WOMEN IN THE BLACK FANTASTIC
Tickets are now available for this year's SFF conference in partnership with Anglia Ruskin University. Women in the Black Fantastic is a two-day online event celebrating the achievements of Black women in speculative fiction and other media. The dates of the conference are 7 and 8 December, and our keynote speakers are Nyasha Mugavazi and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. You can purchase tickets here: https://buytickets.at/thesciencefictionfoundation/1384050 - there are discounts for students and the unwaged. The conference will be held via MS Teams - links will be made available in early November. The current programme is below (all times GMT):
Saturday, 7 December
13.00
Introduction
13.15
Panel 1: Into the Deep
Andrew M. Butler, Ellen Gallagher’s Aquatopia: Fast- Fish and Loose-Fish
Addison Cox, Of Fish and Robots, of Stars and Seas: (Re)Imagining the Diaspora and the Diasporic Body through Rivers Solomon and Nalo Hopkinson
Claire Creedon, ‘History was everything’: How Rivers Solomon’s The Deep reimagines Afrofuturist Myth to represent contemporary Black Americans, rather than imagine a utopic future
Panel 2: Alterities
Omotoyosi Odukomaiya, Okorafor’s Aliens: Identity, Otherness and Alterity in Nnedi Okorafor’s Novels
Kayoko Takegoshi, The (In)Visibility of African Women in Black SF
Sheryl Medlicott, Visionary Utopias: Recognizing a Movement
14.45
Panel 3: Toni Morrison and SFF
Salem James Martinez, title tbc
Sruthi Veeragandham, Pain and Healing in a Black Utopia: Octavia Butler’s Parables and Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Panel 4: Horror
Naiara Berganzo-Besga, Utopia, Dystopia, and the Gothic Traversal of Limits in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis
Doina Ciochina, Bodies as Commodities and Stolen Identities in Horror: A Comparative Study of Never Whistle at Night and Get Out
16.00
Break
16.30
Panel 5: Freedoms
Kay R. Barrett, ‘We Aren’t Human’: The Superwoman Schema and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
Dan Avant Blachman, Rememory and Quantum Time in Afrofuturist Visionary Fiction
Joy Sanchez-Taylor, Black Magic/Blood Magic in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
Panel 6: Transformations
Jonathan P. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor’s Fictions of Change: The Great Costs and Strange Rewards of Transformation
Chamara Moore, Transforming Possibility: Black Trans visionary fiction and Octavia Butler’s legacy
Martha Zornow, Full Ride to Higher Ed, But at What Cost? Colonial Subjects at Imperial Educational Institutions in Binti and The Fifth Season
18.00
Keynote 1 - Nyasha Mugavazi (title tbc)
19.15
Close
Sunday, 8 December
13.00
Introduction
13.15
Panel 7: Identities
Quijie Cheng, ‘You Don’t Always Obey’: Wilful Arms, Trees, and the ‘Unspeakable Taboos’ in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
Rowan Grayson, Multiplicitous Identity as Anti-Colonial Resistance in Elysium
Julia Reade, The Ontological Weight of Names in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
Panel 8: Communities
Beth Aherne, ‘It is so much of what we are’: Surviving the Family in Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn and Fledgling
Jenny Bonnevier, N.K. Jemisin’s The World We Make: Radical Politics and Radical Connections
Nayee Dipaliben and Paressh Joshi, Faith and Resistance in Parable of the Talents: A Journey of Survival and Hope
14.45
Panel 9: Colonial Legacies
Alokita Raichaudhuri, Rethinking the African Diaspora through the images of two sisters; torn apart by fate, brought together by their collective memory of community, captivity and identity in Yaa Gyasi’s HomecomingJasmine H. Wade, A Broken Earth: Antiblackness and Conquest in N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season
Panel 10: The Sacred
Helane Androne, Butler’s Legacy: Emancipatory Archetypes and Sacred Texts
Yesmina Khedhir, ‘This world seething with spirit . . . When you ask, spirit answer’: Spirituality and Survival in Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend
16.00
Break
16.30
Panel 11: Pasts and Futures
andré carrington, Hard Vacuum: Black women space workers femme the future
Nicole Devarenne, Reading the Great Book: West African cosmopolitanism in Butler and Okorafor
Mary-Antoinette Smith, To Be or Not to Be Octavias – That is the Question!
Panel 12: The Power of the Story
Abíọ́dún Abdul, Past Speculation for Future Inspiration
Jacinth Howard, ‘Something Old, Some Place New’: Caribbean Speculative Narratives in Short Form
Debra Providence, A Subversive Aesthetic: An exploration of the carnivalesque in Nalo Hopkinson's Falling in Love with Hominids
18.00
Keynote 2 - Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (title tbc)
19.15
Close
Any questions, please send them to the conference co-organizer Paul March-Russell (paulmarchrussell@gmail.com).
Published 6 September 2024
ANNOUNCING THE PETER NICHOLLS ESSAY PRIZE 2025
We are pleased to announce our next essay-writing competition. The award is open to all post-graduate research students and to all early career researchers (up to five years after the completion of your PhD) who have yet to find a full-time or tenured position. The prize is guaranteed publication in Foundation in 2025.
To be considered for the competition, please submit an original article on any topic, period, theme, author, film or other media within the field of science fiction and its academic study. Approximate length should be 6000-8000 words. All submitted articles should comply with the guidelines to contributors as set out on the journal pages of the SF Foundation website. Only one article per contributor may be submitted.
The deadline for submission is Monday, 6 January 2025. All competition entries, with a short (50 word) biography, should be sent to the journal editor at paulmarchrussell@gmail.com The entries will be judged by the editorial team and the winner will be announced in the spring 2025 issue of Foundation.
Published 7 March 2024
CALL FOR ARTICLES - 'SCIENCE FICTION IN THE 1870s'
To mark the 150th issue of Foundation in spring 2025, we would like to include contributions on the topic of sf from 150 years ago, published during the 1870s. Darko Suvin once proposed 1 May 1871 as the starting-point for sf – the day that Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race was published, George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking began serialisation, and Samuel Butler submitted Erewhon to his publisher. Jules Verne, however, was already in full swing and he would soon be joined by such contemporaries as Camille Flammarion. Where else can we trace the roots of science fiction in the 1870s? How can we reassess the writers we know and who are the writers we need to rediscover?
We welcome articles on any aspect of science fiction published between 1870 and 1880. Articles should be 5000-8000 words long and written in accordance with the style guide available on the website (www.sf-foundation.org/journal). Topics may include but are not limited to the following:
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Ideas of utopia
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Humans and machine technology
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The impact of evolution and the biological sciences
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Sf and the invasion novel
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Sf and astronomy
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Satire and allegory
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Science and pseudo-science
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Space travel and other worlds
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Exploration and voyages of discovery
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Race and empire
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Gender and sexuality
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Arnold, Huxley and the ‘two cultures’ debate
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Sf and the non-anglophone world
The deadline for articles is 7 October 2024. Please email your submission to paulmarchrussell@gmail.com with a short (50-word) bionote.
Published 7 March 2024
MAUREEN K. SPELLER TRAVEL FUND NOW AVAILABLE
In honour of our departed friend and colleague, Maureen Kincaid Speller, we are launching an annual travel fund of up to £500 to enable independent scholars to pursue their research. The fund can be used to attend conferences, workshops and archives both in the UK and overseas. This has been made possible by the profits from the When It Changed conference held online in December 2022, for which we thank all the attendees. For further details, go to our new Research and Travel Funds page on the website.
Published 1 May 2023
FOUNDATION EDITOR CO-LAUNCHES NEW SCIENCE FICTION IMPRINT
Paul March-Russell and Una McCormack have launched a science fiction imprint, Gold SF, devoted to new feminist writing, to be published by Goldsmiths Press. The call for submissions is below:
Gold SF - Call for Submissions
Goldsmith’s Press is seeking to establish a dedicated imprint to publish feminist science fiction. We believe that sf and speculative fictions offer a mode of critical and utopian thinking ideally placed to address contemporary issues. We are therefore looking to commission novella and novel length work which answers to the times, dealing with subjects such as:
· Anti-rationalism and the rise of the alt-right
· The climate crisis and feminism in the Age of the Anthropocene
· Global movements of populations and refugees
· New visions of race, class, and queerness
· Expanding frontiers in gender and sexuality
· Decoloniality and indigenous knowledge traditions
· Pathways to resistance and rebellion
We are particularly keen to hear from new voices not traditionally represented by science fiction, literary fiction, and liberal feminism.
Enquiries to: Ellen Parnavelas - E.Parnavelas@gold.ac.uk
Editorial board: Abi Curtis, Elizabeth English, Joan Haran, Una McCormack, Paul March-Russell, C. Palmer-Patel, Aishwarya Subramanian, Sheree Renee Thomas and Aliya Whiteley
Follow us at: https://twitter.com/GoldSF_Books
Published 17 April 2020 (last updated 5 September 2024)