International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

For the first time in its 30-year history, the William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for an outstanding first fantasy book, has resulted in a tie. The winners for 2015, each of whom will receive the full award, are Zen Cho for her story collection Spirits Abroad (Buku Fixi) and Stephanie Feldman for her novel The Angel of Losses (Ecco).

According to award administrator Gary K. Wolfe, both books won broad support from the nominating committee, which felt both were deserving of the award. The other books included on this year’s Crawford shortlist are Ghalib Islam, Fire in the Unnameable Country  (Hamish Hamilton); Sarah Tolmie, The Stone Boatmen (Aqueduct); Greg Bechtel, Boundary Problems (Freehand Books); and

Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist  (Ecco).

Participating in this year’s nomination and selection process were Farah Mendlesohn, Ellen Klages, Graham Sleight, Karen Burnham, Candas Jane Dorsey, Jedediah Berry, Niall Harrison, and last year’s winner Sofia Samatar.  The award will be presented on March 21 during the 36th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida. The IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award will be presented to Colin Milburn, and the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a work of scholarship written in a language other than English will go to Fernando Ángel Moreno, Mikel Peregrina, and Steven Bermúdez Antúnez. Awards for student scholarship will be announced later.

The 2015 Winners of the Jamie Bishop Award are Fernando Ángel Moreno, Mikel Peregrina, and Steven Bermúdez Antúnez.

The Finalists are Sophie Beaulé,Teresa López Pellisa, Francisca Noguerol.

Further information can be found on the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award page.

The Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies program at the University of California, Riverside announces that the second annual SFTS book award has been won by David Wittenberg, Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at The University of Iowa, for Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative (Fordham UP, 2013). Repositioning our understanding of the relationship between time travel narratives and shifting conceptions of time in physics, the book argues that time travel fiction is a laboratory in which the most fundamental theoretical questions of narratology, history, and subjectivity are rehearsed. Discerning in its critical insights, disciplined in its case studies, and broadly inclusive across media in its examples, Time Travel shows Wittenberg to be one of the most astute among contemporary sf critics.

This SFTS prize honors an outstanding scholarly monograph that explores the intersections between popular culture, particularly science fiction, and the discourses and cultures of technoscience. The award is designed to recognize groundbreaking and exceptional contributions to the field. Books published in English between 1 January and 31 December 2013 were eligible for the award. The jury for the prize was Anindita Bannerjee (Cornell University), Pawel Frelik (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland), and Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside), who served as jury chair.

Honorable mentions were received by Joshua Raulerson, for Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (Liverpool University Press), and by Kevin LaGrandeur, for Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Routledge).

The award, which consists of a cash prize, will be presented at the 2014 SFRA/WisCon Conference, which will be held May 22-25 in Madison, Wisconsin. Professor Wittenberg will be in attendance to accept his award.

Gary K. Wolfe presents Sofia Samatar with the Crawford Award for First Fantasy Novel. Photo by Bill Clemente.

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, April 2013), for which she is here shown receiving the 2014 Crawford Award for Outstanding First Fantasy Novel.

Sheila Williams, Rich Larson, Jameyanne Fuller, Rick Wilber, Gwendolyn Karpierz, and Kayla Chronister. Photo by Bill Clemente.

Sheila Williams and Rick Wilber presented awards to the winner and runners-up in the yearly Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. This year’s winners were:

Winner: Rich Larson, University of Alberta, for “Nostalgia Calculator”

First Runner-up: Noam Altman-Kurosaki, Princeton University, for “The Sons”

Second Runner-up: Rich Larson, University of Alberta, for “The King in the Cathedral”

Third Runner-up: Jameyanne Fuller, Kenyon College, “The Year of Salted Skies”

Honorable Mention: Taimur Ahmad, Princeton University, for “Canyonlands”

Honorable Mention: Jessica May Lin, UC Berkeley, for “Lolita in the Light of Nitroglycerin”

Honorable Mention: Alexandra Gurel, Princeton University, for “The Fire in the Sky”

Honorable Mention: Gwendolyn Karpierz, Colorado State University, for “Autumn Drowning”

Honorable Mention: Kayla Chronister, Seattle Pacific University, for “Swans and Ravens”

Rachel Haywood Ferreira presenting the Jamie Bishop Award to Vera Cuntz-Leng. Photo by Bill Clemente.

Cuntz-Leng received the Bishop award for an essay originally composed in a language other than English. She is the first graduate student ever to receive the award. The title of the essay and abstract appear below.

“Frodo auf Abwegen: Das queere Potenzial des aktuellen Fantasykinos” [i]

[Frodo Gone Astray: The Queer Potential of Fantasy Blockbusters]

Since the foundation stone of blockbuster cinema was laid with the release of Star Wars (US 1977), Hollywood has produced at regular intervals fantasy movies with high budgets and impressive special effects that need to attract as many recipients as possible to guarantee commercial success. Due to the resulting universality of these films, fantasy cinema appears to be predestined to be read against the grain, because certain issues need to be excluded from the narration and therefore conspicuous gaps (Leerstellen) – particularly in relation to sexuality – remain.

The method of Queer Reading may uncover the subversive potential of the genre and can open up new spaces for marginalized social topics; spaces within mainstream cinema, where alternative gender and sexual concepts are allowed and welcome. A queer reading of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (NZ/US 2001) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (GB/US 2004) exemplifies the argument that fantasy genre films have a high subversive potential. Furthermore, an outlook will be given about the way in which fantasy movies might discuss “gender, sex, and desire” in the future.