Call for Articles: Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames

Abstract

157 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Earth Day was first celebrated in the United States on 22 April 1970. It now mobilizes citizens and communities worldwide, representing the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet and launching the modern global environmental movement. As much of the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, our symposium, “(Re)thinking Earth,” aims to bring together plural perspectives under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities. We invite papers on a range of topics that may include nature writing over time and space, global voices in ecopoetics, affect and ecocriticism, climate change in contemporary fiction, reimagined pastoral landscapes, space and scale in environmental writing, agro-ecological storytelling, the anthropocene, representations of environmental science in literature and film, the climate change crisis in visual culture, ecomedia and environmental science, climate change in utopian and dystopian literature, postcolonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses, sf/fantasy and environmental crises, film and televisual representations of climate change, environmental ethics, and environmental education/literacy. Submit a 250-word abstract in English or Portuguese by 15 March 2020, accompanied by a brief bio-note. Letters of acceptance will be sent no later than the end of March. Send inquiries and abstracts to Teresa Botelho at and to Isabel Oliveira Martins at . .—Teresa Botelho and Isabel Oliveira Martins, National Library of Portugal, Lisbon Call for Articles: Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames. Videogames are a powerful storytelling medium, but what are the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, around videogames? While there is an extensive body of scholarship on how videogames create worlds, construct characters, and explore themes, there has been almost no scholarship on the representation of videogames in literary texts. Yet the study of the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, and around videogames can shed new light on how conceptions of character, space, time, the body, and identity are being reshaped by new forms of play, playable media, algorithmic systems, surveillance culture, and social media. We seek essays by scholars interested in establishing the foundations for the study of this fascinating but underappreciated body of literature. The essays will appear in an anthology that we are calling “Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell About, With, and Around Videogames.” We are primarily interested in scholarly work on written literatures: short stories, novels, poetry, autobiography, creative nonfiction, rap lyrics, fan fiction, and graphic fiction. While we are less interested in essays on cinematic and televisual representations, we welcome exceptional proposals in this vein. Possible topics include analyses of individual texts whose focus is videogames, videogame players, or videogame culture; the representation of videogames, videogame players, or videogame culture in texts that are not “about” videogames per se but feature them in some significant fashion; and comparative analyses of texts 158 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) that focus on a specific genre of videogame, such as MMORPGs, virtual worlds, fighting games, etc. Send abstracts of 300-700 words to Dr. Megan Amber Condis and Dr. Mike Sell at by 31 March 2020. .—Megan Amber Condis, Texas Tech, and Mike Sell, Indiana University of Pennsylvania SFRA Awards Renamed. After the votes were cast and tallied, the SFRA formally changed the names of two of its awards. The award formerly known as the Pilgrim Award will hereafter be known as the SFRA Award for Lifetime Contributions to SF Scholarship; the award formerly known as the Pioneer Award will hereafter be known as the SFRA Innovative Research Award. The former names remain on the website so that any past recipients can still be found using either the old or the new monikers. Full information on the awards, their description, recipients, and award committees can be found on our website in the pages under the Awards tab. I want to thank SFRA members for beginning this debate, for suggesting alternate names, and for voting. The forum, now closed for further discussion, remains posted on the site, so that members (current, past, and future), can retrace the considerations that led to the change.—Keren Omry, President, Science Fiction Research Association Call for Essays: Hélice. An online...