Novel

• Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
• Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)
• Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
• God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
• Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
• The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Novella

• “Kiss Me Twice,” Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011)
• “Silently and Very Fast,” Catherynne M. Valente (WFSA Press; Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2011)
• “The Ice Owl,” Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November/December 2011)
• “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2011)
• “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Ken Liu (Panverse Three, Panverse Publishing)
• “With Unclean Hands,” Adam-Troy Castro (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2011)

Novelette

• “Fields of Gold,” Rachel Swirsky (Eclipse 4, Night Shade Books)
• “Ray of Light,” Brad R. Torgersen (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011)
• “Sauerkraut Station,” Ferrett Steinmetz (Giganotosaurus, November 2011)
• “Six Months, Three Days,” Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com, June 2011)
• “The Migratory Pattern of Dancers,” Katherine Sparrow (Giganotosaurus, July 2011)
• “The Old Equations,” Jake Kerr (Lightspeed Magazine, July 2011)
• “What We Found,” Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011)

Short Story

• “Her Husband’s Hands,” Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine, October 2011)
• “Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son,” Tom Crosshill (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2011)
• “Movement,” Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2011)
• “Shipbirth,” Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2011)
• “The Axiom of Choice,” David W. Goldman (New Haven Review, Winter 2011)
• “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld Magazine, April 2011)
• “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

• Attack the Block, Joe Cornish (writer/director) (Optimum Releasing; Screen Gems)
• Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely (writers), Joe Johnston (director) (Paramount)
• Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)
• Hugo, John Logan (writer), Martin Scorsese (director) (Paramount)
• Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen (writer/director) (Sony)
• Source Code, Ben Ripley (writer), Duncan Jones (director) (Summit)
• The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi (writer/director) (Universal)

 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book

• Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor (Viking Juvenile)
• Chime, Franny Billingsley (Dial Books; Bloomsbury)
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Hodder & Stoughton)
• Everybody Sees the Ants, A.S. King (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
• The Boy at the End of the World, Greg van Eekhout (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
• The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Rae Carson (Greenwillow Books)
• Ultraviolet, R.J. Anderson (Orchard Books; Carolrhoda Lab)

The winners will be announced at SFWA’s 47^th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend, to be held Thursday through Sunday, May 17 to May 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Virginia, near Reagan National Airport. As announced earlier this year, Connie Willis will be the recipient of the 2011 Damon Knight Grand Master Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements in the field. Walter Jon Williams will preside as toastmaster, with Astronaut Michael Fincke as keynote speaker.

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of  SFWA. Voting will open to SFWA Active members on March 1 and close on March 30.  More information on voting is available here.

Founded in 1965 by the late Damon Knight, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America brings together the most successful and daring writers of speculative fiction throughout the world.

Since its inception, SFWA® has grown in numbers and influence until it is now widely recognized as one of the most effective non-profit writers’ organizations in existence, boasting a membership of approximately 2,000 science fiction and fantasy writers as well as artists, editors and allied professionals.  Each year the organization presents the prestigious Nebula Awards® for the year’s best literary and dramatic works of speculative fiction.

This two-day international conference aims to bring together scholars for the first academic conference dedicated to Maggie Gee’s writing. Gee is one of Britain’s most prolific and critically-acclaimed novelists: the author of 12 novels, as well as collections of short stories, edited anthologies of contemporary writing and, most recently, an autobiography My Animal Life (Telegram Books, 2010).

Since she was selected for Granta’s first list of Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 (in company with Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain), Gee has worked in publishing, academic research (gaining a PhD in the twentieth-century novel from Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1980) and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working as one of the Society’s Vice Presidents, as well as acting as Visiting Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to her publishing and academic responsibilities, Gee is also highly critically acclaimed: her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), was shortlisted in 2002 for the Orange ! Prize for Fiction as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004.

Ceaselessly inventive and astonishing, Gee’s writing is distinguished by ambitious scope and aesthetic innovation, tackling political themes and writing across a broad range of subjects and genres. Intertwining intimate domestic dramas with grand-scale, seismic shifts in cosmic balance, several of Gee’s novels imagine global disaster, apocalyptic futures and environmental catastrophes. Meanwhile, Gee is also concerned with exploring issues of racism, prejudice, cultural difference and class inequalities. Her body of work confronts political attitudes in contemporary Britain through satire, comedy, family saga, thriller and romance.

The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Maggie Gee’s writing. Topics might include, but are not limited to, Maggie Gee’s writing and:

• genre, science fiction, thriller, autobiographical fiction, romance, family saga, political satire
• war, terrorism, violence and political activism
• (post-)apocalypse and ecocatastrophe
• inter-generational conflict, familial relationships
• utopian and dystopian thinking
• the urban and the rural
• racism, migration and multicultural Britain
• the role, and representation, of women
• the environment and new ecocritical directions
• class, social mobility, poverty and social inequality
• modernism and its inheritances
• death, suicide and posthumous narrative voices
• the representation of time and imagining the future
• nuclear weaponry
• society, nature and the cosmos
• cosmopolitanism, Africa, Japan
• contemporary women’s writing and publishing
• translation, the British publishing industry

The conference welcomes papers from any discipline, a variety of theoretical perspectives, and those which engage with media beyond that of the written text. Submissions are welcome from both research students and academics. Please send a title and 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to gee@glyphi.co.uk by 29th February 2012.

Conference website: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php
Conference blog: http://maggiegeeconference.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html
Conference Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/154402491290124/

The conference is organised by Dr Sarah Dillon, Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction, School of English, University of St Andrews and Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Lincoln. For more information on the research and professional activities of Dr Dillon and Dr Edwards, see their homepages:

• http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/academicstaff/dillon/
• http://lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/staff/3004.asp

For more information regarding the St Andrews School of English and its activities, as well as the Department of English at the University of Surrey, see the homepages:

• http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/
• http://lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/english/default.htm

The conference is sponsored by Gylphi Arts and Humanities Publisher. Selected papers from the conference proceedings will be published asMaggie Gee: Critical Essays, with a foreword by Gee, as part of Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon). For more information regarding the Series see: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php

Winner, Runners-up and Honorable Mentions for the 2012 Award

Winner: “Superposition” by Rebekah Baldridge, Newman University

First Runner-up: “Halcyon Days” by Madeline Stevens, Bennington College

Second Runner-up: “The Taste of Salt” by Rachel Halpern, Grinnell College

Third Runner-up (tie): “The Writ of Years” by Brit Mandelo, University of Louisville

“Opus No. 4: Duet for Expressionism and Absinthe” by Anthony Powers, Wright State University

“The Case of the Smitten Magician” by Lara Donnelly, Wright State University

Honorable Mentions:

“Ilse, Who Saw Clearly” by E. Lily Yu, Princeton University

“The Sister Kite” by Rebecca McNulty, College of New Jersey

The State of Black Science Fiction 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
6:30pm-8:30 pm
144 Clough Commons

SBSF 2012 will feature locally-based authors, artists, editors, musicians, and game designers talking about issues of race in speculative fiction and reading an original round-robin story written for this event. If you are in the area, I hope you will join us on February 16!

Cheers, Lisa

Lisa Yaszek, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0165 lisa.yaszek@lcc.gatech.edu

Black Studies and Comics

Call for Papers for a proposed panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 3-6 Jan. 2013, in Boston. Sponsored by the MLA Discussion Group on Comics & Graphic Narratives.

How Black Studies might inform comic scholarship and vice versa, to promote greater understanding of race and representation. 500-word abstract in .doc or .pdf by 9 March 2012; Charles Hatfield (charles.hatfield@gmail.com).

This CFP has been posted at the website for the Comics & Graphic Narratives Group, along with the Group’s other two CFPs for 2013: http://graphicnarratives.org/category/calls-for-papers/ [.] Please visit the site and see what we have planned for the coming year! We update the site regularly, and, besides our own Group news, we post information about other comics studies-related activity at MLA as well.

A fuller version of this CFP is enclosed at the bottom of this message. Thank you for your attention!

Charles Hatfield
2012-2013 Chair, MLA Discussion Group on Comics & Graphic Narratives

BLACK STUDIES AND COMICS

Call for Papers for a proposed panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 3-6 Jan. 2013, in Boston. Sponsored by the MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives.

Since representation is at the heart of graphic narrative in all its forms—including comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, and panel cartoons—analyzing comics should be of central importance to scholars of race. To take but a single example, one of the pioneers of the newspaper strip, George Herriman, was a Black Southerner whose work offers subtle and complex commentary on race and color. Herriman—like Homer Plessy a mulatto from New Orleans—produced Krazy Kat, perhaps the most critically acclaimed and artistically influential strip in American history, from 1913 up to his death in 1944. Yet the realities of Herriman’s origins remained obscure in his own lifetime, and even today scholars of the Harlem Renaissance rarely if ever align Herriman with the New Negro movement. Nor do most scholars grant more than cursory attention to the possible links between Herriman’s own racial hybridity and the formal innovations that have enabled Krazy Kat to influence figures as diverse as Picasso, Walt Disney, and Jay Cantor.

This proposed panel seeks to tease out these and other potential areas where the methods of Black Studies may inform comic scholarship, and vice versa. We hope greater collaboration between these disciplines will yield a greater understanding of race and representation in one of America’s most vital cultural archives.

We invite proposals on all topics relevant to this theme, including but not necessarily limited to:

• The legibility (and ironies) of race in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
• African-American cartooning pioneers, e.g. Herriman, Oliver Harrington, Jackie Ormes, Morrie Turner
• Ho Che Anderson’s King and other graphic representations of the Civil Rights Movement
• Black biography in comics, e.g. King, Santiago’s 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, Von Eeden’s The Original Johnson
• Contemporary African-American strip cartoonists, e.g. Robb Armstrong, Ray Billingsley, Barbara Brandon, Keith Knight, Aaron McGruder
• McGruder’s Boondocks and Birth of a Nation
• Samuel Delany’s comics work, including Empire, Bread & Wine, and Wonder Woman
• Comics and Afro-futurism
• Black superheroes and racial ideology
• Morales and Baker’s Captain America, in Truth: Red, White, and Black
• Cyborgs and race in American comics
• Encounters between comics and hip-hop, e.g. Ghostface Killah et al.’s Cell Block Z; Slug, Murs, and Mahfood’s Felt; MF Grimm and Wimberly’s Sentences
• Mat Johnson’s comics work, including Incognegro, Dark Rain, and the forthcoming Right State
• Jeremy Love’s Bayou and the nadir
• Depictions of Blackness in manga, e.g. Koike and Kano’s Color of Rage, Hiramoto’s Me and the Devil Blues
• Blackness, racial caricature, and Otherness in French-language bandes dessinées and other traditions
• Black entrepreneurship in comics, e.g. Fitzgerald’s Fast Willie Jackson; Milestone Media; the Afrocentric self-publishers of the 1990s
• Race in graphic depictions of the New Orleans disaster, e.g., Dark Rain, Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge
• Scholarly and curatorial recoveries of Black cartooning
• The archive of comics and the archive of slavery
• Masks and other metaphors of double consciousness in superhero comics
• EC Comics’ commentaries on racial discrimination
• Caricature and stereotype in Eisner, Crumb, Spiegelman, and others

Send 500 word abstracts in .doc or .pdf form to Charles Hatfield: charles.hatfield@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 9 March 2012. Submitters will receive notification of results from the Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives by no later than April 1.

PLEASE NOTE: This CFP is for a proposed, not a guaranteed, session at MLA 2013, meaning it is contingent on approval by the MLA Program Committee (which will make its decisions after April 1). All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by no later than 7 April 2012.

Friday 13 to Sunday 15 April 2012 at The University of Chichester

£75 all 3 days. Day rates available. Conference dinner £25 extra

For Information, visit: http://sussexfolktalecentre.org or phone The Folklore Society on 0207 862 8564. To book, email: b.gray@chi.ac.uk or enquiries@folklore-society.com

In der vom gattungstheoretischen Diskurs mit all seinen zahlreichen ideellen Verzweigungen und begrifflichen Verästelungen auf der kognitiven Ebene dominierten Fantastikforschung lässt sich bereits auf den ersten Blick ein gravierendes Defizit an visuell-ästhetisch basiertem Approach an das Genre diagnostizieren. Der definitorische Zuordnungs­impe­tus rückt den Fokus der Wissenschaft primär auf die Problematik der Verortung literarischer/media­ler Texte in den kategorial determinierten, intentional eröffneten Gattungsraum. Nicht minder intensiv werden in der Fantastikforschung die ontologischen Beschaffenheiten fiktionaler Welten exploriert und darauf aufbauend die Mechanismen ihrer Kreation und ihrer Persistenz untersucht. Es wird also vornehmlich die Frage “Was?” gestellt. Doch auch einer anderen Fragestellung muss Genüge geschehen, damit eine Ganzheitswirkung der Forschungsergebnisse erzielt werden kann: der Frage “Wie?”

Die Redaktion der Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung setzt sich zum Ziel, der defizitären Lage auf diesem Sektor entgegenzuwirken, und lädt somit alle Interessierten zur Mitwirkung an einer Themenausgabe der ZFF # 5 (Frühjahr 2013) ein. Das gewählte Thema des “Visuellen der Fantastik” ermöglicht eine erstrebenswerte Differenzierung des Zugriffs auf die Gattung und will auf diese Weise ein hochrelevantes alternatives Forschungsinterface mit der speculative fiction erarbeiten. Die Antworten auf die bisher kaum wissenschaftlich reflektierte Frage nach dem “Wie?” versprechen spannende und informative Einblicke in die “Existenzweise” fantastischer Schöpfungen zu gewähren. Es sollte zu diesem Zweck der “Visualisierungspraxis” fantastischer Inhalte seitens der Autoren medial unterschiedlicher Produkte (Literatur, Film, Kunst) nachgegangen und hiermit der Versuch unternommen werden, zu erfahren, wie sich die Imaginationskraft des Künstlers mittels einer spezifischen picture language in den fiktionalen Produkten seiner Fantasie hypostasiert. Der Schwerpunkt des Projektinteresses liegt daher auf der Erforschung der Spezifik des Visuellen in fantastischen Kunstformen in gattungsexterner Abgrenzung zu anderen medial präsenten Genres einerseits und in gattungsinterner Distinktion einzelner Werke zueinander andererseits.

Mögliche Themen sind, beschränken sich aber nicht auf:

• Fantastik in bildender Kunst (Malerei, Fotografie, Skulptur) und Architektur
• Kinematografie und Fantastik – die visuelle Umsetzung in Film und TV
• Liberatur – die visuelle Ebene der Literatur (Materialität, Druck, Cover etc.)
• Fantastik in der Werbung
• Die Inszenierung des Fantastischen in Oper, Ballett und Theater
• Gattungstheoretische Überlegungen zu einer “visuellen” Fantastik

Einsendeschluss für die Beiträge ist der 1. Dezember 2012.

Beiträge und Nachfragen bitte an zff@fantastikforschung.de

Der reguläre Call for Papers / Aufruf zur Mitarbeit gilt für alle weiteren Ausgaben natürlich weiterhin, wer also Interesse an einer Kooperation hat, der möge sich bitte unter oben angegebener Email bei uns melden.

———————-

Universität Hamburg

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Lars Schmeink
Von Melle Park 6
20146 Hamburg
Email: lars.schmeink@uni-hamburg.de
Tel. +49 / 40 / 428 38 2689

Thanks for helping ICFA by staying at the hotel!

For reservations, call the hotel’s toll-free number, 800-380-6751 ext. 9290, or dial direct, 407-851-9000. You can also go to their web site.