\u201cIntroduction: Fantastic Science\/Scientific Fantasy\u201d
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
Hidden within the genre term science fiction <\/em>is a powerful oxymoron. Science isn\u2019t fictional; fiction isn\u2019t science. But of course, science and fiction are indissolubly linked, as are science and fiction\u2019s more extreme extension: fantasy. In 2015 the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was organized around the theme of \u201cThe Scientific Imagination.\u201d Imagination<\/em> is a little less provocative than fiction<\/em>; a lot less than fantasy<\/em>, and yet if you look carefully at conference title and conference theme, the apparent paradox is still there, though buffered by capital letters and quotation marks and extra descriptors like \u201cin the Arts.\u201d Guests and participants were implicitly invited to find common ground between observation and deliberate impossibility, between the truths of the physical world and those we seek in stories of the unreal.<\/p>\n Guest of honor James Morrow has always relished contradictions. His fiction is cynical and generous, bleak and optimistic, tragic and wildly funny. He has never been known as a hard science fiction writer: his characters rarely make their way into space, never solve their personal problems by making technological breakthroughs in the manner of a space opera hero. Yet few writers are more dedicated to exploring the scientific imagination: the ways we use science to construct models of reality and the self. In novels such as Towing Jehovah<\/em> (1994), The Last Witchfinder <\/em>(2006), and Gal\u00e1pagos Regained <\/em>(2015), Morrow steers a perilous path between the Scylla of religious belief and the Charybdis of nihilism. He takes on the biggest themes and challenges the master narratives of religion, history, and even science, inviting us to see how each of these is a human construct. I strongly recommend any of his novels as well as his new collection, Reality by Other Means<\/em>, published by Wesleyan University Press. We are pleased to be able to publish Morrow\u2019s Guest of Honor address, which looks at imaginative literature as a form of philosophical thought experiment, a game of world views. Rather than dividing off the science of Newton and Darwin from the magical worlds of Tolkien or Le Guin, he groups them together as fellow explorers of the world of what Samuel Delany would call subjunctivity: the great \u201cwhat if.\u201d<\/p>\n Joan Slonczewski is likewise not the typical hard sf writer, not only because her name is Joan rather than John, but also because her science explores the slippery, messy stuff of life rather than the cold equations of celestial mechanics. When I say \u201cher science,\u201d I am speaking literally: Slonczewski is a professor of biology at Kenyon College and co-author of one of the standard microbiology textbooks as well as over half a dozen major sf novels. Her breakthrough book, A Door into Ocean<\/em> (1986), incorporates not only her professional expertise on genetics but also a feminist challenge to the essentialism of sociobiology and a deep pacificism that grows from Slonczewski\u2019s Quaker background. Slonczewski\u2019s participation at the Conference included an evening reading, hosted by Sherryl Vint, and an interview with Derek J. Thiess. She and Thiess continue their conversation in a follow-up email interview included here.<\/p>\n The third Guest of Honor at the Conference was Colin Milburn, who holds the Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities at the University of California at Davis, with a joint appointment in the English Department and the Science and Technology Studies Program. Starting with a double PhD at Harvard, in both History of Science and English and American Literature and Language, Milburn is particularly interested in places where C. P. Snow\u2019s famous Two Cultures become one. He has done major work on nanotechnology and its cultural influence and is currently studying computer gaming. His address at the Conference considers games as another sort of Gedankenexperiment and, as he says, as \u201can exercise in applied science fiction,\u201d a phrase that could also be argued to describe the contemporary world.<\/p>\n The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts and its affiliated Association have always made efforts to encourage and recognize the achievements of younger scholars in our field. The 2015 winner of the student award, which as of 2016 is named the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, is Taylor Evans, a PhD candidate at the University of California at Riverside. His paper on race, technology, and early science fiction\u2014or, in Hugo Gernsback\u2019s singularly tone-deaf coinage, \u201cscientifiction\u201d\u2014is published here in an expanded and peer-reviewed version. It traces a connection between the pseudo-science of race and the emerging genre, which bought into a broader cultural model of epistemology that, as Evans says, was always \u201ccentered on a subject that is implicitly white and male.\u201d Evans\u2019s essay reminds us that the imagination, even the scientific imagination, is never unconstrained. It reproduces the assumptions and blind spots of the society in which it arises.<\/p>\n Finally, Benjamin Robertson\u2019s essay on China Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s genre-challenging novel The Scar <\/em>looks at standard ways of distinguishing between science fiction and fantasy. The former carries the cognitive stamp of approval and looks to the future; the latter is seen as escapist and retrograde. Yet in much of Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s work and that of other contemporary writers of Fantastika (to use John Clute\u2019s umbrella term), rationality and knowledge are introduced in fantastic, paradigm-breaking ways that challenge us to read the fiction multiply, as participating in two or more genres simultaneously. Furthermore, that double- or manifoldness is a better way of representing reality than the single thread of traditional science fictional narrative\u2014or conventional realism, for that matter. When truly unleashed, the scientific imagination is powerful enough to challenge its own modes of thought. I was sorry not to be at the 2015 Conference in person\u2014professional duties (or, to be honest, a chance to play in a concert with Bela Fleck) kept me away. So it is a double pleasure to put this issue together and experience the gathering virtually.<\/p>\n Introduction: Fantastic Science\/Scientific Fantasy James Morrow: An Introduction, by Kathryn Hume<\/em><\/p>\n Playing the Gedanken Game: Some Observations on Scientific and Literary Thought-Experiments Joan Slonczewski: An Introduction, by Sherryl Vint<\/em><\/p>\n Guests in Conversation: An Interview with Joan Slonczewski Colin Milburn: An Introduction, by Stina Attebery<\/em><\/p>\n Hacking the Scientific Imagination The Technology of Race: White Supremacy and Scientifiction \u201cA place I have never seen\u201d: Possibility, Genre, Politics, and China Mi\u00e9ville\u2019s The Scar Handling the Handbook Harlan Wilson\u2019s They Live Susan A. George and Regina M. Hansen\u2019s Supernatural, Humanity, and the Soul: On the Highway to Hell and Back Molly Clark Hillard\u2019s Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians Murali Balaji\u2019s Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means Karen Burnham\u2019s Greg Egan Lisa A. Nev\u00e1rez\u2019s The Vampire Goes to College: Essays on Teaching with the Undead Joseph Crawford\u2019s The Twilight of the Gothic?: Vampire Fiction and the Rise of the Paranormal Romance 1991\u20132012 Anne Hiebert Alton and William C. Spruiell\u2019s Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works Rick McGrath\u2019s Deep Ends: The J. G. Ballard Anthology 2014 Marcus Harmes and Victoria Bladen\u2019s Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England Tara Prescott\u2019s Neil Gaiman in the 21st Century: Essays on the Novels, Children\u2019s Stories, Online Writings, Comics, and Other Works Alexandra Urakova\u2019s Deciphering Poe: Subtexts, Context, Subversive Meanings Judith B. Kerman and John Edgar Browning\u2019s The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film: Critical Perspectives David Roas and Teresa L\u00f3pez Pellisa\u2019s Visiones de lo fant\u00e1stico en la cultura espa\u00f1ola (1970\u20132012) <\/em>[Visions of the fantastic in Spanish culture, 1970\u20132012] Roger Bozzetto\u2019s Mondes fantastiques et r\u00e9alit\u00e9s de l\u2019imaginaire <\/em>[Fantastic Worlds and Realities of the Imaginary] Xavier Aldana Reyes\u2019s Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film Michelle Ann Abate\u2019s Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children\u2019s Literature Nadine Farghaly\u2019s Unraveling Resident Evil: Essays on the Complex Universe of the Games and Films <\/em>& Dawn Keetley\u2019s \u201cWe\u2019re all Infected\u201d: Essays on AMC\u2019s <\/em>The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human Tomislav Longinovic\u2019s Vampires Over the Ages: A Cultural Analysis of Scientific, Literary, and Cinematic Representations Suparna Banerjee\u2019s Science, Gender and History: The Fantastic in Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood Editor\u2019s Introduction \u201cIntroduction: Fantastic Science\/Scientific Fantasy\u201d Brian Attebery Hidden within the genre term science fiction is a powerful oxymoron. Science isn\u2019t fictional; fiction isn\u2019t science. But of course, science and fiction are indissolubly linked, as are science and fiction\u2019s more extreme extension: fantasy. In 2015 the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-740","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/740\/revisions\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h3>\n
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
\nJames Morrow<\/p>\n
\nDerek J. Thiess<\/p>\n
\nColin Milburn<\/p>\n
\nTaylor Evans<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Benjamin J. Robertson<\/p>\nReview Essay<\/h3>\n
\nAmy J. Ransom<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Tim Bryant<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by D. Felton<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Regina M. Hansen<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Anya Heise von der Lippe<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Chad A. Hines<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Trevor Holmes<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Jeaneen K. Kish<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Lauren J. Lacey<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Megan Mandell<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Kristen McDermott<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Jennifer L. Miller<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Cristina P\u00e9rez Arranz<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Vibeke R\u00fctzou Petersen<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Dale J. Pratt<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Amy J. Ransom<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Brittany Roberts<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by M. Tyler Sasser<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Lars Schmeink<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Carol Senf<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Catherine Siemann<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"