International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Electric Athenaeum is a Science Fiction and Fantasy magazine publishing short fiction, articles, poetry, and interviews. Each issue features an accompanying theme, and is available for free to readers.

This issue’s theme: For Future Generations

We are currently OPEN for submissions! We plan on remaining open to submissions through 15 February 2018.

Fiction Guidelines

Word Limit: 3,000 words minimum, 10,000 words maximum

Pay Rate: 50GBP per story

Genre: We are open to any genre of speculative fiction, so long as the story contains a strong imaginative thread.

Theme: For Future Generations (more detail below)

Language: English (translations are welcome, as are submissions from authors worldwide)

Rights: We purchase first world electronic text rights.

For Future Generations (theme): Generation starships establishing new colonies. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Driving back the dark to protect your children. For this issue of Electric Athenaeum, we are seeking genre stories that focus on the issues surounding planning for future generations. We are particularly interested in stories featuring new visions/interpretations of generation starships, the care of fragile ecosystems, and dramatic explorations of balancing the rights of future generations versus the needs of the present.

Submissions Process: Please submit stories to us at electricathenaeum@gmail.com, using the Subject Line: Fiction: [Insert Story Title Here]. Please include a cover letter clearly listing your name, email address, story title, genre, and word count. The cover letter should also include publishing history (as applicable) and any other relevant information (for example, if you write interstellar fiction and also are a literal rocket scientist). Please use standard manuscript format and attach stories to the email as a .RTF, .DOC, or .DOCX file. No simultaneous submissions, please.

Queries and Response Times: We aim to respond to all submissions within two weeks. Please do not query us before that time.

Nonfiction Guidelines

What We’re Looking For: Articulate, well-written articles on a variety of subjects of interest to the SFF community that fit with out current theme. We are particularly interested in articles that explore the intersections between current science and fiction (be that hard science or social), examinations of genre history (for example, how different authors used/approached the trope of the generation ship), and essays on the writing or reading experience.

What We’re Not Interested In: At this time, we are not looking for reviews, interviews, or reprints of articles published elsewhere (particularly online). While we may print reviews or interviews, they will be handled in-house or directly commissioned to fit the theme of each issue. In addition, we have no interest in clickbait, pieces designed just to elicit an anger response or to denigrate a given work or group, or listicles.

Word Limit: 3,000 word maximum

Pay Rate: 50GBP per article

Submissions Process: Please Query First! Email queries to us at electricathenaeum@gmail.com using the Subject Line: Nonfiction: [Insert Proposed Article Title Here]. Please include a paragraph outlining the proposed article, and a list of your relevant qualifications or experience. If the article proposed seems a good fit, we will ask to see a full version. Please bear in mind that our request to see a full version of the article is not a guarantee of publication.

Poetry Guidelines

What We’re Looking For: Poetry of all forms, structures, and kinds that fits with our current theme. We are currently open to a wide variety of lengths, but it’s probably best to stick to no more than one page per poem.

Pay Rate: 10GBP per poem

Submission Process: Email submissions to us at electricathenaeum@gmail.com using the Subject Line: Poetry Submission. Please include a cover letter clearly listing your name, email address, poem title(s), and genres. The cover letter should also include publishing history (as applicable) and any other relevant information. Please use standard manuscript format and attach poems in a single document to the email as a .RTF, .DOC, or .DOCX file.

Visual Art Guidelines

What We’re Looking For: We are currently looking for artwork for the cover image of our first issue. We’re looking for science fiction or fantasy artwork that fits with the theme of For Future Generations, (see description above). We are open to all experience levels, and original or reprint artwork.

Pay Rate: 75GBP for cover art

Submission Process: Please Query! Email queries to us at electricathenaeum@gmail.com using the Subject Line: Artwork Query. Please include a link to a gallery of your work or the proposed piece specifically (if reprint), and a list of your relevant qualifications or experience.

Thank you to everyone considering submitting to Electric Athenaeum!

Call for Discussion Topics and Panel Proposals:
A Celebration of Slashers

DePaul University

Now accepting submissions and ideas for the sixth annual Pop Culture Colloquium at DePaul University in Chicago! DePaul University’s College of Communication is hosting a one-day celebratory colloquium in honor of the Slasher genre on Saturday, April 28, from 9am-6pm.

This event will feature roundtable discussions from scholars and fans of slasher films, including the Friday the 13th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and other franchises, films, television series, video games, graphic novels, or et al. Our keynote speaker is Rachel Talalay, director of Nightmare on Elm Street 5 as well as multiple television series (Doctor Who, Sherlock, Riverdale, Flash, Supernatural, Reign…the list goes on.)

Participants may propose panels and topics about a broad array of ideas related to the genre and its cultural impact. The Pop Culture Conference does not feature formal paper presentations, but speakers are invited to have roundtable discussions themed around these topics. The audience for this event is both graduate and undergraduate students, both fans and scholars.

If you’re interested in speaking on a roundtable, or want to propose a panel with 3-5 people, or have ideas for other events/lectures, please send a 300 word abstract that proposes a significant topic of discussion and a CV/resume to Pop Culture Conference (popcultureconference@gmail.com) by Jan 15, 2018. Please aim your abstracts for a more general audience and for a discussion rather than traditional scholarly paper presentation. We will also have the opportunity to publish a longer version of your talk in an update to our Time Lords and Tribbles book.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

– Slashers and gender

– Slashers and race

– Narrative and genre theories of slashers

– Changes in the horror genre

– Slasher/horror fandom

– The impact of particular directors, writers, or actors on the genre

– Teaching horror/slashers

– Adaptation within the slasher canon

– Case studies of slasher films

– What counts as a slasher?

For more information, please check out popcultureconference.com, and sign up for updates on Facebook (search “A Celebration of Slashers”). We hope that you will be able to join in the discussion and celebration!

Please send a 300 word abstract that proposes a significant topic of discussion and a CV/resume to Pop Culture Conference (popcultureconference.com) by Jan 15, 2018.

A Celebration of Slashers

#DePaulSlashers

(DePaul University, April 28, 2018)

Please click here for more information.

Women, video games, and modding

deadline for submissions:
December 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Bridget Whelan / McFarland Books

contact email:
bawhelan@gmail.com

***DEADLINE EXTENDED: ABSTRACTS DUE DEC 1, 2017***

This is a call for article-length scholarly contributions for inclusion in a proposed collection of essays (to be published by McFarland) broadly focused around the topic of women and video game “modding.”

Potential topics may include:

Romance mods, including the politics of modding race and sexuality, NPC (“non-player character”) availability, NPC appearance, and creating or extending canonical romantic scenes
Modding the body: what sort of mods are women creating and using on their own characters? Can mods express dissatisfaction with base game character creation options?
Modding communities: how have online spaces like Tumblr fostered modding communities for women? The importance of crediting modders, the policing of gamers on how to use and credit use of mods, collaborative modding communities versus “lone wolf” modders, the backlash against websites like Nexus
Essays focused on particular games, such a Dragon Age, The Sims, or Skyrim
The relationship between female modders and developers: do developers ever respond to modder creations? Is base game content ever altered to appease modder interests? Do developers ever express disagreement or lack of support for modders?
Using modding and game creation in girls’ education.
This list is far from expansive; any proposed essay addressing some aspect of female gamers and modding will be considered.

Please email a 500-word abstract to bawhelan@gmail.com by Dec 1, 2017. Completed first drafts will be expected sometime around Jun 1, 2018. Please also include a short bio with your abstract submission.

Gothic, Ghastly, Corporeal and Creaturely: Tim Burton’s Curious Bodies

deadline for submissions:
December 8, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Fran Pheasant-Kelly/University of Wolverhampton

contact email:
f.e.pheasant-kelly@wlv.ac.uk

Call for Papers

The First International Conference on Twenty-First Century Film Directors

University of Wolverhampton in collaboration with Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton and Redeemer University College, Ontario presents

Gothic, Ghastly, Corporeal and Creaturely: Tim Burton’s Curious Bodies

Thursday 15th February 2018 at Light House Media Centre*, Wolverhampton

Keynote: Professor Adam Barkman, Redeemer University College, Ontario

Film director Tim Burton has acquired an international reputation and critical acclaim for fantasy horror films that variously encompass alternative worlds inhabited by ghosts, animated corpses, grotesque and horrible bodies, or otherwise, ‘different’ beings. So too do creaturely apparitions feature regularly in his productions. While his work often centres on animated characters, he collaborates with a number of specific star personae such as Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Christopher Lee, Winona Ryder, Vincent Price, Christopher Walken, Danny de Vito, Michael Keaton, and Jack Nicholson. Burton also frequently uses composer, Danny Elfman, as well as certain crew members and technical staff to work on his films. This one-day conference seeks to draw together scholarship on the theme of ‘bodies’ in Burton’s films and invites proposals accordingly. We particularly welcome contributions focusing on:

§ Collaborative bodies – stars, actors, composers, and crew members/technical staff

§ Grotesque and vile bodies

§ Gothic bodies

§ Animated bodies

§ Compromised and anomalous bodies, and ‘freak-show’ aesthetics

§ Creaturely bodies

§ Abject and corporeal beings

§ Bodies between worlds

§ Spectacular bodies

Please send a 300-word abstract along with a 100 word bio by Friday 8th December 2017 to: Fran Pheasant-Kelly, University of Wolverhampton f.e.pheasant-kelly@wlv.ac.uk . A final listing of accepted presentations will be released on 15th December 2017.

Delegate fees for Burton’s Curious Bodies are £50 and £20 for students/concessions to include lunch, refreshments, and evening wine reception and screening of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016).

* Light House Media Centre is the Black Country’s only independent cinema, housing two screens, galleries and a café bar within the iconic Victorian architecture of The Chubb Buildings.

Call for Papers – Post-cinema – VR and AR: a Postcinematic Modernity II

Film Forum – XVI Magis International Film Studies Spring School
Gorizia, Università degli studi di Udine-Italy

March 3rd-7th 2018

Deadline November 30th, 2017

Address questions and proposals to: (goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com ) )
​​Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), as well as establishing new identities and expanding the perceptions of existing users and the technologies they use, also represent two cardinal points in the (re)definition of participative and political practices in current media landscape. In this sense the Postcinema section would like to explore the “community/knowledge/power” relationship and the “community/history/truth” relationship in the production and diffusion of certain “media products”, in particular the VR and AR ones. The 2018 Post Cinema section of the Magis Spring School takes into considerations proposals in the following fields:

– Literacy and socio-economic accessibility linked to VR and AR in the new media (eg, the difficult access to the interfaces of VR gaming or the rapport with the casual gaming)
– The creation of social communities linked to the collective use of products specially created for their use through VR and AR devices.
– The user’s bodily, spatial and temporal perception during the pragmatic use of VR and AR. For example, the user’s camouflage with technology and constant development of dedicated peripherals (war games guns, footrests to allow the use of the feet currently not supported, introduction of wireless devices for the viewer …) impact;
– The relationship between truth and post-cinematics products (such as documentaries or interactive films, video games, and other digital products). In these products whose story is being told? Who is telling it? For whom? Whose truth? Who circulates in the market of whom?
– The current use and the future potential of VR and AR as tools for interpreting and re-reading a social-political setting.
– The use of “politics” in digital video games and interactive products (in the form of satire, parody, narration: eg “Trump Simulator”, “Job Simulator”). The analysis of the VR development policies adopted by different communities or countries, and the investigation of the system of power that they configure or contest.

We invite you to send us proposals for papers or panels. The deadline for their submission is November, 30th 2017. Proposals should not exceed one page in length. Please make sure to attach a short CV (10 lines max). A registration fee (€ 150) will be applied. For more information, please contact us at (goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com)

Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference

deadline for submissions:
December 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:
McMaster University, Department of English and Cultural Studies

contact email:
sffembodimentconference2018@gmail.com

**Extended Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2017**

Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference

May 18-19, 2018

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Keynote Speakers

Veronica Hollinger, emerita professor, Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, science fiction scholar and co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and collections including Queer Universes: Sexuality in Science Fiction (2008). Parabolas of Science Fiction (2013), and The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010).

Kameron Hurley, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning author of Stars Are Legion (2017), The Geek Feminist Revolution (2016), the Worldbreaker Saga, and The God’s War Trilogy.

In response to the popularity of cyberspace disembodiment of the 80s and 90s, SFF is increasingly concerned with exploring the materiality of bodies. SFF literature, film, television and video games frequently explore how experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and disability inform the construction of identity and influence lived experience; question what it means to be or exceed the human; and consider the agency and nature of nonhuman bodies. This conference will explore the ways in which the body is a focus in SFF, and how the experience and representation of bodies inform how we understand human, post-human, and non-human subjects, and their positionality within material and cultural settings.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers—or panels consisting of three 20-minute papers—addressing topics that include but are not limited to the following:

gender identity
sexuality
race and ethnicity
representations of disability
body modification, cyborgs, clones
post-human and non-human embodiment
technology and the body
metamorphosis and hybridity
bodily experiences of environmental crisis
bodies, space, and geography
pregnancy, birth, aging, death and dying
bodily containment (in spaceships, or exo-skeletons)
environments as bodies, sentient ecological networks
bodily manifestations of the soul or spirit

Please send inquiries and proposals of 250-500 words (including a title, your institutional affiliation, and a bio of 100 words or less) to sffembodimentconference2018@gmail.com by December 31st, 2017. We welcome proposals from researchers of all levels, including graduate students and independent scholars.

OGOM & Supernatural Cities present: The Urban Weird

deadline for submissions:
January 1, 2018

full name / name of organization:
University of Hertfordshire

contact email:
s.george@herts.ac.uk

The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which have often been accompanied by a media frenzy. We were the first to invite vampires into the academy back in 2010. Our most recent endeavour, Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Feral Humans enjoyed extensive coverage globally and saw us congratulated in the THES for our ambitious 3 day programme which included actual wolves, ‘a first for a UK academy’. Our fourth conference will be an exciting collaboration with the Supernatural Cities: Narrated Geographies and Spectral Histories project at the University of Portsmouth. Supernatural Cities will enjoy its third regeneration, having previously convened in Portsmouth and Limerick.

The Open Graves, Open Minds Project unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifting creatures (most recently, the werewolf) and other supernatural beings and their worlds. It opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. It extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical. Supernatural Cities encourages conversation between disciplines (e.g. history, cultural geography, folklore, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature). It explores the representation of urban heterotopias, otherness, haunting, estranging, the uncanny, enchantment, affective geographies, communal memory, and the urban fantastical.​

The city theme ties in with OGOM’s current research: Sam George’s work on the English Eerie and the urban myth of Old Stinker, the Hull werewolf; the Pied Piper’s city of Hamelin and the geography and folklore of Transylvania; Bill Hughes’s work on the emergence of the genre of paranormal romance from out of (among other forms) urban fantasy; Kaja Franck’s work on wilderness, wolves, and were-animals in the city. This event will see us make connections with the research of Supernatural Cities scholars, led by historian Karl Bell. Karl has explored the myth of Spring-Heeled-Jack, and the relationship between the fantastical imagination and the urban environment. We invite other scholars to join in the dialogue with related themes from their own research.

From its inception, the Gothic mode has been imbued with antiquity and solitude, with lonely castles and dark forests. The city, site of modernity, sociality, and rationalised living, seems to be an unlikely locus for texts of the supernatural. And yet, by the nineteenth century, Dracula had already invaded the metropolis from the Transylvanian shadows and writers such as R. L. Stevenson adapted the supernatural Gothic to urban settings. Gaskell, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, too, uncover the darker side of city life and suggest supernatural forces while discreetly maintaining a veneer of naturalism.

In twentieth-century fantastic and Gothic, perhaps owing in part to a disillusionment with modernity, all manner of spectres haunt our cities in novels, film, TV, and video games. Radcliffean Gothic saw the uncultivated wilderness and the premodern past as the fount of terror; the contemporary fantastic discovers the supernatural precisely where space has been most rationalised—the modern city. Civilisation, rooted etymologically in the Latin civitas (‘city’), is itself put into question by its subversion by the supernatural.

Supernatural cities emerge in a range of contemporary fictions from the horror of Stephen King to the dark fantasy of Clive Barker, the parallel Londons of V. E. Schwaab and China Mieville, magical neo-Victorian Londons in the Young Adult fiction of Genevieve Cogman and Samantha Shannon, and Aliette de Bodard’s fallen angels and dragons in a supernatural Paris. Zombies lurch through scenes of urban breakdown while, in TV, there is the vampire-ridden noir LA of Angel. The large metropolises are not alone in their unearthliness—see the Celtic otherworld that lies behind Manchester in Alan Garner’s Elidor. Then there are the imagined cities of high fantasy, which form a contrast to the gritty familiarity of the cities that feature in the distinct genre of urban fantasy itself or the frequently urban backgrounds of paranormal romance. Supernatural cities are haunted, too, by such urban legends as Spring Heeled-Jack and Old Stinker, the werewolf of Hull.

The conference will explore the image of the supernatural city as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with previous OGOM conferences, from which emerged books and special issue journals, there will be the opportunity for delegates’ presentations to be published.

The conference organising committee invites proposals for panels and individual papers. Possible topics and approaches may include (but are not limited to) the following:

The urban weird

The English eerie

Folk horror’s encroachment on the city

Magical cities

Alternative/parallel cities

Urban folklore/legends

Urban fantasy and genre

YA and children’s magical cities

Monsters and demons at large in the city (Dracula, Dorian Gray, Angel, Cat People, King Kong, Elephant Man, The Werewolf of London, Sweeney Todd, Jack the Ripper, Lestat, Zombie ‘R’, mummies, witches, etc.)

Psychogeography

Gothic architecture

Cities and the incursion of the wilderness

Civilisation and nature

Alternative urban histories; neo-Victorianism and steampunk

Gothic/magical fashion, music, and subcultures of the city

Supernatural city creatures (demons, gargoyles, ghosts, vampires, angels)

Animal hauntings and city spectres

Decay, entropy, and economic collapse

Supernatural cityscapes in video games

Gotham City/comic books/dark knights

The disenchantments of modernity and re-enchantment of the city

Dark spaces/borders/liminal landscapes

Wild, uncanny areas of the city

Drowned/submerged cities

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Owen Davies, historian of witchcraft and magic, on ‘Supernatural beliefs in nineteenth-century asylums’

Dr Sam George, Convenor of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, ‘City Demons: urban manifestations of the Pied Piper and Nosferatu Myths’

Adam Scovell, BFI critic and Folk Horror film specialist, on ‘the Urban Wyrd’

Dr Karl Bell, Convenor of Supernatural Cities, on ‘the fantastical imagination and the urban environment’ (title tbc)

Delegates will engage with our Gruesome Gazetteer of Gothic Hertfordshire and accompany us on a tour of Supernatural St Albans and its environs.

Abstracts (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for two-hour panels, together with a 100-word biography, should be submitted by 1 January 2018 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to all of the following:

Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk;

Dr Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com;

Dr Kaja Franck, k.a.franck@gmail.com;

Dr Karl Bell, karl.bell@port.ac.uk

Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be in the following format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) Abstract. Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters.

Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 30 January 2018. Visit us at OpenGravesOpenMinds.com and follow us on Twitter @OGOMProject

Call for Papers
Fan Studies Network North America is proud to announce its first conference:

Fandom—Past, Present, Future

DePaul University, Chicago, IL
October 25-27, 2018

Building on the success of the annual Fan Studies Network conference in the United Kingdom, and with the support of our international colleagues, we invite submissions for a North American fan studies conference. We welcome all topics and themes related to media, sports, music, and celebrity fandoms, discussions of affirmative and/or transformative fans and their contributions, as well as meta-questions such as ethics and methodology. We encourage submissions on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other aspects of power and identity in fan works and fan communities.

The conference will feature both panels and roundtables, and we invite scholars at different stages in their careers, as well as fan-scholars, to submit:

Pre-constituted roundtables (500 word roundtable proposal)
Pre-constituted panels (250 word panel proposal; names and 500 word paper abstracts, 3-4 participants)
Individual papers (500 word abstract)
Work-in-progress speedgeeking proposals (150 words; speedgeeking involves presenting a work-in-progress to a several groups of people for 5 min each, in order to receive helpful feedback)
Please send any inquiries and/or abstracts to fsnna.conference@gmail.com by 15th February 2018. Multiple submissions are welcome, but we strive to accept as many participants as possible.

Keynote Speaker: Abigail De Kosnik (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley Center for New Media and Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies)

Conference organizers: Paul Booth, Kristina Busse, Bertha Chin, Lori Morimoto, Louisa Stein, and Lesley Willard

For more information, please click here.