I received an email from SFRA Web Director Matthew Holtmeier this afternoon that the new and improved SFRA.org website is now live. Go here to check it out and find out what the new site can offer you!
New SFRA.org Website Launched!
June 15, 2009
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Posted by Jason Ellis
SFRA 2009, Conference completed but not yet on record
June 14, 2009Yufang and I are sitting outside a Starbucks enjoying the warm weather–reading magazines and checking email. We left the Hotel Midtown around noon, saying goodbye to our friends, and we made our way to Norcross to begin our vacation.
During the conference, I was busy making sure the program executed itself with as few memory errors and illegal operations as possible. It may not have been necessary to do this, because everyone really came through in many different ways to make the conference come off as well as it did, and for that I am thankful to everyone at SFRA 2009.
I didn’t have much time to sit in on full panels, so I don’t have much to report on DynamicSubspace.net. However, I will report on the major events and those that I was involved in when I can sporatically connect to the Internet over the coming week. Also, I’m looking forward to reading what other SFRA bloggers have to say about their experiences in Atlanta. As I find these, I will link to them from here.
Talk to y’all soon about our southern-fried science fiction studies conference!
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Posted by Jason Ellis
SFRA 2009, Loading Up and Heading Out
June 8, 2009Yufang and I are finishing our packing now, but loading the car will have to wait until tomorrow. I have put some things in the car, such as the three rotisserie cookers for my folks and Aunt Lettie-Anne and Uncle Doc. After loading up, I’ll have an approximately 11 hour drive ahead of me to reach Norcross.
I can confidently say that packing and preparing for a long drive is a lot worse than any other aspect of conferencing (including programming). That’s saying a lot, because I still have to whittle my 31 page monster from the deep essay on how World of Warcraft creates cosmopolitan subjects to 8 pages. I feel good about the impending revision, but I’m afraid that it will take most of Tuesday with me sitting some place comfy with a steady supply of coffee.
I called the Midtown Hotel tonight, and they said that they only offer wired Internet access (at almost $10/day). I know there are some places nearby that may have Internet access, but I don’t know what my connection will be like (if at all). I did want to blog from the conference, but my updates to DynamicSubspace.net may come in fits and spurts. If I cannot get a reliable connection, I will save my posts and run them all at once the following week.
To Atlanta!
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Conference, Personal, SFRA | Tagged: packing, SFRA, sfra2009, writing | 
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Posted by Jason Ellis
SFRA 2009 Conference Program
June 7, 2009The first draft of the SFRA 2009 Conference Program was completed weeks ago, but I’ve learned that putting together conference scheduling and producing a relatively error free printable program is an arduous task! Lisa Yaszek and Doug Davis, along with folks attending the conference, provided a lot of feedback and offered corrections to turn it into a finished product. Here is the full program for your viewing pleasure. See you in Atlanta in a few days!
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Posted by Jason Ellis
Very Busy and Productive Day
May 21, 2009It is safe to say that I got shit done today. I met Professor Raja at Angel Falls Coffee Co. in Akron this afternoon, and we finalized the first issue of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies. It is an open access journal, so you may go here and read the first issue (or better yet, purchase a print copy so that you can really appreciate my page layout work while supporting the journal). I had some trouble getting the fonts to embed properly in the PDF of the issue for publication, but I finally ironed out that last remaining snag before we enjoyed a celebratory lunch of hummus and kebab wraps.
After I left Market Square, I drove down Market to The Bookseller and found four useful books: Science Fiction Discoveries ed. by Carol and Frederik Pohl, Crash by J.G. Ballard (blurb: “A startling off-beat novel of erotic violence”), Radu Florescu’s In Search of Frankenstein (mid-1970s volume on all things Frankenstein), and Jane’s American Fighting Aircraft of the 20th Century (this big book sports two F-104 Starfighters flying over a city port, and I will make good use of this tome when I’m writing my essay for the aircraft film genre essay on The Right Stuff).
When I got back home with some lunch for Yufang, I got back to work on the print version of the SFRA 2009 program. I worked on that program all damn day, except for a break to enjoy fish and chips and Heroes, but I just finished a rough draft complete with index. I’m very happy with the way the program looks, and I hope that everyone will be happy with the scheduling. Thanks go out to Craig Jacobsen for last year’s program InDesign file, Betsy Gooch for the artwork on the conference flyer that I used for the front cover of the program, and Lisa and Doug for carefully watching over my shoulder as I put the program together. There will probably be some changes, but I’m estatic that the lion’s share of the program is completed.
Oh, I did take a slightly longer break after dinner than I wrote about above. In fact, Yufang and I went out for a walk, and we put Miao Miao in a backpack that I wore against my chest so that she could look around while we walked. She was surprisingly good, but I did have to keep a hand on her to keep her from climbing over me.
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Posted by Jason Ellis
Four Weeks Until SFRA 2009 in Atlanta
May 17, 2009It’s only four more weeks until SFRA 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia! I’m hammering out the finalized program now, and it should be available very soon. I can tell everyone that there is an exciting lineup of panels, an author reading track, and special dedicated time slot events. Stay tuned!
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Posted by Jason Ellis
Science Fiction Research Association 2009 Award Winners
March 14, 2009Lisa Yaszek, SFRA President, announced the 2009 winners of SFRA’s professional awards on Friday. Congratulations to this year’s winners:
The Pilgrim Award for lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship goes to Brian Attebery;
The Pioneer Award for the best critical essay-length work of the year goes to Neil Easterbrook for “Giving An Account of Oneself”: Ethics, Alterity, _Air_”;
The Clareson Award for for Distinguished Service to SF and fantasy scholarship goes to Hal Hall;
The Mary Kay Bray Award for the best essay, interview, or extended review to appear in the _SFRA Review_ in the past year goes to Sandor Klapcsik for his review of _Rewired_ (SFRAR #284); and
The Graduate Student Paper Award for the best essay presented at the 2008 SFRA conference:
Dave Higgins for “The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany’s _The Fall of the Towers_.”
Join us in Atlanta, Georgia to congratulate the winners during the award presentations at the 40th annual SFRA Conference with the dual themes of Engineering the Future and Southern-Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy on June 11-14 2009.
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Posted by Jason Ellis
Review, Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader
March 11, 2009In the next issue of SFRA Review, I will have two non-fiction reviews, and one of those is on Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg’s Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader. As a WoW player and researcher, I found this anthology to be an indispensable body of work on the W0W phenomenon. I am currently working on a paper in which I use my own digitally mediated definition of cosmopolitanism to demonstrate how a game like WoW can counterintuitively teach players to be more cosmopolitan in the physical world. Here is a short except from my longer review:
World of Warcraft (WoW) is the insanely successful fantasy and science fictional massively multiplayer online role-playing game launched by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004. It continues to break sales records with its expansion packs The Burning Crusade (2007) and Wrath of the Lich King (2008), and it currently supports a worldwide subscribership of 11.5 million players. The game, already lush with history and lore, has spawned a collectible card game, books, collectable figurines, manga, and comic books. Furthermore, it has seeped into the cultural archive. For example, it inspired an Emmy award winning episode of South Park titled “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” and it was featured in a Jeopardy! question. Also, the game’s fantasy origins do not prohibit it from being a postmodern mash-up of real world history and popular culture. Obviously, there is something to the World of Warcraft phenomenon that deserves further investigation and critique, but who has the time to study such an extensive and socially demanding rich text?
Enter The Truants. The members of The Truants guild are academics who study and play World of Warcraft. Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader, an anthology of essays edited by Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, is the end result of their in-game and online collaboration as players and scholars. They simultaneously studied the game and its participants, played the game themselves, and used the game as a place in which to meet and talk (in addition to other online and in-person collaboration work). Their gamer intensity is tempered by the rigor and attentiveness found in each of the chapters in this collection.
To read the full review, click over to sfra.org and join the oldest, professional organization devoted to the study of Science Fiction. Also, our 40th annual meeting will be in Atlanta, Georgia in June. Find out more about the conference here, and join us for author readings, essay presentations, and panels on the dual themes: Engineering the Future, and Southern Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy.
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Posted by Jason Ellis
Join the SFRA Group on Facebook
January 27, 2009The tenacious and mostly harmless Stacie Hanes started the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) group on Facebook some time ago. Recently, I signed on as an admin of the group with Stacie after I became SFRA’s Publicity Director. Now, I would like to ask all SFRA members on Facebook (and there are a whole lot of you out there) to join the group. It is a terrific way to put faces to the names of folks that you work with professionally, and it is another way in which we can all stay informed and connected about the going-ons of the organization and our fellow members. Also, the group is not exclusive to SFRA members, so I would like to extend the invitation to curious passersby to find out more about SFRA. You can find the group by clicking here, or you can search Facebook for “Science Fiction Research Association.”
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Posted by Jason Ellis
SFRA 2009, Five Months Away
January 13, 2009It’s already the middle of January and SFRA 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia is only five months away! Remember to get in your paper and panel proposals to sfra2009@gmail.com by 1 April 2009 (no kidding!). For all of you folks needing early semester confirmation for institutional funding, submit your proposals in the next seven days by 20 January 2009.
I’m particularly excited about the terrific special author lineup that we have this year. Our Guest of Honor is Michael Bishop, and the Special Guest Authors are F. Brett Cox, Paul di Filippo, Andy Duncan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jack McDevitt, and Warren Rochelle.
If you haven’t seen one of the ubiquitous emails that I’ve been sending out as SFRA’s Publicity Director, then see the CFP below for more details.
SFRA 2009: Engineering the Future and Southern-Fried Science Fiction and Fantasy
June 11-14, Atlanta, GA (Wyndham Midtown Hotel)
Guest of Honor: Michael Bishop
Special Guest Authors: F. Brett Cox, Paul di Filippo, Andy Duncan, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Jack McDevitt, and Warren Rochelle.
SFRA is currently accepting individual abstracts and panel proposal for its 2009 conference. We welcome paper and panel submissions that explore any aspect of science fiction across history and media and are particularly interested in those that engage one or both of the conference themes, “Engineering the Future” and “Southern-FriedScience Fiction and Fantasy,” or the work of one or more of the conference’s guest authors.
The 2009 conference’s two themes and its selection of guest authors are inspired by the conference’s location in Atlanta and its co-sponsorship by Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. Atlanta, a storied locale in American history, is also in many ways an international city of the future, home to 21st century information, entertainment, technological and military industries, peopled with 21st century demographics, and prone to 21st century situations.
How is the future engineered in science fiction and how has science fiction already engineered our present? The American south has long been well known for its gothic fiction, but it has increasingly figured in works of science fiction and fantasy too. So it is equally fitting to ask, how has the south been an inspiration of science fiction and fantasy and what will its global future in speculative arts and letters be?
The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2009 at midnight EST. Please submit paper and panel proposals by email to sfra2009@gmail.com. Include all text of the proposal in the body of the email (not as an attachment). Please be sure to include full contact information for all panel members and to make all AV requests within each proposal.
For more information, email sfra2009@gmail.com. And be sure to check out www.sfra2009.com for more details!
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Posted by Jason Ellis
