Flossie E. Sheehan”). Her obituary lists no events prior to her graduation from Purdue University as an engineer in 1948. She came a long way from humble beginnings in Akron, but all that now remains of her involvement with sf is her writing.—Charles Levi, University of Toronto
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author thanks Andy Hooper for the off-hand comment that inspired this work, the University of Iowa libraries, and especially Peter Balestrieri, for their assistance with both the digitized and non-digitized material from the Rusty Hevelin Collection of Science Fiction; and also <fanac.org>, led by Joe Siclari, and the Luminist League <www.luminist.org> for preserving many of the sources consulted. The author also wishes to acknowledge the work of fans who declined to be credited for their assistance.
WORKS CITED
“City Desk.” Science Fiction Weekly (14 Apr. 1940): 4.
Donawerth, Jane. “Science Fiction by Women in the Early Pulps 1926-1930.” Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Ed. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol Kolmerten. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994. 137-52.
───── and Carol Kolmerten. “Introduction. ” Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Ed. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol Kolmerten. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994. 1-14.
“Fan Pseudonyms.” Golden Atom (May 1940): 13-14.
“F.E. Hardart Types.” Spaceways (Oct. 1940): 22.
“F.E. Hardart Writes.” Science Fiction Weekly (12 May 1940): 3.
Guenther, Ernst. The Essential Oils. Vol. 6: Individual Essential Oils of the Plant Families. Toronto : Van Nostrand, 1952.
Hall, Hal W. Sam Moskowitz: A Bibliography and a Guide. College Station, TX, 2017. Online.
Hardart, F.E. “The August Number.” Science Fiction (Dec. 1939): 103.
─────. “The Beast in Space.” Comet (Jul. 1941): 82-89.
─────. “Dear Editor.” Strange Stories (June 1939): 124.
─────. “The Devil’s Pocket.” Astonishing Stories (June 1940): 35-43.
─────. “Early Science Fiction Stories.” Spaceways (Mar. 1940): 15.
─────. “The Hypnohorse.” Spaceways (Sep. 1940): 8-10.
─────. “Likes Human Interest.” Future Fiction (Jul. 1940): 66-67.
─────. “Oil from Birches.” Nature Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly with Popular Articles about Nature. 34.10 (Dec. 1941): 553-54, 578.
─────. “Why Amazing Leads.” Amazing Stories (Jan. 1940): 139.
Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. London: Women’s Press, 1988.
Moskowitz, Sam. “The World Science Fiction Convention.” New Fandom 1.6 (Jul. 1939): 4-10.
Santa Clara Conference. “The Social Responsibility of Engineers.” Technology and Culture 11.2 (1970): 241.
Villiani, Jim. “The Woman Science Fiction Writer and the Non-Heroic Male Protagonist.” Patterns of the Fantastic. Ed. Donald M. Hassler. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont, 1983. 21-30.
Yaszek, Lisa, and Patrick B. Sharp. “Introduction: New Work for New Women.” Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction. Ed. Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2016. vii-xxv.
Moonbit: Poetry from Apollo 11’s Computer Code. Moonbit, by James Dodson and Rena Mosteirin, is a work of experimental poetry and prose based on the computer code used to direct Apollo 11 to the moon on 20 July 1969. A full account can be found in the July issue of the Dartmouth News. Punctum Books, the publisher, describes the work as
a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of computer software through multiple readings and rewritings of a singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the ‘AGC.’ Moonbit remarks and remixes the code that made space travel possible. Half of the work is erasure poetry that uses the AGC code as the source text, building on the premise that code can speak beyond its functional purpose.
Dobson and Mosteirin have taken their title from an onboard toggle switch—called a moonbit—that allowed the Apollo astronauts to alternate their representation of space. One position put the Earth at the center of the universe; the other placed the moon in that central spot. A print and online version of Moonbit is available from Punctum, an independent open-access publisher. Says Dobson, “Moonbit will not get you to the moon, but seeks to reclaim the text that did this, as a site for artistic exploration.”—Charlotte Albright, Dartmouth Magazine
2018 Science Fiction Research Association Awards. At the annual conference in June 2019, the 2018 SFRA Awards were presented. The winner of the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to sf and fantasy scholarship was John Rieder, and Sherryl Vint received the Thomas D. Clareson award for distinguished service. For the best critical essay-length work of the year, Jed Mayer received the Pioneer Award for “The Weird Ecologies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” SFS 45.2 (2018): 229-43. The Student Paper Award went to Grant Dempsey for “‘Did they tell you I can Floak?’: Living Between Always and Sometimes in China Miéville’s Embassytown.” The Mary Kay Bray award for best essay, interview, or extended review in the SFRA Review resulted in a tie this year. Winners were Amandine Faucheux’s review of The Stone Sky (#324) and T.S. Miller’s review of The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (#323).—Keren Omry, President, SFRA
Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize. Aimee Bahng, assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Pomona College, has been awarded the seventh annual Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize for Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Duke UP, 2018). The SFTS Book Prize honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections between popular culture, particularly science fiction, and the discourses and cultures of technoscience. The award is designed to recognize groundbreaking and exceptional contributions to the field. Books published in English between 1 January and 31 December 2018 were eligible. The jury for the prize this year was Colin Milburn (University of California, Davis), Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University), Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University, Bloomington), and Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw), who served as jury chair. The committee notes that Migrant Futures “casts an alternative genealogy of the neoliberal present by examining speculative fiction by writers of color over the past four decades.” The book demonstrates the reliance of technofuturism on imperialist exploitation and environmental racism. Commenting on Bahng’s important contribution, the committee praised her methodology, which uses feminist, queer, and decolonial frameworks for thinking about speculative fiction. Migrant Futures, in the committee’s words, “shows us the wayward potentialities of biotechnology and speculative thinking” in cultural formations that Bahng calls migrant futures. Congratulations to Bahng on her excellent work, and my thanks to the jury, and especially to chair Paweł Frelik, for their considerable work in adjudicating this award.—Sherryl Vint, SFS
2019 Mullen Fellows Announced. TheMullen Fellowship offers stipends of up to $3000 for a post-doctoral award, up to $2000 for PhD awards, and up to $1000 for the Masters award in support of research at any archive with sf holdings. Fellowships support dissertation or book projects that include science fiction as a central research focus. The program was instituted tohonor Richard “Dale” Mullen, founder of Science Fiction Studies. This year the Mullen Fellowship Award Committee consisted of Graham J. Murphy and Carl Freedman, SFS Consultants, and SFS editor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. It was chaired by SFS editor Sherryl Vint. The committee has selected the following projects for support in 2019.
The project of Dylan Henderson, an MA student at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, explores how the genres now known as fantasy, horror, and sf gradually coalesced during the 1920s but then separated. His research investigates the role of the early pulp magazines in this process. Dylan will travel to the John Hay Library at Brown University, whose holdings include a complete collection of Weird Tales.
A PhD award goes to Suzanne Boswell, PhD candidate at Rutgers University, in support of her dissertation, “Tropics of Temporality: Science Fiction, Caribbean Literature, and Narratives of the Future,” which explores the Caribbean’s centrality to sf’s postwar imagination. One chapter looks at the gap between the cyberpunk novel’s dystopian portrayals of cyber-technology and the technologist reception of cyberspace as a utopic escape. She will travel to the Cushing Memorial Library at Texas A&M University to examine the extensive archive of correspondence among William Gibson, his agent Martha Millard, and his publishers to further understand how publication practices in science fiction fueled technological transformations.
Michael Green also received a PhD fellowship in support of “Beyond Horror: A Phenomenology of the Weird.” A PhD candidate at West Virginia University, he will explore the defining features that he argues give the Weird its own unique genre character. To conduct the research necessary to support this project, he will visit the H.P. Lovecraft archives at Brown University’s John Hays Library to read Lovecraft’s correspondence with people such as Clark Ashton Smith, Donald Wandrei, and August Derleth, as well as the newly acquired papers of one of the New Weird’s most formidable practitioners, Caitlin Kiernan.
Katie Stone, a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London, is the third recipient of PhD support. She will visit the University of Oregon to research the papers of Joanna Russ. In particular she will focus on Russ’s children’s book, Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978) and her novel, We Who Are About To ... (1977), in which the possibility of future children is rejected in favor of a queer present. She will attempt to read these texts as well as Russ’s contemporary correspondence in order to produce a more holistic understanding of the role of childhood in Russ’s queer feminist sf.
Post-doctoral support was awarded to Derek Lee, who received his PhD in English from Penn State University. His research project, Parascientific Revolutions, explores the concept of the paranormal mind in twentieth-century literature and science. His study tracks the evolution of paranormal cognition from its roots in psychical research and literary modernism to its later transformations via quantum physics, systems biology, Golden-Age sf, and speculative ethnic fiction. One area that remains underdeveloped in the literary and scientific history of paranormal discourse is the connection between the “psi fi” subgenre and government parapsychology. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the US government’s Stargate Project attempted to develop a new form of clairvoyant spycraft known as “remote viewing.” As the creator of remote viewing, a founding member of Stargate, and a prolific author of psychical literature, Ingo Swann is a central figure in modern parapsychology whose contributions to psi fi have been overlooked. In addition to reviewing the Ingo Swann papers at the University of West Georgia, Dr. Lee will visit the Bud Foote Science Fiction collection at Georgia Tech to research their ethno-futurism archives.
The second post-doctoral Mullen Award award was granted to Dennis Wilson Wise, who received his PhD in English from Middle Tennessee State University. He studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and American literature. Among J.R.R. Tolkien’s lesser known legacies was his attempt— alongside that of C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden—to revive alliterative poetry, a form common among Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and medieval poets. At the same time, SFWA Grand Master Poul Anderson also contributed to the twentieth-century alliterative revival and probably deserves co-credit as the movement’s originator. Unfortunately, Anderson never achieved Tolkien’s popularity, nor did he publish much alliterative verse outside of small fanzines. Dr. Wilson plans to explore the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection at the University of California, Riverside, to ascertain the extent of Anderson’s “pulp” alliterative revival.
Congratulations to the recipients, and my thanks to the selection committee for their work in evaluating applications.—Sherryl Vint, SFS
Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special Issue of Science Fiction Studies. We invite papers on the role of nostalgia as a structure of feeling that animates speculative, utopian, and (post)apocalyptic texts across media. Although there has been increasing critical attention to the role of memory in these genres, nostalgia is a neglected topic. Following Jameson’s description of sf as a mode of “apprehending the future as history” (1982), we seek papers that explore nostalgia as affect and motif in the genre, apparently even in seemingly future-oriented texts such William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). It has been consolidated within mainstream popular culture via George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) which self-consciously harkened back to earlier eras, texts, and subgenres, from the space operas of E.E. Doc Smith to the film serials of the 1930s, from Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) to Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). In contemporary media, Star Wars itself is now one among many rebooted titles, as mainstream science fiction reanimates its own popular history. As Judith Berman argues in “Science Fiction without the Future” (2001), even the stories of Golden Age pulp sf were less about the future than “full of nostalgia, regret, fear of aging and ftlinedeath.” The genre has frequently been preoccupied with the past as it imagines the future, evident in films such as Code 46 (Winterbottom 2003) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004) which are driven by almost futile search for the lost object. If utopianism produces future-oriented discourses that seek to transform the present into an idealized future, nostalgia might be described as inverted utopianism that generates an ameliorated, utopianized recollection of the past. This is evident in nineteenth-century utopias, such William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) whose post-apocalyptic future betrays a yearning for a pre-industrial, pastoral era. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym contends that nostalgia can function as as a critical form of remembering that is not bound to a single version of the past, enabling texts to revisit the past to animate different realities and futures, a technique central to works such as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1974) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1974). Classical dystopias such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) often look to the past as a time of more authentic existence, a motif that continues in recent television series such as The Walking Dead (2010-) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2017-), especially in their use of flashback sequences.
Most recently, we have seen widescale interest in sf that nostalgically engages with the 1980s, often through allusions to sf of that era. Netflix has been a major agent in this trend, exemplified by the phenomenal success of Stranger Things (2016-), whose 1980s setting is also contemporary with Jameson’s theorization of sf and history. Other Netflix projects indicate an ongoing interest in nostalgia and this particular decade, such as the German series Dark (2017-), which uses time travel and alternative histories to evoke the 1980s as a consequential turning point in history, or the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror (2011-), whose recreation of the 1980s in an online virtual afterlife is often described as the only optimistic episode of the series. This recent cycle of sf might be thought of as second-order nostalgia, that is, texts that encourage young audiences to feel nostalgia about a period they did not live through, one they have experienced only via media made at this time. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s theorization of “post-memory,” we suggest the term “post-nostalgia” as a way to conceptualize the affective and thematic preoccupations of such work.
We invite submissions that explore these complex intersections of nostalgia and sf. We are interested in papers that revisit the dominant perception of nostalgia as a conservative affective response to a contemporary sense of crisis, and we especially welcome those that explore reflective, critical, or transformative examples of nostalgia that enable a dialectic relationship to the past. We encourage papers that explore how and why nostalgia has resurfaced in genres of the speculative at this particular historical moment. Possible topics include but are not limited to nostalgia and cognitive estrangement; nostalgia and temporality; nostalgia and media archaeology; nostalgia, utopia, dystopia, and (post)apocalypse; identity, nostalgia and counter-memory; steampunk; commodifying nostalgia and the screen industries, including franchising and cross-marketing; and nostalgia and fandom.
We welcome submissions that explore science fiction in any medium. This special issue will be guest edited by Aris Mousoutzanis (A.Mousoutzanis @brighton.ac.uk) and Yugin Teo (yteo@bournemouth.ac.uk). Please send abstracts of 300-400 words by 1 December 2019 to both editors. After an initial review of proposals, selected essays will be invited to submit full drafts due in April 2020. —SFS Editor
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