Jason W. Ellis for SFRA Vice President, 2011-2012

Now that the Science Fiction Research Association executive committee elections for 2011-2012 are now open, I, Jason W. Ellis, am calling on each of you to vote for me as the next SFRA Vice President.

Adam Frisch, the Immediate Past President of the SFRA, posted all of the election candidates’ statements on the organization’s website here. You may read my statement for Vice President below:

I am extremely honored to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate, and I hope to continue my service to the SFRA in this position if I am elected. I have been a member of the organization since 2006. Since then, I have won the 2007 Mary Kay Bray Award, served as the organization’s publicity director beginning in 2008, served on the MKB Award committee beginning in 2008, and promoted the organization, its meetings, and its members on my science fiction scholarship blog dynamicsubspace.net.

If I am elected as vice president, I will pledge myself to the maintenance and efficient running of the organization. As vice president, I will be specifically charged with member recruitment, to which I will dedicate myself in addition to the related functions of organizational promotion and member retention with these three plans:

1) I will work cooperatively with the EC, the SFRA Review editors, the publicity director, the web director, and the membership to promote, develop, and expand the SFRA. Significant growth of the organization will be a collective effort.

2) I will work hard to invite new scholars and graduate students to join SFRA using personal invitations via in-person meetings, traditional letters, and social media. Along with this, I will guide the development of sfra.org into a useful tool for members and a point of contact for non-members, the media, and the public for all matters related to the work that we do.

3) I will poll current members about their needs that can be met by the SFRA, elicit members’ ideas regarding the development of the organization, and advocate those findings with the organization.

Given the chance, I hope to serve the organization and its members as the next vice president of the SFRA. Thank you for your consideration, and see you all in Lublin!

I look forward to continuing to serve the SFRA, and I hope that you will help me do this as the next SFRA Vice President with your vote.

Following Our Mission, Improving SFRA.org with 101 Feature Articles

There is an exciting new addition to sfra.org beginning today! As part of the organization’s mission “to encourage and assist scholarship” and “improve classroom teaching,” the SFRA is adding the 101 Features from the SFRA Review directly to our website. As you may know, the 101 Features are instant immersion articles that introduce readers to the major arguments and concepts within a field of study. These articles are useful to scholars, graduate students, and survey course students alike, because they briefly present a thorough overview of a given topic. Some of the 101 Feature topics include: Postmodernism, Comic
Studies, Mundane SF, Slipstream, New Weird, Science Studies, and Fan Studies. Adding the 101 Features to sfra.org as a public resource will help circulate this important scholarship in an open and easily accessible way, which will get 101 Feature authors more attention while increasing the visibility of the work of the SFRA. This will better enable public discovery and searching of these materials, and allow members to directly link to the 101 Features rather than pointing to the original SFRA Review PDF (you may have read Neil’s email earlier today about Ritch Calvin in an Orion Magazine article about literary SF–Ritch won the 2009 Mary Kay Bray Award for his Mundane SF 101 article). Karen Hellekson initiated this new plan by donating her recent “Scholarly Research and Writing 101” article from
SFRA Review #292, which is now available on our website at <http://www.sfra.org/node/101>. Michael Klein is in the process of requesting permissions from other 101 Feature authors to include their work on sfra.org. If you are a member of the SFRA and would like to contribute a new 101 Feature to the SFRA Review <http://www.sfra.org/review>, please contact the editors with your proposal.

Neuroscience, the Neuronovel, and Science Fiction

Several conversations with Tammy Clewell on the neuronovel rekindled my interest in the biology of the human brain. As a result, I have decided to do some research on the neuronovel and its relationship to science fiction. The neuronovel, with its emphasis on the hardware of the brain over the software of psychology, is arguably a hard science fiction topic (albeit most lacking an extrapolative element). Additionally, novels traditionally seen in terms of psychological explanation can be re-read with neuroscience in mind (pun intended).

I am building a list of science fiction novels and short stories that specifically addresses the neuronovel’s emphasis of brains over mind. What titles of novels or short stories from approximately 1950 to the present can you recommend that emphasize brains over mind, and the brain’s influence on one’s sense of self and understanding of the world. This would include brain trauma over psychological trauma, neuroscience over psychology, depictions of creating or developing brains and how that shapes one’s engagement with the world, introspection or internal dialog that might have a biological explanation rather than a psychological one, etc. Two sets of works that immediate come to mind are Asimov’s robots (they exhibit psychological problems, but there is an emphasis on those behaviors resulting from the way they are hardwired), and Dick’s VALIS novels (the author’s 2-3-74 events can be more simply diagnosed as the first in a series of unfortunate strokes).

This is a very rough sketch at this point, so please bear with me as a work through it. All suggestions are welcome and much appreciated.

Luke’s Lightsaber Cut from the Beginning of ROTJ

My buddy Mark just sent me a link [posted to Youtube by Theforcenet] to this deleted scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi shown at Celebration V. Above, you can see Luke tinkering with his new lightsaber after Vader makes one more attempt to telepathically lure him to the Dark Side. Then, Luke tests it before giving it to R2-D2 for his special mission to see Jabba the Hut:

Yeah, I think its a good idea that it was cut from the final film–it would have given too much away at the beginning. Nevertheless, it makes for a nice addition to the ROTJ totality.

Oct. 21, 2023 Update: Video link removed as it no longer works.

R2-D2 Special Edition Droid Phone by Motorola (But R2 has been with me for years)

Apparently, Motorola, Google, and Verizon have teamed up to produce the Star Wars Empire Strikes Back Special Edition Phone. You can learn about it at the official site here (if you follow @droidlanding on Twitter), or see a picture of the phone here (it looks like a flat, rectangular R2-D2).

That’s cute and all, but I’ve been R2’s buddy since the first generation iPhone:

In all honesty, I’ve been thinking a lot about Star Wars merchandising lately. I’m troubled by it, by my participation in it (yes, I just mailed off my five UPCs for the vintage, rocket firing Boba Fett), and its lasting effect on life to the present (collecting, playing, maintaining interest in movie tie-in toys). I am going to write more on this in the future, but I want to scan some old Christmas and Birthday photos first, so that I can use them in my essay.

For the time being, consider Star Wars and ESB Producer Gary Kurtz’s interview here, in which he says: “The emphasis on the toys, it’s like the cart driving the horse. . . . If it wasn’t for that the films would be done for their own merits. The creative team wouldn’t be looking over their shoulder all the time.” Now, I’m off to Wal-Mart to see if they have any of the new vintage Star Wars action figures in stock.