SFRA Newsletter

University of South Florida Scholar Commons Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications 12-1-2000 SFRA ewN sletter 249 Science Fiction Research Association Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/scifistud_pub Part of the Fiction Commons Scholar Commons Citation Science Fiction Research Association, "SFRA eN wsletter 249 " (2000). Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications. Paper 68. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/scifistud_pub/68 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. {oetIJior1.· Haren Hellekson Crallg Jacobsen Honfiction leyielY! EtlJior: Neill Barron fiction leyielY! EtlJior: Crallg Jacobsen The SFRAReview (ISSN 1068-395X) is published six times a year by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) and distributed to SFRA mem bers.lndividual issues are not for sale. For information about the SFRA and its benefits, see the descri ption at the back of this issue. For a membership application, contact SFRA Treasurer Michael M. Levy or get one from the SFRA website: <www.sfra.org>. SUBMISSIONS The SFRAReview editors encourage submissions, including essays, review essays that cover several related texts, and interviews. Please send submis sions or queries to both coeditors. If you would like to review nonfiction or fiction, please contact the respec tive editor. The general editorial ad dress for the SFRAReview is: <[email protected]>. Karen Hellekson, Coeditor 742 N. 5th Street Lawrence,KS 66044 <[email protected]> Craig Jacobsen, Coeditor & Fiction Reviews Editor 208 East Baseline Rd. #31 I Tempe,AZ 85283 <[email protected]> Neil Barron, Nonfiction Reviews Editor I 149 lime Place Vista, CA 92083-7428 <[email protected]> Visit Us At: www.sfra.org SFRA BUSINESS ANItI~vltI#3QllEItI'JI' ~F IIIERI'SFIIA .",GOIS Joan Gordon Immediate Past President, SfRA Sarah James, (ormerly o( 40 Boumedene, Potters Bar, I am pleased to announce the following new officers for SFRA: Hert[ordshire, EN6 3EL, in the UK is now at 16 Caimhill Gardens, St President: Michael Levy Andrews, Fife, KY 16 8QX UK. Vice President: Peter Brigg Secretary: Wendy Bousfield Adam Frisch's e-mail address has Treasurer: David Mead been changed to Thanks are extended on behalfofthe Boardfor all candidates who stoodfor <[email protected]>. deaian. LSPRAGUEDECAMP EDITORIAL DIES LAsrlssVE L Sprague de Camp, one o( the Karen Hellekson and Craig Jacobsen greatest voices o( the Golden Age o( Sdence Fiction, died Monday in Plano, This is the last issue of the SFRAReview that we will coedit. The three Texas, three weeks short o( his 93rd years' editorship is up, and we are passing the torch to the new editors, Barbara birthday. de Camp was one o( the (ew Lucas and Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard, who will begin with the January 2001 writers elevated by the Sdence Fiction issue. We wish them the best of luck! Thanks to everyone who has helped with and Fantasy Writers o(America to the the SFRAReview by providing copy to publish and endless support, particularly rank or Grand Master, an honor he the Board members and N ei1 Barron, the nonfiction review editor. We're sure received in 1978. de Camp's body will Barb and Shelley have some wonderful ideas, and it will be great to see the be cremated and his ashes will join SFRAReview head off into some new and productive directions. Strangely, the those o( his Wife and collaborator SFRA Board is turning over at the same time as the SFRAReview editorship Catherine, who died in April, at changes, an unusual occurrence, as Board members serve a two-year stint and Arlington National Cemetery. editors a three-year stint, so SFRA members can look forward to new ideas with the turnover in leadership. We have received concerned e-mails from SFRA members whose SPSCHRONOLOGlO\L SFRAReviews take what can only be described as a really, really long time to BIBUOGRAPHYOFSF arrive. We have tracked the trickling-in of SFRAReviews to mailboxes that lasts CRIllasM:NOW (not counting overseas members) up to three weeks. It seems the U.S. Postal or-.n..INE Service is handling bulk mail more and more slowly these days. We have responded by moving up the time copy goes to the printer's in an attempt to get Rob Latham <robert the issues to members in one of the months listed on the cover. However, this [email protected]>, coeditor and means that the copy is prepared six weeks or more before it hits doorsteps, review editor o(Science Fiction Studies, notes that the updated resulting in old news, calls for papers whose deadlines have passed., etc. While we version o( the Chronological hack at this problem (or-better yet-turn it over to Barb and Shelley), remem Bibliography o(SF Critidsm (eatured in ber to check the SFRA Website every now and then; Webmeister Peter Sands is Science Fiction Studies 78 ljuly always putting updates up, and the news there is often more timely. 1999) is now online on their Website. It's been a great three years! In order to increase its utility to scholars and students in the (leld, they have inserted links (rom a large THEORY AND BEYOND number o( the entries to relevant EDITED BY JOAN GORDON AND SHEllEY RODRIGO BLANCHARD reviews in our archive and to the E~~"C7S" Documents in the History o( SF series. IUlan Itratton The bibliography can be accessed at <http://www.uiowa.edul-sfs/ Ecocriticism poses the same sort of challenge to anthropocentrism as biblio.htm>. Rob welcomes reports o( feminist theory does to androcentrism or queer theory does to the centrality of any problems and receipt o( suggestions. heterosexuals. Even though attacks on humanism and dualistic thinking have become familiar in literary criticism, it may still be a challenge to contemplate Earth without perceiving humans as central to or at the peak of a hierarchy that places all other species beneath us. The same dualistic thinking that has posi- tioned "civilized" against "primitive," whites against persons of color, and men against women has aligned humans and their culture against nature. To the extent that our animal nature is acknowledged at all, humanist and Christian traditions have assigned us a position of supremacy, with dominion over the rest of life on Earth. An ecocritical approach to literature EBRARYUPAND adopts instead an ecological perspective that places humans in a web of life, in a relationship of mutuality with the rest of Earth's living beings. m.JNNING Ecocritics tend to be action oriented and focused on the real world. They The follOwing was in a recent issue of are inspired by a sense of urgency about humanity's need to respond to the The Write News Weekly and made fragility of our ecosystem and are convinced that literature has the power to the rounds on the Intemet Ebrary, an shape human impact on the ecosystem. An ecocritic says, "The most important anline research resource, has function of literature today is to redirect human consciousness to a full consider announced a joint investment by ation of its place in a threatened natural world" (Glen A. Love, in Glotfelty 237), Random House Inc., Pearson, and The or to be ecocritical is to be" explicitly geared toward effecting change in the way McGraw-Hili Companies. Ebrary offers we think about and produce the environment" (Simon Estok, in PMLA 1096), researclHJriented content, including or "ecocritics expect to make a difference in the way others live their lives" books,joumals, maps, periodicals, and {Lawrence Buell, in N~ Literary History 709-10). The fundamental premise of digitally archived material. Intemet all ecological criticism, Cheryll Glotfelty asserts, is "that human culture is users will gain access to this content connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it" (xix). William without having to obtain a Rueckert, who coined the term "ecocriticism" in his 1978 article "Literature and membership or pay subsaiption fees. Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism, " issued then a passionate plea to Ebrary is located at <http:// fellow literary critics: "How can we apply the energy, the creativity, the knowledge, www.ebrary.com>. Ebrary also allows the vision we know to be in literature to the human-made problems ecology patrons to acquire information by tells us are destroying the biosphere which is our home? How can we translate enabling the copying of text or printing literature into purgative-redemptive biospheric action ... ? How can we turn of pages for a photocopier-!ike fee. In words into something other than more words?" (in Glotfelty 121). this manner, ebrary provides publishers, authors, and information providers with This real-world focus tends to position ecocriticism against the new revenues. Partidpating publishers poststructura1ist models that have recently dominated literary criticism. Sueellen and information providers may Campbell notes that deep ecology and poststructuralism agree that "there is no determine the degree of access and such thing as a self-enclosed, private piece of property, neither a deer nor a costs assodated with each of their person nor a text nor a piece of land," but ecology insists that we pay attention titles. not to the way things have meaning for us but to the way the nonhuman world exists beyond us and our languages (in Glotfelty 133). Ecocritics split, Campbell observes, between those who work in a poststructura1ist vein, looking at the meanings we create for" nature," "landscape," and "environment," and those In Joe Milida's review of Fantasy Girls who look for ways to remove the writer as far as possible from the recreation of that appeared in SFRAReview 248, the natural world, trying to let it somehow speak for itself instead of focusing Kent Ono's name appeared as Kent on the human thought and emotion it evokes.

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