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Author Archives: Skye Cervone

ICFA 38 Mentors Needed

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As we get closer to ICFA 38, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to consider being a mentor for the Mentorship Program sponsored by the SCIAFA. At this time we have far more mentees signed up for the program than mentors. If you have attended ICFA before, and wish to help newcomers to the conference, I encourage you to sign up to be a mentor.

Please find the full details about the mentorship program below:

SCIAFA Mentoring Program

Since 2001, the IAFA Student Caucus (SCIAFA) has sponsored a Mentoring Program aimed at helping student scholars to find their way around ICFA, discover the natural friendliness of the conference as quickly as possible, use ICFA as an entrance into existing scholarly communities concerned with the fantastic, and leave with both fond memories of the supporting organization and plans to return.
The success of this program depends upon its volunteer participants, and this is your chance to sign up as either a mentor or mentee. IAFA and SCIAFA will be co-sponsoring a designated space where mentors and mentees can meet at the opening Conference Reception on Wednesday evening, March 22, 2016. Attendance at this meeting is the primary task to be undertaken by both mentor and mentee. If you would like to take part in the program in either role but are unable to attend the opening reception, we encourage you to sign up anyway and arrange a more convenient meeting time with your partner. The current SCIAFA representatives will match the mentor-mentee pairs. For this reason, if you interested in joining this program, please answer the following questions and send them to the SCIAFA representatives, Amanda Rudd (rudd.am@gmail.com) and Sarah Fish (srfish36@gmail.com), as soon as possible. Please fill out this information in order to sign up for either position.

1. What is your name?
2. What is your e-mail address?
3. What is your institutional affiliation?
4. What would you consider to be your main interests in the field of the fantastic?
5. When will you be arriving at the conference?
6. When will you be departing from the conference?
7. Are you currently planning to attend the conference reception on Wednesday evening? (*Last year we had a large number of mentees say “yes” and not show up, which creates embarrassments. Please inform us if your plans change and make every effort to follow through with whatever you commit.)
8. Which role are you signing up for, mentor or mentee?

—
Amanda Rudd
PhD Candidate in English and American Literature
University of Houston

CfP: Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction

Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction

deadline for submissions:
April 30, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Katherine E. Bishop, Jerry Määttä, & David Higgins

contact email:
kbishop@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp

Plants have played key roles in some of the most notable science fiction, from prose to graphic novels and film: John Wyndham’s triffids, the sentient and telepathic flora in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” the gene-hacked crops of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, the agricultural experiments of Andy Weir’s The Martian, the invasive trees and mechaflowers of Warren Ellis’s Trees, and the galactic greenhouses of Silent Running represent just a few. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors—and yet in some ways they remain opaque. As Randy Laist writes in Plants and Literature (2013): “Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life cycle, a desire structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms” (12). The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today.

Throughout human history, plants have supported as well as controlled populations; influenced and revised how we think about ourselves, nature, temporality, and history; fostered technological innovation; and raised new legal issues, such as biomatter copyrights and the borders of non-human personhood. Even though speculations about terrestrial and extraterrestrial plant-life have ever abounded in science fiction, we are only just beginning to understand plant communication, kinship systems, and intelligence. Following the rise of fields such as ethnobotany, agricultural phonobiology, and phytophenomenology; the embrasure of ecology, environmental philosophy, and ecocriticism; and the concomitant increase in concern regarding our fragile and endangered planetary ecosystem, this edited collection is timely, if not overdue.

Science fiction allows us to speculate further on what—or who—plant life may be while exploring how we understand ourselves in relation to the mute (?) sentient (?) world of flora. Thinking about plants differently changes not just our understanding of plants themselves, but also transforms our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large. How do the parameters of good and evil, villainy, heroism, and responsibility shift when plant-based life comes into play? How do plant-based characters or foci shift our understandings of institutions, nations, borders, and boundaries? What roles do plants play in our visions of utopian and dystopian futures? How do botanical subjectivities impact our empathic reactions? Our understandings of sentience and agency? How does the inclusion (or exclusion) of plant-based life impact the genre of science fiction?

This volume will be the first to investigate the importance of plants in science fiction. We encourage contributions contending with diverse works from any and all global, national, extranational, or regional positions and all periods. In particular, we welcome essays which consider genre with broader ethical, political, aesthetic, and historical concerns tied to the representation of botanical subjects and subjectivities in science fiction across all media.

Authors are encouraged to consider, but are not constrained to, the following topics and subjects:

Authorship/readership: plant-based authors/readers

Ecocriticism/Green studies: ecology, human/animal/plant interaction and interdependence; anthropomorphism vs. plant subjectivity and agency

Empire: postcolonialism, colonialism, anti-imperialism, pastoral, anti-pastoral

Ethics: individual responsibility, corporate responsibility, global responsibility; carbon trading

Green activism: ‘eco-terrorism’; indigenous lands; environmental legislation; non-human personhood

Habitats: space exploration and colonization; extraplanetary agrarian systems; diasporas, migration, borderlands; heterotopias, utopias, New Edens, dystopias; wilderness vs domesticated

Hybridity: botanical technology; plant-animal / plant-human hybrids; arcologies

Medicine: drugs, poisons, health, ability/disability

Monstrosity: plant-animal / plant-human hybrids; dehumanization; zombification

Narratology: plant perspectives, subjectivities, narrators and/or focalizers

Sentience: consciousness, collective intelligence, ontology, posthumanism

Symbolism: plants as symbols, metaphors, metonymies

Time: alternate time scales; histories; chronologies (“tree rings”)

Value: capitalism, plants and finance; weeds, crops, ornamental

War and peace: weapons, agents of destruction; agents of salvation

Prospective contributors to this edited collection should send an abstract (300-500 words) and brief CV or short biographical statement to Katherine Bishop (kbishop@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp), Jerry Määttä (Jerry.Maatta@littvet.uu.se), and David Higgins (dmhiggin@gmail.com). For full consideration, abstracts are due by 30 April 2017. Completed essays of between 4,000 and 8,000 words will be due by 30 November 2017 for a projected publication date in early 2018.

Update about Hotel and about Valuables

Hello IAFAers!

At this point, our headquarters hotel, the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside, is almost entirely full–only a night here and there remain. 

We are in the process of negotiating for space at the Sheraton Suites next door, the hotel we have used the last few years for this purpose.  For those of you who are new, this hotel is within a stone’s throw of the Marriott.

I ask that if you who have booked a room at the Marriott but do not plan on attending , please cancel your room this week.  We can only hold the block for this week.  If you cancel after Friday, the room will not return to our block, but to the Marriott, which will then charge the rack rate (twice our special rate); plus, we lose the perks IAFA gets when our folks book into our headquarters hotel, such as room nights for our special guests.  

Remember, canceling IAFA registration does NOT cancel your hotel reservation.

If for any reason you need to cancel your hotel room, and we hope you won’t because we want to see you at the conference this year, please let us know, so that we can alert people who have expressed a need that they still need to book a room!

While I have your attention and we are speaking of hotels, please be aware of a feature of staying in any hotel:  LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE KEYS TO YOUR ROOM.  Housekeeping, Electricians, Plumbers, Sales staff–just to name a few.  For this reason, it is imperative that you not leave anything that someone might consider valuable in your room.  We have had few complaints at the Marriott, but it pays to be vigilant.  The hotel will be happy to keep anything for you in the hotel safe.

If you have any questions, please email me at iafareg@gmail.com.

See you all in March!

Valorie 

“The lesson of history is that no one learns.”

― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the wold. It must be given freely. In abundance.”

― Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice

“It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all – but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”

― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Them them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve”

― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?”

― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

Volunteer at ICFA 38!

Hello Everyone!

The Thirty-Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts is right around the corner! As we approach the warmth and sunshine of Orlando, Florida, I thought I would take this opportunity to let you all know that we are looking for volunteers to help make ICFA 38 a success!

The volunteer positions are as follows with (very) brief descriptions:

AV (Fire Swamp): Set up projectors, troubleshoot presentations

Book Room (Florin): Set up, sell, and pack up the book room

Registration (Cliffs of Insanity): set up and pass out badges and maintain the registration desk

Please use the survey link below to let us know when and where you would like to help.

The rate of compensation for volunteering is $5 ICFA bucks per hour worked, which can be used towards registration or memorabilia. Please note: We can only provide compensation toward future conference expenses. Volunteer hours cannot be used to cover expenses for the current year’s conference, and the hours earned expire in two years.

If you know of other people attending the conference that would like to volunteer and earn ICFA bucks to help them keep coming back, please share the survey with them. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Valorie Ebert, Membership and Registration Coordinator (iafareg AT gmail.com).

Please Note: We need extra volunteers to help load and unload the book room.  If you plan on being at the hotel Monday and/or aren’t leaving until the following Sunday or Monday and would like to help with this important task, please indicate your willingness on the volunteer survey or please contact Valorie Ebert, Membership and Registration Coordinator (iafareg ATgmail.com)..

** Book Room Set Up normally begins at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning.  They need all the help they can get, so if you are at the conference early on Monday, stop by and lend a hand.

** Book Room Breakdown normally begins at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.  Again, they need all the help they can get, so if you are an early riser, go lend a hand.

You can find the volunteer survey here.

Social Media:

If you are on Facebook you can connect with IAFA here.  In addition, if you are a student you can also join the Student Caucus Facebook page here.

Please follow us on Twitter here!

If you have questions or concerns, please contact Valorie Ebert, Membership and Registration Coordinator (iafareg AT gmail.com). We look forward to seeing you in March!

Regards,

Valorie

“The lesson of history is that no one learns.”

― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the wold. It must be given freely. In abundance.”

― Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice

“It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all – but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”

― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Them them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they’ll break themselves trying for what they’ll never achieve”

― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?”

― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

ICFA Store Now Open!

Dear ICFA 38 Attendees!

Our ICFA store is now open! 

If you need to get extra tickets to the luncheons or the banquet, or if you would like to purchase a t-shirt or tote, you can now log on to our store to add them on!

If you go to our website here and click the “Members Only” tab at the top of the page, it will give you an option for the store.  

Alternatively, you can click here to go directly to the store! 

If you have any questions, please let me know.

See you all in March! 

Valorie 

Wiki Manager sought for CLOCKWORKS 2: on “The Human/Machine Interface in SF”

WIKI MANAGER — Ideally Knowledgeable in Web Hosting and Able to Recruit in the SF Community —
Again Sought for Clockworks 2: An Annotated List of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF.

For background on the CLOCKWORKS project, see current issue of Extrapolation (57.3, Winter 2016: [355]-58). If interested, whether or not you’ve read the Extrapolation note, please contact Rich Erlich at <ErlichRD@MiamiOH.edu>.

Technical help is available. Business matters for the site have been handled for the near future.

www.Clockworks2.org

IAFA Statement Regarding Current Travel Restrictions

Dear IAFA Members,

As an international organization, we are watching unfolding political events regarding travel between nations. While we don’t anticipate any problems for our attendees based on the new rules as we understand them and the current composition of our membership, the board will revisit the issue as the situation becomes clearer and make adjustments in accordance with our mission as an international organization.  If you have concerns about your personal status, please contact the board with details.

We want to assure our members that as always, we value diversity, equity, and inclusion. We stand with the international community of scholars and writers and will continue to support all those who believe in the free exchange of ideas.

IAFA Board

David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award

David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award (formerly the Graduate Student Award)

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts presents an annual award and
stipend to the graduate student submitting the most outstanding paper at the Association’s
conference. The award, and a check for $250, will be presented to the winner at the Awards
Banquet on Saturday evening. Students must submit their completed paper (3500 words,
excluding bibliography) and verification of student status by February 1.

CRITERIA & INSTRUCTIONS

1. The student will have had a paper accepted for presentation at the Conference. The
paper submitted for the competition should be essentially the same as that presented at
the conference. The maximum length for entries is 3500 words (about 2 pages over the
recommended reading length of 8-9 pages). Students should be aware that funds are limited
and that only one award will be given. The paper selected will be published in the Journal of
the Fantastic in the Arts, and therefore must not have been previously published or submitted
for publication elsewhere. Please note that acceptance of a paper for the Conference does not
guarantee an award.

2. It is the responsibility of the student to send a copy of the paper by 1 February 2017 to the 1st
VP Isabella van Elferen (i.vanelferen@kingston.ac.uk), as well as a copy of the letter of acceptance and verification of student status. Submissions may be in Word, RTF or PDF format.

3. The committee is looking for clear, coherent, and interesting writing. Essays should be
solidly grounded in scholarly tradition, showing awareness of previous studies and of historical
and theoretical contexts. Essays may use any suitable method of analysis, including historical
and sociological approaches as well as those that originate in literary theory. Essays will be
evaluated for their originality and quality of insight into the text.

The judges for the 2017 award will be:
Dr. Mark Bould, University of the West of England Bristol
Jordan S Carroll, UC Davis
Dr. Regina Hansen, Boston University

ICFA 38 Normal Registration Pricing Ending Soon!

Hello Everyone!

As the Thirty-Eighth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts nears, I wanted to send out a few reminders!  If you haven’t already done so, you can renew your membership and register for the conference here.  

Although you can join the association even if you don’t attend the conference, current IAFA membership is required if you are presenting a paper at the conference, so you should join the association or renew your membership before attempting to register for the conference if you are presenting a paper.  

A list of all fees associated with the conference can be found here and a “How To” guide for membership renewal can be found here, and a “How To” guide for registering and paying for the conference can be found here. 

IMPORTANT DATES:

Normal registration rates end on January 31, 2017 at midnight Orlando time, so if you want to take advantage of the regular registration rates, you only have a few days left!

Late registration begins February 1, 2017 and lasts through the conference.

After March 1, 2017, the on-line system will be closed temporarily so that the conference committee can commit to the hotel for space and meal requirements. The system will open again for on-site registration on March 22, 2017.

Please note that date changes for registration purposes are reckoned by local time in Orlando, Florida.

Student Caucus (SCIAFA):

The purpose of the Student Caucus (SCIAFA) is to foster and promote growth, scholarship, and fellowship among the student members of the IAFA and to address the needs of students working in the field of the fantastic, by establishing mentoring and other programs, through coordinating efforts with the main body of the IAFA. If you are a student member of the IAFA, you are automatically a member of SCIAFA

Mentoring Program:

The mentoring program is an important part of the SCIAFA. Since 2001, the IAFA Student Caucus (SCIAFA) has sponsored a Mentoring Program aimed at helping student scholars to find their way around ICFA, discover the natural friendliness of the conference as quickly as possible, use ICFA as an entrance into existing scholarly communities concerned with the fantastic, and leave with both fond memories of the supporting organization and plans to return.

This year, the SCIAFA is still accepting participants for the Mentoring Program, and we are in great need of mentors, so please consider signing up.

For more information about the Mentoring Program, or to sign up as either a mentor or mentee, please contact Amanda Rudd at rudd.am AT gmail.com.

THE HOTEL:

The conference will be held March 22-26, 2017 at the Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel.  For reservations, please call the hotel’s toll-free number: 1-800-380-6751; or dial direct: 407-851-9000 or use the Orlando Airport Marriott web site.

The IAFA group code for the conference rate is IAFIAFA. Fill it in as the group code if you register on-line or mention it to the hotel if you call in the reservation. The box to fill in the group code is on the left hand side of the screen when you first go to search for a room. It’s below the section where it asks you the check in date and for your Marriott number. Click the “+” sign next to “special rates” and fill in the group code before you click “find.” You can find more information about the hotel here.

The hotel deadline is fast approaching, and rooms will not be available at the conference rate after January 31–and will probably not be available at any rate, so if you haven’t booked your room yet, you may want to soon.

DISCUSSION LIST: 

All IAFA members are invited to join the IAFA listserv. You may do so by clicking here.  

VOLUNTEERING:

Interested in helping us make ICFA 38 a success? We are looking for volunteers to assist with the book room, registration desk, and A/V. Please use the survey link below to let us know when and where you would like to help. If you know of other people attending the conference that would like to volunteer and earn ICFA bucks to help them keep coming back, please share the survey with them. If you have questions or concerns, please contact Valorie Ebert, Membership and Registration Coordinator (iafareg ATgmail.com).

Please Note: We need extra volunteers to help load and unload the book room.  If you plan on being at the hotel Monday and/or aren’t leaving until the following Sunday or Monday and would like to help with this important task, please indicate your willingness on the volunteer survey or please contact Valorie Ebert, Membership and Registration Coordinator (iafareg AT gmail.com)..

** Book Room Set Up normally begins at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning.  They need all the help they can get, so if you are at the conference early on Monday, stop by and lend a hand.

** Book Room Breakdown normally begins at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning.  Again, they need all the help they can get, so if you are an early riser, go lend a hand.

You can find the volunteer survey here.

Social Media:

If you are on Facebook you can connect with IAFA here.  You can follow us on Twitter here. In addition, if you are a student you can also join the Student Caucus Facebook page here.

If you have any questions or need any help with membership renewal or registration, please email me at iafareg AT gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing you in March!

Regards,

Valorie

Runoff Election for Second Vice President

Hello IAFA Members!

Make sure to check the email account linked to your IAFA Member Profile for an opportunity to vote in our Second Vice President Runoff Election. Since no candidate for Second Vice President received at least 51% of the vote, the bylaws require a runoff between the two candidates who received the most votes. Voting will remain open until midnight Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017. The link was sent to the email attached to your Member Profile, and only IAFA members may vote.