#151 = Volume 50, Part 3 = November 2023
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE2023 SFS Mullen Fellows. The Mullen Fellowship offers stipends of up to $5000 for a postdoctoral award and up to $3000 each for two PhD awards to support research at any archive with sf holdings. Fellowships are awarded in support of dissertation or book projects that have science fiction as a central focus. The program honors R.D. (“Dale”) Mullen, who founded Science Fiction Studies. This year the Mullen Award Committee consisted of SFS Advisory Board members Rachel Haywood and John Rieder, SFS editor Lisa Swanstrom, and Phoenix Alexander, JK Klein SF Librarian at UC Riverside. It was chaired by SFS editor Sherryl Vint. The following projects have been selected for support in 2023.
Our postdoctoral award recipient is Anastasia Klimchynskaya, who received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and is nearing completion of her first book, “Science Fiction and the Modern World,” which sees the emergence of the genre during the nineteenth century as beginning a recalibration of humanity’s understanding of its relationship to the natural world. This new worldview encouraged a sense of unprecedented power over the physical world through technoscientific means, yet also fostered a growing awareness of human insignificance and potential extinction, due to the era’s discoveries in geology, paleontology, and biology. Her second book project, “Landscapes of Anticipation,” aims to explore the nineteenth-century anticipatory cultures out of which science fiction emerged. She will visit the Jules Verne Collection in Amiens, where Verne resided from 1882-1900. In the nineteenth century, the collective future became for the first time a subject of serious consideration, and science-fictional thinking was enabled by new forms of mass media.
The PhD award recipients this year are Anna Maria Grzybowska, a PhDstudent at the University of Warsaw, and Seoyeon Lee, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California.
Anna Maria Grzybowska’s dissertation-in-progress examines speculative visions of human-animal futures, with a focus on narrative transformations of the animal-industrial complex within literature, film, and video games, challenging anthropocentric modes of interacting with the environment and nonhuman species and examining the recent ethical turn within the humanities approach to nonhuman animals. Her project recognizes the impact of cultural narratives in this process, arguing that a rethinking of human interactions with non-humans is crucial in the process of building more livable futures. Her aim is to consider speculative visions of the place of nonhuman animals in imagined societies of the future; also, to analyze the animal entanglements in both human worldviews and societal organization. Seoyeon Lee’s dissertation, “Writing Utopia: Gendered Nationalism and Posthuman Futures in Chinese and Sinophone Science Fiction,” considers contemporary Chinese sf by women and nonbinary writers as well as Sinophone sf from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The field of anglophone sf has long been regarded as Western and male-dominated, while current Chinese sf scholarship is primarily concerned with works from mainland China. This project advocates for a new critical space that at once decenters Western imperialism, Chinese nationalism, and heteronormative patriarchy by drawing on feminist, gender, and Sinophone studies. By exploring Sinophone sf authors from the margins of geopolitical China, including female Hong Kong writer Hon Lai Chu and Taiwanese queer author Chi Ta-Wei, this project contests the experience of gender and technology from both the Western notion of modern nation-building and the Sinocentric concept of homogenous Chineseness, challenging the techno-Orientalist gaze of cyborg bodies and China-centric representation of alternative futures. Sinophone sf attempts to subvert nationalist discourse and avoid state censorship in China by imagining a world where the ideas of nation/state, race/ethnicity, and linear temporality are contested. The process of (re)writing and (re)reading sf is considered an everyday practice of building a utopia, for sf functions as an alternative and subversive form of participation among Chinese and Sinophone sf writers and readers. Her research will include archival visits to UCR’s Eaton Collection of SF and Fantasy as well as UCR’s fanzine collections and sf research centers in Asia in order to explore Chinese/Sinophone genre magazines and fan communities. Our congratulations to the Mullen recipients, and our thanks to the selection committee for their important work in evaluating applications.
—Sherryl Vint, SFS
SFRA’s New Scholar Program. The SNS program supports advanced students and scholars of outstanding promise to assist them in taking part as active members of the sf community. In alternating years, this excellence- based grant is aimed to fund one graduate student and one non-tenure-track scholar with a PhD for a period of two years, by covering SFRA membership costs. Eligibility criteria, an application form, and information on other requested materials for this year’s track may be found on the SFRA website. The deadline for applying is 1 November 2023, with a special deadline for SFS subscribers of 8 November 2023. If you have any questions, please contact the SFRA Vice President, Ida Yoshinaga, at the following email address: <ida@hawaii.edu>.—Ida Yoshinaga, SFRA
SFRA Student Paper Award Submissions. If you, or a student of yours, presented a paper at the conference in Dresden and would like it to be considered for this award, see our website for instructions. To be eligible, all you have to do is send in the paper that you presented—as you presented it (i.e., no revised or extended versions other than light editing to correct typos). Attach the presentation text (preferably in Microsoft Word or PDF format, though PowerPoint or Prezi are also fine) to an email with the subject line “SFRA Student Paper Award Submission,” addressed to <kagreer@ georgiasouthern.edu>. To ensure we match your presentation with your submitted paper, please also name the files as follows: “Last name, first initial. Title of paper or presentation.” Submissions are due by 13 November 2023. The Committee looks forward to receiving your submissions and reading your work —SFRA
Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead. Vampires are everywhere. Appearing on streaming services, in book series, and on multimedia platforms, vampires and the undead are an integral part of popular culture in the twenty-first century. Yet vampires have a long and varied history across cultures from at least the early eighteeenth century onwards. The late Nina Auerbach commented in Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997) on their ubiquity: “Every age embraces the vampire it needs, and gets the vampire it deserves.” The transformative properties of vampires have made them uniquely able to reflect each age in which they appear. As a result, they provide original and multiple perspectives, not just on culture but on established and emerging areas of study. Vampires and the undead serve as a useful way to explore Indigeneity, environmental studies, and the ecogothic; identity, ethnicity, and gender politics; material culture, spectatorship, and fan cultures; hybridity, posthumanism, and futurities; disability, mental health, and aging studies; and theology, philosophy, and politics.
The new territories and methodologies of vampire studies retroactively shift the ways we view and understand earlier iterations of the undead and the different cultures from which they materialized. In this first book series dedicated to vampire studies, authors will explore the ongoing evolution of vampires and the undead in the broadest sense, including the supernatural, super-human, and non-human, as well as across cultures, histories, and media, using new theoretical frameworks to offer readings of established as well as more recent texts.
This original series aims to provide a focused hub for the diverse and often dispersed body of study that sees the vampire and the undead not as a subgenre of other categories, such as the Gothic or horror, but as a genre in its own right that intersects with others. An important dimension of the series is diversity and the inclusion of multiple cultural and minority perspectives, including LGBTQ+, disability, Indigeneity, and any approaches that encourage new ways of viewing the cultural impact of vampires and the undead and that widen our understanding of an ever-expanding genre. Proposals for monographs and edited collections are warmly invited. All projects undergo rigorous peer review. Contact the series editor Simon Bacon
<baconetti@googlemail.com> or the Press <editorial@peterlang.com> for more information.—Simon Bacon, Poznan, Poland
“Kommissar Rex!” The Place, Role, and Representation of Animals in Contemporary Media. In this thematic issue, we explore the place and role of animals in media, their representation and their influence in the context of new media, advertising, social networks, films, series, and other forms of media content. Animals hold a significant position in popular culture and have become an integral part of our interaction with the media environment. We invite authors to explore various aspects of the presence of animals in new media and to examine the ethical and social questions associated with their use and representation. Possible topics include animals in social networks, the evolution of animal depictions in films and series, from reality to digital embodiment; animals in video games (roles, anthropomorphism, and their interaction with players); environmental awareness, or the role of animals in conveying ecological issues; the use of animals in advertising campaigns (ethical aspects and public perception); famous animals in new media; iconic characters and their influence on popular culture; animals in virtual or augmented realities (creating immersive experiences); the symbolic significance of animals in media and their role in expressing identity and values; and ethical and social aspects of representing animals in new media. All materials should be submitted through our online submission system at <https://galacticamedia.com/index.php/gmd/about/submissions>. This ensures a more efficient review process. Indicate in the comments for the editor that your article is intended for consideration in the special issue “Kommissar Rex! The Place, Role, and Representation of Animals in Contemporary Media.” This will help us to identify and process your application correctly.
The submission deadline is 15 August 2024. For further details, see <https://galacticamedia.com/index.php/gmd/AnimalsInMedia-KommissarRe x> or contact <rastaliev@gmail.com>—Rastyam T. Aliev, Editor of Galactica Media and Associate Professor at Astrakan University, Russia
AI and Fandom. Due in part to well-publicized advancements in generative AI technologies such as GPT-4, there has been a recent explosion of interest in (and hype around) Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Whether this continues to grow or fades away, AI is anticipated to have significant repercussions for fandom (Lamerichs 2018), and is already inspiring polarized reactions. Fan artists have been candid about using creative AI tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E to generate fan art, while fanfiction writers have been using ChatGPT to generate stories and share them online. At the time of writing, 470 works cite the use of these tools on AO3 and 20 on FanFiction.net. It is likely that even greater numbers of fans are using such tools discreetly, to the consternation of those for whom this is a disruption of the norms and values of fan production and wider artistic creation (Cain 2023; shealwaysreads 2023). AI technology is being used to dub movies with matching visual mouth movements after filming has been completed (Contreras 2022), as well as to analyze audience responses in real time (Pringle 2017), holographically revive deceased performers (Andrews 2022; Contreras 2023), build chatbots where users can interact with a synthesized version of celebrities or fictional characters (Rosenberg 2023), and synthesize voices (Kang et al. 2022; Nyce 2023). Chatbots also offer translation services for transnational fandoms (Kim 2021).
Despite the multiple ways that AI is being introduced for practical implementations, the term remains contested. In their contribution to CHI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, “Researching AI Legibility through Design,” Joseph Lindley et al. consider “how AI simultaneously refers to the grand vision of creating a machine with human-level general intelligence as well as describing a range of real technologies which are in widespread use today;” and they suggest that this so-called “definitional dualism” can often obscure the ubiquity of current implementations, while stoking concerns about far-future speculations based on media portrayals (2). AI is touted as being at least as world-changing as the mass adoption of the internet, and regardless of whether it proves to be such a paradigm shift, the strong emotions it generates make it a productive site of intervention into debates about the relationship between technology and art, what it means to create, what it means to be human, and the legislative and ethical frameworks that seek to determine these relationships.
Our special issue, “AI and Fandom,” seeks to address the rapidly accelerating topic of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (ML) systems, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Large Language Models (LLMs), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and speech, image, and audio recognition and generation, as well as their relation to (and implications for) fans and fan studies. We are interested in how fans are using AI tools in novel ways as well as how fans feel about the use of these tools. From media production and marketing perspectives, we are interested in how AI tools are being used to study fans and to create new media artifacts that attract fan attention. The use of AI to generate transformative works challenges ideas around creativity, originality, and authorship (Clarke 2022; Miller 2019; Ploin et al. 2022), debates that are prevalent in fan studies and beyond. AI-generated transformative works may present challenges to existing legal frameworks such as copyright, as well as to ethical frameworks and fan gift- economy norms. For example, Open AI scraped large swathes of the internet to train its models, most likely including fan works (Leishman 2022). This is in addition to larger issues with AI, such as the potential discrimination and bias that can arise from the use of “normalized” (exclusionary) training data (Noble 2018). We are also interested in fan engagement with fictional or speculative AI in literature, media, and culture. We welcome contributions from scholars familiar with AI technologies, as well as from scholars who seek to understand its repercussions for fans, fan communities, and fan studies. We anticipate submissions from those working in disparate disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary research that operates across multiple fields.
The following are some possible topics: the use of generative AI by fans to create new forms of transformative work (for example, replicating actors’ voices to “read” podfic); fan responses to the development and use of AI, including Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT (for example, concerns that AO3 may be part of the data scraped for training models); explorations of copyright, ownership, and authorship in the age of AI-generated material and transformative works; studies that examine fandoms centering on speculative AI and androids (e.g. Her, Isaac Asimov, Westworld, STAR TREK); methods for fan studies research that use AI and ML; the use of AI in audience research and content development by media producers and studios; lessons that scholars of AI and its development can learn from fan studies and vice versa; and the ethics of AI in a fan context—for example, deepfakes and the spread of misinformation.
Transformative Works and Cultures <http://journal.transformativeworks. org/> is an international peer-reviewed online and Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, copyrighted under a Creative Commons License. TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and promotes dialogue between academic and fan communities. The journal accommodates academic articles of varying scope as well as other forms, such as multimedia that embrace the technical possibilities of the internet and test the limits of the genre of academic writing. Submit final papers directly to Transformative Works and Cultures by 1 January 2024. Articles are reviewed by the Editors, and the maximum article length is 4,000 words. Please visit TWC’s website at <https://journal.transformativeworks.org/> for complete submission guidelines, or email to <editor@transformativeworks.org>. Contact Guest Editors Suzanne Black and Naomi Jacobs with any questions, before or after the due date, at <AIandFandomTWC@gmail.com>. Due date is 1 January 2024 for publication in March 2025.—Suzanne R. Black and Naomi Jacobs, Guest Editors, Transformative Works and Cultures
Call for Applications: R.D. Mullen Fellowships, 2024. Named for Richard “Dale” Mullen (1915-1998), founder of SFS, the fellowships are awarded in his name by Science Fiction Studies to support archival research in topics related to sf, broadly construed. As mentioned in our first Note’s introduction of this year’s honorees, there are two categories, one Postdoctoral Research Fellowship up to $5000, for which candidates must have received their PhD degree yet not hold (or be contracted to begin to hold) a tenure-track position. In addition, two PhD Research Fellowships of up to $3000 each are available. The guidelines require that the archival research must support a dissertation, although students may apply at any stage of their degree. Their proposal should make it clear that applicants have thoroughly familiarized themselves with the resources available at the library or archive that they propose to use. Dissertation projects with an overall science-fictional emphasis will receive priority over projects with a more tangential relationship to the field. All projects should centrally investigate the sf genre, but may be focused on any nation, culture, medium, or era.
Project descriptions should concisely define the project and include a statement describing its relationship to sf as a genre and sf criticism as a practice. Candidates should show familiarity with the holdings and strengths of the archive(s) in which the proposed research will be conducted, and explain why archival research is essential to their project. A proposed research plan must include a time frame and a budget practical for the time proposed. Applications may propose research in (but need not limit themselves to) specialized sf archives such as the Eaton Collection at UC Riverside, the Maison d’Ailleurs in Switzerland, the Merril Collection in Toronto, Canada, or the SF Foundation collection in Liverpool. Proposals for work in general archives with relevant sf holdings—authors’ papers, for example—are equally welcome. For possible research locations, applicants may wish to consult the newly expanded listing of sf archives and collections available on the SFS website <https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/archives.html>, which was updated toward the end of 2022.
Applications should be written in English and include a project description (approximately 500 words), a work plan, and an itemized budget (in addition to the 500-word description), a cover-letter defining which award is sought, an updated curriculum vitae, and two letters of reference, including one from the faculty supervisor for candidates applying for PhD support. Award recipients must acknowledge the support provided by SFS’s Mullen Fellowship in their completed dissertations, and in other published work that draws on research supported by the Mullen Fellowship. When research is completed, each awardee must provide SFS with a 500-word report on the results of the research; this is a condition of receiving their reimbursement.
Reimbursements are allowed for valid research expenses up to the amount of the award after research has been completed; requests should be accompanied by receipts. Covered research expenses include airfare or ground transportation costs from one’s home to the archive, meals for the scholar, hotel or accommodation costs, and the expenses associated with using an archive, such as photocopying, camera fees, and other institutional costs. Mullen funding must not be used in support of conference travel (though a Mullen Fellow may attend a conference at the same venue as the archive). Excluded expenses are capital items, including computers or other equipment, the purchase of books or other research material, and meal, travel, or accommodation costs for anyone other than the researcher.
Applications should be submitted electronically to the chair of the evaluation committee and are due 3 April 2024. Awards will be announced in early May. The committee for 2024 will be chaired by Lisa Swanstrom <swanstro@gmail.com>, who will manage the administration but will not participate in voting or deliberations.—Lisa Swanstrom, SFS
Charlatans of AI? In the sixth book of the Old Testament, the prophet Joshua prays for a miracle to ensure that the Israelites will prevail over their adversaries. God grants his request, and a total eclipse of the sun ensues: “And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies” (Joshua 10:13). In the sixth chapter of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a similar “miracle” occurs, which saves the novel’s narrator, Hank, who faces execution unless he can deliver on his promise of an eclipse: “as sure as guns, there was my eclipse beginning! ... The rim of black spread slowly into the sun’s disk, my heart beat higher and higher. ” (chap. 6). Although separated by swaths of time and at farcical odds in terms of both audience and intent, these two moments help illustrate an important lesson about Artificial Intelligence.In both works, the performance of divination is captivating for its violation of natural law. That is, the sun’s disappearance defies causality, cementing Joshua’s connection to God in the Bible and saving Hank’s bacon in Twain If we take the texts at face value, however, only Joshua’s eclipse is “miraculous.” He calls upon God; God answers. In contrast, Twain’s novel depends upon narrative, rather than divine, machinations. Hank has somehow been transported back in time and is scheduled to be burned at the stake. Because he is a modern man of the late nineteenth century, however, and an engineer to boot, he knows a thing or two about the laws of physics and is able to predict the eclipse and stay his execution. Both events, however, are staged as instances of prophecy—and opportunity—from which both men profit.
Similarly, discussions of AI’s ability to parse human communication through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its ilk—Machine Learning, Neural Networking, Sentiment Analysis, Data Mining, etc.—often focus on what appears to be its miraculous capacity for prognostication, if not the inevitability of a computational Singularity. Drawing on the more corny conventions of science fiction, hype about artificial intelligence would have us believe that our enslavement to the machine—whether it takes the form of the HAL-9000, the Alpha 60, the Proteus IV, or Chat GPT—is no longer (to riff on Asimov) an evitable conflict.
Such comparisons miss the mark. Data forecasting is not prophecy. Rather, it is a science of extrapolation that depends on probability and statistical analysis. This might seem banal, but it warrants consideration, especially within popular culture. To return to the two examples above: it is Twain’s narrator, shifty and self-motivated as he is, who provides a more accurate model for understanding such technology. In the case of Joshua, the prediction leaps toward the future, untethered by rational evidence. In the case of his less illustrious counterpart, the success depends equally on his retrospective assessment of the past and the occlusion of this knowledge from the present. Stories, like statistics, do not merely anticipate outcomes. They also have the capacity to shape what they purport to measure, control what is to be counted in their reckoning, and elide what is not. Statistics form an effective speculative epistemology, to be sure, but also a sneaky and redacted one. Every time a lazy reporter invokes science fiction to compare a language model such as Chat GPT to, say, Skynet, an opportunity to make an informed use of sf’s vast archive is lost. For sf as a whole does constitute an excellent resource for considering the startlingly powerful capacity of emerging language models, not in the form of malevolently personified machines but through sf’s use of statistical extrapolation, linguistic improvisation, and computational imaginings.
The Notes and Correspondence editors of SFS invite short commentaries (from 250-2,000 words) that consider AI’s statistical, linguistic, and computational underpinnings within sf. Commentaries might focus on overlooked works of sf, from any time or within any medium, that help elucidate contemporary trends in language modeling and Artificial Intelligence.—Lisa Swanstrom, SFS
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