The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 10-- Call for materials

 Call for Materials

 The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 10:  Social Justice (Redux), will be edited by Margaret McBride. She has issued the following call for materials:

"One thing I admire in Ursula K. LeGuin's writing is her willingness to publicly examine and change her way of seeing the world and her fiction (as in Tehanu, published almost 20 years after The Earthsea Trilogy or the 1976 "Is Gender Necessary?" followed by the 1989 "Redux" version of that essay). I hope The WisCon Chronicles 10 Social Justice (Redux) authors will have the same attitude, for we seem to bring up problems of social injustice so often.  Mary Anne Mohanraj, who edited The WisCon Chronicles 9,  focused on social justice issues in her introduction, as did several included essays. The fiction and WisCon 39 guest-of-honor speeches by Alaya Dawn Johnson and Kim Stanley Robinson focused on multiple aspects of social justice: environmental collapse, need for reduced population, and climate change; violence against women; racial inequality in publishing and elsewhere; gender issues, including reproductive rights; inequality of income and power; etc. Yet current newspapers or blogs about Ferguson or gay marriage or our own science fiction community show that we must continue to address such issues in fiction and elsewhere (I hope in WisCon Chronicles 10!). The "redux" aspect of the volume might include essays on how terms used in debates about social justice could be problematic.

"I am particularly interested in how science fiction is addressing social justice, especially the idea that environmental programs need to include equality for women and minorities. Essays examining the fiction of any past guest of honor at WisCon or Tiptree Award winner or any science fiction that looks at environmental concerns or diversity issues would be appropriate, also. 2016 will be the 40th year for WisCon, so personal memories from guests of honor, committee members, and also people new or long-time to WisCon will be considered, even if not linked directly to social justice issues.

"Please submit essays, personal remembrances, poetry, short fiction for consideration by September 30, 2015 to mcbride@uoregon.edu."

Call for Submissions: LETTERS TO TIPTREE

The great James Tiptree Jr was born sometime in 1967, a little over forty-eight years ago. Fifty-two years earlier Tiptree’s alter-ego, the talented, resourceful and fascinating Alice B. Sheldon was born. And somewhere in there, about forty years ago, poet Racoona Sheldon showed up.

In celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Sheldon’s birth, and in recognition of the enormous influence of both Tiptree and Sheldon on the field, Twelfth Planet Press is publishing a selection of letters written by science fiction and fantasy’s writers, editors, critics and fans to celebrate her, to recognise her work, and maybe in some cases to finish conversations set aside nearly thirty years ago.

LETTERS TO TIPTREE will be a collection of letters written to Alice Sheldon, James Tiptree or Racoon Sheldon; a set of thoughtful pieces on the ways her contribution to the genre has affected (or not) its current writers, readers, editors and critics.

Edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, we are looking for two types of submissions.

Firstly, letters that are between 1000 and 2000 words, exploring personal and/or literary reflections on Tiptree/Sheldon.

Secondly, briefer responses addressing questions such as:
Does it make a difference, reading James Tiptree Jr’s work, knowing that Tiptree was Alice Sheldon?
Who is James Tiptree Jr to you?
Why do you care about James Tiptree Jr?
What impact has reading James Tiptree Jr’s fiction had on you?

We are paying 5cpw up to $USD100 to be paid on publication. We are looking for World First Publication in all languages, and exclusivity for twelve months. LETTERS TO TIPTREE will be published in August 2015.

Submissions are open between May 18 and June 8.

Please send your essay to contact@twelfthplanetpress.com

- See more at: http://www.twelfthplanetpress.com/submissions#sthash.oUnof8el.dpuf

Update on WisCon Chronicles 9

Mary Anne Mohanraj has informed me that she's now 

"reading the submissions for Aqueduct Press's WisCon Chronicles 9 (essays, fiction, poetry, etc., centered around the themes of intersections and alliances -- you need not attend WisCon to submit). Although the deadline has formally closed, I will likely still be looking for some individual pieces to fill out the anthology. If you're interested in submitting still, please send me a query at mohanraj@mamohanraj.com, with a brief description of what you'd be sending; I'll let you know by the end of the week whether I'd like to see it.

"I am open to topical material (such as those responding to various recent controversies in our field) as well as pieces on other subjects."

WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 8-- an update

I've been pretty much off-line for the last month. But now I'm back, and my first post in this long while must be an announcement:

 Farah Mendelsohn has found it necessary to withdraw, regretfully,  from the editorship of the next volume of the WisCon Chronicles. This is sad news, but the show must go on, right? And so I'm happy to say that longtime WisCon attendee Rebecca Holden, who co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler with Nisi Shawl, is stepping up to take her place. Rebecca has asked me to put out a call on her behalf to anyone who might be interested in contributing pieces in the usual forms (essays, panel notes, poetry, and fiction) or even in unusual forms. If you attended WisCon this year and have something to say about it, please query or contact her for further information on deadlines and word counts etc at rebecca (at) holdens.net.

New deadline for "Missing Links and Secret Histories" submissions

I am extending the submission period for my "Missing Links and Secret Histories" anthology, to January 1, 2012.

Call for Materials for “Missing Links and Secret Histories” 

Most writers leave out a lot of what they know about their characters and the histories and workings of the worlds their characters live in. And that’s practically an invitation for readers to barge in and read between the lines and invent more than is actually on the page in the official, authorized version of the story. For “Missing Links and Secret Histories,” an anthology to be published by Aqueduct Press, I’m looking for wikipedia-page-style entries with the aim of compiling a Treasury of Missing Links and Secret Histories of stories we know and love. Such Missing Links and Secret Histories must shed critical or transformative light on the works they riff rather than appropriate them. These entries will probably not include zombies, sea-monsters, vampires, werewolves, and other such frequently interpolated monsters. They must, of course, make sense within the framework of the official, authorized version of the story they are glossing, and the more Wikipedia-like the better. Hyper-links are encouraged. Stylishness, wit, and ingenuity will be especially prized. And for Secret Histories, the more byzantine and buried they are, the better. A word of caution: if the official, authorized version of the story is not in the public domain, it behooves the contributor to be certain that author of the original story being riffed will not view the contribution as infringing their copyright.

Deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012. Submissions should be made by email to L. Timmel Duchamp (use this email address: ltimmel [at] gmail.com). You may either paste your submission into the body of the email or attach it as an rtf or Word Doc file. Payment will be 1 cent a word and two contributors’ copies. Query me first before making multiple submissions.

Call for materials for a new anthology

Call for Materials for “Missing Links and Secret Histories” 

Most writers leave out a lot of what they know about their characters and the histories and workings of the worlds their characters live in. And that’s practically an invitation for readers to barge in and read between the lines and invent more than is actually on the page in the official, authorized version of the story. For “Missing Links and Secret Histories,” an anthology to be published by Aqueduct Press, I’m looking for wikipedia-page-style entries with the aim of compiling a Treasury of Missing Links and Secret Histories of stories we know and love. Such Missing Links and Secret Histories must shed critical or transformative light on the works they riff rather than appropriate them. These entries will probably not include zombies, sea-monsters, vampires, werewolves, and other such frequently interpolated monsters. They must, of course, make sense within the framework of the official, authorized version of the story they are glossing, and the more Wikipedia-like the better. Hyper-links are encouraged. Stylishness, wit, and ingenuity will be especially prized. And for Secret Histories, the more byzantine and buried they are, the better. A word of caution: if the official, authorized version of the story is not in the public domain, it behooves the contributor to be certain that author of the original story being riffed will not view the contribution as infringing their copyright.

Deadline for submissions is Nov 15, 2011. Submissions should be made by email to L. Timmel Duchamp (use this email address: ltimmel [at] gmail.com). You may either paste your submission into the body of the email or attach it as an rtf or Word Doc file. Payment will be 1 cent a word and two contributors’ copies. Query me first before making multiple submissions.

The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 5: Call for Materials

Nisi Shawl writes:

I am editing the WisCon Chronicles Volume 5. I'm looking for essays between 1000 and 6000 words long, on the theme of "Writing and Racial Identity," with the focus on WisCon 34--panels, discussions, and other events. I want written contributions from people who attended WisCon 34. I will need these contributions by August 27. Photos, drawings, poems, interviews, and (very) short fiction will also be considered for this book.

I will need informal proposals for contributions on or before July 26. Proposals must include the following:

* Your name--your legal name, and any aliases you may have used at WisCon 34 and/or online
* The length (wordcount) of the contribution if applicable
* The nature of the contribution (essay, panel report, memoir, interview, survey, photo, cartoon, etc.)
* A very general outline of the topic covered, running about one to three lines, or approximately one paragraph
* If the contribution relates to a specific WisCon 34 event, such as a particular panel, the bake sale, etc., note that in your proposal.
* If the contribution has appeared elsewhere or will appear elsewhere within the next two years let me know; your piece may or may not be eligible for inclusion, and we'll need to discuss this.

Email your proposals in the body of the email's text by July 26 at the very latest. Do not send attachments. I'm not opening them. Don't send them. Just write (briefly) about what you're going to do in your email.

Please respond to nisisNOSPAM@aolDOTcom. Thanks so much for considering this call. Nisi Shawl

CFP: Gender & Sexuality in SF

The new issue of Science Fiction Studies lists the following call for papers:

Special Issue of SFS on Gender and Sexuality. Past special issues of SFS have focused on women writers and on queer theory, but this issue proposes to take a broader approach to gender and sexuality, focusing on a full spectrum of related topics: femininity/masculinity in sf, sf and sex/gender change, sf pornography, techno-fetishism, alien sex, multiple genders/sexualities, sexual subcultures in sf, sf and censorship, sex work(ers) in sf, slash/flash writing, and more. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The deadline for 500-word abstracts is May 1, 2008; please send them to Rob Latham [rob-latham@uiowa.edu] and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. [icronay@depauw.edu].