Introduction: Expanding the Archive

Emily Midkiff and Sara Austin

In 2019, the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) won a Hugo award. This repository of nearly five million original works, representing over thirty thousand fandoms, stands out in the world of science fiction and fantasy awards not only because of the sheer number of authors it represents but also because it is the first Hugo win for unpublished fanfiction, and many of the authors are young women. This victory draws attention to what is “archived” and, by extension, what is valued.

Materials gain different cultural capital when archived and studied. In “The Child, the Scholar, and the Children’s Literature Archive,” Kenneth Kidd addresses this in the context of children’s literature archives: “By preserving children’s materials, and conferring upon them special (primarily historical but also affective) value, the archive asserts the research value of children’s literature within the broader culture of academic and university research” (9). A very similar thing could be said of science fiction and fantasy archives, where the mere act of archiving claims value for the genre and its objects but also makes claims about what is valuable within the genre.

The often-contested canon of speculative fiction demonstrates the importance of asking what is worthy enough to be collected. Recently, there has been more pushback about what is central, and to whom. The documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, produced by Tananarive Due and directed by Xavier Burgin, begins with the assertion that “black history is black horror” and Dr. Ebony Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic considers the simultaneously central and marginalized Black female characters in recent books and film. Each of these examples makes a case for expanding the idea of the canon (and what we value enough to archive) to include more voices.

Curators of archives, whether in libraries, classrooms, scholarly work, or even fandom collections, must address how curated materials and their cultural context represent choices that speak to the curator’s and the consumer’s values and priorities. When archives hold the power to exclude and include, to value and affirm both people and genre, then how do we as scholars decide what belongs and how do we think through the consequences of those choices for ourselves, our students, and our field? The articles in this issue begin to answer that question by engaging with a variety or archival methods and technologies.

Our issue opens with two articles arguing for which types of speculative fiction should and can be archived. First, librarian Sandy Enriquez and archivist Andrew Lippert consider the marginalization of queer fan fiction in archives in “Fandom and Sexuality in the Archives: Collecting Slash Fan Fiction and Yaoi/Boys’ Love Manga.” While slash fiction as the subject of scholarly research is not new, collections like theirs at the University of California, Riverside remain limited. Enriquez and Lippert include an overview of archival theory and critical archival studies, a useful opening for this issue, and discuss the difficulties of collecting this “taboo” material.

Next, Nicholas Clark discusses how speculative fiction dinosaur texts must balance fact with fiction if they are expected to function as an archive of popular scientific communication in “The Mosasaurus’s Tongue: Narrative, Fiction, and Scientific Speculation in Raptor Red.” Clark investigates the space between theory and speculation in Robert Bakker’s novel and argues that it offers an effective example of how dinosaur fiction can communicate new scientific concepts to readers, but only if fiction and fact are clear.

The second part of this issue deals with questions of cultural archives and archival bodies. In “Toward Korean American Ethnoformalisms: The Historian-Archivist and Speculative Gendered Empowerments in Minsoo Kang’s Of Tales and Enigmas,” Stephen Hong Sohn engages in the archival recovery of Kang’s work as an example of Korean American speculative fiction. Sohn argues that Kang’s historian-archivist character connects his seemingly disparate short stories by repeatedly discovering and recording tales of women who are empowered by speculative abilities and refute the centrality of men in times of war and violence.

Then, in “The Colonization of Bodies and Cyclical Nature of Othering in Nnedi Okorafor’s ‘The Popular Mechanic,’” Mary Laffidy analyzes the framework of postcolonial science fiction in Okorafor’s short story and how it highlights the ways in which biomedical experimentation collects an archive of often-unconsenting human samples. Laffidy focuses on the figure of Papa as an example of petro masculinity situated within a futuristic Nigeria to discuss how oil companies devalue nature, culture, and the human body. She concludes that the story reminds readers of colonialism’s “historical existence and cyclical nature to prove how the systems of the present determine the violence of the future.”

To close the issue, Kaylee Jangula Mootz’s “The Body and the Archive in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God” shows how Native bodies challenge our definitions of the archive to include the data and memories of a people, as demonstrated by Erdrich’s story. Jangula Mootz situates her reading within the growing climate crisis, arguing that reading the body as a living archive is necessary for humanity’s survival.

Archives hold our collective cultural memory. They can serve as tools for scholarly recovery and reconciliation, but only if we allow and encourage them to do so. The articles in this issue suggest sites where our current ideas and expectations for the archive might open and expand, increasing access to new forms of knowledge and valuing the works of multiple communities and types of scholarship. Presented together, these voices blend into a compelling argument for expanding the archives of speculative fiction in both form and content.

Articles

Introduction: Expanding the Archive
Emily Midkiff and Sara Austin

Fandom and Sexuality in the Archives: Collecting Slash
Fan Fiction and Yaoi/Boys’ Love Manga
Sandy Enriquez and Andrew Lippert

The Mosasaurus’s Tongue: Narrative, Fiction, and
Scientific Speculation in Raptor Red
Nicholas Clark

Toward Korean American Ethnoformalisms: The Historian
Archivist and Speculative Gendered Empowerments in
Minsoo Kang’s Of Tales and Enigmas
Stephen Hong Sohn

The Colonization of Bodies and Cyclical Nature of Othering
in Nnedi Okorafor’s “The Popular Mechanic”
Mary Laffidy

The Body and the Archive in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home
of the Living God
Kaylee Jangula Mootz

Reviews

Carys Crossen’s The Nature of the Beast: Transformations of
the Werewolf from the 1970s to the Twenty-First Century
Rev. by Antonio Alcala Gonzalez

Catherine Belsey’s Tales of the Troubled Dead: Ghost Stories
in Cultural History
Rev. by Amanda Dillon

Laurence Talairach’s Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror, and
Anatomical Culture
Rev. by Jeanette A. Laredo

Sarah Cole’s Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the
Twentieth Century
Rev. by Rob Latham

John M. Bower’s Tolkien’s Lost Chaucer
Rev. by T. S. Miller

Juliette Wood’s Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore:
From Medieval Times to the Present Day
Rev. by Indu Ohri

Jennifer Schacker’s Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s
Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime
Rev. by Don Riggs

Natalie Wilson’s Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in
21st Century Horror
Rev. by Carol Senf

Omar Ahmed’s RoboCop
Rev. by Matthew Sorrento

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins’s The Paradox of Blackness in
African American Vampire Fiction
Rev. by Jonathan W. Thurston

Tim Lanzendörfer’s Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in
Contemporary Literature
Rev. by Jonathan W. Thurston

Simon Brown’s Creepshow AND Joshua Grimm’s It Follows
Rev. by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.

Karl Bell’s Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety,
and Spectrality
Rev. by Lindsey Carman Williams

Darren Arnold’s The Devils AND Lindsay Hallam’s Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me
Rev. by Madison Mae Williams

Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel’s Sideways in Time:
Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction
Rev. by Paul Williams