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Monthly Archives: November 2012

CFP 2013 World Science Fiction Convention

LoneStarCon 3 – Call for Papers
71st World Science Fiction Convention
August 29 ‐ September 2, 2013
San Antonio, Texas
http://lonestarcon3.org/

Guests of Honor:
Ellen Datlow
James Gunn
Willie Siros
Norman Spinrad
Darrell K. Sweet
Leslie Fish
Joe R. Lansdale

The academic track of the 2013 WorldCon is soliciting papers on all topics related to the science fiction and fantasy genres. We especially encourage papers related to the work of the guests of honor (listed above). Work on Steampunk, Old West/frontier themes, and Spanish language sf is also appreciated. Science fiction has long benefitted from works of criticism and scholarship from those outside the academy, a tradition that GoH Dr. James Gunn helped encourage. Paper proposals from both academics and non‐academics (fans) are welcome.

Paper proposals must include a 300-500 word abstract and appropriate bibliography. Proposals are due by December 31 2012, and participants will be notified by February 1, 2013 if their paper is accepted. All participants must be members of the convention. They will deliver a 15 minute reading of their paper as part of a panel, followed by a Q&A. Attendees may present only one paper at WorldCon, so please, no multiple submissions. All submissions (and any questions) should be sent to the head of the academic track:

Karen Burnham (academic@texas.lonestarcon3.org)

Call for Nominations for Board Positions

Call for nominations.

The following positions are open for election.

  • President
  • First Vice President
  • Second Vice President
  • Public Information Officer

Schedule.

Nominations are now open and will close on Friday 7th December.

You may nominate yourself, or be nominated by others. Nominations will be confirmed and nominees requested to send in a statement for circulation by December 14th.

All position are for three years. Officers may serve a maximum of two consecutive terms in the same role.

The electronic ballot will open on 21st December and close on 25th January

The Election Committee will count the ballots immediately after the 25th January deadline, and if no candidate has a clear majority (51% or more), a run-off election will be held between the two candidates who have received the most votes. The run-off election will be conducted promptly, with appropriate announcements, and with ballots being distributed by 10 February, and with a final vote deadline of 1 March of the election year.

The Election Committee will announce results of the election at the IAFA business meeting during the annual conference of the election year, with additional announcements in appropriate IAFA venues thereafter.

Positions open for election.

President:

Qualifications: The President should have served a term on the Board as either an elected or appointed officer

Role: The President is the chief executive officer, responsible for directing and coordinating all functions of the organization, including the annual conference, the quarterly journal, other sponsored publications, the Awards Program, and public relations of all kinds. The President sets the agenda for, and presides at, all meetings of the Executive Board and the annual Business meeting at the ICFA. The President is also the chief planning officer, responsible for setting agendas in all Association projects. The President oversees the work of the other officers, recruits special guests, seeks institutional support, confirms non-elected Board members, etc. The President is elected by majority vote of the membership of IAFA.

The President serves an additional three years as a voting member of the Board in the capacity of Immediate Past President in which capacity s/he is responsible for the organization of elections.

First Vice President:

Role: The First Vice-President coordinates the ICFA Program, overseeing the work of the Division Heads and scheduling paper sessions, and the Annual Conference Program. The First Vice-President also consults with the President concerning appearances by special guests in panels, readings, and lectures, and with the Conference Chair about physical arrangements such as AV equipment, room assignments, etc. The First Vice-President substitutes for the President when necessary. The First Vice-President is elected by majority vote of the membership of the IAFA.

Send Vice President:

Role: The Second Vice-President oversees and develops the programming track of published creative writers, maintaining a current email list, contacting writers to solicit proposals, organizing sessions, and consulting with the First Vice-President to schedule the creative track. The Second Vice-President also oversees the IAFA Graduate Student Award including: advertising the award, organizing and chairing the prize committee, and collecting and forwarding submissions to the committee for a blind reading process. The Second Vice-President is elected by majority vote of the membership of the IAFA.

Public Information Officer:

Role: This officer edits and distributes promotional materials and forms publicity liaisons with other organizations where appropriate. The Public Information Coordinator maintains and regularly updates the website and weblog, creates and distributes information from the Board such as the Call for Papers and election material, and contributes photos and promotional copy to the IAFA website. The Public Information Coordinator takes Executive Board minutes, disseminates them, archives them, and makes them available for archival use. The Public Information Coordinator is the recorder of motions and amendments at official meetings. The Public Information Coordinator is elected by majority vote of the membership of the IAFA.

PCA Pulp Studies (second call)

Please see below the CFP for the Pulp Studies area of the PCA/ACA.  As many of our sessions tend to focus on pulps in the fantastic, I hope that members of the IAFA and SFRA will submit proposals.  Please note that the deadline was moved back this year from December 15 to November 30.

If you are so inclined, please also join the Pulp Studies listserv.  You may email me directly to request that I add you to the list or may submit a request via the Pulp Studies site listed in the call below.  I am continuing to add to the bibliography as quickly as I can review submissions, so please let me know about any works you think should be included.  I also welcome CFPs to post in pulp-related areas.

Call for Proposals
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Pulp Studies Area
Popular Culture/American Culture Association National Conference
Washington, DC
March 27-30 2013

Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulp paper.  They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content.  They were sold for modest sums, and were targeted at (sometimes specialized) readerships of popular literature, such as western and adventure, detective, fantastic (including the evolving genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror), romance and sports fiction. The first pulp Argosy, began life as the children’s magazine The Golden Argosy, dated Dec 2, 1882 and the last of the “original” pulps was Ranch Romances and Adventures, Nov. 1971.

The Pulp Studies area exists to support the academic study of pulp writers, editors, readers, and culture.  It seeks to invigorate research by bringing together scholars from diverse areas including romance, western, science fiction, fantasy, horror, adventure, detective, and more.  Finally, the Pulp Studies area seeks to promote the preservation of the pulps through communication with libraries, museums, and collectors.

With this in mind, we are calling for papers and panels that discuss the pulps and their legacy.  Suggested authors and topics:

  • Magazines:  Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, Fight Stories, All-Story, Argosy, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spicy Detective, Ranch Romances and Adventures, Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet Magazine, Love Story, Flying Aces, Black Mask, and Unknown, to name a few.
  • Editors and Owners:  Street and Smith (Argosy), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales), Hugo Gernsback (Amazing Stories), Mencken and Nathan (Black Mask), John Campbell (Astounding).
  • Influential Writers:  H.P. Lovecraft, A. E. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and Henry Kuttner.  Proposals about contemporary writers in the pulp tradition, such as Joe Lansdale and Michael Chabon are also encouraged.  New Weird writers and others, such as China Mieville, whose work is influenced by the pulps, are also of interest.
  • Influences on Pulp Writers:  Robert Bloch, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs were all influences, along with literary and philosophical figures such as Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herbert Spencer.
  • Popular Characters:  Conan of Cimmeria; Doc Savage; Solomon Kane; Buck Rogers; Northwest Smith; The Domino Lady; Jiril of Jiory; Zorro; Kull of Atlantis; El Borak; The Shadow; The Spider; Bran Mak Morn; Nick Carter; The Avenger; and Captain Future, among others.  Also character types: the femme fatale, the he-man, the trickster, racism and villainy (such as Charles Middleton’s Ming the Merciless), and more.
  • Artists:  Popular cover artists including Margaret Brundage (Weird Tales), Frank R. Paul (Amazing Stories), Virgil Finlay (Weird Tales), and Edd Cartier (The Shadow, Astounding).
  • Periods:  The dime novels; Argosy and the ancestral pulps; Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and the heyday of the pulps; the decline of the pulps in the 50s and 60s; pulps in the age of the Internet.
  • Theme and Styles:  Masculinity, femininity, and sex as related to the heroic in the pulps; the savage as hero, the woman as hero, the trickster as hero, etc.
  • Film, Television and Graphic Arts:  Pulps in film, television, comics, graphic novels and other forms are especially encouraged.  Possible topics could include film interpretations such as Conan the Barbarian, comic book incarnations of pulp magazines and series; “new weird” reinventions of the pulps such as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Watchmen; fan films; and newer productions, including the recently released Solomon Kane and Conan.
  • Cyberculture:  Cyberpulps such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and pulp-influenced games such as the Age of Conan MMORPG or the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

These are but suggestions for potential panels and presentations.  Proposals on other topics are welcome.

For general information on the Pulp Studies area, please visit our website:  http://pulpstudies.weebly.com/

Final Submission Deadline: November 30, 2012

  • When submitting your paper, abstract, proposal, or panel please include your name, affiliation, and email address. For those submitting a panel, include the name, affiliation, and email address for each participant and note who will be the principle contact and panel chair.
  • Abstracts should be approximately 250 words in length.
  • Indicate if presentation media is required.  Projectors will be present in most locations, but presenters must supply their own computers.
  • A preliminary version of the schedule will usually be posted on our website in January.  Due to the number of panels and participants, we are unable to accommodate individual scheduling requests.  We encourage participants to come for the entire conference.  The final version of the schedule will be distributed in hard copy at the conference with addendums if needed. For privacy reasons we do not publish email addresses in the online version of the program.
  • Only one paper is accepted from the same presenting author. All presenters, including invited panel speakers and session chairs, must register and pay the conference registration fee. If you need an early confirmation for visa or budgetary reasons, please indicate this in your submission.

How to Submit Proposals:  Submit proposals by December 15 through the following website:  http://ncp.pcaaca.org/

Note:  Only papers submitted through the website will appear in the conference program.  If you have any questions, please contact the Pulp Studies area coordinator:

Justin Everett
University of the Sciences
j.everet@usciences.edu

Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction

Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction
Deadline for inclusion in our first issue: February 1st, 2013

We are now soliciting articles for the first issue, scheduled for publication April 10th, 2013, and for subsequent issues of the Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction. The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online journal hosted by the University of California at Riverside, affiliated with the UCR Library’s Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Graduate student editors run the Eaton Journal, with scholarly review provided by an interdisciplinary executive board made up of SF scholars, research librarians, and archivists. We are proud to announce the addition of John Rieder, Mark Bould, Catherine Coker, Jess Nevins, Rob Latham, Sherryl Vint, Arthur B. Evans, Roger Luckhurst, and Melissa Conway to our board.

The Eaton Journal creates a space for science fiction scholars to share their findings and their experiences within the several archives dedicated to science fiction found throughout the world. The Eaton Journal is also the only journal dedicated to providing a place for archival librarians to discuss the challenges of managing significant science fiction collections and share their best practices for facilitating as well as conducting archival research in SF.

Each of the journal’s bi-annual issues will feature three types of articles, each of which addresses a different aspect of our focus on developing an interdisciplinary dialog around archival research in SF:

Scholarly articles with a significant research component:  These articles will not simply be notes and speculations regarding material in an archive, but rather will use archival materials to build critical arguments that go beyond the textual and theoretical claims of conventional literary research.  While these articles must still be textually and theoretically sound, we hope to provide a venue for research that makes archival evidence its primary focus.

Methodological/Pedagogical articles:  Just as the journal will be a showcase for the best archival research in SF, it will also provide a space where SF scholars, librarians, and archivists can develop innovative and incisive strategies for research within the archive, and for integrating that research into the academic genres of publication, presentation, and dissertation.  From a pedagogical standpoint, the journal will be a space to discuss methods for developing, transmitting, and assessing archival research skill-sets within the academy, publishing articles that promote skill-sharing both among faculty and between faculty and graduate students.

Articles spotlighting neglected authors, emerging archives, and other research opportunities:  The third type of article featured in the journal is that which identifies newly discovered or undeveloped archival resources, or points to authors whose archival traces offer particularly rich opportunities for scholarship.  This will also be a space for articles that seek to expand the bounds of the SF archive, exploring new mediums, materials, or discourses as sites for SF scholarship.

Submission Information:

The Eaton Journal is a refereed and selective journal. All articles submitted to the Eaton Journal pass through a three-stage peer review and revision process: (1) the article is initially reviewed by the graduate student editors of the journal; (2) if it is judged to be potentially publishable, then the article is sent to our executive board for further review; and, (3) if the outside reviews are positive, an Eaton Journal editor is then assigned to work with the author to prepare the article for eventual publication.

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction accepts contributions with the understanding that: under the author’s warranty (1) the article has not been previously published in English, and will not be published elsewhere until after it has been published in the Eaton Journal; (2) that in any subsequent republication of the contribution, the author will acknowledge its first publication in the Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction; (3) that the Eaton Journal retains the right to republish the contribution in any issue or reissue of the journal in any form, including a possible future printed edition of the journal, and to reprint the contribution in any anthology sponsored by the Eaton Journal; (4) that the author has obtained all necessary rights and permissions pertaining to media quoted or reproduced in the submission; and, (5) that the author will be financially responsible for any legal action taken against the Eaton Journal by cause of his/her contribution.

The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction will not review article submissions that are under consideration elsewhere or that have been published previously.

FORMATTING GUIDELINES: When submitting an article to the Eaton Journal, please format it according to the following guidelines:

  1. Submission must be in MS Word .doc file format.
  2. Submissions should be between 5,000-12,000 words.
  3. For the text itself: margins at 1″, double spaced, font size 12 pt. or smaller.
  4. Submissions must use the most recent MLA Style for all documentation.
  5. Images and other embedded media should be placed in-text throughout the submission, not located together at the end. All images and figures should be properly captioned according to most recent MLA style. Authors are responsible for securing rights to all images and figures used within their submission. Authors must produce evidence that these rights have been obtained before an image or figure will be published.
  6. Submissions must include Notes and Works Cited at the end as regular text. In other words, please do NOT use the “automatic” footnote/endnote function on your word processor to generate these. They sometimes tend to disappear when traveling through cyberspace or when the document is converted. For matters of writing style with respect to endnotes, works cited, and references in running text, contributors should follow the style of the MLA Style Manual, 1999, or newer. Precise information on the following must be provided. For books: the place of publication, publisher, date, page numbers for quoted or paraphrased passages, and (for articles in anthologies) inclusive page numbers. If the edition cited is a later edition, provide also the date of the first edition. For articles in periodicals: volume number or (if there is no volume number) whole number, date of issue cited, page numbers for quoted or paraphrased passages, and inclusive page numbers.
  7. In order to ensure blind readings from the Editorial Committee and Editorial Board, authors must remove any identifying information from the content of the submission and from the document’s ‘properties’.
  8. On a separate document, include your name and your postal and e-mail addresses, the title of your essay, and a brief abstract of its contents (3-5 sentences).

Articles submitted for publication in the Eaton Journal should be sent to the editors at: eatonjournal@gmail.com.

Deadline for inclusion in our first issue: February 1st, 2013.

Thank you for your consideration,

Founding Editors
Jeff Hicks
Josh Pearson

Co-editors
Richard Hunt
Jennifer Kavetsky
Annie Schnarr
Anne Sullivan

Dell Award

Everyone, please let your students know it is time to work on those sf/f short stories. The Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing is open for submissions at www.dellaward.com and the Facebook page is available at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dell-Magazines-Award/177319923776?fref=ts. Remember that there is a class-submission category of $15 for as many stories as one instructor wishes to send. Guidelines follow:

THE DELL MAGAZINES AWARD

For Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Guidelines

The Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing (formerly the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing) has been established by Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and is supported by the School of Mass Communications at the University of South Florida.

The $500 award goes to the best unpublished and unsold science fiction or fantasy short story submitted by a full-time undergraduate college student. The winner will be invited to the IAFA annual Conference on the Fantastic in mid-March in Orlando, FL, and the winning story will be published in Asimov’s in print or on-line.

In general, the winner of the Dell Magazines Award will be the story that best meets the expectations of the judges. Those stories typically are “character oriented”; i.e., the characters, rather than the science, provide the main focus for the reader’s interest. Serious, thoughtful, yet accessible fiction will have the best chance of success.

Deadline for entries for this year’s contest is midnight (ET), Tuesday, January 8, 2013.

The contest is open to all full-time undergraduates at accredited colleges and universities. The award is not limited to unpublished authors, but all submissions must be previously unpublished and unsold, and they should be from 1,000 to 10,000 words long. Writers may submit an unlimited number of stories, but each manuscript must include a cover sheet with the writer’s name, address, phone number, and the name of the university the writer attends. Your name should not be on the manuscript itself after the cover sheet.

The judges reserve the right to double-check your university status. For this year’s contest, you must have been a full-time undergraduate during the fall 2011; spring 2012 summer 2012; or fall 2012 semesters (or quarters) of your university or college.

Story submissions should have been written during your time as a student. However, if you attended college full-time during a qualifying semester and then graduated, went to part-time status or quit entirely for a time, you are still eligible.

The winner will be determined by the editors of Asimov’ magazine and the award administrator.

There is a $5 entry fee per story.

You can submit your story electronically at www.dellaward.com and there is a PayPal option for the entry fee. If you like, you can elect to mail the story to the address below along with your submission fee or you can send the story as an attachment to RWilber@usf.edu and mail the entry fee separately.

You can also find us on Facebook by searching for the Dell Magazines Award or going to this site: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Dell-Magazines-Award/177319923776

IMPORTANT: There is a special class-project category. Any instructor may submit an unlimited number of stories from any one class for a flat rate of $15. The manuscripts must meet the general requirements of the award and should be put into one envelope along with a brief cover letter from the instructor listing the college or university and the name of the class. This offer is for any college class and not limited to creative-writing classes. The instructor should contact Dr. Rick Wilber at RWilber@usf.edu.

Manuscripts cannot be returned, but if you include a self-addressed stamped envelope, we will send you an announcement of the winner and runners-up.

Dell Magazines Award/CIS 3095
School of Mass Communications/USF
4202 E. Fowler
Tampa, Fla. 33620

If you have any questions, you can reach Dr. Wilber at this e-mail address: RWilber@usf.edu.

Stories by previous Dell Award winners are available at the Asimov’s Science Fiction homepage at: http://www.asimovs.com. The complete list of winners and finalists is on this website.

ICFA Paper Deadline Extended

DEADLINE EXTENDED for those affected by Sandy. Please submit papers by the 10th if you are affected by this storm. We hope that everyone affected by this storm is safe.