We like science fiction. We admire science fiction. We always stay on the lookout for more scholarly work on science fiction. Behold! Over the weekend a new journal hit the stands. Published by the work-in-progress Museum of Science Fiction (location: Earth), the inaugural issue of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is available for free download. Strap in to expand your mind on a variety of fascinating topics including Hindu gods in three SF novels, loving the Other in SF by women, and Imperialism and Assemblage theory in Frank Herbert’s all-time classic Dune.
Veronica Hollinger, co-editor of Science Fiction Studies, provides a letter to the editor on her relationship to the field. She begins:
As a longtime science fiction reader, I no longer have much interest in novels of psychological realism. Realist novels tend to treat the world as a background to the foreground of individual character development and conflict. The world of such novels is a given and, therefore, requires very little attention except insofar as it impacts the characters who are central to its particular plots. In science fiction, the world itself is foregrounded and the characters are embedded in the world—whether that world is a future earth, some other planet, or the whole of the universe. Psychological realism magnifies the specifics of the individual psyche, while science fiction is the genre of the zoom-out.