Dynamic Subspace

Category: Science Fiction

  • McFarland & Co Publishers Dealer Booth at Dragon*Con

    I met Mark Durr, McFarland & Company’s Senior Designer, at Dragon*Con 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. I was glad to meet the fellow who put choose such a kick-ass cover to my book with Masood Raja and Swaralipi Nandi The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction [available for purchase online here]. And, he was kind enough to indulge my request for a picture of my book in front of the McFarland banner.

    McFarland’s presence at Dragon*Con was substantial. It is great that they were selling books at a largely non-academic gathering like Dragon*Con.

  • Travel Light With Only a Regular JanSport Backpack, From My Experience at Dragon*Con 2011 in Atlanta

    When I flew to Atlanta for Dragon*Con 2011 this past weekend, I only carried a regular sized two pocket JanSport school backpack [pictured above]. Like many other folks, I have discovered the joy of lightweight traveling.

    As Y and I discovered during our trip to Europe over the Summer, carrying fewer things makes travel a lot easier and less stressful.

    In order to succeed at lightweight travel, you have to critically evaluate your travel needs and plan ahead for ways in which you can reuse, repurpose, and clean your things on the go.

    This is what I fit into the JanSport: two days of clothes, toiletries, 13″ MacBook, iPhone, compact digital camera, chargers, snacks, travel documents, and Mr. Bread (for photos).

    For the trip to Atlanta, I knew that I would be staying there for two days, so I had to bring enough clothes for that. I wore a polo shirt, Lucky jeans, and Teva hiking shoes on the trip down. Despite the heat, I knew that a nice pair of jeans are a great all-purpose and all-setting garment. Also, I needed my laptop for the SFRA panel on Sunday and a camera for the parade on Saturday. This meant that I also needed chargers for my laptop and camera batteries. I knew that I would bring my iPhone, but that doesn’t necessarily need its own charger–only a USB adapter to connect it to my MacBook for recharging.

    In addition to traveling light, it is smart to organize your things so that you don’t have to hunt for things on the road. I used a clothes washing bag to hold two polo shirts, underwear, and socks. I used another bag to hold electronic support gear (screen wipe, camera lens cleaning pen, chargers, thumb drive). My MacBook went into its own neoprene sleeve, which also carried my travel documents. Liquids went into a quart ziplock bag, and my other toiletries went into a small zip-up bag. The types of bags that I employed did require a little extra weight, but the sizes and colors allowed me to immediately recognize what bag held what things. Grocery bags and ziplock bags would work if you are weight conscious.

    Having only the backpack of things to carry around meant that I could easily board the puddle-jumper aircraft that I knew that I would be flying without having to gate check anything. Also, a backpack fits easily underneath the seat in front of you, which means that you can easily grab things without having to hunt through the overhead bins. Also, I knew that I would have to check out of my hotel before the SFRA panel on Sunday, so I didn’t want to have to carry a roller bag through the 40,000+ crowds at Dragon*Con.

    I am very pleased with my single backpack traveling experience to Atlanta. The con was certainly stressful enough for me, so having one less thing to worry about made me more relaxed.

    Considering it from another perspective, my choice to travel with less things meant that I made a lower impact on the environmental costs of getting me from Ohio to Atlanta and back again. Less weight means less fuels/energy consumed by my car, by the aircraft, by the Marta train.

    Planning and organizing might save you some travel stress, too. And you can contribute to less pollution, too, especially if more of us choose to travel with fewer things that we probably don’t need to travel with anyways.

  • Gary Westfahl’s The Mechanics of Wonder

    I just finished reading Gary Westfahl’s The Mechanics of Wonder as part of the research on my dissertation’s important theoretical chapter.

    I wish that I had known about and read this book a long time ago. I have heard some of the things that he argues about Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, Jr. in other places, but I see now that those other places likely based or were inspired by Westfahl’s book.

    Having read The Mechanics of Wonder, I am persuaded by Westfahl’s arguments that science fiction came to be what it was from the work of Gernsback and Campbell. Their delayed influence on the writing taking place in the genre appears to have had profound implications. For the most part, Westfahl’s rigorous approach to evidence and his claims based on that evidence are very well received.

    This is not to say that I am giving up my Aldiss or Suvin. I find their work equally stimulating even if their historical claims might not always be on target. I believe that we can find earlier examples of science fiction even if they are not part of the modern instantiation of the genre itself. Can we not say that a particular work is science fictional? Can we not go so far as to say that a given work is part of the science fiction genre, because it shares all of the characteristics of the work even if it was not yet part of the genre due to its chronological deficiencies?

    Likewise, I believe that structuralist approaches such as that undertaken by Suvin are useful for understanding the mechanics of the science fiction genre. In fact, Suvin provides an advantageous link between two different spheres of knowledge in my theory chapter. Westfahl’s careful reading does knock a few sizable holes in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, but I will gladly salvage the concept of cognitive estrangement.

    The Mechanics of Wonder is a must-read for everyone studying science fiction. Westfahl not only presents compelling evidence, he also provides a demanding model for scholarly rigor and engagement of evidence.

  • 2011-2012 R. D. Mullen Fellowship Winners

    Last week, Rob Latham of the University of California, Riverside announced the winners of the 2011-2012 R. D. Mullen Fellowship winners. I am one among the three recipients! This fellowship will provide each of us with funding to travel to California during the next school year to conduct research in the Eaton Science Fiction Collection at Riverside. I am very honored to have been selected as one of this year’s winners, and I congratulate the other recipients, Alexander and Jennifer, listed below from the original release:

    I would like to announce the winners of the third annual R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship, which is funded by Science Fiction Studies in the name of our late founding editor to support archival research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at UC-Riverside. The committee—chaired by me and consisting of Andrea Bell, Neil Easterbrook, Joan Gordon, and Brooks Landon—reviewed a number of excellent applications and settled on a slate of three winners for 2011-12:

    JASON ELLIS is a PhD student in the English Department at Kent State University. His dissertation studies what he calls “neuronarratives,” sf texts that deal with the cognitive implications of artificial intelligence and human-machine interfaces. He is the coeditor of The Postnational Fantasy:  Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction (McFarland, 2011) and has published articles on H.G. Wells, on digital nomadism, and on World of Warcraft. He plans to visit UC-Riverside to do research towards the writing of a dissertation chapter on “the effects of brain trauma” in the work of Philip K. Dick.

    ALEXANDER ISER is a PhD student in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His dissertation focuses on how time-travel narratives draw out the links “between apocalyptic crises and societal conceptions of time.” He will be spending several weeks at UC-Riverside examining the Eaton’s extensive fanzine collection for evidence of how readers interpreted major time-travel stories as allegories of cultural crisis.

    JENNIFER L. LIEBERMAN is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Illinois. Her dissertation, entitled Power Lines: Electric Networks and the American Literary Imagination, studies how “literature helped to shape American perceptions of electrical technologies between 1870 and 1952.” She has published essays on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and on Gertrude Atherton’s Patience Sparhawk and Her Times. At the Eaton, she plans to explore dime novels, boys’ adventure stories, and other proto/early-sf materials in terms of their evocation of the engineer as “the new frontiersman of the twentieth century.”

    I am very grateful to my committee for their work in vetting the applications, and my congratulations to the three winners, whom I hope to see soon here at UCR.

  • Michio Kaku, Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, and My Early Readings in Physics

    Another good show on the Science Channel is Dr. Michio Kaku‘s Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible. In each episode, Dr. Kaku investigates a single science fiction idea (e.g., the technological singularity, Transformers robotic beings, or building your own solar system) and speculates about how humanity could achieve those plans. In the episode that is on right now, about solar system construction, he does calculations to show that you cannot built a Dyson sphere, a superstructure that encapsulates a star to harness all of its energy, with only the materials found in our solar system. On the surface (a pun?), I had not considered this as a limitation to the construction of such a structure. However, he then considers the possibility of using graphene, an allotrope or special molecular bonding structure of carbon that has a super strong honeycomb structure. Additionally, graphene’s strength allows it to be very thin, thus requiring less material. Therefore, graphene could be used to construct a Dyson swarm or sphere given that the planets in a solar system are carbon rich.

    During the show, he interviews science fiction fans for ideas, and then, he works through these ideas with scientists at universitiesHis explanations are fascinating and insightful. I like the way that fans are engaged through brainstorming and opinions as Dr. Kaku arrives at his solution to the episode’s problem. This is one aspect of science fiction that goes beyond the stories themselves as prophetic visions. Fandom is the meta-level discourse that, in part, explores the what-if or is-this-possible aspects of science fiction. It is this meta-level discussion that Dr. Kaku’s show engages.

    I have long been a fan of Dr. Kaku. In my senior year of high school, after reading Albert Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theories, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy among others, I read his book Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. This was when I was a physics-geek rather than a lit-geek. I had finished two interviews for MIT, and I had won my high school’s Physics prize in my Junior year. I was energized not only by the amazing science that Kaku described in his popularization, but I was also intrigued by his life leading up to becoming a theoretical physicist. While I was in my teens learning how to work on cars with my 1965 Ford Mustang and optimizing memory usage on my and my friend’s computers, Dr. Kaku in his teens had built his own particle accelerator in his family’s garage complete with electromagnetic confinement rings and vacuum pumps! I suppose the life of the scientist is almost as interesting to me as the science. Also, the writing was important for Kaku and other popularizers from Einstein to the present. I appreciated the way in which they and Kaku could present an engaging narrative that also told me about the advances taking place and the imaginative conjectures proposed in the physical sciences. Perhaps I should have recognized then that I might not have been pursuing the best career path when I tried out for the MIT and Georgia Tech physics programs.

    At least now, I feel more comfortable with what I am doing as a English literature PhD candidate. In the way that I approach literature, I look at the relationships between science, technology, and culture, because I believe that our exploration of and engineering of the world is absolutely necessary to our understanding of ourselves. Our science shapes our understanding of the world, and our technology shapes our engagement and mediation of the world. Even the most mundane narrative, past or present, is indelibly marked by the traces of our science and technology. It is exciting to approach the humanities in this broadly interdisciplinary approach, because it reveals more ways to read and understand humanity than a limited or narrowly defined humanities approach. However, I am not advocating the erasure of those approaches, but I am saying that interdisciplinary approaches energize and expand our comprehension and appreciation of humanity and our work.