Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures: New Book Series

Abstract

612 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 48 (2021) Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. The journal, which publishes two issues each year, provides an open-access international forum for scholarly exchanges on science fiction, fantasy, other speculative genres, and issues current in the field. Fafnir welcomes contributions from a wide range of perspectives. The editors are particularly interested in innovative (yet rigorous) approaches to scholarship, and give submissions from emerging scholars, independent researchers, and researchers from non-traditional backgrounds the same careful consideration shown to established and university-based scholars. Articles can be in English or in any of the Nordic languages. Authors are very welcome to query the editors about proposed research at . Fafnir also maintains a lively book-review section; inquiries about providing books for review can be directed to . The journal’s entire archive is available online at no cost, along with our submission guidelines at .—The Editors of Fafnir Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures: New Book Series. Sturgeon’s Law—Theodore Sturgeon’s claim that “90% of everything is crap”—suggests that most cultural production is not worthy of our attention, except perhaps as a guilty pleasure. Yet as popular media storyworlds increasingly dominate the global entertainment landscape, they call out for serious criticism. The “Mass Markets” of our series title refers both to the audiences who consume media franchises and immerse themselves in those storyworlds and to one of the key media forms through which this consumption has taken place, the mass-market paperback. This series investigates an archive that traditional scholarship typically ignores—from video-game franchises to longstanding comic storylines, and from fantasy trilogies to Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood blockbusters—even as it expands that archive to include cultural productions by marginalized auteurs as well as from the world beyond North America and Europe. These studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most visible cultural texts are written for critics and fans interested in thinking through the joys and problems created by mass markets and their fandoms. Mass Markets books are 40,000–60,000 words each, focused on storyworlds developed in specific franchises, and dedicated to expanding our understanding of what franchises can be and who can create and study them. Briefly put, “Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures” takes up popular narratives (from books and film to television, games, comics, and beyond) that are produced and distributed across relatively long timescales; extend across multiple media (including film, television, streaming services, video games, books, comics, and, in certain cases, toys and other commodities); generate extensive narrative storyworlds, both textually and through paratexts such as maps, glossaries, indexes, and digital extensions such as authorized encyclopedias and fan wikis; have been produced by multiple writers, pen names, and work-for-hire journeymen rather than in accordance with elite notions of “authors” or “auteurs”; are often governed more by a top-down corporate vision than aesthetic and political considerations; and are created for 613 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE large, mainstream audiences (although they may also contain Easter eggs and other sorts of fan service directed to longstanding fans of the franchise or the genre more generally). The series does not aim to produce complete histories of various franchises: their dates of inception, long lists of their various texts, and descriptions of the relations among them, the economics and studio maneuvering behind their productions, and so on. Such nondiegetic history is necessary to the series, yet we expect the individual texts that make up the series to situate the storyworlds they address in larger cultural movements and historical moments. The series focus is on the diegetic natures of the worlds themselves created by franchises that wish to leverage those worlds into a sustainable condition for storytelling and profit, as well as on the varieties of reception and audience participation such worlds produce. We therefore envision books on Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the STAR WARS Universe, The Walking Dead’s ruined post-zombie America, Marvel’s Wakanda, Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, the BROKEN EARTH’s the Stillness, Tin-Tin’s Africa, Akira’s Neo-Tokyo, Valérian and Laurelin’s City of a Thousand Planets, the stylized India of Bollywood film series such as DHOOM...